Obviously, most people don’t replace their TV every year, so it was years after new sales were mostly LCDs that most people had LCDs, but companies making content like to be sure it looks good with the latest screens.

I think you might have misjudged when LCDs became common as by the end of 2004, when Halo 2 released, LCD TVs were already a reasonable fraction of new TV sales, and in parts of the world, it was only a few months later that LCD TVs became the majority. For PC monitors, the switch came earlier, so it was clear CRTs were on the way out while the game was being developed. If they hadn’t expected a significant number of players to use an LCD and tweaked the game as much as necessary to ensure that was fine, it would have been foolish

That’s what’s keeping the lights on. If they sunk the extra billions into making their discrete cards genuinely superior to Nvidia’s (which already means taking it for granted that selling comparable products for less money makes them knockoff rather than superior), then Nvidia could stop them recouping the development costs by eating into their own margins to drop their prices. Over the last decade or two, ATi/AMD’s big gambles have mostly not paid off, whereas Nvidia’s have, so AMD can’t afford to take big risks, and the semi-custom part of the business is huge long-term orders that mean guaranteed profit.

The main point of 32-bit Windows 10 wasn’t to make it run on non-64-bit hardware, it’s that x86 processors can’t run in 16-bit mode if they were booted in 64-bit mode, so if you’ve got an old 16-bit Windows/DOS/CPM app that you’ve absolutely got to run natively instead of through DOSBox and have to use modern Windows instead of an older version, it needs to be 32-bit. By the time Windows 11 released, Microsoft had decided that nearly no one still wanted to do that anymore.

As it says in the article, it’ll be smaller and quieter, so less offensive for most people’s living rooms than a full-size desktop. It’s not meant to replace your existing PC if you have one, unless it was getting old and you were about to replace it anyway. If you don’t have a PC, or don’t have one in the living room, then it might be a better option than anyone else’s prebuilt.

Usually when people post a source, the numbers say that at median screen sizes and distances from the screen, 4K isn’t perceptibly better than 1440p, and the person writing it up as an article has misunderstood the conclusion as saying 4K isn’t better than 1080p rather than that it isn’t better than 1440p. TVs tend not to be made with 1440p resolution, so upgrading from 1080p gets you right to 4K, skipping the sweet spot.

It’s still a luxury yacht decked out with nearly all the things you’d expect from a half a billion dollar superyacht. Only part of it is customised for research. If the main goal was to turn half a billion dollars into a research boat, this isn’t the boat that would get made.

I’m not sure I’d consider this a total upgrade - I have a Steam Controller and an 8bitdo SN30 Pro, and despite the 8bitdo one being newer and having been used much less, I wore through its original thumbstick rubber and had to replace it much sooner than the Steam Controller’s thumbstick cap, which hasn’t even worn through, it was just flaking.

Either that was a fluke, or the 8bitdo rubber isn’t as durable.

The comments on the article are pretty illuminating:

• Unlike BIOS transplant mods of the past, this doesn’t enable any disabled cores (which would likely have been disabled due to manufacturing defects) as they’re physically fused off rather than controlled by software. It just increases the power limit, which you can do with the stock BIOS anyway.
• The before and after comparison is inflated due to abnormally poor results on the stock BIOS, and the gain is much less impressive when comparing to an average RX 9070. If I had to guess, maybe the user had previously been meddling with settings and one of them hurt performance, but the reflash restored it to its default.
• Because of the different power limits, RX 9070 XT cards typically have much beefier cooling and power delievery than a non-XT RX 9070, so going for the power limit of the bigger card is pushing things in a way that’s likely a bad idea.

The XT card has more cores, so using its power limit on the non-XT card means more power draw from each core, so it’s pushing things further than they’d be on the XT card. That’s probably an especially bad idea given that it’s already lower-binned silicon to start with.

At the moment, they’re already at risk of being removed by the government, who can make them illegal, and simultaneously at risk of being removed by payment processors, who can prevent the stores from operating. It makes no difference to the government whether they’re also the payment processor. They could remove them anyway. Having two entities with unilateral power to remove something can’t be worse than just having one of them.

They can do a really shit job of administering payment processes in a transparent and democratic manner before they end up being worse than the status quo where it’s entirely untransparent and undemocratic. Also, governments already have the power to make things they don’t like illegal, so there’s no reason to expect they’d block payments for things they’ve left legal, whereas payment processors currently block plenty of legal things.

Most of the UK’s COVID fraud was from giving out contracts to companies that knew full well that they couldn’t deliver, e.g. a £40 million PPE contract to the landlord of the Health Secretary’s local pup, so it’s not absurd to claim that the point of those contracts wasn’t to save the economy, but rather transfer taxpayer money from the treasury to friends of Conservative Party leadership while there was still something left to loot. There was also lots lost in loans to fictional companies and furlough payments to fictional employees, of which a minority went to small businesses gaming the system, and a lot to organised crime gaming the system and then laundering the money so it couldn’t be traced and recovered (without giving the Serious Fraud Office and National Crime Agency enough budget to hire a workable number of forensic accountants).

The previous government wrote off billions in COVID-related fraud, and this guy got less than forty grand. Either there were millions of people defrauding the government, or the average incident involved much, much more money.

Unfortunately, I’m not the right kind of software engineer to answer in more detail than that.

I think for something like this, you’d rent cloud servers as you’d expect the number of concurrent users to change over time and ideally would be able to spin up more capacity when you need it without having to have those machines available all the time. You still need some kind of system that decides when to order more capacity with enough warning that it’s actually available (you can tell AWS you want a VM immediately, but it still takes a couple of minutes to transfer your data onto it and boot it up, which is longer than people want to sit in a loading screen) and decides which servers to assign to which users.

There’s a strong argument that the server architecture needed to be better at launch, but then the game sold more than an order of magnitude better than it was expected to, so no one would have noticed that it scaled badly had the player count been in line with their design and testing.

This is a mod that only runs in a fan-made from-scratch recreation of the game’s engine. Morrowind modders have basically every other game’s modders beaten if you want to make it a competition.

Thermal problems are much less likely to kill hardware than they used to be. CPU manufacturers have got much better at avoiding microfractures caused by thermal stress (e.g. by making sure that everything in the CPU expands at the same rate when heated) and failures from electromigration (where the atoms in the CPU move because of applied voltage and stop being parts of transistors and traces, which happens faster at higher temperatures). Ten or twenty years ago, it was really bad for chips to swing between low and high temperatures a lot due to thermal stress, and bad for them to stay at above 90°C for a long time due to electromigration, but now heat makes so little difference that modern CPUs dynamically adjust their frequency to stay between 99.0° and 99.9° under load by default. The main benefit of extra cooling these days is that you can stay at a higher frequency for longer without exceeding the temperature limit, so get better average performance, but unless your cooling solution is seriously overspecced, the CPU will be above 99.0° under load a lot of the time either way and the motherboard just won’t ramp the fan up to maximum.

The last time they had plenty of stock and cards people wanted to buy at the same time was the RX 200 series. They sold lots of cards, but part of the reason people wanted them was because they were priced fairly low because the cards were sold with low margins, so they didn’t make a huge amount of money, helping to subsidise their CPU division when it was making a loss, but not more.

Shortly after this generation launched Litecoin ASIC mining hardware became available, so suddenly the used market was flooded with these current-generation cards, making it make little sense to buy a new one for RRP, so towards the end of the generation, the cards were sold new at a loss just to make space. That meant they needed to release the next generation cards to convince people to buy them, but as they were just a refresh generation (basically the same GPUs but clocked higher and with lower model numbers with only the top-end Fury card being new silicon) it was hard to sell 300-series cards when they cost more than equivalent 200-series ones.

That meant they had less money to develop Polaris and Vegas than they wanted, so they ended up delayed. Polaris sold okay, but was only available as low-margin low-end cards, so didn’t make a huge amount of money. Vega ended up delayed by so long that Nvidia got an entire extra generation out, so AMD’s GTX 980 competitor ended up being an ineffective GTX 1070 competitor, and had to be sold for much less than planned, so again, didn’t make much money.

That problem compounded for years until Nvidia ran into their own problems recently.

It’s not unreasonable to claim that AMD graphics cards being in stock at the wrong time caused them a decade of problems.

Part of the point of ReactOS is that it can use the existing Windows drivers for existing hardware, so every driver that doesn’t work is because of a bug that needs to be fixed. Even if no one uses a particular piece of hardware, the same bug might have stopped another driver for another piece of hardware working.

As someone else said, installing things outside of Program Files is generally only necessary if they were made for XP or older, and the developers didn’t test on Vista or newer or read the bit of the Windows documentation that said not to write to an application’s installation directory because it might not work on future versions that was there since the early nineties. Regular Oblivion works fine in Program Files (although it makes it more of a pain to mod) and the Remaster was obviously made post-Vista.

All that said, none of this is relevant because you’ve got the Windows App version, which uses a completely different system and works in a partial sandbox so doesn’t interact with the rest of the computer like a traditional program would.

Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.

It adds the executable permission (without which, things can’t be executed) to all the files in the game’s directory. You only need to be able to execute a few of those files, and there’s a dedicated permission to control what can and can’t be executed for a reason. Windows doesn’t have a direct equivalent, so setting it for everything gives the impression that they’re trying to make it behave like Windows rather than working with the OS.

Selling old games and new games isn’t mutually exclusive, and more money tends to be spent on new games than old ones. It’s not unreasonable to expect that selling new games too could subsidise the work to make old games run on modern platforms.

The main lore change people refer to generally seems to be them thinking it’s set decades earlier than it is. Part of the plot of the show is working out why the NCR isn’t the dominant faction anymore, and plenty of characters remember it, and used to live in Shady Sands. The status quo changing years after New Vegas was set doesn’t mean that the events of Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas didn’t happen.

You can’t really find out of you’ll get good enough to enjoy a soulslike without buying one and playing it for longer than the two hour refund period. For other products, you usually have something you can do about it or some way to try it first. You don’t need to buy a kayak to find out you don’t like kayaking as you can go for a kayaking lesson first and use the venue’s equipment. It’s understandable that people who hit a wall and can never get any enjoyment from a soulslike will be upset that it cost them just as much to find that out as it costs someone who’ll compete the game and have a great time.

Maybe it’s enough to just do the refund window based on progression rather than time.

Mono died because Microsoft bought it out and used parts of it along with parts of regular .NET to make the modern cross-platform MIT-licenced .NET implementation that’s used both on Windows and elsewhere. There’s no need for an open source third party .NET implementation if the first party one is already open source.

If anyone’s in this thread because they’re looking for a new mail client after Microsoft killed the old Mail app, and haven’t been happy with the typical suggestions of using each email service’s web interface or Thunderbird, I found I don’t hate Mailspring (with the fancy features disabled - I just want my email client to do email well and don’t want extras that provide clutter).

They banned someone for a few weeks who’d comment Dub time on dubs after some weirdos got irrationally angry about it and mass reported her. There’d also be a meaningful comment on the actual episode from the same user, but it wouldn’t be upvoted as much, so wouldn’t be displayed as prominently. Before the ban and after it was reversed, there’d typically be an argument in the replies to the Dub time comment between people angrily ranting about it and other people defending it.

So there clearly was some moderation, but beyond an automated bad word filter, and I guess something blocking URLs, it was done sparingly and reluctantly.

Better have comments on Crunchyroll than make me go to R*ddit to find out if I missed something in an episode, especially as anime subreddits typically start permitting episode spoilers before the dub for that episode is out, so there’s often nowhere except the dub comments on Crunchyroll that’s safe to look for dub watchers.

Super useful for something like Overlord, where scenes with background information were cut and there’d be someone saying what else you’d know by this point in the manga, or if you’d forgotten something since watching a previous season and needed a reminder.

That’s what I remember, so I’m not convinced the other commenter posted correct numbers.

No, that’s the cyborgs.

I just left a game where someone was using the Spear to great effect, although they were finding it a bit of a pain to lock. That’s pretty different to completely broken.

This kind of mod is always a DLL of some kind, and typically, they’ll have you install the DLL to a location that the script extender will load DLLs from automatically (but sometimes they instead use the same name as a Windows DLL and go in the same directory as the game’s executable, as when the game tries to load the Windows DLL, it’ll try ones in its own directory before System32 and similar folders, then as long as the mod DLL in turn loads the real DLL, everything will still work). When the DLL’s loading, it’ll either overwrite bits of memory corresponding to functions with its own code, or if it needs to replace the whole function, will swap out the first few instructions with instructions to jump to a mod function instead.

If all they do is add more Creation Club content, all that happens is the functions people are hooking end up the same, but at different addresses. After the first few Creation Club updates, tools were made to automate mapping old addresses to new ones, and most script-extender-based mods could be made to work with just an Address Library update, which said which new addresses to use.

This is not that kind of update. The compiler version and settings used have changed, so functions, even ones that do the same thing, end up with different machine code at different addresses. This means a lot of mods will need making from scratch, and a lot of mods will need lots of work tracking down which functions need hooking now and how to do it even if there’s still stuff that’s salvageable.

There’s a pretty extensive API, capable of more than most games that advertise modding support, but it can’t do literally everything anyone could think of, so people reverse engineer the game engine to make it possible to do even more things (hence it being called a script extender rather than the modding API). It’s the mod reliant on reverse engineering the executable that break, not the ones using the modding API.

Fixing the script extender itself won’t take that long as it doesn’t need to hook that many functions (although depending on how much free time people have and whether there are any surprises, it could still take longer than most people expect). Fixing all the mods that depend on it will take much longer, as between them, they hook lots more functions than the script extender itself, and with this update, it’s not just a case of most functions being the same, but at a slightly different address (as was typical with creation club updates, which tools could help with), but instead lots of functions have changed slightly due to using an updated compiler, and lots of functions have been inlined differently (so instead of just existing once, they get copied into every function that uses them, and then optimised differently in each place based on the surrounding code).

In the olden days, online games didn’t have servers run by the publisher, they came with a separate program users would run to host their own server. Things like Minecraft still work that way, although I think there are servers run by Microsoft too now. For some games, this will be more complicated than others, but it’s not impossible.

Federation ships explicitly have warp drives in the movie, allowing FTL travel.