I think the GP is saying that we already deal with these problems with downlinks, so accounting for similar problems on crosslinks is a known, and expected quantity.
1,094 karma · joined May 7, 2008
COP: Coefficient of Performance. This is a ratio of how much you can augment the temperature for every unit of energy you put in.
Your best, most efficient top of the line gas furnace has a COP of 0.98. This means that, for every 1 joule of energy, you're getting 0.98 joules of heat energy. Let's say that, for easy math's sake, you pay $1 per joule for natural gas, so your operational cost for the furnace is $1.02 per joule. Yes, numbers are crazy town, but simple math for simple explanation.
A modern bog-standard heat pump has a COP of 4. The operational COP of the heat pump varies depending on the difference in temperature from inside to outside, but the vast majority of the state of California is going to operate at temperatures that can support the COP. Per your statement, electricity is 6x the cost of gas, so we'll say that every joule of energy going into the heat pump costs $6. This puts your operational cost at $1.50 per joule.
It's certainly not a "better deal", but the cost delta can't simply be measured by the cost of the energy going into the heating system.
As far as points of failure, there's no additional hub/switch in between the devices, so you have a Thunderbolt controller on each device, two cables, and two ports. If a cable goes bad, so long as there isn't a silent/awkward failure mode, all three nodes can still talk to eachother, at degraded speed. If a switch goes bad, the whole network is down, unless you start talking about redundant switch topologies.
To your point though, there does seem to be plenty of shenanigans with performance, especially between devices with different Thunderbolt controllers, that may make this less ideal. But IMO, that's more of a question of do you want to with a more battle tested topology, or are you okay with a less battle tested, but still highly performant and "simple" (we won't go into how bonkers the USB/Thunderbolt spec is) topology?
If folks ask "why would you pay for email", I think the right first answer to that question is that it's a better service than the free service providers. Then, you can talk about the why's (when you pay for email, you're the customer, not the product, the privacy aspect of not having their email being farmed to enhance a company's advertising profile about you, or being used for AI/ML research if that's important to you, or any of the other reasons that might be important to folks).
So yeah, paid email is a premium service, and if we're being honest, it's been a premium service for regular folk for decades. I happily pay for email myself, but my parents sure don't, my wife doesn't, and most of my friends don't.
If you think about it, the less bandwidth that Twitch consumes through their CDN network, the less money a stream costs per minute. A viewer still watches ads with the same CPM, a viewer still subscribes for the same amount per month per broadcaster, a viewer optionally pays the same for ad-free viewing (Turbo), and a viewer pays the same premium for bits, regardless of what quality they're watching at. So, interestingly enough, the economics of limiting transcoding are more about limited capacity and ensuring a positive cost per streamer. If a streamer does not become an affiliate or partnered broadcaster on the platform, the only revenue Twitch gets from the streamer is the ad money from its viewers. By virtue, they want as many casters on the platform as possible to become affiliates, as being able to get commissions from bit sales and subscriptions gives Twitch more revenue streams for the same content.
So, to your point, they definitely want to be able to support more efficient codecs that are not as patent encumbered as h.265 (which IIRC did have limited support in SE Asian markets), because at the end of the day, if streamers are generating the renditions for the ABR ladder, and ultimately, folks are using lower bitrates, then overall, this cuts costs for the same operational cost.
Ultimately, less of a concern for servers that likely have limited scope and use cases, but a significant decrease in usability for workstations.
Advertisers do not want their products advertised next to adversarial content. The exodus of advertisers on Twitter/X is a great parallel - flood a user generated content platform with content that does not bode for positive brand associations, and brands stop paying. You can argue that it's "puritanical ethics" at play here if you'd like, but I see this more as wanting to associate their brands with mass market appeal.
Secondly, the moment you cross into pornographic content, your payment processors start bailing. This, in my opinion, plays more into your perception that mass standards for acceptable content influence the decision. I can't think of a major payment processor that permits their service to be used to pay for pornographic content, and that is because it's high risk. It's high risk because it's rife with chargebacks. Things like claims "I didn't pay for this!" when a partner happens to see a charge for a pornographic product, buyer's remorse as the truth of a parasocial relationship plays out to an unsatisfying conclusion, whatever the reason, payment processors just don't want to be associated with it.
You don't have to like it, you don't have to agree with it, but in a sense, this is companies choosing what markets they want to serve.
- Greenfield tech is simpler, and more stable. There's only 1 or 2 CPEs, a handful of distribution gear types, and a much smaller network. As a result, the support cost is much cheaper, more stable, and less prone to failure from equipment damage. These networks aren't traversing over 40, 50, 60 year old coax or 80, 90, 100 year old copper, it's fiber all the way down.
- Profit as a motive for the ISP is purely to pay for the costs of the service. Wages, equipment, investment in the service. Without a need to spread dividends to investors, and those investors leading a board to shift the motive of the service provider to generate revenue as a first priority, pricing priorities can be much more simple. This also mitigates choices to stay on existing infrastructure to squeeze more money purely for the purposes of paying more dividends. Those choices will happen, but they should be to buy time for the next upgrade that is planned.
- Manufactured monopolies by virtue of connection agreements (Cable provider X is allowed to have a monopoly as a service provider for a municipality so long as they provide service to N% users) have turned out to be a poor incentive to provide up to date, quality, affordable service as the service matures. New fiber providers, whether muni or independent, seem to be taking a much more sustainable approach to buildout and growth. As a result, because they are capturing the market by virtue of a better product, at a better price, whenever these ISPs onboard a new neighborhood, they have to do what they do well to retain the subscriber base, because the alternatives may not be as good, but they're not awful.
This is an opinion I used to hold, so I definitely understand where this comes from. As I've learned more however, I now understand why this is not always a reasonable ask. Depending on the state of the emulator, the level of accuracy to the underlying hardware is pretty broad. Accuracy's not an outright killer of playability - most popular emulators for every console do some trade of accuracy for efficiency. A lack of accuracy however leads to a lack of compatibility. This might mean some titles might run with graphical or audio glitches, some might run with game breaking bugs that make a title unplayable. For the casual game enjoyer though, the bar for "good enough" is pretty low that people thoroughly enjoyed the "Classic" reproduction consoles that were all the rage back in the late 2010's despite them being far from perfect. However, this doesn't solve the key problem that will come with this change, which is availability.
In order to have a title to emulate or otherwise shim into running, you need to be able to download it. While plenty of titles have drifted into abandonware collections or various other sites for you to access, it's certainly gray area territory. Digital archivists will need to get access to the software to preserve it. In the days of classic cartridge based consoles, this meant buying every game you could get your hands on and getting it in the hands of someone with the ability to dump the ROM. With storefronts like Steam though, there is no secondary market to do that on the cheap, and no physical media many games that released exclusively through this Steam, or even the App Store, to be archived outside of this fashion.
You do make a good point though regarding keeping old hardware running. While sometimes you can still find boxes of old components to replace, the amount of supply will dwindle to inexistence. The Super Nintendo speedrunning community is desperate to find replacement components for the ceramic oscillator used for audio timing on the console, as the cheaper component in the BOM is degrading over use and time, causing inaccurate RNG generation and instability.
All this to say, it's reasonably hard to maintain compatibility and playability of old software, and the quality of that compatible experience isn't consistent. I'd love it if game platform developers put more effort into preservation efforts, whether that be first-part production of compatibility shims for newer consoles to play older titles, or an openness to publish technical documentation for platforms to make preservation more feasible by communities. And most importantly, a willingness to offer access to titles from libraries and collections digitally after their money making days are done.
In addition to this, when Steam detects that a game in your library is not supported on the target platform, the UI prevents you from downloading it. It's certainly possible to use steamcmd, Steam's CLI client to download an entitlement regardless of whether the platform supports it or not, but the game will certainly not be easily accessible even if it would run unmodified. This effectively relegates the access and hopeful functional use of these classic Mac OS X games to digital archivists, developers and/or publishers willing and capable of re-releasing the game for the new target, and/or a third party providing compatibility shims to allow the game to work, whether official or third party.
macOS's player base has always been in the basement. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Apple hasn't made a particular welcoming environment for games on their hardware save for mobile, and that has more to do with the proliferation of smartphones being the new hot place to release software than game developers working hard to make games available. So, the likelihood of there being a plethora of titles released on Steam for macOS that will become unplayable is low, since I have to imagine most of these releases are available for other platforms. However, because of the lack of attention, there's also a fair likelihood that many titles that were released for Mac on Steam probably will be forgotten. As it stands today, 87% of classic video games just aren't available at all any more[0], based on a study by the Video Games History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network.
Nintendo has always been fond of favoring second party relationships and working tightly with them to create either new IPs themselves, or expand on their existing IPs. HAL Laboratories is famous for Kirby, Super Smash Bros, working closely with Creatures, Inc. and Game Freak on Pokémon titles, and the Mother / Earthbound series, and was so close that their darling programmer and later manager Satoru Iwata became the first president of Nintendo outside of the Yamauchi family. Other strong second party development studios that Nintendo has hitched their horse include but aren't limited to Intelligent Systems (Fire Emblem), Retro Studios (Metroid Prime, though now a first party studio), and Argonaut Software (Star Fox).
Rare was just trying to make games before their eventual partnership with Nintendo grew. I believe I read somewhere though that the relationship started to wane, so when Microsoft started wining and dining studios to build their own second party studio, when they came to Rare, the company saw the dollar signs and promises of more creative agency and decided to hitch to another cart. Since then, the company has released some successful titles since then, but arguably none are as notable as during the heyday of their partnership with Nintendo.
LLHLS is darn good, but it's not as good as WebRTC-powered technologies have shown from a latency perspective. Whether that's required for particular use cases is really pertinent to the case. For non-interactive feeds, it's not really a value add.
That said, the biggest quality improvements MoQ has are how it recovers from a poor connection issue, which happens frequently even on the best of consumer networks and Internet connections, let alone on poorer quality WiFi and cellular networks.
As a result, die hards (admittedly, like myself) were happy to purchase the console, and were willing to get read up on the differences, but capturing the casual, and probably more importantly, the parent audience, who remarkably during the NES -> SNES transition were adamant about not purchasing a new console because "they already have one" didn't understand that, while there was backwards compatibility, the console was certainly capable of standing on its own. It would have offered neat experiences with games like Breath of the Wild taking advantage of the WiiU gamepad with screen, and otherwise been easy to write software for as an existing developer on the previous platforms. It would have been a quite fine stopgap release if it had been marketed appropriately.
Many moons ago, I helped an older couple who unfortunately got vastly oversold on a Windows XP Media Center Edition computer from Gateway, when all they needed was a simple computer. The computer had a real nice Hauppauge capture card to act as a DVR, a neat amplifier looking PC case, and all sorts of bells and whistles. For a pointer device, Gateway included a Gyration mouse, which operated on 2.4 GHz RF, and worked surprisingly well. It used a trigger to activate gyroscopic mouse movement.
Turns out Gyration is still in business! https://www.adesso.com/product/gyration-air-mouse-go-plus/
* A site must be certified by some board in order to be accessible. At what level is a site certified? Root level? Page level? Individual content item.
* A site hosts user generated content. This could be as small as comments on an article, or as large as YouTube. How is the site certified? If each piece of content must be certified, who assumes responsibility for certification?
* A site is certified as appropriate for all ages. The owner of the site then puts content that would have caused to to fail certification. At what interval is a site expected to recertify? What is the ramification for certification and then hosting of objectionable content?
* You have a process that is onerous for site administrators to comply with in order to host content for children. What incentive is for them to comply vs. not host a site that requires certification?
* As a parent, you install a compliant operating system that enforces this system. Sites comply with the program and it works without exception. Kids talk, as they do, and share how to get around this system by using a Linux live environment to boot into an OS that does not enforce the parental control header. How do you prevent this?
* As a parent, you install a compliant operating system that enforces this system. Your kid either does not know how, or is prevented from circumventing these access controls. They have one or more friends that have computers that are not blocked from accessing this content. How do you prevent them from accessing content in this system?
Wow. I feel so seen with this particular sentence, having felt this at numerous jobs both professional and volunteer. Well said.