Not using it this way, but wanting to: a friend of mine is working on a TTRPG. He has items, powers, other things to track - and right now it's in a mess of a Word document.
It would be so much better if he could store these things in SQL - for non developers, they often use Excel, when a SQL DB is the correct solution, just because they can't figure out SQL at all. A visual editor/manager is perfect for them - create a table with columns, enter data, later integrate with other tools that can pull it out.
that's 51.2% of Americans with Hypertension, not 51.2% of Americans at large.
CDC says:
Percent of people using at least one prescription drug in the past 30 days: 49.9% (2017-March 2020)
Percent of people using three or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days: 24.7% (2017-March 2020)
Percent of persons using five or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days: 13.5% (2017-March 2020)
Source: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Published by: Health, United States. Table RxUse and NCHS Data Query System, Prescription Medication Use Tables One or more, Three or more, Five or more.
in ottawa, and most of ontario, they lay down so much road salt you would think they're trying to brine the pavement... it's disgusting, i wish we'd follow the leads of AB & BC.
Not true. You can turn off the wifi and the headset works fine.
The current problems sound like a server-side bug while it phones home. But usually it can work fine without internet.
Standalone just means the VR compute is happening on the headset itself, not on a console or gaming PC the headset is tethered to. Of course, most of the people disputing "standalone" already know that, they're just playing definitional games.
For what it's worth it does require a meta account, but not a Facebook one. I refused to buy one while it required a Facebook account since I deleted a couple of years ago. Once they made the change I figured that was an OK compromise. I just found out today during the outage that my headset won't work if I get signed out of my Meta account. That was an unpleasant realization, although I suppose it's partially my fault for trusting Meta not to hamstring the hardware their selling.
It's the equivalent of finding out that if Microsoft's auth servers go down no one with a Windows PC can use it since they can't authenticate. I'm fairly displeased.
I know they raised the price recently but it seemed pretty obvious to me they were selling these at a loss to try and get people locked in by the software.
Oh there are definitely people who avoid it because it's made by Meta. Maybe a bunch. On the other hand, it seems to be the most popular VR headset line by a wide margin.
It would be cool if Valve came out with a standalone headset, they're one of the few companies I can see that would be in a good position to do that: they already have a good amount of VR experience with one high-end headset + SteamVR APIs + a couple VR games, they have their own highly popular store/platform, they generally have a positive reputation with gamers, and they have a decent amount of hardware experience in general including the recent Steam Deck for mobile gaming hardware specifically.
And of course, a Valve headset would probably be significantly more open than the Quest. The Steam Deck has gotten some good reputation among more FOSS/hacker-oriented people for being fairly open: you can use it in a regular Linux desktop mode, you can install Windows (or presumably other OSes) on it, it's fairly repairable, etc. The default behavior is very console-like, but it's not very locked down if you don't want it to be. Best of both worlds, really.
A silly comparison. A standalone VR headset is more comparable to a smartphone or game console than a monitor or keyboard. The latter have little to no compute.
So compute requires vendor lock in? That seems silly to me.
Edit: Can we just acknowledge that a lot of the bells and whistles are for the companies benefit at the expense of the user? Thats their right, but it's also our right to want something better.
> So compute requires vendor lock in? That seems silly to me.
Correct, it's very similar to game consoles, though it is somewhat more open than those (sideloading is possible, including standard Android apps IIRC, and you can run PC VR games from other stores while tethered).
> Can we just acknowledge that a lot of the bells and whistles are for the companies benefit at the expense of the user?
It's the same model as XBox or Playstation, seems like. They sell the hardware at cost or at a loss, and make it up via software.
A fully open headset with comparable specs would probably cost much more for the hardware. From a business standpoint that would be very stupid for a company like Meta, but this is hacker news, and many commenters here see nothing wrong or silly about asking businesses to commit suicide.
This doesn't explain why its _required_. It just means there is precedent.
Your other point is better, although I think you mean it would cost the consumer more for the hardware, right? The hardware would cost the same to produce, it's just that the company would miss out on surveillance based revenue.
It's a reasonable point, fb would make less money if they made an open headset, possibly to the point that they wouldn't make it all.
But the world where fb doesn't make any headset, and the world where they make an unacceptable headset are basically equivalent to me - the former might even have an edge in that shitty relationships with corporations aren't being encouraged (like they are throughout everything tech related currently). Granted, them blazing the trail has a tiny chance of enabling a reasonable alternative to come along in the future.
But I am a bit of a Luddite, and I know that people want their toys, and they want them now.
> the company would miss out on surveillance based revenue.
More than likely most of Meta's revenue from the Quest series other than hardware is based off of, y'know, selling games. I doubt tracking what games you play to target ads in the OS is more valuable than the money they make when people actually buy games.
In Facebook or Instagram, you're looking at a space that they can shoot lots of
ads into, and it's otherwise very hard to monetize. But a gaming-focused VR headset is a different story. Most of the time you're not looking at anything that can have ads in it, but you can actually sell stuff very easily.
Maybe this'll change someday if they actually get social media shit in there that's popular, I'm sure Meta would love that, but so far that hasn't happened.
> But the world where fb doesn't make any headset, and the world where they make an unacceptable headset are basically equivalent to me
Popularizing the format is useful for pushing the tech forward. A big player pushing lots of devices means that the supply chains feeding the manufacture of those devices bulk up too, not to mention other knock-on effects like greater consumer awareness, and "free research" for whoever copies what the market leader does (at least for things that aren't IP-protected).
> But I am a bit of a Luddite, and I know that people want their toys, and they want them now.
> More than likely most of Meta's revenue from the Quest series other than hardware is based off of, y'know, selling games. I doubt tracking what games you play to target ads in the OS is more valuable than the money they make when people actually buy games.
Isn't that a great argument for why they don't need to have such a hard requirement for a logged in session? Consoles didn't have an internet connection for the longest time, though only because it wasnt feasible yet. They moved a lot of games.
> I can hear the sneer from over here, yes.
I don't mean it as judgment, I know I'm the weirdo here. Sorry if that came off rude.
> Consoles didn't have an internet connection for the longest time, though only because it wasnt feasible yet. They moved a lot of games.
Consoles had physical games. VR headsets don't. Consoles treat digital games the same way Meta is doing them here, I think; if you get logged out, no more games.
The problem here isn't that Meta servers are merely down -- losing connection usually doesn't mean losing access to your library of games on consoles, or Steam. The problem appears to be that authentication is failing such that you're actually being essentially logged out, which would definitely lose you access to digital games on every console as well as Steam.
Which, I mean yeah, that's a big fuck-up on Meta's part.
> Consoles had physical games. VR headsets don't. Consoles treat digital games the same way Meta is doing them here, I think; if you get logged out, no more games.
Again, consoles and steam do this because they want to, because it benefits them, and consumers don't put any meaningful pressure on them for doing so. It's not some kind of fundamental requirement. It's helpful for e.g. anti piracy stuff, but not necessary. It is 100% feasible to sell me a digital copy of a game and then not hang around on my system and watch me play it.
People let triple A PC games basically put rootkits on their systems. It's not like the games wouldn't work just fine (or better even!) without them. It's just that approximately nobody cares, and the companies will do whatatever you let them do.
> I view VR headsets and their peripherals as no different than a mouse, keyboard, and display
That could be valid when VR headsets were tethered to a PC via a DisplayPort or HDMI connection and essentially mirrored the display.
The Quest is closer to an iPhone or Android phone or an all-digital handheld gaming device. With integrated compute, display, battery, text input, pointing devices, mic, and speakers, it bears little functional resemblance to peripherals like a mouse, keyboard, or display with no utility unless slaved to another device.
Considering I can use my Quest with no wifi or other network to log in (once initial set up is complete), it seems that the Meta back-end APIs must have broke in some way that confused the headsets into thinking they were available when they weren't.
It sounds like a server-side bug that forced a log out somehow. Which does really suck, Meta deserves criticism for that, but acting like this means the headset "isn't standalone" is silly, since that's not what "standalone" means in the context of VR headsets.
Agree, many posts I read seem like classic "I don't like Meta/VR/big companies/social media so let me use this specific incident to confirm my biases."
As you say, there's valid criticism to be made but it's hard to find the signal through the noise.
I think the desire for "standalone" VR headsets to mean offline-capable is totally reasonable. It has its own storage, apps and games get installed on it directly, and none of its core features need to rely on an online connection.
Given that it uses its own OS, essentially, is a fair point. I guess what I meant around my monitor analogy earlier is that it has the capability to serve that purpose, possibly without the sophisticated OS that wraps the store experience, the apps/games, and other features -- specifically with being able to use it on SteamVR or your PC in general.
This makes it a device that's generally capable of using any supported source for its screens, and can pass its peripheral input to other devices, like a PC, not unlike a mouse and keyboard.
VR headsets could treat their "OS" as a minimal experience akin to an OSD on a monitor that lets you switch sources and use the peripherals more generally like a mouse/keyboard with the right drivers on the target machine.
I'm more interested in calling out that Meta missed an opportunity here, and that it's confusing that they offer some semblance of these features (wireless linking for SteamVR...) while coupling that so closely to their OS and online-only experience.
I don't know if you'll ever see this, but thought I'd reply.
First, the original Rift headsets were as you describe: lightweight, passing through the PC VR image. However, Meta did not miss out on an opportunity. In what was perhaps the most effective A/B test they could run, they released the Rift S (tethered PCVR) and Quest 1 at effectively the same time. The market feedback was resounding: I believe it was a 10-to-1 preference for a standalone experience vs. tied to a PC. Since they doubled down on standalone (or all-in-one if you prefer), well over 20 million headsets have been sold. In fact, they're so popular that even the fraction that connects to Steam is basically tied for market share with the most popular PC VR headset ever, the Index.
Second, even as a PC VR HMD it was a real stretch to call it a monitor equivalent. It's wildly complicated to create compelling VR images. You need two screens at nearly 2Kx2K resolution each, running at 90 frames/second, sustained. Dip below that and you can induce nausea. Not every PC can do that, so you need careful engineering between the client and HMD, with tricks like time warp, space warp, interleaving, compression, prediction, pose estimation, etc. to take up the slack. Creating sub-millimeter precision of location with six degrees of freedom either requires external base stations (cost, complexity) or inside-out tracking with headset-mounted cameras and a processor running realtime simultaneous location and mapping and image recognition code, which implies a CPU and tech stack to support it. Nowadays people also expect passthrough (with real-time depth correction), hand tracking (AI routines for hand posing), and more. All this is to say that significant code must run on the HMD for a modern gaming headset (Meta's target market), as well as on the PC. And if you're investing that much in a custom software stack, you can't make it up on hardware margin - the cost to build an HMD is just too high. So you have to have an app store tie-in, because Valve sure isn't going to share its Steam profits with you.
Now, certainly there have been (and are) HMDs that tried this approach. HP (G2) and HTC (Vive series) both put out quality products leveraging the Steam ecosystem. Neither are sold in volume today, because the economics of selling a headset just aren't good enough.
Immersed and Big Screen are releasing very lightweight fixed-function HMDs for either work or movie watching that do operate the way you describe. Neither are expected to be high volume devices, and both are more expensive than Quest 3.
In short: VR is much, much harder than you may realize. Meta didn't miss an opportunity, the explicitly chose the market-tested, most popular solution that also has an economic model with some potential future payoff. If you want a "minimal experience akin to an OSD" then look at the Big Screen Beyond ($999, https://www.bigscreenvr.com/) or the Immersed Visor ($1,049, https://www.visor.com/). (Note: compare the price of these hardware-model pass-through devices to the Quest 3 ($499) which also includes a CPU, battery, storage, audio, more RAM).
It's also worth noting that Quest 3 is not online-only. It works fine offline once you've logged in once (people use it on planes, in parks, in the car, etc.). But this particular issue at Meta forcibly logged out users, then the API appeared online while failing all future login attempts. Ironically, users that work offline never noticed the outage because the bug couldn't log them out.
comparing it with a monitor is rather unfair, you have to bundle the computing along with it, not to mention the applications to make it an actually fair comparison. At that point, is it still ludacris?
can't on latest ipad os, at least not without a jailbreak first? at least as far as I can tell, from UTM's own documentation. wish it was a developer option at least.
>If you are running iOS 14.0, 14.1, 14.4, or higher: UTM works if you are jailbroken or semi-tethered with Jitterbug, AltJIT, or Jitstreamer. “Semi-tethered” means either tethered to a Mac/PC, to another iOS device with Wifi sharing, or to itself (one iOS device running both Jitterbug/AltJIT and UTM) through a on-device VPN profile.
Seems like with iOS 14+, and as of writing it seems like we're on iOS 17, it needs to be jailbroken? Do Jitterbug, Jitstreamer, AltJIT, work for developer accounts?
China is still urbanizing rapidly. Just like GP said, it won't be a ghost city for long. It depends though on how long the investor can hold out, and whether or not the new city is doomed from the start.
CCP planning is just different. TBD if it's doomed to fail like the Soviet Union, or if it will make it through a crisis like this. It's also hard to tell what will ultimately call a crisis; just thinking back to 2008, a lot of the story is only figured out in retrospect (eg how critical Bear Stearns was).
Many things wrong with that statement. There is a reverse migration from cities back to countryside, since the wages in the city have fallen, jobs have disappeared, rent is still expensive, and it's harder to justify living in the city when you can only save a few hundred dollars a year from a job.
Thus, empty retail stores in major tier 1 cities. Empty apartments in Dongguan and Shenzhen. Small crowds at malls.
From what I heard that is a somewhat "recent" trend while most ghost city cases I heard of outdate that trend by month potential over a year.
I think a lot of people living in the west without ties to china haven't realized that there are many huge but sometimes subtle changes in China in the last view years.
Kangbashi is up to 100k now, at least, but they designed for a million, so it is still pretty empty. As soon as coal becomes big again, maybe it will fill up.
Empty retail stores in major tier 1 cities wasn't unusual even in good times. Nor were empty apartments in tier 1/2/3 cities as well as small crowds at malls. Actually, I would be hard pressed to use these signs as good or bad news, since they are so normal.
Anecdotally, there’s a great episode of the journal[1] that does not lend too much credence to the idea that the reverse migration movement is anything but a temporary stay away from home.
I think it’s much too early to really say the trend is sticking.
>ith only a ~220 mile range the Tesla needs to stop about every 150 miles for 40 minutes which is brutal.
If you ask my Eastern Europe wife, that's pretty much the way she needs to road trip lol. I think if we get it to 3hrs / 15 minutes break it would be perfect. 240km/40 minutes is a bit of a reach.
Your doctor will tell you stop more often than that. I haven't been able to find anything official though, but nobody says more than 2 hours between breaks for health reasons.
> but nobody says more than 2 hours between breaks for health reasons
DOT regulations for truck drivers is something like every 8 hours stop for 30 mins. This is the first I’ve heard stop every 2 hours which would drive me nuts if we were road tripping together.
this is how i road trip generally. i almost never drive more than 3 hours without stopping for coffee/lunch/dinner. And if its more than 300 miles 90% of the time i'm going to fly.
Any time i'm road tripping more than 3 hours i'm trying to find some cute little town along the way to stop in at. Usually these cute little towns have chargers.
e-4701 has less to do with the actual popularity of the parties or the system than it does with the fact that we're 8 years in with a fairly progressive leader. c.f. the annual anti-Trudeau demonstrations that are astroturfed (yellow vests, "freedom convoy 2022", united we roll, etc). This system didn't exist when Harper was PM or anyone before it; and we're hardly at Mulroney level of discontent.
edit: also... the bill in question is opposed by the Liberal party at large (the ones who this petition oppose). it's mainly being pushed by the Conservatives and the Bloc (which makes for an odd union already) as well as the NDP (which pushes it completely into nutty territory of voting patterns). and it was introduced in the Senate - where most Senators do not have party affiliation.
or my other favourite character... the illusive Roland Piquepaille and his "articles" that pioneered blogspam based on the way ./ers would react to him.
Wow! I haven't heard that name in nearly 20 years, but the instant I saw it I had a negative reaction. I didn't even know why at first until I read the rest of your sentence.
I forget, is this the persona responsible for that "voices from the hellmouth" series? the one that, retrospectively, coincides with my /. usage starting to slope negative.
omg, voices from the hellmouth was sooo cringe. Who was that? typetypetype
oook, JonKatz, and it lives on
(tl;dr for my post here, there was a segment of the slashdot population who really identified with the Columbine shooters, the trench-coat mafia, i guess in terms of being picked on at school by the popular kids or something? it was sort of like "of course Columbine, what did you expect from those of us living at the hell-mouth you've created for us" If I have any of that wrong it's because I couldn't stand reading any of it in the first place)
It would be so much better if he could store these things in SQL - for non developers, they often use Excel, when a SQL DB is the correct solution, just because they can't figure out SQL at all. A visual editor/manager is perfect for them - create a table with columns, enter data, later integrate with other tools that can pull it out.