With 4K displays having failed (so far) to displace 1080p, Samsung has now revealed their 8K displays

I love c|net's headline for this story: "Hello, 8K displays: TV's next must-have feature isn't really a must-have."

The article that accompanies that bit of pith is almost as pithy:

Remember when every consumer electronics company hyped 3D TV as the next big feature? Or started pushing curved TVs? Yeah, I barely do, either.

That's because those supposedly hot TV features eventually faded away.

The latest TV "must have" that you actually don't really need -- at least right now -- has arrived at the IFA electronics show in Berlin. That's 8K, the super-crisp display technology that has four times the resolution of 4K screens. (I know, the math confuses me too.)

[...]

It's the latest "next big feature" from an industry that has hyped advancements with dubious value. It may be a long time -- if ever -- before you'll even consider one. Experts say you'll have to sit really close to the screen, even with huge 85-inch TVs like the Samsung, to notice a difference in the sharpness, and there isn't even content you can watch on it. Also, you can bet these initial TVs won't be cheap. As CNET TV expert David Katzmaier noted in his initial thoughts about Samsung's new TV, "all those pixels might be so much overkill."

[One might say exactly the same thing about 4K, too, but I digress.]

But people tend to hold on to their TVs much longer than their phones. The push to get 8K into the market -- when 4K is just starting to become a thing -- underscores the industry's desire to give consumers a reason to upgrade and pay more for a premium product.

I'm going to disagree with c|net on one point: 4K hasn't started to become a thing, yet, either. You don't need 4K, for which there's basically no content available, and you definitely don't need 8K, for which there's nothing.

The Steam Play experience

The adventure continues...

Yesterday, I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu, with the intention of gaming on Linux using Steam Play + Proton. Today, having installed a couple of dozen games to use as test cases, I finally booted up Path of Exile for the first time.

PoE is not a Linux game, and Grinding Gear Games does not provide any support for Linux. This means that I have to rely entirely on Valve's new Proton addition to Steam Play to run the game (well, I could try to run it myself independently, using Wine, but since Proton is Wine, it amounts to the same thing). And so, I booted up the game for the first time.... and it crashed the OS.

On Windows, this would mean ten minutes of downtime; on Linux, however, reboots take seconds, and are just no big deal. So, I booted it up again, dove into Steam, and restarted PoE... and it crashed again.

This time, though, only the game crashed; and, afterwards, Steam asked if I'd like to try booting the game in DX9 mode, rather than DX11. And so, figuring third time lucky, I said yes, and re-restarted the game... and it worked!

In fact, the login process was working better that it had been working on Windows, lately. I'm not sure why, but PoE on Windows 7 had been failing to open instances for the first two login attempts, every time the game was started, needing at least three tries to actually start the game. On Linux, once I managed to get the game to load, it started first on the try. Excelsior!

Finally taking the plunge...

I was perusing my past posts, and realized that it was April of 2016 when I first mentioned planning to migrate to Linux. By September of last year, I had bought a 2nd hard drive, with vague plans of dual-booting. Only one thing stood in my way: my gaming habit, and the fact that most of the games I was interested in simply didn't run natively on Linux. Worse, getting to run games on Linux using Wine looked really... complicated.

I had high hopes for SteamOS, which seemed to pair well with the new Vulkan API and a growing trend in cross-platform development to make more Linux-compatible games a possibility. But Valve seemed to be letting the SteamOS initiative wither on the vine, which left me using Windows 7, facing end of service in a year and a half with an extra hard drive still in its packaging, and wondering if Linux was really the OS that a lifelong PC gamer like me needed.

All that changed last week, though, when Valve announced Proton, a Wine implementation that they'd built into the Linux Steam client, adding 1000 certified Linux-compatible games to Steam in a week -- and making all of the other games on the service Linux-installable at the same time.

Suddenly, installing any game on Linux that I wanted to play was a doddle, and the main reason for my procrastination was gone. Here I was, with two weeks' vacation ahead of me, every reason to switch operating systems, and no excuses left

Reminder: Net Neutrality matters

For people who might be thinking that Net Neutrality is an abstract, purely theoretical thing that will never impact them directly, we now have a very stark demonstration of exactly why and how it can become a matter of life and death.

From arstechnica:

A fire department whose data was throttled by Verizon Wireless while it was fighting California's largest-ever wildfire has rejected Verizon's claim that the throttling was just a customer service error and "has nothing to do with net neutrality."

[...]

Verizon yesterday acknowledged that it shouldn't have continued throttling Santa Clara County Fire Department's "unlimited" data service while the department was battling the Mendocino Complex Fire. Verizon said the department had chosen an unlimited data plan that gets throttled to speeds of 200kbps or 600kbps after using 25GB a month but that Verizon failed to follow its policy of "remov[ing] data speed restrictions when contacted in emergency situations."

"This was a customer support mistake" and not a net neutrality issue, Verizon said.

Santa Clara County disputed Verizon's characterization of the problem in a press release last night. "Verizon's throttling has everything to do with net neutrality—it shows that the ISPs will act in their economic interests, even at the expense of public safety," County Counsel James Williams said on behalf of the county and fire department. "That is exactly what the Trump Administration's repeal of net neutrality allows and encourages."

I haven't any reports linking Verizon's greed directly to any injuries or deaths, but it's not hard at all to imagine a number of ways that this could have gone horribly, horribly wrong:

The throttling affected a device on a fire department vehicle that is "deployed to large incidents as a command and control resource" and is used to "track, organize, and prioritize routing of resources from around the state and country to the sites where they are most needed," Fire Chief Anthony Bowden wrote in a court declaration. Internet access is crucial "for events like large fires which require the rapid deployment and organization of thousands of personnel and hundreds of fire engines, aircraft, and bulldozers," he wrote.

Worse yet? Verizon didn't end the throttling until "after County Fire subscribed to a new, more expensive plan." And that, folks, is some serious corporate bullshit. Seriously, fuck Verizon.

The next time you head to the polls, take the time to learn about the Net Neutrality stances of the candidates that will be on that ballot. Picking the right one might literally save lives.

FCK DRM

Some days, I really, really love the team at CD Projekt:



Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

OK, they actually do have a little more to say on the subject:

Why should you care about DRM?

Because there is a killswitch built into your games. Sure, DRM might not affect you right now, but corporations hold the key and they'll only let you in as long as you can repeatedly prove ownership. As long as you're connected to the internet. As long as their DRM works without fault. As long they're still around.

So should the burden of proof be on you? Do you place your trust in someone who doesn't trust you?

There's a little bit more on the site, so click through if you're interested, and share freely with those who don't seem to get it when you tell them DRM is bad.

Amazon's Twitch streamers are revolting

I mentioned yesterday, more or less in passing, that Amazon had announced that they were eliminating the ad-free Twitch streaming benefit from the basic tier of Twitch Prime, basically at the same time that Valve were confirming that they would be launching their own streaming service, Stream.tv, in the near future. It seemed like a truly bone-headed move, even at the time, but I was mainly focused on the possibility that the move would leave Twitch vulnerable to competitors in a way that it hadn't been, up until now.

What I didn't take into account was the reaction from Twitch's current user and content creator community. And, oh boy! are they ever double-plus-unhappy about this:

Compared to other online ads, Twitch ads are relatively unobtrusive. But they’re still obnoxious as hell. You tune in to watch your favourite streamer, and then the same 10-second ad plays three times in a row. Unfortunately, Twitch announced yesterday that Twitch Prime will no longer offer an ad-free viewing experience. [...] Twitch justified the decision by saying that this will “strengthen and expand that advertising opportunity for creators so they can get more support from their viewers for doing what they love.” So basically, more money for streamers.

Many streamers take issue with that stance, though, given that they were previously told that they’d still pinch pennies from Prime viewers as though those viewers had watched ads — even when they hadn’t.

“Partners don’t see any direct benefit from the Twitch Prime ad-free removal,” Justin Wong, formerly a Twitch VP of six years, said on Twitter. “There are possibly indirect benefits depending on whether viewers will subscribe to avoid ads. In other words, the ‘benefiting creators’ shtick is BS.”

Some streamers are turning off ads on their streams, while others (who don't have access to that function) are telling their viewers to ad-block. The only other online content creator I can think of who is cool with ad-blocking is Jim Sterling, whose YouTube vids are ever ad-enabled (he supports his channel via Patreon, instead); for content creators to be turning off ads and encouraging ad-blocking on their own content is almost unheard of.

I'm beginning to think that Amazon may have really stepped in it, this time.

Kotaku's article has a lot more detail - it's a little inside baseball, unless you're fascinated by the business models of Twitch streamers, but if you are it's well worth reading.

Updated Steam Play makes every game Linux compatible, paving the way for SteamOS 3.0... and that's just for starters...

Valve Software have a history of "running silent" - they'll make little or not noise, saying almost nothing publicly about what they're working on, only to pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, and make all kinds of news. Their critics (and some of their fans) often find this to be a source of frustration; Valve simply don't fit the mold of most other big players in the video game business, mainly because they're not a publicly traded company, and thus don't have to be unceasingly communicating to their investors, and potential investors. Some days, Valve's silent running mode works against them.

Today was not such a day.

From PCGamesN:

Steam Play – Valve’s name for its cross-platform initiative – is getting a major update, with built-in tools allowing you to run Windows games on Linux. [...] In the most practical terms, this means you can now download and install Windows games directly from the Steam client without any further fuss. Valve is currently checking “the entire Steam catalog” and whitelisting games that run without issue, but you can turn off those guidelines and install whatever you want, too.

[...]

In theory, this should eventually allow nearly the entire Steam catalogue to run on Linux, though it’s possible certain types of DRM and anti-cheat measures could keep that compatibility from happening. [...] Valve’s own SteamOS is built on Linux, and as we speculated when hints of this update surface last week, this could be part of a renewed push for the platform. There are rumblings around the internet about SteamOS 3.0 being on the way, even after Valve removed Steam Machines from the Steam store. At the same time, Valve reiterated its support of Linux and Vulkan for PC gaming – and this update marks a major confirmation of that support.

Combined with the Vulkan API and an industry-wide trend towards cross-platform development, the fact that Valve is about to make the entire Steam library compatible with Linux will be game-changing. Valve's Steam Machine initiative failed to launch because there were too few SteamOS-compatible games to convince people to switch operating systems, and too few people using SteamOS and Linux to make Linux game development worthwhile.

But Linux is about to become a viable gaming platform, virtually overnight, which means that game developers don't have to maintain a separate Linux version of their games anymore, and Linux gamers can play the largest single library of PC games on their own machines with no additional work required. This is great news for any gamer who had been dragging their feet about switching to Linux. Valve just made it easy.

And that's not the only news that Valve made this week.

A sign of the smartphone times

Having recently switched cell service providers, and having thus spent time also picking a new phone, I was really struck by this Vice/Motherboard article when I came across it:

Thursday, at a flashy event in New York, Samsung unveiled yet another phone: the Galaxy Note 9. Like you’d expect, it’s rectangular, it has a screen, and it has a few cameras. While unveiling what it hopes will be the next hit, it unknowingly confirmed something we’ve all been wondering: the smartphone industry is out of ideas.

Phones are officially boring: the only topic that’s up for debate with the Galaxy Note 9 is the lack of the iconic notch found on the iPhone X, and that it has a headphone jack. The notch has been cloned by almost every phone maker out there, and the headphone jack is a commodity that’s unfortunately dying. However, the fact that we’re comparing phones with or without a chunk out of the screen or a hole for your headphones demonstrates just how stuck the industry is.

It’s clear that there’s nothing really to see here. Yeah, the Note is a big phone, and it has a larger battery too. It’s in different colors, it’s faster than last year, and it has wireless charging. Everything you see here is from a laundry list of features that other smartphone manufacturers also have, and the lack of differentiation becomes clearer every year. It’s the pinnacle of technology, and it’s a snooze-fest. 

Yeah... did I mention already that Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore? I think I might have.

This isn’t exclusively a Samsung problem: Every manufacturer from Apple to Xiaomi faces the same predicament. [...] As smartphones pushed the boundaries and iterated at breakneck pace over the last decade, they’ve quickly run into limitations governed by the laws of physics: A phone can only get so thin or light, and the year-to-year speed and battery upgrades are becoming less-and-less impressive. There’s only so many millimeters you can shave off, and megapixels to cram into the camera, before it’s good enough for most people and nobody cares anymore.

This is what the end of Moore's Law means. Smartphones were able to get smaller because smartphone makers were still learning how to pack all of those components into the smallest space possible, but there are limits to that which we've apparently reached. The race to smallness has yielded benefits for laptops and desktops, also, but microchips simply aren't increasing in power anymore, which means that this year's new tech is... more or less identical to last year's tech. Which is identical to the year's before that, and the year's before that, and the year's before that...

You get the idea.

It was only a matter of time before people started to notice that technology wasn't actually changing anymore. The exponential growth of computing power has been such a driver of change in our daily lives for a long time now, and we're still coming to terms with exactly what that means, but it looks like we're going to get that time now... before technology leaps forward again, leaving us panting in its cold, impersonal wake.

Seeing what they want to see

I know that I've previously said that I was done writing about Windows 10's struggles to take usage share away from Windows 7, and I really don't intend to go back to staring at NetMarketShare's usage graphs every month, but I couldn't help commenting on the commenters this time around.

For the record, this is the graph that we're all talking about, this time around:

And now, the hot takes. First up is betanews:

NetMarketShare reports on the state of the desktop operating system market on the first day of each month. Usually at least. It spent a few days auditing June’s figures last month, which caused a bit of a delay.

There’s no such lag for July’s figures though, which arrive on time and show Windows 10 continuing to cut into Windows 7's dominance. [...] If things continue like this, there’s every chance that Windows 10 will overtake Windows 7 by November.

And then, a second opinion, from WCCFTech:

The latest numbers tracking Windows 10 growth rate are out today, revealing that Windows 7 has lost 0.51% market share over the past month. Marking exactly three years since Microsoft introduced its latest Windows 10 to the world, these stats show that the operating system still has some work to do to stop the dominance of Windows 7.

The July numbers reveal that Windows 10 went up from 35.71 percent to 36.58 percent, which is an increase of 0.87 percentage points. [...] In comparison, Windows 7 went down to 41.23 percent, losing 0.51 percent. This places Windows 7 a little less than 5 percent ahead of Windows 10, which means at least an additional four to six months before the newest Windows OS version gets over Windows 7.

For the record, this is not the first year that Betanews has predicted that Windows 10 (WX) would pass Windows 7 (W7) by November.