TwinIon

This first headset was never going to be a mass market product. Still, even for a dev kit that's pretty low. It seemed obvious to me that they were sunk when it became obvious that their AR display wasn't really any better than what MS had. Their entire valuation was based on the idea that their display was that much better, and it just isn't.

But I think this is the concern being expressed here. If you're building a game for the next gen consoles and you want to take advantage of the SSD and high end CPU for seamless worlds and AI simulation and whatever, you can't really do that if you also have to support the One X or even One S. With graphics, it's somewhat straightforward to just scale things down for a lower spec. You really can't build something reliant upon SSD speed and scale that back to a spinning disc. Sony talked about how the swing speed in Spider-man was limited to how fast they could stream the world from the HDD. Put in an SSD and all the sudden you can stream it much faster and now you can change the gameplay; put more stuff in the world, allow faster travel speeds, etc. Or let's say you're building a game with a lot of real time deformation, and you need the power of these new CPUs to do it. I'm not sure how a developer would scale those kinds of things down. If it's just "make it less pretty" or "the loading screens are 10x shorter on SSD consoles" then yeah, it's easy to see how you build a game that scales with the hardware. But if MS expects devs to build for the whole range I don't see how they can also build in gameplay leaps that require the new hardware.

I missed that it was only the US. That changes things quite a bit.

The most important benefit to modern screens compared to CRTs is size. I can understand there are some real benefits to CRTs, but I'll take whatever minor visual downgrades for that nice big screen any day.

I believe that's what most of Europe does.

Anthem outsold SSBU? That's a surprise. It may have been deemed a failure, but Smash sold ~16M copies, maybe 5M were sold that first month, so that would put Anthem sales somewhere above 11M copies. Not entirely a flop I guess. Glad to see Outer Wilds get recognized. I really should try some of these small games.

Here's a recommendation of the film from a Guantánamo Bay lawyer. He mentions something I didn't know: He also brings up that Jones didn't talk to any of the victims. I don't know if Jones would have been allowed to interview any of them, but I think it is notable that it doesn't really come up.

Warren has released all of her tax returns since 2008. If she made a bunch of money working for big companies prior to that, who cares?

DP

I like Bernie's goals here, and while he's clear about what regulations he'd put in place his plan is a lot of "I will fix it by fixing it" talk without much in the way of specifics. Breaking up cable monopolies is fine, but unlike most other monopolies that doesn't actually fix the problem. If you break up Facebook, suddenly there are multiple competing social networks. If you break up Charter or Comcast or whatever most people still only have access to one broadband option. A federal law to override state laws preventing municipal broadband is good, but that by itself just opens the door for competition without actually providing any. I don't think there is anything in that plan that would incentivize actual competition in broadband. It would be great if ISPs had to play by better rules, but I think you're only going to get so much out of forcing them to be better.

Nevermind then.

Biden calls an Iowa voter a "damn liar" when the man says Joe set his son up to work for a Ukraine energy company. I'm sure his campaign has put some thought into what to do when confronted like this, and somehow this doesn't seem like the best idea to me.

My understanding of JL is that Snyder shot a lot of it, left the project, and Whedon came in and re-wrote much of it and finished shooting. If that's the case, then it seems likely that some of what Snyder intended to shoot was never shot, so it's hard to imagine getting a completely Snyder version of the film. It would have to be some assembly of what each of them shot. I like Snyder well enough (Watchmen is great), but I don't really trust his story instincts. If Whedon thought that much of it was unusable, I'd guess he was right. Now something I can easily imagine is that there were some very Snyder-esque action sequences filmed that did hit the can, and if they put those back in a lot of DC faithful would probably be happy enough, regardless of how much of a mess the story remains.

The obvious model for this is Netflix. You're selling a monthly service, so first you need to pay other people for their content just so there is enough to justify the monthly sub. Build up your own first party content offerings until they become a sufficient selling point themselves, such that when third parties have other options or even their own competing services, you still provide sufficient value to your customers.

That was poorly worded. I suppose all that I meant was it makes a lot of sense for these devs to work on Alyx. As far as I can tell, Valley hasn't been canceled, it's just a function of Valve's unique work structure and the Campo Santo folks going all over the place to work on whatever they want.

The Trieu industries logo is an elephant. I don't think it really needs an explanation, but wouldn't mind if there is some deeper meaning.

I enjoyed Firewatch, and I'd be excited to see what Valley could be, but Half-Life: Alyx is far more exciting to me. It does make some sense to me that you'd put your recently acquired devs on a game that is actually coming out. How many people at Valve have worked on a single player game in the last decade? Also, Firewatch is so very much about atmosphere and feeling, skills that I think will translate very well to VR development.

So, Zack Snyder posted a photo of reels of film labeled as JL Directors Cut... The running time is listed there at 214 minutes, a full hour and a half longer than the theatrical cut. So yeah, don't expect random fanboys to stop brigading random WB threads asking for the Synder Cut anytime soon.

Not a bad trailer. Based on that trailer I'd assume this isn't a musical, do we know if that's the case?

I feel like this is verging into semantics, but even if you consider the Xbox One and Scarlett multiple skus of the same platform, xCloud streaming certainly realizes the idea of an "Xbox ecosystem." I don't entirely agree with the tweet though. I think we'll see Nintendo continue to tie software to individual pieces of hardware. Whatever replaces the Switch certainly could be an in place upgrade of the same form factor, but I doubt it. I won't bother to speculate what shape their next console will take, but I'd bet money today that much of the software that it runs will be exclusive.

And it seems to be increasingly true. You buy an Xbox One game and it works on the OG, S and X. Odds are they'll work on Scarlett and Lockhart as well. It will be interesting to see how long the OG Xbox One and PS4 continue to be supported, but even when big games stop supporting them the One X will likely remain for a while.

I don't see a lot of TV ads, but I'm pretty sure Bloomberg's are the first campaign ads I've seen on TV this year. I think it's a shame that Harris dropped out, even if she's not my first choice. Sure does seem like having Iowa and New Hampshire going first isn't the best idea if there's any desire for diversity in the candidates.

If that rumor is correct and it's similar in power to a PS4 Pro, that would put it below the One X, which seems like a mistake to me. Games like Control and Fallen Order already struggle on the One X (though I imagine an SSD would help a good deal). Putting out a new, far more powerful console along with one below the current top spec ensures that it'll be a sub-par experience forever. I feel like the move is to wait until you can put the One X internals in a discless case for the target price, and launch that as Lockhart.

I know this isn't news, but the man only watches his own propaganda. It's scary and bizarre, and I can only hope that when Historians look back at this time they point to it as the apex of the this horrific feedback loop. I can hardly believe we live in a world where the President is certain of his infallibility because of cable news pundits proclaiming it so.

It certainly looks like a Bond movie. I believe this was known before, but it's definitely continuing where Spectre left off, which means I might have to revisit that one, which I'm not entirely looking forward to.