I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems…
For the kinds of games where DRM free matters, where they don't have a prominent online/multiplayer side or the equivalent of playing the game 'from the disc', is the console subscription really an issue? I don't have a…
I wonder if this signals anything about Sony's attitude to blu-ray movies. Aside from games one of the reasons their consoles have sold well is because they've been excellent physical media players. The PS2 for DVDs and…
I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of…
Isn't that a consequence of it being a fairly open platform and no certification gatekeeper before a developer can release/update their game? The platform isn't specifically steam or where mouse/keyboard is unavailable…
For what it's worth, my ASUS motherboard from 2017 has their overclocking utility branded as "AI suite 3" (implying there were 2 before). I think having a buzzword to slap on products that fits the latest trend is a…
It was also around the time of the early netbooks, when the premise was a lean laptop and you'd do tasks that'd usually be done with relatively demanding local clients by the browser, as google and others were improving…
That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity…
I'd say that comes down to the difference between requirements (i.e. will it run at all, does it use features only found in win11) and support, and the developer's decisions around that. I can appreciate not supporting…
My sense of it is that as linux is gradually inching towards the general power user audience, there's a lot of "just use [distro]" or fashionable distros where they're all seen as flavors of one thing. In a sense that's…
One related question that you need to follow that with is the associated costs of switching the whole studio to another engine that's technically better, or if proposing teach studio tailor-make their own engine the…
The way of observing it I find concerning is if you look at PC gaming (or personal computing in general) as a population, with a rate of new entrants or 'birth rate' and people exiting or 'death rate'. It's hard to be…
One tangent from this is that few of the big 'household name' tech products that have become infrastructure for modern life for huge amounts of people seem to be allowed to be mature and stable, they must be kept…
One of the biggest challenges with computer UIs is how you convey information to a user, and that goes especially for games where players often can't take much time to analyze complexity, and it gets boiled down into a…
Something I've noticed as a general trend is that tech news has seemed to breed an optimistic fandom, that technology for the sake of technology must be good. It's exciting and dramatic, it's science fiction becoming…
I wonder where the 'extents' of the game product/service you buy can be defined. I could foresee a game client/server/toolkit like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights being released but as a barebones legally compliant…
The "files and folders" hierarchical tree model for a file system is one where I wonder about the limits or effectiveness of the skeuomorphism approach to convey such a concept. If you're coming from a place where…
Something that has been largely forgotten about is that it used to be routine to see pictures of smoggy Chinese and Asian cities, this was a problem for them that they solved. I can't help thinking we can't get this…
The other recurring theme is a mantra along the lines of "ends justify the means" when it comes to building data centers and all the consequences of that in the present, for some promise that AI will somehow have a net…
I think one precursor could have been EA's debacle with Sim City in 2013, when they apparently had a huge wave of disappointed customers doing chargebacks. I'm not aware of any public statement/evidence of this, but it…
Another angle is the processing cost, I assume Google is seeking to offload the computation for whatever features this covers from their own data centers to end users. On the scale of billions that's probably measurable…
It's an aspect I've wondered about, constraints do make you consider what's essential. For example in btop (screenshot in the article) the graphs are rendered with dots at low resolution, if there was another version…
For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their…
I think the challenge is where do you draw the line between the OS and the set of baseline applications it comes with, and then further questions on what is included in that (default?) set or how full featured they are.…
24 is another one that was at the right time, although the big one was not under their control. It started showing 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. More to the general point, it was also at the time that computers and…
I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems…
For the kinds of games where DRM free matters, where they don't have a prominent online/multiplayer side or the equivalent of playing the game 'from the disc', is the console subscription really an issue? I don't have a…
I wonder if this signals anything about Sony's attitude to blu-ray movies. Aside from games one of the reasons their consoles have sold well is because they've been excellent physical media players. The PS2 for DVDs and…
I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of…
Isn't that a consequence of it being a fairly open platform and no certification gatekeeper before a developer can release/update their game? The platform isn't specifically steam or where mouse/keyboard is unavailable…
For what it's worth, my ASUS motherboard from 2017 has their overclocking utility branded as "AI suite 3" (implying there were 2 before). I think having a buzzword to slap on products that fits the latest trend is a…
It was also around the time of the early netbooks, when the premise was a lean laptop and you'd do tasks that'd usually be done with relatively demanding local clients by the browser, as google and others were improving…
That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity…
I'd say that comes down to the difference between requirements (i.e. will it run at all, does it use features only found in win11) and support, and the developer's decisions around that. I can appreciate not supporting…
My sense of it is that as linux is gradually inching towards the general power user audience, there's a lot of "just use [distro]" or fashionable distros where they're all seen as flavors of one thing. In a sense that's…
One related question that you need to follow that with is the associated costs of switching the whole studio to another engine that's technically better, or if proposing teach studio tailor-make their own engine the…
The way of observing it I find concerning is if you look at PC gaming (or personal computing in general) as a population, with a rate of new entrants or 'birth rate' and people exiting or 'death rate'. It's hard to be…
One tangent from this is that few of the big 'household name' tech products that have become infrastructure for modern life for huge amounts of people seem to be allowed to be mature and stable, they must be kept…
One of the biggest challenges with computer UIs is how you convey information to a user, and that goes especially for games where players often can't take much time to analyze complexity, and it gets boiled down into a…
Something I've noticed as a general trend is that tech news has seemed to breed an optimistic fandom, that technology for the sake of technology must be good. It's exciting and dramatic, it's science fiction becoming…
I wonder where the 'extents' of the game product/service you buy can be defined. I could foresee a game client/server/toolkit like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights being released but as a barebones legally compliant…
The "files and folders" hierarchical tree model for a file system is one where I wonder about the limits or effectiveness of the skeuomorphism approach to convey such a concept. If you're coming from a place where…
Something that has been largely forgotten about is that it used to be routine to see pictures of smoggy Chinese and Asian cities, this was a problem for them that they solved. I can't help thinking we can't get this…
The other recurring theme is a mantra along the lines of "ends justify the means" when it comes to building data centers and all the consequences of that in the present, for some promise that AI will somehow have a net…
I think one precursor could have been EA's debacle with Sim City in 2013, when they apparently had a huge wave of disappointed customers doing chargebacks. I'm not aware of any public statement/evidence of this, but it…
Another angle is the processing cost, I assume Google is seeking to offload the computation for whatever features this covers from their own data centers to end users. On the scale of billions that's probably measurable…
It's an aspect I've wondered about, constraints do make you consider what's essential. For example in btop (screenshot in the article) the graphs are rendered with dots at low resolution, if there was another version…
For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their…
I think the challenge is where do you draw the line between the OS and the set of baseline applications it comes with, and then further questions on what is included in that (default?) set or how full featured they are.…
24 is another one that was at the right time, although the big one was not under their control. It started showing 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. More to the general point, it was also at the time that computers and…