There is absolutely no way they managed to do proper due diligence to understand who on the team is essential ("good bones" for the structure) vs. those that are not. It's been a week.
Ah yes, the good ol' Linux "You're holding it wrong" mantra.
Look, I don't know about you, but I don't have unlimited time to go fiddle with whatever emulation layer is there to make some game from 2017 work well on a modern Mac. Not only that, but Apple has proven, time and time again, that they completely do not care about backwards compatibility, which is crucial for games, so let's not pretend that the "manufacturer" (assuming you're talking about the game developers here) is at fault - nobody has unlimited time to adjust their product on the whims of the folks in Cupertino.
Here's the reality - on Windows, I can still play DOS games. On macOS, with the latest OS release, 90% of my Steam library cannot be used (that were all perfectly fine before the update) because Apple decided to remove support for 32-bit apps. So sticking to Windows for gaming is the logical choice if you want access to the latest and greatest titles and not a selection of a few that are "hacked around".
You're being unfair to Linux if you think Windows doesn't do the same "you're not supposed to do that" every time you step out of a nice path. Or even with the nice path it'll suddenly decide it's time to worsen your experience to improve their marketing or data mining.
There's awesome Linux experiences out there and the Steam deck is starting to show what's possible giving varying levels of control.
We live in exciting times. The more choice, the better.
On Mac, your apps reliably break. On Windows, they never break. It's not whether there's a right way and a wrong way, it's whether the right way stands at complete odds to how anyone actually wants to use the computer. Sure, Linux has a reasonable experience most of the time - that has nothing to do with Mac, and in fact has very little to do with Linux or its community either; Steam has nearly single-handedly made it work. The same way Windows tries to make it work, and the way Mac notably tries not to.
Steam Deck is nice, but let's not kid ourselves that it's anywhere close to what Windows has to offer. Most games in my Steam library still are not Steam Deck compatible, and chances are they never will either because they are too old or because they require new OS components that embed themselves around kernel APIs (separate conversation on whether that is good or bad).
Again - not necessarily saying that the Windows experience is ideal, but it's the absolute best out of the available options.
The more I see these announcements, the more I wonder - what is the appeal of something like Vercel and the likes? On the surface it seems like AWS/GCP/Azure/whichever big cloud provider can replicate literally everything they build within their infrastructure quite easily. Why host your core infra in a BigCo cloud and then the site on Vercel?
And if you are spending your time and resources trying to replicate it instead of building your core product you're an idiot/forever software engineer clueless about product.
I wasn't referring to the edge network for _startups_ to replicate. I was more wondering how AWS and others can replicate Vercel/Netlify and eat their lunch. They have no defensible moat as a company.
Vercel makes app deployment a first-class citizen that's baked into the CDN. Fastly doesn't offer a Vercel/Netlify deploy feature, and AWS requires considerably more work to setup but can easily replicate.
At the end of the day, even when it's running sever-side or on the edge, it still all exists to deliver a front-end experience. Vercel makes delivering such an experience more palatable. This includes isolated environments that can easily be shared and a CDN-as-default deploy model. It's like someone sprinkled a little Heroku magic on a specific front-end deployment workflow.
Until Vercel adds a solid and flexible database as a service, I'll continue using Google Cloud Run + Cloud SQL + Cloud Build for a "no server" solution.
Granted, the Vercel edge network is amazing, but Google routes internal requests way way faster than the edge can communicate with Google's infra.
Vercel is great for things that aren't stateful and for automagic build configuration and asset serving. But not great for anything needing a DB.
On our team, we deploy our web app through Vercel primarily because of this (maybe there is some hype factor bias in there too?..). Everything else we rely on runs on AWS. We don't necessarily need Vercel for any of the edge computing or serverless environments, but the experience of building, previewing, and deploying our app is FAR superior to AWS's Amplify offering because it just works.
Trialing Amplify for a few weeks led to a world of hurt, leftover build artifacts in our accounts, failed builds left and right, unreliable preview environments, etc.
Most smart watches are actually providing a lot of information that is useless for the consumer. Yes, you can track your heart rate and step count - but then what? What does that mean? Do you need to walk more? Sure, but you could do that without the watch.
There is some gamification aspect to it, but it creates the illusion of "caring about your health" while doing the bare minimum. Let alone the constant distraction with notifications that now buzz your wrist and you get distracted by.
This is a well-known play on FOMO - there is that bit about the inherent fear of missing out on being top of leaderboard/in-game items/bonuses/etc. What's fascinating is just how easy this mechanic is applied to so many modern games and apps, and how hooked folks become on it even though they know what's going on.
"Ugh... they implemented this for FOMO... but damn I can't skip playing this game for a day because I am going to miss out on the +1 bonus to agility that's gonna be awarded if I log in 7 days in a row."
There is a big difference between "We enable others to access data with user permission" and "your game play, activities and usage of games and Xbox Services will be tracked and shared with applicable third-parties, including game developers". The latter means that they leave the door open to that data being sold and shared with "partners" if it's convenient.
That's part of the problem - opt-in never works because it's an inherently an anti-consumer practice. The industry got so used to vacuuming up as much data as possible that the moment you give customers the option, they do not want to partake.
You know it's a bad thing when you say "If I ask users for consent, nobody will agree to this."
I as a customer want full control of my data and if you, the website owner, try to force me into giving data that I did not consent to (invasive site analytics, for example, that track my page behavior), I will go out of my way to block that through extensions and by just banning things at the DNS level.
More folks need to realize that their best bet (if they want to play games) is to buy them through DRM-free services like GOG, and not Xbox Game Pass or whatever flavor of subscription there is.
You're right in that once you get banned (for any arbitrary reason), there is no recourse. You can't get your library back.
So what can folks do?
- Buy MP3s that are DRM free.
- Buy physical copies of movies on DVD/BluRay instead of paying for streaming.
- Buy games on GOG, or physical copies that do not depend on "launchers".
- Buy software that is not subscription-based (Affinity is fantastic if you want to replace Adobe, for example) and you can buy for a one-time fee.
Getting really tired of the game of cat and mouse with telemetry domains, but alas the vast majority of the population does not understand the risks to their privacy, nor are they educated about the extent of data collection and re-selling that is happening in the industry.
It's as if we need to simplify the way we have 18,337,398 page Privacy Policy into something like "We collect and sell your data to the following parties: 1, 2, 3". Bet at least then you'd have some people against the mass telemetrization of every nook and cranny of your devices.
I wonder if it might also help if companies were compelled to share specifics. E.g. Imagine just like the "Security" tab in $WEBSITE that lists all your recent logins and originating IP's, there were a "Privacy" tab showing each disclosure.
7/2: We told Facebook you visited our website
7/3: We shared your recent search on "Ukraine" with Cambridge Analytica
Even more-so if you could audit your telemetry data blockchain-style as it propagates through the ether...
7/14: Cambridge Analytica shared your Ukraine search history with Russian FSB
FWIW, I just assume that any data in the "cloud" is up for grabs to the highest bidder, with any service, no matter how "privacy-oriented" they are today. Once they get enough data, it becomes too tempting to start monetizing it.
Microsoft despite its revenue volumes is not exempt from trying to diversify its revenue streams through selling whatever data they have for ads/whoever wants it.
That's a HUGE part of the reason why I refuse to use any "cloud storage" aka OneDrive or whatever they call it these days, or any of the MSFT cloud services in Windows. Bing is the first thing I disable, along with all the MSN bloatware, and it's all done through a DNS block at the top of my network stack. Never connect the OS to the Microsoft account either, because the way the company works - they are not a friend of yours and neither are they going to help you re-gain whatever semblance of privacy you're aiming for.
> FWIW, I just assume that any data in the "cloud" is up for grabs to the highest bidder, with any service, no matter how "privacy-oriented" they are today.
Microsoft intends to turn Minecraft into snitchware that will effect players playing the game entirely on their own computers and private servers, not just those playing on rented servers (aka "the cloud".)
I know this will sound like proposing a bandaid to a bigger problem, but that should be an incentive to drop Minecraft. Stop playing the game and move on to something different.
Minecraft is not like other games. Ten years ago minecraft was a blooming platform for mods. It has been lying dormant ready for another bloom when MS finally decide to enable the tools to allow it. Dark patterns while this future is still possible is a reason for concern.
We're talking about MSFT here - what did they build in the past 5 years that did not have a dark pattern built in?
Windows nags you about Microsoft account and won't let you install without it unless you know the magic CMD incantations.
Xbox games that are physical are nothing more than a "license key" that is used to download games from the MSFT servers, so if they ever go down, your DVDs are useless.
MSN being showed in Windows under the guise of "weather" and "widgets" while they promote trash tabloid content.
Logging in with an Outlook account in Edge hooks it to sync with Edge and you have to then explicitly go and opt out.
Shoveling third-party adware into Edge in the form of "credit payments".
Blocking custom browser settings.
There's a clear history here of reverse-Midas-ing quite a few things, and I genuinely feel bad for folks that want to build a great product within that environment. But the pattern is clear - your data and usage of their products will be tracked and monetized. The only winning move is not to play.
> It has been lying dormant ready for another bloom when MS finally decide to enable the tools to allow it.
I enjoy Minecraft as much as the next schlub, but I think you're being hyperbolic. Modding is great, but I think we've seen the extent of what it's capable of. Enabling mod support on Bedrock isn't going to herald in a new golden age of gaming, it would probably just give Microsoft more of a reason to kill off their legacy platforms, which is not what anyone wants.
Java and Bedrock compliment each other. Java is simply a better pick for modding, and Bedrock is available so kids watching Minecraft videos have somewhere to spend their $7 allowances. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think Microsoft made the right move here. Running the Java version on mobile was miserable, so making a pared-back, cheaper and monetized version for mobile gamers is fine as long as that development effort ultimately feeds back into the Java version (which most of the time, it does).
