“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is a saying in science. We build on the work that came before.
Same with Rockstar. Go back and play GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas.
You really feel how these were built on the same engine/platform and how each game kinda just feels like the game they made while making the other game. If you look at the timelines San Andreas came quickly after Vice City (by modern standards at least). Imagine if they didn’t upgrade and reuse assets? If everything was to be built from scratch.
Apple literally rolled out the feature 13 months ago with 24 months free use with the purchase of a compatible device.
How can you claim any statistics on the topic?
But yeah, I think the real interesting thing is what’s going to happen with the LEO constellations, but I also get why Apple isn’t keen on relying on a Musk-driven enterprise.
All other LEO-constellations are probably a decade away from having enough coverage.
I think Apple wants to get in the game now, and they have the money to spend on differentiating themselves.
And for those who have stumbled into a situation where they needed it and been rescued it’s great, but on the other hand the majority of the planet is not served as of now.
Apple has shown that the market could be willing to adapt.
But then again, they’ve always had more leverage than the Wintel-crowd.
But what people seem to ignore is that there is another option as well: hardware emulation.
IIRC correctly old AMD CPU’s, notably the K6, was actually a RISC core with a translation layer turning X86 instructions into the necessary chain of RISC instructions.
That could also be a potential approach to swapping outright. If 80% of your code runs natively and then 20% passes this hardware layer where the energy loss is bigger than the performance loss you might have a compelling product.
The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s...
Honestly don’t know. Whenever I check back in on the few communities that I care about that didn’t find a new home on the fediverse (at least that I’ve seen) the rest of Reddit seems less engaged than before.
“Known to scam people”, “designed to stop working”.
I am fully aware that people can say anything on the internet, but clearly you are not objective at all.
Obviously any further attempt at discussion is pointless. Enjoy your fruit-less life, may it treat you with software updates until the next flagship device is launched.
In my experience very varied. I feel students lean more towards Android, but if you develop on Mac you’re also more likely to have an iPhone, but the one place where it’s somehow been consistently Android in my team is the app developers.
While I don’t mind it at all, somehow the Android build of our app still has the most issues. Consistently over almost six years now. Which I find a bit ironic.
A friend of mine that was also a former colleague has always been an Android guy. A year ago he switched employer and the new company is iPhone only - but he can’t get the latest versions, and it’s basically just the base version too. So he’s still running with his Galaxy S21, but no e-mail or calendar sync.
I think he’d switch if he could put some of his own cash in and upgrade to the top model.
People can have the preference they want in life, but there’s no need to obnoxious about it.
But there’s a big difference between not supporting old devices with software updates and designing them to stop working which you allege to.
If you ask me theres way worse fish out there than Apple, and if you look at phone support Apple is the golden standard by a mile with most Android devices still not being supported for more than a year or two tops.
What we should have is a requirement to support devices for at least ten years.
Yes, I know, ten years is a long time, but we’ve gotten to a point where we should expect a device that’s been treated well to last that long.
My 2013 MBP runs just fine, so does my 2011 MBA, my dad’s Fujitsu-Siemens laptop from 2008 even still works. But only one of those is running an updated operating system. Guess which one?
Doesn’t mean that the product is designed to fail, just that Apple chose not to support them any longer.
I’m saying that anyone singling out Apple for planned obsolescence and disregarding the rest of the market is playing into someone’s playbook.
I’m also fully aware of the so-called batterygate (oh, how I loathe how people add a “gate”-suffix to things to make a “scandal” completely clueless to the fact that Water_gate_ was the name of a fucking hotel. Anyways…), and while we may only speculate wether or not Apple was trying to push people to buy new phones, from appearances it would seem that they were acting in the (somewhat*, I’ll get back to that later) best interest of the consumers, but just failing to communicate it in a good manner.
Before the story broke people discovered that replacing batteries made the devices run faster again.
Before Apple started power/performance-throttling devices with worn batteries plenty of older iPhones exhibited shutdown issues, especially at lower SoC. I remember being clueless as to why some devices among friends and family behaved this way. After Batterygate broke it suddenly clicked.
Built-in batteries can be replaced for a reasonable price either via Apple (less reasonably), or via a third-party (more reasonably). Device experience is regained (minus software bloat), and device longevity is maintained.
Now let me get back to my asterisk:
*: There are different types of battery chemistries, and while Apple thumped their own chests back in the day that their MacBook batteries took 1000 charge cycles to get to 80% of factory capacity.
Apple willingly choose to use cheaper chemistries for iPhone batteries than they could use if they wanted longevity to be higher.
So yes, in that regard you can argue planned obsolescence. The amount of money Apple charge for their phones they could definitely put better batteries in, but on the other hand there’s likely arguments for why they choose these batteries, such as capacity or other characteristics. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on battery chemistries, and will leave that to someone else.
With regards to some of your comments on longevity then and now; note that we used to use the best material to make something, regardless of its impact on people and environment. Some environmental concerns do actually reduce product longevity.
Combined with increased technological complexity and a higher rate of improvement in the digital era than in the analog era it’s been a long period where don’t think it’s too bad to replace a device after a few years time.
However, we’re now seeing so good performance from a lot of our tech products that an upgrade feels much more incremental than it used to.
I definitely think we should demand more lifetime from our products, but this needs to be through regulation and not just left to consumers.
Software needs to be supported and updated so that the devices can be used safely
Parts need to be available for replacement.
Soldering components with limited lifespan to the motherboard should be illegal without providing a backup port and room for a replacement device, at least over a certain form factor. Thinking of SSD’s primarily.
We should be able to use cloud features without being locked to the manufacturer. Especially if they go belly-up.
He mentions a Chinese car manufacturer, and Arlo cameras, but it could just as well be Norwegian EV charge box manufacturer Easee, or a cell phone manufacturer like RIM (BlackBerry) or a TV manufacturer, etc.
So many products today depend on cloud services for basic functionality, and for a lot of those devices their planned obsolescence will be the cloud service they’re connected to.
Most of the sysadmins I know have incredibly high tolerances for friction, but ridiculously low tolerances for repetitive tasks. Which I think is a bit ironic.
I’m not sure this crowd will be representative in terms of which tools and services they use (or prefer to use).
People don’t audit anything, and pretending that they do is hopeful at best, deceitful at worst.
Even if you audit it you are likely not understanding the code well enough to figure out if it is vulnerable.
Which leads back to my original point which thus still stands; there’s no smart way to choose non-vulnerable plugins. One can obviously avoid things that don’t meet certain standards (popularity, lines of code, known issues, how they’re resolved, etc.), but still doesn’t guarantee anything.
This means that your statement about “smart Wordpress sites don’t pick vulnerable plugins” is frivolous. May I suggest “smart Wordpress sites chooses plugins carefully and limits the amount to those strictly necessary, but should still pay attention to updates patching issues”. Because that’s the difference between smart and dumb. Dumb sites are just left running whatever they shipped with, PHP or not, and smart devs make sure to keep their system and/or CMS and plugins up date.
And if you still want to argue that people actually review the code they depend upon I have one word for you: Heartbleed.
Heck, sometimes someone comes to me and asks if some system can solve something they just thought of. Sometimes, albeit very rarely, it just works perfectly, no code changes required.
Not going to argue that my code is artificial intelligence, but huge AI models obviously has a higher odds of getting something random correct, just because it correlates.
And they probably scan your surroundings and upload it to the cloud. Only thing creepier would be Amazon making the same thing and then sending you ads for stuff that goes with whatever they saw you had or replacements for old stuff you have.
Well, the player can choose which gender V is, plus there’s a lot of catering to gender fluidity.
It’s definitely a conscious choice, but I can’t say if it’s to not have to record more variations of dialogue, and maybe NPC’s use it less so not to draw attention to them not knowing V’s gender.
That said, nothing that really bothered me, although I still haven’t gone through the entire game.
But maybe it’s just how they picture 2077? Just look at recent history and draw an exponential curve and assume pronouns just went out of fashion?
If the weight of the car stopped her from breathing it would have been a very different thing.
You are adapting your arguments to the situation.
It should be clear that no self-driving car will ever know what “the right thing” is in cases like this and it would require human interaction/intervention to resolve*. This is simply because the car would be unable to gather the necessary information about the situation.
That should not deter us from adopting self-driving, as self-driving vehicles will be the biggest boon to pedestrian safety seen since the advent of urbanization.
One could obviously imagine a future where other vehicles could contribute information about the situation so that the vehicle in question could take actions and react based on what happens around it and seeing different perspectives than its own. Interactions with robots or drones could potentially also contribute information or actively aid in the situation.
If the vehicle was intelligent enough to converse with other humans or even the human in question, or at least use human voice to gather information to aid its decision making this could also be different. But the vehicle itself will always struggle with the lack of information about what is actually going on in a situation like this.
My 9yo daughter has a tablet with family link, so I can monitor what apps she wants to install. As the garbage games are mostly at the top free, she keeps asking for games that I reject, in most cases because it’s riddled with ads....
Likely this price model is worth a lot to them anyway, because there likely some big fish that are stuck in, and who are better off just paying Unity than sinking all that development cost to switch to a different engine.
The small projects that go under or jumps ship is probably not worth that much to them anyway, but probably generates an ongoing support cost neither way.
Thus, cynically speaking, Unity is probably better off like this, and they even got some PR out of it. Wether good or bad.
Chances are if you buy a high-end PC you’ll buy another one (or spend enough on upgrades to cost the same as another one) by the end of the console generation.
And let’s be honest. PC gaming has become ridiculously expensive due to first crypto and now AI.
I paid less for my Xbox Series X in October 2020 than I paid for my 3070Ti - which incidentally still costs more than when I bought it over a year ago.
Console games still cost an arm and a leg, and there’s only a handful of games I actually prefer playing on the couch with a controller, but given the inflated gaming pc prices it’s hard to argue that consoles are “as expensive”.
As a lifelong PC gamer I simply will not pay for online gaming, but Microsoft and Sony will continue to push in that direction as long as people let them.
I mean, you could buy old hardware and find that the newly released game you really wanted to play doesn’t run.
I had planned to skip the 970, but the 1070 “never” came.
Ended up biting the bullet when Just Cause 3 launched and my old AMD GPU was giving me seconds per frame. Sometimes even two digits.
Consoles are more or less static targets and as such the games are optimized for them.
PC will always have cutting edge graphics, but the last couple of console generations haven’t exactly been slouches either. A lot of bang for your buck compared to the GPU market.
It used to be that a mid tier current gen GPU was $300, now it’s $600 for the mid tier last gen.
That’s not adjusted for inflation, just price gouging.
If anything is killing PC gaming that’s the problem. People don’t mind paying extra for a superior experience, especially when it’s a multipurpose machine, but ridiculously expensive GPU’s is tragic.
if it lasts it may lead to the new generations growing up on consoles only due to the price.
On the other hand, Apple really wants to get into the gaming space, so who knows what will happen next?
Yeah, we know. That’s how updates to games work. If it didn’t change forever, it means they had to roll back the update and someone’s getting fired....
People seem to think that Rockstar milked it, and still is. Lots of paid content and P2W, if I’m not mistaken?
Personally only played online for an hour or two, I much prefer the single player experience, especially the story lines.
GTA V was great.
RDR2 was brilliant, a masterpiece.
If you want to hold grievances over rockstar it shouldn’t be milking a success, it should be how they treat their developers and content creators.
But that’s an industry problem, not something specific to Rockstar.
Personally I’m happy that they take the time to make these great games instead of rushing out a title every year like some companies do, but on the other hand it was really awesome how GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas came out in rapid succession of each other and each game was bigger, better, and technically better than the previous one.
Then GTA IV and RDR came fairly quickly after that, then we got GTA V in 2013.
At some point the scope and ambition just got so big that these games now takes 8 or so years to make (RDR2).
I’m looking forward to GTA VI. And I would be surprised if it doesn’t break the $1 billion opening sale (3 first days) of GTA V.
When I got the XSX recently, it was so I can play Starfield when it comes out. That was basically the only reason. I did not realize the extensive backwards compatibility that this thing has. But since getting it, I’ve been playing FF13 trilogy, Fable games, Dragon Age series, Lost Odyssey, etc. Basically all games of note...
I think the problem with emulating a PS1 is “don’t meet (play) your heroes”.
Most of us played PS1 on dinky little CRT screens before we got used to the graphical fidelity we have these days.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes.
It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
Besides, at the end of the day Sony is selling every PS5 they make, just like they did with the PS4 and PS3.
Adding backwards compatibility doesn’t make any financial sense as long as it’s not a killer feature that shifts sales towards Microsoft then Sony has little insensitive to do it.
They much prefer you buy those new AAA titles or subscribe to PS+.
I’m 36, not feeling the nostalgia, but then again I was always a PC gamer and never really had to struggle with the lack of support for old games.
I’ve played old games on newer hardware all the time over the years.
The most common realization is that the games were simpler and looked worse than you remembered.
Games also hold up better on PC, PS1 graphics was severely limited, and PS2 was a bit better, sure, but PC graphics were ahead of consoles.
PS3 and Xbox360 finally got to a level where the PC vs. console graphics playing-field seemed more even, and since then console graphics have been properly good in terms of value for money.
I paid more for my 3070Ti than my Series X, but I can’t really tell the difference without spending a lot of time optimizing the settings (or maybe I just need to break out other titles?).
The huge difference is that I can play any of the games I’ve bought over the years, plus most of the ones I acquired in my teenage years - if I wanted to.
Yet - what do I play? Surprise surprise - it’s not the games of yesteryear.
Obviously I’m just one data point, but considering how many gamers I surround myself with and I can’t recall when any of them wanted to play games from the 90’s that weren’t readily available console classics from Nintendo or Sega I’m not convinced it would make a huge difference if the classic games were available.
Maybe they’d sell more consoles, but people just don’t want to pay AAA money for 25-30 year old games. And it’s the games that make them money, not the consoles.
Skyrim is a game that probably deserves to be mentioned along Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac.
But in general comparing games and music is not that simple. Music production and recording has had high fidelity for ages. But pick up a worn cassette and put in an old tape deck and you might feel a bit what playing those old games feel like.
"Today, PlayStation revealed that its PS5 has sold 40 million units. Microsoft doesn’t share hardware numbers typically, but court documents, math, and slides from an ID@Xbox in Brazil seem to suggest the Xbox Series X|S line-up is around 20-23 million units sold globally. That essentially puts the PS5 at a 2:1 advantage...
I used to think that not having a built in rechargeable battery was a dull idea.
However: Whenever I wanted to play on my PS3 the batteries were empty and the controllers needed to be recharged.
Around the time I got my first Xbox I came to the realization that I had more units than I ever thought consuming AA or AAA batteries, so I decided to go all in on rechargeable batteries.
I love it. Whenever my Xbox tells me that the controller needs new batteries it takes me 20 seconds to swap in a new pair.
I don’t ever think about having to plug the controller. I don’t care if I pick it up and it’s dead. Etc. etc.
And best of all, there’s literally no drain when it sleeps. My switch controllers drains the battery when it’s resting. The PS3 drains the controller. Don’t know about the PS4 and PS5.
Of course they did, but the world be so much better if games were available for all platforms and the platforms competed on the merits of their hardware and software instead of the merits of their exclusive titles.
Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1 (www.youtube.com)
Windows PCs can't sleep properly, and Microsoft wants it that way (www.spacebar.news)
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Satellite for smartphones fails to take off (liliputing.com)
Official: New Grand Theft Auto Trailer Arriving in December (twitter.com)
Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market (arstechnica.com)
Decentralized Matrix messaging network says it now has 115M users (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
Twitter's lost 13% of its daily users and its rebrand has failed (www.bigtechnology.com)
The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s...
Why projects start with a Discord and not an alternative - Comment found on Mastodon
Original comment, copy-pasted for convenience:...
Something weird going on at DuckDuck… (beehaw.org)
The Intercept conservative?! The Nation conservative?! What gives? https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/17db21e0-7037-4d77-b3fd-fa7b958a3432.webp
Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here | NOEMA (www.noemamag.com)
So Far, AI Is a Money Pit That Isn't Paying Off (gizmodo.com)
Archive link...
AI Is Writing Books About Foraging. What Could Go Wrong? (civileats.com)
Meta Quest 3 review impressions - one of VR gaming's best options (www.eurogamer.net)
Cyberpunk's storytelling makes Starfield seem ancient - Opinion (www.eurogamer.net)
A pedestrian was pinned under a Cruise robotaxi after another car’s hit-and-run (www.engadget.com)
The woman is reportedly in critical condition....
How to let my kids find quality games on Android? Right now they only find the pay to win / ad riddled games.
My 9yo daughter has a tablet with family link, so I can monitor what apps she wants to install. As the garbage games are mostly at the top free, she keeps asking for games that I reject, in most cases because it’s riddled with ads....
Unity updates its runtime fees (blog.unity.com)
Archive link: https://archive.ph/Ys676...
Penny Arcade sums up the Unity debacle in the first panel. (www.penny-arcade.com)
Today’s Penny Arcade is a near perfect commentary on the Unity debacle....
GameStop Boss Says Disc Drives Should Be Required On Game Consoles (www.gamespot.com)
"It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing," says guy who makes money selling the thing.
deleted_by_author
FCC says “too bad” to ISPs complaining that listing every fee is too hard (arstechnica.com)
Aww … poor little ISPs.
Switch 2 - launch games?
Switch 2 is rumoured for 2024, but what could be launch titles? Metroid prime 4 would be a candidate, but might not a be a system seller....
Xbox boss would ‘love to find solutions’ so games aren’t lost when the 360 store closes | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com)
"X is about to change forever!"
Yeah, we know. That’s how updates to games work. If it didn’t change forever, it means they had to roll back the update and someone’s getting fired....
deleted_by_author
Tencent is bringing back military FPS series Delta Force | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Let's Just Calm Down About The Nudity In Baldur's Gate 3 (www.dualshockers.com)
Looking at you, streamers and angry defenders of Japanese ‘fanservice’ games.
Backwards compatibility is the best feature of Xbox, and I don't understand why Sony is so far behind on this
When I got the XSX recently, it was so I can play Starfield when it comes out. That was basically the only reason. I did not realize the extensive backwards compatibility that this thing has. But since getting it, I’ve been playing FF13 trilogy, Fable games, Dragon Age series, Lost Odyssey, etc. Basically all games of note...
Xbox's biggest crisis right now isn't games. It's hardware. (Opinion - Jez Corden) (www.windowscentral.com)
"Today, PlayStation revealed that its PS5 has sold 40 million units. Microsoft doesn’t share hardware numbers typically, but court documents, math, and slides from an ID@Xbox in Brazil seem to suggest the Xbox Series X|S line-up is around 20-23 million units sold globally. That essentially puts the PS5 at a 2:1 advantage...