I'm sure it was tough to balance EAs corporate meddling so /shrug

This release now, fix later shit really needs to be curbed soon though its just getting way out of hand. The products coming to market from the AAA side of the industry are embarrassing.

Linux had at least 5 privilege escalation exploits in the past few years, one that went undiscovered for 7 years of kernel development. Glass house, stones, etc. The author of this exploit wasn't pleased witih "reduced bug bounty payouts" so he tuned up his old exploit, claimed it was unfixed and released it.

The presence of security vulnerabilities is a given in software development because most original input is (for now) human. That's why best practices, testing and methodology matter so much. Disclosure and reaction are super important. If anything I would say Microsoft has improved in this regard.

Some really good deals, picked up like 8 things from my wishlist already.

I played the trial thanks to Gamepass and saved myself some money - just an utter fucking mess. 128 players is not fun, it just isn't. Maps are way too large with too much dead air running around. Get sniped or etc on your way to a spot? Enjoy the walk again. Continues the awful tradition of having even less original maps than its predecessor. The levolution is pathetic, might as well have not bothered at all, the marketing was totally misleading. Squad teamwork is almost pointless because of operators and there is essentially no balance to the game. There's literally one mode where squad work even matters and it gets old quickly. Operators instead of classes SUCKS, this is not a case of change bad, it's just a terrible fit for a squad based game on this scale. Graphically its very awkward, featuring bizarre visual choices like the overblown bloom on some weapons and stiff animations. Some of the levels manage to impress but then seem to clash badly with the lighting, it almost feels like an emulated game with uprezzed textures. I still can't believe they couldn't be arsed to put in a scoreboard, I don't believe their reasoning on it either. The whole thing screams minimum viable product and I suspect this wasn't even a Battlefield project originally. Did I mention bugs? Everything from despawning entirely, falling through the world, crashes, bizarre physics glitches and even literal teleportation. I've seen some highlight reels from streamers and I can say they soft peddled it a bit.

Been a huge fan of the franchise since the original but just can't do it anymore. BF V was a big regression in so many respects and Dice continues to re-invent the wheel unnecessarily. Many other companies actually iterate and refine their franchises, Dice keeps starting over from nothing every single project. To not even preserve what should be standard libraries like the VoIP stuff is absolutely insane. Getting rid of classes with seemingly zero thought to balance or design points to a total lack of direction on the project. Just a damned shame, this is going to be hugely damaging to the franchise.

I don't know how you can fix this with updates, so many of the games problems are fundamental design issues. This should have never been released at all in it's current state, even if they polished it. It's just a mess and totally devoid of any compelling reason to play.

The Flying Penguin wrote on Nov 20, 2021, 10:58:
"I'm stuck an hour away from home because I normally use my phone to start [my] car," one owner tweeted.

Okay, I'm sorry, but if you're too stupid to also carry your car keys, you kind of deserve this.

Agreed. Tesla provides 2x keycards in addition to the phone key functionality. They also sell a FOB on the store if people still want a traditional one. I always keep one key in my wallet with my other ID, the missus has the other.

anonymous anonymous wrote on Nov 18, 2021, 23:42:
The gaming activists/wokies would love to take down a CEO like this, and it doesn't matter if he is guilty or innocent.

What exactly is a gaming activist?

Of course it matters whether he's guilty or innocent but thankfully we know he's guilty so it's a moot point. "Take down" lol. Are you for real? This guy has a golden parachute that beggars the career lifetime earnings of half the board here. The only real justice will be getting him out so he can't keep running a company where the internal culture literally permits having a Cosby suite.

You should be ashamed of yourself. Imagine your wife or daughter had to endure 1/10th of this on a daily basis. You'd be at their office with weapons.

Agreed, to me there was never any doubt. In the first episode Christopher makes a big deal out of getting into the "members club" and becoming a made guy. I always thought the final scene (the jacket especially) was a callback to the first season, they dropped the members stuff later on and start using different terminology. It's interesting that people thought Tony was an anti-hero and wanted him to live so badly despite all of the suffering he caused.

We're partway through season 2 on our latest rewatch. I can ignore the phone booths and other stuff because the writing and acting was so strong, it's timeless.

There are no words suitable for experiencing such a tragic loss. Deepest condolences and best wishes from our family to yours.

Any decent chair is going to be ~$600 unless you go through an office liquidator or get lucky with a user to user transaction. Ergonomic chairs are worth every penny and if you have even a half way decent employer they will buy you one. I would never work at a company who balked at buying their employees office equipment to keep us healthy. Cheap chairs for too long will lead to back pain, nerve irritation and other shit that's easily avoided. Of all the things to spend money on, health is paramount.

Herman Miller and Steelcase are the gold standard but there are other OEMs who make decent stuff if you're budget constrained.

Bodolza wrote on Sep 1, 2021, 15:51:
I don't get why they need to constantly add support for new monitors. Shouldn't there just be some standard that the monitors meet to automatically work?

It's a certification program because you can trust OEMs about as far as you can throw your monitor. Freesync is a certification program too just FYI. It's to ensure they meet certain minimum performance standards to ensure interoperability and so that consumers have confidence in the program.

Drivers are huge because of all of the bundled libraries, APIs and etc. I don't use AMD cards currently but last time I did they were above 400MB too. Nvidia has a bunch of legacy crap (PhysX, 3d Vision, etc) to carry along for awhile yet unfortunately. On top of the thousands of engine related tweaks, hacks and whatever other nonsense shows up if you use Nvidia Inspector.

Thankfully storage costs are reasonable so it's not a big deal to me.

RIP IdolNinja, great dude and fellow SA goon, basically made all of the tools that made the SR2 PC port tolerable. I hope the informal Volition team working on the big SR2 patch can finish his work, I know he really loved that game and wanted to see it complete.

Cutter wrote on Aug 31, 2021, 15:52:
In fairness CDPR had a pretty good reputation on the whole. Give the scope of their games one could rightfully assume there were going to be a good deal of bugs and issues at launch. Not all the time in the world in QA would ever have them perfect to go out of the gate. They dropped the ball big time with this one however.

Eh they have a pretty good reputation with post-product support but at launch their games have been universally fucked up. Witcher 1-3 all had huge problems out of the gate and required extensive patching and additions. I agree though that they really pushed it too far with this game - trying to support the older gen consoles was a huge mistake.

The Flying Penguin wrote on Sep 1, 2021, 10:59:
It's part of DirectX, which despite being developed by MS, changed modern gaming for the better (sometime, very rarely, they do get it right). Potentially, if implemented properly in games, it will virtually eliminate the need to have long pauses between game 'chapters' where all the assets need to be loaded, to move on to the next section of the game, or long map load times and limited map sizes, for multiplayer.

Yeah, some games do something like that now, using programming tricks, and slight of hand. GTA5 and other open world games, for example, appear to seemlessly load an entire huge world in one go, but they're actually playing a game of 'hide the load' in the background, and disguising it with distance haze. It works, but it has it's limitations. Having something like that baked into Unreal Engine 5 and other engines would, potentially, allow for very new game play flows.

But realistically, this tech is probably years away from showing up in games.

I think realistically we'll see it in the next two years. There's already a few PS5 games doing it with Sony's API. One great thing about the newer consoles has been faster storage and devs are starting to take advantage of it.

I forget who asked but HDR is totally configurable in the display options, you won't be forced into using it.

The Windows Update streamline should also please a lot of people, it was one of the biggest beefs from people around here. Many of whom are oddly now favorable about Windows 10 now that Windows 11 is almost here. Right on schedule as predicted bwhaha.

Windows 10 is going to be supported to 2025 and no one cares when you install it. Go ahead and stick it to the man for a few years or run Linux or whatever.

Bit of a break at work so I can post a bit more:

- HDR is hugely improved, in Windows 10 it is an afterthought, in Windows 11 it is well implemented and a visual treat. As people upgrade monitors I think they will be very happy.
- Start menu is streamlined now, great visual aesthetic with the flat look and well laid out. I don't personally use the start menu much but for those that do, big improvement from the 8-10 era. There's a recommended section that annoys me but I haven't tried to play around with customizing it. I am sure there will be a billion addons related to start anyway so I feel like this will make most users happy and people who were never going to be happy can just use an app to revert it to whatever version of Windows was their favorite
- Gaming performance for me has been fine, I used my old gaming setup with a 1080ti to test things out and outside of some oddities with older titles probably related to drivers, it was generally within margin of error on performance
- My old machine doesn't have an NVMe drive so I can't test DirectStorage, not sure if it's fully enabled on this build or not.
- Tabbed powershell and command prompts (Windows Terminal) is a small but awesome improvement
- Fully functional taskbar on all displays, great for multi-monitor setups like mine. They've been monkeying with this for awhile but seem to have finally got it right. All of my icons are correctly memorized and layouts preserved between sessions and etc.
- Big improvements to the Search UX and the indexing seems improved too. This was a pet peeve of mine in Windows 10, I found the default search utterly useless and had a third party addon for it.
- Settings menus have been mostly unified now and cleaned up a lot, big improvement over 10
- I have not played with Widgets because I think they are dumb, someone else can comment here
- System tray and quick toggles were tweaked, nicer than 10 IMO
- File explorer is improved and I feel like the increased space between items is cleaner but you can revert this if it bugs you. Annoyance - still no tabbed file explorer! Come on.
- The store is still fucking awful
- I didn't try to load Android apps or anything like that, I don't even recall seeing it in the current build so it might've slipped to a later date.

Anyways that's my random collection of thoughts. Overall I really like it and feel like its a series of minor improvements over Windows 10, by themselves nothing huge but in aggregate its a better experience.

I'm running a beta build and so far it's a solid improvement over Windows 10. UI especially is much nicer and still retains customization options for diehards. The UI itself is very fluid, huge improvements in animation speed and very little interface hitching. Compatibility has been 100% for me so far. Windows Update has been improved as well. I'll do a full write up sometime when I'm not phone posting.

For a free upgrade from 10 it's a no brainer IMO. Not seeing any teething issues and they reverted/improved a lot of the dumb stuff like Live Tiles. I think it will be a lot better received than 10 was.

We recently fired an employee who was discovered by the Accounting department during a process audit. They look at internal processes and make recommendations, rarely they discover fraud or other issues but most of the time its humdrum stuff. During a review last year they found someone sending encrypted files to chinese IPs. I don't know what was actually sent but I suspect it was internal docs and IP, everyone has clammed up about it unfortunately. The employee was terminated and the police were called who escalated it to a different agency but to my knowledge nothing has/will happen because he's gone back to China and it's basically impossible to extradite their citizens. At some point western countries need to get serious with China on IP theft, we really need a big economic coalition to exclude them from, something that will really hurt. We also need less reliance on their manufacturing, outsourcing labor to China in search of short term profits is how we got here.

The thing is that one day another country will do this to China, probably just as brazenly. Of course China needs to actually innovate meaningfully first and producing a generation of robotic learners isn't how you get there, their educational programs are rigid and dismal which is why so many families opt to give their children western educations.

Reddit tells millions of users that they're going to allow that bullshit to fester in the name of "democracy". Nothing to do with money of course, nope. It's all about the freedoms guys.

chickenboo wrote on Aug 27, 2021, 13:10:
I'm not convinced this is actually a win. It will generate a bunch of spam emails to iPhone users with discount offers on their apps which will go straight into the spam folder. I also think a lot of users will just say that it's easier to pay through the app than it is to go and register an account on an app's website, then provide credit card info, to get 20% off a game's coin trove purchase. To Apple however this is a win, as it ends a settlement, and it possibly appears to politicians and regulators that Apple is appeasing its customers (the devs). Part of the settlement requires that claimants admit that they are happy with the 30% charge and believe it is fair.

Yeah I don't know why anyone would celebrate this as a win, I think some people just read the headline and didn't bother with the actual text. Companies have tried repeatedly to end run mobile payment systems and get customers to use their own with little success. Users aren't going to jump through hoops just because the developer gets more money. Being allowed to tell them that stuff outside of the app exists is great but means little in practice. This is better for Apple as looks like a major concession but isn't really.

A major concession would be something like "Developers can now offer their own alternative payment method but must direct X percent to Apple for platform upkeep". That would be huge. This is nothing.