> Premium gaming and premium content of any kind seems unsustainable.
That's one of the main problems of current gaming. Games have become just "content". And as such they are disposable. Why replay (and appreciate) something you liked? Just play something else.
People have got too used to Steam doing things well, but don't forget that: 1) that's not the norm, and 2) there's no telling when it will change. Gabe Newell will retire not too long from now. Will the next one in charge be so lenient? Don't forget what happened with Unity, for instance.
> The tension is that digital goods are somewhere between.
That's the thing. If they are truly goods, they cannot be in between! Otherwise they are being handled as services and as such they will be terminated at some point. So unless we redefine the word, a true "purchase" can never depend on future actions from the provider (like renewing some DRM).
This article is quite right, but there's even more to it than that. Why should we need to hold ANY kind of relationship with the seller/provider of an article we bought? You certainly don't need a bookstore account to buy a paperback book. Nor do they get to keep your contact information. You get your article and a ticket. They get your money. End of story.
Careful! Some of the scenes you would think as CGI are actually using practical effects. Even a couple of scenes with liquid metal on screen were using models.
I am surprised to hear this. In Spain there are plenty of physical toy stores. I can easily think of a few not too far from my home. Not only that, it's also common here to see entire aisles full of toys in some big supermarket franchises, like Carrefour.
Not just AI. Every subscription in general can be a time bomb. You grow more dependent on it, and the provider can disappear or take it away at any moment.
I always see the same when someone says things like this in any article, video or comment. There will be like 20 replies saying that it's because they chose the wrong linux distro. And of course each of those 20 will recommend a different one! Sometimes distros that I had never even heard about before...
Unfortunately no, Unicode is not simply a mapping of bytes to characters. It is a mapping of numbers to code points, and in some cases you can even get the same characters with multiple code point sequences (not a very good mapping!). Then you need to convert numbers to bytes, so aside from Unicode you also need an encoding. And there are multiple choices. So what would be "plain text" then? UTF-16? UTF-8? If so, with or without BOM? It can't be all of them. For something to really be "plain text" it has to be the same thing to everyone...
I read that article long time ago, and for me it's a hard disagree. A system as complex and quirky as Unicode can never be considered "plain", and even today it is common for many apps that something Unicode-related breaks. ASCII is still the only text system that will really work well everywhere, which I consider a must for calling something plain text.
And yes, ASCII means mostly limiting things to English but for many environments that's almost expected. I would even defend this not being a native English speaker myself.
Indeed it seems I was not well informed. Back in the 90s I did see several pieces of ANSI art, but even then the people and magazines I knew always called all of it ASCII art. In fact I don't think I had heard the term ANSI art before today.
I guess this may similar to how we usually call all tracker music "MODs", though in fact there are MOD, XM, S3M, IT...
Having the rating of how well the model will run for you is cool. I miss to also have some rating of the model capabilities (even if this is tricky). There are way too many to choose. And just looking at the parameter number or the used memory is not always a good indication of actual performance.