What difference does it make?

PS4 and PS5 games have to be installed to run. And then you download updates. Bigger games often require you download part of the game. The disc is just a license check that saves you part of the download.

PS3 was the last console to play games off the disc, and even then, installing was optional and improved the experience. But even then, some of the bigger games had mandatory installs.

All of that boils down to PCs are an open platform with an infinite number of possible hardware combinations, but the Xbox is a fixed implementation with only a few variations.

The Xbox has always been a Windows box running DirectX. You just have standard hardware and a different UI, and the user can't muck with the OS.

My desktop has 64 GB of DDR5 RAM.

When I hit the power button, some motherboard lights and the fans turn on. And then nothing.

It takes a good minute for the RAM test to run. Nothing displays on the screen until it finishes. And that's the fast test. If the computer was unplugged before turning it on, it does a longer RAM test.

It takes long enough that I legit thought my parts were defective when I first built the PC. I tried turning it off and on and checking components a bunch of times. Finally I gave up and assumed something was defective. Left it alone and started talking to my friend about what to do. We were shocked when it finally booted as we were talking.

So yeah, modern DDR5 based PCs take long enough to boot that a lot of people will assume it's broken before anything shows up on screen.

The rule of thumb in baseball is that if you take an MRI of a pitcher's shoulder, you'll find something wrong.

This is why they don't jump to surgery right away and generally just try to rehab if at all possible. It's got to get really bad before you even think of fixing it.

We're also really bad a fixing shoulders. The odds of you coming back at full strength are a lot lower than with most surgeries.

So yeah, none of this is really news. Everyone's shoulder is a little messed up, and its usually not worth trying to fix it.

Others have pointed out the ethical reasons we don't do what you're asking.

The tests we currently do are "is this more effective than what we had before?"

It's literally the opposite of the scenario you're describing. We know that the starting point isn't perfect. We're taking some steps to improve it and then testing to ensure that it really is better than the previous one. And then we repeat.

We're starting with a flawed but usable cabinet, and making it a little bit better with each iteration.

He bought the site, drastically changed it, and most of the users left.

Who would you blame?

The old Twitter is dead. Almost everyone left. If you're still there, it's because you want to see what Elon posts, or your job requires it.

The big issue is social media as a whole is dying. No one uses Facebook anymore. Everyone left Twitter when Elon took over. There's nothing inherently wrong with Mastodon or Blue Sky. People are just tired of social media and don't want to start over.

It's just one last desperate try to revive the glory days of social media, hoping that people will be more fond of it if you bring back the branding they liked.

I don't expect Netflix pricing to stay the same.

But the main reason this is happening is there are too many streaming services for them all to be viable. This isn't a merger of equals. HBO Max isn't sustainable right now. Not enough people are willing to pay their asking price to keep it going.

You merge the services, cut your operating costs, and raise Netflix prices a little.

And maybe we see Netflix take advantage of Warner's distribution systems and get more Netflix content in theaters and on DVD/Bluray.

5090 isn't a bubble.That's just a low volume, high margin niche product for people with a lot of money.

Did you get one of the high end iPads?

I've got the 2018 base model, and it hasn't received any software updates in 2 years now. We got to the point of getting a new one about a year ago because it was too sluggish, and the limited RAM was causing problems. We still keep it around for simple tasks, but not for anything remotely demanding.

Sounds like you're not from the US.

Most people get their phones from their service provider. And the major providers offer a free phone upgrade every 2 or 3 years if you trade in your old one. It's structured as paying for the phone in monthly installments, and they give you a credit each month to cover the installment. They give you the option of paying upfront for the phone, but you don't get the credits that way, so it's almost always a terrible idea to do.

They are very, very clear about what the full price of the phone is. The catch in all of this is if you cancel your service before the term is up, you lose the remaining credits and have to pay the remaining balance.

The result of this is upgrading more frequently than the 2 or 3 year cycle is very expensive. You can keep your phone longer than the cycle if you really want to, but it rarely makes sense to because there usually isn't any benefit to turning down the upgrade offer.

I suspect you have a different definition of "cheap phone" than the parent poster.

Your logic seems reasonable if you're looking at a $400-$500 Android phone instead of an $800 iPhone or Galaxy.

But you can get $30 Android phones. I would not expect those phones to last for very long, both because the tech quickly becomes obsolete, and due to physical durability.

Also worth noting that most people getting a flagship phone are getting it as part of their service plan, usually on a 3 year upgrade cycle. As a result, upgrading every 3 years is by far the most common cycle, as upgrading at any other frequency doesn't really make sense.

What's the market for a good integrated GPU ?

AMD is clearly capable of making a fairly high end integrated GPU. The PS5 is roughly a GTX 2070 level GPU integrated with a Ryzen CPU.

But to make that perform well, you need a custom memory architecture with faster memory bus for the GPU. And you need an enormous cooler. The PS5 is basically a tiny motherboard with a massive heatsink attached to it. Xbox Series X isn't much different - they went heavier on fans and airflow, less on the heatsink.

If you go a little better on integrated GPU performance, who really cares? If you go significantly better, the cooling situation becomes complicated, and you're almost always going to be better off just using standard discrete parts where the cooling is a solved problem.

The whole "dropping kids off in the dark" thing is a dumb argument because that's going to happen to some people no matter which time zone you use.

The fuss wasn't that it happened - it was that it happened to a different group of people than it used to. People don't like change, and complained loudly that they were now the ones inconvenienced.

Everyone already has the choice to set their own hours for their business.

But most people need some sort of alignment between school hours and work hours. If you need to commute via mass transit, you need to align with transport. If you work in the financial industry, your hours are generally based off the stock market's hours. There's lots and lots of factors that essentially force large chunks of people to align their schedules.

We ended up in the time zone situation we have because it's the easiest way to get things reasonably aligned.