Why does it feel like EA tries really hard to kill off franchises with a loyal fanbase by constantly playing limbo under the lowering bar?

For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won’t or will stop supporting ‘legacy’ Android Auto apps, so AA dies ‘because developers aren’t supporting apps anymore – totally not our fault and we’re sorry to see this happen.’

Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company – so decades now.

This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.

In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we’ve seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming – they promise!..one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?

Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it’s going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.

In short, his argument in court is that the lack of evidence is evidence of criminal intent.

In many countries, the question of profit doesn’t matter as to whether it violates copyright or not. Who knows where the legal stuff would happen but I looked up Australia’s copyright laws as well as I could and it seems similar to US copyright with the fact that it doesn’t matter whether someone is profiting from it or not.

To view the coking, you really need a very small and long endoscope with it. You really didn’t get that with the $50 borescopes back then. Most of them at that price point wouldn’t allow change outs either. Now you can get them with changeable endoscopes, decent video and recording of course fairly cheap.

Well, the borescope is running on an old archaic motherboard with ISA slots to do everything so I just didn’t really care enough to try to do anything with it at that point mostly because the fiberscope was garbage as well. At that point I might as well have built a new one but there’s no way they would have funded it so I wasn’t going to.

We used to have a borescope that saved pictures and some jet engine engineers always requested them when we checked for fuel coking. The thing was heavy, massive and ran on Windows 3.1. It would save one picture at it’s highest resolution on a single floppy but wouldn’t have enough space for another. So for each picture, we had to load in a new floppy. Then find the floppy drive with a USB.

I put a new borescope in the budget and it got knocked off for other stuff of course. As far as I know, they’re still using it because a company that profits billions per year and hundreds of millions on this project couldn’t afford a new one.

When people say “I own the game” these days they are generally saying there is no DRM or other factor preventing their passing it around for whatever reason

That’s why I said:

If it’s actual ownership instead of availability

The context is that the person I was responding to said they use GOG because they ‘own’ the game, in response to someone else saying that there are games on Steam with zero DRM that you can also buy.

Frankly, with the ‘availability’ argument you also don’t need Steam to play them and could copy them over to a PC that’s never had Steam installed and play them as well.

If it’s actual ownership instead of availability, then according to GOG’s own EULA, you don’t own the games there either.

I’m about to start a playthrough for the first time myself. I couldn’t believe that it is actually stand-alone. I thought for sure you’d need to have the OG Stalker games but you don’t and it warns that you shouldn’t install over them if you have them either.
I never could get myself into the originals but I’m looking forward to GAMMA.

I’d stay away from their storage solutions and network gear as well. They are trash.

It doesn’t matter. The suit is alleging that valve threatened to ban games if they were cheaper on other stores. Thats monopolistic price manipulation, and it’s illegal.

That is only true specifically for Steam keys and is a very important distinction. You can’t sell your game cheaper with your free Steam keys on another store cheaper than Steam without giving Steam customers the same discount within a ‘reasonable amount of time’.

Publishers/Developers are free to undercut Steam with non-Steam keys on other stores.

From their policy:

It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.