Got taken by robots and automation, not outsourcing. Automation and process improvement have been devouring jobs and destroying the middle class for 40 years. We just don't like the talk about it. People will bray at you like a donkey yelling luddite if you bring it up.

Not when you're competitors could just cut their prices in half, still make enough money to be doing pretty damn well and wait for you to go out of business after you spent the money building out the fabs.

Just like how if you want competition in sports you need a referee if you want competition in business you need the government refereeing everything. We spent 50 years firing the ref. Why the hell are we all surprised that the game is rigged?

Several of the companies that are in a position to manufacture RAM have let it slip that they are holding off because of the risk that the big players would just lower their prices.

Every single time we have had a huge spike in the cost of electronics in my life after a period of time it has come out that the company's involved were colluding. Whether it was the chip shortages in the '80s or the flat panel prices in the 2000s it always turned out to be collusion. And we always gave them a tiny tiny slap on the wrist after they made fuck tons of profit.

This is a political problem not a technical one. Nerds don't like political problems though. They want everything to be solved with technology like in the Sci-Fi books we all grew up reading. You would think that after all the cyberpunk dystopia sci-fi we also read we'd be able to integrate that into a coherent worldview but nope. I think the reason is that it's the stuff we read as kids that sticks in our brain and we didn't get our hands on the cyberpunk dystopia stuff until we were teenagers or in our 20s or 30s.

But make no mistake just like every other time, I mean assuming we still have a functioning civilization in 3 years, we will eventually get a slashdot story about how the ram manufacturers and the storage manufacturers were colluding and got paltry fines after pinky swearing to never do it again...

And we will never learn our damn lesson until we're in our Graves. You would think with all the autism we'd be good at pattern recognition but nope

While this is true, those jobs are few in number.

Historically, little. The bulk of DCs have typically been located where people could go to them because that used to be more necessary, and therefore they were concentrated around tech firms. And they were planned out years in advance, and mostly sited where it made sense. They also weren't maximally power-dense, as there were other considerations. AI DCs are more power intensive, as they're shoving as many processors and as much memory as possible into every rack. And they're building them fast and desperately, so anywhere they can find to cram them in.

That means yes, noise issues, but also lots of other problems associated with rapidly installing extremely power intensive facilities in awkward locations when infrastructure is already strained. Resulting issues with power and water availability are now well documented.

Good thing they are nowhere near having a monopoly then

I agree. The existing players themselves would increase capacity in hope of outcompeting one another if they thought this would last.

Nope. There will be more idiots behind them.

It helps distinguish it from all the times Microsoft intentionally broke things in order to prevent interoperability with their rivals. I sure am glad that their illegal Monopoly was broken up back in 2000 and we didn't just elect a heavily pro corporate president whose doj dropped the lawsuit the first chance they got... That would have been terrible for computing.

Things systemd doesn't do for 200, Alex

I think the main innovation is proton. I have several buddies that have switched to Linux and it's just fine for them. Several of them switched over because Windows 11 was so effing slow and they just installed Linux and installed steam and stalled their games and played them and didn't think of anything else. It all just worked.

It looks like epic is looking for somebody to Port their anti-cheat to linux. Honestly if it wasn't for all this AI bullshit destroying our entire civilization and the complete lack of any Anti-Trust regulation preventing anyone from making RAM and storage except the existing players then I think this would massively take off and really screw over Microsoft.

I mean I'm running Windows 11 for work and holy fuck is a terrible. Eventually I'm going to get forced to switch operating systems since I'm on 10 and when that happens I don't know what I'm going to do but it's probably going to be installing Linux with proton. I mean assuming Microsoft hasn't found a way to kill it by then. I don't play call of duty so I don't have to worry about that but I could see them going around buying up every company that might possibly make a game I want to play to keep you from doing that...

I am really sick and tired of companies having unlimited cash and zero regulations. I can't even pretend anymore that it's not impacting my day-to-day life and I don't think any of us can without really sticking our heads in the sand.

Rent free.

Yeah but in practice virtually zero of them are actually closed loop. Even when it is claimed they are there is often a cooling tower which is used sometimes, which means they only sometimes operate in a closed loop mode.

Godwin's law obviously has no modern relevance given that it was invented for USENET and that was effectively destroyed.

Now seriously though it never spoke to whether or not the comparisons to Hitler were apt, as that is situational, only that they would occur.

And sidebar, Mike Godwin explicitly stated that such a comparison is apt when it comes to der pedofuhrer. Just like to toss that in there.

I've got three PC game pads lying around that would just work out of the box with it. I play on PC but I play a lot of console ports. The steam controller is there for people who are going to play the kind of games best played with keyboard and mouse but they want to do it from their couch. It's hyperoptimized for that. So it makes sense not to include it in the base unit because a lot of people wouldn't actually use it myself included.

Mind you at$1,100 I will not be buying a steam box. The price is competitive with regular pc hardware and for something that small and usable it's pretty good. Keep in mind that if you buy an equivalent laptop and you actually game on it it is likely to have much less performance because of thermal throttling and it's likely to burn out and die in a few years.

But I will stick with my aging ryzen 5600 and my ancient GTX 1080 I picked up off eBay years ago. It's good enough for pretty much everything I want to play except for one ratchet and clank game

And I have no idea how it is that the right wing convinced you that going to sleep was a good idea.

I'm sure it's fine. You can go to sleep surrounded by jackals and none of them will bite your neck out while you're unawares. After all jackals are famous for being helpful to anyone caught unawares...