But it does do the force-a-Microsoft-account thing that doesn’t work without a network.

Part of it is not finished DRAM that was sold yet, it’s wafer capacity at the factory.

Sam Altman has promised orders for a kazillion wafers that don’t exist yet. It’s been argued this is less legitimate demand and more an effort to crimp the scaling ambitions of other competitors.

If his cheque bounces early on, the manufacturers are likely to reassign his slots to other buyers.

The manufacturers are taking a fair bit of risk though. If they aren’t getting paid before work starts, and the bubble pops in the middle, thry could end up with a lot of (partially or fully) finished wafers that they can’t just slice up and sell to Corsair and G.Skill.

Even with the internet “available” you can get in chicken-egg scenarios like “the network card is not supported on the OS disc, and it won’t let me complete the OS installer so I can install the driver from external media later.”

Even Windows 10 got pretty testy about that in late releases.

There was also a period where you needed 3.5 AND 5.25 drives to use off the shelf software.

It was a literal 100-level course project in my CS programme in 2000 or so.

You didn’t even do it with a programmed CPU, you used 74xx logic gates and counters wired on a breadboard

When they first launched, their whole main message was “it’s a cheaper cut for the devs!” Perhaps I’m being selfish, but that’s not a message that resonates to me as a buyer.

Hint: most of us don’t get hot and bothered about exactly how much margin Walmart lets Tyson take on their chicken nuggets, so trying to apply that message to games is weird.

I’ll say one word: WRT54G.

You put the hackers in control and otherwise mediocre hardware can become iconic and shape the future of your brand. (It’s funny that you now see the second-gen “looks like a low-poly WRT54G” routers in thrift shops due to wi-fi churn)

OTOH will it be harder with video, if every third party integration is demanding DRM blobs, than with RF which is justjust a federal offense if misused?

They look like the press kit for one of those Million Dollar Skank-off romance-game-shows. I assume Thursdays at 9, next day on Paramount Plus?

Floats for currency in a payments platform.

The system will happily take a transaction for $121.765, and every so often there’s a dispute because one report ran it through round() and another through floor().

But what about this promise makes it so uniquely seductive?

There are a million guys with ideas for cars that will go 750km on a thimble-full of Fresca, robot butlers that can’t turn evil because they don’t have red LEDs in the eye positions, and 200:1 data compression as long as you never have to decompress it. They must all be looking at Altman and company and asking where their bubbles.

I sadly suspect the charm is “we can sack some huge percentage of workers if it delivers”

He’s so cute! He can monitor me any day!

I was initially surprised thst the stablecoin boom didn’t seem to involve more commodity or currency-basket pegged tokens.

But they aren’t in it for that, it’s a shiny digital way to go back to pre-1860s protocols where a paper dollar was made up by some dubious piggie and you had to know that it was really worth about 35 cents in government silver coin based on how hard it was to exchange, and insiders could make out like bandits via arbitrage and printing junk that they could pump and dump.

Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.

Thwn I’d expect higher figures for musicians, swayed by the top .01% that suck up all the fame and royalties.

It’s Frontier. They’re not upset about the gun per se; they’re just desperately trying to figure out how to charge $50 for thr privelege of taking it on board.

Make something unmarketsble.

My big hobby project was software for 30-year-old computers, not a big market.

The new solution has a chatbot delving into whipping strategy and toadying the whippers.

I run the Windows build on Lutris just fine. You might have to cut the network for a few seconds during the launch (after you press “start game” in the launcher, before it loads the title screen)

Carry slot limits annoy me more.

Weight makes sense from a story perspective. Even a top-spec fighter can’t carry four zweihanders and 500 food rations.

But even the 1-STR mage who might have a legitimate carry weight limit of 2kg, should not be told “you can only carry 3 different types of 10-gram herb.” Especially if he’s allowed to carry 200 units of any one of the types. Give me anything resembling a viable story-based reason for that.

But selling a solution to that is a very popular monetization paradigm for MMOs, so it stays.

Invite your friends for “bonus” resources, or even worse, to unlock progression.

If you want to incentivize me to growthhack your product, let’s talk dollars, not Mystic Sunshine Gems.