Recent content by Mercutio

I have a milestone birthday in a month-ish. The plan was originally to spend a week in Jamaica or Cancun, but my partner forgot to renew her passport and my best friend can't get away from her job for more than a three day weekend anyway. So we're now talking about New Orleans, where even the...

I don't know if anyone caught this, but AMD has started calling mobile Ryzen 6000s "Ryzen 100 series" and mobile Ryzen 4000/5000 series Ryzen 10s. There's no change in the actual hardware. They're just naming them differently to match their high end branding. Thanks, guys.

I'm still trying to figure it out. I think the Xbox brand will still exist for software and maybe input devices. It sounds like Microsoft doesn't want to be in the console business. Maybe it'll be branding on Asus or Dell PCs? Just not a dedicated-function gaming device.

Apparently the next Xbox will just be a PC. It will have access to the full Windows desktop and compatibility with all Windows desktop software, meaning that it can run Steam et al. They're framing it as "compatible with Playstation-exclusive games" by which they mean that it'll run Playstation...

I think the next step in the decline is when the dollar stops being the currency of global finance. I think it will happen during Trump's turn and it truly will be the end of American global power.

Apparently the big news now is that Microsoft is expecting its gaming projects to hit 30% profit margins, which is somewhat unprecedented by past performance and on top of that, with the acquisition of Activision, there's no longer a non-Microsoft gaming company big enough to buy the Xbox brand...

For what it's worth, there have been supported Microsoft OS releases on ARM since Windows 8. They might not be well supported and they certainly didn't have the massive engineering push that came with the new Snapdragon Elitewhatever, but the Thinkpad x13s pre-dates the "PC-spec" SoCs by a...

A happier thought for just a moment: If Trump is allowed to run in 2028, the Democrats could potentially nominate Obama. He's not History's Greatest President by any stretch of the imagination, but we can remember a time when a sane and competent administrator (who isn't kissing 80 years old)...

Backblaze data seems to suggest that the bathtub curve for drive replacement is getting wider. Big drives really do seem to be lasting longer than old ones did. The article links to the most recent Backblaze data dump if anyone needs to see it, but the important detail is that they're still...

I know that Marine tablets are a thing. I've been out on Lake Michigan and seen them in action, but I can't say for sure that it's not just a fancy case over a regular tablet.

Someone asked me this morning to remote in and connect his second monitor.

I went to protests on Saturday in Valparaiso, Indiana. There were around 1000 people there, which is about 950 more people than these things usually have when they're in Indiana. We had a bunch of idiots in "Roll Coal" trucks gun their engines or try to drown out our chants and I'd say support...

I'm also on the lookout for one of those things, just to satisfy my personal curiosity. I know one person who has an Asus Snapdragon X Elite something or other, but 80% of her job is just being in meetings and taking notes about meetings. I don't even think she knows the difference between what...

The application I support is still largely Visual Basic. We need to move our development to C# and two of my three developers are in their mid 60s, so I'm guessing modernization efforts are gonna have to wait for some meemaws to retire.

The Better Offline podcast has a 100-minute long interview with the guy from Gamer's Nexus today. There's a lot of discussion of non-public aspects of running an outlet dedicated to reviewing PC hardware.