"We have noticed that by accident we provided a user-friendly functionality without trying to extract money out of you. We apologize for the convenience and promise that we will make sure it never happens again"
I'm a Linux guy and I don't really care about Windows, but I'm glad to see this happening and every day I thank Europe for being the main entity fighting for regulation of big tech monopolies, because America is really failing.
I use Linux (one that’s based on Arch btw) Make one guess at:
my diet
what I think is the best text editor
Seriously, how am I supposed to keep quiet when I find a clearly superior choice? Especially when most people feel a psychological barrier to trying it, that turns out to be not nearly as big as the adcantages.
Exactly! I use neovim as a full IDE (got started quickly using the nvchad template). And I think you know which “at least meat-reduced” diet is most associated with evangelizing ;)
EU is very much a mixed bag. On the one hand, they do this, on the other hand, they tried to ban P2P encryption and microtargetted religious and elderly in resisting countries, feeding them the classic “it’s for the children’s safety” lies.
Though we have to remind ourselves that it’s mainly the EU Commission who does this.
The Supreme Court spoke out against it from the very beginning, the Parliament voted against it, it’s really only the Commission who doesn’t want to understand that EU law applies to them, too.
Quite a few positions in there that need to be held by new people who understand the damn law.
Its nuts that during the Obama admin, all anyone cared about was the threat of zero privacy. Now everyone in the US has surrendered to it, because our politicians have sold our digital privacy rights to the tech companies.
If we had actual IT giants in Europe, this would look very different.
I’ve seen how the car industry in Germany only got a slap on the wrist because of Dieselgate and even got the chance to send out advertisement payed by the government.
I feel like the only reason stuff like this gets pushed so hard is because we try to slow down the current IT giants until we get our shit together.
I’m glad that we do it, but i wouldn’t say we are better than anyone else.
Yeah because dieselgate was a travesty and all companies have a moral obligation to find ways around the idiocy of the US EPA as they actively make our cars more harmful to the environment by writing poorly thought out rules that encourage larger vehicles as well as completely failing to understand how to calculate diesel emissions for vehicles in a sensible manner.
Thanks for the honest take, a lot of people get caught up in the idea that if an organization does something that aligns with them, they are good or doing it for the same reasons.
There is a lot of protectionism at the heart of the EU. They are quite happy to heavily regulate Big Tech when it’s not based in their own market. Unfortunately they don’t have quite the same passion for nurturing the European tech industry as much as stifling the foreign ones.
They are it purely fighting these fights for the greater good, or they wouldn’t also be pushing things like the recent browser certificate debacle.
Same here. Ironically I’m using a bunch of original Xbox controllers on it. I just like the shape. whaddayagonnado microsoft? Your OS and your consoles are shit! You are the third party now!
Me too. And I even purchased the official proprietary dongle from Microsoft and play it wireless. Why not Bluetooth? I don't like Bluetooth, as I have bad experience with it in the past and would need a dongle for it anyway. Otherwise, the controller works very well with Steam and with non Steam emulators. Microsoft knows how to make good controllers, I give them that.
But on the other hand, I wonder how it is to have a PS5 controller. First, Sony has open source drivers for it and they are included in the Kernel I think (tag me wrong, if it's not true). Plus it has some features, which the Xbox controllers do not have. I'm very curious, but the prices for new controllers are so expensive!
i'm telling you, i hadn't really been considering it all that seriously, but all this positivity absolutely makes me want to just go ahead and dive in with everyone.. and reward the devs..
Jesus Christ, just reading about Microsoft developing something called Moments made me nope out of that article.
Obv there’s worse things in this world, but goddamn it if Microsoft isn’t reclaiming its crown slowly. I think people forget/zoomers never knew, but Microsoft was once, rightly, one of the most hated corporations on earth. They were taken to court, in the United States!, for monopolistic practices. You gotta be doing some insaaaaane shit to get hit with that type of case in the US post-Reagan administration.
Microsoft’s name was basically equivalent to dogshit from the mid-90s until maybe the mid 2000s. Maybe 2010? Hard to put a finger on it. Windows 7 certainly did a lot to get people to calm down from a steady hate-boner.
I just wish, I fucking WISH, that if MS is gonna do this weird “make your pc your phone too! Dur hrr!” shit that they’d offer a Windows Lite ™️ edition where you can opt out of the little stupid assistant thing. No, Clippy, I don’t need help, fuck you very much. Let me opt out completely, without having to fuck with reg editor and CLI, from all types of ads, tracking, “offers for free shit,” all that shit. Just provide a barebones OS, let me add the programs I want, stop popping up telling me the .exe is a trojan sent to murder my dog just because you want me to download shit from your precious proprietary store, just stop all that shit. Something akin to Windows XP or Windows 7 type era. Neither OS was perfect and certainly many features in modern OSes are nice, but the simplicity found in them just because at the time they kind of HAD to be simple in order to function, is something I’d love for MS (and Apple too for that matter) to embrace.
But since none of that will happen, the next best thing I can hope is developers start making more and more programs run natively on Linux distro. Linux has come very far in my lifetime and I’m honestly excited that I can now use Linux basically for everything and only keep Windows installed as dual boot for a few specific tasks. I just hope it keeps growing in coming years. Hopefully demand from gamers for the steam deck and such drives more and more support for Linux. I can you one thing though… if my Windows updated and tells me “set up Moments! Click here!” I’m nuking that shit from orbit immediately. I don’t care what it does, I will never use any of that shit Microsoft packs into Windows. Probably sounds grump old man or whatever, but I just refuse. Stop adding dogshit no one asked for! This goes for basically all devs! Rant over, but I’m still pissed!
Microsoft’s name was basically equivalent to dogshit from the mid-90s until maybe the mid 2000s.
I’m old enough to remember well the Microsoft hate. It’s not so much they’ve changed their ways, but Google has now taken the trident and diverted attention away from them.
Yes, this right here. It’s really the same ol shitty Micro-fuck, Google just wanted to be king of the shit-mound for the most morally and ethically bankrupt corporation of this age. [edit] Google and Facebook are just vying for the crown of “biggest asshole corporation in the world”
Fuck all three but at least Google and Microsoft provide something I can potentially get some use out of, although I’m with you and plan to be 100% Linux in a few years
if my Windows updated and tells me “set up Moments! Click here!” I’m nuking that shit from orbit immediately.
Why wait? You seem to be fed up already. Reconsider the importance of those specific cases. I haven't missed anything really after moving to Linux full-time. Forced to use Windows at work and that's a daily reminder how bad it really has become.
I do use it use linux for most things and especially for light usage such as web browsing/chatting. Many games also work now thanks for new interest due to the steam deck, which is cool. Gone are the days, it seems, where you gotta read 14 forum pages on why your specific distro won’t boot this specific game. It’s honestly in the hands of the software devs at this point though. They gotta break from the standard for the last 20 or so years of catering only to Windows. I’m hoping the steam deck pushes more teams to embrace the Linux world. I’d also love for Valve to officially release a standalone desktop version of steamOS (or whatever their name is for their distro). I know people have kinda made hacky versions, but an officially supported version with real support for stuff like nvidia drivers (which is another thing… nvidia needs to get away from that shit) would be very cool and would certainly push other companies outside the steam universe to get on board too. It just seems like a matter of time thing now which is certainly better than “this will never happen” that it felt like a decade ago
This is the saving grace for so many people who are forced to use windows at work - I can do terminal stuff locally now which is great. Slow when working with windows directories (outside of WSL) but still great.
Exactly. Microsoft also has the benefit of double-dipping - they have Xbox, but they also get a healthy cut from PC as a vast majority of gamers are going to be running Windows.
This article feels very much like a fanboy wanting to keep the stupid “console wars” going, when really Microsoft is happy to just rake in the cash.
vast majority of gamers are going to be running Windows.
Vast majority of PC gamers are on windows, yeah. But overall the PC gamer market and console gamer markets are similar. There's a lot of overlap too as PC gamers also have consoles.
Bummer. This is terrible news for consumers and is really going to hurt competition. Microsoft has already shown that they're going as exclusive as possible with their recent acquisitions, so we can probably expect to never see any new Activision/Blizzard titles outside of Microsoft's ecosystem now, and that's a huge umbrella of content that the rest of players are going to miss out on.
The FTC did important work here even if it wasn’t successful in the suit.
Microsoft got Zenimax and was then rather excessive in how they handled it, and that is a large part of what prompted this degree of pushback by regulatory bodies.
If Xbox wants to leave the door open for future acquisitions they are very much aware they need to tread carefully moving forward.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Zenimax titles end up as timed exclusives down the road rather than permanent exclusives as announced.
Similarly, Sony has set any of their own future acquisitions up for potential scrutiny if they continue down the path of total exclusively, and what’s likely going to end up happening is each side plays their bargaining chips to end up with mutual releases after timed windows.
This is arguably better than Activision Blizzard ending up in the hands of Tencent and going even further in the direction of Diablo Immortal, and may even help curb future exclusivity across the industry.
(In general, first party studio ownership leads to better games and less microtransaction BS.)
Less exclusivity in the future may largely rest on the FTC and other regulatory bodies having aggressively pushed back on this here and now.
In trade regulation you don’t need to necessarily win the fight to still have a net positive influence.
Microsoft got Zenimax and was then rather excessive in how they handled it, and that is a large part of what prompted this degree of pushback by regulatory bodies.
If Xbox wants to leave the door open for future acquisitions they are very much aware they need to tread carefully moving forward.
This reads like a rather optimistic take to me.
What Microsoft learned here is that they can buy a publisher (Bethesda), make that publisher’s games exclusive, and still get the biggest gaming acquisition in history approved by regulators.
Microsoft will likely pause acquisitions for a bit, but everyone else that wants to get into/stay in gaming is going to look into them even more than before. I’d be surprised if Sony doesn’t end up buying someone decently large (but not as large as Activision: Sony cannot afford anything like that). Everyone seems to think Sony would go for Square Enix but I think they would make a different choice.
As long as PS sells better than Xbox, they don’t really need to acquire companies as it also makes economic sense for third party studios to simple agree on an exclusivity deal with the console leader.
We can already see how most multiplatform games actually perform better on PS5 despite Xbox Series X being a notch better. In fact, some games even lack features on Xbox (Callisto Protocol to date has shitty Ray Tracing on Xbox with poorer performance, Resident Evil 4 Remake having better controls on PS5 compared to Xbox) even without any deals that we know of, while games like Hogwarts Legacy have exclusive content just for PS5, and FF XVI outright being exclusive to PS5. Sony didn’t have to acquire these devs to make that happen, the devs get to remain independent and sell their game exclusively on the largest current gen console.
And if and when Xbox sales actually start to match that of PS, they can still make PS+ a better service by having day one releases before going for acquisitions.
It doesn’t feel like it, but with ABK, Microsoft finally has parity with Sony when it comes to number of IPs, with Sony still being the market leader with most reach and “true” exclusives that require you to buy the console.
Sony didn’t have to acquire these devs to make that happen, the devs get to remain independent and sell their game exclusively on the largest current gen console.
They didn’t, they just use their market leader position to make it happen - which is what should actually be being stopped and investigated by the regulatory bodies.
Make no mistake - Sony won’t be allowed to purchase a big publisher. They are the overwhelming market leader. Just because the last placed Microsoft were allowed to it doesn’t mean the first placed Sony can, especially since everyone knows the very first thing sony would do is make every single game Playstation exclusive (and then probably raise the price of all games to USD$90 and raise the price of the console $100).
Yes, Sony will very likely eye an acquisition (possibly even the one extensively rumoured over the years that isn’t Square Enix), but that’d be to shore up their bargaining position over exclusivity.
The exclusivity fight, particularly if mutually assured destruction, isn’t a winning bet long term.
There’s an ebb and flow to this industry, and we’ve already seen under Jim Ryan the shift to PC ports after exclusivity windows.
Honestly, the biggest thing holding back Sony ports to Xbox is probably Microsoft’s insistence on platform support for the Series S.
Not great to engineer streamlined system that you push to the max with first party titles to then instead get held back planning to support your competitor’s worst product.
Honestly, the biggest thing holding back Sony ports to Xbox is probably Microsoft’s insistence on platform support for the Series S.
I don’t agree with that assessment given Sony only published games on the Xbox One when forced to by the license holder. They also seem to do just fine porting their games to PC where there is a host of different hardware configurations. Go look at the minimum PC specs for Ratchet and Clank; that sure seems like it could run on a Series S to me.
Sony will very likely eye an acquisition (possibly even the one extensively rumoured over the years that isn’t Square Enix)
Sony won’t be allowed to since they’re the market leader by a long way.
Honestly, the biggest thing holding back Sony ports to Xbox is probably Microsoft’s insistence on platform support for the Series S.
No, it’s that sony don’t want to release their games on xbox. Don’t be silly. Playstation basically is Sony these days. Everything else they own has either died or faded into irrelevance apart from cameras and tvs. Playstation is their biggest asset, and they would never consider releasing their games on their competitors consoles.
What Microsoft learned here is that they can buy a publisher (Bethesda), make that publisher’s games exclusive, and still get the biggest gaming acquisition in history approved by regulators.
Microsoft are in last place in the gaming industry, so why wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) they be able to buy a publisher? If they were the overwhelming market leader like Sony then there’s not a chance in hell this would get approved…but they’re not. They’re last.
It’s absurd how everyone is now like “this opens the floodgates and means that everyone can buy everyone!”. It means nothing of the sort. If sony were to try and buy EA or Take 2, as people are now suggesting, it would be blocked almost universally because they’re the overwhelming market leader. The companies position in the industry matters. The point is to stop monopolies, and allowing the leader to get bigger goes against that. Allowing the last placed competitor to buy companies doesn’t.
They’re currently getting outsold over 2:1 by Playstation. They have tens of millions less service subscribers than Playstation has. They are being skipped by many big third party games. Owning windows doesn’t get them any money from games sold on Steam/Epic/etc.
How are they not in last place in gaming? They’re last in revenue. They’re last in software sales. They’re last in hardware sales. They’re last in subscriber numbers. They’re last in peripheral sales. They’re last in…you get the point.
Let me rephrase the question - who do you think is the market leader in the video game console manufacturer industry? What position out of the “big 3” do you think Microsoft is in?
Yeah. When IBM started getting wary of antitrust in the 80s, that paved the way for Microsoft, and when Microsoft started getting wary of antitrust in the 90s, that paved the way for Google. The FTC may be toothless, but the more it sucks up a corporation’s time and resources and just makes things difficult, the more it serves it’s purpose regardless.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Zenimax titles end up as timed exclusives down the road rather than permanent exclusives as announced.
Yeah, I really hope this is how things play out with that acquisition. I'd really love to be able to play Elder Scrolls 6 (some day), but don't want to be forced into a separate ~$500 purchase in order to play it.
Similarly, Sony has set any of their own future acquisitions up for potential scrutiny if they continue down the path of total exclusively, and what’s likely going to end up happening is each side plays their bargaining chips to end up with mutual releases after timed windows.
Yeah, this is a concern I've had with Sony acquiring Bungie. Although, Bungie's new game, Marathon, is already slated to be cross platform, so the fact that they're not immediately going into exclusivity-mode is a good look, so far. Hopefully we see a similar pattern with their other new IP, Matter, whenever they share more about that.
If I was Sony I’d now immediately partner with Nvidia to offer their cloud gaming service on PS4 and PS5.
I know they are trying to roll their own but I think that’s a mistake, and offering their users the ability to access Microsoft games on the equivalent of a 4080 for $19.99/mo for the duration of playing the one exclusive a year they’d actually care about would be the biggest F-U to Xbox.
Yes, in theory it could cannibalize software sales through channels they don’t get a cut, but generally I’d prefer playing locally on a PS5 than dealing with compression artifacts on cloud offerings, even if the cloud offering is good enough to not buy a $500 separate box.
Why would Sony let Nvidia’s cloud service onto the PS storefront? If Sony wanted players to have access to an equivalent cloud model that Sony didn’t control, they’d just let Game Pass onto PlayStation.
Delivering a subpar workaround for your users is different from giving a subscription service that you don’t get a cut of which is better than your current offerings.
Sony is exposed to far less risk to their revenue letting Nvidia in than Microsoft.
Nvidia would be max single digit cannibalized sales but would probably put a significant dent into the potential market of PS5 owners that might otherwise have bought Xbox hardware for exclusives.
Game Pass would likely be well into double digit cannibalized sales for both games and subscription services.
My tech company relies heavily on custom drive letters. If this feature goes public, we will never move off of Windows 10. It would literally kill the business if we couldn't see which drive we were accessing.
I cant remember where I saw it, but there was a long windows conference on youtube recently but they are planning a big windows revamp it might be part of that, This time its not just front end but a lot of backend stuff is changing. including trying to make Adminless users the default without losing any important functionally for the average user.
I think most people have misunderstood these changes. Drive letters are not removed, but the option "Show drive letters" in folder options is removed. By default, that option is enabled, so the drive letters will be shown, now if you want to disable them you'll have to go to the registry.
Just like "Hide protected OS files" is enabled by default, it will remain like that, if you want to show them, you'll have to fiddle with the registry instead of just changing an option.
In Linux there is one filesystem and you mount your drives in a folder of your choosing within that filesystem. By default external drives mount in /mnt or /run or wherever your distro sets a default mount point.
It... doesn't? Unless you mean line /dev/sda1, but that's not really the same thing. On Linux you can theoretically mount any drive anywhere you want under the root, so you might have your music on /mnt/music, or /media/music/ or you could mount it at /home/<username>/music.
Mine is on a drive called Stuff I have mounted at /mnt/Stuff/, I also have a symlink in my home directory from /mnt/Stuff/music/ to /home/<username>/music, which seamlessly makes it appear that it's there as well.
Really it's far more convenient than arbitrary drive letters!
Linux has a very different file-structure, which is the way your files are organized on a system. It's a bit weird at first, but once you get used to it makes a lot of sense. A second drive can often be found at /mnt/DRIVENAME or /media/DRIVENAME. But they show up in the file manager in a list anyhow.
That's for mounting, yeah, but when it comes to interacting with the hardware, Linux itself uses letters for some types of devices. For example, serial-connected ones (e.g. SATA internal drives, USB external drives) are /dev/sdx (x being a letter from A-Z). I don't know what happens when all letters are used up though, maybe someone can chime in there? NVMe uses numbers it seems - my boot drive is /dev/nvme0n1
There are other ways to access devices and partitions besides that though. I just had to put EndeavourOS on a flash drive and the Arch Wiki recommended doing this by targeting the drive via /dev/disk/by-id/, which lists connected drives by name, connectivity and serial number.
That's totally true and somehow it didn't think of it. I think that is the closest equivalent of the Windows naming scheme on storage devices.
But on the contrary: I believe on Windows the drive letters ( C:, D;, etc) ARE used for recognition (by the user) while the drive is already mounted. But you can also mount them without assigning a drive letter, making it somewhat different than how it's handled in Linux. On Linux, the (average) user usually doesn't see stuff like "/dev/sda" unless they specifically look for it. At most, they will see the name that are assigned to the drive and it's mounting point.
Imagine putting microtransactions, paid character edit vouchers, Denuvo, and anti-cheat into a $70 single player only game. They know what’s happening, they’re just trying to shift blame onto the community.
Think of it as their very shitty solution to mods and cheats that so many dumbasses pay for. “Hey, why let those cheat makers profit off of our games? Let’s make the cheats ourselves! But you know, for better profit, let’s chop off parts of the game and call them cheats instead.”
There’s a mod right now that adds the item you need to change appearances to a vendor for like 10 gold, so I’m not really sure what cheats it’s preventing exactly.
Ouch, I'd be pissed too if my $70 was still not enough to buy all the character models, let alone that I would have to pay to re-customize my character. They 100% deserve this negative criticism.
So a 80W 12 Performance core CPU could only manage +10% single core and 2x multi-core over a 20W 4+4, year old CPU? That doesn’t sound like a dunk. Performance per Watt looks to be worse than the M2 as well.
„Best Snapdragon CPU beats Apples basic entry level Mac processor“ doesn‘t generate enough clicks and outrage to divide Apple haters and Apple fanboys further.
The critical thing to remember during all these benchmarks is that Qualcomm matches or beats the competition (as of today) at all these CPU and GPU tests, but at less power than the others, sometimes up to 70% less power than Apple or Intel.
Even against the M2 Max from Apple, which will beat the Snapdragon X Elite on most benchmarks (except single-thread), the Snapdragon X Elite still consumes 30% less power when matching Apple's single-threaded peak performance.
Looks like a 30% efficiency improvement, although the article doesn't detail the performance against M2 besides in writing. We'll have to wait for more benchmarks.
On the more familiar and widely used Geekbench 6, both configurations easily beat Razer’s Blade 14 (2023) powered by the AMD R9 7940HS. The MacBook Pro 13” with M2 processor came last (compared to our best gaming laptops) with 2,658 single-thread and 10,088 multi-thread. By comparison, Qualcomm pulled off 2,940 ST, 15,130 MT, 2,780 ST, and 14,000 MT at its lower TDP configuration.
Cinebench 2024, which replaces Cinebench R23, hasn’t been used a lot by us yet as it’s brand new, but the new version, which is compiled to run ARM natively, still shows the Snapdragon X Elite way ahead of the competition with 132 ST and 1,220 MT for Config A. The MacBook Pro with M2 could only muster 121 ST and 572 MT and was still easily beaten by the Config B model with 122 ST and 950 MT.
The article didn’t even make it a day before Apple announced the M3 CPUs which will probably dunk on this in both performance and efficiency.
The M2 CPU was kind of a disappointment since it was mostly just an overclocked M1 with a few more GPU cores, but the same bad architecture. The M3 should actually be a newer architecture and fix the M2s PPW regression.
Apple says the M3 is 50% more efficient than the M1, and since it's on a 3nm process it's likely at least competitive, and probably more efficient than the Snapdragon at 4nm.
Likely this will target modded controller jigs like “Chronus”.
This is definitely due to them now owning Call of Duty where these fucking users are rampant and since it’s not software hacks, it could be done on consoles…at least until now
The bg, bg2, iwd trilogy was a magical play experience! Gameplay was unique, immersive, and the dnd element was unlike almost any other game on the market. Can’t wait to play bg3!
I remember when all these games were just coming out and the hype surrounding them. My favourite was always Minsc and his hamster companion Boo from BG1.
I adore Minsc but feel like WoTC has started flooding him into stuff once they realized that he was popular. He’s in a comic, in Magic the gathering now, and I think even showed up in modules and games. Their involvement in any of this has made me trepidatious, tbh. It sounds like Larian may have made a good game despite them. (I have my own nitpicks there but I’m a very inflexible and nostalgic person, so that’s to be expected.)
windowscentral.com
Hot