What are the chances that a vendor that declines to update 4.3 to 4.4 would be willing to do an update for a 4.3.x if Google bothered to do it.

I think it smells bad, but trying to target users with vendors holding back 4.4 but willing to do another 4.3.x update is tricky. This is why google moved toward moving stuff in a more modular fashion: to get the ability to update relevant portions without demanding the vendor get in the middle.

Of course, in that case you still don't need the fake engine. The natural sound of the engine is plenty adequate. Ford more screwed with the tone to make it sound like a bigger engine. Pull the fuse and you still hear it, just sounds different.

There are plenty of videos now of people doing comparitve drive with the fuse in or out. With fuse out, it sounds much more like one would expect a 4-cylinder turbo to sound. It's not exactly terrible, but it is markedly different than the sound of the V6. The manipulation brings it more in line with a larger engine for people too insecure to be reminded they are driving a 4 cylinder.

I can understand the perspective that a single repository for more of the userspace resembles the *development* of traditional Unix systems, the argument made is usually not about where it is developed, but reducing the principle of having small simple utilities with straightforward interactions with other componets. For example, Most traditional Unix systems have terrible implementations of a shell interpreter and things like fileutils. It is an awkward, but not too terrible a situation since you can replace that stuff with GNU equivalents trivially without horribly breaking the OS. An administrator that understands enough to write scripts can discern the nature of interaction even if that administrator isn't a full-on software developer. systemd design trends in many ways toward requiring someone needing to dig in to have more development competency than previous designs. As a developer, I understand the attraction of some of the architecture choices, but I think they lose perspective of what it's like to be an administrator on the ground. Someone who doesn't live and breath your code has a harder time wrapping their heads around how it should be working when something requires customization, replacement, or debug.

In general, systemd is all-or-nothnig about a lot of things. They figure out a way to achieve what could be considered a sensible goal, but then go about it in highly disruptive ways. The sense is they throw up their hands and say 'well, this is the only way to do it, and it's worth it' rather than rethinking how the end could be achieved in a less disruptive way.

I actually went to one the other weekend. They actually had a good selection of resistors, capacitors, and so on. As others have said, I can't think of another brick and mortar anywhere near me where I could pick up components *now* if I wanted. I think there was a phase where they got all of that out of their stores to chase yet another business strategy. I think that was a mistake because it removed radio shack from the minds of the few people who still would go there to chase a market that didn't place any value whatsoever in their company.

I really wish they had settled into some run-rate business model that could've sustained them while continuing to stock those piece parts.

Your point is a big part of why management should be very careful about apparent 'cost savings' In a large amount of cases, management is chasing a buzzword more than carefully examining what comprises their budget for in-house versus cloud hosted.

Part of the cost savings of the cloud operator is having them do things to the data that most companies would never approve for themselves. Additionally, only a relatively small portion of the expense is moved 'to the cloud'. A lot of work still *should* happen that is lumped into the presumed cost of being internal versus external. So either a new budget starts growing to cover the cost previously not broken out or work stops happening that may critically matter.

Actually, if anything the typical cloud experience doubles down on proprietary tools. Sure the vendor may be availing themselves of open technologies on the backend, but the vast majority of them use proprietary interfaces to interact with their customers.

ntp is surprisingly complex to deal with a surprisingly complex thing. If tlsdate was a decent enough utility, then we'd still be using the time protocol of rdate as the go-to time sync strategy. Precision and quality is much lower.

There's also a couple of tricky things. One is that it could be dropped in TLS 1.3. Another is that it doesn't play with the concept of TLS certificate expiry.

Basically, this is a potentially handy utility to take the place of rdate, not something that begins to touch ntp.

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Perhaps you reacted a bit strongly. Keeping in mind the thread was oversimplifying to imply nothing has changed in 20 years tech wise, I naturally presumed you were supprting that argument by saying the high end 20 years ago had everything that the consumer level is offering, which isn't so.

When I say huge, I mean huge compared to looking at the same environment on a monitor with no tracking. When you say it is nothing next to high-cost solutions, that's almost certainly true, but not relevant to the consumer space. In much the same way an automotive company needs a rack of servers and a meticulous model of a vehicle to simulate a car crash for their purposes, but a game developer can make a car model in a matter of minutes that can be deformed by a physics engine running on a single core enough for a gaming situation, consumer grade VR doesn't need the things you are talking about. Similarly, the communication needs for multiple players depending on game design isn't going to be more than a conventional shooter game.

I last tried a high end professional VR environment in the 90s, and even then just as a guest, not an expert. My current perspective is totally based on my first hand experience with an Oculus, firmly rooted in the consumer electronics world. It's just odd because it seems remarkably capable and all my guests felt it was in the right ballpark, but then people say it can't be remotely adequate.

Close one eye. Move your head left or right. Congratulations, you perceived 3d information by parallax. Same thing works in reality and VR. If you can't see it in reality, then of course you can't see it in VR, but your perception of reality continues to have you understanding depth.

Two eyes provides depth information without head movement for a few meters. Moving the head provides the information over greater range and works with one eye or two.

I won't notice better than 48 hz, except how it impacts my head tracking. 60 fps versus 75 fps when head tracking is involved at least appears very different. There could be an issue with some factors not being done perfectly right or an unfortunate interaction with the motion sampling frequency that could change, but at least for now it looks night and day to me.

I guess I'm a bit perplexed at this statement. The current DK2 uses two USB 2 ports (for camera data and motion tracking). A tiny fraction of modern IO capabilities, and it seems to do just fine. Sure it only tracks the head, but technology adding more tracking seems content with USB as a bus. I'm not sure what IO load you are referring to that would be infeasible with modern systems.

Well, just head tracking is *huge*, though the lack of positional tracking without augmentation is an issue. My point is those sorts of sensors, which are a valuable component of comprehensive motion tracking, are now commodity items. DK2 provided good experience using camera based tracking to what amounts to a somewhat higher end version of common motion tracking equipment.

In general, you make it sound like you haven't been involved in the market since RH ES3 days. I had the opportunity to experience VR demos back then in a few instances, and it wasn't compelling. It's night and day compared to the DK2. I haven't had the chance to demo modern high-end VR simulators, I can't imagine how those have changed since back then.

So you wouldn't watch any movies because you can't feel anything? You wouldn't play any sort of game because none of them provide perfect immersion?

We are talking about a rather *large* step in progressing immersion. Going from text adventure to side scrolling/overhead games to wolfenstein 3d to doom to quake, etc. Each step has added a new dimension to immersion, and this is just another step. It's not the last step but why bother waiting for the last step while settling for lesser immersion than is possible?

So I don't use mass transit. If I did, I would be looking harder at GearVR to watch movies on my commute, no problem. This is something that really should be tried before going out of your way to dismiss it as having any market at all. It really isn't a bad idea for a significant chunk of people.

I have absolutely no issues playing for a long time. At least no problems unique to VR (as a husband and a father, binge gaming is usually off the table). I have played for hours on end while my family went out to do something a couple of times. The headset doesn't weigh much, meaning your neck doesn't get tired. The focus is at infinity, so it doesn't fatigue your eyes to focus. Some people prone to sickness may not be able to cope, but so far the people I know that have tried it and said they got sick can't play FPS games either for the same reason.

I won't claim my experience is how it will be for everyone, but I can't imagine I'm unique in not getting at all sick or fatigued.

I personally spend most of my time in it watching video. It allows me to have an impossibly large screen, without being intrusive to my family. It also allows me to watch content and play computer games that my daughter shouldn't be seeing/hearing.

Simulator gaming is certainly a big one, but I would like more FPS and even third-person perspective gaming as well. I'm utterly immune to being simulator sick, so I'm eager for experiences that might not work for everyone.

I also enjoy the more laid back experiences. I would love to see new star trek interactive technical manual software, for example.

I think any 3d gaming experience naturally suggests VR enhancing it, but there are other opportunities. Not everyone will stand for the bother of putting on goggles to experience it, but there's some of us who are perfectly fine.