UltraMega

Totally agree that other companies like yelp can be just as scummy, but yelp doesn't control search, and yelp is just one of at least half a dozen other places to find business listings and reviews so they would normally have to compete in the market. Google doesn't have to compete because they control the very platform that the vast majority of the market all this online advertising exists on. It would be like if one grocery store chain owned 90% of the market and then started charging insane prices to the food distributors just to have their food in stores, and still competed with their own store brand options but also made the store brand easier to buy than the alternatives.

Pro tip: the dogs are blind, so they won't attack you if you don't make any noise.

Stalker 2 is out! So far, the game is a lot of fun, but there are some performance issues for sure. Essentially, no CPU can hold a steady 60FPS 100% of the time, but CPUs like the 7800X3D get pretty close. There are some towns in the game that are heavily populated with NPCs that will cause frame dips on any system, but these areas are not typically places you will be in combat so it's not a huge issue. With a powerful CPU, you can stay pretty close to a steady 60FPS in combat area most of the time, though frequent short dips are going to happen on all but the most powerful CPUs. On my system (5800X/7900XT) the FPS is a mostly steady 60FPS in combat areas with somewhat frequent dips into the 50s. Lowering settings doesn't really do much, so I'm playing on a mix of mostly epic setting with a few things set to high and 66% resolution scaling with TSR upscaling to 4K. It looks pretty good at these settings and TSR has come a long way, though anyone with an Nvidia card will surely want to use DLSS instead. I might give a 30FPS cap a try and crank up the resolution as much as possible at some point. Apparently motion blur is broken at 30FPS but it can be forced in the .ini file. Given the level of visuals in this game, 30FPS might not be so bad. Halo was 30FPS until Halo 5. That said, the game looks fantastic. The asset quality is not quite as high as something like Hellblade 2, but it being a UE5 open world game that uses nanite and lumen, it's pretty impressive. The combat is good, very reminiscent of the first games but without feeling dated. The high level visuals and audio definitely add to the immersion level. The game is very dark. There is a black level setting in the game that defaults to "-4" (for me at least) and increasing it to "0" actually makes the image darker. I thought increasing it would make it brighter, and I set it to "0" at first and ended up playing the first hour or so with the game darker than it's supposed to be. Anyone with a high end rig should check this game out. Don't expect perfectly smooth performance unless you have a 7800X3D/9800X3D and even then there will be some dips in populated areas, but it's pushing the limits hard enough to justify the dips to some extent. One thing to keep in mind is this game is very CPU limited so you might as well turn up the graphics settings because you're going to get dips either way. Using V-sync or an FPS cap is an absolute must for this game as well. STALKER 2 Benchmarks & PC Performance Analysis WWW.DSOGAMING.COM Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it's time now to benchmark STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl and examine its performance on the PC.

Hard to imagine anyone with eyes and ears could see Google as "simply doing it's job". As a small business owner, I can tell you with certainty that Google has killed a ton of small businesses and hurt consumers greatly in the process by dominating search and charging for ads. They control the platform in which people use to find goods and services, and they set the prices for business to be able to reach customers. A business with 100+ 5 star ratings will show up after a business with a bad rank if the latter is paying more for ads. Google has turned local businesses into a pay to win model, and that's just one aspect of their business. Everything they do is anti-consumer. They corner a market and then they surround it with pay walls. Google has been around for so long and evolved with the internet in such lock step that I don't think many of us fully realize how much damage Google has done. We have never seen what a mature online landscape that wasn't dominated by Google would look like, so we are not totally aware of what we're missing.

Yes, I agree it seems unlike... except that the DOJ is saying it may push the sell off of Android if Google can't stop being anti-consumer, and if there is one thing that true above all else about Google it's that it's an anti-consumer business. I doubt that Google will be able to avoid further scrutiny. Of course this all assumes Trump doesn't just shut this all down and let Google go back to doing whatever it wants, which is probably what will happen. Maybe the next administration will pick this back up.

4 threads like this at one time is a bit much, makes the site look like it's being spammed. Just a suggestion. You do it however you want but you're knocking user made threads out of the latest threads list and replacing them with spam. I don't think that's going to help here. One thread titled "Black Friday Deals" would probably fit better here.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/google-must-sell-chrome-to-restore-competition-in-online-search-doj-says/ar-AA1uvJma?PC=EMMX01 DOJ is pretty serious. Hopefully that carries forward into the next administration. Android would be so much better without google.

Stalker 2 is great. It's pretty demanding, but a lot of fun.

All these deals your posting should be in a single thread.

It definitely seems possible, but I can't find any evidence that "Smartphone Magazine" is a real source. The article says that Smartphone Magazine is a "tech website" and not an actual magazine in 2024, but I can't find any evidence that it actually exists online.

Just to clarify, Microsoft doesn't own the studio making Stalker 2, they just have a timed exclusiveity deal. Not that you were saying it was a Microsoft owned studio but I think there is some general confusion for some. Msfs2024 was a total mess yesterday. Couldn't play until real late at night when the servers weren't overloaded. Hoping Stalker 2 will have a smoother launch! Launch Trailer:

I think Stalker 2 is going to deliver. I haven't been this excited for a game in a while. 4K: "I didn't ask for this" https://open.spotify.com/track/0lrCqVZRUsryeaFxiR5YX5?si=ce2cd07ad15840e8 Both out in the next 48 hours.

^I've posted this before, but added to it. Don't play if you don't at least a 10 inch 150w~ subwoofer.

After cutting 2,500 jobs in under one year, Phil Spencer says he feels good about the industry and that "the Xbox business has never been more healthy" | GamesRadar+ With MSFS2024 and Stalker 2 about to launch on game pass, and Black Ops 6 having just launched, it's an interesting time to take a look at how well Xbox is doing. On Steam's Top Selling list Microsoft games make up 5 out of the ten top selling games. Perhaps Xbox is doing well at the moment.

Valve recently released a documentary about Half Life 2 for the game's 20th anniversary. At the end of the video, they go over so details about the work they had done for Episode 3. Timestampped:

Why do you think this? 1000 full 4K images would be about 12GBs of storage. I'd think a 2TB NVMe drive could easily last a very long time for all of the server's needs. Redundancy is easy to solve. Just setup a 2 drive RAID or clone the drive once a month or so. Considering the state of things here, that should easily be enough. As for services, I don't know any specifics but I don't think there is anything that can't be done locally unless it's for analytics or something like that. Maintenance on a single server just hosting a website should be very minimal I would think. I would be willing to contribute some hardware/cost towards a server that could host this site locally for someone at the very least.

Yea I mean, if the site grew it could be moved back to a more scalable environment later on.

I understand server hosts charge a lot for storage. But if someone here built a server, storage would be a non-issue.

https://www.techspot.com/news/105584-nvidia-arm-based-apu-could-offer-rtx-4070.html Will be interesting to see what happens with this.

Just an additional thought about this: I don't really know anything about the cost of running a site like this so forgive me if this is totally out of touch. IIRC, I think you had mentioned @ENTERPRISE that the cost per month is something like $300. Are there ways to bring that cost down significantly? Maybe there are features the site doesn't really need until/unless the user base were larger that could be dropped? Could there be a situation where the site is stripped down as much as is reasonably possible without destroying the core functionality to reduce the cost, and thus give you more time/flexibility in finding a new owner? Or if the per month cost were significantly less, you could potentially let someone here take over the management and monthly cost sort of indefinitely while you remain the owner for as long as it takes to sell the site, or figure out a way to transition it without shutting it down? If the monthly cost were much less, I could potentially even afford to essentially keep the lights on while you/we figure out what to do next. What is to stop you/us from building a server ourselves and just hosting the site on that? Wouldn't really need that much bandwidth for something like this, right? Heck, I could setup a server and host the site from my standard comcast home plan without any issues I'd think. Then all we would need is someone who knows how to move the site over to that server, which I don't know anything about but I'd imagine a lot of people here do. So is there any reason someone here couldn't setup a server and host the site from there?

Side note, this is a pretty interesting video on one of Ubisofts larger controversies. It does a good job breaking down what went right and wrong with what was perhaps Ubisofts first big flounder. It's interesting in particular because WD1 was Ubisoft's best selling game ever at the time, and it was actually a great game that was overshadowed by the E3 demo issues, which themselves were a result of not having final dev hardware from Sony for the ps4. I personally really enjoyed WD1. The plot was a breath of fresh air in that it was dark and gritty with no happy ending. The protagonist wasn't a good guy, he was a guy fully focused on revenge to the detriment of any personal relationships he had in his life. The plot felt a lot deeper and more realized than any other Ubisoft game I can think of. WD1 is one game I would actually really like to see get a remaster. In this age of remasters it would be awesome to see a game that was supposed to have better visuals at launch get the remaster treatment.

I hadn't looked at Rocksmith+ before. That actually looks really cool. More learning should be gamified.

Oh yea, I'm sure that will be huge among those who played wow. IDK about winner of game launches this year though. Stalker 2 is looking like it might take that crown. Really looking forward to that game. One game that looks like it really got all the time and attention it deserves.

Ubisoft has had a lot of games that didn't meet general expectations, and the expectations are never that high. I can't think of any games that were major flops except for Skull and Bones, and a lot of lots of mini flops to go with it. Some of the more recent ones: Ghost Recon Breakpoint Far Cry 6 Watch Dogs Legion Skull and Bones Star Wars Outlaws

What are ur specs?