narc0tic_bird

I'm not 100 % sure how it exactly works, but I think Microsoft recompiles/translates the games and you then download the changed binary instead of playing off your disc (which is also why texture streaming should be a lot faster).

This is most likely a process that's automated for the most part though. And I highly doubt it's recompiled from source, that's why I called it "translated".

Games using the id tech engine were often affected by visible texture pop in, and apparently the PS3 version was affected more than the 360 version, but the latter still was noticeably affected. Rage uses id tech 5, but I remember playing BRINK (id tech 4) on PS3 which had no mandatory install (it ran from the disc without installing anything to the HDD upfront), but used the HDD extensively for caching texture data. After I upgraded from the standard 5400 rpm HDD to a 7200 rpm HDD I remember texture pop-in was noticeably reduced.

Xbox 360 emulation on Xbox One or Series isn't really accurately emulating the hardware, instead it translates the original code to something the One and Series understand.

I do, and I couldn't care less. I think a visual indicator that tells me "hey, this is an iMessage" or "hey, this is an SMS/RCS message" is a very good thing to have.

Funny how many people wanted RCS on iOS in order to be compatible with Android, while large parts of Google's implementation of RCS in Android is proprietary as well.

Well most of these AAA ports aren't exactly new and people interested in AAA gaming likely already have something like a PC, gaming console or Steam Deck, which are all better suited to these types of games, because they have more power than a mobile device and/or built-in controllers.

Like, what is the setup for playing at home? Mirror an iPad to an Apple TV via AirPlay to play on your TV with a Bluetooth controller?

And on the go, you either need a bluetooth controller and a way to hold your iPhone while holding the controller, or get one of these clip-on controllers.

Then there's pricing, with the games often being a lot cheaper at least on Steam.

I doubt the bullying would be any different if it was a beautiful red (or whatever is considered a pretty chat bubble) instead.

And even if it was a blue bubble, the bullies would find another reason to bully someone.

I get the peer pressure part and sure Apple might be exploiting that in America, but in the past it was clothing brands or whatever it is now. Making the bubbles the same color (or even bringing iMessage over to Android completely) would get rid of a single symptom, not of the root cause.

Clothing (or other things, clothing was just an example) does get you excluded from a group. The only reason a bully would want to "include" the bullied person in their group is so they can bully them more.

I agree that they could open up iMessage to competitors with relative ease and that this would be a good move. Not because it would seriously stop bullying, but because it would make it a little bit easier to find a common messenger to use (we don't really have that problem in my home country, as most people use WhatsApp, which is multi platform).

What I'd hate is if Apple removed all indicators that what I'm sending or what I already sent is an SMS/RCS message instead of an iMessage. It shows me what features work for that particular conversation, and if I'm roaming in a region where sending SMS is not free, I want to know when I'm about to send one.

Most people will use whatever the default on their device is. Most phones that aren't iPhones come with Google apps and services set as default.

The only Google services I still use are YouTube and in rare cases Google Maps. But if YouTube continues to enshittify I'll stop using that. I've been using Google Maps mainly to get information about places to eat/sleep in cities, not really for navigation.

RIP and thank you for your contributions!

Not sure why you'd want an ARM-based handheld to play PC games at this point in time. Pretty much all PC games are available in x86 only, and any efficiency gains these fancy new ARM chips supposedly have will be lost when translating x86 to ARM.

Yeah, it's also not "just" if it's one of what feels like hundreds of steps now to make the OS somewhat usable.

From Software's PC ports are always pretty poor, but I feel like they don't get enough flak for it because it's a From Software game. Does the game still not run with an unlocked frame rate?

Then there always seems to be so much talk about the apparent difficulty of the game that talking about the actual game sometimes falls short. The difficulty of these games is mostly down to observing and learning attack patterns and reacting to them accordingly. It would also be rather trivial for the developers to add a difficulty setting to make the game more accessible or on the other hand make it harder for players that want more of a challenge (I'm aware that there are certain builds that make the game easier and new game + makes it harder in some ways).

The fact that many players always defend the games supposed difficulty often doesn't allow good discussion about actual balancing (which is different to "difficulty").

This number is likely very inflated though and doesn't match what people actually spent on unplayed games.

It couldn't have accounted for key sales or bundle purchases. I have at least a hundred unplayed games that were included in some random Humble Bundle I bought just because of one game that was in that bundle. If you were to divide bundle pricing by amount of unplayed games, it'd be like 1 or 2 bucks per game.

I'm not particularly interested in the game so I can't say whether the game is actually difficult (from what I saw it's still very much about learning attack patterns of bosses and spamming the roll button or something), but my god do big parts of the Souls community get salty if someone wants to have the option to reduce the difficulty in a single player game.

To me it's a completely legit complaint and request to have a difficulty setting.

I wouldn't be so sure. I feel like many people would not buy another MacBook if it were to feel a lot slower after just a few years.

This feels like short term gains vs. long term reputation.

If both AMD/Intel and Qualcomm do a good job with their core design and the same process node is used, I don't see how a translation layer can be any faster than a CPU natively supporting the architecture. Any efficiency advantages ARM supposedly has over x86 architecturally will vanish in such a scenario.

I actually think the efficiency of these new Snapdragon chips is a bit overhyped, especially under sustained load scenarios (like gaming). Efficiency cores won't do much for gaming, and their iGPU doesn't seem like anything special.

We need a lot more testing with proper test setups. Currently, reviewers mostly test these chips and compare them against other chips in completely different devices with a different thermal solution and at different levels of power draw (TDP won't help you much as it basically never matches actual power draw). Keep in mind the Snapdragon X Elite can be configured for up to "80W TDP".

Burst performance from a Cinebench run doesn't tell the real story and comparing runtimes for watching YouTube videos on supposedly similar laptops doesn't even come close to representing battery life in a gaming scenario.

Give it a few years/generations and then maybe, but currently I'm pretty sure the 7840U comfortably stomps the X Elite in gaming scenarios with both being configured to a similar level of actual power draw. And the 7840U/8840U is AMD's outgoing generation, their new (horribly named) chips should improve performance/watt by quite a bit.

Most rhythm games have different difficulties. Last time I checked Guitar Hero had 3 or 4 difficulties for every single song, osu! has a shitton of maps with many songs being available in multiple difficulties, and Beat Saber has what, like 5 difficulty levels?

I wouldn't really see myself enjoying rhythm games if I was deaf (as the music is a big part of it), but if you can make the game more accessible to someone who still enjoys the gameplay, then honestly, why not?

Porting games to a different architecture is normally quite a bit more involved than just recompiling them, especially when architecture-agnostic code wasn't a design goal of the original game code. No, Valve couldn't release all their games natively running on ARM tomorrow, the process would take more time.

But even if Valve were to recompile all their games for ARM, many other studios wouldn't just because a few gaming handhelds would benefit from it. The market share of these devices wouldn't be big enough to justify the cost. Very few of the games that run on Steam Deck are actually native Linux versions, studios just rarely bother porting their games over.

I'm not saying ARM chips can't be faster or otherwise better (more efficient) at running games, but it just doesn't make sense to release an ARM-based handheld intended for "PC" gaming in the current landscape of games.

Apple can comparatively easily force an architecture transition because they control fhe software and hardware. If Apple decides to only sell RISC-V based Macs tomorrow and abandon ARM, developers for the platform would have to release RISC-V builds of their software because at some point nobody could run their software natively anymore because current Macs would be replaced by RISC-V Macs as time passed by. Valve does not control the full hard- and software stack of the PC market so they'd have a very hard time to try and force such a move. If Valve released an ARM-based gaming handheld, other manufacturers would still continue offering x86-based handhelds with newer and newer CPUs (new x86 hardware is still being developed for the foreseeable future) and instead of Valve forcing developers to port their games to native ARM, they'd probably lose market share to these other handhelds as people would naturally buy the device that runs current games best right now.

In a "perfect world" where all games would natively support ARM right now an ARM-based handheld for PC gaming could obviously work. That simply isn't the world we live in right now though. Sure we could ramble on about "if this and that", it's just not the reality.

No, that's not at all what I said. Translating between CPU architectures and translating API calls isn't even close to the same thing.

They don't owe you anything in a sense that you don't have to purchase their product, that is correct.

Also yeah, the idea of cheating didn't even come to my mind. We used to do that a lot back in the day :D - but to be fair, trainers aside, games often actively supported cheats out-of-the-box, and I don't think From Software's games do. It's probably still trivial to cheat on the PC version, but on console, it might not be feasible.

I totally get the feeling of accomplishment that comes with playing games on high difficulties, I do play quite a few games at higher difficulties, but then again I also enjoy lower levels of challenge at times.

It's still a very valid complaint that difficulty levels aren't a thing. It wouldn't change the difficulty for anyone who enjoys the current default difficulty, and might make the game more enjoyable to other players.

Their detection script is probably trying so hard that it hits false positives.

Ironically, with an up-to-date uBlock Origin, you wouldn't see this popup.

archive.org is cool and all, but a centralized service will never be a reliable way to truly archive something.

USB-C and Thunderbolt docks/hubs are a huge mess.

Around a year ago I was searching for a solid single-cable solution for my M1 Max MacBook Pro to hook up to an external monitor, ethernet and peripherals - and best case a decent audio jack.

The MacBook supports Thunderbolt 4 so I thought I might as well go for a Thunderbolt 4 dock (as opposed to a "normal" USB-C dock), but oh boy.

First, there was the problem of display outputs. I thought I'd just get a dock with two DisplayPort ports. But there are a lot of differences. Some are DisplayPort 1.4, some only 1.2. And some use MST (multi stream transport) to support both ports; which macOS does not support. Thunderbolt 4 does support two distinct streams of DisplayPort though, so in theory docks could exist with two DisplayPort ports, each with their own dedicated stream/signal.

Long story short, there were basically no docks with these specifications. So it became clear to me early in the selection process that would need to act as a hub that has multiple Thunderbolt outputs, so I can simply use USB-C to DisplayPort cables. This seems to be the best solution anyways, as the dock doesn't limit you in DisplayPort version or feature set this way.

So I looked for a Dock with 2-3 Thunderbolt outputs, Power Delivery, USB-A, gigabit ethernet and an audio jack.

There's the Razer Thunderbolt 4 dock for example. Has all required ports, provides 90 watts of power to the computer and (at least in color "Mercury"), looks the part. Bought it, plugged it in, connected a display via USB-C to DisplayPort cable. So far, so good. USB-A seems to be working.

So, what are the problems? Well. Firstly, the ethernet controller is connected to the internal USB controller. This also means it shares bandwidth and when hammering the USB controller, doesn't only mean bandwidth is throttled, but also that latency can be affected and spike seemingly randomly (like you're on wifi). There are also reportedly some issues with USB ethernet when waking up from sleep, but this might be related to macOS. Anyways, use f* PCIe based ethernet in your 300,-€ dock!

Next problem was something I couldn't believe got through QA. When audio starts playing via the audio jack, the right channel starts playing immediately, but the left channel starts after I'd say around a 200-300ms delay. This is VERY irritating, especially with headphones. As I said I couldn't believe it so I tried other devices including Windows 10 and 11 notebooks, and they all showed the exact same issue with this dock.

I found out that the problem goes away or is at least reduced when you set audio output to 24-bit in Windows. That's not how it works in macOS though (I know you can set something in some MIDI audio setting app, but that didn't help). So you're basically stuck. It's so insane to me that this glaring and obvious issue went through QA.

Then I thought okay, it's just Razer being Razer and ordered alternative docks. Turns out THEY ARE ALL THE SAME CRAP INSIDE. Sonnet Echo 11, i-tec whatever, Kensington. If it has a similar port layout to the Razer dock, it's likely that it's the exact same crap with the only difference being the odd USB-A port more or less and slightly different PD wattage.

There's a highly praised 400,-€ dock from CalDigit, but availability was bad at the time.

I ended up getting an Anker dock for around 170,-€, which simply has 3 Thunderbolt 4 outputs and a single USB-A output. I connected a simple USB-A hub so I can connect keyboard, mouse and USB DAC and mic for audio. I use the Thunderbolt outputs for DisplayPort via USB-C and the Apple Thunderbolt (1) Gigabit Ethernet adapter plugged into an Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter, and that's plugged into the dock. You wouldn't believe that this abomination of adapter chaos works a million times better than this USB ethernet crap.

Now, this setup works but it's super ugly and messy on the desk.

Nowadays I'm using some HP monitor with USB-C which has built-in ethernet and USB-A ports. It's honestly not a great solution (and functionally worse than my solution above), but it's simple and doesn't clutter your desk with 3-4 different boxes and 10 cables.

Unbelievable.

I always find it interesting how many people are welcoming kernel-level anti-cheat software. I dislike cheaters as well, but granting a part of a game essentially full access to my system isn't worth it at all in my opinion.

Also, I didn't even realize that people commonly play this game on a public server. I thought this was more like a co-op experience on a private server/invite basis, or solo.

I actually get Prime TV series from the high seas even though I'm subscribed to Prime. It's simply better UX this way.

The lawsuit isn't really about the 5 GB free tier, but about being able to use system services like device backups with other cloud providers.

Poorly written headline.

No way I'll use YouTube with ads. The amount of your lifetime they waste is what I'd consider disrespectful to their users. Even if the ads were bearable, I wouldn't turn off my ad blocker on any Google site for tracking alone.

I also don't see myself subscribing to YouTube Premium, firstly because it's too expensive (stop including your music streaming service and make it cheaper maybe?), but also because YouTube is just a platform with a lot of not curated content that YouTube had no part in creating.

Let's see how the cat and mouse games between YouTube and ad blockers and alternative frontends go. If it's too much of a hassle, I'll just stop using YouTube. I don't miss Twitter, I don't miss Reddit, and I won't miss YouTube.

Will have to wait and see how Apple reacts with Safari. Mozilla dismissing the proposal is big, but Apple has the second largest mobile OS marketshare with iOS, and so Safari is very relevant for websites to support it.

I don't even want to hate on Snap, I just think Flatpak is probably superior in almost every way and it's probably not great that there are three competing formats for "applications with dependencies included". It was supposed to be "package your app to this format, dear developer, so everyone can use it no matter the distro they use", now it's a bit more complicated. Frustrating, as this means developers without that many resources will only offer some formats and whichever you (or your distro) prefers might not be available.

I know that you can get every format to work on every distro (AppImages are just single binaries you can execute), but each has their own first class citizen.

By the way, the unofficial Steam Flatpak has been working well for me under Fedora 39 KDE Spin, but an official one would be great to have.

What a sensationalized headline (and not the first one I read on the topic).

Apple didn't send lawyers to prevent his company repairing devices, but because the company uses Apple trademarks in their marketing material which then could confuse customers into believing this is an official Apple service partner.

It's pretty standard brand/trademark protection going on, and as far as I know you actually have to protect your trademarks to a certain extent.

This stuff is happening a lot, and this time news outlets chose to make it seem like Tim Cook himself wants this man in prison.

So they're banning what's likely the "end all, be all" meat replacement in the (hopefully not so distant) future just so that being a "livestock farmer" remains viable?

Yeah, let's make sure all exploits are patched before the device inevitably becomes obsolete in a couple of years, so we can throw it away and buy the next version instead of not being wasteful.

Just me or did their weird way of communicating ("go fuck yourself" and whatnot) get old and cringe very fast?

Is it 100% confirmed now that the DMCA is from Nintendo themselves? I find it weird that they'd go after (initially small) forks when Ryujinx exists.

The Suyu team also hosts their code under https://git.suyu.dev, so I wouldn't exactly call it dead (yet).

And stop charging a "Core Technology Fee". And allow JIT compiling for non-browsers so emulators for newer systems can perform well.

Considering officially refurbished Steam Decks are already a lot cheaper and they are checked for functionality/repaired if necessary and also come with fresh warranty, only going down $100 from the original asking price likely doesn't get your listing a lot of attention.

In the end I don't care whether the "default" Fedora is KDE or GNOME, as long as the spin of the other DE is maintained well. Except for the ootb experience which is better on the GNOME version with setup steps for proprietary drivers and whatnot, the KDE spin feels like a first-class citizen.

But KDE just makes more sense for most users I feel. Currently you start wondering where your tray icons went (for example) when switching from a non-Linux OS. For gaming, KDE is simply more mature with built-in Wayland VRR support for example.

I just use uBlock Origin (without any additional scripts) and whenever it stops working I update the filter lists manually (it updates them automatically every now and then).

Compared to the blockchain type train, I thought this whole AI thing was quite cool and actually useful, but it feels more and more similar to the blockchain hype, where companies tried to solve every problem with some form of blockchain (for example in-game items).

The same is kind of happening with AI now.

It's not like Pegasus is exploiting a single bug in iOS, there are probably hundreds of different ways Pegasus got onto phones over the years. Known security bugs get patched.

Pegasus isn't a single piece of software, it's a big toolkit, constantly updated. It's a race similar to ads vs. ad blockers.

It's not a problem exclusive to iOS either. Pegasus works on Android phones as well.