It might be nice if auto reviewers included a “privacy rating” for a vehicle based OK whether it broadcasts anything via radio (e.g. cell or tire-pressure systems can be used to identify someone). It’s not just auto manufacturers, but anyone who wants to set up a radio monitoring network, if there are unique IDs being broadcast.

I don’t know how a reviewer could know whether there’s a way for a manufacturer to gather logs during maintenance.

AGI is not a new term. It’s been in use since the 90s and the concept has been around for much longer.

It’s not new today, but it post-dates “AI” and hit the same problem then.

It depends on the definition of “support ended”. Like, there are various forms of extended support that you can pay for for versions of Windows, and some companies do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Support_lifecycle

Support for the original release of Windows XP (without a service pack) ended on August 30, 2005.[4] Both Windows XP Service Pack 1 and 1a were retired on October 10, 2006,[4] and both Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 reached their end of support on July 13, 2010, about 24 months after the launch of Windows XP Service Pack 3.[4] The company stopped general licensing of Windows XP to OEMs and terminated retail sales of the operating system on June 30, 2008, 17 months after the release of Windows Vista.[114] However, an exception was announced on April 3, 2008, for OEMs producing what it defined as “ultra low-cost personal computers”, particularly netbooks, until one year after the availability of Windows 7 on October 22, 2009. Analysts felt that the move was primarily intended to compete against Linux-based netbooks, although Microsoft’s Kevin Hutz stated that the decision was due to apparent market demand for low-end computers with Windows.[115]

So for those, we’re all definitely a decade past the end of normal support. However, they have their extended support packages that can be purchased, and we aren’t a decade past the end of those…but most users probably aren’t actually getting those:

On April 14, 2009, Windows XP exited mainstream support and entered the extended support phase; Microsoft continued to provide security updates every month for Windows XP, however, free technical support, warranty claims, and design changes were no longer being offered. Extended support ended on April 8, 2014, over 12 years after the release of Windows XP; normally Microsoft products have a support life cycle of only 10 years.[118] Beyond the final security updates released on April 8, no more security patches or support information are provided for XP free-of-charge; “critical patches” will still be created, and made available only to customers subscribing to a paid “Custom Support” plan.[119] As it is a Windows component, all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows XP also became unsupported.[120]

In January 2014, it was estimated that more than 95% of the 3 million automated teller machines in the world were still running Windows XP (which largely replaced IBM’s OS/2 as the predominant operating system on ATMs); ATMs have an average lifecycle of between seven and ten years, but some have had lifecycles as long as 15. Plans were being made by several ATM vendors and their customers to migrate to Windows 7-based systems over the course of 2014, while vendors have also considered the possibility of using Linux-based platforms in the future to give them more flexibility for support lifecycles, and the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) has since endorsed Windows 10 as a further replacement.[121] However, ATMs typically run the embedded variant of Windows XP, which was supported through January 2016.[122] As of May 2017, around 60% of the 220,000 ATMs in India still run Windows XP.[123]

Furthermore, at least 49% of all computers in China still ran XP at the beginning of 2014. These holdouts were influenced by several factors; prices of genuine copies of later versions of Windows in the country are high, while Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences warned that Windows 8 could allegedly expose users to surveillance by the United States government,[124] and the Chinese government banned the purchase of Windows 8 products for government use in May 2014 in protest of Microsoft’s inability to provide “guaranteed” support.[125] The government also had concerns that the impending end of support could affect their anti-piracy initiatives with Microsoft, as users would simply pirate newer versions rather than purchasing them legally. As such, government officials formally requested that Microsoft extend the support period for XP for these reasons. While Microsoft did not comply with their requests, a number of major Chinese software developers, such as Lenovo, Kingsoft and Tencent, will provide free support and resources for Chinese users migrating from XP.[126] Several governments, in particular those of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, elected to negotiate “Custom Support” plans with Microsoft for their continued, internal use of Windows XP; the British government’s deal lasted for a year, and also covered support for Office 2003 (which reached end-of-life the same day) and cost £5.5 million.[127]

For the typical, individual end user, one probably wants to have been off Windows XP by 2008.

Text-based-games and MUDs are not the same thing. There’s a considerable library of text-based interactive fiction out there.

I don’t think that there’s an immediate application for specifically making carrots, because I doubt that the economics work, but I can imagine a world where we manufacture a lot more food than we do today.

Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.

The EU is preventing price discrimination within the EU.

They do have that requirement as part of the Digital Markets Act, but I don’t believe that that’s what the case here is addressing. That is not what the article OP posted or the article I linked to is saying: they are specifically saying that what is at issue is sales outside Europe.

EDIT: I am thinking that maybe the article is just in error. I mean, just from an economic standpoint, the EU doing this would create a major mess for international companies.

EDIT2: Okay, here’s an archive.ph link of the original Bloomberg article:

https://archive.ph/JuM0z#selection-4849.212-4863.277

In the contested arrangement with Valve, users were left unable to access some games that were available in other EU nations.

Yeah, so it’s just that these “mezha.media” guys mis-summarized the Bloomberg article.

But retail law attaches to a location, not to citizenship. Why would the EU be mandating sale of things in other regions? I mean, it’s not like the US says “if an American citizen is living in the EU, then vendors operating in the EU must follow American retail law when selling to him”.

EDIT: Okay, I went looking for another article.

https://www.gearrice.com/update/steam-cannot-block-the-activation-of-a-game-depending-on-the-country-of-purchase-europe-confirms/

Steam specifies in its terms of use that it is prohibited to use a VPN or equivalent to change your location on the platform. Except that it takes the case of the activation of a game given to you by someone and sent to your account. Following Europe’s decision, this should technically change and it would be possible to change region in Steam directly to buy a game then activate it in France. Valve has not made a comment at this time.

Hmm. Okay, if that is an accurate summary – and I am not sure that it is – that seems like the EU is saying “you must be able to use a VPN to buy something anywhere in the world, then activate it in Europe”. Yeah, I can definitely see Valve objecting to that, because that’d kill their ability to have one price in the (wealthy) EU and one in (poor) Eritrea, say. Someone in France would just VPN to Eritrea, buy at Eritrean prices, and then use it in France. The ability to have region-specific pricing is significant for digital goods, where almost all the costs are the fixed development costs.

thinks

If that is an accurate representation of the situation, that seems like it’d be pretty problematic for not just Valve, but also other digital vendors, since it’d basically force EU prices to be the same as the lowest prices that they could sell a digital product at in the world. I don’t know how one would deal with that. I guess that they could make an EU-based company (“Valve Germany”) or something that sells in the EU, and have a separate company that does international sales and does not sell in the EU.

I mean, otherwise a vendor is either going to not be able to offer something in Eritrea (using it as a stand-in for random poor countries), is going to have to sell it at a price that is going to be completely unaffordable to Eritreans, or is going to have to take a huge hit on pricing in the EU.

I’m a little suspicious that this isn’t a complete summary of the situation, though; that seems like it’d create too many issues.

EDIT2: Though looking at my linked-to article, it seems to be that the author is saying that that’s exactly what the situation is.

Valve was fined €1.6 million ($1.7 million) for obstructing the sale of certain PC video games outside Europe. However, the company pleaded not guilty.

Wait, outside Europe?

Some countries make it illegal to buy certain video games. If Valve can’t geoblock sale of them outside Europe, how are they supposed to conform with both sets of laws?

I remember that the EU didn’t want country-specific pricing inside the EU, and had some case over that. That I get, because I can see the EU having an interest in not wanting it creating problems for mobility around the EU. But I hadn’t heard about the EU going after vendors for not selling things outside Europe.

I think that that’s a sheep.

EDIT: The top comment on YouTube says “goat mommy is Crimson Acid from Paradise Killer”.

Valve’s “fake Windows Linux device that just runs Windows games without paying Microsoft money – how is this not a violation of Windows TOS”

Valve uses a build of WINE called Proton, not Windows. Microsoft’s TOS terms apply to Windows. They don’t have anything to do with software that’s simply able to run the same binaries.

EDIT: Ah, I looked at your comment history, and it appears to just be trolling, so I assume that this wasn’t a serious question.

It is possible to get a USB power station. The Deck can charge at up to 45W.

I wish that power stations acted more like “external batteries” (would automtically be flipped on by devices when their internal batteries get low, will be charged after their internal batteries are charged), but even as things are, they do let one extend battery life on portable devices dramatically.

It sounds like the issue the regulator had was something specific to cloud game streaming, and Microsoft addressed that.

The CMA had originally blocked the acquisition over cloud gaming concerns, but Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft.

I mean, I would rather have a Steam Deck too, but then we’re getting into how much people value openness versus price, and that’s definitely not a constant; some people aren’t going to care much about openness.

That said, if I were trying to compare Valve’s offering and Microsoft’s offering, I’d probably compare a desktop PC running Steam to the XBox, as they’re more-physically-comparable in terms of what they can do; the Series S doesn’t have one having to pay for mobility. If one were comparing to a mobile console, then sure, the Deck is a legit comparison.

I still would say that the XBox Series S is going to be cheaper on the low end, though, than a desktop PC. You can get a $279 PC that can play games and a comparable controller, but I’d bet that it’d be more-limited than a Series S.

That being said, Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, and then makes it back by jacking up the price of games:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-says-xbox-consoles-have-always-been-sold-at-a-loss

As VGC points out, Wright was also asked if there’s ever been a profit generated from an Xbox console sale, which she confirmed has never happened. To put that in context, Microsoft has been selling Xbox consoles for nearly 20 years now, including the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and now the Xbox Series X and Series S. In all that time, every single console sale cost Microsoft money.

The reason game consoles end up being profitable is through a combination of software, service, and accessory sales, but it’s still surprising to find Microsoft has never achieved hardware profitability. Analyst Daniel Ahmad confirmed that the PS4 eventually became profitable for Sony and that Nintendo developed the Switch to be profitable quickly, so Microsoft is the odd one out.

We know that consumers weight the up-front price of hardware disproportionately – that’s why you have companies selling cell phones at a loss, locking them to their network, and then making the money back in increased subscription fees. I assume that that’s to try to take advantage of that phenomenon.

If you wanted to compare the full price that you pay over the lifetime of the console, one would probably need to account for the increased game price on consoles and how many games someone would buy.

Now, all that being said, I don’t have a Series S or a Series X, and I’m not arguing that someone should buy them. I have a Linux PC for gaming precisely because I do value openness, so in terms of which system I’d rather have, you’re preaching to the choir. I’m just saying that I don’t think that I’d agree with the above statement that the Deck is as cheap as the Series S.

The Steam Deck is more expensive.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Microsoft-SVP-00001-Xbox-Series-S-Game-Console-512-GB-SSD-AMD-Zen-2-3-6-GHz-10-GDDR6-SDRAM-RDNA-HDMI-1440p-Controller-HDR-Capable-DTS-Dolby-Atmos-Sea/1861650659?from=/search

Series S: $274.95

https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck

Steam Deck: $359.10

And that’s for the low-end Steam Deck. The nicest one is $519.20, almost twice what the Series S runs.

A bunch of controllers have extremely obnoxious security bits required. I had to get two separate bit sets to open a bunch of controllers.

I loved my Dualsense too, and then the left stick started drifting so badly, it’s completely unusable now. It’s only about a year old, too

I really think that something changed with a major potentiometer manufacturer in the past few years. I don’t recall stick drift on a PS2 controller that I used for many years, but I’ve seen it on a number of controllers from different vendors recently.

Only thing I can think of other than recent hardware problems is that maybe the controller hardware imposed a certain amount of deadzone at one point in time and stopped doing so in newer gamepads, and that masked the drift.

What is Microsoft even making money on these days?

googles

https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/

Azure, Office, and (still) Windows, apparently.

Only 8% of revenue is gaming. They sure do went to grow that.

I’m a little fuzzy as to why the first-sale doctrine exists for physical goods but not for digital goods. It seems to me that any reasonable economic rationale should affect either both or neither.

modular thumbsticks

Hmm.

So is this modular thumbsticks akin to the Microsoft Elite controller, where you can put taller or shorter stems on or different tops?

Or is it like the Thrustmaster eSwap Pro, where you can remove the entire mechanism beneath, and put something else in (like, say, a more-expensive-but-immune-to-drift Hall Effect thumbstick)?