miggol

> You know, in this case I don’t think Stadia was a joke. I think it was a completely sincere effort to compete with a new kind of “console” in the game industry.

I agree! They really gave Console as a Service a shot. But back in the day when it was launching, my take was that the "new console" part of it was secondary. The core goal would have been to get a foot in the game streaming market for their Android TV / Cast platform.

> dug in instead of pivoting

If this rumour is true, maybe that's exactly what's happening. They've proven that the experience is good enough for people to play games on it, and even pay for the privilege. So it's technically sound (depending on geography).

Gamers aren't going to play through the entire new Skyrim on Stadia, Google knows that. But what about Gamers (in the right geographical location) watching a Youtube video on their smart TV being served an ad? That ad for the new Skyrim has a "Play demo now" button, no download required, instant gameplay. Now that's an expensive ad if I've ever seen one.

Thank you for your informative reply! These are such good reads

My curiosity is killing me as to what exactly went wrong. And as someone living in The Netherlands I'm also kind of mad at the apparent fragility of this huge chunk of our infrastructure. If this had happened on a work day, it would have been a real national emergency, rather than just a huge national inconvenience.

I would appreciate one of those post-outage "what happened" reports like with the AWS and Facebook outages last year. But outside of IT I don't think anyone really expects those over here. And there might be national security considerations preventing such disclosure until any chance of a repeat has been engineered away, at which point everyone will have forgotten.

Alpine is more of a command-line distro. It's compact design and lack of many dependencies make it ideal for virtual servers and containers. Personally I've been eyeing it for an install on a small ARM board as a music streaming server, which it seems quite suitable for. In this case I would still connect to it over the network, still with no GUI or desktop.

I imagine the DRM is contracted out to a company which the publisher uses for more of their games. The DRM guy or gal comes in a couple days around the end of development, imports some libraries, and sprinkles some function calls here and there. There either isn't the knowledge/time/co-operation to optimize it, or the actual devs are told to stay well away from the DRM stuff to avoid messing something up and causing piracy false positives.

Not that I'm in the know, but it seems likely that publishers can get code into the binary one way or the other.

Gmail is back up for me, but youtube is still down and music.youtube.com won't let me log in, showing an error 500 on accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin

Is there anyone with knowledge of the google auth flow who can shed some light on what part of the machine is likely failing?

As someone who in the past year has only used cash to pay for illicit substances, I was quite surprised by the title. Why punish business owners for choosing a more efficient and safe payment method? But having read the article, well, I see it differently. I did not know that cash still played such an indispensable role in the lives of many vulnerable groups in the U.S..

Does anyone have more info on what is meant by "alternative financial services"? I'm guessing they're not referring to bitcoin...

I'd argue that for data storage purposes, you'd like to have a low metadata to information ratio. In the examples the author gives this seems to be the main problem, with way more characters being used for markup than for content.

Compare that to JSON or TOML, which are more human-friendly and waste fewer bytes on structure to convey the same information. When used for data storage, two XML files of the same schema describing two completely different objects are likely to share a large amount of content, which is wasteful and gets in the way.

The worst example of this that I deal with regularly has to be the libvirt domain XML.

https://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html

It does occasionally put information outside of the tags, but because there's no logic to when, it's nearly worse.

The Dutch law for the protection of personal information (wet bescherming persoonsgegevens) on which these conclusions are based, is basically just an implementation of an EU-wide directive. So if the WBP authority can agree that this breaks the law, this could climb up the ladder and result in another huge EU fine for Microsoft. I wonder if and how MS will respond or react to this release.