Mine is about the same. Totally forgot it included by Steam Deck and my Index. Makes me feel a little better!

But then when i look at the number of unplayed and unfinished games in my library I feel bad again.

And then I feel worse remembering I also have a large GOG library which isn’t in that Steam spend and also lots of unplayed games…

And the company remains massively overvalued despite the recent falls in value. It has a long way to fall yet.

How is it misleading? Plex Pass is a subscription? It would be confusing to many people if it said “Plex pass” instead of “Subscription” as not everyone would necessarily even know what that is. Subscription is very clear.

I use Jellyfin as a home media server - in my set up I have it running on my desktop PC, and I use it to stream a media library to my tv.

A home media server basically just means its meant to be deployed at a small scale rather than as a platform for 1000s of people to use.

Your scenario is exactly what Jellyfin and Plex can do. If you have 5 users then you just need a host device running the server that is powerful enough to run 5 video streams at the same time. The server can transcode (where the server takes on the heavy lifting needing a more powerful CPU) or direct play (where all the server does is send the bits of the file and the end user’s device such as a phone or smart tv does the hard work of making a quality play, so a lower power server device can work).

If this is contained within your home, your home wifi or network should be fine to do this, even up to 4k if your network is good enough quality. If the 5 people are outside your home then your internet bandwidth - particularly your upload bandwidth - and your and their internet quality will be important determinant of quality of experience. It will also need more configuring but it is doable.

This doesn’t need to be expensive. A raspberry pi with storage attached would be able to run Jellyfin or Plex, and would offer a decent experience over a home network if you direct play (I.e. just serve up the files for the end users device to play). You might need something more powerful for 5 simultaneous direct play streams but it would still be in the realms of low powered cheap ARM devices.

If you want to use transcoding and hardware acceleration you’d need better hardware for 5 people to stream simultaneously. For example an intel or amd cpu, and ideally even something with a discrete graphics card. That doesn’t mean a full desktop PC - it could be an old PC or a minipc.

However most end user devices such as TVs, PCs, Phones and tablets are perfectly capable of direct playing 1080p video themselves without the server transcoding. Transcoding has lots of uses - you can change the audio or video format on the fly, or enable streaming of 4k video from a powerful device to a less powerful device - but its not essential.

Direct play is fine for most uses. The only limitation is the files on the server need to be in a format that can be played on the users device. So you may need to stick to mainstream codecs and containers; things like mp4 files and h.264/avc. You could get issues with users not being able to playback files if you have say mkv files and h. 265/hevc or vp9. Then you’d either need to install the codecs in the users device (which may not be possible in a smart tv for example) or use transcoding (so the server converts the format on the fly to something the users device can use but then needing a more powerful server)

I prefer Jellyfin as its free and open source. It has free apps for the end user for many devices including smart tvs, streaming sticks, phones, tablets and PCs. Its slightly less user friendly than plex to set up but not much. And the big benefit is your users are only exposed to what you have in your library.

Plex is slightly more user friendly but commerical. You have to pay for a licence to get the best features and even then it pushes advertising and tries to get your users to buy commercial content. Jellyfin does not do that at all.

Finally if your plan is to self host in the cloud, again this is doable but then you stray into needing to pay for a powerful enough remote computer/server, the bandwidth for all content to be served up (in addition to your existing home internet) and the potential risk of issues with privacy and even copyright infringement issues around the content you are serving. A self hosted device in your home is much more secure and private. A cloud hosted solution can be secure but youre always at risk of the host company snooping your data or having to enforce copyright laws.

Edit: the other thing to consider ia an FTP server. If you just want to share the files, its very simple to set up. What Jellyfin and Plex offer is convenience by having a nice library to organise things, and serving up the media. But direct play from a media server is not far off just downloading the file from an ftp server to your home device and playing it. But you can also download files from a Jellyfin server so I’d say its worth going the extra step and to use a dedicated media server over ftp.

In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.

You’re r absolutely right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its being used to its best or not. You can also have the most expensive top end dedicated ERP in the world and still be a total mess. Similarly business used to run on pen and paper and could be highly efficient.

Software is just a tool, and organisation go wrong when they think it alone is the solution to their problems.

Also I doubt Health NZ overspend has anything whatsoever to do with excel. Instead it’ll be due to rising demand, and inflationary pressures on public finances. We have the exact problems here in the UK with the NHS just scaled up to a £182bn.

One thing Phil Spencer does not seem to care about is emulation. There are already Xbox and PlayStation emulators that allow access to more of both platforms back catalogues than any of the current generation consoles are capable of…

Xbox could build cloud based emulators off the open source tools already available and make their entire Xbox back catalogue accessible to current users to stream. They could help improve the tools to ensure greater and greater compatibility for titles and then it would be there forever.

The reason it doesn’t happen is money. They dont see money in game preservation so they dont bother beyond a few big name nostalgia hits. Muse AI isn’t about game preservation, its about game development - they’re just pissing around with game preservation to feed it content as a punt on the future for it somehow making game development cheaper.

AI can make Shakespeare BETTER! Like it can put it in modern text speak, and shorten it down to fit in a 30 second tiktok, plus give space for ad breaks and temu product placement. AI will help enhance user engagement with Shakespeare and also leverage new monetisation options and cross platform synergies.

All we have to do is let people copyright AI made content because ultimately it wasn’t Shakespeare that did the hard work, it was the AI tech Bros who transformed it into a modern content meme and raised 3rd quarter profits for everyone!

Yeah, instead game preservation is being solved by abandonware and copyright infringement.

Legal open source software is doing the heavy lifting, and then torrenting is sharing by he files. But there is a huge risk as there is no safety net to preserve the niche and unpopular games.

The game publishers and broken copyright laws are blocks to preservation but fortunately people are just doing it anyway. And the more the big companies push against it (including targeting emulation systems for current systems) the more they push it underground and out of any control they might have had. Typical greed and stupidity.

The article totally misses the big intervening step between Skyrim/old Bioware and the failure of Starfield/Dragon Age: CDProjectRED.

While those studios largely just made “more of the same”, CDPR made Witcher 3 and then Cyberpunk 2077. Both games are way better narrative experiences and pushed RPG forward. Starfield looks very dated in comparison to both, and Dragon Age failed to capture to magic. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 are successes because they also bring strong narratives and emotional connections to the stories.

Starfield would have been huge if it had been released soon after Skyrim. But now it just looks old fashioned, and I think the “wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle” analogy is good for Starfield. Meanwhile Witcher 3 - which is 10 years old! - has quests and storylines with choices and emotional impact. BG3 and KC:D2 are heirs to Witcher 3.

Most services are forced to carry DRM only versions of Ebooks by the book publishers. But there are ways of legally removing the DRM - it’s a faff but doable. I buy epubs and don’t use Kindle (haven’t for a long time) as it’s much harder to remove the DRM and actually own your books.

But way I look at it - if I bought the Kindle version of a book, I can just download a DRM free version by sailing the seas. Fuck Amazon.

Yeah took them years to recognise the value in FiveM. At first they trued banning its makers, even sending private investigators after one, and accused it of being a tool to facilitate piracy. Then they changed the rules to allow non commercial mods online in 2022, and finally bought the makers in 2023.

I still find it a bit bizarre they’re not launching on PC at the same time as the consoles. Its the PC landscape where all the modding comes from, and PC is the single biggest gaming platform. But in fairness simultaneous launches are risky, and PC launches are more complex in terms of the breadth of hardware that needs supporting. But it’ll be PC that facilitates the most user generated content.

Genuinely not had a problem with mods, and I’ve been PC gaming for decades. Of course sometimes mods don’t work but thats life. Just be patient, you’ll get it done.

Decent mods have a readme file - follow the steps strictly - no skipping thinking you know better - and they should work.

Also look on YouTube or search online for guides - people often provide step by step guides to mod games purely out of a love for gaming.

Keep going - mods can be great, and its one of the many benefits of PC gaming. You’ll get there!

Paywalled, archived version: https://archive.is/M7hHZ

Its worth saying a GPU dock is just an eGPU. Often they use mobile GPUs and will make something more streamlined or portable. They often include a USB hub.

Most eGPU chassis are the same tech but often larger so you can install a larger desktop gpu, and have more space for cooling and even a dedicated PSU.

GPU docks have their own usefulness but you are likely to get more performance for the price by getting your own chassis and card, but less mobility and more bulky.

There are plenty of chassis available if you go looking. Some haven’t been updated to newer models but remain available.

A chassis is fairly simple - its basically a bit of mother board with pcie and a thunderbolt 3+ connection. Thunderbolt 3 remains powerful enough for most uses, and ones with dedicated PSU will work with newer cards. I think the lack of new products reflects the lack of needing to change the products at the moment.

I haven’t seen much about thunderbolt 4 reducing the overhead. It might do, but there are fundamental constraints in these devices as this is basically converting pcie to thunderbolt and transferring over a distance - thats not going to ever match a direct pcie connection into a motherboard no matter how fast Thunderbolt 4 or 5 are. Thunderbolt 3 may not be the main bottleneck.

The Razer Core X is still available for example. And there are loads of smaller companies woth offerings.

I think just the highest end cards would be out of reach for the popular existing chassis but there is not going to be much market for pairing cards costing 1000s with a laptop when you are far better getting a desktop. So there may not be the market to make lots of new thunderbolt 4 chassis with PSUs.

The most important consideration is your laptops ports and it’s cpu. You will need Thunderbolt 3, 4 or 5 or USB 4 to get high enough transfer speeds and bandwidth between your eGPU and the laptop. You also need a decent CPU to get the full benefits - an eGPU paired with an old or low powered CPU may mean you dont get the full benefits of the eGPU as your CPU is still a bottleneck in running the software or games that would make use of the eGPU.

Then the eGPU chassis you choose will have specific limitations in terms of size of card that will fit. You need to check these carefully to ensure the chassis can fit and support the card you want. The bigger and better the chassis the more expensive it will be. Were talking a couple of hundred pounds / dollars on top of the card price.

But in theory there isn’t a limit on the cards you can use. Any GPUs that fits the chassis would work as its a standard pcie slot. However i would contend that if you want to use a top end card like a 5090 youre better off getting an actual PC to enjoy the full performance. If youre spending 1000s on a GPU it should be paired with a high end laptop or far better in an actual desktop to get the benefit. You also need to ensure the chassis can provide enough power to the card you want.

You lose about 10-15% of the cards functionality in the overhead of the eGPU. Thats because as fast as thunderbolt and usb4 are, you are transfering that to/from a pcie slot in the eGPU chassis and also transferring data over an distance via a cable compared to a gpu plugged directly into pcie on a motherboard for a PC, with direct connection to the CPU and rest of the motherboard. Newer thunderbolt and newer chassis might have lower overheads but they will never be able to completely match direct plug into a motherboard.

So yes eGPUs work, if your device can support it, and you can get big performance boosts. There isn’t a limit on the GPU but you should probably not go too high end as you’d be wasting money. A low end GPU would likely out perform any integrated card or graphics for most laptops and a mid range card would likely give excellent performance if paired with a decent specced laptop. But any eGPU set up cannot match the Max performance of the card in a dedicated desktop set up.

Edit: I know you have a surface but in case others read this and have a Mac - eGPUs wont work with Apples M1/M2 CPU chips. There is no way around this. AMD and Intel chips do although newer is better.

This story has lots more to run. Trump is giving them a 90 day reprieve but hes going to try and extract something from them.

I suspect he will still try and get them to sell to one of his cronies. And bytedance won’t do that.

There is no way TikTok will be sold - China won’t allow it, and it’s also technically likely nigh on impossible to just sell the “American” portion of it.

TikTok is a multinational success and highly profitable, so ByteDance aren’t going to sell it just to keep it going in the US for the benefit of Americans. They of course don’t want to shut it down as it’s hugely financially successful in the US, but a ban is the lesser evil for the company.

But it’s all nonsense anyway - Trump wants to “do a deal” over this; I doubt he’ll get anything meaningful from China but he will blowhard about some bullshit to save face and TikTok will continue, even if there is a short ban before his inauguration.

It’s already not art and just mass market commercial products.

Let’s be honest, the companies allowed inclusion of the DEI and social/political commentary because they didn’t think it mattered not becuase they actually care about such issues. Now they think it might affect the bottom line they don’t want their devs doing it anymore. But they were hardly marketing and selling games based on this stuff.

It is but it’s also better for consumers.

Google dominates search by bundling lots of services in one place and destroying all competition. They want you tied in to all their services and to never leave. You ar ethe product and they want to sell every bit of data they can and sell you to advertisers.

The tech giants keep abusing market dominance to dominate new markets. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with windiws and destroyed the browser market. Then Google search sites and android aggressively pushes Chrome and now dominates the browser market. Microsoft bundles Teams in Office and destroys Slack; one of many egrarious actions by Microsoft over the years. Apple forces all browsers on iOS to use Safari - so you can’t bypass the Apple app and service marketplace - their 30% cut is too important.

Regulation is needed to break up the domination of these tech monopploes. By separating navigation from search, people get back in the habit of using other services for navigation results.

That might be Google maps, or that might be Bing maps or OpenStreetMaps. But Google can’t use bundling to make consumers too lazy to leave.

It’s a start. A minimal inconvenience for users benefits everyone longer term.