The controller design/feel and the more seamless/intuitive online play & party handling kept me on the Xbox side of the fence for a looooooong time.
That said, if I didn’t have to re-buy a bunch of content I already own and if I could avoid playing against MnK players while I’m on controller, I’d have already switched over entirely to using my workstation to play all my games. New purchases for myself and my kids are 100% on Steam.
>and if I could avoid playing against MnK players while I’m on controller
If you can stand to move away from an Xbox controller (they're the only ones without gyro still) and learn gyro/flick stick, it levels the playing field a lot more. Flick stick's instant turns even give it some advantages over KB+M.
8BitDo's controllers are the best-supported on Steam at the moment, with gyro, analog triggers, and back buttons all fully working at the same time now in DInput mode. I use the Pro 2, but if you prefer Xbox layout, you may want one of their Ultimate controllers. Don't buy the ones that are licensed Xbox controllers as I believe they then don't have gyro. Many have the Nintendo button labels, but Steam has a toggle to use the Xbox layout.
I really hate UI button mismatch in steam. I grew up on PS controllers, I couldn't even tell you the xbox layout from memory. I was once forced to use a Switch controller (was traveling, forgot my main) while the in-screen UI was XBox. I had so much trouble at first, especially since the xbox and switch controllers share button names but even the "x" made me think of the playstation x. Just some musings.
Some games now put you in matchmaking pools based on input device, like Overwatch from a update a few months ago. In OW, you have a Controller pool and a Mouse and Keyboard pool. You confirm which device you want to use for gameplay and other inputs are disabled. Although I do think they don't let controller on pc play in comp.
I meant the other way. I would switch over to playing something like Destiny on Steam on my PC and just use the Windows Xbox app for joining chat parties with my friends, but if I am playing on PC using a Controller, I’m going to end up matched with a ton of cheaters and be in mixed MnK and controller lobbies. By continuing to play on Xbox I mostly avoid those issues, save for PlayStation players using a Cronus or Xim.
However, in writing this I’ve realized that this is really only a problem for me when playing Destiny and only when I’m playing PvP. As the player population continues to die and I move on to other games or mostly PvE content in Destiny, then I’m not going to care anymore and I can switch entirely over to PC.
On the one hand, that’s going to be pretty convenient. On the other, it’s kind of a sad realization as it marks the end of a very long era of console gaming for me stretching all the way back to the NES.
My son has a Switch, but other than that my kids have only ever known using a PC as a “console”. Their play room has a relatively compact PC (13th Gen. Intel CPU & ARC A770 dGPU) connected to a TV that just runs Steam and Batocera with 4x USB 8BitDo controllers attached.
By all appearances, until about the last year or so, I would look like an ideal customer demographic for Microsoft. I’ve purchased every single gaming platform they’ve ever produced, but I’m thiiiiiiiiis close to having migrated entirely away, and it wasn’t really a conscious decision. It just sort of happened a little bit at a time. :-/
> When I teach programming, some students, when stuck, will start flailing around - deleting random lines of code, changing call order, adding more functions, etc - and just hoping one of those things will “fix it” eventually.
That sounds like a lot of people I’ve known, except they weren’t students. More like “senior engineers”.
I often consider how many total human lifetimes must have been spent on nothing other than dealing with and/or mitigating something as seemingly banal as Python versioning & dependency management or line ending encoding snafus.
After all these years, I assume it must measure in the tens to hundreds of thousands?
It’s in those moments of consideration that I understand humanity hasn’t done a very good job grappling with its frailty and mortality. If we had, then we’d have a crowned a winner that didn’t subjugate us endlessly to the most vapid and Sisyphean aspects of programming. Python is a lesson in managing existential angst, which I now assume was the point of it from the very beginning.
The later PowerCenter Pro’s could run with a 60 MHz FSB whereas the PowerTower Pro’s were usually 45-50 MHz FSB. There are a variety of tasks where my PowerCenter Pro 240 outruns my PowerTower Pro 250 for precisely that reason.
Nah, the whole second-Earth, terraforming nonsense is pure rationalization for whatever they want to do. If they weren’t using that as a post hoc justification, they’d just land on something else.
Avoid UHC and that is mitigated significantly. I’ve never had a claim denied by BCBS.
I realize some people are stuck with UHC. I’d turn down a job unless it was perfect in every other way and paid extremely well if they only had UHC plans.
Do you think countries with even the most coveted universal healthcare just approve everything blindly?
Should everyone (anyone?) receive monoclonal antibodies, gene therapies, biologic medications? What criteria should be used to make these determinations?
> Do you think countries with even the most coveted universal healthcare just approve everything blindly?
Yes. Everything that they are trained and able to do here, is covered by the national insurance, at least where I live.
We never even have to explicitly ask them to approve anything, it's all automatic. You don't see the bill.
You might have to pay the difference for "nonessential upgrades", like a plastic cast instead of a normal one when you break your arm. Had to pay 5.00 EUR for that and it was the only time I had to pay out of pocket in my entire life.
> You might have to pay the difference for "nonessential upgrades"
This is exactly what happens in the US. It's just that in your case the nonessential upgrade is a $5 cast. Sometimes the nonessential upgrade is an expensive surgery. My grandfather had heart surgery at 86 shortly before he died. My relatives went to 3 surgeons who all refused to perform surgery on the grounds that he was too old and frail for the procedure. Then they went to a fourth who agreed to perform it. The first three doctors were right, and he died a few months later. The insurance company quite correctly denied the claim and my family ended up fighting them over a bill for open heart surgery north of $50,000.
Your government wouldn't (and shouldn't) have paid for that surgery either. I think the real difference is that since you have a government system, that in your country that unnecessary surgery just never would have happened in the first place. I will admit this is a more efficient system, but it is no different in that there is a cost benefit analysis being done over what gets paid for and what doesn't whether you see it happening or not.
The point is that there's a value judgment being made somewhere - who should be the arbiter and why?
Diagnostics aren't free, either: many (most?) countries do not have anything remotely resembling the private offerings that Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp provide (breadth of tests, 3+ different methodologies for some tests, etc.)
Everything? No.
But routine stuff will NEVER be denied. If your doctor thinks you need a scan, you're getting the scan.
I have quite literally NEVER heard of someone in my country (Australia) going bankrupt from medical bills. It can happen but the rate is so low it's not something anyone ever worries about happening to them.
Routine stuff is never denied in the US either. I've never had one thing denied ever and I even have a weird condition that requires expensive testing to diagnose and even more expensive treatment (narcolepsy). The insurance companies will throw up annoying bureaucracy like prior authorizations, and made me switch medication to generic when it came out (reasonable) and then back from the generic to another brand name when it came out (WTF??), but never actually a denial.
I had an MRI denied for a partial pectoral rupture. Which was a routine diagnostic as a precursor to open shoulder surgery to determine the extent and location of the rupture to figure out if surgery was absolutely necessary and to prep a viable surgical plan.
I had to fight the insurance company with the assistance of both my surgical and non-surgical sports medicine doctors.
The good news though appears to be that I imagined the entire thing, because denials for routine things never happen.
Gemini states that an ultrasound is just as good for diagnosis as an MRI and is much cheaper. Could it be that the denial was correct and the mistake was from your doctor ordering a less cost effective diagnostic test, not from the insurance company?
And from my personal experience with narcolepsy, AI is a much better doctor than most human doctors.
Odd that your experience would be so different from mine. I routinely experience denials.
To give an example, about 60 to 80% of the time, when I visit the dentist for a regular cleaning the charge is denied and I have to submit additional paperwork to convince them to pay it. I can't think of any more simple and basic procedure than that.
I have no idea why your experience with healthcare in the US is so much better, but I can assure you that there are many people whose experience is more like mine.
> Should everyone (anyone?) receive monoclonal antibodies, gene therapies, biologic medications? What criteria should be used to make these determinations?
Yes, if that's an indicated and effective treatment.
Do you think people should just be left to die if they can't pony up the dough in the hospital? Oh, your card's declined, no oncology ward for you?
That stinks. I'm sorry. The founders could have taken part of the proceeds to at least adjust your upside with a transaction bonus. It's pretty easy to do.
Erlang's BEAM, assuming no chicanery of NIFs, will use reduction counting to eventually yield a scheduler to make sure other Erlang processes get execution time. This gives you kind of a "will eventually happen" property. It can't guarantee meeting a deadline. Just that all things will be serviced at some point.
Right GRiSP has support for creating RTOS tasks in C, IIRC.
Within BEAM itself there’s no priority mechanism, however, on a RPi3 or BeagleBone you could get about an 200 uS average response time to GPIO on Linux, even under moderate load. The jitter was pretty low too, like 10-20 uS on average, but the 99.9% tail latencies could get up to hundreds of millis.
That’s fine for many use cases. Still I now prefer programming on esp32’s with Nim for anything realtime. Imperative programming just makes handling arrays easier. Just wish FreeRTOS tasks had error handling akin to OTP supervisors.
Now Beam/Elixir would be amazing for something like HomeAssistant or large networked control systems.
Just a reminder that commonly "real-time" on stuff like VxWorks isn't hard realtime either. You test a bunch of scenarios, put in some execution CPU head-room you are comfortable with, and call it a day. With enough head-room and some more (or less, if you have money and time) hand-waving, you can more or less guarantee that deadlines will be kept.
That said, if I didn’t have to re-buy a bunch of content I already own and if I could avoid playing against MnK players while I’m on controller, I’d have already switched over entirely to using my workstation to play all my games. New purchases for myself and my kids are 100% on Steam.
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