- I can't simultaneously play a third MMO (already got FFXI and FFXIV)
- X4 custom start allows me to jump to the parts I want to play instantly, no matter if it's starting wars, flooding the market, dogfighting, etc
- My X4 save is a gzip file: no need to worry about latency after moving to another country etc (my EVE account is locked to a region halfway across the world)
- I don't have to wait for irl people to do something fun in X4
- The gziped save file is in xml format. If something breaks I can just fix it
- X4 has a huge modding scene for whatever features you want
- X4's modding tools are super easy to learn: it's all xml and lua. Took me only 2 hours to figure out how to modify the UI from scratch.
stardreamer
Because it's in a genre that has no good alternatives?
EVE is spreadsheet simulator, Elite Dangerous is space-truck simulator, NMS is all planets not space, StarField is StarField.
The only viable alternative I found was X4. Even that is slightly different from what Star Citizen promises (it's more empire management than solo flying in the endgame, vanilla balance is also questionable: you can "luke skywalker" a destroyer with a scout with pure dogfighting skills)
Agreed. Personally I think this whole thing is bs.
A routine that just returns "yes" will also detect all AI. It would just have an abnormally high false positive rate.
Having a good, dedicated e-reader is a hill that I would die on. I want a big screen, with physical buttons, lightweight, multi-weeklong battery, and an e-ink display. Reading 8 hours on my phone makes my eyes go twitchy. And TBH it's been a pain finding something that supports all that and has a reasonably open ecosystem.
When reading for pleasure, I'm not gonna settle for a "good enough" experience. Otherwise I'm going back to paper books.
20 Gig is nowhere near what most current cloud data centers are using. Most existing infra have at least at 100Gbps NICs. State of the art right now is 800Gbps. Your 20Gbps enterprise server might be enough for bare-metal AD, but if you include us-tail latency network storage and all the other fancy stuff you'll need way more than that. Doubly more so for HPC, ML and other data heavy workloads. Existing links can already see multi-terabit of aggregate throughput, it wouldn't be surprising if someone decided to have a bunch of HD cameras, streaming, torrenting, etc at their house generating traffic 24/7 because someone thought it was a fun thing to do.
For the gateway switch power draw, I can think of an off-the-shelf software switching solution at 75w, and that's for 100Gbps. A 20Gbps ASIC switch would be a lot less power hungry than that. If you're willing to go experimental, here's a theoretical 400Gbps SmartNIC design that runs at 7w, all you need to do is write a basic L3 switching program with NAT and it should all work.
Because this wouldn't be targeted towards a single device/connection. This is for a household of 5+ streaming 4k, running servers, having cloud (yada yada) IoT devices running simultaneously.
It's the hobbyist tier. It's like asking someone "why do you ever need more than one cast iron pan" when they're into cast iron pan collecting.
It's based on a book by Sir Terry Pratchett (GNU Terry Pratchett, you shall be missed) and Neil Gaiman. If you know Pratchett then you know it's mostly going to be an absurdist comedy.
Other works I recommend from Pratchett are Going Postal, Equal Rites, and Guards! Guards!
You can do it through democracies. Taiwan has two sets of high speed rail systems.
Are they expensive to maintain? Absolutely. In fact they bankrupted 2+ companies until the government decided to step in and foot part of the bill. But then again, if the government isn't willing to pay for basic infrastructure, what are taxes for?
(Also as a tangent, the Taiwan high speed rail bentos are to die for. I had it 5+ years back and I still remember it. Super cheap meal in a disposable bamboo lunch box. Usually there are 1-2 choices per day. I had chicken thighs, pickled veggies, steamed pumpkin, and half a marinated tea egg. The bottom half of the lunch box was filled with rice. 10/10 would eat at a busy train station during rush hour again)