Without hardware decoding, it will take more compute to decompress, but sites usually wait to fully roll out new codecs until hardware decoding is more ubiquitous, because of how many people use low-powered streaming sticks and Smart TVs.
It’s not for the end user at this point, it’s for YouTube/streaming companies to spend less on bandwidth at existing resolutions. Even a 5% decrease in size for similar quality could save millions in bandwidth costs over a year for YouTube or Netflix.
It’s been revised since this edition. I was homeschooled with the “for Christian Schools” textbooks (and was sent to college at the University that produced them) I was just young enough to get the newer editions as they were being rewritten, my cousins who were 4 grades ahead of me weren’t as lucky and had the version shown in the picture. The versions I had were slightly better, they at least didn’t have this particular nonsense in them. But they still all taught a very warped view of science, and I was in my mid-twenties before I stopped believing in Creationism. The last ~10 years since then has taken both a lot of work to learn about reality, but has also been quite a lot of fun. Science is really cool if you aren’t stopping all the time to try to fit God in somehow.
For what it’s worth, Epic Games sold Bandcamp to Songtradr in 2023. It’s still an American company, and probably isn’t meaningfully better than Epic, but at least they haven’t totally tanked the platform yet either.
If your mail server is configured correctly this generally isn’t that big of an issue. You need a DKIM service on your mail server, and with that add some dns records (SPF records and DMARC) to the domain As long as those are in place and configured properly, you should be able to avoid most spam filters considering your domain invalid.
Personally, I prefer Infinite over the first two. Maybe I’m biased because I played Infinite first. But to me the story seemed a bit more polished and coherent.
I want to like this, but some of that mocap animation looks really off. Especially in those scenes with the idol and where indie is slamming down that stone. Looks like the mocap actor was holding back and that the idol weighs less than it should. It’s probably going to be okay, but after the excellent mocap work in games like God of War, where the animation really conveys a sense of weight, and in comparison to the Indiana Jones films this looks a bit floaty and like Indie is pulling his punches.
Why would you want another year of their software for free? This is their second screw up (apparently they sent out a bad update that affected some Debian and RHEL machines a couple years ago). I’d be transitioning to a competitor at the first opportunity. It seems they aren’t testing releases before pushing them out to customers, which is about as crazy to me as running alpha software on a production system.
I’m sure you have reasons, and this isn’t really meant to be directed at you personally, it’s just boggling to me that the IT sector as a whole hasn’t looked at this situation and collectively said “fuck that.”
I feel like a lot of what made the Bioshock games good was Ken Levine’s social commentary. And while we’ve had Bioshock games that he didn’t write or direct, and it would be silly to argue that he is the only one capable of writing a good Bioshock story, I do think he understands that it’s more important to say something with a game, than just churn out another title within the same world.
Rapture wasn’t just a dark underwater city, it was a Libertarian utopia, with all the exploitation and unchecked capitalism that would come from that. Columbia was a Christian Nationalist utopia, with the cultish brainwashing, revisionist history, and racism that is common in that worldview. I hope the team in charge of the new games understands that the series is more than the locations, and the “Big Daddies” and “Little Sisters.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love more Bioshock (if it’s good), but I’m glad we’re also getting Judas from Levine’s new studio, because I have a feeling it’s going to feel more like Bioshock than whatever the next official Bioshock game ends up being.
Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don’t studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.
Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.
This isn’t about defending Fromsoft, they’re just another company trying to get your money. I’m just saying that’s how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).
From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.
Difficulty wise, yeah, it’s hard. That’s a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it’s probably better that they launched a game that is “too hard” and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you’ll make things much harder on yourself.
I had a similar upbringing, but was also guided to go to a Christian University and it took me much longer than it should have to realize that what I was taught about Science and “Evolution” were lies, and how much of the evidence for Creation/Intelligent Design was dubious.
And yeah, with as beneficial as deprograming myself has been for my own personal growth, it’s not easy or fun - or how I expected to spend my 30s.
I figured you were being genuine, but there’s usually a few people who point at Microsoft’s “embracing” of Linux as the first step in the “embrace, extend, extinguish” trope, and see any involvement by Microsoft as nefarious. When the reality is just that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are a much larger share of their annual revenue than Windows, and Linux is a major part of their cloud offerings.
If you browse the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) for 5 minutes, you’ll probably see a bunch of microsoft.com email addresses, and it’s been that way for years. I understand why it bothers some people, but also Linus (and a couple others) approve everything that actually gets merged, whether it’s from a microsoft employee, or a redhat employee, or anyone else. Even if microsoft wanted to pay employees to submit patches that would hurt the kernel, the chance that they’d actually be approved is so low it wouldn’t be worth their time.
I’ll probably make the jump when Plasma 6.1 releases with their “real, fake session restore” functionality, was hoping that would make it in to Plasma 6, and I am daily driving Wayland on my laptop now, but I kinda need my programs (or at least file managers and terminal windows) to re-open the way they were between reboots.
Thanks to kscreen-doctor, I’ve been able to port most of my desktop scripts that I use for managing my multiple monitors to work on Wayland, and krdc/krfb have been a decent enough replacement for x11vnc or x2go for accessing the desktop on my home server/NAS remotely (I know, desktops on servers are considered sacrilege, but for me it’s been useful too many times to get rid of at this point).
Where Wayland currently shines for me is VR, Steam VR works better, and more consistently on Plasma Wayland than X11 at this point, which is probably more of a Valve thing than a Wayland thing. When I first got my Index, X11 worked fine, but there have been times when Steam VR on Linux being “broken” has made the news on Phoronix/Gaming on Linux, but still worked fine on Plasma Wayland (which seems to be where Valve is doing most of their SteamVR Linux testing as of late).
As an end user, I do wish that the Wayland specification was organized better, because as an outsider, it seems a lot of the bickering that goes on has more to do with everyone having different end goals. I think if they would split out the different styles of window management to have their own sub-specs or extensions and then figure out what of that could be moved into the core after everyone has built what they need would be better than their current approach of compromising their way through every little decision that doesn’t always make sense for every use case. Work together when it makes sense, but understand that there are times when that doesn’t make sense, and sometimes you can’t please every stick in the mud, and are going to have to do your own thing without them. I do get the appeal of doing things right the first time too though, even if it takes more time. But it seems like usability is always the thing that gets sacrificed when compromises are made.
$80/month for 300Mbps down/10 Mbps up, Southeastern US. Consistently get higher download speeds than advertised, currently around 350Mbps. Upload speed is never more than 10Mbps.
There is still a desktop overview that allows dragging windows between virtual desktops (Meta+G) unfortunately when they removed the old overview, they forgot to fully integrate the new overview, so it can’t be activated by screen edges (which is how I used to access the old desktop overview).
I think that’s actually what discord should be used for. It’s one of the better platforms for voice/video/text chat. It’s mostly just when people use discord for what should be a public forum or wiki that it becomes a problem.
And sure, it’s not a great place for open source developers to do all their communication in, because being able to reference things in the future if a project lead closes the server is important. But it’s probably fine for coding sprints and meetings here and there as long as someone is taking notes to be documented elsewhere. Discord is arguably better than zoom for that use case.
8.99/month seems mostly competitive to Incogni which is a similar service that costs 12.98/month (they’ll give you a 50% discount if you buy a full year at once, which works out to 6.49/month). Although with as many sponsor spots as I see Incogni buy from YouTube creators, they are probably flush with investor capital, and trying to get as many subscribers as they can, before slowly “raising” their prices by offering fewer discounts.
While it still doesn’t get the same big seasons that we used to enjoy (probably because low popularity and streamers taking more than their fair cut). I appreciate Leverage and the new series Leverage: Redemption for being a lower-budget show that just tells good stories and doesn’t try to be a 13 hour movie. Sure there’s usually an overall season story that concludes in the finale, but there’s usually only about 3 episodes a season that even reference that story.