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aquovaon PlayStation cancels Kojima's PHYSINT, Xbox steps in

This situation seems very similar to Konami's frustrations with him a decade ago. Don't get me wrong, Konami too seemed hell-bent on driving into the ground, but Kojima does have a reputation for going over time and over budget. In a world of tightening belts, I wonder if Sony execs felt the same frustration as their counterparts did. We'll see how he fairs with Xbox, which seems even more eager than the other two to shutter things these days.

aquovaon Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

I'm a pretty heavy GoG customer and I disagree with a lot of this premise. Most games aren't getting updates past a year or two after their release, and the ones that are aren't DRM-free. And even if they weren't, I'd rather be able to play an older revision of a game I own than not own it at all.

Your Steam games run on Linux run due to Valve's (truly excellent) work on their compatibility layer. However, that work is not exclusive to Steam. I can play my DRM-free GoG copies of big budget Windows games just fine on Linux. There's an extra step you have to invoke, but they still run superbly. Supporting DRM-free is the best we have in an increasingly hostile customer market.

aquovaon User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

If you're interested or nostalgic for these types of UIs, I would strongly recommend Picotron[0]. Not only is its UI very reminiscent of these types of programs, with its own music tracker software, but developers have been making their own software and utilities with their own custom design sensibilities.

[0] https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

aquovaon Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

I think this is more discovering the rot left from the previous leadership who sat around for years and years on their bad decisions, and then using the young clueless outsider as the face.

aquovaon Linux for the Sega MegaDrive

You're lucky, I search fairly often and never come across CRTs at thrift stores. The only option is to buy comically overpriced ones off marketplace, and I live in a large metro area.

aquovaon Mechanical Watch (2022)

While I do agree, if the author is reading the comments one piece of feedback I have is the overuse of the phrase "In this article I will...". It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and they use a version of the phrase three times in the first four paragraphs.

aquovaon AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit

As people have noted, this sort of thing has become inevitable and likely to increase in occurrence unless some changes are made. I'm a big fan of the AUR PKGBUILD system, and I leverage it quite frequently to write my own. The most egregious issue in my opinion, and one of the low hanging fruit to fix, is the fact that anyone can adopt an orphaned package with no notification to end users that this has happened.

It's honestly more trouble than it's worth to get your package deleted, instead leaving orphaning as the more optimal way to relinquish control. This should be the opposite in my opinion, or at the very least the users should be made very aware that an orphaning has occurred. Perhaps that burden is more on the AUR helper like paru and yay (who I would encourage to make such a change).

aquovaon Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release

I can't speak for Chrome, but I can right click a Firefox picture-in-picture window, tell it to remain on top, and it does, no problem. I've been using Plasma Wayland for years now and this has worked for ages

aquovaon Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

I have such a soft spot for this scene. I saw this movie in theaters when I was a high schooler, and this exact scene with Sam entering in commands piqued my curiosity to learn if it was a real thing. I eventually discovered that OS X came shipped with a bash terminal, and that I could manipulate a computer in just the same way. It really made an impact on me, which I certainly wasn't expecting when buying tickets to this film I knew nothing about.

aquovaon Valve raises Steam Deck prices

Where do you think all the supply that the Steam Deck was previously leveraging went?

aquovaon Iran will impose fees on subsea internet cables in Strait of Hormuz

I thought that was A. MI6, not the Americans

B. 25 years earlier and

C. Less of a revolution as Shah had always been around, they just supported him in kicking out his own prime minister (and exerting autocratic rule as a result)

aquovaon PC Engine CPU

Ah, I thought the URL sounded familiar. This is the dev of the new-on-the-scene but quite good jgenesis emulator. It started out doing just Sega systems, but has started branching out, sounds like the PCE is next.

aquovaon New bill would let New Yorkers hang solar panels from windows

The panels are designed to not provide current if no current is detected on the mains. Otherwise you would also have a live plug at the end of the panel. Killing your own customers is typically not a good business strategy, so quite a lot of safety has been focused on ensuring this isn't a problem.

aquovaon WiiFin – Jellyfin Client for Nintendo Wii

Speak of the devil, I was just looking for something just like this earlier this week. I may have even have ran into this exact project, but it didn't have functioning playback until now. I have a spare CRT in my office that I use for some old consoles, and thought it would be neat to stream some 4:3 media onto it, but didn't want to bother with getting some client box and HDMI to composite converter. If this works well, it would solve that problem nicely.

aquovaon The “small web” is bigger than you might think

What methods are you using to find them? I notice my own doesn't appear, although it does show up well under some (very niche) Google search terms. I suspect there's the potential for an order of magnitude more sites than have been found.

aquovaon Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]

Ars did a retrospective on the Palm line-up that I occasionally go back and re-read. I never got into the ecosystem, although my dad had a Palm III(?) when I was younger. Had I been a decade older I think I would've been infatuated with them.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/palm-os-and-the-devi...

aquovaon People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much

One of these is not like the others

aquovaon Plasma Effect (2016)

As someone who has seen this effect before, but was unclear how it was done, this article is very "and now draw the rest of the owl". They define a basic equation, it's about what I expected, but the end shader code doesn't use it in that form, and I found it pretty difficult to parse, I can't say I'm much better off in the end.

aquovaon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://aquova.net

Definitely a playground for whatever I find interesting, mainly game-related topics

aquovaon Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

To be fair, I remember visiting my aunt's house in the mid-2000s, who had a surround sound set up her husband had set up. It required three or four remotes to work and no one but him could ever get it working. I think UX has forgotten a few generations by now.

aquovaon Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

Reminds me of HitClips from the early 2000s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitClips

I remember being quite entranced with one that a neighbor had. It feels like a bit of a silly format now, but perhaps it's time for a resurgence.

aquovaon Video Game Websites in the early 00s

It's not quite as stylish as these, but my personal favorite video game site was the Super Smash Bros. Brawl blog site, which had its heyday around 2007 or so.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071001132450/http://www.smashb...

It was the first time I had ever seen pre-release information about a game, and I checked the site religiously. The game director himself wrote all the posts, and it felt like a revolutionary way to get me excited about the game.

aquovaon Sega co-founder David Rosen has died

It's part of the strange history of Sega. Even back in their heyday, Sega of Japan had a pattern of treating its American and European offices as subordinate, yet the founders of the company just a few decades earlier were Americans

aquovaon I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

I see this sentiment a lot, but I never agree with it. Sure, some of their projects seem very odd for them to lead, but given that they are completely reliant on their competitor for cash -- a revenue source that has been threatened several times by anti-trust cases against Google -- they should be looking to branch out. Firefox alone won't pay the bills, so they need to try and find some other revenue source. Plus, Chrome has essentially won. Not necessarily for any engineering reason, at least not these days, but from continued momentum of being the market leader. Sitting around quietly isn't going to get people to switch, they do need to find some way to distinguish themselves apart from Chrome, which again leads to these misc features being thrown out there.

The AI inclusion seems like the same reason everyone else is adding AI, they don't want to be left behind if or when it's viewed as an essential feature.

aquovaon IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products

"Range" here refers to a range of products, in this case a collection of Matter supported devices

aquovaon The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)

I really wish ShaderGlass supported Linux. If there's a good(ish) alternative that anyone knows about, I'd love to try it out.

aquovaon New England's last coal plant has stopped operating, according to its owners

Unless "coal generating station" means something in particular, this isn't true at all, there's around 200 coal power plants in the US

aquovaon Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy

I scoffed when I first read this, but the more I think about it, the more that might be correct.

Mario 64 had third-person camera movement, but it was with the N64's C-buttons, and had fixed angles, not free movement. Since it didn't have a second joystick, that rules out the N64 (some games did allow you to use a second controller as a second analog stick, but I don't think any third person games did so).

Likewise, the Dreamcast didn't have a second stick, so it's ruled out too. That basically leaves us with the PS1 or an early PS2/Gamecube game. Apparently Quake II on PS1 did allow for the second stick to aim, but that's not third person. The closest I can find is Ico on PS2, which allowed for analog stick camera movement, but I think only in the horizontal direction. Mario Sunshine might well be the first for full camera angle movement, which honestly really surprises me.

aquovaon Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy

I've seen a few posters ask already, so I figured I'd answer what the PS2 analog button's function was.

The button switches between two modes of the analog joysticks, either to behave with their normal functionality, or to simply be a digital input (so just round all movement to either up/down/left/right). For PS2 games, you typically wouldn't want to do this. Instead, the functionality exists because the PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 titles. The original PS1 controller didn't have analog sticks at all, just the D-Pad for navigation. After a few years (and the success of Nintendo's N64 analog controller) Sony released a revised version of the controller that included two joysticks, which their controllers still mimic to this day. However, those PS1 games released prior to the analog controller wouldn't always behave correctly if you tried to use an analog input scheme, so Sony added a mode to allow the Joysticks to function the same as the D-Pad, in case players preferred it.

Other fun fact, the analog controller was not the same as their more famous Dualshock controller. There was a short-lived PS1 Dual Analog controller which just added the joysticks. It only lasted a few months before Sony replaced it with one that supported rumble functionality (also after being inspired by the N64), this was the Dualshock.

aquovaon Regarding the Compact

Regardless of what's even in the document, the core issue is the administration effectively attempting to punish universities who do not agree to whatever standards they dictate. Not because anything actually against any enacted state or federal law, or even standards set out for every university, but based on policies the executive can arbitrarily decide for a handful of schools. That's why you're seeing such push back.

As for the document itself, it's a bit of a mixed bag, with a lot of subtle gatchas to make it sound enticing on the surface, but more sinister the closer you look. I honestly like some of the proposed tuition changes, but there's some language regarding enrollment that I find problematic. However, since the whole thing is being given to them with the threat of a knife hanging over their head, you're going to see a lot of universities be opposed to this.