If you look for a “watt meter plug”, you’ll pribably understand what it is at a glance. It’s a device you plug into your wall outlet (or surge protector or whatever). It has a power outlet on it, which you plug your device into, and a screen that shows watts drawn and watt-hours over time. Super simple. I think “Kill A Watt” is the most well known brand.
My friends and I called all annoying companion/escort characters “Buttfuck”. Natalia was the buttfuckiest Buttfuck.
Agreed. A lot of people in this thread are confusing what they believe should be illegal discrimination with what is actually illegal discrimination. Or they believe discrimination laws are more broadly encompassing than they are. There are a lot of kinds of discrimination that most of us agree is bad and shouldn’t be allowed… but unfortunately is not illegal.
Ambrosia probably provided me the most hours of gaming entertainment over the 90s. They published Mac software and, if I remember correctly, most of their games were shareware and the non-paid versions were pretty well featured.
I wonder how many hundreds of hours I played Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override. Those were some absolutely amazing games and they supported plugins (mods) and had a thriving mod community.
For the 90s mac users, you’ll probably recognize a lot of their games (listed on the Wikipedia page). Here are some from the 90s that stand out to me:
Maelstrom
Chiral
Apeiron
Swoop
Barrack
Escape Velocity
Avara
Bubble Trouble
Harry the Handsome Executive
Mars Rising
EV Override
Ares
Escape Velocity Nova
Old farts unite! I’m right there with you, although I think my first wing commander game was 4. I think I did something similar with Myst to escape constant “hunting” on the disc drive. The noise of the cd drive revving up and down 2ft from my head is seared into my brain.
Can we meaningfully say that performance has improved over time when games are getting more graphically intensive and wasting all that potential? I would say a Nintendo DS running Tetris has more performance than a PS5 running that new Bethesda game
Yes, we can. Gamers and computer nerds have been measuring performance for decades. For example, see https://www.userbenchmark.com and https://www.digitalfoundry.net.
You could develop a benchmark around the DS version of Tetris, I suppose, but that doesn’t seem like a useful benchmark to me.
The rest of your question seems to be a value judgement that graphically intensive games are “wasting all that potential”. Kind of ironic considering you appear to be asking for objective ways to measure performance.
Optical drives were a major bottleneck in every gaming system that used them. They were convenient because they offered a lot of data storage for cheap, but the trade off was that games performed worse than they could. The fact that consoles have moved off of optical storage and onto fast internal storage is a boon to people that care about performance. That may be a sad situation for you, but a lot of people find it to be a good thing.
Undoubtably, the airline doesn’t allow them to help because of “lawsuit”
And while I agree, they should have had the wheelchair there in the first place, I don’t see that as the core problem. While this incident wouldn’t have happened if the wheelchair were there, there will always be problems that need to be addressed in real time while running their business.
This incident shows how they respond to problems and it is terrifying. Sure, the company could make sure there are wheelchairs on every plane so that this particular incident never happens again. But the broader issue is that they appear to have actively disempowered their employees from solving problems or doing anything outside their specific list of duties. Problems will always happen and you can’t have a precise plan for every possible problem. That’s whey employees need the power to solve those problems. Otherwise you get evil shit happening like this.
Edit: and the solution was simple. If you don’t have the wheelchair you are required to have, you wait for a wheelchair (or give the passenger get the option to be physically assisted off). Yes, that is painful to the business. It means delays. But that is the obvious solution.
She said that eight cleaning crew members, two flight attendants, and the captain and co-captain watched as she tried to help her husband exit the plane.
At first I was going to say, “how as a human being do you stand there and watch this?” But i have to think that many of those people wanted to help but felt that they could not. Instead, I’ll ask: What kind of terrible, shithole, money grubbing, leach on society company must this be to have made all of those employees too scared to step forward?
Except the captain. That is your plane, you subhuman piece of shit. The company you work for may be the devil, but you let this happen while it was your responsibility to fix it. You watched it and did nothing.
Ever heard of Sealioning? Look it up. That’s you. Your posts are dripping with pseudo-intellectual “just asking questions” spittle.
Three thoughts:
I wonder if you would still have this take if you played a newer, high quality AAA game on a high end setup. I don’t mean to imply that your mind will definitely be blown — really don’t know — but it would be interesting to see what doing so would do to your opinion.
Gaming is about entertainment. There is no denying that better/bigger/smoother/more immersive tends to add to the entertainment. So devs push those boundaries both for marketing reasons and because they want to push the limits. I have a hard time seeing a world in which gaming development as a whole says “hey, we could keep pushing the limits, but it would be more environmentally friendly and cheaper for our customers if we all just stopped advancing game performance.”
There are SO MANY smaller studios and indie devs making amazing games that can run smoothly on 5/10/15 year old hardware. And there is a huge number of older games that are still a blast to play.
Old curmudgeons unite! I totally knew what you meant.
Edit: that said, I would add NVMe SSD as the way to go… although I think that is pretty much all you find these days. Are non-nvme m.2 drives a thing?
I haven’t used other handhelds, but what you say is what I’ve seen from other discussions and reviews. Yes, there are more powerful systems with better screens, but the SD’s OS is miles ahead (but not without a lot of quirks as well). The touchpads are incredible - I couldn’t imagine trying to use a handheld PC without those touchpads. Also, the custom control configuration abilities built in to steam OS are incredibly versatile and detailed.
I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.
Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.