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protimewaster

882 karmajoined 2 jaar geleden

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protimewaster
·4 dagen geleden·discuss
If you want to see it outside the context of tech forums, you can look up the industry reports and see the numbers yourself. There are some media types that are dropping, obviously, but there are multiple types of physical media that have seen notable growth recently.
protimewaster
·5 dagen geleden·discuss
> I doubt that they will go back to where Sony are now.

I agree. However, I do think they would get some positive attention (and some accompanying sales) if they were to backtrack and announce a console more like the 360.

It feels doable if they care to do it. Physical media should still be viable for holding all the game data for a while longer. Blurays can manage up to 128 GB, and I think the average game install size is ~60GB right now, giving most games some room to grow.

The biggest issue with a strategy like that is that they're, like you said, pushing digital-only hard already, and they're also trying to save money, so the idea of spending more money to make future consoles with disk drives, and to make disks, is unlikely to appeal to them.

It is a shame, though, because it seems like the Xbox 360 will have been widely viewed as peak Xbox until the end of Xbox.
protimewaster
·5 dagen geleden·discuss
Xbox has an interesting opportunity going forward, that I expect they'll fumble.

Interest in physical media has actually been on the upswing, and, with Sony announcing their plans to abandon physical media, it feels like MS has a chance be the "good guys" like what Sony did to MS when MS threatened to ruin physical media prior to the Xbox One release.

However, I'm expecting Microsoft to simply follow Sony's path, because I think they are already going down a path that favors digital-only, and I also think they just don't care to distinguish themselves. It seems like Xbox's claim to fame for the past few years is "It has game pass, and it can play a lot of the same games PlayStation can."
protimewaster
·13 dagen geleden·discuss
Yeah, it definitely requires some luck or planning. I mostly meant that all simply to say, I think that, with Blu-ray physical media, the odds are pretty good you'll be able to watch it in the future, via some means. Right now, used PS3s and Blu-ray players are pretty cheap, used PS4s that haven't been updated in a few years are available, etc. There are ways to play Blu-rays even if all the supporting online infrastructure is shut down, even without resorting to breaking any DRM or pirating. That's a contrast to movies on services like PSN.
protimewaster
·14 dagen geleden·discuss
> What happens when those servers go offline?

Funny enough, if you keep your PS4 on an old version and jailbreak it, you can just go in and activate the license yourself. No internet or servers required. Turns out, you can also pirate games if you do this. Piracy wins again?

> Sony was the principle architect of Blu-Ray, if even they can’t build a system that comes with decryption keys then who can?

The even weirder thing is that Sony did build this, with the PS3 and their standalone players. They just skimped on the PS4 (and I assume PS5).

I think Sony just really started half-assing the video player part of their consoles after the PS3. For example, the PS4 Pro, which is specifically advertised for 4K capabilities, cannot play 4K Blu-rays. In contrast, when Microsoft updated the Xbox One, they added UHD Blu-ray support to every model, even the cheapest one.
protimewaster
·14 dagen geleden·discuss
For what it's worth, if it was a PS4, they only require internet access the first time a Blu-ray is played. And, I don't mean the first time a specific Blu-ray is played, but the first time any Blu-ray video is played.

My guess is that Sony didn't want to pay the licensing fees for every PS4, so, the first time you play a Blu-ray, it connects to Sony to get a license. From then on, you can play them without internet.
protimewaster
·16 dagen geleden·discuss
The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, except their stuff. It's okay to hammer some random website with AI crawlers, ignoring robots.txt, and causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
protimewaster
·18 dagen geleden·discuss
Games at a certain point in their life are cheaper on console. At least, physically. I remember being shocked at this years ago, because I expected PC to be cheapest. But, a few years back, I went through and looked up a bunch of AAA games that were about 6 months old, and a lot of them were cheaper to buy physical, on console, from Amazon or another retailer. Cheaper than they'd ever been available for on PC, according to IsThereAnyDeal.

I think it's partly because, on console, the sellers / devs have an incentive to reduce the price of physical copies, because they need to compete with used copies. They killed used copies on PC, so they don't need to compete with that market.
protimewaster
·18 dagen geleden·discuss
Doesn't Steam do that too? For a long time, offline mode in Steam didn't work for many people, and, when it did, it wasn't reliable for being offline for long periods of time. Is that all sorted?
protimewaster
·22 dagen geleden·discuss
> It’s a very thin and a political line between being a gatekeeper and a very successful company.

Honestly, I'm fine with just placing extra requirements on very successful companies.
protimewaster
·vorige maand·discuss
I don't understand why anyone who sees how the world works would expect us to end up with a utopia where people work less.

The trend has almost always been to work the same, or more, hours as new technologies come out, and you'll be expected to get more done using the new technologies. Why would AI be any different?

But, yeah, the people who no longer have jobs will be working less, that's true.
protimewaster
·vorige maand·discuss
Isn't a solar panel going to be a poor heatsink, though? It's flat, and thus has relatively small surface area compared to its size.
protimewaster
·vorige maand·discuss
You're ignoring the fact that timing has a lot to do with a short position. There was a long period where shorting Enron would've ruined you, and a short period when it'd make you rich.
protimewaster
·vorige maand·discuss
Companies that are 80, 100, 200 years old or more have trouble with founders dying.

One of the disadvantages of relying on the founder is that founders die. If I'm trying to keep a fund going for the next 100 years, investing in a company that relies exclusively on a person who will be dead within 100 years seems problematic.
protimewaster
·vorige maand·discuss
I don't even remember what it is I have learned about Creative Labs in the past, but I went into this pretty sure that Creative Labs was going to fuck it up somehow.
protimewaster
·vorige maand·discuss
I'm expecting most everything to go this route eventually. Charging a subscription fee and having ads seems to be a money maker, so most services will get here eventually.

This is also one of the reasons I don't like the direction the video games market has gone. Most games (at least on PC) require Steam or EGS or similar service to access them. At some point, I'm expecting those to transition to a subscription model and/or become very heavy with ads, and then you'll need to deal with ads or subscription fees just to keep accessing stuff you already bought.
protimewaster
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
If someone comes in and points out a bunch of valid similarities, are you going to start being nice, or are you just going to call that person's ideas stupid too?
protimewaster
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
I can think of a couple of possible explanations.

One is that they don't really want to sell a lifetime subscription, but it'll look bad if they discontinue the option. This way, they effectively don't sell them anymore, but there aren't people all screaming "They've discontinued lifetime subscriptions. How long until they take away the ones they sold before?!"

Another possible explanation is that it's just a ruse to sell more subscriptions. They probably sold a ton of subscriptions last time a price increase was announced. So, if they need a cash infusion, just announce another price increase. Then, when it turns out nobody buys at $750, decrease the price later on to return to normal.
protimewaster
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
> Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.

Beyond that, normal people also have other things besides work that will take up their time. It's a lot easier to work 80 hours a week when you're rich enough that you don't ever have to do laundry, clean the house, cook, take care of your kids, tend to a sick relative, sit in a waiting room for 6 hours, be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, etc.

One of the reasons that working a lot sucks for most of us is that we still have to go home and do the laundry or whatever.
protimewaster
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
I'm starting to think that the most likely solution to this problem is that one or more generations leave things in such bad shape that everyone dies. Problem solved, no future generations to be worse off than prior ones!