Yup. It’s about time MS got some antitrust push back they’ve been getting relentless lately…
Edge is well into enshittification territory, it’s gross to use. But the real monopoly practice is bing-ifying everything. They’re using their OS monopoly to claw out monopolies in browsers and therefore AI search.
If they preinstalled a Firefox wrapper like the EU browser choice ballot they used to have, this would all go away in a heartbeat!
And both of these companies build and purchased more renewable energy sources than all 100+ countries combined. Microsoft has committed to be carbon free by 2030, and while I don’t belive in their commitment, they at least seem to be trying contrary to most nations. They even invested in nuclear plants for their power needs.
You can fault both companies for a lot of different reasons, but in terms of carbon emissions due to power usage, they are better than 99.9% of the countries on that list.
They didn’t build it. They buy from local suppliers, power that could have been used by people and companies already there. Now it’s just a lot more, while a serious part of the power consumption goes into debatable purposes like overhyped AI stuff.
Edit: and fwiw, recently Microsoft themselves announced that they are far from their reduction targets roadmap, so not sure where you got the happy flow news from
Green energy that could go to higher priority sectors like decarborning housing, food production and transportation . Carbon free doesn’t mean no ecological impact, of course it’s better than fossil fuel, but it still a lot of ressources extracted and place taken over nature (which is the first cause of biodiversity loss). So ideally we should only destroy so much for essential needs.
I think all moths have some amount of fur, it’s easy to notice on the base of their wings, just “behind” (below?) the head. Some, like the rosy moth, are almost entirely covered in furs
The steam deck is definitely my best purchase in a long time. So many games in my library that I can play now if I don’t want to sit at my PC after working on my PC.
I frankly wouldn’t care at all had MS not truncate your home folder to 5 characters when using a Ms account and also didn’t make using remote desktop impossible when enabling a passwordless account.
I refuse to build up expectations, the little I’ll hope for they will mess up. This is the same company that tried to make physical games unsharable long-term.
Which they walked back and hacen’t tried again since. Their latest console is also still backwards compatible with games from the first xbox.
I’m legitimately hopeful. Won’t ever stop the best option from being piracy and open source emulators on PC, but Microsoft’s track record for backwards compat is sparkling.
Sure, it’s not true hardware based backwards compat. It works by using the disc as a key to download and run a full copy of the original game + an emulation layer customized for the specific game, so if you don’t have internet or they pull the plug on their store servers you can’t just use the disk alone. If you lose the disc or it breaks, you have to buy the game again from their online store. Also, I’ve encountered some crashes and minor emulation issues with some titles. Poor, poor Kotor.
It’s sad, but that’s still leagues better than their competitors in the console market.
Sony makes you buy the old games again on each platform. Standard “Virtual Console” type shit. Thankfully, they usually do this by making a general emulator that homebrew folks can later shove non-supported games into.
Nintendo. Nintendo. Are you shitting me? An ongoing subscription to keep access to the same 30 year old games you’ve been reselling since the Wii?
You can use homebrew to shove other games in, but you risk a ban from their online services. Also, if you’re already doing homebrew, the consoles they offer games for this way on the Switch are more than easily handled by Retroarch running as homebrew.
Mario 3D All Stars? Take all the time and money to get a half port half emulation solution working on the Switch for one Gamecube and and one Wii game, sell it as time limited, don’t include the direct sequel to the Wii game that was built on the same fucking game engine in the package… and then never use that tech again? Are you fucking kidding me?
That last one shouldn’t surprise me too bad though. They managed to emulate the N64 on the Gamecube, and only used it for Legend of Zelda. Once in a limited preorder bonus for Wind Waker, and also in a limited Nintendo Power magazine bonus disc for subscribing.
There’s reason to believe that the next Xbox will just be a PC with a coat of paint, the same way that the Steam Deck is, and so this preservation team would, in that case, probably be built to legitimately emulate the Xbox 360 on PC, because that’s where the biggest compatibility gap is.
Emulation is the only thing that can long-term battle the difficulties of physical platforms evolving. Doubt x86_64 will be in main consumer hardware forever. I don’t even know if ARM will be forever. It’s all just a matter of timescale.
Like I said, they tried. They had leadership change, but at the end of the day consoles in general largely disrespect your freedom and are designed around it.
I do own several consoles and I like them for their emotional value, but I’m never going to trust lip service from ANY company that tolerates things like always-online DRM or worse: actively implements it themselves. (refer to figure A: latest Forza)
PS: I’ll admit I didn’t read all of your comment because by God that was WAY too much for 2:30am, but I’ll forget to reply otherwise and think I want to react to your initial statement at least.
Edit: Read the rest, my comment wasn’t to paint Xbox as worse than others (after reversing course), but rather expressing they all try to eat away your freedoms.
Backwards compat is nice, but only fixes self-imposed problems.
To be honest they’ve been doing this for a while with backwards compatibility so it’s continuation to make it forwards compatible as well. It’s a bummer they’re not following up with physical copies but it’s clear there’s been a lack of demand for Xbox games. Seems like they want to go the Steam route which I’m all for.
Ya, then just install the N version. It’s not some weird region locked thing. If you tell Microsoft you don’t have a product key, you’ll get a list of windows versions you can install, and you just select the N version.
Their main income is from businesses. They don’t care what an individual user does.
That said, most motherboards already have a license key for Windows attached. Or you can just use a Windows 7 or 8 key you have laying around. I believe they wanted to stop being able to do this, but it still isn’t implemented.
I expect that it’s because we’re not in the EU that measures like this can be passed there. Maybe in 10-20 years time we can rejoin an EU massively improved by our absence.
Not true. There has been big moment against the MS monoply by the EU, pre-Brexit. Truth is, the UK hasn’t been powerful enough to stop these large antitrust cases for a long time. Brexit or not.
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