The steam machine is, hardware-wise, just a regular Mini-PC. Valve even lets you put whatever OS you want on there. So if this was a loss leader, that would mean that non-gamers and even small businesses would buy these, would install Windows on them and use them as office PCs, with Steam probably not even installed on the PC.
With the Steam Deck, the form factor made it impractical or at least really weird to use them as office PCs. The steam machine doesn’t have that issue.
You’re 100% correct at a sane company. At my employer the hardware team is incentivised to cut costs and impacts to productivity are someon else’s problem. Corporate metrics lead to some pretty hilarious situations.
This happens so often. The new version of the framework our frontend developers use has massive performance problems, which meant that our FE devs couldn’t test their changes locally, they had to upload a release to the cloud to test every single change. That reduces productivity to close to 0. A developer isn’t cheap, so you’d think the company would be quick to issue macbooks that we are also allowed to have so that they can work again.
Nope, it took 3 months for our manager to convince the helpdesk that they can get macbooks. Helpdesk originally said they’d have to wait for 2 years for the scheduled replacement of the laptops.
Was it confirmed that you can install Windows? The video said software, I don’t remember that you could install any operating system. It comes with an Arch Linux.
OSX has several things going for it, primarily, it’s got the clowns at apple running the show, thus, it has a bunch of “natural” interface bullshit that only make sense if you intend to live like a caveman and not understand that computers can function differently to physical objects.
On top of that, they pushed themselves as an “alternative” to windows back when they were even more corporate than fucking Microsoft, while blaring out the ignorant ass ipod adverts whose goal was to make the user into consumers making computing choices based on fashion. The iphone and it’s money gated, walled garden BS was just the cherry on top.
If you wanted a fucking alternative to microsoft, linux has been there for you all along instead of the “worse but shinier” osx, which mac served to just overshadow with its increased advertising budget and psychotic CEO.
And I mean that literally, Steve Jobs was actually fucking insane and a horrible person. From firing people at random, to abandoning his kids, to stealing livers and trying to cure his cancer with smoothies.
Also, it’s basically open/free BSD with more propriety bullshit on it than you can shake a stick at.
I don’t know how anyone can use Windows after 7.
Yeah, windows 8 , 10 and 11 are toxic shitholes. You know what macs did before windows started begging you to log in and create microsoft accounts? Force you to have Icloud or whatever the fuck it is accounts. You know how I know? My work laptops suck ass and forces me to have mac accounts, and is complaining that it can’t sync HEALTH DATA. MY WORK LAPTOP WANTS TO SYNC HEALTH DATA.
Apple blew the doors off for enshittification. They primed the fucking pump, and now microsoft and google are following through the door, you guys are like “yeah, putting osx on a steam box would be cool” fucking no. Ew.
It seems like you’re too emotionally invested to have a normal conversation like a person.
Health is an app you can delete. It’s not forcing you to do anything. You don’t even need iCloud for anything. You don’t even have to use their walled garden App Store. I know because I download and install shit from the internet all the time.
Yes, it’s free/bsd based. Who cares? I just want it to work and the chassis and build quality on the laptops are excellent.
It seems like you’re too emotionally invested to have a normal conversation like a person.
My bad for having opinions. Sorry. /s
Health is an app you can delete. It’s not forcing you to do anything. You don’t even need iCloud for anything. You don’t even have to use their walled garden App Store. I know because I download and install shit from the internet all the time.
I found an answer on the Steam Machine page: Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it’s still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
It’d be interesting seeing Microsoft in a position where the vendor isn’t automatically making their drivers for them. It’s a massive advantage they have.
This part’s basically guaranteed, yeah. But there’s a secondhand market and also surely some scalping companies saw the Deck launch and went yknow what? It doesn’t cost us much in the long run to make a few hundred Steam accounts now and buy some $0.10 team fortress hat on them just in case Valve does the incredibly predictable thing of releasing more desirable hardware.
Lol this reminds me of that time the US Air Force built a giant compute cluster using PlayStation 3s. Idk if Sony sold those at a loss, but they certainly didn’t see any game purchases coming from the US Department of Defense
Exactly, but I don’t see anything keeping them from selling the Frame at a loss or tight margin. What else are you going to use that with but Steam games?
Even the Steam Controller is useless without Steam Input, but I’d argue it won’t necessarily sell more games. Maybe they could include it with the Steam Machine for “free” to bump the price of the machine up enough to not make sense for a company, but still sell it at a tight margin to sell more games.
Why would they sell any hardware at a loss at all? Console manufacturers do it to lock people into their ecosystem and sell them games at a premium, Valve doesn’t need that, people are already overwhelmingly favoring their store.
The same reason people go into debt for a burrito. It’s easier for people to justify a smaller cost now, and valve will make than money back later with extra games sold, especially in the case of the Frame.
Nah thats dumb take. The switch 2 just came out, so if you have any issues within warranty period, you will want to have that box. Wait until after the end of warranty to throw it away.
I think I should explain. A post is the main, original content that someone uploads to the internet for others to reply to, supplying a separate space, called a comment section, for people to discuss. It can be a picture, text, link, or some combination of the three.
A comment, despite being able to hold the same content, is not a post as it is not the main, original content someone posted. A comment does not create a separate space, but it does create a comment thread, a string of replies, usually by separate users.
A comment is to a post as the red marks on your school papers were to your writings. Hope that helps!
But I enjoyed explaining the difference between a post and a comment a fair bit more. I comment for me! But I’m a bit upset that no one has “umm, actually’d” the mistake I added later.
Outlook 2000 was magic, even if it had more security warnings than a trip to Yemen. The current iteration of Outlook that they’re pushing with Office 365 is an absolute disaster, as if they’ve dragged it down to Teams’ level and let it rot away.
The big problems is outlook like every mail client from the early 2000s collected tons of features during the mail client wars where every client needed to do a billion different things, so now there’s dozens of random little features baked in that very few people use but those who do have built entire business processes around.
For example I observed while working at a bank that the backend finance people would use the voting feature to vote on whether to bundle certain loans together. I’ve never before or since seen anyone in any business actively use that feature. There’s lots of other little features and tunables buried deep in Outlook and it’s a royal pain as an IT person to quickly learn about whatever obscure feature a user is complaining stopped working and of course figure out what the intended workflow for the feature is to begin with before I can even start troubleshooting how to fix it
I can’t blame Microsoft for wanting to greenfield Outlook development to a new standard base that’s shared between webmail and the application, but holy crap the amount of technical debt Outlook accumulated is going to take ages to escape from.
Personally, I don’t mind Outlook (new). It sends and receives emails, it shows my Teams meetings on the calendar, and it lets me easily schedule calendar events and Teams meetings, which is all I really need. Most importantly it bypasses a ton of annoying quirks of Outlook (classic)'s license verification and M365 authentication so I generally encourage my users to use it if they don’t otherwise have a strong preference, because it saves me tickets (especially the dreaded “outlook lost teams integration” complaints where Outlook (classic) misplaced its own extension for communicating with Teams (new) and usually involves uninstalling all versions of Teams then installing Teams (Classic) and upgrading it in-place 3x to resolve)
I prefer the new color.
And hot take: I like the icons of O365 for Wort Word, Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. And I prefer those over 2007. But I can compromise with the icons from 2013.
Agreed, the current batch of Office icons - and the updated versions rolling out soon - are excellent. I’m a big fan. But I still wish Outlook was gold.
Access let you build visual apps, usually data-entry workflows, around its internal SQL database. You could build small apps with it using Visual Basic and a visual UI editor. Plus, all your work ships as a single file, provided the user also has Access installed. In many ways, it was like Apple’s Hypercard, but also way easier to write than webpages with the same capability. Oh, and you don’t need a server anywhere to make it work; it’s 100% local. It was also the next logical step to take after the most complex things you can do in Excel.
That said, it was crippled from the start - still very useful, but not for heavyweight stuff. It’s limited to a fixed number of UI, pages, database rows, etc, so it wouldn’t compete with more expensive MS solutions (this thing came with Office). I don’t think it got a lot of love because of that, but I personally used it to solve some real problems in the workplace, without need of any (official) developer resources.
In the present day, it would actually compete with a lot of simple business cases that are served in the cloud at some cost.
Honestly Microsoft could’ve had a killer product with Access if they made an easier pipeline from Excel -> Access -> Win32 application/webpage with an SQL backend. Like there is some of that pipeline present, but if Microsoft actually followed that vision, created easy wizards for each step that your average office drone can complete and marketed the shit out of it, they could completely own business processes instead of a cottage industry of spreadsheets turned SAAS apps for every niche usecase that could’ve been handled by a common database frontend.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
Exactly. Access was a dirt-cheap rapid application design (RAD) tool in disguise, and very easily could have been shaped into a smooth on-ramp to ASP, ASPX, IIS, and SqlServer solutions. In short: a hypothetical “Access.NET” would have been really something.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
You just described most of my career, and how a lot of contracting shops get their start. Managers need reports, and someone has to program them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve replaced Excel with custom software; a faster way to do this is usually welcome. That said, the cloud “Data” space is doing a lot right now to reduce this kind of task to Jupyter notebooks and some other proprietary solutions.
Getting ptsd flashbacks from having to work with access.
Database corruption was so common I’ve had scripts in place to run automatic recoveries.
Terrible security, performance, and SQL feature support.
I’m so glad that thing is buried deep where it belongs
The Outer Worlds is pretty much what Starfield could and should have been and was made by Obsidian, the developers behind a ton of other great games such as (in chronological order, with the best of all games ever bolded)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
Neverwinter Nights 2
Fallout New Vegas
Pillars of Eternity
Tyranny
Pillars of Eternity 2
There’s even a sequel to it coming out some time this year so you don’t run as much of a risk of running out of game any time soon!
Hard disagree. They’re both equally boring as shit, but Starfield at least had decent ship flying/building mechanics. What did outer worlds have? Nothing.
It did? Outer Worlds was just an over-exaggerated parody of capitalism, Starfield at least had some somewhat-believable world building in terms of how the tech progressed, how/why did humans start to live among the stars, conflict between different religions or factions, the xenomorph threat...
Like I'm not saying any of these were done well, but it did have decent worldbuilding and some neat ideas, it was just the execution that sucked. OW might have some better parts than SF, like companion writing (although it was pretty cliched and cheesy there too) so I'm really surprised you use world building as your example lol
im just salty about starfields world building shouldve chosen different example
OWs world building was fine. nothing special, just fine. there were stupid things but they were either a joke or there to back up a point (“we moved this dangerous animal to this planet to make a deodorant and now its killing us” 👈 this shit is supposed to be funny and anti corporation. does it work? dunno, its stupid, might be funny to someone, its fine, little cringe )
starfields world building just grinds my gears. when there are stupid things, they are there because someone at bethesda thinks its coool as heck or didnt think it through. fucking space cowbois. fucking colony war. why add mechs into your world and ban them? why artificially limit the number of star systems the nations can control?
Totally agree the dlc really made it one if those “it gets good after x hours” sorta things; All different vibes for the dlcs too. The raider one was lonely but it felt like it was supposed to be.
Thank you! Felt like I was I playing a different game than everyone else.
Everyone mocked Starfield’s Neon for being Discount Cyberpunk. But at least they played it as straight as they could. Like, I could believe people live there and had a life.
It felt like Outer Worlds kept trying to make jokes about how cruel capitalism is versus tell a real story. Like, “Oh boy time to go increase shareholder value!” Or “I love Space nuts. I have to say that or I die.” Like wtf, where’s the subtlety?
It’s not Borderlands 3 bad, no where near it. But it’s pretty bad.
In this genre of “big space games”, The Outer Worlds stands near to Mass effect, because it follows “the Bioware formula” pretty closely: The player and a group of followers visit several semi-open worlds, where they look for a MacGuffin related to the main story while solving local problems. (I’ll write a short essay about the Bioware formula someday…)
The Outer Worlds was a good game (not great) and I look forward to the sequel. I’ve played most Obsidian games and I wish they wrote more sci-fi.
Starfield was much better than Outer Worlds IMO. I enjoyed my time with Starfield, it’s not perfect of course. I’ve tried to get through Outer Worlds three times but it’s just not fun, I also strongly dislike New Vegas. Just ok writing doesn’t make up for shitty gameplay.
The core of the problem is that there’s absolutely nothing effectively preventing companies from abusing IP claims to harass whoever they want.
At least you’d expect claims to be automatically dropped when coming from an assumptive/disingenuous party. Something like “you issued 100 wrong claims so we won’t listen to your 101st one, sod off”. But nah.
As such, “your violating muh inrelactual properry, remove you’re conrent now!!!” has zero cost, and a thousand benefits. Of course they’d abuse it.
The role of AI in this situation is simply to provide those companies a tool to issue more and faster claims, at the expense of an already low accuracy.
IP and copyright laws have been the bane of the internet. Not only stifling fair use but it has become nothing but weaponised for corporate warfare. the DMCA isn’t fit for purpose.
An individual would risk corporate lawyers lobbing suits at them they don’t have nearly enough resources to fight. In that way, it’s much like other forms of activism: individual actions are easily singled out and retaliated against.
If a ton of people were to do so, however, they might have an impact. Either the registrar would have to take steps to limit who can submit them, which might conflict with some laws, or they’d invest a great deal of resources trying to sort out the legit ones. Trying to single out people for retaliation is hard when there’s enough of them. In this way, too, it is like other forms of activism:
There is strength in numbers. There is power in unity.
If, hypothetically, someone were to coordinate such actions in the style of a crowdsources DDoS, and they could get enough participants, they might get away with it.
Sounds like a job for a group similar to Anonymous, just less focused on actual illegal activities and instead just playing out the legal methods of fighting against corporations.
[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor from any country following Saxon tribal law like USA. Take what I say with a grain of salt.]
As far as I know, in theory the victim of the bogus DMCA could sue the copyright troll for damages, including attorney fees and all that stuff. In practice, it would be the same as nothing, megacorp who hired the copyright troll would make sure that the victim knows its place.
I mean, there is. DMCA essentially protects content hosts from copyright claims. When they get a DMCA notice, they remove the material and inform the user whose material is removed. If they want to contest it, they can submit a counter notice denying the claim and basically saying “take me to court then”, with their contact info so a suit can be filed. At this point, if nothing is filed in a two week period, the host is free to consider the initial takedown notice void.
Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.
The problem is that defending against a copyright troll in the court is an expensive headache, and the copyright troll has a whole army of lawyers to prove for sure that the Moon is made of green cheese. As such, even if the target knows that it’s a bogus claim, they still comply with the troll to avoid the court.
Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.
In theory, yes. In practice, good luck proving that the copyright troll knew it and acted maliciously.
you don’t get entire functional UI elements accurately populated with appropriate data out of a “bug”. at best its a feature that was being tested internally and never would have made it past that, at worst its something that went live early.
Oh whoops I accidentally built an entire ad portal and placed it onto the main page and oh no I accidentally passed it through multiple levels of code review QA and approval, then crap I deployed it to the test environment then prod
Yeah it is possible he’s accurately, but misleadingly, calling it a bug because it was not meant to be deployed to production (yet). I do not think that’s how he wants or expects people to take it when he calls it a “bug”, though.
First thing that came in to my mind was Gears of War with its specific third person view and hiding behind covers. I don’t think it was the first game with that mechanic but the most influential one
I think you need to be more specific than just “third person”. Third person view was in Pong, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Centipede, etc. It’s the default for most games.
First person was probably introduced with Battle Zone.
Which, I don’t mean to sound pedantic, I just literally don’t really know what you mean here.
Then you will need to extend that to the OP of this comment chain as they didn’t specify either what Gears of War is. I am going to edit my comment to clarify but I do feel you are too pendantic for asking this.
Thank you. Sorry. Never played that game and didn’t know that was specific to FPS. I know some arcade shooter games had that mechanic, but not in the context of free-roaming FPS. I think you’re right about Tomb Raider.
If you are attempting to ask which game popularized 3d, third person shooters, then yes, the original Tomb Raider is probably the most early, widely popular game that popularized this.
The term I refer to is “hiding behind cover” singular - so when I hear “hiding behind covers” I think of the COG seeing locusts, getting scared, and wrapping themselves up in blankets. Lol
To be fair when it came out seven years ago it really shook up the portable gaming scene. Every portable console coming out since is an iteration on that design. The joycons can go to hell though. And those weird ass online plans.
I really liked the original 2DS personally. The announcement left everyone incredulous as the device sounded and looked like a dumb downgrade. I mean, it was hard to tell if it was joke or not. In the end though it’s light, cheap, tough and surprisingly comfortable.
Hey, is it too late to buy a couple of n3dsxl in 2024? Is it unusable now as all online services are shut down? Can you still find game cartridges to buy?
I just want something simple to play co-op game with the wife and kids on camping trip or on-the-go sometimes. Last month I dug out my old DSLite from the attic and it’s still boot. My candy-crush-4-life wife love the Mario kart and couldn’t stop playing LOL. But we can’t justify to buy 2-4 Switch.
Because fuck Nintendo and their predatory anti consumer business model.
I think that calling BOtW similar to other full-scale console games of 2017 like Sniper Elite 4, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Nier Automata, Prey, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, RE7, or AssCreed Origins, is a biiiiiiig stretch.
It was a huge jump for Nintendo (it was basically putting GameCube-level games on a handheld), but it was still far behind other consoles. Witcher 3 (2015) even eventually released on the Switch in 2019, and it was massively graphically gimped compared to ahemreal consoles.
I didn’t say it’s not good, I said it’s not equivalent to console releases of that year. Graphics isn’t everything, and I still enjoy playing Pax Imperia and Nox, but that doesn’t change that it was a handheld game, not a console game. Pokemon Red/Blue were also some of the best selling games the year they released, but that doesn’t make the Gameboy equivalent as a console to PSX or N64 either.
BotW was originally developed for the WiiU, which it also released on. It is not a “handheld game”, and tbh I’d take it’s gameplay loop over Nier Automata or Shadow of War any day of the week.
The Switch design is an evolution of the Wii U controller, which itself was evolved from the the lower screen design of the DS, which itself was modelled on the old Vertical Multi Screen Game and Watches from the 1980s.
Have a look through all of Nintendo’s consoles and you’ll see the lines of inspiration drawn from generation to generation.
That and it’s a tire-screeching exit from the abusive road we thought gaming was going down. Microtransactions, lootboxes etc. Baldur’s Gate 3 is refreshing from that perspective and, like me, I think many are amazed that it’s actually working.
I see nothing revolutionary about a game not having things like microtransactions and loot boxes. Those are mostly restricted to multiplayer games, and the industry never stopped making good single-player games without that bullshit.
Only played the first one which was pretty good. It’s super big on character customization as it has a million race/class combinations. A bit more extreme than the rest
When the baby is that small, it’s the perfect time to do stuff like this. You have to be “on call” if they need you, but they spend 90% of the time sleeping. So just hold them or have them strapped to you and do your thing!
I got caught up on so many shows during the first few days when my daughter was still nocturnal, and I know my wife beat a few games she had on the back burner.
I hate Microsoft but I also hate self-described “Libertarians” complaining about free speech because it usually means they want to spam slurs and white supremacist bullshit without pushback.
I replied to a comment like this somewhere else, so I’ll just paste this here
Take this with a grain of salt, as I’m a commoner on the server.
While freedom of speech means you can yell whatever racial slurs you want, it doesn’t mean you are free from consequences. When you start saying bigoted stuff on the chat, you will be targeted by players and get /ignore’d.
I would advise you to make your own judgement by reading the chat logs on Discord or IRC, but not everybody has that amount of time. Some people said vile stuff here, but every time someone says some weird stuff, it always gets backlash, and it definitely isn’t a nazi breeding ground.
Also I’ll add this, Most of the server staff and community are queer and from different backgrounds, slurs aren’t taken kindly here.
While freedom of speech means you can yell whatever racial slurs you want, it doesn’t mean you are free from consequences.
This seems to be the MS stance as well, and they seem unwilling to associate with that kind of speech, so they want to cut that connection off as a consequence.
MS isn’t telling them not to speak. MS is telling them to take their speech somewhere else.
Mojang as well? Because MS employs hundreds of thousands of employees making their own decisions and owning their own work. I don’t see how Minecraft has anything to do with the poor decisions made on Azure.
That aside, the fuck does Halo have to do with Mojang? Unless you’re saying it’s the Xbox people as a whole I guess, which makes a lot more sense to me. I saw a bunch of people talking about Palestine and assumed you were just talking about that somehow.
Anyway, none of this really explains to me why they should not be allowed to limit speech on their own platform, regardless of what speech is limited. People can always pack up and go somewhere else. This isn’t the government coming in and arresting some people for having an opinion they don’t like. This is a company coming in and saying they want that speech somewhere else.
Edit: found the Halo reference, had no idea this was a thing honestly with the dumpster fire that is the US government going on.
I am? You’re the one coming out of left field with the Azure issues?
The actual topic is Microsoft games wanting to distance themselves from alleged racist speech while at the same allowing one of their largest IPs to represent one of the most openly racist organizations we have seen in recent American history.
The issue is whether they can limit speech on their platform. Their own hypocracy means absolutely nothing. They are free to be as inconsistent as they want so long as their rules stick to their own software and platforms.
Edit: I should add that “they should allow racism here because they do somewhere else” has to be the most wild argument I’ve ever read.
I mean fair enough. I think we both agree on a base level. I’m not arguing they shouldnt limit their server, and you’re not arguing that their ICE support is laudable. Think we just started misaligned.
Bro for real! Like I hate any porn game, as a game. Not as a societal flaw!
So you know what I do? Same exact thing I do about gay sex. I don’t do it, I don’t think about it very often unless there’s a funny joke to be made in a tangential way, and I don’t tell other people that they have to be exact like me.
Ffs, let people do what they want if they aren’t hurting anyone.
They want people having more babies so the US president has more supply to pick from. It’s not been as easy since he lost his best friend that helped sort it out for him.
They cannot help it. They literally think about it all the time, and there’s no helping people like collective shout or the crazies on the street. The unwashed ones with the “you’re going to hell for gay sex” signs.
I see the same people on the street all the time. And they think about gay sex WAY more than I do, and I’m married to a person of the same goddamn sex, lol.
Some people really need to cut loose. Generally, I’m not pro-drugs, but damn, they need some hard party drugs to reset things and help them get back to a normal life. Go to burning man, get a good job, then go hike the Appalachian trail or something, for Christ sake.
I would argue that instead of party drugs (which I assume is X, coke, alcohol, pot, and so on), I think they need a good ego death trip. I’m talking like twenty caps(or two wavy bois) or an LD50 of LSA.
I’m so sick of this. What if we don’t want saving? Just fuck off.
I’ve got friends in both places, and I highly doubt God is gonna give you extra karma or brownie points for converting someone to a made up religion that’s like, maybe 200 years old, lol.
Go gardening. Volunteer at a big cat rescue place. Stop wasting your life preaching something that deep down, you probably don’t even believe in, but is distracting you from something else in your life that could be resolved with therapy.
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