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.

I have literally zero complaints with the game. Art style, gameplay, level design, humor and everything is all on point. I can't believe we got a sequel to this game in 2021 and it was this good. Just an excellent game, I'm only 5 hours in but having a great time with it.

Just what the world was clamoring for, a 3090 that is 3% faster. Toot toot.

NKD wrote on Aug 25, 2021, 15:35:
I thought they were working on a Saints Row game, not whatever this is? Its just a cinematic of course, but man it looks lame as fuck.

Yeah I'm not sure what this is but the CGI trailer did not make it feel like a SR game.

His content wasn't super entertaining and he was likely banned for something embarrassing, otherwise he would've revealed it already.

Finally some decent first party IP from Microsoft.

Exactly my point, selective accusations of "cancel culture" when it was blatantly obvious it was the same strategy that has been used for decades for other "issues".

I guess it wasn't obvious to him, mea culpa.

I think the words you are looking for are "Whoops my bad". You obviously confused him with another poster and seemingly refuse to admit it. The idea that he must read and participate in every discussion equally otherwise he's a hypocrite is so bizarre I'm not going to even indulge it as it's clear what's going on here.

It's OK to be wrong man, no one cares or is going to hold it against you. We have all accidentally confused people, quoted the wrong person and so on.

It will definitely be better at fleecing money from kids.

phinn wrote on Aug 21, 2021, 16:50:
Speak for yourself, Windows 11 looks great to me, it's in beta and a lot of those minor gripes will be improved. While probably not a day 1 install I plan on putting it on a clean install by the end of the year on a PCI-E 4.0 nvme drive once I get one. I use Linux too, on my phone (Android 12), router (OpenWrt 21.02) and a dual boot with latest Fedora, but recognozise how useful and good Windows is at some productivity tasks and especially gaming compatibilty and performance.

Yeah based on my use so it's a refined version of Windows 10 with an improved update system which is what most people were asking for. Seems absolutely fine and I'll run it for my gaming system.