keyringlight · HackerTrans

keyringlight

526 karmajoined 6 jaar geleden

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gisterendiscuss

The challenge lies with whether the things you go to reddit (or any other service/product) for are concentrated or exclusively there, such as discussion or information on a particular topic. There's a lot of communities where they've concentrated their resources on a free site and are at the mercy of the whims of the owner, discord is another. Very often there's no simple switch to an alternative without losing a lot, or hoping on the charity of others to spend effort migrating.

4 dagen geledendiscuss

I'd also wonder about the average display equipment in use, the environment they're viewing in, and versus what our eyes are capable of.

6 dagen geledendiscuss

Something I can't fault nvidia for is long term vision. If you ignore all the non-gaming uses, I can't see significant gains to be had by keeping evolving rasterization based rendering, which presumably would hit diminishing returns, upgrades would be less exciting, and be easier for AMD and others to compete against them. The trouble is a variety of reasons has meant that long term is likely going to be over a decade from when it was introduced before it's really commonplace or part of the furniture for the majority of games.

6 dagen geledendiscuss

I'd add the move from feature phones to smart phones and later tablets. Early adopters were getting them 2007/08, 5 years on from that the platform was well on its way to maturing and with a broader range of hardware and the software ecosystem was moving to target it too. Then there's the question of what form best suits the usage the tasks the netbook audience have, if you're doing the very basic browsing/comms tasks, why take a comparatively big slab when a 4-5" will do, and if you do need a portable PC why constrain yourself to a weak system, netbooks were in no-mans-land.

10 dagen geledendiscuss

IIRC winget is another mechanism with a CLI front-end that resembles a package manager. What it does is either hook into the windows store (another channel) for packages, or points to an installer which likely runs silently in the background, for example 'winget show adobe.acrobat.reader.64-bit' or 'microsoft.vcredist.2015+.x64'

19 dagen geledendiscuss

I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems to pull a lot more information from a NT based starting point than 9x. I'm not sure if I'm curious enough to try a 98 to NT5 upgrade in a VM though.

Whether or not many people would want to do that upgrade/migration is another question, but similar to you I doubt the number was high.

19 dagen geledendiscuss

For the kinds of games where DRM free matters, where they don't have a prominent online/multiplayer side or the equivalent of playing the game 'from the disc', is the console subscription really an issue? I don't have a console myself, but from when I've looked into it there's a bunch of mainly free to play games where that subscription isn't needed as both the publisher and Sony/MS get their money from purchases.

23 dagen geledendiscuss

I wonder if this signals anything about Sony's attitude to blu-ray movies. Aside from games one of the reasons their consoles have sold well is because they've been excellent physical media players. The PS2 for DVDs and the PS3 onwards for blu-ray.

If I remember well PS3 was during the period where blu-ray lasers were production constrained and more expensive with Sony prioritizing their own devices, so the console was price and availability competitive against dedicated disc players by third parties. And the PS3 had pretty long term update/support. I'm fairly sure that had an impact on the financial side as it was in the era when console hardware was subsidized on the expectation they'd get a slice of game sales, except those consoles bought for primarily for movies didn't reimburse them so well.

27 dagen geledendiscuss

I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of customization. I think partially it's down to the platform many use (many seek to theme mobile OSes), but the tools to do so has to be a large contribution. I'm not aware of anything like Stardock's Skin studio that exists outside windows, and from looking at their website it's now useless for anything past win10 1909. Having their art seen on widely used platforms (OS or applications) has to be a large draw to it as well.

28 dagen geledendiscuss

Isn't that a consequence of it being a fairly open platform and no certification gatekeeper before a developer can release/update their game? The platform isn't specifically steam or where mouse/keyboard is unavailable or inconvenient, it's generally what they think most of their target market will be using which is likely a generic windows desktop. I don't think developers or valve themselves would want to set up certification and enforcement to say "you must have X in your game otherwise you can't release on steam", especially for the wide range of categories of criteria you could possibly think of, and someone out there will want a way to do text input on their steering wheel for a driving simulator. PC gaming casts such a wide net it's likely an impossible task.

29 dagen geledendiscuss

For what it's worth, my ASUS motherboard from 2017 has their overclocking utility branded as "AI suite 3" (implying there were 2 before). I think having a buzzword to slap on products that fits the latest trend is a checkbox for whoever is marketing these, whether or not it fits any textbook definition of that term.

vorige maanddiscuss

It was also around the time of the early netbooks, when the premise was a lean laptop and you'd do tasks that'd usually be done with relatively demanding local clients by the browser, as google and others were improving their online app offerings. They'd be using things like SATA/IDE to compact flash adapters to keep power down and responsiveness up, they were an ideal candidate for early SSDs as they didn't need a lot of capacity to run a linux + lightweight DE. Then they became just cheap laptops running full windows.

vorige maanddiscuss

That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity for spam for a lot longer, in a way the Win8 live tiles were an evolution of the widgets that first appeared in Vista, and they introduced active wallpaper along with IE4 (or was it Win98?) although that opportunity would have been much less effective as internet availability was much less.

vorige maanddiscuss

I'd say that comes down to the difference between requirements (i.e. will it run at all, does it use features only found in win11) and support, and the developer's decisions around that. I can appreciate not supporting win10 even if it runs as they have a written or implied burden to make sure it keeps operating correctly for the lifespan, and that may include keeping test systems around or handling bugs that turn up in the OS that's getting reduced support itself, or other factors like drivers. Then there's the question of whether people would be willing to pay for a "your mileage may vary" level of support on something commercial.

vorige maanddiscuss

My sense of it is that as linux is gradually inching towards the general power user audience, there's a lot of "just use [distro]" or fashionable distros where they're all seen as flavors of one thing. In a sense that's true, but not in others like this. I'd also add the various atomic distros like Silverblue or derivatives which have other conditions you need to learn to work with. For AUR it seems to get recommended as a secondary way to get software, if it hasn't been brought into the original distros package repos then the next step is to just search AUR, make the shortest line to the goal and don't worry about the details.

As far as Arch goes, I wonder if Arch-based CachyOS is a factor as it's seen the high performance desktop linux.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

One related question that you need to follow that with is the associated costs of switching the whole studio to another engine that's technically better, or if proposing teach studio tailor-make their own engine the costs of that engineering, if presumably they have or learn the expertise to surpass whatever they're using currently.

I'm not a game developer, but it would also seem to be a link between resource usage by the engine, and whatever content the production side are making. For all the commentary about how brilliant the id software engines are, if you examine the levels you pass through they're also very efficient with what they demand out of the engine - it's like an orchestra playing well together, not one instrument that means you can do anything.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

The way of observing it I find concerning is if you look at PC gaming (or personal computing in general) as a population, with a rate of new entrants or 'birth rate' and people exiting or 'death rate'. It's hard to be optimistic with raising barriers to entry, upgrading or replacing failed hardware which seems like it'd shrink that population over the long term, and make it less attractive to invest in. This isn't even new with the influence of AI, crypto mining was similar but in retrospect just a taster course.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

One tangent from this is that few of the big 'household name' tech products that have become infrastructure for modern life for huge amounts of people seem to be allowed to be mature and stable, they must be kept changing (beyond maintenance) or to offer some other new thing.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

One of the biggest challenges with computer UIs is how you convey information to a user, and that goes especially for games where players often can't take much time to analyze complexity, and it gets boiled down into a light gem indicator. One of the things I really love about the Thief games is how intuitive they are because they're mostly relying on sight/sound senses, you can relate to how the guards/defenses are going to sense you because it's how you would detect someone. If you're noisy you know what will happen next, and the guards are extremely vocal in telling you their state.

Going beyond that simplicity to account for other factors you could technically improve the simulation with is where I'm not sure it makes it more fun. Ultimately a mission needs to be conquerable, how far can you go making it more challenging and leave space for the player to push through while remaining plausible. Silhouette, different areas of your body being lit/unlit, whether movement speed of a lit/partially lit person affects detection makes a difference, guards having long term memory and adapting to half of them - they all sound good but I'm not sure they'd actually be rewarding to players and the development studio that implemented them. How do you 'tell the story' of a guard that spots your shape, knows you're sneaking around acts accordingly to take you by surprise and ends your game.

Similar with armor systems in a lot of games, we can probably simulate a lot of coverage/protection and the impact on mobility, that characters ability to fight with various weaponry because of what they wear, injuries, and so on, but for most games it gets abstracted into categories or points. Even if computation challenges of physically simulating that were overcome for dozens of characters in a fight, how do you convey all the consequences to the player to suggest how they can change things.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Something I've noticed as a general trend is that tech news has seemed to breed an optimistic fandom, that technology for the sake of technology must be good. It's exciting and dramatic, it's science fiction becoming reality. Concerns about needing to adapt around it are diminished even when it could be devastating (losing their job) to those involved, and it's unlikely much assistance will be given to "just" retrain.