Each endpoint had a different save. I am guessing this was to keep the saves separate in the case of the game running on more than one device at a time. I don't know how they handle it now, but I believe that was the issue. My kids play a lot of streamed games, and they knew that their progress on their laptop was different than the progress on their Xbox.

But as an aside- I just switched Xboxes with one of my sons this past weekend. He was very happy that all of his game progress moved over when he logged in. To all of us here on Slashdot that is the obvious way this should work- but for a typical consumer (my son) he was amazed and thrilled that it 'just worked' when he signed in on his profile. And- the games themselves from my profile were still there for him, but he had to download anything that I didn't already have saved to the local drive.

Their cloud integration is pretty good. I'm glad we all kept our saves in the cloud, otherwise we'd be dealing with a huge hassle.

For people who do not work at a large university in a liberal state- you don't really know what is going on. (I don't mean, you, I mean the people responding to you) I also work at a university (in the top 20 of research universities in the US) that is a recipient of a lot of federal grants. Diversity has been identified as the TOP priority at our university. Everything we do has to have a diversity angle to it.

Overhead on grants can be up to 50% of the award. And, since the university has identified DEI as the top priority, a lot of that money goes to support DEI effort.

For many years I have heard people complain about this. Outside funders (non Federal) have complained about this directly. Employees have complained about it. When a funding agency has $5 million to give to research, they know (they are notified) that $2.5 million will go to university administration, and a large part of that goes to the diversity office.

This isn't the grumblings of some red-had MAGA. This is the real world. And when people online try to trivialize the complaints it's obvious they don't understand. The people doing the science see their research dollars being spent on programs that can't demonstrate their effectiveness at all (the demographic numbers haven't changed) but they are constantly pushed as the most important thing we do. I go to meetings where farmers see their money used to support trans-kids movie nights, and they are asking "Isn't this money supposed to be used to develop new plant varieties?" Nope...this money is going to support movie nights- and you don't get a choice. Thank you for your support.

The people funding research are tired of spending half of their money to support the social programs the university is pushing. They want science, but they are getting feel-good politics.

I am also liberal, but the DEI thing has just gone way, way too far. The people doing this work see what's happening, and we are not happy. And with all of this, the university just continues to double-down on their insistence that diversity is top priority. They may change their tune a little bit when we come up empty handed in the next round of funding...but without any financial pressure, research is going to get overshadowed by social programs anyway. I think the university deserves to be in the position they are now- scared for their funding. Because they have been mis-using the money for far too long.

I also work at a place where the building systems are running on Windows 2000, using RS-232 interfaces.

By leaving it off the network, things are 'safe'. Now I need to figure out a way to put data onto the network, so we can monitor remotely.

I have a decent site on Squarespace- it costs about $16 per month. Totally ad-free. $16 is a reasonable price to cover all the costs involved. Once upon a time I had a server at a colo facility which cost a lot more, so the $16/month is fine.

Having a small fee to push my content out the world makes sense.

But if this ruins Buzzfeed, because people stop clicking on their articles due to AI telling them the 'one small trick', then I am all for it.

I actually started paying for an AI service.

Not because I'm a heavy user, or that I rely on it. But because I would rather that they have a subscription model, than an ad-supported model.

I'd rather pay $20 a month for a service designed around my needs, than get a service for free that is designed around advertisers.

In the whole, "If you get a product for free, then you are the product" way of thinking, I would much rather pay for a service I use, rather than being used by people who are serving me ads for free.

On the other hand- I generated about 100 images yesterday for a presentation I was creating. I was able to get exactly what I needed, and pretty quickly. Totally worth the $20 just in one afternoon.

As a developer whose sites were forced behind Cloudflare by our security group....Cloudflare sucks. The number of communication errors I get has gone from zero prior to Cloudflare, to a couple times a month that I see problems- not counting the visitors to our sites.

We updated all of the host files for our local users to bypass Cloudflare, just to make things work better. They had some problem where they would occasionally flag image uploads as dangerous files. Image uploads are a large part of our system, and 5% or so were getting flagged by some filter they run. I don't pretend to know why it happened, but I do know that bypassing Cloudflare solves the problem.

How many recipe sites does Cloudflare serve up? That's their speed- overbloated garbage designed to make money for the creators, not something useful for the users.

So maybe the web will return to more of the state it was in back before 2000.

Back before every website was filled with ads. Before everything was paywalled.

I am very happy to get my AI answers rather than going to a site with pop-ups, ads, and a paywall. But I will gladly visit a site that is designed for USERS rather than advertisers.

Cloudflare makes money by serving companies that have enshittified the web. If they all go away, and the web goes back to a place where people create content designed for users, I am all for it.

Does anyone have any sympathy for the decline of the enshittified, google-ified, ad-supported web?

The performance needs to be at LEAST the Series S.

For me, it's all about the super-fast storage. Once I moved from One X to even the Series S, the fast storage is what made me really appreciate the upgrade.

Just last week I installed a game from ~2021. As part of the intro video they told me how great it was that my character could be any gender or non-binary. I would have full freedom to express myself, etc. etc. That was the top feature they mentioned.

That really was a time where DEI was the most important thing in gaming- rather than the gameplay. It wasn't imaginary boogeymen, it was what was really happening.

Even just 3 years later it seemed horribly outdated. I wonder how the developers feel about that game now.

I think Game Pass is awesome. I've got way too many (4) Xboxes in my house, all with Game Pass. Me and my 3 kids can all play the same games, play against each other, or not. My kids are never asking for more games because Game Pass always has something new on it. If I wanted to play something with my kids I would normally need to buy 3 copies of a game (my daughter only plays Sims and Fortnite) so we can play together. I don't want to spend $180 just to try out a new game. I was super excited about the recent MechWarrior that came out, but honestly I was bored after about 20 minutes. But Donut County kept me going for much longer.

I love the GaaS model. Even at $80/month (4 subscriptions) it saves me a lot of money.

That was my thought.

If they are going through tons of different processes during an upgrade, they are making tons and tons of changes, and the logs will fill up.

I know I've had a server stop working due to runaway log files at least once...until you find the 'Delete log files when they get X big' features.

I may be working on a different scale than you...but I am given VMs to work with. They almost always under-spec the VMs, and I need to ask for more disk, and more memory.

The admins don't understand why I keep 6 versions of a database during development, and I don't understand why they can't just give me 10 times more storage. We usually have a back and forth for a couple of months before things get sorted out.

This has been going since we moved to VMs, rather than me just having the entire disk capacity available to me.

You're right about when things started to go downhill big time.

Reddit used to be a platform where millions of different opinions could be represented.

Then during the Ellen Pao era Reddit started to try to control the message, not just provide the platform. Some opinions became 'correct' while others were demonized.

The platform should have been left open.

You're a bit wrong.

Pushing reading and education is white supremacy, because setting the expectation of standardized English is how white people retain their power.

I agree with the rest of what you said.

But reading and education using standardized English is not woke. Not woke at all. You need to stay up on this stuff!

You don't need to bring your Xbox on a business trip. Xbox has Cloud Gaming, which has the huge advantage of not being yet another Google boondoggle. It's from a company that actually wants users to be part of it's service for the games- not for the user-data it collects.

Maybe the Saudi's will buy Stadia- seems like the perfect match.