Does this mean we'll stop getting poorly done ports of console games to the PC?

Sadly, no. The reason is piracy - PC piracy is huge, and PC ports of console games don't make as much money as console games do. So devs will develop for console first, make all their money back, then make a profit. Then they'll do a cheap PC port in the hopes of the PC port paying for itself.

If it's a big game, you'll get a nice port. If it's a game that did so-so, it'll be a cheap port.

The ports did get better when things like Denuvo and such made it possible to get a few more sales, but since their decline, the ports started sucking again.

The money pays for the port.

Oh, it's even worse. They're now advocating for straight up inserting multiple fake frames to give an illusion of smooth gameplay to avoid optimizing games. DLSS3 was just one fake frame between real ones, DLSS4 is multiple fake frames.

We're about to have really choppy game play that looks "smooth" because of all the fake frames posted on top of the 24FPS cinematic experience underneath them.

This is what happens when Nvidia moved from GPUs to AI. They don't care about gamers - GPUs make up 10% of their revenue. The rest of it is selling cards for AI use where they can stock a server with 8 $30,000 cards. Even your 5090 at $2000 is not worth it to Nvidia.

So the 50 series is basically just barely an improvement - because they couldn't bother improving it knowing gamers will buy it anyways because 0.1 frames is all that matters.

It's happened. All you have to do is look at Visual Basic.

How many companies rely on some poorly coded VB6 app? It's going to be a scary number.

Some guy thinks he can outsmart the developers, codes something up in VB6, gets awards for it. Then more people add on to it, and the next thing you know, you end up with a fragile thing that barely works but the company relies on it and it ends up on TheDailyWTF.

And that's assuming the source code is still available - not always a safe assumption. Then you have people trying to keep Windows XP alive just so the one critical app can be used.

Then tell your surgeon to donâ(TM)t bother wearing one when youâ(TM)re operated on.

You jest, but even after the 1912 spanish flu outbreak, many doctors still refused to wear a mask for anything - seeing patients to surgery. (And we're talking the medical paper masks they all wear, not the N95 ones). It took until the 1940s or so before the AMA started requiring them after lots of studies showed less disease transmission and better outcomes for patients

Then again, it wasn't too much earlier where sanitation in surgical contexts was a thing - it was common for doctors to perform surgery in front of students in an auditorium, or to do things like cut open organs and such to teach a class, then when class is over, do a surgery still bloody from teaching. Doctors fought the request to clean up in-between. It only happened because certain chief medical officers at some hospitals started requiring it, and then saw their patient death count plummet. Then those people moved on, and the new CMO rescinded those orders and patient death rates soared again.

Modern sanitation and hygiene in health care is a really modern thing, and doctors fought such mandates as well.

The sole point of complaint is that it was not submitted for certification.

Did it filter to an N95 standard?
Did it filter BETTER than an N95 standard?
Did it filter worse than an N95 standard?

Who knows? Who cares?
(certainly, nobody here and nobody in the media).

And that's why the FTC complained. Razer was marketing it as an N95 compliant mask when it hasn't been tested. So no one really knows. It could be better, it could be worse. Since they never bothered getting it through NIOSH or other testing facility to verify compliance, no one knows.

But it was advertised as such. And the practical matter is to assume it isn't. Which can be a shame - one thing the pandemic did was produce masks that are a whole lot more comfortable.

Something like this might be useful in the summer when cutting the grass if you're someone affected by the dust or other stuff that comes up.

Had it been N95 certified, it might be handy for people who need them - people who work in medical facilities and such because they do let you see the mouth.

Or almost all of the former Soviet states. Even during those days they hated Russians, they just couldn't be open about it lest they quietly disappear one day.

One of the largest bumps to NATO's memberships happened shortly after the breakup of the USSR. Basically all former Soviet states (save Ukraine) immediately asked to join NATO, and those that didn't, asked to join later.

You have to be a pretty terrible neighbor if everyone immediately starts going to the other side when they can.

Comic book consumers aren't interested in political indoctrination.

They want a good story that intrigues, excites, and motivates them.

The industry has nothing but itself to blame for this.

There's more to comics than Marvel and DC, you know. There's an entire world of indie comics, and the problem is Diamond is one of the largest distributors of those comics.

And FYI, DC went with their own distributor in 2020 (AT&T and other fun stuff), so comic shops have to deal with them as well. (It doesn't help said DC distributor also owns a chain of comic book shops). Marvel is using Diamond, but that's because they tried to go their own way in the 90s, and found out it was costing them more time and effort and returned to Diamond.

The other publishers like IDW were moving away from Diamond anyways.

The bigger issue is all the indie comic publishers, of which there are hundreds, who use Diamond for their distribution. Getting a distributor is hard - and many indie comic publishers may not meet minimum requirements for many distributors in terms of units sold.

I say drop by your comic book shop. You'll be pleasantly surprised how many great comics there are, many of which are free of the wokeness you are afraid of. And if you really want woke, there are publishers who have published comics on being LGBTQ+, on having mental illnesses, how autistics think and many other topics as well.

These are toys that don't need a license that requires hours and hours of training. If DJI wants to press their luck with being banned outright, good for them.

Note that the toy that grounded an air tanker in LA last week was a DJI drone that wouldn't be covered under drone legislation (weighs less than 250g). AND using the old software.

In the end, it's a helpful tool to stay legal. Nothing more. If you want to break the law you probably could. That drone pilot in LA who flew that drone into the air tanker will suffer the same consequences, licensed or not (ignorance of the law is no excuse).

In the end, one of two things will happen. Either nothing happens because most owners are responsible, or things go wild and the FAA will end up regulating all drones.

There will be a slight uptick in arrests, because there will be idiots who fly them near airports, but you can bet when your flight gets delayed an hour because a drone pilot is nearby there will be very little sympathy and they'll be arrested in short order. You can look at the UK for examples.

Of course, some senator or something might get their flight delayed, or Trump might be delayed from his next appearance because of a drone flying nearby, so he'll probably have somebody act on things like that

And then people will decry how their hobby has become even more bureaucratic - RC clubs have shut down because regulations on remote aircraft flight rules have become more and more onerous. But it hasn't stopped use of drones - they're still used by lots of people in professional situations - fully licensed and everything. And those people are happy if it keeps the yahoos away from spoiling their occupation.

It can run Windows apps, at least - and it can run 32-bit ones. Application launch time can be very, very slow... but, aside from the initial startup time, the apps seem to run pretty well.

Wrong, Crossover (which is really a paid support version of WINE - CodeWeavers is how you can support the WINE project) only runs on x86 processors.

What Parallels has done is nothing special, true, because even on the 68K days, we had VirtualPC that let us run DOS and Windows 3.1 on our 68K, and later on Windows XP on PowerPC Macs. So Parallels is basically offering an emulated PC environment similar to those days of yore except running on ARM instead.

Granted they probably can't use Apple's Rosetta 2 (which emulates x64 on ARM to allow x64 macOS apps to run seamlessly) because it would probably only be emulating the x64 userspace instructions (ring3), wherease Parallels would have to do ring0 instructions. (The lack of nested virtualization implies they're not doing rings -1 or -2 either). Of course, it isn't really virtualization, it's emulation.

But here's the other thing that's going to happen when this all settles: people do not update their insurance relative to the home values. California has had some skyrocketing home prices and people have not been selling, just sitting on it. When the fires came through in 2003 and 2007 in Southern California, insurance paid out the value of the home, except it wasn't the market value or the replacement value of the home, it was the value of the home when they bought it. So when insurance pays people out, and they will, they're going to pay them what the were insured for, not the current fair market value or the value to replace the home or rebuild it. So a lot of people will get enough payout to pay off their mortgage to make the banks whole, and be left with very little left to get started again. ANd of course insurance is going to be blamed for it.

Most of the value of real estate isn't the building - it's the land. And land, even after wildfire, earthquakes, etc, generally is still usable as land to build upon.

Most of the increase in price of a house is the land value appreciating - buildings don't really appreciate, and many renovations are negative on values.

Land thus doesn't really need to be insured - if your house burns down, you still own the land, and the cost is really the cost to put a new building on that land. It's also why a dilapidated building can command a lot of value - the house wasn't worth anything, its the land the house sits on.

It's why people often buy a house and then proceed to knock it down and build their own - they're not buying the building, they're buying the land.

Reading the actual article, one can note that this lack of engagement is following the trend of GenZ people entering the workforce. And there are well documented articles about GenZ's expectations, attitudes, and interaction with other humans ftf, and many employers finding them to be difficult and often unemployable.

Here we go again, blaming the next generation coming into the workforce. Guess what? We did the exact same thing last time - the same articles all held millennials entering the workforce were less motivated and had different expectations and etc. etc. etc.

The real reason is that the boomer C-suite, after screwing over GenX thanks to the Jack Welsh school of greed, is seeing the effects. Millennials saw their GenX parents get screwed over - GenX being raised by boomer parents where loyalty was still king, only to get hosed over things like pay and other things. There's a reason why one has to jump to other jobs to get pay raises and advance your career these days, and why companies hire externally rather than promote internally anymore.

GenZ is merely continuing the trend. After all, the CEO pay gap has never been larger - with CEOs earning by noon January 2nd more than what most of their employees will earn all year. (Again, part of the Jack Welsh school of business).

Engagement is down, because the greed that infested the boomer C-suite has taken its toll. It takes a little while to undo the effects of over a century of work ethic because each upcoming generation gets to see the struggles of their parents. Boomers started screwing over GenX whilst being taught about work ethic and loyalty. Millennials seeing their GenX parents screwed over vowed to change that, and now GenZ being raised by millennials are the result.

So yeah, engagement is down, because the companies are seeing what happens when they screw loyalty around. I've seen companies hold onto employees for a long time - even in retail (which usually has a 200% turnover year over year). There are retailers who have had the same employees working for them for years. The reason? The boss doesn't screw over his employees smf actually makes it a pleasant place to work. He's not rich or living it up, he's living a decent life in an average house and makes enough money to provide for his family.

But hey, maybe that's the problem - he's got enough to live a comfortable life, and he puts in a few hours to keep the store running.

If $15/mo is profitable, then why just low income, why not for everyone?

Because they don't make enough profit.

They don't want to encourage people take these lower profit services because that means less money for the CEO and smaller bonuses.

What infrastructure? EU specifically wants others to be allowed to deliver the infrastructure that's what the whole thing is about.

There's more to the App Store than just the store.

There's infrastructure in the OS to provide apps with functionality, commonly called APIs.

EU laws block Apple from developing APIs only for apps using its app store, so technically those developers are subsidizing developers who use alternative stores. The "Core Technology Fee" basically was to cover those costs.

Microsoft makes money like that as well, though it's often in the form of a "Windows license fee". Though for several versions they've waived that, until Windows 11 where they imposed a new requirement to get older PC users to pay the fee again.

As for Android, well, your phone maker often has a say on whether you get an update or not...

Yet. Donald Trump's inauguration happens next week.