and by recent, TPM was external last in gen 8 of intels, so this attack works on cpus released last in October 2017. That's almost 7 years ago. Most organizations have a 3-5 year replacement schedule.
Because that car is a highly stylish car aimed at upper middle class people, and has the styling, pricing, and marketing to match.
The Jeep is going to be midmarket with probably a lot of cost-cutting features. Probably not as nice fit and finish and such and will probably hit the $25k price point, after the $7500 subsidy.
If I had to guess it might be an electric version of the ICE Jeep Compass which starts at $25k. EV motors and batteries are reaching an economic point where they are becoming practically drop-in replacements for ICE drivetrains. The engine, drivetrain, emissions, etc stuff is also expensive. Assembly I imagine is cheaper too because electric cars are simpler machines.
They're expensive if you're buying them new. But they quickly depreciated in value and back when they still sold their ICE models here it was easy to buy a 2-3yo one for around $12k.
Stuff like this made me realize how I have no idea how big enthusiast markets are. If you asked me how many weirdo disk connectors for vintage macs and Apple II's could be sold today I would have guessed maybe one or two hundred at most, sold over many years.
It looks like they've sold tens of thousands of these.
If we guess 50,000 at $129, with say a 30% profit margin, which might be low for hobbyist markets, its $2m net. These "little" enthusiast markets are much larger and lucrative than I thought.
Isn't a lot of 3D in shows and games "faked" to look good to the viewer?
I remember seeing this blog write up on what 3D animators do to make things look acceptable. Like make a character 9 feet tall because when the camera panned them, they looked too short at their "real" in-system height. Or archway doors that are huge but at the perspective shot, look "normal" to us. Or having a short character stand on an out-of-scene blue box to make them having a conversation with a tall character not look silly due to an extreme height difference? Or a hallway that in real life would be 1,000 feet long but looks about 100 in-world because of how the camera passes past it, and how each door on that 1,000 foot hallway is 18 feet high, etc.
I wonder if shows like Futurama used those tricks as well, so when you sort of re-create the 3D space the animators were working in by reverse engineering like this, then you see the giant doors and 9 foot people and non-Euclidian hallways, etc. Just because it looks smooth as the camera passes it, doesn't mean that actual 3D model makes sense at other perspectives.
I don't have a ton of experience in this realm but from what I've seen it does happen a lot -- looking good is often better than being right. A great example of this is the way they tilted the models for Zelda's A Link Between Worlds[0]. Basically everything in the world is tilted back so it looks better for the camera angle, which is designed to mimic the feel of A Link to the Past.
I saw some video on A Difficult Game About Climbing a while back. The things they did to make the guy appear to grip the rocks and suck normally make the hands utterly bizarre when seen from the side.
We're probably not getting to space without AGI or at least some level of sophisticated AI. At a certain point our biological bodies are just wed to the Earth and its ecosystem, as we are animals that are products of the Earth.
If "we" ever get out there, some form of mechanical AI will. And we will never know it because once we send those ships off, we'll be long gone before the return signal gets to us from some far of locale. Imagine a voyager who can self-repair, mine asteroids, print circuits, etc. Now imagine giving it a 1 million year mission. Maybe by then we'll all have given up on biology and we'd be the "robots" on that ship.
Sometimes the universe makes beings like us, but not often, and probably makes all manner of interesting beings that will most likely be forever out of reach, and us out of their reach. Kudos to some life on a faraway planet, I wish we could meet.
Also its fun to think of the universe as a system. Here's this incomprehensibly large thing constantly in motion, constantly having stars die out and explode, and new ones born, etc all the time but to us at incredible slow speeds, everywhere, yet at incredible distances from each other. Its like this bellows that keeps a fire lit, over and over, non-stop. But not quite non-stop because this great furnace too will (probably) have a proper death. This universe life cycle chart is both a feat of science and an incredible work of a permanent and grim mortality of all things.
Pykrete is one of those things that makes sense in theory, but in practice and from a practical perspective just isn't great.
There aren't a lot of places in nature where you have tons of trees and easy to get ice. So a society would never default to pykrete because those two things tend to be the opposite of each other. Its a somewhat unnatural thing to do.
Industrialized societies just can make steel and steel doesnt start to soften until 500-600 degrees F. There's no need for a 24/7 refrigerator power plant to keep steel from melting. Steel also is strong and rigid. Steel is of course still used today for both war and civil ships, and has been since the day it became technically and economically feasible to do. Its really hard to beat steel. This project has some nice technical merits and pykrete itself is interesting, but it just doesnt seem to ever have a practical use.
> There aren't a lot of places in nature where you have tons of trees and easy to get ice.
I take issue with this - there are vast swathes of canada, sibera, and northern europe where this is the case. I would say however finding all three year-round near liquid water may be harder, although not exactly an insurmountable challenge compared to say, moving quarried rock 5 miles to build a house
>Meta already sells the Quest systems basically at production cost
This is of course scary and why the VR market is now pretty much a monopoly. Perhaps the next versions of the vision pro will be lowered cost and have more games, but Zuck is just throwing money at each headset so how can groups like HTC compete? HTC and Valve never really had a chance when a headset that costs $300 to make is sold for $300.
Zuck and Carmack running victory laps now trying to Android-ize VR is probably not super surprising, but all of this show what happens when there's no real regulations to stop this kind of monopolization.
imho, Apple certainly saw this coming and fears a new Android-like competitor in a space they arguably could do well in. So the Vision Pro was pushed out before this got traction. Now its a matter of titan vs titan because smaller players are probably not going to enter this space anymore outside of hardware partners for Meta.
Why would the vision pro have games? I'm still waiting for the damn iPhone to be the gaming platform they promised over a decade ago. I watched over the last few years as Mac computers somehow got more powerful than they ever were but also have lost just about all support for modern games. The truth is, despite what apple says out of their mouth at their pressers, they don't really care about gaming or have any interest in establishing a viable development environment for this platform. Valve isn't even porting their games to mac anymore despite how much fanfare the relationship with this company and apple had for years.
You’re conflating games with high end gaming. The iPhone is a gaming platform. It’s one of the largest ones in fact.
Mobile gaming (iOS and Android) dwarves other gaming.
This is the issue that “gamers” have a hard time grappling with because they often disregard mobile games as an inferior product.
But then it leads to the fact that the mobile platforms don’t actually have to cater to their needs other than as halo products. They optimize for the majority of their customers and the majority are mobile gamers who are happy with the range of mobile games available.
> they often disregard mobile games as an inferior product
Have you seen the type of mobile game which accrues the vast, vast majority of the revenue? They are literally designed as addiction engines first, and games a distant second. They're "games" in the same way that a baited hook is fish food.
The relative handful of actual good mobile games have often struggled, partly because Apple is very happy to promote and take a cut of the enormous revenue generated by this predatory business.
> I'm still waiting for the damn iPhone to be the gaming platform they promised over a decade ago.
They have a different definition of gaming than we do. The games they're interested in are the ones with in-app purchases.
Except the design department, "good enough" is their motto for everything. "iPhone is the most popular gaming device" and "iPhone is the most popular camera" are two technically correct statements that don't sit right with me, but that's just me.
> The games they're interested in are the ones with in-app purchases.
Apple literally pays developers of mobile games an up front premium to strip out all the Skinner Box nonsense and create an Apple Arcade version of their app.
HTC no, but Valve absolutely could compete. They have an existing popular App Store where they receive a cut of the profits. Even breaking even on hardware costs they could still reap fairly substantial profits if they were to succeed in the VR market.
Also regarding the Vision Pro, as long as Apple doesn't give up on it, it absolutely should come down in price over time. The original Macintosh retailed for $2,495, which is approximately the equivalent of $7,250 in today's dollars adjusted for inflation.
I agree, but I'd add that Valve also has the technical acumen and the good will of a community that knows they stand behind their products. To build something like the steam deck, even though it's not VR, you have to solve a lot of the same issues you'd have with VR.[1] Personally, I'd rather vote Valve with my wallet than Meta.
[1]: I'm mostly thinking about constrained space, weight and power delivery here. Obviously for proper VR there's a bit more that goes into it, but they're definitely not clueless.
Valve never really tried to compete. Index is old, outdated and never saw a price discount and their supposed Index V2 has been delayed so long it's a huge meme.
HTC never really iterated like Quest did beyond big bulky headsets that required a full room set up did they?
I can't say Meta spending 10s of millions to push the technology forward is monopolistic unless you want to say Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft consoles or any device with a walled garden (ipad/iphone) ecosystem is monopolistic.
This is sort of a democrat neolib explanation that's only possible if you ignore the corrupting effects of capitalism and the unending class struggle between workers and capital, regardless of party.
The GOP isn't some weird guys who can't govern, but an incredibly powerful group that works almost exclusively for the capital owning class and uses social issues to empower that class. The GOP caters a bit to the workers class but not a lot and is actively radicalizing them to believe they have the same interests as the capital owning class. The culture war is by accident. If the GOP could do this all without the culture war, selling hate, etc then it would. These are merely tools for an end.
The Democrats are almost as bad, but also are beholden to some level of will of the working class, but generally default to the whims of the capital owning class as much as practically possible. The Dems need to get the working class on its side to continue to exist. The pure capital owner party is the GOP and they can't compete against them without this rhetoric. Hence, a lot of Dem ideology being lip service for populist worker issues and actual change from Dems is very rare, and when it happens, its under the approval of the many/most capital owners (see Obamacare being a mandatory private insurance program instead of a Euro-style socialized medicine program.)
The better governing of the dems is by accident. If the dems govern better its only by accident due to the strong influence of the middle-class dependent on good government to survive, and if the dems could maintain power with more corrupt governing, they would.
This is your classic conservative vs liberal divide that defines nearly all modern capitalist nations.
The difference between the two parties isn't that strong. Under capitalism, the government is a capitalist government and is nearly fully corrupted by it, regardless of party. The only real fix is to replace capitalism with socialism, but neither party will allow that, so here we are with the usual back and forth and hiding issues with workers class and capitalism under whatever social issues of the day best distract.
> The GOP caters a bit to the workers class but not a lot and is actively radicalizing them to believe they have the same interests as the capital owning class.
They don't cater to them as much as they convince them that they could one day be a member of the capital owning class.
The whole "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" line.
> The difference between the two parties isn't that strong.
That's the kind of thinking that led to Bush in 2000. Say what you like about Gore, but his administration would have done a great number of things differently from how it worked out.
Additionally, you wouldn't see e.g. Trump's EPA turning up the pressure on coal power plants. In fact hundreds of effective EPA staffers left (/were purged from) the EPA in 2017/2018.
To the working class who under Both Bush/Trump and Obama/Biden sent their kids to die in the war on terror and under both fund a destructive foreign policy that has led to incredible civillian deaths wordwide especially in the middle east, a "well one guy might make cleaner coal" is a cold comfort.
To the working class who labors under inflation with no guaranteed vacation or maternity or pension, its a cold comfort that the one guy "likes ice cream and is friendly." To the working class who can't buy a home, its a cold comfort that one guy has better diction and vocabulary than the other. To the working class that can't retire and will die at their desks, its a cold comfort that one guy said something nice about labor unions. To the working class who are watching the global south be exploited and the pollution there blowing upstream to the "clean EPA driven USA" its a cold comfort. To the working class who can't afford to have children, its a cold comfort that one guy has given lip service to LGBTQ issues.
etc, etc.
Neither can or will address the fundamental problems of capitalism that causes nearly all these issues. The working class will continue to suffer under any pro-capitalist leadership. One guy just has nicer window dressing than the other.
I don't think you're being very fair. We can see stark difference between Democratic and Republican controlled states, especially when looking at the South. In terms of women's rights, they are second class citizens in the South while their rights are protected in states with Democrats leading the charge. In states where Republicans have complete control, they've asserted full control over women. That's a real difference between Democrats and Republicans that I hope you can appreciate.
In the South they are banning DEI, queer books, and trans participation in public life. This is not happening in Democratic controlled places, and that's not just lip service, that's for real. People's jobs are being impacted by this, teachers are fleeing Republican controlled states.
You look at rate of infant mortality, pregnancy complications, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, opioid addiction, childhood poverty, poverty in general, and it all looks better in Blue versus Red states. That's real data we can look at which tells us the parties are different. Under Democratic administrations, access to healthcare is expanded. Under Republican control, it contracts. I know it's not your preferred solution, and I'd like a better one too, but when it comes time to vote I'm damn for sure voting for the party that causes healthcare access to expand.
And Trump's problem isn't that he has poor diction or vocabulary, it's that what he says is literally insane and psychopathic. The SC case today was evidence of that, where he argued in court that he deserves the power to assassinate his rivals and to order the military to stage a coup without fear of prosecution. Democrats are not arguing this position in court.
Yes both will not address the fundamental problems of capitalism, and the working class will continue to suffer under both, but the data say they will suffer more under Republicans compared to Democrats.
We are not talking about window dressing we are talking about measurably less suffering. I understand that's not the "no suffering" benchmark you'd like to achieve, but how about we not let perfect be the enemy of better?
Yep this. PQ is a huge satire of the grind RPG games do and the low-quality writing and such, especially in quests. Look at the things it says at the bottom "Fighting teenage werewolf" or "Fighting giant mini rat" etc. Its entirely satirical from top to bottom.
Its a huge criticism of the WoW/Ultima/Bard's Tale/MUD era. Thankfully, since about Dragon Age and Mass Effect, that stuff is less common and those works showed us that you can have RPG mechanics without the "kill a rat" grind or "fetch me my long lost magical object" grind stuff. In retrospect playing older games or MMOs feels so infantilizing and lazy writing. Its incredible how long we considered that acceptable.
So I had one of these and loved it so much, but then I switched to an, early-ish, iPhone, perhaps the 3G one, after playing with a couple early-ish androids. The iPhone was just so much better, generally, even if I lost the parts of the Treo that appealed to the more "nerdy" or tinkerer parts of me.
I think this was a lesson for me on how important UI is to mass-market devices. The Treo had so much going on for it, but most of the things you describe, most people would describe as awkward to use. Worse, the hardware keyboard meant the screen would always be smaller than an iPhone. I think the earliest Androids were marketed as "still has a keyboard" and that didn't really last. No one cared other than die-hards.
Downloading apps from random websites wasn't fun either. The app stores make a lot of sense in general, but moreso in mobile.
I also learned most times I'm forced to be a "tinkerer" by the industry, when most times I just want stuff to "just work" so I can choose what to tinker with. Oh, my win10 wont update to win11 because I need to redo the boot type and install a TPM chip on my old motherboard? That's not fun tinkering, that's annoying. The same way all the little things about the Treo or other less polished tech were like that. The game or novel I'm writing? That's fun tinkering.
It was also a lesson for me on how if you want to sell a mass-market product, the geeky, super-efficient, nerd-culture wisdom, etc stuff is a liability, not an asset. A lot of Apple wins is because someone said "this is too nerdy, get rid of it, abstract it away, make it easy, pretend you're a stressed out executive in a hurry." That model just gets sales and then that becomes our new default.
Apple is trying this in VR too, but Meta seems to already Apple-ized its current gen of headsets. Its a very Apple-like experience. I think that's hurting it. Ignoring the price issues, I can get "apple" from Meta already. They're several years too late. Apple, reportedly or rumored, cancelled its electric car program probably because groups like Tesla and others have already "Apple-ized" the car.
I'm not sure what areas Apple can attack now. We've all learned Apple's lesson.
I don't think Apple agrees with you that Meta has made headsets Apple-ized. Apple's idea with headsets is that you're basically never in a black VR void. Nobody has done that except Apple.
You're probably right about cars to a point, but I believe there the main problem is that Apple no longer believes self-driving cars under all situations that are safer than humans are achievable with current tech.
I think there are creature comfort areas Apple can work on, definitely, but I was very surprised at how Apple-like the experience of the Quest was, from unboxing to the UI. Especially coming from a Vive/Steam combo which is a bit of a technical Rube Goldberg machine and expects a certain amount of technical skills on top of owning a gaming PC, which is its own barrier to entry, both financially and technical skill-wise.
The bigger issue is that the Meta is just a gaming device while the Vision Pro is being marketed as a productivity device. I think this is where Apple can have success. They could, predictably, be the Apple // to Meta's Colecovision.
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