Maybe it is the movie studios, but there don’t appear to be any of them on the list of HDMI Forum members, or on its board of directors. So my first guess was some combination of Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and Apple. Whoever it is though, the question is how they went about convincing the HDMI Forum as a whole to take such a self-destructive approach.

They’re not fucking with AMD and Valve just because they spontaneously developed an irrational hatred of partly-open platforms. Somebody has persuaded them that they have a financial incentive to do it.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected

It’s pretty weird that this organization that exists only to extract rents from people who want to use hdmi remains unwilling to do so even for a customer as large as Valve. I wonder who has given them the motivation for it, and how much it cost them.

People do occasionally buy new computers, and this one looks likely to be a better choice than most of what’s on the market.

What do you mean “people who don’t want a normal prebuilt”? That’s exactly what they’re going to be selling — a normal prebuilt from a vendor people trust with the economy of scale to sell it for a competitive price. It’s got an unusual form factor and some fancy hardware, but functionally that’s what it is.

Yes, that is the type of monopoly they have. It’s one that would probably not attract the attention of anti-trust regulators. If you’re not coming from the free software world I guess it looks like that’s the only way things can be.

Games that are linked with the Steam libraries, distributed through the Steam store, and launched through the Steam client.

It’s true though, Steam has a monopoly on Steam games.

That video came up in my youtube recommendations last night, and I watched it. Pretty good, although if you’ve used Windows in the past ten years there aren’t going to be any real surprises in there. It sucks for all the reasons people usually complain about, and it’s all getting worse lately.

Thank Goodness You’re Here was good for a few laughs.

1,759 mods published in the last 28 days on nexus.

I am taking a break from working on my Skyrim mod list to try getting into Baldur’s Gate 3 for a third time.

My first attempt, I picked “tactician” difficulty, didn’t make optimal choices for character build and party composition, and then quit at the end of act 2 when the fights got too hard. Then I tried honour mode, minmaxed everything, was getting by okay but quit in the middle of act two because playing that way was boring.

So now I’m playing at the default difficulty level, just relaxing and having fun like a normal person.

Do you lock your door at night?

No, I rely on a bro from Riot Games to come round and lock me in, so they can be sure I won’t go out at night and commit crimes.

It’s a pretty big change then… They should call it ChromeOS/2 or something.

Why is it up to google?

So, not required on Linux then I guess.

Our prevailing system of electronic payments is an absolutely ridiculous situation that gives Visa and Mastercard more power than anyone should have over the whole world of retail commerce. It’s been like this since fucking 1993, or whenever it became commonplace to buy stuff using credit cards on the Internet. It’s nice that gamers have now noticed that it affects them but it remains unclear how their efforts are going to help improve things other than by making more people aware of the problem.

It’s nice to have ntsync, I’ve been using it for a few weeks. Knowing that the thread sync api is solid means one less thing to worry about when debugging modded skyrim.

I don’t know, there’s just something about it.

For a long time we had VGA for video cables. There was no VGA version 2.1.9, now supporting 1024x768 mode with 16-bit colour. Cables did not cost $29. There were no rent-seeking patent holders charging license fees, or at least they weren’t obnoxious enough that we knew about them. It didn’t have five different types of connectors. There was no VGA consortium constantly keeping itself in the news with periodic press releases. Companies didn’t need to sign away their soul to write drivers for it. There was no VGA copy protection trying to keep us from decoding our own video streams. Cables didn’t include enough microelectronics to power a space shuttle.

Somehow I think we could do better.

I hate HDMI with a passion that can not be explained.

Your other doubts and concerns seem slightly biased, e.g. wondering what settings could be tweaked on only one of the systems being tested and then reminding us all that there do still exist some things that won’t run on SteamOS. It’s only that one that is outright ridiculous.

Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation

Really grasping at straws there, eh? I’m no big fan of Ars but I hope we can assume they’re not quite that incompetent.

In the early 2000s I actually thought made sense to buy a console, since not many games would run on linux.

continued innovations from major players like Microsoft

MS using its massive reserves of innovation to acquire many of the major game studios.

I’m sure It will probably be fine for at least a year or two before the new owners manage to ruin it somehow but anyway I’ll just go make sure I have a full backup of my 150 gigabytes of skyrim mods.

How many did you play?

Is it a big spoiler, or did you mean to say “protagonist” instead of antagonist?

If he’d chosen his words more carefully and said “many” rather than “most” nobody would have a reason to disagree.

Sometimes it seems to me that just maybe it could be possible that the same two or three companies controlling the entire supply of a crucial component for decades at a time is not really enough to enable the magic hand of capitalism to provide a healthy competitive market.

if patents are meant to protect new inventions, how come Nintendo is asserting patents for which it applied months after Palworld launched?

The answer, it turns out, is ridiculous legal bullshit that makes no sense. Just like most of patent law.

People still care about Starfield in 2025? I thought everyone went back to Skyrim a year ago.

In the 2000s, an ideological battle played out across the fictional cosmos of EVE Online.

I was playing EVE around that time and it’s a little strange to see Goonswarm valorized like that. It’s the only MMO I ever tried where I really got into the social scene within the game. For a time I was loosely affiliated with a small independent corp which was loosely affiliated with a sort of informal federation of others. We all had the ability to make a living independently but we all usually had more fun when we cooperated and so we often did. I never really stopped to think about the politics of it but I guess it was pretty close to proper anarchism, in a way. The giant alliances that battled each other for total dominance were a but distant menace that we would occasionally snipe at or steal from.

Anyway, good book review. More interesting than I would’ve guessed when I clicked on the link.

Sorry devs, not even trying to stop me from playing Infiniti Nikki can make me want to play Infiniti Nikki.

Whether or not you have to be, if you are online for a single player game they are probably collecting data. Or trying to. Use opensnitch.

It’s striking how many of the things they’ve changed seem to be slightly for the worse:

• the lockpicking and persuasion minigames are a little less fun
• the level-up choices are dumbed down
• the speed at which you gain levels is even faster
• the local map is weirdly hard to find for some reason
• the HUD looks worse
• there is much telemetry
• there are framerate problems

Then there are the things I’d have expected them to improve that are unchanged:

• they didn’t give us better difficulty settings
• there’s no walking slowly with the controller
• level scaling has most (but not all) of the same problems it did
• the day/night cycle still flies past at hyperspeed
• horses still report your crimes to the telepathic guards (okay I guess they had to keep that)

Of course there are mods to fix most of those problems. Oblivion is a great game, and it’s good to see a lot of new people playing it for the first time.

That was my reaction watching it on Twitch. Playing it in person is way more fun, the nostalgia got me. Still, Skyblivion will probably be better-looking as well as having better mod support.

The AI-generated speech animations are strangely exaggerated like it’s some kind of lip reading training program. There’s no hair physics. You don’t get a shadow in first-person mode. The persuasion minigame UI looks worse than it used to. Sometimes the NPCs look off to the side while they’re talking to you as if the camera’s in the wrong place. Considering that the main point is to make the old game look nicer, they seem to have neglected a lot of little details.

Brilliant marketing trick: Keep people waiting for the next game in the huge blockbuster series for 14 years and they’ll be eager for whatever they get

Eribees and Mortalbeef will be streaming it on Twitch as soon as they can download it, along with many others. Might be interesting.

Seems like a sign that it will not be optimized at all.