Up to us, the populace to vote for people who would be willing to pass a law about it. This is the extent the FTC can do without that.

You might be too young.. oh who a hell am I kidding this is slashdot.

Anyway in electronics there are different grades of quality. TigerDirect made a business selling the B and c grade stuff. Because of that they could undercut just about anyone but they often sold junk.

Think of it like how Intel bins their CPUs only it's stuff like the quality of the electrical wiring in the final product.

So the practice I think has more or less gone away for major brands. They have much better quality control so they don't do the binning thing anymore. But the factories will absolutely do binning and resell them to different brands. So there can be a big difference between the Kodak electric scooter and the one from some weird Chinese seller. Although honestly kodak's brand is so shot these days that I doubt there's much difference between those two particular companies

Apparently broadcom does have fabs and they make chips and apple uses them for that. I don't really think of broadcom like that but yeah I guess they do. So it's Apple designed chips being manufactured by broadcom.

As a matter of national security yeah it's good to have chip production here but it's kind of a yawn from a jobs perspective. None of these chip foundries produce very many jobs. It beats the hell out of an AI data center I guess.

Agree, I buy a lot of fiber optic cables for work and many of the cheaper brands on there have been solid with no problems (Yutianhome is one in particular). While i try to prefer more "reputable" suppliers like LANShack I have to say the quality is comparable. Ditto for SFP adapters, Amazon is where I came across 10GTek and they have always been solid and reliable by my anecdotal experience.

If it gets any kind of traction then one of those brands is going to sue him sooner or later. Possibly multiple brands. If he's in the United States he'll just get bankrupted by the lawsuits and if he's in Europe they don't have the same Free speech protections we do so he's looking at a pretty serious libel suit...

As an American I don't have a hell of a lot of civil liberties left but I can't at least talk shit about bad companies. I mean for the time being and all...

I absolutely love my EHEYCIGA electric scooter and OH GOD IT'S ON FIRE. Quick where is my WNPETHOME brand fire extinguisher!? Oh God it's full of bees! Why is it full of bees!? They aren't even live bees!!

Those won't be able to do gaming though. The steam machine has something roughly equivalent to a RTX 4060 in it. You could get one of those cheap mini PCS on eBay for that price but it would have a low-end integrated GPU that struggles with 5-year-old games at 720P...

I know some people who gain like that but it's not anything anyone's going to really want.

If I was building something out though I could do it for about $800 right now. I Think I would struggle to do it for less but I might pull off $500 or 600 depending on what I'm willing to sacrifice. The main problem would be getting something that has Ray tracing. GTX 1080s are all over the place and they perform really well, I'm running one right now, but without Ray tracing lots of games don't work.

So I think you'd be looking at $200 for your graphics, about $300 for the board CPU and 16 gigs of RAM after some hunting, about $100 for a cheap power supply and case but you need to be careful buying a power supply at that price point. Really you want to spend a hundred bucks on your power supply or your kind of gambling. So somewhere around 600 to $700. Then you add in keyboard and mouse and maybe a gamepad although you can get a really nice cheap one from 8-bit do or one of the other manufacturers using hall effect sticks.

Fair value doesn't really help though. It's about what people can afford and what other options they have.

If I was getting into gaming my first stop would probably be a used PS5 right now which you can get her around $400. If I was really broke I might dig up an old PS4. With some effort you can get those for next to nothing and they should be usable for at least another three or four years before Sony starts shutting down servers.

So I'm not saying that the steam machine is bad value in the current market but it doesn't matter when folks just don't have a lot of money right now. We are more or less in a recession. If you take out AI spending we are in a deep recession.

They absolutely are so don't play dumb. You have *very* strong opinions about America but refuse to declare yourself American or not.

I cannot be similarly critical about your country in response because you refuse to answer a basic question. It isn't fair and you laughing baout it is why I don't give a shit and will continue to attack the messenger with zero regard to your opinion.

I am being similarly bad faith as a point which clearly has gone over your head. Is your country one without sarcasm?

If we had some actual competition they maybe could. And I really think that Linux through the steam boxes as gaming machines could finally get some serious traction in the market.

But at $1,100 for the base model that's just too much for anyone but dedicated hobbyists. Honestly for a lot of dedicated hobbyists they're going to build their own setups for less money. Not quite as sleek of course. I mean if you want a solid home theater PC that your wife isn't going to yell at you about then the steam machine is a good buy. But that's only because of today's market and stuff like the $700 PlayStation 5...

It's frustrating cuz I think Valve was probably on the verge of cracking at least the Linux home desktop market. Maybe if we still have a functioning market in 5 years RAM prices and storage prices will come back down and they can take a real crack at it. Although I do wonder how Microsoft is going to respond. But right now they just don't need to.

Well when I think the messenger is a bad faith liar or a foreign based paid operative yeah, I am not going to take you seriously. My safe assumption is you are a Russian agitator and unless you show me different that's what i believe so you can stay mad.

I mean at this point you could have just lied to me about where you are. Your caginess about it is as the young people would say "quite sus".

You are so absolutely mortified that just saying what country you live in will absolutely destroy your arguments which means your arguments are bullshit.

Again, if I thought you actually knew what a leftist was I might consider your opinion.

Fuck yeah brother. Maybe Ukraine will take back Crimea after all.

Based. I can give credit to Trump when he earns it because I am not a hack like you.

It doesn't fix every issue no but part of the idea is that now if me, a person who has been blithely not caring about politics but now I have to go sign a ballot, maybe I will care a little bit.

Sure some people will donkey vote, some will write in a dick but will that be the majority or even a plurality or will some people actually take a moment and try to inform themselves just a little bit. Again, in that Pew poll most of the nonvoters still express a preference. If you want your vote to be "fuck off" at least it's recorded.

Agree 100% but if people care about this then they have to support politicians willing to change the system. Unfortunately for the fence sitters that is the Democratic party who is open to approval voting or ranked choice. It's why the places that do it at all today are blue cities and blue states.

What does Germany do that gets the high turnout is the question then and maybe we should emulate that. I bet what leads to that high turnout will also lean towards one party. That means some poeple are going to have to swallow the pill of "liberals have been right"