TwinIon

That's a shame. I've used Amazon for the pre-order discount for almost every game since they started doing it. I'll get my order in for some of the big games I know I want ASAP. It's annoying that they don't even list Spider-Man for the PS4 or RDR2 in a physical copy so you can't get the discount.

Certainly seems that way, but I haven't seen many indications of when a next gen Vive or Rift will actually hit. Next March will mark three years since the Rift's launch, and I can't imagine a successor coming out by then.

Even after seeing it on the ProVis products, I was skeptical that the USB-C VirtualLink connector would make it to the consumer ones, but according to the specs on the founders editions, they will indeed include it. I wonder when the first VR headsets that support it will come out.

While it didn't completely destroy by memories of it, going back to FF7 was much more rough than I anticipated. Those early 3D games just did not age well.

This probably doesn't need it's own thread, but Huawei got caught using a DSLR for their phone demo shots, again.

I do think his point about ray tracing light being easier is a good one. It should make better lighting a lot easier to do (so long as you have sufficient nVidia hardware available). Once this hardware is more common, developers would probably prefer to leave effects to the hardware rather than have to put in all the work to fake the lighting. It's a good pitch.

They did mention that they worked with Epic to get it into UE4. If it's a feature that devs can more or less flip on for those special few (and use in all the promo footage), maybe it gets used. If it's much more difficult than that, I doubt we'll see it much for a while.

Thanks for posting that, I was wondering if I just couldn't find it or if Amazon really wasn't selling the physical version. Now Newegg is showing as $55 in the cart for me. I wonder if Amazon is going to do any physical sales of this game. I've been buying most games physically through Amazon since pre-orders are usually $48.

I walked out of Black Klansman and felt a little conflicted. It's absolutely an enjoyable and well made film, but I couldn't help but feel like the messaging, for all it's didacticism, was muddled. Some of that might be my own interpretation and could be based on an incorrect viewing, so feel free to correct my recollection of the ending of the film.

I've been thinking about picking up the new Expansion. I played through the last one and didn't end up getting sucked in too much. Have you guys been playing continuously, or been more on and off like me?

For Disney, just imagine that they buy AMC and change nothing. Recently AMC reports that film exhibition costs are almost exactly 50% of their ticket revenues. All the sudden that 50% of ticket revenue for 40-50% of the entire box office is now a intracompany expense. They very much have an incentive to put their films in as many theaters as possible, and I don't think a film like Infinity War or Black Panther could be profitable without being everywhere. Still, it suddenly would give Disney theaters an incredible advantage over non-Disney theaters, which is the exact kind of thing that lead to the Paramount decrees in the first place. I'm also not entirely sure that revenues from streaming are significantly smaller than the box office. The total domestic box office this last (record breaking quarter) was $3.4B. Netflix alone made $3.8B, of which $1.8B was made in the US. I can't tell if these guys are estimating the whole year or how they get their numbers, but they seem to think the US streaming market will bring in $11B this year, which would put it neck and neck with the total US box office. There are a lot of reasons these are not fair comparisons one way or another, but I think it's probably fair to say that streaming (not even including VOD, just subscriptions), will be worth more than the US box office very shortly, if not this year.

To make a case against my own argument, it only really matters if ARM actually hits their performance numbers, and so far it's not looking great. Qualcomm promised that the Snapdragon 850, their first chip designed for the new Windows on ARM, would best the 835 (a high end smartphone chip) by 30%. The actual tests didn't get near that, with improvements of 23% in single core and only 7% in multi core. Of course, this is an early try, but it doesn't bolster the idea that ARM can really provide the kind of performance they need to in order to challenge Intel in any real way.

The Tale (on HBO) A cleverly told story about investigating one's own past. It's as difficult a subject as I can imagine putting on film, and had points that made me physically unwell. It's a difficult movie to recommend despite its obvious care and craft. If you don't know anything about the story being told, I'll just say that I was grateful they put a title card up at the end of it saying that all sex scenes with minors were filmed with adult body doubles.

I think there will always be a price in terms of legacy application support, but it's very easy to compile to either architecture right now. Apple moving some of their laptops to ARM feels inevitable, and Microsoft is starting to get serious about Windows on ARM, with a full emulation layer available for legacy apps. One of the biggest problems with those kinds of efforts in the past was that even if you designed an entire device around ARM, it just wasn't good enough to compete with Intel's offerings. We've seen it quite often with Chromebooks as well. They were primarily ARM based, but moved over to Intel more and more for the high end. If ARM can deliver chips that are good enough to actually compete with a modern i5, I think we'll quickly see those devices gain traction.

I think the question facing the industry here could well end up being: what happens to movie theaters when they don't really have to make money? AMC lost money last year, and though they've turned things around, this last quarter they made ~$22 million dollars of net income on ~$1.4B in revenue. Amazon doesn't break out income by segment, but they do break out revenue. Amazon's subscription services (primarily Prime), had a net sales of $3.4B last quarter, and I think it's fair to guess they made a tidy profit on that. They're going to spend $5B on Prime content this year, and probably follow Netflix to at least $8B in 2019. Now, AMC, who owns ~1000 theaters is far larger than Landmark with their measly 50, but with their reach and questionable profitability, they do seem an easy acquisition target for an Amazon or a Disney or a Comcast. What does a theater chain become when it's simply an extension of a massive profit center? I don't have a great answer for that, and I rather hope we don't find out. For me, the theater experience has improved massively in the last few years. Lots of theaters have closed, but the ones that remain in my area are far nicer than they used to be, with better seats and reserved seating, with better screens and sound systems, and with full bars. I've also really enjoyed the subscription model for theaters, and even though that wasn't started by the theater chains, I've now moved to AMC's service and found it excellent. I'd hate for the motivation that has spurred the industry to up their game to disappear because a corporate parent was using them as pawns in some larger game.

The Verge is doing a whole series on batteries right now. In one story they talk to an expert and ask what the chances are that any kind of great new battery tech making it to market in the next 5 years is. His answer: zero. The battery tech that has the most promise is largely the same tech that had the most promise a decade ago, and it's not really any closer to market than it was then. There is a ton of research going into batteries, but nothing to expect in the near future. I think that quantum computers are a good deal further away than that, at least in terms of being useful to any real degree. They're only now getting to the point that they're maybe faster than a traditional computer at some things, but there still aren't great uses for them, and I don't expect that to change. Word is Samsung is looking to introduce a flexible device as soon as next year. If it's anything like their curved screens it'll take a few years for it to be worthwhile in any particular way, but this is something I think we'll be seeing sooner than later.

As poor as Nolan often is at centementality, I actually think the ending of Inception is one of the few times he got it right for exactly this reason. People get so caught up in the puzzle of it all, that they fixate on a potential mystery rather than recognizing what he was trying to communicate with that last shot.

You started the topic with what I think is the current king of the hill. The way they treat the camera in GoW is unlike what anyone else has done, and was apparently quite difficult to pull off. Uncharted 4 has also been mentioned, but I find the dynamic camera work far more impressive than whatever happens in the cutscenes. Here's a deep dive into their process if you're curious. I wish I could think of other examples, but unfortunately bad camera work is so much more common than anything notable. I was actually debating video game camera work with some friends recently. They were playing through Until Dawn, which often uses an almost RE style static camera setup, which I've never liked. They argued it helped set the mood, but I feel like a good dynamic camera can do even better without compromising gameplay.

Anand has the details, and while some of their performance and power numbers are questionable, it's a big deal that they're officially going after Intel on Intel's home turf. While Apple and ARM threaten Intel in the low power laptop arena and with AMD threatening on the other end of the spectrum, the once invincible Intel could soon be in deep trouble.

Following news that the antitrust laws preventing film studios from owning theater chains may be reversed, Amazon is looking to be the first studio to take advantage and is reportedly looking to buy Landmark Theaters. Landmark has just over 50 theaters in 27 markets across the country. It's easy to imagine Amazon turning the economics of theater ownership on its head. Having a massive conglomerate willing to use the theater experience as a backdoor for all their other consumer products could either hasten the demise of theaters or change the industry forever. It's hard to see this going through without other content companies joining in.

If you haven't ready a movie review since college, how in the world can you feel qualified to comment on and disregard the entire field? Certainly film criticism has grown wider, and in doing so now incorporates a good deal of the inane and the pointless. Where there used to be a small number of critics doing quality work, now there are a million voices to filter through. I don't have much use for recaps and almost everything on Youtube is worthless, but there is a lot of worthwhile stuff that gets put out on a regular basis. It's a shame The Dissolve is gone, because for a while that was an easy place to point to for actual insight.

I had to double check and make sure that article wasn't fake, but here it is. Mayo is terrible and deserves to die.

Well, they are owned by Lenovo. I was hoping that the iPhone X would be an opportunity for the Android phone market to differentiate a little. The notch is ugly and particularly difficult to rationalize without Face ID. At this point it's pretty much just Samsung that haven't blindly followed Apple into a design that feels so easy to best. Especially since these copycat phones don't have Face ID, they don't need to put a ton of sensors at the top of the phone. Make that top part crazy thin or do something else interesting and you could probably make a better looking phone. I think my next phone will be the Pixel 3, and for the first time in awhile I won't be getting the XL. Without the stupid notch (which is enormous on the Pixel 3 XL), it's just a much nicer looking device.

I believe they do something similar in Germany, and this does seem like the kind of change that would place very little actual burden on companies while also affecting a reasonable amount of change. I'm curious how legal this would actually be. If you thought of corporations as a collection of people, it would make sense that you'd want some agreement from those people before spending money on behalf of those people. Legally though, corporations are singular entities, so putting this kind of requirement on their political expenditures (aka speech), seems unlikely to hold up in court. Still, I'm not really sure how it's decided now, so maybe there isn't really a problem. Certainly the above requirement to have workers represented on the board would help in this regard even without the 75% threshold. So this is probably the most difficult and problematic part of the whole thing. The ability to simply terminate a corporation at the will of the government is tricky. On the one hand, I'd say that it makes sense that a corporation that has a repeated history of illegal conduct should go away. However, it seems to me that maybe mechanism for this should be directly related to the punishment for those crimes. It's also difficult to imagine how this would work in practice. Let's say that a state AG decided to revoke the charter of a company like Nike or McDonalds or Google. What happens to that company in those states? Do they just get told they have X days to pack up, sell their assets, and leave? It's really hard to imagine exactly how this would work.