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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
Kyle Crane returns in Dying Light: The Beast
21 August 2024 at 9:22 pm UTC

But Kyle died at the end of The Following no matter which choice you did, but now he have just been caged for 10 years?

AMD Ryzen 9000 Series processors dates and prices revealed
7 August 2024 at 11:34 pm UTC

Quoting: croxisI'm still running a 1700 and never bothered upgrading because I never really ran into significant gaming bottlenecks from the CPU. I'm probably going to wait for the fancy 3D cache version. I've read those chips are significant upgrades for gaming.

Yes they are significant indeed, went myself from a 1600x to a 5800x3d one year ago and oboy was that an upgrade.

Valve working on a new game that could be Half-Life 3
7 August 2024 at 11:29 pm UTC

Quoting: EhvisThere is only one thing we know for sure. It won't be called "Half-Life 3".

And turns out to be a remake of HL: Decay.

Intel to lay off around 15,000 staff as they try make $10 billion in savings
4 August 2024 at 4:34 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: damarrin
Quoting: ZlopezI'm not sure why companies are taking growth for granted. Why they won't rather work with what they made the current year and expect that the next year will be the same or maybe save some of the money for bad times if you are making more than you expected, so you have some reserves.
The stock market doesn’t work that way. It’s cool and useful or sometimes necessary, but it is also cancer.

Yep, major source of these issues are the shift from long term investment where people invested in companies and held on to them for years on end (and got rich on the constant but stable dividends) to the more modern "lets buy and sell the same share within a few milliseconds" that drives the demand for infinite growth.
Short-termism is a big problem, but I actually think it's not the millisecond thing that's the biggest. It's the this-quarter thing, where the big objective is to hand out lots of dividends and share buybacks right now. CEOs have a lot of stock themselves, not to mention a lot of options, and they're fairly footloose, so they tend to be motivated to goose the price in the short term, not grow in the long. Plus, shareholding tends to be more concentrated, so you get "activist shareholders" (read: Blackrock) exerting a lot of power and wanting the money now. In the end, after all the dividends and these days especially buybacks, there isn't much left for investing in the business. Some big corporations actually borrow money to spend on share buybacks.

I think a big reason actually is low taxes--particularly low corporate taxes, but also of course low taxes on capital gains for rich people with loopholes available. No, I know the corporate types whine on and on about how high corporate taxes would depress investment, but if you look at the actual mechanisms I don't think it works that way. Remember that corporate taxes are on profits, not revenue. So, say I've got this big corporation, and it made a billion dollars after normal expenses.
Scenario A: It pays no tax on that billion, so if it wants to it can pass the whole thing, untaxed, to the shareholders. Well then why not do it?
Scenario B: It pays 50% tax on that billion. Well now, suddenly it might make a bit more sense, rather than passing only half a billion to the shareholders, instead invest a lot of that billion in the business instead of paying tax on it--upgrade capital equipment, do some R&D and so on. With that high tax on profits, shareholders might in the end get a better return on investment by reducing the declared profits by investing in the business, because that way you get to invest all the money rather than just the after tax money.

I added the millisecond part to make it the other extreme from the long term type of investments where people tended to hold on to their shares for life (like say Warren Buffet) but ofc the situation is far more complex and diverse then just a simple matter of the hold time. E.g even such a thing as share buybacks is not really something negative, but then you have those companies that abuse them, even the leveraged buybacks (aka when you use debt to perform the buyback) is not normally really negative but companies have abused them to the brink of now having to actually borrow money to perform them. So what is really missing here is regulation to allow things like this to happen when it's good and prohibit it when it is being abused.

And you are 100% correct on the tax thing, ofc they will always complain that the tax is too high but then they would do that even if the tax rate was 0%. And increasing taxation on buybacks and dividends would be part of the "we need more regulation".

But then our entire current capitalist system is built as if growth is infinite, e.g on how money is created in banks when people lend money which leads to the situation that there will always be more total debt than total amount of money so the cycle have to continue in perpetuum or it collapses.

Intel to lay off around 15,000 staff as they try make $10 billion in savings
3 August 2024 at 7:40 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: damarrin
Quoting: ZlopezI'm not sure why companies are taking growth for granted. Why they won't rather work with what they made the current year and expect that the next year will be the same or maybe save some of the money for bad times if you are making more than you expected, so you have some reserves.
The stock market doesn’t work that way. It’s cool and useful or sometimes necessary, but it is also cancer.

Yep, major source of these issues are the shift from long term investment where people invested in companies and held on to them for years on end (and got rich on the constant but stable dividends) to the more modern "lets buy and sell the same share within a few milliseconds" that drives the demand for infinite growth.

Acre Crisis looks like a fun throwback to the original Dino Crisis
19 July 2024 at 12:47 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderWell I hope its way better than Locked Door Crisis...... I mean Empty Hallway Crisis.......... Errrr...... Sorry....... No Dinosaurs Crisis.......

I still dont understand the died hard love for Dino Crisis........ Locked doors are more of an obstacle in that game than the Dinosaurs are....... You can go almost hours without seeing or hearing a Dinosaur as you wonder through empty hallways trying to unlock or bypass locked doors........ Or move crates in a not very good crate moving mini game puzzle.......

At least with this being a FPS it does indeed stand a chance of being much better...... Only time will tell I guess......

Also being a PS1 inspired game...... Is it still a Boomer Shooter or Gen Xer Shooter????..........

Sure you remember the correct game? Dino Crisis have dinos in almost every room of the game with a few exceptions.

Linux remains above 2% on the Steam Survey for June 2024
9 July 2024 at 2:37 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: LoudTechie
QuoteOn the one hand it surprises me that Linux isn't as popular in China as in, say, Germany, Brazil or India. But it also makes a lot of sense: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

If you look at the "Linux market share on Steam, another way to look at it" section, you can see the Linux (English only) share madly distances itself from Linux Overall share soon after the Steam Deck releases. Which is still not available in China, as far as I know.

Still handily beating macOS.


Warning here I'm probably a conspiracy theorist.
I can't help it.
If you don't want to read my conspiracy hypothesis(I don't have enough proof to rightfully call it a theory) about how Microsoft and the NSA are actively keeping China on Microsoft products don't click on the spoiler tag.
Spoiler, click me

The story behind Windows being popular in China smells like politics to me, but I can't prove anything directly.
Microsoft has widely encouraged Windows piracy explicitly in that market to get them reliant on their products, we've got Gates' word on this.
It's not in the consumer space alone either WannaCry wrecked Chinese servers left and right, because they all ran pirated xp to the point that China pressured Microsoft in updating XP out of release.
Microsoft is deeply embedded in the prism program.
China has done a lot of attempts to launch their "own" operating system(android and ubuntu forks) for "independence from western ecosystems", all these attempts failed miserably for all the expected reasons(reliant on proprietary shit that doesn't run on Linux).
Microsoft still barely makes a dime of all this pirated Windows in China.
I think the NSA pas them good money to make China reliant on their product and include espionage software on demand.

This is not a conspiracy, not only do we have actual proof, Microsoft is doing it in full public: Free Windows 10 upgrade for China pirates. While this particular news item is for Windows 10 they have done this in the past as well.

The conspiratory part is that I'm arguing that the NSA paid them for it.
The hypothetical part about it was that the NSA paid them for it.
Your argument upgrades my hypothesis to a theory, but it leaves the conspiratory part.

To be a conspiracy people have to work together in secret to harm someone, which is literally what I argued: NSA+Microsoft harm China.
To be a theory effects originating from the hypothesis have to show up: "active support for pirated software".

Ah sorry, I misread your post. Yeah I don't think NSA had anything to do with it, Microsoft had full motives to do this on their own and I highly doubt that the NSA have a backdoor in Windows. We have seen from history and from Snowden how NSA operates, they either intercept shipping and manipulates hw or they operate as the repairman (as they did for Xerox back in the cold war), involving private companies like Microsoft leaves too many loose ends and mouths that can speak.

GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin moves to a more rapid release cycle
5 July 2024 at 2:42 pm UTC

Quoting: such
Quoting: ssj17vegetaNot gonna lie, considering Nintendo's recent behaviour, my heart skipped a beat when I read the first words of the title.
Easiest clickbait opportunity I've seen, and just about everyone reporting on this is taking it. Props to Liam for explicitly stating what's up instead of going for the clicks.

Also, not a great time for any announcements regarding... certain emulators. They're on sheet music now, so it's clear we're way past any kind of reason here. I'd lay very low.

The Dolphin Team received legal counsel back in the Steam page debacle and are quite firm in their belief that they do not violate any US laws, including the DMCA.

Linux remains above 2% on the Steam Survey for June 2024
4 July 2024 at 12:05 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: LoudTechie
QuoteOn the one hand it surprises me that Linux isn't as popular in China as in, say, Germany, Brazil or India. But it also makes a lot of sense: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

If you look at the "Linux market share on Steam, another way to look at it" section, you can see the Linux (English only) share madly distances itself from Linux Overall share soon after the Steam Deck releases. Which is still not available in China, as far as I know.

Still handily beating macOS.


Warning here I'm probably a conspiracy theorist.
I can't help it.
If you don't want to read my conspiracy hypothesis(I don't have enough proof to rightfully call it a theory) about how Microsoft and the NSA are actively keeping China on Microsoft products don't click on the spoiler tag.
Spoiler, click me

The story behind Windows being popular in China smells like politics to me, but I can't prove anything directly.
Microsoft has widely encouraged Windows piracy explicitly in that market to get them reliant on their products, we've got Gates' word on this.
It's not in the consumer space alone either WannaCry wrecked Chinese servers left and right, because they all ran pirated xp to the point that China pressured Microsoft in updating XP out of release.
Microsoft is deeply embedded in the prism program.
China has done a lot of attempts to launch their "own" operating system(android and ubuntu forks) for "independence from western ecosystems", all these attempts failed miserably for all the expected reasons(reliant on proprietary shit that doesn't run on Linux).
Microsoft still barely makes a dime of all this pirated Windows in China.
I think the NSA pas them good money to make China reliant on their product and include espionage software on demand.

This is not a conspiracy, not only do we have actual proof, Microsoft is doing it in full public: Free Windows 10 upgrade for China pirates. While this particular news item is for Windows 10 they have done this in the past as well.
Makes me wonder . . . so, recently you've got Adobe going to a revolting subscription model for all their stuff. MS Office seems to be trying to do a Google Docs thing where they're emphasizing their cloud-based version, which . . . is that a paid subscription too? Is this a widespread trend?
If it is, that subscription/cloud stuff's hard to pirate. Bunch of Chinese people might find themselves having to pay for, not Windows itself, but increasing amounts of the software they run on it. Chinese users don't care about open source, but they certainly seem to care about cheap. I can imagine a move towards Linux just for the free-as-in-beer software ecosystem. Be ironic 'cause in the past, it was Linux's software ecosystem that held it back.

Don't have much experience with Windows software but a quick look tells me that Office 365 which is their cloud office solution costs about $80 per year for a single user. And if I'm not remembering completely wrong they for a long time makes far much more money from the Office suite than they ever done with Windows so Windows have since some time in the mid 90:ies simply been a way to sell you Office. Hence the importance of having people and organizations being locked into the proprietary office formats.

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