It’s a gorgeous game experience. Not to mention they put so many other gamedevs to shame with their technical accomplishments (especially in the expansion – flooding waves in a ringworld!).

Don’t look up spoilers. Get yourself a copy and play it. Find somewhere to land your spaceship :)

Comedy prediction: SD2 releases overseas, but Australia is used to sell remaining stocks of SD1s for a few years before the SD2 is released here.

The whole thing is vaguely and noncomittally worded, it promises basically nothing.

Take this bit for example:

taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it

In other words: talk to the individual publishers of each game and get their permission :P At which point GOG’s involvement is almost irrelevant, if you have the publisher’s consent then they might as well give you a copy.

I would assume that court orders and proved wills have different levels of coercion when you present them to someone like GOG? Dunno. Each country probably has its own rules, including fun complexities like whether or not GOG was a party to the process or not.

Title of PCGamer’s article is misleading, they want a court order to do it. Proof of death is not enough.

“In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen. We’re willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system.”

They have to do that anyway. Court orders overrule a company’s policies in most (all?) legal systems.

Appreciated Minty :)

Suicide Squad: Less interesting than discussing linguistics xD

reap children

I click on my “From” address and then select “Customize From Address…”. I can then type anything I want up there. It’s a little annoying when replying to an email chain with an alias, but not too many steps.

I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI). Whilst the hype for crypto imploded the use for the hardware sort of didn’t. I wonder if the next bubble with be the same, or if we get some refreshing variety to our money sinks?

Microsoft et al are subsidizing GenAI to an insane degree. […] prices shoot up for their customers and serve as a rough awakening to all the websites that integrated a crappy chatbot.

I’ve run some much simpler chatbots on just my desktop PC, so they will have some fallback (if they really choose to take it). Still it locks up my entire computer for a few second for each reply, so even a few hundred users per second peak would be an expensive service.

(Insert joke here about customers not noticing or caring about the difference between website chatbots built on big company services vs smaller ones, because they have exactly the same problems just in different hues.)

I’m confused. Sacholding?

Windows update fetches all sorts of things now. If the hardware advertises X device then Windows update will check if it has anything for it. Approved vendors can provide all sorts of guff. Historically that has included drivers that intentionally brick your devices. HP probably packaged up some software that updates the BIOS and got it into the Windows Update DBs.

This is something HP should have handled.

If a bad update is rolled out then it’s the responsibility of the software maker partner (HP) and the distributor (Microsoft), not just one or the other.

Those laptops are THEIR products, not Microsoft’s.

Both Microsoft and HP have branding on their laptops and a responsibility post-sale for the reliability of their systems. Hardware, firmware and OS responsibilities are all party to this chain of failure.

Dear Take Two,

If you want to port GTA3 and VC to mobile then I would recommend looking at the re3/revc project. Fans have already put lots of effort into making the games work on modern systems, patching many bugs and making things more portable. Last I checked there already was a Nintendo Switch port.

Oh wait.

Bad bot. Several of your selected sentences are verbatim repeats.

I wouldn’t know, but it’s totally not on there, or so I’ve been told.

There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.

The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen’s perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).

FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical (“battery”) and electrostatic (“capacitor”) energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can’t mix.

My university login no longer works so I can’t get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:

This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.

“holds promise” and “has the potential” are not miscible with “May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries”.

Only for certain types of capacitors. In practice they can overlap quite a bit, especially with common aluminium electrolytic capacitors (these form & dissolve complex aluminium oxide & hydroxide layers on the plates).

Meanwhile the fan PC port is absolutely amazing. I couldn’t play my copy of PD on my actual N64 because the low framerate made me motionsick, the fan-made PC port runs smooth.

This makes me remember what happened with the re3 and revc (GTA III and GTA Vice City) projects. Fans fixed so much in those games, in their spare time, and published it as a patch (so you still had to own the games). Take Two DMCA’d and sued them just before releasing their the maligned “GTA Trilogy”. I wonder if Microsoft would have done the same before releasing new Perfect Dark content?

Oh. Back to resistance: Doesn’t really matter audio quality doesn’t care it’s still the same AC signal just with less amplitude

Only for ideal resistors.

Resistors are noise sources. Intentional resistors tend not to be too bad (and probably won’t be heard in this situation unless you have super-high-impedance headphones, perhaps 10’s of K), but unintentional resistors (eg corroded unstable metal contacts inside a plastic part) can be atrocious.

A few things to add to this:

(1) If your resistor acts even slightly like a diode then you will encounter partially rectified RF signals (more noise yay). Metal oxides between metals can do this, eg if the connector has crimped two badly-plated bits of metal together.

(2) Plasticisers in some plastics can leak out, causing corrosion on unseen internal metal parts.

(Of course linking all of this together is just conjecture, the causes of Moss’ bad adaptors might be something completely different)