I think it’s more likely that silicon foundries are reallocating their production time towards making datacenter hardware because at this particular moment in history that prints money. Or, possibly, prints fairie gold since most of what’s been “bought” is contracts on future production of product that hasn’t even been manufactured yet, using money that investors are probably going to want back pretty soon now.

We can hope, anyway.

In the meantime I’ve submitted this for warranty replacement with Sandisk, as it allegedly has a “lifetime” warranty, and I await with interest the variety of cockamamie excuses they’ll surely come up with to try to weasel out of giving me a new one.

There isn’t, which is why I wanted to get a feel for what the community wants. I inherited this board and have not changed anything on the sidebar yet.

These still exist and they’re everywhere. To the extent that in the US the smaller light bulb screw base is literally called the “candelabra” base. I have such a chandelier in my house right now (a very cheap one, probably from the 1980s) only minus the tacky flicker bulbs.

Which is a take on the old pied piper tale, of course.

Apparently mine are boring. I don’t buy a whole heck of a lot on Amazon because of the usual litany of reasons. My department profiles basically boil down to “buys knives” (you don’t fuckin’ say) and “buys 3D printer filament.”

There is also such super secret data as “likely lives in [town I live in].” Yes, that’s where my shipping address is. How much electricity did you burn connecting those two dots with your stupid AI?

If you put your blinders on and only look at that one line on the spreadsheet, it was probably “successful” in that regard. They pay fewer employees, full stop.

But that doesn’t take into account the fact that the machines themselves are extremely expensive up front, have a nontrival setup cost, require ongoing maintenance, assuredly these days come with some manner of mandatory service contract attached, and the monetary losses from theft on the machines are huge. So whether or not any large businesses actually came out ahead on the proposition as a whole is questionable, and I don’t have the data to support a conclusion there either way.

I like how A) his robo-bird has a matching hat, and B) it’s holding up a scroll and coaching Wizard Guy on it, whose script is apparently contained thereupon. That’s right: his brain is so thoroughly cooked that he can’t even berate an underling without outside assistance anymore.

At the height of the curved TV fad I had salespeople trying to insist to me that this somehow improved the available viewing angles throughout the room. Oh yeah? Then how come they’re not convex, then?

Given that the battery in the Frame is not readily swappable, that’s your only choice. I’m already on it, of course.

There’s a Virtual Boy emulator for VR headsets, too.

You can move the main center window and the dashboard bar by grabbing the long skinny horizontal stripe beneath either them, same as moving any other floating window. Unless you hit “float in world” on the center window the dashboard/taskbar/clock will remain pinned to the bottom of it.

The inverse L shaped grab handle on the lower right of any window allows you to resize it. When you are holding it, pushing the analog stick forward or back will move it closer to you or farther away.

Word on the street is that you can use FrameDrop to put .apks (and other executables) into your Frame’s library. I haven’t had occasion to try it; my main interest in onboard software has been regular productivity-ish apps that run natively in Linux. I stream actual games from my desktop PC, which is approximately three million times more powerful than the Frame itself.

It turns out there really is a market for a standalone capable wireless headset provided that it actually respects your privacy.

And all the joy of also being a small Linux computer, still with the eyeballs thing. Hit “desktop” in the hotbar on the bottom and you’re looking at a KDE environment.

Most programs can also be opened into a separate full-screen styled floating window you can stick wherever in virtual space, independent of the base desktop.

Correct, the only idiotic thing about VR is buying your hardware from Mark Zuckerberg. As the folks in the VR community here are already aware, I got my Steam Frame the other day and basically the only reason I’ve had to take it off my face since then is because the thing has a finite battery life.

You can extract the chip’s serial number in software trivially. In Windows, from a commandline:

wmic cpu get pricessorid

I’m positive you can do the same with some Linux command, and failing that certainly with basically every vaguely modern benchmarking tool. Same deal with hard drives and probably also video cards. My BIOS/UEFI even enumerates all my connected hard drive serial numbers on screen if I interrupt its graphical boot screen.

Given that the anti-cheat schemes these competitive games are literal rootkits, I don’t think gathering the user’s hardware serial numbers in order to attempt identify them is much of a stretch.

I wonder if people came up to Seurat and tried out correcting him on the green on the lakeshore maybe needing to be a tad more vibrant, or it would have been better if he got the lady in the foreground with the huge bum a little more centered on the canvas.

I imagine if they did, he would have been well within his rights to whack them with his palette.

For said budgets, there are also a myriad of well established tricks such as teleconverters, gimcrack homemade contraptions involving cardboard tubes and magnifying glasses, stuffing the objective of your camera into a dime store telescope or… this friggin’ thing.

One of these days I am totally going to pick up an EF/RF mount adapter and one of those just for the yuks. I imagine the optics are godawful, but it still sounds like a good time.

You still need a camera body to attach it to. But yes, you can indeed spend any amount of money on lenses if you put your mind to it. And if you’ve decided you haven’t spent enough, you can always shoot yourself in the foot by picking up a camera that belongs to a different lens ecosystem than what you’ve already got and then start building up a pile of lenses for that…