I'm all for MS bashing and laughing at their incompetence, but was there really any threat there? I don't know anyone on PC who was interested in buying a game anywhere other than Steam in 2015.
It was specifically the release of Windows RT (Windows 8 on ARM) in 2012 that had people nervous that Microsoft wanted to lock Windows down long-term in the manner of iOS and Apple. Windows RT only ran code signed by Microsoft and only installed programs from Microsoft's store. It failed, and Microsoft let off the gas locking down Windows, but that moment was probably the specific impetus for Gabe Newell to set Valve on a decade long course of building support for Steam and the games in its storefront on Linux. Windows being locked down to the degree of iOS was an existential risk to Valve as a company and Steam as a platform in 2012. It isn't anymore.
Windows RT also drew ire from people other than Newell at the time IIRC. It was widely perceived as a trial balloon for closing down Windows almost completely. The first Steam Machines a decade ago were Valve's answering trial balloon. Both failed, but Valve learned and Microsoft largely did not... They haven't locked down Windows 11 to the point of Windows RT, but they're abusing their users to the point of potentially sabotaging their own market dominance for consumer PCs.
Yes. We could have had Windows on Arm ten years previously, but Microsoft tried to use the platform transition as an opportunity for lock in. Fortunately this meant there were no apps and basically zero take up of WinRT.
This was also closely related to their initial plans with the Xbox One to essentially kill used games, which they were about a decade to fast on rolling out.
I buy games on GoG when I can, Steam when I have to. I have nothing against Steam, but they do have a near monopoly position on PC. Unfortunately the non-GoG alternatives are from even worse actors.
People feared that MS will make installing things not from the store harder. Like what apple is doing. It posed a serious potential threat. Given that MS had complete control over the Windows, DirectX and many other tools developers were using.
They still can be, Microsoft is one of the biggest publishers, and they can lock everything from their studios into XBox app store or Gamepass, if they feel like it.
I hope we keep making progress in isolating tracks in music. I love listening to stems of my favorite songs, I find all sorts of neat parts I missed out on. Listening to isolated harmonies is cool too.
From the papers I've read, the stem separation models all seem to train off what seems like a fairly small dataset that doesn't have great instrument representation.
I wonder if you could assemble a big corpus of individual solo instruments, then permute a cacophonous mix of them. IIRC the main training dataset is comprised of a limited number of real songs. But I think a model trained on real songs might struggle with more "out there" harmonies and mixes.
The problem of track isolation is sometimes underconstrained, and so any AI system that does this will probably invent "neat parts" for us to hear that weren't necessarily in the original recording. It feels like using super-resolution models to notice details about your great-grandma's wedding dress.
It shall also allow to make re-recordings in higher quality of stuff that are impossible to find in good quality. Like that cover that that band played only once at that obscure concert and that was recorded on an old tape. Or many very old reggae songs: although many from Jamaica/Kingston had great recordings (there was know-how and great recording studios there) there's also a shitload of old reggae songs that are just barely listenable to because the recording is so poor (and, no, it's not an artistic choice by the artist: it's just, you know, a crappy recording).
It's not trying to be Portal. It's a Sokoban game. If you like playing Sokoban games, here's a package of ~1400 hand-crafted puzzles, probably with a handful of interesting gimmicks/rule alterations to spice things up.
> At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay.
Unfortunately we're not all as smart as you but in TFA he estimates it'll take 400-500 hours to complete all of them.
Hah! Didn't mean to imply I'm some sort of puzzle-solving genius, point was precisely the opposite — that solving those puzzles at a breakneck pace would still be a crazy amount of time.
Soulja Boy never made any videos about Garry's Mod
This is kind of a joke and I know he was mostly poking fun at Braid but this does speak to how mainstream indie games got in that first wave that hit XBLA.
If there's anyone who I think deserves to be able to say "all existing languages/engines suck" it's someone who made his own language from scratch to make an engine with it from scratch to make a game with it from scratch to combat the problem.
This was a scary story to read after I cashed out all my rewards points at work for the first time in 5.5 years to get six $100 Apple gift cards which I redeemed back-to-back-to-back.
Nintendo is pretty good for putting a solid 1.0 version of their games on the cartridges on release. But on the other hand, the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long as they keep the servers online so you could download a digital purchase.
I've kinda given up on physical games at this point. I held on for a long time, but the experience is just so bad now. They use the cheapest, flimsiest, most fragile plastic in the cases. You don't get a nice instruction manual anymore. And honestly, keeping a micro SD card in your system that can hold a handful of games is more convenient than having to haul around a bunch of cartridges that can be lost.
I take solace in knowing that if I do still have a working Switch in 20 years and lose access to games I bought a long time ago, hopefully the hackers/pirates will have a method for me to play them again.
> the Switch cartridges use NAND memory which means if you aren't popping them into a system to refresh the charge every once in a while, your physical cartridge might not last as long
You've been paying attention to the wrong sources for information about NAND flash. A new Switch cartridge will have many years of reliable data retention, even just sitting on a shelf. Data retention only starts to become a concern for SSDs that have used up most of their write endurance; a Switch cartridge is mostly treated as ROM and only written to once.
