keyringlight

As much as they've got large resources, I'm not sure what projects they could reasonably throw a mountain of money at and expect to change things, and presumably benefit from in the future instead of doing it to be a a force of chaos in the industry. Valve's efforts all seem to orbit around the store, that's their main business and everything else seems like a loss-leader to get you buying through it even if it comes across as a pet project of a group of employees.

The striking one for me is their linux efforts, at least as far as I'm aware they don't do a lot that isn't tied to the steam deck (or similar devices) or running games available on steam through linux. Even the deck APU is derived from the semi-custom work AMD did for the consoles, they're benefiting from a second later harvest that MS/Sony have invested (hundreds of millions?) in many years earlier. I suppose a lot of it comes down to what Valve needs to support their customers (developers/publishers), they don't see the point in pioneering and establishing some new branch of tech with developers.

We've already proven we can build huge amounts of renewable generation if we want, the issue I see is that additional huge demands like AI prevent us from making carbon based generation redundant, lowest priority choice in the mix of sources or used exclusively for its strengths to respond quickly to changing needs.

The aspect I wonder about for windows vs xbox(console) is that I find it hard to imagine they make much money on the consumer side for windows, yet they have a certain support burden for maintaining/advancing the windows platform and DirectX. I assume xbox contributes heavily to making it worth their while to work on DirectX, but without it there seems to be a lot of beneficiaries that don't contribute back - so what's Microsoft's motivation to have their own API?

Even when D3D12 came out there was commentary how very close it was to Vulkan, which was supposedly largely the work of DICE engineers working for AMD to create the preliminary Mantle implementation.

I've found you need to remember that you've done this as occasionally I'll get a website that behaves strangely until I link the behavior to uBlock, temporarily disable it and fulfill the cookie notice, then I can enable it and proceed.

IIRC the xbox one onwards (switching from PowerPC to AMD x86) gave them synergy with AMD's efforts to push hard into servers with virtualization, as well as MS pushing Azure

The phone/tablet as most common 'personal computer' is what I see that will be a constant bleed on the audience for the desktop PC. At least for the home audience the price trends over the past decade seems like a big deterrence, and the old model of having a desktop for home use and an enthusiast upgrading/modernizing it involves more. I do a fair amount of gaming on my 8-9 year old PC, and it's hard to justify an upgrade (which at this point is a whole new build) for more recent games versus getting a PS5 for 400 bucks or so (or a used one for 200-300) which is less than a reasonably capable/modern GPU by itself.

I guess my concern is where are the gradual on-ramps for getting people into that desktop PC (windows or otherwise) environment so they can explore and discover what it enables for them? There's no trouble if you already know you're an enthusiast, you can make an informed decision if the bill of parts is worth it, and I don't see professional-workstations going away as a tool.

The impression I have is that YotLD windows migration evangelism is honest so long as you don't go off the beaten track, but as soon as you do it gets hairy quick and that's where I find some of the evangelists dishonest by omission. It's fine if you just use a browser, or software as provided by a repository, or your steam games work and you don't need/want to mod/tinker with them. Otherwise you might be dropping someone recently transplanted into unfamiliar territory and they haven't build up a new knowledge base yet.

I'd be interested to know what effort would be needed to decouple the manual download database from what is connected to WU within currently supported versions of windows, presumably they've already got some way of filtering off which drivers they want to keep live. I think MS could handle the download cost of old drivers when a lot of them can be smaller than an average modern webpage.

I guess it comes down to the question of how much MS cares about old hard/software past its support window, versus delegating that to third party sites like vogons.org and praying someone has the relevant file still available.

What kind of actions can gentoo do with your financial accounts, and what levels of user authentication does it use to do it? My phone can effectively act as a bank card with contactless payment or I can transfer up to a daily allowance (that would be painful to me if it was misused) of thousands with biometric auth. Similar to the OS if you're doing that with any browser with a web login you could potentially compile it to behave how you like or lie about what it's doing

Because it's a bank there's going to be insurance behind the scenes to cover them if something goes wrong, and I assume part of that is ticking off enough points to be confident a transaction is secure or different payment limits on confidence levels.

Valve doesn't seem interested in doing much on the desktop, they seem to have constrained themselves (probably wisely) to working on areas directly related to their business and products.

I'm surprised there haven't been more events of mods and tools being used as trojans. For all the concern about anti-cheat/DRM, PC gamers seem very selective over what sources of code they're running on their computers they scrutinize. There's an awful lot of users with "just enough" levels of knowledge where I think a tempting enough release with the right timing for a hot game could get a lot of installs.

I'd wonder what the costs and risks are of trying to get that $170, assuming it's one or a tiny amount of passengers compared to dozens each sailing who tell their friends. If you get someone who's got nothing better to do than argue on the topic, make you prove that the charge is justified and not just some misconfigured device that "didn't go online because I only use it for reading ebooks, honest", then it could get ugly including legal or press routes.

On a small scale for a cruise liner scaled operation I'd be prepared to say "huh, that's odd" or turn a blind eye to just one.

At least for motorbikes, the tactic is to abandon a stolen vehicle for a while after the theft to see if anyone comes for it, then take it to home base. I'd guess it all comes down to how professional an operation you're dealing with, last week a haul was recovered due to a tracker: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1denv9eg6wo

One thing I try to bear in mind with this is while there's a lot of anti-corporate discussion alongside video games, they're quite often contrary to what happens in the wider world when you compare against what games or companies are successful. A lot of it skirts around the concept that developers big or small take money to be made and don't seem to have a good idea on how success should be rewarded (or differing rules depending on who you are). The video game audience is also going to be incredibly broad across a huge range of circumstances around the globe, so the question of what something is worth will have a wide range too.

The way I've come to understand "icon" is that it's as used like "religious icon". A painting of a particular figure is not so much about that figure, but what they represent, it's somewhat abstract. The save icon isn't about the literal bit of media as what you could do with it.

I think one thing that is involved in this is conventions, and when you've learned one set of rules on how to communicate on one form of interface that it transfers to other applications on that interface. If there's certain ways to use graphical elements, gestures, console keywords/option flags, spoken keywords, while other applications have the freedom to do their own thing it should be seen as better not to diverge and reinvent the wheel (so each needs learning its own rules) too much without good reason.

When a mozilla application crashed it'll ask you to leave a comment to try and help resolve the issue when it prompts to send crash info, and you used to be able to see all those comments on https://crash-stats.mozilla.org (it seems to be behind login or restricted access now). There was a lot of vitriol and unhelpful comments that any developer would need to wade through to get to anything to give them a lead

I think modern skeuomorphism must be in a weird spot compared to a few decades ago. Right now our real world devices designers would be inspired are less likely to have physical controls, so the virtual versions are pulling from a more distant original source that's already been through a few degrees of separation. If the original industrial design that computer interface graphics was pulling from was the rise of industrial and consumer electronics through the 20th century (the various switches, dials, indicators, tuning knobs, etc), what new physical design is there to inspire that isn't feeding on itself.

Similar with how MS brought 'glass' into their Aero theme for vista or win7. There was exactly no benefit to being able to see some blurry version of the background window if I'm trying to read the foreground. I don't think a version that lets background detail through clearly will do any better outside of flashy demos.

The question that poses to me is the quantity of writing you need for training before you can reasonably expect a generation system to produce something new and interesting, however much work on the right knowledge is in the right place, and is worth the costs for how you expect the player to interact with the game beyond the manual work.

I doubt there's telemetry in the elder scrolls games, but I'd love to know how many go around the world exploring everything the characters have to say, or reading all the books. How many get the lore in secondary media, wikis or watching a retelling or summary on youtube. On a certain level it's important they're there as an opt-in method to convey the 'secondary' world lore to the player without a "sit down and listen" info dump, plus give the impression it was written by someone so these objects would would exist organically in the world or certain characters would talk about those topics, but I wonder how much of the illusion would still be there if it was just each book having a title.

I'd love to have the inside insight on how MS see WINE and related products and how that compares to how they saw chromium versus Trident/EdgeHTML. I really wonder if windows by itself is a loss leader to other areas where they do make money and would love to stabilize the desktop side and outsource/"contribute" that to others to maintain, just so long as they could keep money coming in from office, user administration, support contracts, alongside the services side.

On a tangent I wonder a similar thing about nvidia/AMD carrying around decades worth of tweaks and fixes for old games within their GPU drivers (and matching that is a cost for entry for intel), could they shed a burden by opening that to projects like DXVK.

I'm not sure that's directly on control panel so much as which windows version you pick to look at, over the years it's changed as they try to make it friendly to different audiences. In win2k it's not very deep to get at, by default there's network places on the desktop you can right click to skip a few steps. Similarly they could improve the win8+ settings app but presumably they think win11's version is the best they can offer.

Something I know from a past role is that teaching is demanding, and for any broad audience you've got to consider the range of different thought processes that you may need to provide your knowledge in different ways. As someone trying to increase my linux skills (and assess the best one for potentially migrating/supporting my parents) it doesn't help that a lot of linux documentation comes across as barebones, or very concise about the one way it's meant to be done with a certain distro (plus potentially outdated on an earlier version), and a general lack of explanations.

As example toy projects I'm trying to test out dnf-automatic because I'd prefer not to have the admin work of manually keeping on top of routine updates, but there's little feedback (although so far that's better than pacman on Arch which specifically expects atdmin), or learning why a distro has set up swap/zram/zswap the way they have, what the limits are on that config, how to measure what my system uses and if/how to adjust it. There's little guidance within the system to get you up to that level, and to open another can of worms the terminal-first approach in linux's DNA usually doesn't present anything but the bare essentials for whatever tool you're running, but any extra/wasteful information shown could nudge you where the next step is.

What keeps standing out to me is that windows has been moving away from the PC as Personal Computer model, they've been moving in the direction of a MS prescribed experience of what a device running windows is, with less opportunities to customize it as you want. The trouble for MS is that the ability to run old software is one of windows greatest strengths so they can't really cut off too much without killing the golden goose leaving customers freer to move to another platform, but I think windows would be much more of an appliance if they did cut off that legacy.

Another one is Sjoerd "Hourences" De Jong, a lot of UE3/4 era stuff, which was around the era Epic made their engine widely available

http://www.hourences.com (no https on the site)

There's one where I think it could have made sense, the xbox. They're apparently confident enough about security on those systems as a large part of the point is that they act as locked down game players (related to AMD's work on securing servers IIRC), so adding a locked down 'desktop mode' would seem viable. They'd need to be certain it doesn't enable any new jailbreaks so either mode isn't more useful than they intend, if they wanted people to buy/subscribe to office direct from the store they don't want libreoffice working.

During covid and the supply/demand mismatch as everyone rushed to WFH I was wondering if they could repurpose the cheap S xboxes as cheap desktops. Essentially a reversal of the original 'xbox as a trojan horse' idea, instead of using consoles to get windows in the living room, it's to get windows in the home office.

>(if anyone ever bothers to use it, including Microsoft)

I think this is a large part of the problem, within the range of applications MS offers there's range of ways they get distributed, installed and managed. Will office use it? How about visual studio, teams, various windows components? It'd be more 'sit up and listen' interesting if MS committed to using it themselves, showed it works for a range of use cases and was great at doing it.

There was a merge into Rockbox [0] last month with someone making their own hardware [1] primarily to run rockbox.

[0] https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/6510 [1] https://github.com/amachronic/echoplayer

What's telling for me is that SSDs have been a readily available consumer part for around 15 years now, a default option in PCs for quite a while now, and to my knowledge there hasn't been many tales of SSDs dying (specifically for write endurance or otherwise) beyond occasional bad models like the old OCZ vortex2s. Even early torture tests were finding that you'd need to push around 2PB of writes (on smaller drives than we have now) to get failures, and that was on a sample size of 1 for each model. I wouldn't expect a SSD to die more than any other electronics.

The way that the netbook 'evolutionary branch' went from lean and mean to underspecified bloated windows small laptops is one where I really wonder if MS suffocated something that would have been to their benefit longer term if only they could have put out their own lean OS and an ecosystem of lean software to run on it.

It was at the time mobiles were picking up momentum, and just before tablets arrived on the scene (the ipad launched 2010, the tablet focused Android 3 came out in 2011), and a lot of people migrated away from windows for their personal computing needs. There's also been MS's ultimately failed efforts for their own mobile platform. Besides the established huge momentum of gaming and professional/office usage it's difficult to see why consumers would move to windows, or what MS offers to prevent the momentum slowing and linux slowly chipping away at it.