Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest presenter Jorge Castro present Bad Voltage, in which apparently reading A Song of Ice and Fire is as bad as being a Crossfit person or using Arch, Jorge refuses to publicly state just how many HDMI devices he has, and:
[00:02:30] The Sony PlayStation 5 is coming. In 2020, probably. What's going to be good, and what's going to be less good?
[00:17:40] Employee wellness programs apparently may not work: "The study concluded that the program didn’t seem to have much effect on total medical spending, employee productivity, or health behavior in the first year.
[00:24:50] Is "996", the idea that workers should work 9am-9pm six days a week, a good idea? Jack Ma of Alibaba says it is. Workers in China disagree. We have thoughts.
Regarding upscaling and backwards compatibility - it’s not just taking emulated output and doubling the pixels or some such bollocks.
One of the main reasons I saved up my pennies to get an Xbox One X over the wimpier hardware was because it does beautiful things to Xbox 360 games:
Red Dead Redemption (the first one, not the sequel) rendered natively at 720p on the 360. Performance also wasn’t great. On modern hardware it renders at 4K natively with 16x anisotropic filtering, and it runs at a solid 30 frames per second too (DF video with the details if anyone cares). It looks cracking. I didn’t play it when it was new - just kicked things off last night, and I had to stop to take that screenshot to show it off. Lovely.
If the PS5 can do the same thing for PS4 titles then I’ll give the current gen machines a miss and nab one of those when I get around to catching up on the PlayStation stuff I’ve yet to play. Might be a while, admittedly, given that Red Dead Redemption came out nine bloody years ago…
This makes me believe the 3D audio of the PS5 is already in the Xbox One? I’ve used that “Windows Sonic for Headphones” with a videogame which specifically supported it, and it did sound really cool. Outside of that specifically supporting game it seems to do the virtual 7.1 effect for surround sound movies and regular games.
That does look incredible. Just some more info to add, DF’s done a video on their take on the hardware:
I know we were going long on PS5 but I’m kicking myself for not remembering to discuss the ray tracing claims. Also not sure if they will explicitly support Freesync like the xbox does,
I love it when you have guests on the show, it livens and changes it up a bit.
But I do find you tend not to let your guests talk as much as you do. There seemed to be long periods of @jonobacon and @sil going back and forth without any input from @jorge.
I like how Jono generalizes an “always show off how much you work” culture to the entirety of humanity (“just human nature”) and then goes on to accuse everyone else of over-generalizing.
On top of that he’s definitely wrong. This kind of thinking is very specific to certain circles. You’ll be hard pressed to find the same mindset in a starbucks, at least here in France. Same goes for everyone else who works “just some job to put food on the table.” And (some) high-schoolers of course. Which is fine by me.
And my two cents on the wellness programs: from far away, they all feel to me like excuses to not offer sufficient paid vacation and health insurance. Once those two are in place, and if there’s still a problem, they might be more interesting to look at.
I think this true of most jobs. We all work to earn money but some jobs are more enjoyable than others. @jonobacon, @sil and myself are self employed and doing things we want to do (for fun) for a living. I own a small engineering consultancy for example. I’m sure you already have a good idea what Jono and Stuart do so I won’t go into details here.
There is a clear difference between people working because they want to and those just earning a living. My aunt used to own a seaside guest house and I would often help out when I was in town on holiday. I can’t say that I looked forward to getting up early in the morning to get the dining room, which was also last nights bar, ready for breakfast. I did it to help out family but I did not want to be there. Working behind the bar on a night was better depending on how many guests there were and who they were.
Now I look forward to work and I do more hours than most because I want to. In some positions you have a relatively clear objective such as serving coffee and snacks in Starbucks. My job is more fluid and I have few set hours. I have worked in companies however where people feel they need to be seen working by arriving before the boss and leaving after. For me, this does not seem very healthy.
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