keyringlight

I wonder if this would be a favorable time for someone within the EU to pursue MS with regards the windows user account being tied to an online account unless you jump through unofficial (or at least hidden) hoops. In the context of a business/office I doubt it's a big issue, but it'd be interesting whether there's any angle that businesses or individuals should be able to run their computers independently. There's been a strong distaste for the compulsory online user account for years now, although knowing luck if forced MS would find a way to only comply within territories they have to rather than making it a basic opt-in for all users wherever they live.

I think in cases like this "personal computer" is a blessing and a curse. It seems like most of the big parties involved in computing with the big levers to move things are mostly in it for themselves and pick and choose whether they shoulder responsibility for a certain feature, or which side of 'personal' it comes down on with regards to if they hook it into their services and privacy. What would the attitudes be to losing physical information or property be for other parts of our lives versus digital info/property, if that was media, references, financial details, property deeds, old records, etc.

While I do appreciate the generosity in how many projects make themselves available (free or otherwise), it does seem like they can have a narrow focus where they solve the challenge they had to solve, but aren't interested going past that point. There's logical reasons for why that happens, but there's unfulfilled potential to make personal computing a better environment there.

Hitman is an example that contradicts your point about gameplay, guards will see you in mirrors and act appropriately. They'll be doing that for gameplay with a non-graphical method, but you need to show it to the player graphically for them to appreciate the senses available

I think there's two ways of looking at it. Firstly that raster has more or less plateaued, there haven't been any great advances in a long time and it's not like AMD or any other company have offered an alternative path or vision for where they see 3d graphics going. The last thing a company like nvidia wants is to be a generic good which is easy to compete with or simple to compare against. Nvidia was also making use of their strength/long term investment in ML to drive DLSS

Secondly, nvidia are a company that want to sell stuff for a high asking price, and once a certain tech gets good enough that becomes more difficult. If the 20 series was just a incremental improvement from the 10, and so on then I expect sales would have plateaued especially if game requirements don't move much.

I'm fairly sure pretty much everything at google since the doubleclick acquisition has been a loss-leader in order to give users good 'viewers' for advertisements, there's some nice byproducts along the way of course.

Depending on what you want to use it for, the device and the ROM is one aspect, but secondary to that is the online services and apps accepting your device. I think android ROMs are a dead-end now because of aspects like safetynet/play integrity, unless you put the work into countering/spoofing them a lot of the tasks people use phones for now such as online/accounts/payments require the device to appear untampered/modified for security purposes. I have my old 2018 phone on android 14 via an unofficial lineage build because there was the freedom to do that, but I expect a bunch of apps will also make use of their freedom to deny me entry.

If you're only using it for on-device tasks then you're probably fine, although at that point the benefits of updating a ROM are probably marginal

The Framework desktop seems like a next step.

Although I appreciate the drive for small profile I wonder where the limits are if you put a big tower cooler onto it, seeing as the broad design direction is for laptops or consoles I doubt there's too much left on the table. I think that highlights a big challenge - is there a sizeable enough market for it, or can you pull in customers from other segments to buy a NUC instead. You'd need a certain amount of mass manufacturing with a highly integrated design to make it worthwhile.

Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood tells it a bit differently [0]. From memory after the EA acquisition they stopped doing their edutainment/casual games, which is where they used to nurture their junior developers along with taking on too many major projects because EA gave them the resources to do that. That led to less quality and later Westwood releases (Renegade, Emperor Battle for Dune) suffered.

The podcast also includes details of Westwood's filming setup, which seemed to include motion tracking which would have been interesting in the context of performance capture, but before its time.

[0] - https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/louis-cast...

Something I've noticed over the years is that a lot of PC enthusiast discussion seems to be self-selecting for those most likely to chase the latest hardware, which affects how they think and talk about future proofing or upgrade ability. The challenge with x86 PC is that because the platform is so flexible it casts the widest net over huge amounts of use cases and circumstances. The example that comes to mind is criticism over intel vs AMD chipsets/sockets with longer compatibility, but it comes down to what your demands are plus where you buy in the cycle of other components (DDR4 vs DDR5) and needed support. There are trade-offs everywhere.

Underneath the campy humor and old spy movie/TV series references, there was a number of elements on spying, about manipulating and using people, attitudes to women, the dull work spying is for the non-super spies. and so on. If someone was to make a follow-up, I don't think a NOLF copy/paste would do so well beyond pure nostalgia (and I don't think NOLF ever set the world on fire with its sales), but there's enough substance there where they could make something interesting playing it straight.

Supposedly there's a texture of a coconut included in source games, along with either a filename or tagged with a comment to say that if it's removed then the game will break and noone knows why.

What I sense with the Nolan films that I've watched is that he packs a lot into the runtime, even accounting for how they generally are long films to start with. He has to be very efficient with how he uses the time, every shot and dialogue carries some information that is useful in some way, there's little spare space or idling. In a way I wonder if it's a bit deliberate to overwhelm the view a little on the first viewing so they can't take it all in and analyze as they go so late revelations have the impact they do, if it was spaced out as a TV series the writing would need to adjust.

At that point (or preferably before) they need to pay attention to exactly what they're getting, including warranties (if any) and what paid options are available to get what they need or want.

The impression I have is that 'game playing devices' coming out now are picking points on a speed-quality-cost style trilemma triangle, except it's desktop PC/couch+TV console/portables. All the different products are picking different points in the triangle to see if there's a market, if laptops are a step away from desktops, then the GPD Win is a second step towards portables, the steam deck is third. The software side also answers another desire that a lot of people have which is to have PC games with a more console-like management experience, and the desire for the steambox to do something similar for HTPC form factor never went away.

It seems like a similar challenge as looking at the steam hardware survey stats, it's probably the best public source of information but it's too much of an overview to make anything but the most general conclusions from it. Within that data there's going to be millions of different stories if you could divide it up a bit - what are common combinations of hardware, what are common combinations in different age ranges, what is used for playing games of different ages, what's common in different locations in the world. Valve could possibly tie hardware to software purchasing activity as well what is played.

The generated frames thing is interesting as it's an obvious example of the whole discussion around halo products (the x080 or x090 cards), "the rich get richer", it takes up a lot of air in the room but is only appropriate for a small vocal proportion of the market.

As you say you need a good framerate to start with before generated frames make sense so either you're already running well with a high tier card and are further able to show off the combination of framerate/resolution/detail level, or running a lower tier card at lower settings turning the graphics down further which can be a very obvious trade off. Less demanding games which are generally online competitive usually wouldn't do as well with any extra latency introduced, and the situation where I've heard it would be a good fit is emulators or any kind of game where the CPU is the limiting factor

The thing that gets me is application launchers, I'm fine with any clever and obscure name you pick for something that's intended to be behind the scenes as presumably there's going to be a certain amount of promotion or awareness inside whatever domain is involved. However if a launcher (or a repository/app store as an earlier step) just gives the clever name with no context to what it does rather than "CleverName - media tag information editor".

It can go too far the other direction too, for example the generic names like Files, Phone, etc either preloaded on the device by the manufacturer (eg Samsung) or by Google, or some third party.

The other major issue with regards pricing is that intel need to pay one way or another to get market penetration, if no one buys their cards at all and they don't establish a beachhead then it's even more wasted money.

As I see it AMD get _potentially_ squeezed between intel and nvidia. Nvidia's majority marketshare seems pretty secure for the foreseeable future, intel undercutting AMD plus their connections to prebuilt system manufacturers would likely grab them a few more nibbles into AMD territory. If intel release a competent B770 versus AMD products priced a few hundred dollars more, even if Arc isn't as mature I'm not sure they have solid answers for why someone should buy Radeon.

In my view AMD's issue is that they don't have any vision for what their GPUs can offer besides a slightly better version of the previous generation, it appears back in 2018 that the RTX offering must have blindsided them, and years later they're not giving us any alternative vision for what comes next for graphics to make Radeon desirable besides catching up to nvidia (who I imagine will have something new to move the goalposts if anyone gets close), and this is an AMD that is currently well resourced from Zen

The only way I can see it getting solved is the OS sandboxing everything behind the scenes, redirecting everything the application spews in random locations to The One True Profile Folder per application. Even then it wouldn't be without challenges, off the top of my head some method if you actually wanted an application to get out of its sandbox and look at the real documents folder, another method for App1 to look at files in App2's sandbox (and detecting when this is desired), or what to do if an application is able to change how it identifies itself to the OS (new versions?).

What gets me about android is the "have your cake and eat it" way it approaches whether or not it's locked down/secure.

Over time the usage of android has changed as more users and more services adopted mobile, for a lot of people it is an appliance, and I can appreciate that payments and linking to bank accounts is a convincing argument for something like play integrity/safetynet. Where I think there's conflict is that android hasn't entirely moved away from the early days where it was something a bit closer to a personal computer with a high amount of freedom, or at least they haven't been clear or drawn a line in the sand (this is while the issue around third party app stores and if they must be somewhat open is still being resolved).

If you do some unlocking/rooting and what it enables, it either gets the bare minimum CYA notification or doesn't get flagged in the UI at all as presumably the users is meant to know what they're doing at that point, even if cases where apps refuse to run or just crash with no feedback to inform. I'd appreciate it more if they did put up a big red warning "this is happening because your phone is in insecure mode because you did X", but on the surface level it appears as the phone is fully operational but acting weird.

Even before the ribbon they had identified and were trying to deal with the problem. I think either office 2000 or xp had the 'traditional' drop down menus but would hide less-used items until you clicked a little ≫ expander at the bottom, the downside being that would change the layout of the menu a bit as less/most-used changed which works against learning what items are located where.

I think the screen can definitely be a factor. I'm using a monitor with a TN type panel, and the viewing angle will change the amount of contrast which makes a difference in the later stages. Some would have been impossible to pass first time without shifting my head, even if my eyes are up to the task.

This seems to be my experience too. The "linux is a great simple windows alternative" attitude works great so long as your usage follows well trodden paths, but otherwise you end up in the weeds quickly.

The kinds of usages that consumer windows has had and the software ecosystem that's promoted for 3+ decades compared to what has been developed for linux affects this too. Windows is extremely broad in all the software available for all the little utilities users are going to look for, and hardware it's going to need to support (and support well). Even trying to pull windows applications that don't do anything too complex over to linux via Wine is very much a YMMV area. It's impressive what has been accomplished and the recent rate of progress, but there's always more to do so it's not an awkward, poorer version of doing the same task in windows.

The aspect I wonder about is what proportion of the 60% of people still using win10 are actually aware or care about it going end of life, assuming windows doesn't auto-update to 11 for them any EOL warning will just be swatted away like most other annoyances so they can get on with their intended task. Getting that type of user to switch to linux seems like it'd remain a herculean task.

I think there's a few angles on this.

Firstly that a game developers main concern is getting their product functional, keeping that way, and that they can make money on it to make the whole endeavour worthwhile. There's already a lot of game releases where it comes across getting their idea working out the door is a lot higher up the list than the 'details' and attention to working great on the PC platform. Then that gamers will come in a wide range of skill/knowledge levels for their PCs, from those that treat them as glorified consoles to others that know every detail of their workstation.

Dual booting adds more admin and complexity, and in a way it's admitting that the trust level in software is so low your OS can't sandbox things out, that stuff you're running is taking liberties or just enough effort to fulfill its task, and you're going to the extent of running a console in a separate partition but running it is mutually exclusive with the serious OS. I'd guess a lot of people who felt strong enough would just have 'serious OS' be another device, most likely a phone but alternatively laptop, which would seem to marginalize what they use the windows install for.

I think the "no work" aspect gets underplayed in a lot of these preservation discussions. At the point you've got a failed product you're either scrambling to start or do something new to pay the bills or winding up the company. There seems to be this idea that everyone involved who could work on the old product has a lot of free time and won't see a significant return for it.

It's similar to the rumor that if something apocalyptic happened to Valve they'd keep steam open and let you download all your stuff, if that scenario happened they'd be least able to be able to do that for a long list of reasons unless they had instantly been bought.

I looked into this because I find I want something I can stuff into a trouser pocket. The only reasonably viable android option was a Sony Xperia XZ2 compact, from 2018 on android 10. You can put lineage on it which is currently maintained, but that has the downsides of not passing device integrity which some apps will check, or being willing to constantly play cat and mouse to spoof it. Sony also apparently wipe a partition with a little DRM blob for the camera, which degrades some aspect of its post processing capabilities so image quality might be less. There's also the iPhone SE3 which is currently in support

I ended up getting a 'regular' sized samsung only slightly larger than the one it's replacing, but at least modern phones seem to be getting longer software support periods (assuming there's no nasty surprises included).

One of the aspects I've wondered about is the software bundled with either the OS or by the device manufacturer. When PCs (broadly, not just IBM compatibles) were penetrating into the home market they would often come with a suite of tools or demos to show what it could do, or let you create things even if they were the basic editions. Before the internet became part of the furniture, if you'd spent several hundreds on some hot technology there was a good chance you'd buy print magazines for it as well, and they would come with cover discs that exposed people to a lot of what was possible with computing.

Without wanting to sound like a stick in the mud, the focus of computing has definitely changed now. I see it as an interesting thought exercise on how to get someone running around with what is usually a marvel of computing in their pocket to try and imagine that is not the apex of computing, whether to explore what other means of computing offer or what comes next besides a slightly better version of what we have now.

Another aspect to this, for recent games I imagine on a certain level it's on the original developer to implement things for their games sold through the GOG channel. There is a spreadsheet [1] of games where the GOG version has lesser functionality or has been left behind compared to others, usually steam.

This is one of my problems with the "PC gaming = steam" attitude that has become prevalent, PC as a platform is broad and varied, and if you're going to sell your product on multiple stores without making clear that they're different then you really should support them, otherwise be honest enough to only sell where you are prepared to. I'd say managing expectations and who's responsible only gets muddier when you're involving compatibility across different windows versions, hardware generations, or different OSes entirely.

[1] - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zjwUN1mtJdCkgtTDRB2I...

There are a handful of videos from E3 (97 or 98) showing off the original 3DRealms development of Prey. One of the things that didn't survive into Human Head's version on the Doom3 engine was rotating portals, or if they did they were rare that I don't remember them.

Isn't the more common usage of this in skyboxes? You'd have one area where the gameplay is taking place, then another area in the map that shows the larger scale area surrounding where the player is and the portal makes it appear that the gameplay area is within the other.

The designer needs to confine the player so they can't break the illusion (where Prey lets Morgan Yu shatter that 4th wall), or you can do things like put the player on a speeding train traveling through a scenery and falling off is fatal