Absolutely agree. If the marginal cost of this on a seat during a refit which has to happen anyway is low, could happen and could be a deal-breaker once word leaks out. Cathay made economy cramped, people went to Emirates. This could be a fight back move to regain lost market share?
They’re offering privacy, yes, but not as a service. They’re still very much in the business of selling devices to their customers, and this business model is incidentally one of the main reasons they, unlike Facebook or Google, can afford to offer such comprehensive privacy measures.
If people in the chat want him suspended, I guess it is those people with the complaint making a recording/listing of the chats and then passing the evidence onto authorities.
Not quite the same though, since Epic and Steam don’t require paid subscriptions to access their content. The only difference now is that you’re buying some of your games from Epic instead of Steam.
As that necessitates trusting Epic after years of shadiness and recently outright lies, it mostly means a bunch of games aren't going to get bought. For me anyway.
> after years of shadiness and recently outright lies
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. By my account, Epic has been among the better game developers for consumers. I wish Fortnite et al didn't use microtransactions—as far as I'm concerned, they always make games worse by building a purchase incentive into the design of the game—but it is free to play, so there's a limit to how much I can complain.
Using microtransactions (and the normal vehicles to facilitate those, like random loot boxes) is in itself a shady move. Their target demographic with Fortnite certainly doesn't help them there in my eyes.
The fact that it's "free but if you want you can gamble here and look we made it fun!" actually makes that worse, not better. First it draws you in, then when you're hooked you have more trouble stepping out.
I have only played Fortnite Battle Royale (like most Epic users I guess), but there are no loot boxes involved, and it feels very different from freemium mobile games. You pay for skins, or you pay for challenges that make the game more interesting, and for which more skins are the reward. That's it. And you can't wear more than one skin at any time, so it doesn't really encourage binge spending.
It's so harmless that even the non-monetary "engagement hacking" by other services feels like a burden in comparison (e.g. Steam's incessant notifications about new crappy stickers - stop stealing my precious time!).
Steam microtransactions are built into even meta nonsense like cards you get for playing games. It seems like the obvious worse platform for shady lootboxes and gambling with cs:go as well.
I wasn't talking about these issues as if one party or the other had them and another party did not. I was merely pointing out that the construct itself is shady.
Epic might be one of the only companies doing microtransactions correctly with Fortnite. Fortnite Battle Royale is free to play so it makes sense that they monetize somehow, but there is no randomness to purchases in the game. You buy items you want and you see exactly what you're getting. The paid for version of the game recently switched their lootbox mechanic so that you also see what's in the boxes before you buy them.
I’m not familiar with the legislative landscape you’re referring to, but it doesn’t seem like most of the other major companies have gotten rid of their lootboxes, so Epic is doing something right...
I think this is going away. I can play (some, and it's growing over time) Xbox and Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One, and if I bought them digitally or still have the original disc, I don't have to pay anything more.
Backward compatibility used to be way more normal. Then it was killed, now it is slowly coming back and we are supposed to be thankful for it. A more cynical mind could be tempted to think of this as a strategy.
probably the security flaws and lying about stopping exclusives. Tim Sweeney has caused a lot of outrage with his recent statements on press, which pretty much were lies. Can't link since don't have time, sorry
Crazy to look back at that exchange between him and Drew Houston knowing what we know today about the success of Dropbox (which hadn't even launched at the time of that comment!).
It's easy to look back at the "good old days" with the benefit of hindsight, but I'm sure that even today many of the famous founders of tomorrow can be found commenting here on HN. We just don't know who they are yet.
It really is amazing, I've been here nearly 12 years now and the quality of discussion hasn't devolved. If anything, it was a bit more cynical/negative ten years ago than it is now.
Your comment gave me an interesting idea. What would happen if we imposed a minimum char-limit for say, hacker news comments? On one hand I'd expect more descriptive responses, fewer comments that are a short "Your wrong but I won't tell you why", etc. Comments just spamming letters would be fairly easy to detect.
On the other hand what would this minimum char/word length be? Even your comment is fairly short, but it's descriptive and fully communicates your point...
Huh. I've only been here a couple of years, and I feel the quality of discussion is already starting to worsen. (However, it's still better than most other things—see https://danluu.com/hn-comments/)
Drew Houston even replied to one of his comments in that thread suggesting possible collaboration, and this was while Dropbox was going through the Summer '07 YC program, before they had even launched.
Crazy to look back and see how things panned out for these two random internet commenters.
Population growth is actually slowing worldwide, and we face the very real possibility of a global population decline within the next century. You’re trying to solve a problem that is already “solving” itself.
If this works out, this has the potential to be huge for the industry. I would love to see more unionization in tech, and this could be a first step in that direction.
It's going to end badly, unlike factories where a walkout would but a strain on production. A walkout necessarily doesn't put a strain on tech. Companies are going to embrace distributed teams/remote teams very fast and unionizing will just be a reason to close up shop in that location. That's what I imagine happening, predicting the future is hard tho.
I think it would be comparable, but not equal, to a factory walkout. Without active bug-squashing, DevOps and server maintenance, there is an increased risk of a major outage, which would even affect previous customers as well. Also, most tech companies collect revenue incrementally, via subscriptions, ads and the like, rather than up-front like most factories would. And getting a scab developer up to speed would likely take a lot longer than getting scab factory workers up to speed.
There are some differences as you said. If you're an auto factory that goes on strike, the management is likely still making money—they have all the cars made yesterday and the day before to sell. Of course, the pressure would rise much quicker in a factory vs a tech company; where the latter could presumably float itself for a few weeks, the former would start losing money within days.
A programmer walk-out is way worse. The Bus Factor is a real thing. Hire a new team to replace the old one on a complex project and it'll be months or years before they start doing anything productive. Making things worse, bit-rot is real and threatens existing software with failure if complaints aren't addressed.
If everyone in my department walked out and a new team had to be hired, they'd just be screwed. There's not enough documentation and the system is pretty complicated, with bits of it hiding everywhere and a bunch of ancient code that we never got around to refactoring (especially after they laid off half our department and another half quit afterwards, without replacement).
I'm sure whenever I get a new job and resign they're going to be like 'oh shit', because there's just not anyone left to replace what I do, really (I'm the last person in the department with a good amount of knowledge on their proprietary and stupid complicated phone systems, and they've kept me too swamped to be able to do any knowledge transfer worth a damn).
And in phone systems, there's always something going wrong or down, it seems like, often network related.
>It's going to end badly, unlike factories where a walkout would but a strain on production. A walkout necessarily doesn't put a strain on tech.
Certain types of work-to-rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) would bring most tech companies to their knees in a matter of minutes. It wouldn't just gum up the works as it would in industry, it could literally put systems into failure states.
The amount of crap I've had to do outside of my contract to keep the business running, I totally believe it. People in the right positions doing this and you're going to have swarms of angry clients and customers in minutes.
Better seats might not drive more seat upgrades, but it might drive more traffic to your airline.