Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
I imagine I’d make a not totally incompetent blacksmith, or some other equivalent allied trade. In fact, I’d probably have a better chance at that 300 or so years ago than now.
Yes, I do already have my own anvil. Jury’s out on whether or not I feel like lugging it with me, though. The fucker is heavy.
Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.
I do too, but I’d highly doubt it will. It’s well known that Meta sells every headset at a loss and funds the expenditure via revenue from their gargantuan advertising and spy network, specifically to squeeze out competitors and make it harder to enter the VR market as a newcomer. Zuck Zuck still thinks all the prime real estate in the metaverse is going to be his, because he only read the first half of Snow Crash.
Gabe is a rich man and I assume he and his company could take this approach as well if they wanted to, at least temporarily. But based on their pricing for their past hardware (particularly the Steam Deck), I predict they won’t.
Insufficient pedantry detected.
The PC platform is an extension of IBM’s Personal Computer architecture, which was not a description of what it was so much as it was literally the brand name. It’s long since been forgotten that this is now a shorthand, and the full name of the platform arguably ought to be PC Compatible. Unless you bought your machine from IBM, anyway, which these days would be quite the trick.
Being PC compatible was a big deal back when the original PC was also a big deal. Probably slightly less so now, since it’s the assumed default.
It should go without saying that the original IBM PC, model 5150, did not run Windows… Because Windows did not yet exist. It didn’t even necessarily run the then-nascent PC-DOS provided by Microsoft, because IBM also supported running CP/M and and UCSD Pascal on it.
The whole Windows-as-default thing didn’t happen until well after the appeal of the PC specification had escaped containment at IBM and x86 had handily taken over the desktop computing world.
A personal computer is basically anything you can stick on your desk (or lap) and doesn’t require hooking up to a mainframe to run. But a Personal Computer, capital P and C, implies an x86 compatible platform with architecture designed such that it is technically still capable of running all those decades old 8086 programs and operating systems. (Just, several orders of magnitude faster than their designers ever envisioned, and probably only by sticking your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode first.)
FYI, technically Meta/Facebook had already owned Oculus for something like five years before the original Quest came out. They just started getting really blatant about the branding shortly after that time, probably to acquiesce to Zuck Zuck and his huffing of his “metaverse” crack pipe increasingly frequently.
That was never actually an official statement. It was an offhand comment by some staffer that didn’t carry any legal weight nor accurately describe the internal trajectory for Windows in any way. As much as we like to poke fun at it regardless.
It could be either given that Alyx ended on a cliffhanger that ties it back to the original series. They’d better come up with something, or else they’re going to have another riot on their hands.
It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.
I still have my boxed copy of the Orange Box on a shelf. It still sees use because every once in a while I get embroiled in a Kids These Days type of conversation and I need a prop to wave around.
I’d happily put an orange Gabecube right next to it.
As opposed to what, buying a viable phone from those other guys?
What other guys?
At minimum a stampede of people moving to iPhones should theoretically cause Google to shit enough of a brick (providing capitalism actually works as advertised, and for the record I am trying like hell to keep a straight face as I type this) to correct their behavior in an attempt to win some of those users back.
Because at the end of the day most consumers are consumers, not nerds, and if neither platform is going to allow you control over your device and they’re both privacy nightmares you’re not much worse off with an iDevice if you plan on owning a smartphone in the first place.
What we really need is a viable third option. Hopefully an inherently non-shitty one. The barrier to market entry seems pretty high, though.
Eyy, Reverb gang.
Apparently there is third party support in Linux under Mondao but it still seems pretty developmental and I haven’t had the time to mess with it yet. I’m still clinging to mine as well, because at least for now it still works and I’ve blocked Windows from rug-pulling my WMR app. I’m sure that’ll only last until the next time I need to reformat and reinstall in a couple of years.
0 to 1023 is 1024 possible values, but the highest value you can display is still 1023.
When you count on your fingers in base 10, do you tell people you can “actually” count to 11? Of course not. Only if you, in fact, killed Inigo Montoya’s father.
Valve’s strategy here seems to be to build physical inertial tracking into the controllers as well. They both have an IMU built in which presumably gives them a pretty decent ability to guess where they’ve been moved in physical space even if they’re outside of the cameras’ field of view. I don’t know if anyone has accurately assessed how well that works in this case.
The only other major PC oriented inside-out system, Windows Mixed Reality, allowed controllers and headsets from all brands participating in the program to freely intermix. I’d doubt Valve would be dumb enough not to also follow this path, if there are ever successive iterations of this hardware.
Linux Desktop!
Linux… facetop?
I just like that they have the complete compliment of normal controller buttons. It seems the world has agreed on twin sticks, a d-pad, ABXY (or triangle square cirlce et cetera, you know what I mean), and two shoulder buttons… Except for VR controllers. Every brand has their own dinky layout and they’re all sparse on buttons, I guess not to “intimidate” newbies, but it requires making weird compromises or binding actions to directions on one of the analog sticks or something, and that always feels lacking.
I hope they also stole the idea from the OG Oculus controllers where it can sense when your fingers are on the buttons but not pressing them, to so they can show your fingers in VR space and help people work the things by sight as well as feel.
Edit: I watched the LTT video. Yes, the buttons have capacitive finger tracking as well. Rejoyce.
But that part was so wholesome. Not to mention physically improbable.
It’s the same line of logic as when you see people post on a forum something like [img]c:\Users\Bob\Documents\My_Image.bmp[/img] and then wonder why it doesn’t work.
“But I can see it on my computer!”
Over the internet, the origin of all data is on someone else’s computer. All means all. And all of it needs to come down the wire to you at some point.
You’re on the right track in one regard, though, in a roundabout way with caching: Browsers will keep local copies of media or even the entire content of webpages on disk for some period of time, and refer to those files when the page is visited again without redownloading the data. This is especially useful for images that appear in multiple places on a website, like header and logo graphics, etc.
This can actually become a problem if an image is updated on the server’s side, but your browser is not smart enough to figure this out. It will blithely show the old image it has in its cache, which is now outdated. (If you force refresh a webpage by holding shift when you refresh or press F5 in all of the current modern browsers, you’ll get a reload while explicitly ignoring any files already in the cache and all the images and content will be fully redownloaded, and that’s how you get around this if it happens to you.)
Regarding She-who-must-not-be-named, somebody already kinda tried it, it didn’t work because the fomrer was already in possession of large sums of money by that time (and the challenge was kind of spurious anyway) and then everyone forgot about it.