No, I’m wrong. It’s the Mid-Atlantic ridge.

And we gained a pretty damn good idea during World War 2 and the Cold War when we were trying to map parts of the ocean floor for submarine warfare purposes, and discovered the mid ocean fault points. Especially the true extent of the Mariana Trench, Mid-Atlantic Ridge which is spang in the middle of the Atlantic between the jigsaw puzzle coastlines of Africa and South America.

Needless to say we weren’t to keen to blab to our enemies just how much we knew about the seafloor, and neither were they. What with submarine warfare being a Big Deal in the Cold War, and all.

Edit to add some additional detail now that I’m not pecking on my phone: Alfred Wegener proposed his almost-modern theory of continental drift in 1912, as well as the hypothesis of Pangea, the prehistoric supercontinent from the time when all the current major landmasses were together. You’re right that there was not a solid explanation for the mechanism by which this proposed action ought to occur. But even by the 1940s scientists were proposing that continental drift happened by way of the continents floating on convection currents of magma underneath and predicted there would be expansion joints in between them in the middle of the oceans.

I mean, what. You’re going to play Ikaruga on mobile? Of course you need your Dreamcast.

Active Desktop. That actually started with Windows 98, or at least that’s when it came bundled with. You had to install it on purpose on Windows 95 and NT4.

You could do some interesting tricks with this if you wrote your own local content for it. Different wallpaper images on different monitors, interactive wallpaper effects, and so forth. I have no idea what its actual intended use case was nor what anyone at Microsoft was smoking when they made this available by default. Parking anything on there that accessed external web content always struck me as rather a bad idea.

Missing the one massively important takeaway, which is that even taking into consideration many decimal places in the number, precisely no one other than Samsung and Google give a rat’s ass about this thing or, if the uptake numbers are any indication, the current “XR” path in general. Microsoft already gave up on it. Apple is probably going to wind up giving up on it after snookering the rubes and influencers out of their dough for one or two more hardware generations. Google already gave up on it once previously. (This isn’t even counting Cardboard, and whatever the fuck Daydream was supposed to be. No, not that Daydream. The other one.)

As the Apple Vision Pro debacle showed, devices like this are a solution desperately searching for a problem which doesn’t seem to exist. They’re expensive, limited, make you look like a massive berk when you’re wearing one, and nobody’s managed to come up with the killer app or appeal these are supposed to have for not only normal people, but also really anyone.

The tech savvy nerds who might be a niche sort of market for such a cyborg faceplate are going to see “Google” and “AI, AI, AI” in the same sentence and avoid this like an overwrought bubonic cliché. I certainly am. For this to have anything approaching any kind of appeal for its intended use case, it needs to be much more portable and discreet. Think the phantascopic spectacles from the Diamond Age. Not Hiro’s goddamn face-helmet from Snow Crash. The former is, needless to say, still firmly impossible in any reasonable form factor given our current battery tech. And then the system it’s hooked up to has to be not bullshit, or (I am smirking as I type this) under the user’s own control. I’m seeing subscription nonsense attached to this already. $1799, and then you have to pay subscription just to have crap floated in front of your face that’s by and large pretty much what the smartphone in your pocket does already. Verily, that is a non-starter.

Look, we just want to play good looking VR games and watch VR porn, at a high resolution and a decent framerate, and at an affordable price point. Preferably without vendor lock-in or a bunch of strings attached, nor instantly becoming bricks when the vendor inevitably loses interest in a couple of years. This isn’t hard to figure out. Get with the program already.

Yeah, and it’s just dumb terminals with extra steps.

Likewise. Outer Wilds was an incredible experience but it’s one of those things that will inherently have zero replay value. Unless maybe you feel like doing a quick run-through as a comfort food nostalgia game, or something. It’s fairly unique in that your progression in it is based purely on your personal knowledge of what you’ve discovered in the solar system, and if you had foreknowledge there’s literally nothing stopping you from beating it on your very first launch without even doing a single time loop. There’s even an achievement for doing the same, no doubt intended to be earned once you already know everything.

I am predicting at some point Windows itself will become a business only product and cease to be marketed to consumers, and the home user platform will be some kind of live service bullshit probably served in a browser. Basically the Chromebook idea, but Microsoft.

Consider the IoT Enterprise LTSC builds. These come premade from Microsoft with less bloat (or none, in the case of the Win10 IoT version), and don’t shove the consumer features down your throat on every update because they’re designed for mission critical embedded applications.

I have 10 IoT LTSC running on most of our machines at work because a significant chunk of our hardware is not Windows 11 “ready” and we use many vendor-specific things that don’t work in Linux or Wine, and I use 11 IoT LTSC at home (locked to 23H2 so my Mixed Reality VR headset remains working!) without incident.

http://massgrave.dev/

Without either of the above restrictions if I were you I would shop for a new mouse.

It seems like a pretty solved problem to me, being the owner of a Reverb G2 myself. There’s also the Vive Focus models, Pimax, Pico, and probably tons of others I can’t think of offhand.

Even so. $1900. No base stations in the box. Come on.

I’m not asking it to be, but for a “high end” rig how come it’s not even complete out of the box? Even the dinky old WMR setups managed to come with controllers, and had inside-out tracking as well.

If it exists in the consumer VR space, it’s competing with the Quest whether we like it or not.

But the Quest is a fully self contained device in the sense that you can take it out of the box and use it as-is, without requiring the purchase of any external bullshit, and you can use it anywhere without having to string said external bullshit all the place to make your play space permanent. Those are the two big important factors.

Never mind the delta in price between a thoroughly entry level versus a high end VR rig. I don’t think many of us (i.e. nerds) would care too much if a really good PCVR solution cost north of $1000 provided it did everything it said it did without a hassle attached. But for fuck’s sake, at this price point they could at least deign to include a basic set of lighthouses and a pair of OG Vive controllers in the box or something.

Still requires tracking towers/lighthouses, costs $1900, and doesn’t even come with them.

I think somehow people still haven’t figured out the two important things that make the Meta Quest so popular despite its many, many inherent drawbacks.

Edit: Oh, and also:

• The product is scheduled to ship in late December, 2025.

• Please note that orders cannot be cancelled, returned or refunded once confirmed.

Yeah, that’s a big old nope from me, dawg.

The Qidi Q2 has built-in spaghetti detection (and print failure detection in general), auto leveling, bed mesh compensation, etc. It’s not a print farm machine, though, so how you’ll get your parts off the bed and into your finished bucket will require some outboard tools and elbow grease. If its mechanicals are anything like my prior X-Max 3 from them I don’t predict it will require any adjustment, maintenance, or parts replacement for many hundreds/thousands of hours of runtime. I guess eventually you’ll need a nozzle at minimum, and you might want to lubricate the linear guides on the gantries every now and again.

It’s also compatible with their “Qidi box” filament changer doohickey if that sort of thing is important to you.

As far as video games go, an obvious answer is the Sims.

Perhaps only slightly less prominent is Shadow of the Colossus. Insofar as I know all of the spoken dialog is a nonsense fictional dialect that definitely isn’t Japanese, except possibly when calling your horse’s name. The language is based off of syllables and random bits from both Japanese and Latin with some of the syllables being spoken backwards, and with a kinda-sorta Japanese style cadence. But it’s utter gibberish, and only the subtitles make it intelligible.

Yes. And using Rufus to create your install media, you can even configure it to create a local account for you so you don’t have to go through the rigmarole yourself.

Actually, I wonder if that still works with an image of the new current Win11 releases where the local account functionality has been “removed.” I haven’t tried it. Someone will probably chime in.

https://massgrave.dev/

How about seven instead, and for free?

These days this is true of many other brands as well. The early days of your printer showing up as a kit full of bits and requiring you to spend as much time wrenching on it as using it are gone, unless you deliberately go and seek something like that out.

Qidi, Anycubic, Prusa, Creatality, and probably tons of others I can’t think of off the top of my head also make machines that are unbox-and-use.

Some clients go out of their way to mark posts by a moderator in some way, though. Alexandrite makes their username bright green an bold, for instance.

I wonder what portion of users are turned off by stepping into a community and discovering that basically every post is from its only moderator, and thus feel that whatever-it-is is probably just that individual’s personal hobby horse.

Not that I’d know, or anything…

This is how hardware accelerated TV tuners worked back in the day, and probably also MPEG cards during their brief flash in the pan when they were necessary to play MPEG encoded video before processors were powerful enough to do it in software (and/or had various extensions added to them to assist, like MMX and SSE, etc., etc.).

I had an ATI TV Wonder card back in those dark days, and its mask color was hot magenta: RGB(255,0,255). Any pixels in your framebuffer of that color would be overwritten with TV output, although the player that came with the card already seemed to broadly know approximately where its output should be located so you couldn’t relocate the video on your screen by doing this. If you full screened the player and then minimized it, though, you could color in any pixels on your display with e.g. Paint and they’d magically become little slices of broadcast television.