It's an immense uphill struggle if you tried to get people to adjust to where transport is less available, and encourage living or working at closer ranges or conversely long range shipping/travel/vacations seen as more of a luxury. Just thinking about it I'm reminded of the outrage that was fabricated/stirred up over "15 minute cities" in the UK where the idea that you'd be able to get to most things you need day-to-day in a 15 minute walk was warped into a scare of state checkpoints, fines and surveillance. Or the retreat from working from home.
It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have established expectations, and it'll take a big force to change quickly, similar to covid even though that was short term in hindsight.
There was a similar path with Unreal3. The early games (2006) lighting looks quite harsh by modern standards, one of the highlights of Mirror's Edge (2008) was DICE using third party Illuminate's "beast" lighting, then Epic moved to "lightmass" around 2009 with the public UDK toolset.
I've seen a lot of gamers mention this, but I'd wonder why it hasn't happened yet especially as there's a set of gamers that seem to love centralizing on steam already. One massive downside I can see is that the various public social areas of steam like the game forums are already a cesspool (and have been since they were vBulletin based) and I don't see that improving with more users in near real-time chat.
Discord getting used as a knowledge base or download source for some areas is already seen as a convenience for those involved or a single point of failure by many 'outside', I wouldn't want to see more of PC gaming moving to one place.
One hypothetical I wonder about is what the windows ecosystem would be like if third parties could make distributions of windows, if somehow that could be licensed and enough windows building/packaging was opened up. It'd be interesting to see whether collaborations of projects would form where they pull out MS parts and substitute their own, presumably with the constraint that they maintain compatibility. I imagine it'd take a while for any commercial products thinking of getting involved to figure out sharing, trust, and how to offer it in a way companies or individuals might want to donate/pay for.
Windows file search has been useless as far back as I can remember. Especially file indexing and the load it puts on the CPU. I usually just disable file indexing on a new windows install.
Even if we do leave, it's unlikely that we do so for a very long time so taking care of the planet makes sense even if you intend to discard our crib. Similarly in the nearer term if we had a unified goal to colonize a near planet/moon that's still going to take a huge long term effort to do more than the equivalent of putting a tent up on an island off the coast to get that colony established (if it can ever be self-sufficient).
I think PC gaming has some advantage because it casts a huge net over a lot of factors: games big and small, lots of genres, lots of input types, ancient weak hardware to the latest extreme can all be viable, can be tinkered with, developers of all types can produce on it, shared with non-gaming usages. The only way I could see console claiming more of that is if it standardized something similar to a CD/DVD/BD player device, under a consortium and not 'owned' by a single company (or at least easier to license).
I also wonder about M.2 drives, mounted flat to the motherboard with what seems like lip-service to cooling. One of my bug-bears with PC design has been as heat/power demands increase it seems like there's a lack of incentive to do more than the bare minimum on coordination to drastically improve layout, the GPU daughterboard growing into a brick you need to mount and cool is another. I don't entirely blame them when shiny lights keep on selling.
Given the number of computers now it's practically a certainty. One of the big challenges with diagnosing non-ECC RAM is that you can't directly measure it so you're left trying to eliminate issues elsewhere first and measuring symptoms or stress testing to determine if RAM is the most likely failure, meanwhile the system literally can't remember correctly. And that's if you're actively looking to diagnose, as opposed to accepting some gremlin in the machine.
Assuming you can stay out of the way of other satellites I'd guess you think about density in a different way to building on Earth. From a brief look at the ISS thermal system it would seem the biggest challenge would be getting enough coolant and pumping equipment in orbit for a significant wattage of compute.
It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have established expectations, and it'll take a big force to change quickly, similar to covid even though that was short term in hindsight.
reply