AnyOldName3

I think you might have misjudged when LCDs became common as by the end of 2004, when Halo 2 released, LCD TVs were already a reasonable fraction of new TV sales, and in parts of the world, it was only a few months later that LCD TVs became the majority. For PC monitors, the switch came earlier, so it was clear CRTs were on the way out while the game was being developed. If they hadn’t expected a significant number of players to use an LCD and tweaked the game as much as necessary to ensure that was fine, it would have been foolish

That’s what’s keeping the lights on. If they sunk the extra billions into making their discrete cards genuinely superior to Nvidia’s (which already means taking it for granted that selling comparable products for less money makes them knockoff rather than superior), then Nvidia could stop them recouping the development costs by eating into their own margins to drop their prices. Over the last decade or two, ATi/AMD’s big gambles have mostly not paid off, whereas Nvidia’s have, so AMD can’t afford to take big risks, and the semi-custom part of the business is huge long-term orders that mean guaranteed profit.

Even in 2000, I feel like they should have been able to compromise, e.g. by doing his sclera and covering up breathing holes on the computer, but still having the rest be makeup, prosthetics and a costume.

They didn’t end up building a utopia, so must have made some kind of a mistake along the way.

Much more straightforward in British English where d and t are more distinct

I’m glad to see someone’s made this because it’s been bouncing around in my head for ages but I’ve never got around to putting it together and letting it out.

The press widely covered AV as if it was incredibly expensive and didn’t solve any problems, so presented it as if we’d be throwing away beds at children’s hospitals, support for pensioners and equipment for soldiers just to introduce pointless bureaucracy. If the choice was the one most voters thought they were making, then voting against it would have been the sensible option.

I’ve printed kilos and kilos of Geeetech PLA, and that’s some of the cheapest on AliExpress (although I used to get it directly from their website before I realised doing that was normally more expensive). It arrives wet, but other than that, there’s (nearly) nothing to complain about (although years ago, I had a roll with two lumps of grit in it that caused clogs). I’ve had mixed success with their other materials - their ABS+ started burning in the nozzle while still being cold enough that layer adhesion was bad and their high-speed PLA has ridiculous oozing that causes ridiculous stringing, but their PETG and TPU seem fine. I’m pretty confident that their basic materials are absolutely worth £7/kg.

Some of the charity is self-serving, e.g. eradicating diseases means he’s less likely to catch them (and really any billionaire not funnelling funds to pandemic prevention etc. is being moronic), and founding charter schools on land he owns so over the life of the school they pay more in rent for the lease than they cost to build is just a tax dodge. Most billionaires are just so evil that they won’t spend money on themselves if other people who aren’t paying also benefit, so in comparison, Gates’ better ability to judge what’s in his interests makes him look good.

The main point of 32-bit Windows 10 wasn’t to make it run on non-64-bit hardware, it’s that x86 processors can’t run in 16-bit mode if they were booted in 64-bit mode, so if you’ve got an old 16-bit Windows/DOS/CPM app that you’ve absolutely got to run natively instead of through DOSBox and have to use modern Windows instead of an older version, it needs to be 32-bit. By the time Windows 11 released, Microsoft had decided that nearly no one still wanted to do that anymore.

The geeky minority who care that it’s open source might be predisposed to liking each other, though, so the user base wouldn’t need to be as big as a general-purpose dating app.

As it says in the article, it’ll be smaller and quieter, so less offensive for most people’s living rooms than a full-size desktop. It’s not meant to replace your existing PC if you have one, unless it was getting old and you were about to replace it anyway. If you don’t have a PC, or don’t have one in the living room, then it might be a better option than anyone else’s prebuilt.

They focus on the low end, but a lot of people who only want low end GPUs care about Minecraft, and their OpenGL performance is abysmal, so Minecraft runs like molasses. If you play a lot of Minecraft, Nvidia’s cards manage to be much better value. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be fixed if they’re willing to invest in writing native OpenGL drivers instead of going through a compatibility player or mitigated if they invested more in making the compatibility layer faster, but that would mean deciding they’re losing a lot of sales this way, as it wouldn’t be cheap.

Usually when people post a source, the numbers say that at median screen sizes and distances from the screen, 4K isn’t perceptibly better than 1440p, and the person writing it up as an article has misunderstood the conclusion as saying 4K isn’t better than 1080p rather than that it isn’t better than 1440p. TVs tend not to be made with 1440p resolution, so upgrading from 1080p gets you right to 4K, skipping the sweet spot.

It’s nitpicking and also not quite right. Stock of a corportation is shares, whether or not they’re publicly traded. It becomes plural when it’s shares of multiple corporation.

However, LLCs aren’t corporations at all (the C is Company), and in the US, stock is specifically of corporations. I’m in the UK, where the equivalent to an LLC’s shares are still considered stock, and I’ve been googling whether private corporations have stock in the US, which they do, so the confusion’s been that the public/private distinction isn’t the important one and I’ve been arguing the definition of a word that’s defined differently in the relevant country.

As I said, he also owns a billion dollars worth of superyatchts for personal use in addition to the one(s) nominally for marine research.

The billion dollars in superyatchts is just the personally-owned luxury kind that billionaries like to hoard, not marine research boats that he has funded. Him giving away some of his money doesn’t mean that he’s not also frivilously spent more money than most people could hope to see in a lifetime.

Fundamentally, I don’t think we’re going to agree here, as I fundamentally believe that there’s an amount of money beyond which there are no ethical grounds for keeping it, and it’s much lower than $11 billion. Newell has kept money above that threshold instead of giving everything he made beyond that threshold away (even illiquid stuff like part of his stake in Valve could, in principle, be given to a charity so the profit from Steam went straight into the charity), and I and plenty of other people would see that as greedy. Others might say that the fact that he’s given anything away that he wasn’t legally required to means that he’s not greedy. These are subjective ethical opinions, so even though they can’t be reconciled, it’s not a big deal. Different people think different things are wrong.

The reason I’ve been replying at all is that some of the things you’ve stated to be facts are untrue, not that I’m trying to convince you that all billionaires are unethical.

Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.

Realising that ratfucking your customers and suppliers at every opportunity makes them less willing to do business with you in the future, and therefore you’ll potentially make more money by not doing that, so then not doing that, is exactly what a greedy person would do if they weren’t also a moron. Gabe Newell is certainly not a moron. Lots of other billionaires are, or have other empathy-limiting conditions that mean they don’t realise people won’t want to do repeat business with them if they got screwed over the last time.

There’s obviously a majority of billionaires that are much less ethical than Newell, but one superyatcht ought to be enough for anyone, and anyone buying a second one instead of putting the money directly to good causes is not benevolent.

It doesn’t have publicly-traded shares because it’s a private company, but it’s still correct to say someone has stock in a private company corporation (which isn’t relevant as Valve is unincorporated) that they own part or all of. Like with physical objects, they don’t stop existing just because they’re not for sale to the public. It’s an easy mistake to make, though, as the vast majority of the time people talk about stocks and shares it’s in the context of buying and selling publicly-traded stock.

A man who owns a billion dollars worth of megayatchts is not doing everything he can to ethically spend/donate his wealth. Yes, lots of his wealth is tied up in Valve stock and he can’t sell that without losing voting rights and making Valve stop being what it is, but he’s rolling in other assets and cash, too