randomacct44
Joined 10 years ago
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135
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49
Member since
Jan 19
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
Yeah.
Sure, tape-out may be cheaper with one chip line, but we aren't talking about chips where the feature is there in silicon but intentionally disabled (say, for the other more expensive variant). We're talking about a feature that the chips and systems are advertised as having, which doesn't work as it is intended to because the driver stack is broken. Where the vendor specifically says '....supports OpenGL ES x.x', but then you find it sort of does but not really and it's broken and won't ever be fixed.
It's even more frustrating because there's a whole open-source community that would be willing to do the work of writing the drivers even, but then of course the vendors won't give them the data they need because of IP concerns. It just really sucks.
Comment · 10 years ago
The utterly stupid thing is that the hype is what killed the game. Of course, then I guess they wouldn't have been able to charge AAA price for it and get away with it :/
I'm a fan of the space sim / massive universe concept and pretty much ignored most of the NMS hype, so I had no expectations going in. What I found when I did go in was an immediately recognizable game that I'd describe as Elite + Noctis with modern graphics. Which is fine, really. Particularly, anyone that loved playing Noctis would love playing NMS.
The problem is that price tag and the hype though. The game just doesn't have the staying power. I'd feel a bit better about the price tag if the studio communicated what they're doing more. I don't mind paying that price for a game in and of itself - games are expensive to make and I kinda hate the race-to-the-bottom that gives us things like freemium. However at this point, NMS feels abandoned by the studio and that's disappointing.
Jim Sterling did two excellent videos exploring the gaming hype culture and what everyone's roles were in this mess (the studio, Sony, the games press at large and the gaming public). They're worth watching in order for anyone that hasn't seen them:
Sky Hype (The Jimquisition): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_HEI8ZfDbM&t=847s
A Video Discussing Whether Or Not Hello Games Lied About No Man's Sky (The Jimquisition): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2qKAX_QaoI&t=72s
Comment · 10 years ago
What the?
"When I was discharged from the hospital late the next day, the cabdriver asked me, “Where do I take you?” I couldn’t remember the name of my street. I handed him the discharge paperwork with my address on it, arrived home and slept for a long while."
How does someone who just had a stroke get discharged from hospital the next day, to a taxi?
Comment · 10 years ago
AFAIK Android 6.0 and up lets you 'Format SD as internal storage' and from then on it's well, internal storage. I remember messing around with it on my Nexus Player awhile ago. In that particular case though, it did NOT handle unexpected power-downs at all well. I suspect it was a bug with remounting the encrypted filesystem on the card when booted back up next (where a Linux box would normally run fsck on it and then remount). I ended up doing some digging and filing a bug but never really getting motivated enough to stick with it.
FYI at least Samsung seem to be realizing their mistake as their latest models have the microSD card slot again after having abandoned it for some time, so it does seem like it's back.
I also have to concur with what others have said here - I've done my fair share of Raspberry Pi and ODROID-XU4 system image tinkering and come to the conclusion that microSD cards suck big time as a general purpose read/write storage device. I wouldn't feel comfortable having my phone's internal storage running off one actually.
Now if phones came with eMMC slots.... :)
Comment · 10 years ago
This is what happens when the concepts of security, DRM and commercial restriction get entangled.
This reminds me of the PlayStation 3. It remained an un-hacked console for so long and the theory goes that the people who wanted to tinker with it could do so without being forced to fight on the same side as the bad guys, because Sony allowed 'Other OS'. When Sony closed off 'Other OS', this gave incentive for people to actually try and jailbreak the system [1].
Yet now the people that just wanted to tinker had to take the same route that people who just wanted to pirate would have to take. By locking the platform down further, Sony only succeeded in merging the two camps (benign tinkerers and pirates). I think there's a lot of validity in this theory.
It's a tough choice. As an iOS user I've long since come to the same acceptance as you - that the added security is worth the extra restrictions. Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Protecting your platform from hackers shouldn't be the same as protecting your platform from SNES emulators or games with adult themes.
[1] I believe it was this talk where this view was put forward, but I might be wrong (at work, can't really double-check): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR9tFXz4Quc
Comment · 10 years ago
Reminds me of what happens when you step onto an escalator that isn't working (the broken escalator phenomenon):
http://www.newsweek.com/crazy-genius-brand-guru-peter-arnell...