Microsoft

Thanks To Microsoft We Have Gamer Nail Polish

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Yes, this is a thing.

Xbox and the world’s leading nail polish brand OPI, are teaming up to launch a new gaming-inspired palette for Spring 2022, inviting everyone to play and express their creativity through nail art.

They have quite a selection of colours, with 99% of the names that could only be pulled from a wormhole of cringe, like “You had me at Halo” or “Can’t CTRL Me!”.  Another one in the collection is “Heart and Con-soul”… which should really be Red Ring of Death. If they had Blue Screen Of Death I’d buy that shit right the fuck up. I’d also be pretty chill with Clippy decals. I actually like the idea! But they could of at least hired me to name their products. :v

Tune in next time: When we review Valve’s lipstick with haptic feedback.

My Linux Surface Pro Arrived!

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My Surface Pro 6 arrived today! It only took me a couple hours but I have a KDE Plasma spin of Manjaro running on it, with the custom surface kernel even! I did run into a couple of peripheral issues, as the touch screen doesn’t work until you install the surface kernel provided here. Fortunately I still have my old gaming keyboard, and I used my Steam Controller as a mouse. 😛 After getting the custom kernel installed I focused on installing my usual programs and tweaked the overall aesthetics. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years, and it’s nice to have finally achieved it painlessly.

My next goal will be to take my Kindle HD8 and see if can sideload a different OS on it. I’ve read that it can be done, but if you’re not careful you can do some serious damage to the system. Having a better tablet makes me less fearful of nuking it, that and the HD8 was only a dollar. 😛

Microsoft Purchases Todd Howard’s Soul For $7.5 Billion Dollars (pinky to the lip)

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In case you haven’t heard… this happened.

Microsoft’s priciest video game acquisition, a $7.5 billion purchase of Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media, shocked the industry on Monday. The deal puts Bethesda, one of the industry’s biggest publishers and owners of some of the most successful gaming series, under the Xbox brand.

Does this mean that all future Bethesda titles like Elder Scrolls, DOOM, Wolfenstein are going to be exclusive to only Windows and XBox? There would be a lot of franchises that would become exclusive under one platform… if I were a Playstation gamer I would be a little worried right about now. I know the article makes light of Microsoft not being interested in exclusivity anymore as they used to be… but this is Microsoft, and while I may use their products when needed, it doesn’t mean that I trust them.

Zune is all I have to say.

Rest In Pieces Mixer

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You have a new neighbor, Zune.

I knew this day would come the moment Microsoft wanted to compete with Twitch and YouTube… I’m shocked I tell you! Shocked!

Microsoft announced today that the company will be shutting down its streaming site Mixer on July 22 and will partner with Facebook Gaming moving forward.

Anyone with a basic history of Microsoft products should have seen this coming from a mile away. I mean the moment I researched Mixer and found they were Microsoft owned I knew this wasn’t something that was going to stick around, much like their history with the Zune, Microsoft Phone, Microsoft Bob (yes that was an actual thing), etc. Now, Microsoft’s streaming platform isn’t entirely dead… but it might as well be, as they’re moving their services to Facebook Gaming as mentioned above… a name alone that makes me cringe buckets. Facebook Gaming makes me think of… Farmville. Then again that image alone is lame enough for Microsoft to be a part of them.

Microsoft is listening in on your Minecraft porn discussion?

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I think I can check this off of the “I predicted this would happen” list.

Leaked documents and recordings obtained by Motherboard show that humans are able to listen to intimate conversations held over Skype — something that has hitherto not been revealed by Microsoft.

I don’t want to discourage reporting on these kind of things, but this stuff is pretty obvious. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, CreepyUncleGoogle, they’re all the same. All of this technology runs on the backs of large computers, computers that can record your voice or anything on your account information. Computers that are maintained by people, and can be accessed by said people, as evidenced in recent reports over the last few months about Apple, Amazon, and Google. Microsoft being among them shouldn’t be a surprise, none of this should be. I’ve predicted these kinds of things since the dawn of MySpace (and fucking Trogdor). If you want to own or use these kinds of services I won’t hold it against anyone, but these are things to keep in mind if you choose to put something with a microphone attached to it in your home. Your conversations about tongue bathing the neighbor’s pitbull next door is currently being listened to by the device of your choice… for science and research of course. :trollface:

Microsoft is doing things that I can’t complain about

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I really need to stop sleeping when weird shit happens. I awoke yesterday to find Microsoft actually making somewhat of an attempt to make themselves look good on PC for once… where to start? The first thing I read yesterday was the announcement for the Halo Master Chief Collection coming to PC, and you can purchase it on Steam!

For the first time ever, The Master Chief’s story comes to PC. Featuring Halo: Reach along with Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2: Anniversary, Halo 3, the Halo 3: ODST Campaign and Halo 4, this is the definitive Halo experience.

Shorter Microsoft: Here’s the deal, we don’t talk about the first Halo release for Vista, and you can get our game collection outside of our shitty store. :zorak:

This came as a bit of a shocker considering Microsoft wanting to push their store onto people, and placing it on Steam also gives people like me a chance to see if it will handle under Proton. :trollface:

Of course that was shocking enough on it’s own, but Microsoft cranks it to 11 when news of DirectX12 coming to Windows 7 via World of Warcraft.

Blizzard added DirectX 12 support for their award-winning World of Warcraft game on Windows 10 in late 2018. This release received a warm welcome from gamers: thanks to DirectX 12 features such as multi-threading, WoW gamers experienced substantial framerate improvement. After seeing such performance wins for their gamers running DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Blizzard wanted to bring wins to their gamers who remain on Windows 7, where DirectX 12 was not available.

On the surface this seems like really extraordinary news, however if you take the time to think about it DirectX12 never really took off quite like how Microsoft wanted it to. When AMD open sourced their Mantle API (now Vulkan) that left Microsoft a little dead in the water as that looked much more attractive to developers. especially when developing on more than one platform. Plus with more people having little reasoning to switch to Windows 10 to take advantage of DX12 apart from maybe a handful of titles that properly utilize it. It is interesting they would do this so close to Windows 7’s end of life cycle… or is this a sign of them continuing to support it? I might have to turn my dualboot system into a triple. :trollface: My only hope is that if they do go back to Windows 7 they don’t do to it what they did with their newer OS’s/

Then to top it all off Microsoft actually did something to make Windows 10… somewhat better?

Occasionally, startup failures can occur due to hardware issues, file corruption, or incompatible 3rd party software.
If Windows detects that your machine cannot start up successfully, it will try to diagnose and resolve failures due to disk issues, system file corruption, invalid registry keys, or other such causes. If all these steps are unsuccessful and your machine is still unable to start up properly, Windows will determine if the startup issue was introduced after recent driver or quality updates were installed. If so, these updates may be uninstalled automatically to get the device back to a workable state. This is only done as a last resort.
This is only available via the Windows Insider updates, but it’s about friggin time they got to work on a update safeguard. In fact all of the items I discussed above should have been rolled out a long time ago. Anyone that is at least half tech savvy could look at all of this and see this was all possible. We have been on pretty much the same kernel since Windows Vista, porting DX12 to Windows 7 should have been just as fine as adding it to Windows 10, and making Halo games console exclusive was always a boneheaded move on Microsoft’s behalf. You already have people using your OS, why not give them a game to play on it that YOUR own company made if they have the hardware to back it up? Not all of us want to buy a console to play exclusives… unless it’s a $10 PS3 or something. :trollface:

Microsoft Open Sources Calculator… DaFuq?

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Ummmmm…. why?

Today, we’re excited to announce that we are open sourcing Windows Calculator on GitHub under the MIT License. This includes the source code, build system, unit tests, and product roadmap. Our goal is to build an even better user experience in partnership with the community. We are encouraging your fresh perspectives and increased participation to help define the future of Calculator.

You know… I was actually thinking the other day that there just isn’t enough calculator in anyone’s life. I mean, my decade old mp3 player I bought two years ago has one, my computers have one on each operating system, my calculators have calculators, and my kindle has a fucking calculator! I’m almost tempted to turn on my PS3 to see if that even has a calculator! if not I could see about homebrewing Windows Calculator. :v: That seems to be the only logical point where one might consider the option…

The future is Chromium based

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Ever have that feeling where you wake up from a nap, or from a good night’s sleep and feel like you entered another dimension? I think I can add this to my top 10 WTF did I wake up to moments.

For the past few years, Microsoft has meaningfully increased participation in the open source software (OSS) community, becoming one of the world’s largest supporters of OSS projects. Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.

Translation: Our browser has sucked since the day of its conception, fuck it let’s go open source!

As part of this, we intend to become a significant contributor to the Chromium project, in a way that can make not just Microsoft Edge — but other browsers as well — better on both PCs and other devices.

Extend, Embrace, Extinguish, EXTERMINATE!

Working with open source is not new for Microsoft Edge. Our mobile browser has been based on open source from its beginnings over a year ago.

Shorter Microsoft: We’ve been lazy longer than you think.

Ultimately, we want to make the web experience better for many different audiences. People using Microsoft Edge (and potentially other browsers) will experience improved compatibility with all web sites,

Shorter Microsoft: Our browser will offer you the greatest things that you’re already able to do on almost any browser that isn’t currently ours. INNOVATIVE!

Not that I care… I’m Waterfox master race.

October is the time for scary stuff, like Windows Updates

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Me watching everyone else install the new Windows 10 updates.

It’s a good thing I have Windows configured to not update immediately to the latest update (and an even better thing that I’ve been maining on Mint); this bug sounds a little pants shitting.

Several early adopters of the Windows 10 1809 update have reported vanishing file problems on Reddit, Twitter and Microsoft’s Community forum.

One poor Windows 10 1809 user, Robert Ziko, claims to have lost 220GB of data after updating.

Bunches of people at a couple tech sites that I read have been saying “This is why you should make backups” and yeah, backups are a good thing to do, but you shouldn’t have to live in fear looking over your shoulder in fear of the grim clippy. Hell, in most cases people don’t know how to configure their systems and will be updated unwillingly, not even giving them a chance to perform a proper backup. Most of the time I can’t trust these people with an HDMI cable, why would I expect them to know how to properly configure Windows 10 to not fuck you over?

Fortunately I have Windows 10 Pro, you can set that up to put off major updates by one year. Plus I’ve been making it a habit to only use Windows for things I either haven’t tested under Linux or haven’t been able to setup properly. Feels good to finally reach that point, it was long overdue.