I gather that’s a meme that’s older than you are?

By linux ISOs I meant any content you’re torrenting: movies, software, audio, my little pony porn, whatever.

Frankly, it probably means absolutely nothing.

Even when captain coffee cup was the FCC chairman, did you lose the ability to torrent linux isos? Did usenet stop working?

I wouldn’t expect anything different this time, either.

Sounds good to me?

That’s a wee revisionist: Zen/Zen+/Zen2 were not especially performant and Intel still ran circles around them with Coffee Lake chips, though in fairness that was probably because Zen forced them to stuff more cores on them.

Zen3 and newer, though, yeah, Intel has been firmly in 2nd place or 1st place with asterisks.

But the last 18 months has them fucking up in such a way that if you told me that they were doing it on purpose, I wouldn’t really doubt it.

It’s not so much failing to execute well-conceived plans as it was shipping meltingly hot, sub-par performing chips that turned out to self-immolate, combined with also giving up on being their own fab, and THEN torching the relationship with TSMC before you launched your first products they’re fabbing.

You could write the story as a malicious evil CEO wanting to destroy the company and it’d read much the same as what’s actually happening (not that I think Patty G is doing that, mind you) right now.

Yeah but it’s priced the same as a cheap laptop and/or desktop, which of course doesn’t then require you to pay monthly to actually use the stupid thing.

It feels like another ‘Microsoft asked Microsoft what Microsoft management would buy, and came up with this’ product, and less one that actually has a substantial market, especially when you’re trying to sell a $350 box that costs you $x a month to actually use as a ‘business solution’.

This would probably be a cool product at $0 with-a-required-contract-with-Azure, but at $350… meh, I suspect it’s a hard sale given the VDI stuff on Azure isn’t cheap.

Amazing what happens when your primary competitor spends 18 months stepping on every rake they can find.

And, then, having run out of rakes, they then deeply invest in a rake factory so they can keep right on stepping on them.

This’ll probably be a lot more interesting a year from now, given that the product lines for the next ~9 months or so are out and uh, well…

Yeah but all Google needs to do is back up a dump truck of cash to Mar A Lago, and he’ll forget all about whatever it was he didn’t like about Google and immediately start tweeting how he’s the bigliest fan of all the very good things Google is doing, so I’m going to skip the breath holding bit.

I mean even if you could remove them, the problem is that beige is not always the same beige: same problem you had 30 years ago.

The colors would never, at any point, remotely match the rest of the beige, and it’d be nice if a premium product that exists only for the aesthetics, would have just you know, done that last itty bitty little thing so it’d look right (from at least a distance) and be color matched.

It’s really too bad they couldn’t have made the bay covers either plain or actually look like a floppy drive.

So close, and yet, so far.

Absolutely.

2.0 was 100% not the same game, but it was vastly improved and perfectly playable well before then.

I played at launch, but on PC, and it was… fine. In that, unlike Starfield, it was a game with characters and a story that was interesting enough to carry the buggy world and somewhat less than fleshed out side-quest mechanics.

But, like, there were enough buildings and set pieces and people and stories to actually sit down and spend 200 hours exploring the world without seeing the same stupid PoIs over and over and over again, while trying to care about the least interesting NPC companions I’ve probably ever dealt with.

And Phantom Liberty is fucking fantastic, so they took a bit of a turd at launch and turned it into an amazing game.

makes you dizzy

Fun story about VR and being dizzy.

I had huge problems with VR dizziness and blurriness and it turned out I had strabismus which was not normally noticeable as it was mitigated by my glasses and by being only a modest amount of cross-eyed-ness, but would absolutely make itself known after about 20 minutes of playing VR, to the point I was absolutely certain I was just getting motion sick.

Might be worth talking to your optometrist the next time you’re there, since boy, it’s shocking how much better my eyes got after dealing with it.

Fallout and Skyrim VR

takes a lot of modding

To be fair, so do the 2D versions. VR Skyrim, at least, is super fun once you get the modding done.

As for general value: it depends.

I mostly play various “exercise” games like Beat Saber, Synth Riders, Pistol Whip and Thrill of the Fight. The Quest is fantastic for those, because you can untether and go stand outside in a nice open surface and whilst you look like an absolute idiot, it can be a hell of a workout if you put in the effort.

As for like, traditional games, it’s less rosy: there’s very little market, thus very little software support, thus very little market, which means there’s very little software, which means…

There’s a ton of gems all over the place if you’re after slightly more social activities, but I’d say for single-player game experiences you’re going to be limited for good options that run exclusively on the headset.

That said, there’s a LOT of options in PC-tethered VR that are fantastic, assuming you can/want to tether to a PC. If you don’t, that’s fair, but all the really really in-depth experiences require a pretty beefy gaming pc. Stuff like HL: Alyx, because it’s (still) probably the best VR-native game that’s been released so far.

There’s also the VR-versions-of-PC-games like Flight Simulator and various racing and space games that are worth checking out if you’re interested in them, and VR adds a lot to those experiences, if you can run the VR versions with sufficient performance which eh, is a whole different ball of problem.

And the amazing variety of points of interests and quests!

You can have literally dozens of combinations!

(Still salty about Starfield, don’t mind me.)

Alternate headline: “Person with lots of money who doesn’t have to do anything useful to survive has opinions on why people with no money should stop worrying about money”

They made awesome portable TVs like uh, 30 years ago.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-11-iot-enterprise-ltsc

Keep in mind, though, that you’ll still have to do some activation and KMS hackery to make them usable, but you can at least use an installer that’s going to be clean.

I’m literally using 15.1 right now, and set up 86box las tonight which is unsigned.

You hit a button in the control panel, say ‘fine’, enter your password and it runs.

So no, that’s not how it works and he’s just plain wrong, but it’s Lunduke who is usually wrong when he’s not being a chud, so that’s the usual for him.

I’m going to roll my eyes: if you read the change it’s literally ‘Instead of cmd-clicking, you need to hit ‘okay cool’ in the control panel’, not YOU CANT RUN UNSIGNED SOFTWAER!!@11!!111

The reason for this change was, shockingly, because malicious asshats were putting up malware pages telling people ‘oh you have to cmd-click to install totally legit thing here!’ and this puts a nice warning up in front of less-educated people in the hopes of preventing the spread of malware.

I’m 100% for this change since it literally adds 3 seconds of clicking a single time for an app, and makes it where my family members are less likely to get totally screwed over.

From Microsoft. They actually provide ISO downloads for the 11 LTSC versions, so there’s not really any reason to go grab some random one off totally-legit-software-and-totatlly-not-malware.com or whatever.

The really gross part is this is firmly not just Americans being stupid this time, and has somehow become The Thing To Say Online for the whole damn planet full of incel types.