This isn't unique to games, and it's not just "today". Go back a decade [0] find people making similar observations about one of the largest tech companies on the planet.
And that's consumer apps, having only glimpsed in the world of back-end / cloud shenanigans, there's heaps of data being generated and stored in datacenters. Useful data? Dunno, how useful are all access logs ever?
But it's stored because it's possible, easy, and cheap. Unlike older games, where developers would hide unused blocks of empty data for some last-minute emergency cramming if they needed it.
> That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn
Cartridges were also crazy expensive. A N64 cartridge cost about $30 to manufacture with a capacity of 8MB, whereas a PS1 CD-ROM was closer to a $1 manufacturing cost, with a capacity of 700MB. That's $3.75/MB versus $0.0014/MB - over 2600x more expensive!
Without optical media most games from the late 90s & 2000s would've been impossible to make - especially once it got to the DVD era.
I hate it when you buy a physical game, insert the disk, and immediately have to download the game in order to play the game because the disk only contains a launcher and a key. Insanity of the worst kind.
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.
The read speed off of an 8xDVD is ~10MB/s. The cheapest 500GB SSD on Amazon has a read speed of of 500MB/s. An NVMe drive has is 2500MB/s. We can read an entire DVD's capacity (4.7GB) from an SSD in under 10 seconds, compared to 8 minutes.
Maybe, but I'd argue the on-board storage chips literally an inch away from the CPU / GPU of the PS5 are faster these days. But in between cartridge consoles and fast hard drive consoles there was a disk-based gap where seek times were an issue.
They do, but it's irrelevant to performance nowadays since you're required to install all of the disc data to the SSD before you can play. The PS3/360 generation was the last time you could play games directly from a disc (and even then some games had an install process).
I believe even then it was already "most", at least for the PS3; that was the era where always-online devices became the norm, where game developers were more eager to release patches after release, etc.
i think you can see from the development of coding agents that people do want this. i would add 'to their own detriment', but i am a cynic and a C programmer.
I think it's only "weird" if you don't understand why it is the case... adding UDP/raw socket support is much more difficult, and waiting to get that implemented would have much larger downsides for the project as a whole to gain any traction in the meantime.
its kind of funny to say:
"A official c library doesn’t exist yet unfortunately, but there’s several out there you can try." if its litterally in the standard library...
Actually providing a method rather than documenting the syscall would be a good start. libc patches over a lot of syscall requirements and side effects, as well as keeping track of the individual syscall numbers for you.
I'm kind of surprised glibc doesn't provide a normal interface yet, but I suppose it has to do with non-Linux compatibility?
glibc has been reticent about adding new syscall wrappers for a few years. The situation did improve for a bit recently (and they added something like 5 years of syscalls from their backlog in the past few years) but I'm not surprised it's taking some time.
Thankfully we have had unified syscall numbers on Linux (for almost all architectures) for the past few years so tracking them is less painful than it used it be.
i think you are right, but its hard to explain as ppl can interpret your words in many ways depending on their context.
i think this:
you dont need language for an idea, to have it, or be creative.
to think about it outside of that, like asking critical questions, inner dialogue _about_ the ideas and creativity, that is i think what is 'thought' and that requires language as its sort of inner communication....
you could run ur own resolver somewhere and have ur devices update that? i think dns updates are a bit 'slow' sometimes so unsure how much u'd need to update them. if its frequent id say ur own dns resolver would be fastest as ur control the records directly on the box u query
i get that humans are not sexual objects. but 'being decent' and outright denying instinct and physiological responses to stimuli seems distinctly inhuman.
Doing this, will also impair the ability of people to handle such stimuli without getting overloaded by it. That last part is really dangerous... makes people unpredictably behave in light of sudden stimulus....
stop dehumanizing eachother and let eachother be natural in a human way. give eachother chance to experience and learn . the vast 99.9999% of humans will 'do the right thing'. (its why its called the right thing afterall..)
reply