jj4211
@jj4211@lemmy.world
- Comment on 4 days ago:
Would be interesting to see the stats for revenue by game, price by volume. If someone charges 300 for a game that no one bought. Then it shouldn’t count, hypothetically.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
Yeah, but in relatively small volumes and mostly as a ‘gimmick’.
The Cell processors were ‘neat’ but enough of a PITA is to largely not be worth it, combined with a overall package that wasn’t really intended to be headless managed in a datacenter and a sub-par networking that sufficed for internet gaming, but not as a cluster interconnect.
IBM did have higher end cell processors, at predictable IBM level pricing in more appropriate packaging and management, but it was pretty much a commercial flop since again, the Cell processor just wasn’t worth the trouble to program for.
- Comment on 6 days ago:
Unlikely.
Businesses generally aren’t that stoked about anything other than desktops or servers.
To the extent they have desktop grade equipment, it’s either:
- Some kiosk grade stuff already cheaper than a game console
- Workstation grade stuff that they will demand nVidia or otherwise just don’t even bother
On servers, the steam machine isn’t that attractive since it’s not designed to either be slapped in a closet and ignored on slotted in a datacenter.
Putting all this aside, businesses love simplicity in their procurement. They aren’t big on adding a vendor for a specific niche when they can use an existing vendor, even if in theory they could shave a few dollars in cost. The logistical burden of adding Steam Machine would likely offset any imagined savings. Especially if they had to own re-imaging and licensing when they are accustomed to product keys embedded in the firmware when they do vendor preloads today.
Maybe you could worry a bit more about the consumer market, where you have people micro-managing costs and will be more willing to invest their own time, but even then the market for non-laptop home systems that don’t think they need nVidia but still need something better than integrated GPUs is so small that it shouldn’t be a worry either.
- Comment on 6 days ago:
Consoles are sold at a loss, and they recover it with games because the platform is closed.
Sometimes, but evidently not currently. Sources seem to indicate that only Microsoft seems to say they are selling at a loss, though it seems odd since their bill of materials looks like it should be pretty comparable to PS5…
I’ll agree with the guess of around $800, but like you say, the supply pressure on RAM and storage as well as the tariff situation all over the place, hard to say.
- Comment on 6 days ago:
I think it’s a response to the sentiment that Sony somehow got bit by selling PS3 at a loss because it triggered some huge supercomputing purchases of the systems that Sony wouldn’t have liked, and that if Valve got too close to that then suddenly a lot of businesses would tank it by buying too mld uch and never buying any games.
Sony loved the exposure and used it as marketing fodder that their game consoles were “supercomputer” class. Just like they talked up folding@home on them…
- Comment on Sensory issues 6 days ago:
Yeah, but as adults we start to just declare we are going to suck it up more.
- Comment on Sensory issues 6 days ago:
Wait, being irritated by tags in shirt is an autism thing? I just thought it was a pretty common kid thing…
- Comment on Is there a practical reason data centers have to sprawl outward instead of upward? 1 week ago:
But the reason for the expense is largely the weight.
Yes we can at great expense support massive weights. But even in skyscrapers, you aren’t expecting to just cram every floor with equipment that weighs over a ton and supported by less than a square meter of floor.
It’s not just armchair engineering, i work in the industry and commonly you have racks preferring the ground floor and weight restrictions going up and even marked paths that the racks need to stay on when on upper floors due to limitations of the reinforcements.
Skyscrapers are largely impractical structures done for the sake of showing off, with any value based on keeping people close to each other. No one builds a skyscraper by itself miles from anything else. This is where they build the datacenters because they don’t need proximity.
- Comment on After Today's meeting where Trump fell in love with Mamdani, this is MAGA tomorrow morning. 1 week ago:
But the two were all smiles throughout, with Trump even siding with the soon-to-be first Muslim mayor of New York over one of his GOP allies, Rep. Elise Stefanik, who’d called Mamdani a “jihadist.”
“She’s out there campaigning and you say things sometimes in a campaign,” Trump said of Stefanik, who’s running for governor of New York. “I met with a man who’s a very rational person. I met with a man who wants to see New York be great again.”
Well that’s not what I expected…
- Comment on After Today's meeting where Trump fell in love with Mamdani, this is MAGA tomorrow morning. 1 week ago:
Keep in mind that the critical affordability issue as it landed in the news as we recovered from COVID and also supply chain impacts from Ukraine war. During his first term, inflation was pretty much the same as it had been since 1990. Then during Biden’s term, there was 7% then a further 6.5% on top of that and then another 3.4% on top of that and then 2.9% on top of that. So there’s a correlation that things are now even more rapidly unaffordable and in such cases the president inevitably gets the blame whether it makes sense or not.
His first term was pretty incompetent and corrupt, but got nowhere near as maliciously and successfully corrupt as this go around. On the matter of deaths, while the USA by the data was among the worst, almost in the 10 worst nations for per-capita death, the subjective coverage was “globally lots of people are dying”, it’s not Trump’s fault specifically in that perception of “no one has it good”.
Generally speaking, in these circumstances people are just voting against the state of the way things are with less high minded ideals. Trump lost because people hated things under COVID. Harris lost because the economic reaction to recovery was all messed up and so a change was demanded.
I share the shock that people actually went for it, but I’m not surprised that this seemingly nonsensical situation could happen.
- Comment on apparently, the T button dosent exist for some people 1 week ago:
I would assume that a screen reader will pronounce it properly. If it doesn’t, then that reader needs an update. Still think it’s a pointless thing to try to resurrect that character from the past and kind of annoying, but at least screen readers should in principle be able to pronounce it.
- Comment on Tell us the truth Donny. 1 week ago:
To be fair, it says “bubba” and the Clinton link is speculative.
- Comment on Tell us the truth Donny. 1 week ago:
The republicans have started trying to blame Obama for this years hikes…
It’s quite a leap, but they are trying to say ACA blew it all up, but it just took almost 20 years for the pain to hit.
It’s a narrative that really only works for the ride or die republicans, but it’s all they have to try, since they have no actual answer they want to propose…
- Comment on Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders 2 weeks ago:
I think that one was also significantly a publicity thing, they made videos and announced it as a neat story about the air force doing something “neat” and connecting relatable gaming platform to supercomputing. I’m sure some work was actually done, but I think they wouldn’t have bothered if the same sort of device was not so “cool”
There were a handful of such efforts that pushed a few thousand units. Given PS3 volumes were over 80 million, I doubt Sony lost any sleep over those. I recall if anything Sony using those as marketing collateral to say how awesome their platform was. The losses from those efforts being well with the marketing collateral.
- Comment on Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders 2 weeks ago:
That’s just pointing out upgrades carry a large price, not that the base model is at a loss.
Which is a super common strategy in pre built, especially in systems that can’t in theory take third party upgrades. Commonly a mobile platform will charge a hundred dollar premium for like 20 dollars worth of UFS storage. At least at some points PC vendors have done DIMM SPD lockouts to force customers to first party so they can charge a significant multiple of market rate for their parts.
I doubt anything in Apple’s lineup is sold at a loss. They might tolerate slimmer margins on entry, but I just don’t think they go negative.
- Comment on Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders 2 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t be sure the mini is a loss leader…
- Comment on Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders 2 weeks ago:
I think that was overstated. Sure there were some “fun” projects for fun or publicity.
However supercomputer clusters require higher performance interconnect than PS3 could do. At that time it would have been DDR infiniband (about 20 Gbps) or 10 g myrinet.
Sure gigabit was prevalent, but generally at places that would also have little tolerance for something as “weird” as the cell processor.
OtherOS was squashed out of fear of the larger jailbreak surface.
- Comment on Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders 2 weeks ago:
Probably true, but there is a chance they might convert some console gamers…
But not enough to bet on it with a loss leader probably.
- Comment on Our first look at the Steam Machine, Valve’s ambitious new game console 2 weeks ago:
Frankly, the Xbox One and the PS4 marked those vendors transition to ‘tiny prebuilts’, by the standards one might call this a ‘tiny prebuilt’.
One could fairly argue that Switch is “just a gaming tablet/phone”
- Comment on They Wylin' 2 weeks ago:
I doubt this one. It would require that Trump ever would care about the pleasure of anyone other than himself.
- Comment on While we eagerly await the second coming of Steam Machines, it's worth remembering what a gloriously awful mess Valve got itself in over a decade ago 2 weeks ago:
There was no mention of motive, just of the consequences. Microsoft going the Apple/Google path was/is an existential business threat to a company like Valve. Microsoft’s coming up short on MS Store mitigated the risk, but still you have a platform that is geared toward Microsoft subscription revenue.
Just because those business concerns factor in, doesn’t detract from the positive ways that it has gone so far.
- Comment on While we eagerly await the second coming of Steam Machines, it's worth remembering what a gloriously awful mess Valve got itself in over a decade ago 2 weeks ago:
Pretty spot on, it was so worth it to remember, that Valve actually seemed to remember.
Their first go at it was “make a viable platform and the developers/publishers will make the effort to come over, and hardware partners will step up with offerings because of Valve’s brand strength and fear of the Microsoft Store screwing everything up”. That didn’t work, and Microsoft Store also didn’t pan out as far as Valve and others feared, but they have been kind of screwing up the platform particularly for games as they chase other things that would be subscription revenue instead of transactional revenue.
Valve learned they needed to work harder to bring the platform to the Windows games, so heavy investment in Proton. They learned that they had to take the hardware platform in their own hands because the OEMs aren’t committed until they see proof it can work for them. They learned that the best way to package their improved efforts was with a “hook” with mass-market appeal, enter the Steam Deck, recognizing the popularity of the Switch form factor and bringing it to the PC market at a time no one else was bothering.
So now they have a non-Android, non-Windows ecosystem that covers handheld, console/desk, and VR with a compelling library of thousands and thousands of games…
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 2 weeks ago:
This is more thinking about material cost rather than relative value. If you save money on the passthrough and incur a few costs above the Quest 3 but nothing dramatic, then I’m just saying the pricing needs to be in the ballpark of Quest 3. Better value by making smarter choices that may not have a cost impact (e.g. using a maintstream high end SoC instead of a niche SoC, putting the battery at the back instead of making it front heavy).
Of course they may be hampered by different business needs. Meta affording to risk more money than Valve can risk might drive higher price point, but it would be unfortunate.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 2 weeks ago:
A $1k would break it in this market… The specs suggest a little lower end generally than Quest 3 hardware wise, or in the ballpark (comparable display and optics, lower quality cameras). The only notable improvement is including eye tracking, which is nice, but not $1k nice…
$500 should be a good target, some tradeoffs with Quest 3 (worse ‘AR’, better eye tracking and PC connectivity).
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 2 weeks ago:
They did at least do: www.meta.com/experiences/…/5781689118524197/?srsl…
No idea if it is vaguely any good or not…
- Comment on Why have so many services started using single-factor passwordless authentication in the last little while? 3 weeks ago:
Though passkeys are now commonly shared across devices. That was one of the changes they made. For example, chrome will gladly do all the passkey management in the Google password manager. Under Linux at least there’s isn’t even a whiff of trying to integrate with a hardware security device. First pass they demanded either a USB device or Bluetooth connection to a phone doing it credibly, or windows hello under windows, but now they decided to open it up.
- Comment on Why have so many services started using single-factor passwordless authentication in the last little while? 4 weeks ago:
Technically the truth, but an argument can be made that 2FA was mostly more secure by virtue of how bad password security is, and selling a switch to passkey as a convenience is a big security win.
Also with passkey, you’ll be commonly be forced to do some sort of device unlock making it generally the “thing you have” require either “thing you are” or “thing you know” so it becomes effectively 2fa.
- Comment on Why have so many services started using single-factor passwordless authentication in the last little while? 4 weeks ago:
If a service were going to passkeys for sake of law enforcement or works be so much easier for them to just comply with bypassing auth to access the user data altogether. Passkey implementations originally only supported very credible offline mechanisms and only relaxed those requirements when it became clear the vast majority of people couldn’t handle replacing their devices with passkeys.
For screen lock for the common person it was either that or nothing at all. So demanding a PIN only worked because most of the time the user didn’t have to deal with it owing to touching a fingerprint or face unlock.
People hate passwords and mitigate that aggravation by giving random Internet forum the same password as their bank account. I wouldn’t want to take user passwords because I know I have a much higher risk of a compromise somehow leading to compromise of actually important accounts elsewhere.
- Comment on Please no, just stop 4 weeks ago:
That’s how you get a promotion.
I wish I was kidding.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Except how bad was it for Microsoft?
They didn’t lose share. For the people that rightfully saw Metro as a painful dumb direction in Windows design language, they just stuck with Windows 7. Microsoft didn’t have upside they wanted, but they didn’t have the downside.
They tried to pump life into their mobile platform by throughing their desktop platform under the bus. Because they have zero competitive pressure, they attempt to do that with essentially zero downsides. Just like now they can make their OS little more than an advertising platform for the Microsoft Store and Microsoft services without real repurcussion.