How likely is this to work? KVM/VFIO Single GPU Passthrough
tal @ tal @kbin.social Posts 11Comments 458Joined 2 yr. ago
tal @ tal @kbin.social
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I don't know if you can do it in software with passthrough, as the guest controls the hardware and would need to coordinate things.
Using a KVM would be a hardware solution that would permit for one monitor, though.
The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like
SMSes use a standard available to any app. WhatsApp is controlled by a single company.
If you were arguing that XMPP or something like that should be used instead of SMS, okay, that's one thing, but I have a hard time favoring a walled garden.
It sounds like the issue the regulator had was something specific to cloud game streaming, and Microsoft addressed that.
The CMA had originally blocked the acquisition over cloud gaming concerns, but Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft.
I mean, I would rather have a Steam Deck too, but then we're getting into how much people value openness versus price, and that's definitely not a constant; some people aren't going to care much about openness.
That said, if I were trying to compare Valve's offering and Microsoft's offering, I'd probably compare a desktop PC running Steam to the XBox, as they're more-physically-comparable in terms of what they can do; the Series S doesn't have one having to pay for mobility. If one were comparing to a mobile console, then sure, the Deck is a legit comparison.
I still would say that the XBox Series S is going to be cheaper on the low end, though, than a desktop PC. You can get a $279 PC that can play games and a comparable controller, but I'd bet that it'd be more-limited than a Series S.
That being said, Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, and then makes it back by jacking up the price of games:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-says-xbox-consoles-have-always-been-sold-at-a-loss
As VGC points out, Wright was also asked if there's ever been a profit generated from an Xbox console sale, which she confirmed has never happened. To put that in context, Microsoft has been selling Xbox consoles for nearly 20 years now, including the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and now the Xbox Series X and Series S. In all that time, every single console sale cost Microsoft money.
The reason game consoles end up being profitable is through a combination of software, service, and accessory sales, but it's still surprising to find Microsoft has never achieved hardware profitability. Analyst Daniel Ahmad confirmed that the PS4 eventually became profitable for Sony and that Nintendo developed the Switch to be profitable quickly, so Microsoft is the odd one out.
We know that consumers weight the up-front price of hardware disproportionately -- that's why you have companies selling cell phones at a loss, locking them to their network, and then making the money back in increased subscription fees. I assume that that's to try to take advantage of that phenomenon.
If you wanted to compare the full price that you pay over the lifetime of the console, one would probably need to account for the increased game price on consoles and how many games someone would buy.
Now, all that being said, I don't have a Series S or a Series X, and I'm not arguing that someone should buy them. I have a Linux PC for gaming precisely because I do value openness, so in terms of which system I'd rather have, you're preaching to the choir. I'm just saying that I don't think that I'd agree with the above statement that the Deck is as cheap as the Series S.
The Steam Deck is more expensive.
Series S: $274.95
https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck
Steam Deck: $359.10
And that's for the low-end Steam Deck. The nicest one is $519.20, almost twice what the Series S runs.
In Paris, Sir Keir sought to break the ice with an exchange of gifts that saw the leader give Mr Macron a personalised Arsenal shirt and receive cufflinks.
The contrast in formality of the two made me chuckle.
A bunch of controllers have extremely obnoxious security bits required. I had to get two separate bit sets to open a bunch of controllers.
I loved my Dualsense too, and then the left stick started drifting so badly, it’s completely unusable now. It’s only about a year old, too
I really think that something changed with a major potentiometer manufacturer in the past few years. I don't recall stick drift on a PS2 controller that I used for many years, but I've seen it on a number of controllers from different vendors recently.
Only thing I can think of other than recent hardware problems is that maybe the controller hardware imposed a certain amount of deadzone at one point in time and stopped doing so in newer gamepads, and that masked the drift.
What is Microsoft even making money on these days?
googles
https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/
Azure, Office, and (still) Windows, apparently.
Only 8% of revenue is gaming. They sure do went to grow that.
I'm a little fuzzy as to why the first-sale doctrine exists for physical goods but not for digital goods. It seems to me that any reasonable economic rationale should affect either both or neither.
modular thumbsticks
Hmm.
So is this modular thumbsticks akin to the Microsoft Elite controller, where you can put taller or shorter stems on or different tops?
Or is it like the Thrustmaster eSwap Pro, where you can remove the entire mechanism beneath, and put something else in (like, say, a more-expensive-but-immune-to-drift Hall Effect thumbstick)?
It's not as critical for Bethesda's series, because the stories don't intertwine, but one good reason to update some series is that the games span a really long period of time, to the point where only players who grew up with the series will have played the whole thing. Otherwise, players can only play the later games in a series.
Heh. Porting Skywind to an Oblivion remaster might make sense.
It'd be interesting to see Tamriel Rebuilt ported to Skywind ported to this Oblivion remaster.
Need some kind of automated migration tools to help.
The Fallout 3 remaster (fiscal year 2024)
If you consider that A Tale of Two Wastelands -- where people forward-ported the Fallout 3 world to the Fallout: New Vegas engine and ruleset -- was successful, that could be pretty solid. I still think I'd forward-port Fallout: New Vegas to the current Bethesda engine before I'd forward-port Fallout 3, though. Fallout: New Vegas was a better game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout:NewVegas#TaleofTwoWastelands
Tale of Two Wastelands
Tale of Two Wastelands is a total conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas that merges the entire content of Fallout 3 and its DLC and New Vegas into one game. The mod implements features introduced in New Vegas into Fallout 3, such as the Companion Wheel, crafting recipes, and weapon mods. Players can freely traverse between the two games on a single save file, keeping all of their items and their progression between game worlds.[76][77][78][79]
Also, most Fallout: New Vegas mods worked with Tale of Two Wastelands, which was pretty cool.
So, first, that text is from the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution, which defines legal rights.
But, secondly, the right to "pursuit of happiness" needs to be understood in the (somewhat euphemistic) language of the time. It is generally understood as referring to a right to property; this right was a core dispute in the American Revolution, and mirrors a nearly-identical "life, liberty" phrase from John Locke where the term used is explicitly "property". That is, the right is not to never feel unhappy or depressed, but rather to not have one's property taken away by non-elected parties.
https://www.crf-usa.org/foundations-of-our-constitution/natural-rights.html
The Tea Act, which imposed taxes on American colonists, was a critical dispute in the American Revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeaAct
The Tea Act 1773 (13 Geo. 3. c. 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive.[1] A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain's North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament's right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.
At the time, it was generally accepted that in England, only elected officials had the power to tax; this is one of the rights of Englishmen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RightsofEnglishmen
The "rights of Englishmen" are the traditional rights of English subjects and later English-speaking subjects of the British Crown. In the 18th century, some of the colonists who objected to British rule in the thirteen British North American colonies that would become the first United States argued that their traditional[1] rights as Englishmen were being violated. The colonists wanted and expected the rights that they (or their forebears) had previously enjoyed in England: a local, representative government, with regards to judicial matters (some colonists were being sent back to England for trials) and particularly with regards to taxation.[2] Belief in these rights subsequently became a widely accepted justification for the American Revolution.[3][4]
However, American colonists had no elected MPs in Parliament. Parliament was willing neither to grant them elected MPs, nor to refrain from taxation and have locally-elected legislatures perform taxation. Parliament's counterargument was that Americans had "virtual representation", in that MPs elected by people in the UK -- though not elected by American colonists -- had their best interests at heart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualrepresentation
Virtual representation was the idea that the members of Parliament, including the Lords and the Crown-in-Parliament, reserved the right to speak for the interests of all British subjects, rather than for the interests of only the district that elected them or for the regions in which they held peerages and spiritual sway.[1] Virtual representation was the British response to the First Continental Congress in the American colonies. The Second Continental Congress asked for representation in Parliament in the Suffolk Resolves, also known as the first Olive Branch Petition. Parliament claimed that their members had the well being of the colonists in mind. The Colonies rejected this premise.
I mean, I think the closest analogy is to a TV station and a TV show.
The TV station isn't the employer of the people making a show.
On the other hand, a show and a station contract on a season-by-season basis, so AFAIK, normally a show is guaranteed payments for the remainder of a season. Youtubers don't get that guarantee. But then again, a show is obligated to actually keep making shows until the end of the season, and that isn't true of Youtubers.
And a Youtuber can pull their content that they've already made down whenever they want. Like, either YouTube or Brand can, at any point and for any reason, terminate the relationship.
Also, YouTube doesn't get any exclusivity. Brand can put his shows on YouTube and Vimeo and OnlyFans and as many other services as he wants. The only Youtuber that I've followed much, a guy that drives around the US in an RV with his cat, puts some stuff up on Patreon, some on YouTube (and sells some merch). He puts as much content/time or as little on any platform as he wants. Maybe he never uploads anything to YouTube again, maybe he puts a lot up in a given month.
I don't think that this is a control move.
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Hmm. I'd think that a desktop would probably be most-comparable to a console (well, okay, other than portable consoles).
And the price difference isn't that high these days. It used to be enormous:
Go back to the NES, which came out in 1983:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NintendoEntertainmentSystem
Introductory price: ¥14,800 (Japan) US$179 (equivalent to $530 in 2022)
Compare to the IBM PC (which, frankly, lacked a lot of game-friendly hardware) and came out in 1981:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBMPersonalComputer
Introductory price: Starting at US$1,565 (equivalent to $5,040 in 2022)
The Mac came out in 1984:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh128K
Introductory price: US$2,495 (equivalent to US$7,000 in 2022)
The Apple II in 1977:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleII
Introductory price: US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,270 in 2022)
So the NES -- in inflation-adjusted dollars -- cost about what an Xbox Series X or PS5 cost.
But nobody is spending $5k-$7k on a typical desktop today. And certainly not on one with comparable hardware to the existing consoles.
Ah, I gotcha. One keyboard/mouse, VM guest output in a window on the host would be ideal.
Run a VNC or RDP server on the guest VM, connect with a client on the host? That won't have quite the performance -- if you're debugging a 3d game and playing it as part of it, you'll get latency, so that won't be a good solution for OP -- but that may not matter for your use case.