My best guess is that with the second season of Jury Duty being about a corporate retreat

Occasionally I need reminders as to why I havent owned a television set in 20 years. Yep, shits still brain-damaged out there in TV land

I've been very fond of the "actual money" currency. Its got a much less "fiat" backing than cryptocurrencies, doesnt involve any expensive proof of works and is reliably handled by almost all brokerages.

And you can buy pizza with it. Hell, keep it in paper form, its even anonymous.

Yeah Vista was when I switched over to the mac. Got a new "Made for Vista" Asus laptop that almost immediately started bluescreening and ran like shit. After the computer store refused to let me get a license for XP for free to replace Vista I just returned it as "not fit for purpose" and drove over to the Apple store and told them to give me the "elevator pitch" on why I should switch and they succeeded , and that 2006 mac ran fine till I upgraded to the 2011 which I stuck with till the M1 in 2020, though by the time I got that M1, there was probably zero original components in that 2011 mac, as I had swapped the drive and CD out for a pair of SSDs, replaced a faulty wifi module, replaced the motherboard after frying it in a coffee accident, upgraded the ram, replaced the heyboard and topcase after the keyboard crapped out from another coffee accident, and replaced the screen after a cat accident. Yeah, cant do that with macs no more. And thus why it took me a decade to upgrade.

Have Linux usage numbers gone up dramatically since Win 10 went off-support?

Yes. Linux desktop useage has gion up around 400% since the start of the 2020s

The thing with most countries that aren't america is you cant just unilaterally change a contract even with "30 days notice", you need to get the customer to actively consent, click a button that says "I acknowledge this nonsense" or whatever. Netflix was fined for breaking Italian law, in Italy.

Netflix are absolutely NOT in the right, and that should not be controversial to anyone

Yeah well, we can't all be a person who doesn't understand how things work. Kudos to you for being simple minded!

" The Kathmandu Post"

Ah we don't to pay for journalism, says a planet of suckers

Oh, that's pretty neat. Microsoft is definitely the right level to address this at - they already have permission to enumerate the HW, own the hardware and software infra to tackle this, enjoy economy of scale other players are not privvy too, and can deliver a solution in a vendor agnostic way. Thanks for the heads up. It's the right thing to happen.

Of course there are. Tragedy of the commons. My point is that no single entity is likely to absorb the costs unless they're already enjoying economy of scale advantages and there are business experience/optic benefits to doing so. The poster above you pointed out that Microsoft seems to be addressing this, which makes a lot more sense to me than doing it at the 3d HW vendor level.

Sure, but many people would opt in, especially if you explained that they would benefit.

Maybe. Maybe not. Before committing to developing such a thing, you'd have to at least do some research and analysis to find out if that's true and how the likely opt in/out ratios would impact the business case. Remember, this is hosting content in a daemon on your machine .. I think that'd a non-starter for a lot of people, despite the upside of shorter shader updates. (I'm not super up on what the US ISP market/landscape is like these days, but are not data caps still a thing on many plans there? I get the sense that hosting off a home line is not only a performance concern but a concern with actual possible financial ramifications.)

It can't be only when the game is open - this is when gamers are most sensitive to their computers doing other work, and the available of such a network would be far more limited.

Also a torrent like network would be absolute loaded with cache misses. You need to fetch a shader from somebody who has the exact same hardware/drive/game version combination as you do, and they need to have opted in. I highly suspect the majority case for many would be to cache miss and end up compiling locally.

Asking people to host and serve a non-trivial amount of content to other players is a non-starter. (The size of compiling all the shaders for CoD can range from a couple gigs to 10 gigs.) Opting in to a torrent-like network would have to be opt in - many people would just opt out (justifiably or not) minimizing the point of such a network.

You can probably assume that if you've thought of something, they've thought of it too. They simply have constraints and considerations - both technical and business oriented - you don't need or want to account for.

It's worth noting that many game studios/engines do support shared shader caches in their local studio pipelines, but the hardware config spread is much more limited, and the costs for lost productivity waiting for shaders is far greater than hosting a shader cache on premises.

Yes, this. There are many *many* combinations. Distributed compilation and a remotely hosted shader cache would cost a lot of money to host. I don't think it's the technical considerations that are as preventative as simply the cost of hosting the service.

Particularly for PvP competitive games that require constant FPS (think CoD, Battlefield, Fortnite, etc) runtime shader compilation is a nonstarter. CoD won't even let you matchmake without compiled shaders, even tho the engine supports compiling them on demand.