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Comment Re:Goldeneye 007 (Score 1) 228

I never played Doom with the mouse before the ports, but I thought you could configure it to turn only - not move you forward and backward. The default controls weren't ideal, but you could definitley remap the them, and I used Z and X for strafe left and right, which allowed turning and strafing simultaneously. WSAD + mouse was definitely possible out of the box.

Comment Re:Goldeneye 007 (Score 1) 228

I think that's probably true for console players, but I had already played Doom and Quake (which came out a year prior) before playing Goldeneye on my cousins' N64, so I already had expectations for first-person shooters, and I remember being frustrated that it was comparatively lacking in some areas, notably the controls. I seem to recall that you had to unlock the ability to use different controller input layouts, which seemed bizarre even then. Being used to mouse + WASD for gameplay made using a controller an adjustment, but I did recognize how great the 4-player splitscreen deathmatch was.

It definitely added more story and purposeful level design than the basic versions of Doom and Quake, although some of the id-based games like Strife and Hexen had already expanded on that a bit.

In answer to the original topic, I think it's probably either Super Mario Bros or Wolfenstein 3D, both of which while not the first of their respective genres established the basic systems used by their successors as well as achieving widespread appeal. They're a bit like the iPhone in that regard - not the first, but the first ones that everyone wanted, and what everyone else imitated thereafter.

Comment Well dangit (Score 1) 119

I saw this video yesterday, and it really stings / stinks (stingks?) because I was *just* about to buy a Brother inkjet because they didn't do this BS. Our pre-scam-era HP Deskjet finally died and I need to print stuff. I might still get one, but it's tremendously disappointing to hear. I'll have to look for other brands - I saw a comment on Rossman's video that Konica Minolta printers haven't succumbed yet, but they seem to be pricey business-oriented laser printers, not exactly what I need at home.

Comment Re: Desktop? (Score 1) 57

96GB.

The memory architecture of AMD parts is not unified, it's partitioned.

The largest supported partition for this part is 96GB/32GB.

Yes, I wasn't precise about the RAM usage - in Windows it's limited to 96GB for VRAM, more in Linux. I thought I saw 110 for the latter reported somewhere, but can't find it now.

Comment Re:Not his property anymore. (Score 1) 127

Clarification: I read the detail about the girlfriend not in the linked article, but in a quote from the court's ruling that was repeated on Ars:

In his drawers he found two hard drives: one was the Hard Drive, and the other was a blank hard drive that contained no data. He meant to throw out the blank hard drive, but instead he mistakenly picked up the Hard Drive and put it into one of the black bin-liners. He then left the two bin bags downstairs in his house and asked his partner at the time to take them to the landfill at the Site the following day after completing the school run. However, she said that she did not want to take the black bin bags to the Site and refused to do so. The claimant was not overly concerned at her refusal, because he decided that on the following morning he would check to make sure that he had put the correct hard drive in the bin bags. However, when he awoke at 9 o'clock the following morning he found that his partner had had a change of heart and had already taken the bin bags to the Site and manually deposited them into the general waste bins at the Site.

Comment Re:Not his property anymore. (Score 1) 127

Once in the garbage truck, it is property of the city. He want to blame someone? Blame the woman.

FTFA, he accidentally put the wrong hard drive into a garbage bag and asked his then-girlfriend to take it to the dump. She complied with his request and once dropped off, it was the property of the landfill operators. So he made the only mistake and has no one to blame but himself.

It stinks to have missed out on that amount of wealth. I remember looking into purchasing an ASIC miner 9-ish years ago, but I remember doing the math and figuring that I'd only mine one coin every few months and it would take a year or so to break even so it wasn't worth it. Obviously if I had done so and held on to the bitcoins, it would have paid for itself many times over. In this guy's case, though, rather than make the wrong decision whether to jump in or not, he actually had the bitcoin already in hand, so the loss is real rather than hypothetical. I feel bad for the guy, but he needs to accept the loss and move on.

Comment Year of Linux on the desktop... (Score 1) 49

My personal year of Linux on the desktop arrived back when security updates for Windows XP were discontinued. I can't remember if I went straight to Linux Mint, or dabbled in Ubuntu first. It's been my primary desktop OS ever since, although I did buy Windows 10 and install it in a dual-boot configuration for some games and apps that don't support Linux, such as iRacing (which ironically used to support Linux natively).

Thanks to Valve's efforts, nearly all my games run on Linux now, so I only boot up Windows every few months to install updates. Thanks to the maturity of Cinnamon, and Microsoft's failure to produce a coherent, responsive, usability-centric UI, I actually prefer the Mint user experience to Windows, even though it used to be the other way around. Mint/Cinnamon keeps getting better, while Windows just gets worse.

Comment Re:The new corporate buyout reality (Score 1) 106

Yup
Acquisitions NEVER benefit customers or employees ...

Never say never: sometimes a larger company will buy a smaller company that's on the verge on going out of business, preserving some of the jobs, and continuing the products or services the smaller company produced/provided. For a recent example, the reason you can still buy Twinkies is because Hostess was bought by another company (Smucker's). The customers benefit (if you want to call it that) by still being able to buy Twinkies, and the employees who were retained benefit by not losing their jobs. It's likely in these scenarios that if the company was failing due to poor management, then better management might result in reducing headcount, and obviously those who lose their jobs do not benefit, but it's not as absolute as your statement indicates.

There are plenty of other instances, such as the specialized software I work on now - the company that originally produced it was acquired about 15 years ago by my company, and not only did the software keep being made, and the employees who worked on the software keep their jobs, but the product was able to benefit from integration with other data and software made by the acquiring company, benefiting the customers by creating a more powerful software solution.

There are plenty of instances of companies amicably combining their resources to craft a more capable widget where nobody loses out, but those don't make headlines, so our perception is skewed.

Comment Re:To game or not to game ? (Score 1) 100

For me, Windows is a necessary evil for only 1 thing: Gaming.

I don't game on my laptop... so I'm using Fedora and entirely satisfied with the user experience.
I do game on my desktop pc... so Windows 11 it is... even if I'm not especially a fan of it.

Yes, I know, Steam has Proton... but I despise buying games with DRMs. So, I mostly get my games from GOG.com (I also don't use their launchers)

So, vote went for Windows... But I'll just as easily use Linux if I don't plan on gaming on said machine.

I've been using Linux as my primary gaming OS for quite a few years now. My PC dual-boots Windows, but the only things I boot Windows for are iRacing and PUBG, and it's been months since I played either of those. I also buy from GOG whenever possible, and many of their games work fine with Proton. The Heroic games launcher can download your GOG games and set them up to use Proton automatically (and add them as an external application to Steam if you wish). It's what I use to play my Windows-only GOG games on the Steam Deck. The only downside compared to Steam is that I don't get cloud saves, but supposedly they're supported for some titles.

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