Comment Re:Uh oh! (Score 1) 58
The value I see in Xbox:
1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.
Frankly? I see 2 options.
AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.
It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).
Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.
Comment Re:Loss leader? (Score 1) 58
Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.
I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).
There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.
I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.
(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)
Comment Yeah, but why not? (Score 1) 58
Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.
Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.
As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.
What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.
There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.
Comment Re:wrong focus (Score 1) 60
It isn't sociopaths which makes a product good, it's engineering.
France specifically, and Europe more generally, lacks the economic incentives to keep the best and brightest employed at frontier level work. The European "IT industry" is all but dead.
Comment Re:My grace? (Score 1) 49
No, that clearly isn't what Jesus meant, and it's made excruciatingly clear that faith without action is dead. Heart condition -> action -> salvation. You can't omit a step.
Comment Re:They worried about Florida Man (Score 1) 49
That's interesting, because I've seen the exact opposite play out twice in our small local schools. There's a "measles outbreak", and they rush to blame the unvaccinated, but it's only vaccinated kids who end up getting sick.
Comment Re:People still use reddit? (Score 2) 85
It does have valuable information, but after the changes it will all be behind a wall. Just like so many other sites.
Comment Extorting the Russians. Good boy. (Score 1) 13
Stap is still a piece of shit, but extorting a Russian hacking group is a good thing. It should happen more often.
Comment Re:They worried about Florida Man (Score 2) 49
The way the law is written, if a doctor performs any abortion they can be charged. That is what the hospitals legal department said. In 2024, a woman was told it would be a crime to perform her abortion, so she was left to die.
In 2023 another woman died because the procedure that could have saved her life after a miscarriage was not administered because it could also be used for an abortion.
Just this year, a woman who had previously had two stillbirths due to preeclampsia asked if she should continue with her pregnancy as she was experiencing the same preeclampsia as before. Nope, she was good to go. Until she was found dead in her bedroom from preeclampsia.
But sure, keep making excuses for why women have to die because Republicans don't care about them.
Comment success (Score 1) 48
and produced just one alert with no arrests directly resulting from the technology.
A resounding success. No large-scale demonstrations, damaged cameras, lawsuits or political suicide for those involved. So we can expect this to be rolled out fully.
Crime prevention? Who said this has anything to do with crime?
Comment Re:inputs and outputs (Score 4, Funny) 51
Probably the next code that it outputs will be:
# You're out of uploads for today, so if you want me to stop this vehicle anytime soon, upgrade your plan now!
Submission + - New Ai-Powered "America.gov" Government Website Uses Gemini and Grok (cnn.com) 3
The site, which launched with some basic functions ahead of a full rollout next year, is designed to serve as an AI-powered guide through the thicket of government agencies that Trump officials pledged would ultimately save people a whole lot of frustration.
The administration’s new initiative aims to allow Americans to access dozens of federal websites through a single point, making America.gov akin to a search tool that pulls information from across the government. And in the same way that people increasingly use AI models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to compile information and provide customized answers, Trump officials claimed that America.gov would be able to do the same for people’s interactions with the federal government.
Enrolling in Medicare, for example, will become a matter of typing the request into the America.gov AI tool and following its step-by-step instructions. The same goes for applying to a government job — the new tool will now let people upload their resume directly to the site — or answering questions about federal benefits, publicly available documents or other necessities that fall under the federal government’s vast umbrella.
“Our vision is that one day, this type of convenience and simplicity will be across every government service,” said Joseph Gebbia, who leads the government’s National Design Studio.
But the reality is that the most advanced actions won’t be available until some point in 2027, raising questions about how long it will take for the administration to revamp the way the people interact with the government’s websites. The current version of America.gov can only do “answers.”
In related news, Variety notes that America.gov confirms, for now anyway, that Biden won the 2020 election.
Comment Re:They worried about Florida Man (Score 1) 49
To answer your question, there have only been 4 cases of vaccinated people getting measles. This is straight from the PA Department of Health site. This means 0.004% of the total 903 cases.
What excuse will you come up with next because clearly, they do share that information.
Comment The Bill Gates Maxim (Score 1) 64
I propose "The Bill Gates Maxim".
Anything Bill Gates proposes or theorized should be strongly opposed societally because he is either wrong, evil, or both, in his prognostications.