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

My company uses lots of Macs. Some of the users are software developers. The main reason I did not get a Mac during the last refresh was one application was Windows only. That system was retired so I do not have that limitation anymore.

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.

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.

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...

The problem is AI data centers and a complete lack of antitrust law enforcement so nobody is going to risk getting into RAM or storage manufacturer even though there's half a dozen companies that could be up and running in 6 months to a year. Several of them have had their CEOs interviewed and just quietly hinted that they wouldn't take the risk. They usually talk about the bubble but the underlining thing that they will hint at but never outright say is that they all know if they enter the market the existing manufacturers will just drop their prices long enough to put them out of business.

Don't get me wrong nobody is a saint here one of the reasons why none of these companies are pushing for antitrust law enforcement is they want to be the ones committing antitrust and violations. Several of them are in their own spaces. So none of these fuckers want to see the government come in and clean things up because they are all crooks.

A drug dealer might like it when a cop busts their competition but they don't want the cops coming around in general.

I'm not defending AI, but it's interesting to compare the price to other machines released long before AI existed.

Adjusted for inflation, the 2TB model is a bit cheaper than a Panasonic 3DO or a Neo Geo was at launch. But a lot more than any Playstation ever had been.

Consoles generally punch above their weight because games can be specifically optimized for them, compared to on PC where a compatibility is the most important thing. It will be interesting to see if developers optimize for this thing.

Or whatever your local equivalent is.

If we had antitrust law enforcement other companies would enter the RAM and storage markets because there is years of demand.

Every company eyeing those markets knows that if they even try they will get run out of business and go bankrupt.

If you're American there is one political quality that enforces antitrust law and one that doesn't.

Everything is political whether you like it or not. And that includes your video games.

Anyway have fun with the mod points. Nobody likes it when I point out reality around here

It did mention they were a junior, so yes probably greatly reduced fees. This would have been County Court too, Small Claims Track, so in theory you don't even need a legal rep. For £7k you might want one anyway, especially if the case is complex.

That's how much PS5 controllers are as well. The Steam one looks better though.

Could be an interesting use for old phones. I've got a couple. I looked at using them as CCTV cameras, but the software is kinda crap. If they could run a more generic Linux distro they might be useful, low power servers.