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Alkaline batteries are great for remotes and stuff like that, where they potentially last years, in those applications it seems very reasonable, my TV remote still has the included AA batts and I bought it 3 years ago. But they end up getting used in higher drain devices and it gets a bit absurd. Still, at least people aren’t rocking around with their boombox with 6 D cells that last 8hours.
As a long time e-cig user and enthusiast I agree. I thought we got away from that garbage a decade ago, but then it came back. I don’t get it, it’s expensive, it sucks, and it’s mind bogglingly awful for the environment.
I don’t even love the idea of pre built coils but I compromised for the convenience now that they are actually good. Feels a lot less bad to toss a little bit of steel and kanthal every few weeks.
I can’t really get behind banning flavors, but less attractive packaging and only allowing open refillable systems would be a huge step to slowing adolescent use, they pretty much all use disposables because they can be bought at gas stations and you have to go to a smoke shop to get the refillables. Not to mention dropping $60 on a mod+tank isn’t as easy to start as $10 for a disposable.
I think the flavors are a big part of why they can be effective as cessation aids you start to no longer associate tobacco with it which helps a lot. I no longer smell someone smoking and get cravings.
Also are we just going to ignore the whole thing with GTAV where you had three characters with intertwined stories that you could switch between (mostly) at will? Multiple protagonists has been done, but not really like that, not in such a living breathing manner that they managed to pull off. Rockstar also manages to fill the world with many interesting characters for the story to play with, they manage to take really simple gameplay and make it engaging all the way through.
They also added the heists which were a pretty good way of adding more meaning to the old school mission structure they continue to use and while ultimately I don’t think it had they impact they wanted it did add some flavor and interest to the gameplay. I’m an absolute fiend for heist films and that was a lot of fun for me.
These games are characterized by superficial simplicity underlaid with surprising complexity to craft a smooth experience. LA Noire is a prime example of that kind of design where it becomes very obvious how much the game has to run like well oiled gearworks to function at all and have the cases work as narrative. (developed by Team Bondi, but with the help of a lot of the R* studios including North)
Also they manage to do all this without a second of it feeling like a cynical product, it’s clear the people doing this love the topic of pop culture crime, films, stories, legends and want to take the player along for a fun ride. I don’t know at this point, with everything that happened with GTAO, which mostly feels like a cynical product, if that’s the R* making GTAVI, I sure hope it is though.
Haha, that’s exactly the kind of game I want to make but with graphics and a little less dry. Didn’t even know about that one. Also I should probably actually figure out how to start that once I’m settled in here. It’s amazing how much planning and thought goes into getting one truck across the country. It’s like Oregon trail but you die of stupidity, yours or others, rather than dysentery.
Yeah, I hope so, but they also cannot just lie about the direction they think they are headed like that as a public company. With the kind of progress translation has made it just seems inevitable that the switch will happen for lower power consumer devices at least. (Lower power being relative to a high end workstation) interesting to see if maybe this means a pivot to commercial only products.
Rock and a hard place, it’s very similar to the situation the people of Afghanistan find themselves in, if you are living in Kabul, yeah the Taliban aren’t sunshine and rainbows, but you are pretty happy to see them swoop in when ISIS shows up. (I’m not equating ISIS and the IDF directly for the record, but you can see how from a Gazans perspective the IDF poses a similar threat at times)
Israel definitely is well within their rights to retaliate against Hamas, it would be foolish to claim otherwise. It’s the exact way they are doing it that is the issue, they are behaving nearly as poorly as their enemy. You can’t just tell the world “look at the barbarity of Hamas slaughtering innocent civilians just out there kibbutzing” and then turn around and bomb civilian hospitals, completely disregard rules of engagement around medical aid killing humanitarian volunteers you were aware of, shutting off all power, water and closing food supply to the Gaza strip, and then act like it’s somehow better than that.
Hamas absolutely sucks and Israel has every right to defend themselves from terrorism, but the Palestinian children buried under rubble didn’t deserve any of this. (Neither did the Israeli citizens who were slaughtered and kidnapped for that matter.)
Israel has the technology, the troops, and the tactics to be far more precise and surgical in their retaliation, but their response has been punitive and brutal, and seems to almost maximize collateral damage. Of course that’s what Netanyahu and his thugs will all but directly say they want given the opportunity to speak. I do not believe that properly represents the citizens of Israel who are generally much more sympathetic to the people of Palestine.
Both the citizens of Israel and Palestine have been failed by their leadership. Agree or disagree, at this point, I just had to write that down somewhere. I know people from both Palestine and Israel, wonderful people, all this is heartbreaking.
War is hell, even if you play by the rules, why make it even worse?
If it were me I’d just tell them they have the choice between refunding me or me issuing a charge back since they didn’t deliver the product, I know which is preferable to them…
It’s really none of the customers problem why you can’t deliver, unless they are somehow being difficult, you are obligated to make the customer whole on the transaction which is a contract.
If they took care of me I’d happily email Sony and tell them they are being dicks (in a brutal but classy way), but these guys are probably cut off for a reason.
No? There’s more color, but it’s reasonable CSGO always had a kind of dull color grading/textures, though updates changed that A bit later on. A lot of players turn up saturation themselves for the (at least perceived) benefit of visibility so that might be what you saw, you also see CS players playing in 1024x768 stretched still because that’s how they always played before.
They definitely gave it that trendy sunny slightly hazy day look. I’m not complaining it’s a much nicer aesthetic than the original release of CSGO which felt like a Seattle afternoon in the middle of the desert.
You really think M$ is better about this? You still can’t play any Forza Motorsport games on back compat, there may be some technical reason for this, but I doubt it. They delist games before the next one in the series comes out too, which is the wildest shit. you can’t buy FM7 anymore and haven’t been able to for a while. The new one isn’t even out yet.
This practice boggles the mind because I can go on Steam and most publishers are still selling their decade + old games.
I also wonder if Xbox will use the reaction to the leaks to determine potential changes going forward (ie: reactions to the console being all digital, reactions to the next gen console processor, etc).
Almost certainly, make lemonade and all that, it can be very valuable feedback it just wouldn’t have been worth telegraphing your 5 year plan.
I’m just slightly too young to have lived the video store junkie lifestyle and I really wish I could have. Even as a teen when I’d get the chance to visit the local rental place I’d spend so much time just talking with random people about movies, it was amazing, there’s really no equivalent space to it anymore. Same with videogame stores etc.
Cablek has a nice primer on their website on it
https://www.cablek.com/technical-reference/cat-5---5e--6--6a---7--8-standards
the connector types used are also a part of the spec for example CAT7 standard cannot be achieved with an RJ45 (at least by the book) Though you might still use CAT7 rated cable for the additional interference resistance at longer distances with RJ45 connectors.
I was definitely a junk wizard back in the day, as I’ve grown older and have less time and more money I just want stuff that works. I used to build entire (pretty acceptably decent) home theater systems out of $150 worth of stuff off craigslist and yard sales. When you know how it all works you can cobble together some real goofy shit that works.
It’s about the exact amount of cringe I expect from a non mainstream linux distro. but aye who doesn’t like dragons and eagles? I’ll have to try it out on this old zenbook.
Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1
I think you may have rose tinted glasses on this point, the level of detail in environments and accuracy of shading, especially of dynamic objects, has increased greatly. Material shading has also gotten insanely good compared to what we had then. Just peep the PBR materials on guns in modern FPS games, it’s incredible, Crysis just had normals and specular maps all black or grey guns that are kinda shiny and normal mapped. If you went inside of a small building or whatever there was hardly any shading or shadows to make it look right either.
Crysis is a very clever use of what was available to make it look good, but we can do a hell of a lot better now (without raytracing) At the time shaders were getting really computationally cheap to implement so those still look relatively good, but geometry and framebuffer size just did not keep pace at all, tesselation was the next hotness after that because it was supposed to help fix the limited geometry horsepower contemporary cards had by utilizing their extremely powerful shader cores to do some of the heavy lifting. Just look at the rocks in Crysis compared to the foliage and it’s really obvious this was the case. Bad Company 2 is another good example of good shaders with really crushingly limited geometry though there are clever workarounds there to make it look pretty good still.
I could see the argument that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze to you, but graphics have very noticeably advanced in that time.
Don’t even get me started on linux audio support.
I recall exactly once back in the day that Ubuntu actually just played audio through a laptop I installed it on and I damn near lost my mind.
like 30 minutes ago I installed Mint on a laptop and literally everything just worked as if I installed windows from the backup image. (I’m not sure power states are working 100% but it’s close enough and probably would with 3rd party driver)
I love my 6900XTH, killer chip. if you don’t expect ray tracing it’s an absolute monster. I bought it because it was what was available on the shelf but ultimately I feel like it was the best choice for me. I don’t think I’d buy another nvidia card for a while with the shit they’ve pulled, and I’d previously bought dozens of EVGA nvidia cards.
I just wish FSR2 could be improved to reduce ghosting. it’s already OK so any improvement would make it very good.
They cannot void your warranty over that, maybe for the computer you modified but the Magnuson Moss warranty act means they have to honor the warranty unless they can prove your modifications caused the damage.
Also, who cares if it gets updates? It will continue to work as it did from the factory indefinitely. Security updates aren’t necessary if the car isn’t connected to the internet and those updates cant change how the immobilizer/keys work anyways.
I’m probably never buying a car newer than the one I have. Everything is so ridiculous now. Though if I can just physically disable the WAN communication it uses I guess that’s fine too, though it would likely be expensive to get working again for resale.
It bothers me enough that my car is even capable of doing any kind of steering input I didn’t give it myself, brakes are by wire too, but fully depressing the pedal still connects you to the hydraulics directly so kind of a non issue, it allows for AEB which is a good safety feature though I’ll likely never trip it.
My current car I think can do some kind of connection but I disabled it in the firmware when I flashed the BCM. Not missed, did nothing of benefit to me afaik.
There is in most countries. Unless you mean shortfills you are meant to add nic to? In the US those still firmly fall under the laws restricting sale of vapes. Don’t know about the UK or Europe, I know those products exist there though.
Otherwise you can’t legally sell bulk nicotine to underage people, obviously the other ingredients are used for such a wide variety of things they can’t really be restricted like that.