Are there any hobby projects to hack/replace the controller board to make a new/fancy TV into a dumb tv?
Would be nice to be able to use a new OLED panel like that...
Describing those 'ads' as "abusive" is quite a stretch. It's like going to the store page itself and complaining they're telling you about products they sell.
Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other game client I know of offers that.
Advertising in general is absolutely abusive. I like to think of advertising as mind rape: it forcibly inserts brands and trademarks into your mind while you're trying to read or watch something.
On the other hand, I don't classify what Steam is doing as advertising. When I open the Steam store, it's because I want to see the games it has on sale. It's not advertising, it's the exact information I asked for. It would have been advertising had it kept spamming me with game deals while I'm watching a film or something.
Just because most advertising is abusive doesn't mean that all of it is. The popups that Steam shows when you open it are definitely still advertising, as are the recommendations for other games and things like that.
Ironically, this is exactly the reason why most other ad networks go to such lengths to track you, because they think they want to show you ads you'd find relevant and thus worthwhile to click on.
Unfortunately, the way the ad networks go about doing this means that they're actually incentivising making money by any means necessary over actually showing relevant ads, so you get ads that are psychologically abusive, full-screen ads that pop up in the middle of a game, ad networks selling off the data they have on you, etc.
That is why I will permanently have an adblocker - since this is how things work now - but why I don't care nearly as strongly about the Steam ads.
We don't disagree. It's just that I have a funny definition of advertising. It's more narrow than what people usually mean. Basically, if I asked for it, then it's information, not advertising.
For example:
> as are the recommendations for other games and things like that
I asked for this when I opened the Steam store. It's not advertising, it's just the exact information I wanted. I went to the market to see products, and they showed me products.
If they start bringing the products to my home by plastering ads on billboards all over the place then it's advertising and abusive.
> That is why I will permanently have an adblocker
They are also surprisingly effective because they often show things that I might actually buy (especially when it's on sale, which is precisely when they show ads for it).
No, that's not an excuse because Steam is also a launcher to play your games. If the store was completely separate then sure it would be OK to promote games being sold in the store there.
To be fair the F22 would have been closer to the F35 in price if the number produced were larger so that the R&D was spread over a larger number of airframes. Such a pretty plane.
I agree that the F-22 is gorgeous, but it is also extremely expensive to operate, couldn’t be exported, can’t do carrier launch or VTOL so the demand was inherently lower.
That said, we could have made more than 195 of the them, but even at 750 it would have still been significantly more expensive per aircraft than the F-35 and it wouldn’t have let us cancel the F-35 program.
I feel like we got locked into the aerodynamic & airframe structural limitations of a particular CVN format with the USS Enterprise and are doing some wacky things, like not navalizing the F-22 or the C-130 or the B-21, because we can't dream any larger without assuming that such a ship would cost infinity dollars. South Korea, Japan, and China build larger container, tanker, and bulk ships all the time for ~1% of the price of a supercarrier; It's not that adding tens of thousands of tons of steel is going to break the bank, it's that a carrier group encompasses most functions of the military. The larger a ship gets the easier it is to move quickly through the wind, and the slower effective landing approaches are. The longer the catapult, the lower the necessary acceleration. CATOBAR takeoff and landing that works a little more like normal runway takeoff and landing means more of the USAF R&D ends up being projectable power.
It would cost an insane amount of money.... but... It already does cost an insane amount of money, and then we have to run three separate military aviation programs for different regimes.
The US military doesn’t want to sacrifice the capacity to go through the Panama Canal without getting a large benefit.
As to cost, in many ways a cruise ship is a better comparison than a cargo ship. The giant crew needed to maintain and operate a large aircraft fleet themselves need support staff, supplies, housing, etc. Carriers are expensive because of the people and systems onboard not the size of the ship.
Even just moving aircraft up and down from the flight deck requires a massive and thus expensive system. Civilian nuclear reactor are hideously expensive to build and operate let alone a system designed to ramp up and down more quickly, operate on a moving ship etc. Close in weapon systems have limited field of fire when you want a clear flight deck etc.
So sure, in theory you could just say we want a larger flight deck and are going to just have a number of empty components to pad out the ship but it’s not so simple.
The US sacrificed that a long time ago, when it first introduced supercarriers in the 50's. Too tall for the bridges, too wide for anything but the Third Locks era, and then only with some minor alterations.
Now that we do have the Third Locks, I think it would be reasonable to replace the bridges and make the alterations, a rounding error in the CVN budget.
Repositioning is far from the only concern but it is something they care about. For example the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower crossed the Suez Canal in 2021.
Surprised that no one has corrected them that it's not RS232 anymore. It was eventually ratified and it's technically called EIA-232-F (at least for the most recent 1997 version).
There were a number of hacks to deal with this. RAIN was very popular back in the day, but AMNHLTM appears to have better compatibility with modern CPUs.
