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Old man yells at cloud

jonandnic.com

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Re: Old man yells at cloud

#121

Post by greedo »

adrr wrote: post #102
AJRF wrote: post #39

I tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened; - Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked. - Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed. - Try to…

I do remember the past and dealing with driver issues, irq conflicts and broken implementations of opengl or directx that crashed my games all the time. The countless hours trying to get unreal to run in hardware mode without crashing. Hours trying to find the right combo of drivers and IRQs and even moving slots. That's just games. I don't know how many papers I lost due crashes due to macs not having protected memo…

I remember playing WoW on my brand new Mac Pro (circa 2005) and a month later the GPU was burned out. Replaced the GPU under warranty, a month later it burned out again. Replaced it a third time (with a lot of side eye from the Genius Bar), and decided to stop playing WoW. Never had any more issues with the GPU.

Was it WoW's fault? I would think that a GPU would prevent any application from damaging it, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#122

Post by capybara_2020 »

The complexity that this article talks about was all built to solve a problem and in a lot of cases it does solve that problem. The problem might not exist for the author and a particular user and that is what makes the tech hard for them.

I cannot imagine a world without downloads, I spent a lot of time in my younger days in parts of the world where finding a gaming system, lets alone a cartridge/CD was a nightmare. I have spent hours/days/weeks looking for games. Digital downloads have virtually eliminated that problem no matter where I am.

The whole social media complexity is about how to make money off people especially when they potentially cannot afford/want to pay for a service(plus other problems like how to keep up with shareholders that expect to see a business constantly grow while being risk averse). It solves that problem with ads and a whole bunch of complexity to increase revenue. Making the app complicated for users but solving the revenue problem.

I used to be a big PGAdmin fan for Postgres management. But then they rewrote the app as a web app and I stopped using it because it was completely broken for me. But it was done to solve a problem with tech debt.

It is very easy to see in hindsight what went wrong, but at the point the solutions were created it is probably the best solution possible with the give constraints. I have seen code that was a horrible mess and wondered what the devs were thinking but then I have written horrible code too, but it was the best I could do at that point with the information I had then. I did not actively set out to write bad code and at that point I just solved the problem. But in hindsight it was horrible code.

This is such a complex topic and I do not think it is a case of "things were good in the old days, now they are bad". It is more a case of, ok today we have this information how do we fix X. But then that might lead to unknown complexity down the road. Plus there is the whole needing to cater to the needs of different people with very varied interests and often contradictory needs.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#123

Post by bitexploder »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #89
bitexploder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4runner are still decent.

The current generation 4Runner went on sale in mid-2009. The engine was first introduced in 2002 and the transmission in 2005. It should be half the price, but people will apparently pay Toyota just about anything for it.

Relative to the market it is still a good deal, especially if you actually off road and camp with it. There is a reason there are so many here in Colorado.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#124

Post by asciimov »

krony wrote: post #76

GoldenEye on Nintendo 64 was peak “play video games with a group of friends”. Now, it seems like every game is single player per console. So if my son has buddies over, they all haul their own Xbox’s and monitors (or scrounge my old ones from the basement closet). It’s considerably more difficult. Even though the TV screens now are so much larger! Craziness. I solidly agree.

For me playing at home with a group of friends peaked with Halo on Xbox and Smash on GameCube. Halo let you get 8 friends together on 2 tvs and 2 Xboxes with just an Ethernet cable, you could double those numbers with with a switch.

Games still loaded relatively fast, and you didn’t have to spend hours waiting for downloads.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#125

Post by wildhereplzhold »

m463 wrote: post #112
habitue wrote: post #21

These are all examples of tradeoffs that have been made, and just collecting examples of the downsides of those tradeoffs without mentioning the upsides. Touchscreens are objectively worse than dedicated buttons, but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit. additionally, the UI can be less confusing because the button text can change depending on what you're doing, vsm a single physical d-pad and…

touchscreens in cars might be ok for settings, and the kinds of things you do when you are stopped. But touchscreens have become a mess in cars. Telsa is a horrible offender. I believe the UI designers must have stationary mockups that don't move around like a car. Not only have they removed some dedicated controls, they have eliminated almost ALL dedicated controls now. The new model S/X cars don't have stalks - tur…

> The car guesses what gear you want to be in.

TBF, most automatic transmissions do this, and I think that Teslas only have one gear anyways.

Unless...please tell me they don't guess whether you want Park, Drive, Neutral, or Reverse?

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#126

Post by acdha »

root_axis wrote: post #90

This article disproves its own thesis. The article shows that technology has gotten objectively better, the problem is that better technology is a double edged sword, but cynics only like to acknowledge the negatives. This contradiction is perfectly embodied by the first example where the author bemoans 45 minutes to download 20 gigs over the internet (which is even a bit slow by today's standards). In the time of th…

> This article disproves its own thesis.

I wouldn’t be so quick to be defensive here. While it’s true that networks and drives are faster, it’s also true that the metric affecting the user experience in question is time to load rather than bits per second and many modern games are much worse on that front compared to a Nintendo which was playable in about the same time it took a CRT monitor to boot up.

A more thoughtful criticism would be thinking about how gaming companies could offer the things people want (high resolution imagery, for example) with more care for the user experience - e.g. downloading in the background or after someone’s done for the night, optimizing their file structures so a small change doesn’t force most of the assets to be retransferred, telling you whether an update fixes a critical bug or can be deferred, etc. If you simplt attack people for accurately criticizing something you like, you miss out on a chance for it to be even better.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#127

Post by adrr »

goosedragons wrote: post #13
teen wrote: post #3

The first example is because the game had a patch, I'm pretty sure that you can skip that on Switch, but even if you can't, games that couldn't be patched were objectively worse than ones that can. The second example is social media and has been discussed to death. No arguments there. The third example, Tesla's UI, could be said to be worse than manual buttons, but the technology in a Tesla is not objectively worse o…

Its not a Switch in the article. There's also this bad trend where publishers literally leave pieces of the game off the disc/cartridge and force you to download the rest. Not a patch, the actual game.

Is it worse than the time when games came on multiple disks or cds and you had to switch during the game? How many cds did myst come on? Prior cds was floppies which you couldn't even install it on a HD because the floppies had copy protection on.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#128

Post by yabones »

CharlesW wrote: post #96
flumpcakes wrote: post #85

It might be hardware too… or the software/firmware side: Recently I’ve had every DX12 game crash at start-up, time to RMA my expensive graphics card. I buy an Intel Arc A750 as a cheap stop-gap as my CPU has no iGPU. I completely wipe windows and start from scratch—I can now play DX12 games! Oh, no, they hang after about 1 hour of play time and brick the system. Hard reboot required. Also, if my PC sleeps/hibernates…

> I’d trade 10 year old graphics for 10 year old stability. Would you trade 3-year-old graphics for 25-year-old stability? If so, my friend, console gaming is where it's at!

Eh, it's not much better. You want to play a game, but the game needs 80GB of updates before it will open. Oops, it dropped out 90% of the way there and needs to start over. It's better than GPU-driver-hell, but consoles aren't without their flaws

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#129

Post by dontknowwhyihn »

I love my Nintendo Classic- no accounts, no ads, works offline.

I also agree with everything the author wrote about cars. I would add- for all the technology in cars, you still can’t see the exact amount of fuel in your tank. Because then you could determine exactly what mileage you’re getting.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#130

Post by windex »

Cloud has made irritating monthly payments possible even for small and tiny bits of rarely used software. As with electronics without removable batteries that will die soon, this trend is not something I will support by buying anymore. This year, I am cutting back on subscriptions in favor or whatever alternative that allows me a "reasonable" one time payment option. I hate having external dependencies and have developed subscription fatigue.
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