TwinIon

There would be some hijinks I'm sure, but I doubt you could game the system that much. I know Amazon doesn't report the revenue it makes from what they sell on their store, so their reported revenue is dramatically lower than what most might consider their actual revenue, but for the big firms there's no way they could pretend revenue is less than $1B. Public companies already have a number of restrictions on how they have to report financials.

Rumor is that Microsoft is prepping a streaming only console, so I guess we'll see. Sure, there are a lot of simple games that this kind of emulation could help, but then, what is the point? This is an OS designed to run on $500-$1000 devices. Who could possibly recommend to anyone that you spend that much to get something that can play a few modern games poorly and a bunch of old or simple games just fine? The answer of course, is either buy a Windows machine, which isn't really much more expensive, but at which point it's no longer console like, or just buy a freaking console. The use case here is horribly small even if it worked perfectly. The technical realities effectively guarantee that it never will. As long as games and hardware drivers are built first (and largely only) for Windows, the marginal cost of a Windows licence will remain a very small price to pay for getting 100% compatibility and 100% of the performance out of your expensive game playing machine. Or again, you could just buy a console for half the price.

As Ars points out in that article and in their previous one linked, games suffered a 20-60% performance hit playing natively under SteamOS. It's likely a matter of driver optimization, but even still, that's a big hit. Adding in a bunch of wine style emulation layers is only going to make that worse. The end goal is admirable, but I just can't see how this would end up working well enough to recommend. I also just can't see them figuring this out to any reasonable degree before streaming services get good enough to make this kind of product pointless anyway.

Even though I also voted for R*, I'm surprised that there is so much consensus.

I've had a couple Logitech Harmony remotes and I very much like them. They're imperfect, as any IR based device is bound to be, but they generally get everything right, and rarely need help beyond pressing the help button once. It will switch the receiver and television inputs to the correct device.

Were you one of the people who were angry that we got a Bond with blue eyes?

Two things. 1. "some things shouldn't be changed because of reasons."? Really? maybe not any good reasons. Especially for a modern Bond, there's no particularly good reason the actor needs to be white. I think the actor needs to have charisma, and needs to be physically capable, but there's no good reason they need to be white. 2. There is actually a worthwhile reason to change an established character, rather than invent new ones out of whole cloth. There's a good reason that when you make a spy movie, the ones with new characters get made for $30M, new franchises based on existing properties get double that, and proven franchises get $150M+. You're getting a fundamentally different film when you put someone in "cool new spy movie" for $30M vs putting them in a $150M Bond movie. We can complain about the facts of franchise filmmaking, but it's a reality that should be considered.

Here's a link to Anand's writeup of the Turing reveal. I personally don't follow the ProVis side of things closely enough to know what of this kind of hardware will make it into the consumer products. Purpose-built ray tracing hardware feels unlikely to make it to the consumer cards this generation, but it does setup a real differentiator down the line for nVidia. If ray tracing becomes a part of consumer applications and nVidia has a real lead and the only dedicated hardware, it could again widen the gap between their cards' and AMDs'. Also interesting is that they're already supporting the VirtualLink USB-C Alternate mode for VR. When announced I thought it was unlikely we see support anytime soon, but nVidia has already proved me wrong, at least for the ProVis scene.

So Movie Pass went out and did about the scummiest thing I can think of, and automatically reactivated the subscriptions of people who had recently canceled, including me. I got an email identical to the one in the article, stating that: But there was no opt-in. I hadn't touched the app since I canceled two weeks ago. Unlike some people in that article, I was able to cancel again, but still, not cool Movie Pass. Not cool.

I think this is the money quote from the Anand Review:

I suppose the evidence of him growing would be that he hasn't been a provocateur making bad jokes for years, certainly not since he's apologized, and that those around him have been unequivocally supportive of him. Unlike many of these cases we're talking about, it's not like we're dismissing the experiences people he hurt. There is no victim here. I'm not sure what more would be required in the case of bad jokes a decade ago. I think here we can agree. If there was any rape or pedophilia involved, sure, put him away and toss the key.

The problem that Star Trek is having is that it's not growing it's foreign box office. Look at the recent Mission Impossible entries: domestic openings in 50s and 60s, with totals ~200M. Overseas grosses though are approaching ~$500M. (Fallout is currently running behind, but a strong opening in China is likely to change that). Compare those to the Star Trek reboots. Openings between $60-70M, domestic totals ~$200M, but the overseas grosses are only ~$200M. It doesn't help that Beyond underperformed (largely thanks to Into Darkness being poor). It also probably doesn't help that Trek is so much of an ensemble, and the least profitable series that some of it's stars are involved in. I liked Beyond quite a bit, but I wouldn't be sad to see Trek to go back to just being on TV.

There wasn't any content available, but it seems that modders have found a VR mode of sorts in the Switch. Given the screen and the graphics capability of the Switch, I would expect any kind of VR to be a LABO quality experience, more like a toy than a way to play real VR games. Still, it's interesting that Nintendo is even thinking about VR that much.

I don't think this is necessarily the best film of the year, but it's probably the film of this moment. Sorry To Bother You had a lot to say on a broad range of topics, and I found that its didacticism and hyperbole went hand in hand. Blindspotting is focused on a much smaller subset of issues that it explores much more carefully, if still bluntly. It does an excellent job of building themes through character work, and, importantly, is consistently entertaining.

There are certain movies that I won't watch without her, and there are a lot of things that I know she doesn't care about and wouldn't enjoy. We saw Eighth Grade this weekend and it was a much better experience having her there. Later I watched The Meg and Infinity War and she has zero interest in those and would more than likely fall asleep. She'd be upset with me if I saw a new Coen Brothers film without her, but I know I can book a single ticket to anything in the MCU.

My review after seeing it this weekend: Of all the dumb giant shark movies, The Meg is certainly one of them.

I tried to see it this week, but my local theater was only showing it in the middle of the afternoon. I'm planning on seeing it tomorrow.

It doesn't matter that Idris Elba is 50, as long as he can do the part. Not everyone's 50s are the same. Cruise is 56.

This is an interesting idea that I'd like to see explored more. I imagine the consequences of this kind of thing would be significant, but it's difficult to quickly assess what they would be. My first instinct would be that simply because you're moving from taxing one large entity to many small ones a lot more of the expected tax revenue would be collected, just because on average investors wouldn't be as good at finding loopholes and what not. Still, when many of those investors are themselves large companies, maybe it doesn't change much.

I saw some photoshops adding silly taglines to some of those, I had no idea they were actually real proposals. The best people.

I've heard the Intel is doomed story too many times to buy it until it actually happens. I don't believe they'll fall that far behind in the server market any more than they're falling that far behind in desktop and laptop chips. I feel like they're doomed eventually thanks to their complete failures in mobile and in graphics. Increasingly we'll see those two things eat everything (including laptops and the server market), but they've got a few good years left before that materializes.

As long as Donald Trump is still president, of course they're winning. I think we'll have to see what of their policies remain mainstream republican after he's out of office. I have to imagine that if the GOP gets punished badly enough in the elections then they'll quickly turn on Trump, and the policy inroads of the alt-right will be pushed back to the fringes.

I hardly ever replay single player games, with a few exceptions. I've gone through Mario games a few times, and a couple Final Fantasy games. Bioshock is one I've revisited. Other than that nothing is coming to mind.

Better late than never. I think 2-3 films is probably a good mark. Potential for some kind of multi-film arc, and it would be a shame for a someone really great in the role to only get a single movie, especially if the film itself isn't great. I saw a tweet the other day floating the idea of a period Bond showing Judi Dench's M's early career as a spy in the 60's and 70's. I've heard the Broccolis want to turn Bond into a wider franchise, and that seems like an interesting way to expand the brand without trying to make it some kind of cinematic universe.

After playing a bit more and watching some streams, I get the feeling that some of these OTK decks are going to get nerfed or banned or something. I'm watching Firebat consistently pull off Mecha'thun with priest OTK on turn 10 after playing Psychic Stream on turns eight and nine(sometimes 7, 8, and 9 with Shadow Visions). Even against real aggro decks, they end up needing to do something like 15-20 damage from hand, with no board to have any kind of chance, and you can't tech around it. Then there are all the Druid combo decks with Malygos and Toggwaggle. Toggwaggle in particular feels bad to lose to since you lose your deck. Given how many ramp, draw, and stall tools there are for Druid, even with pretty aggressive decks I've had pretty mixed results. There is probably more room for optimization in the aggro decks than there are in the OTK and combo decks, but I'm not really looking forward to a meta of "who drew their combo first." I like control decks, but things like Toggwaggle and Mecha'thun kinda suck.