Luke

I'm not sure you appreciate just how inexpensive it is to download stuff. It is literally pennies per gigabyte and you don't need "a lot of servers" to do any of it. Really, once you've built the infrastructure to purchase and download a product for any simulator, additional ones have almost zero marginal cost. It's not like you're building completely parallel infrastructures for different sims. You're not. Cheers

The support costs for old birds are next to zero. The bugs are fixed, the support articles are written and all you have left is the odd redownload and livery. TBH, I have no idea why they stopped the sales - in software, it's not about revenues, it's about margins - and the old birds are as close to a 100% GM offering as you'll ever get. I support simulators back to FS2002 - the number of support requests are zero and the bugs are zero as well. It's completely free. Companies regularly support products for many years after sales stop - as you can see here, a quick loss of support makes people question purchasing if they can't get support throughout their usage lifetime. Companies (especially in this market) go through stuff quickly, and that reduces purchases. The more complicated the add-on, the more critical support and its longevity are. Cheers

Tell me you have no idea what you're talking about, without telling me explicitly. Do you have any idea at how insanely low the support costs for these old birds are, relative to the new stuff?

I feel the same way about Ferraris. But for some unknown reason the local DA will not indict the dealership. They're probably in on it. Cheers

No idea why folks aren't considering an AMD 9070.

I have them both with the TFDi 717, no issues. Cheers

2.4.0.18. Latest from GitHub. Cheers

It's likely related to the water textures and special effects, given that it only appears when you turn those settings up. If you turn them down again, does it go away? Cheers

It appears to break nVidia Profile Inspector. Cheers

I struggle to determine what you're actually advocating for, Dave. You suggest that it's important that people have experience and skills in a certain area to be effective, but when it comes to your own opinions then your admitted lack of said skills and experience is completely irrelevant. I suppose I should be hiring lots of people with no experience and strong opinions? You remind me of my 93yo mother. As a retired physician, she complains to me about not diagnosing myself and leaving medical opinions to those with training in the field. Then she claims that she is suffering from heart failure because of a few dizzy spells and tells her son-in-law that he is wrong when he claims her diagnosis is incorrect. You guessed it - he has been a practicing cardiologist for the past 30 years. I should be grateful that I am surrounded by so many brilliant people who always seem to be right and just need "common sense".

Dave, have you or others here actually been a hiring manager in a DEI situation? Because I have. Two ground rules that are worth mentioning. First, no sane hiring manager would ever hire someone incompetent. You live and die by the quality of your people and you absolutely need good to great people at every level. Second, you're almost never going to hire the "best" person in your applicant pool. You need to fill the vacancy in a reasonable period of time because the work needs done, there's a limit to how many folks you can move through your recruiting pipeline, and ultimately candidates in demand aren't going to wait around forever (they're interviewing elsewhere, too). You're almost always going to hire the first person that clearly looks like they can do the job well. There may be a better person 20 people farther down the pipeline. So what? There might not be and then I have no one. If you want to discuss these two items, we can do it separately and you can tell me about your work as a hiring manager and what you did instead. Your industry might be different, but I doubt it. In my most recent role I was responsible for staffing up a team from 1 to 45 in around four months. It's software engineering, and I was looking for a variety of roles - Architects, Engineers, Managers and some entry-level folks. As you know it's male-dominated, very much so. I had gotten some flack from execs about the fact that I had never hired a woman in my career, and when I had an engineering manager opening I had the opportunity to change that. I didn't change any of my criteria. I didn't lower the standards. I just changed the top of the funnel - I ensured that our recruiting department (and one or two of our female employees) reached out in online communities focusing around women in STEM, in addition to what we already did recruiting-wise. The applicants I got from one of them were so good that I said that we'd just focus on people from here unless someone truly exceptional came along. I got not one but two good hires out of it, one of whom was quite exceptional. When you have jobs with hundreds of applicants, just ensuring that the top of the funnel is opened a little more to under-represented groups is all it often takes. And in a collaborative job, having different perspectives makes a huge and positive difference. I've generally found that the people most critical of DEI have never worked as hiring managers in such an environment, and they're almost always middle-aged white males. To talk about the good old days of pure merit where by sheer coincidence the best people were all white males from a good upbringing? Rubbish. That's the sound of mediocre, underachieving people being threatened. Cheers

Sorry, what is difficult?

More VRAM doesn't speed up the GPU.

Like the 4080, the price/performance ratio is pretty terrible. NV hasn't made a good 80-series card since the 3080. Cheers

Having done push notifications at scale on both APNS and GCM (think >100,000 in a 5s interval), this is true in almost all cases. Cheers