‘Your claim that “way more stuff is running at the same time” is only true if the PC user deliberately decides to keep other programs running alongside their game’ - So did you deliberately decide to run virus scanners, Microsoft telemetry, anti-cheat-software, preloaders for browsers like Chrome so they start up faster, explorer plugins and the usual assortment of bloat- and malware? No offense, but thinking that nothing ran on your computer unless you deliberately start it is naive. Why do you think there are so many “PC-Cleaner”-Tools? Even for Android there are “game modes” and “memory cleaners”. I have never seen anything similar on a gaming console.

‘It is true that while developing for PC you have to take account that different people will have different hardware, but that problem is solved by having a graphics settings menu.’ - And what do you think who designs the content that you choose from in that menu? When artists create meshes and textures they have to decide on resolution and polygon count. If your graphics card simply does not have that much memory then the performance is going to drop significantly. So if you want to have the option to lower the graphics settings you need to have assets that require less memory. I mean sure, some engines offer generic settings menus and there are algorithms that lower the memory footprint of assets algorithmically, but if course the result won’t be the same as if the assets were manually designed for that size. And if the assets are designed for a lower footprint a slider won’t be able to magically add details. The same applies for shaders. If the performance of the hardware is not sufficient a generic settings menus will only switch off effects, and unless you create an alternative the result may look pretty rough.

So that settings menu may be a solution for the players, but for the developers it means that all the options you can choose from need to be developed and tested, and that takes time and money.

The price doesn’t indicate anything other than what the seller thinks the customers are going to pay.

Companies are going to build their products as cheaply as possible. If they can make a car for 50$ they are going to do so. And what you just said is the reason why they are not going to sell it for 50$ but for 5000$, and you will immediately think that it must be less crappy.

I can show you tons of products that you can buy directly in China for half the price that you would pay over here in Europe, and I bet you that a lot of people reading this will think “the Chinese product must be a cheap knock-off”, and the only reason you have is that just because something is more expensive people expect it to be better.

I bought a wireless computer mouse in China for 3$ including shipping, and it’s working fine. The Bluetooth headphones that I use daily cost 5$. We are so used to the prices that sellers ask for that most people have no idea what things actually cost to produce.

“It can’t be any good at that price.” - It sounds smart, but turn it around to see how dumb it is: “It has to be good because it is expensive.”

Hey, I can sell you the cheap crap at a higher price if that makes it better. You know, like so many companies do because you believe that first sentence.

You are underestimating the importance of standards here. On a PC you will always only get a fraction of the hardware’s power, because there’s way more stuff running at the same time, not just the game, and because the developers can’t know exactly what hardware configuration every single gamer has. On a console you can know exactly how much RAM you will have available, so you can design your content to use that amount of data and then stream it into memory that you reserve at the start. If you do that on a PC you may ask for more RAM than the PC has or you may leave RAM unused. Or you can try to optimize the game for different specs, which costs time and money, so you won’t get the same results with the same budget.

It’s very similar to the previous “King”. Elvis Presley was not just a good musician, he was a cultural statement. When people first heard him sing on the radio they were sure they were listening to a black singer, but when he started talking in interviews it became very obvious that that he was not.

Michael Jackson did something similar. He came from the musical background of black Soul bands, but as a solo artist he covered a variety of styles that were unexpected from a black musician. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of his songs deal with social issues as well (“It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.”, “Heal the world.”, “start with the man in the mirror” where most songs of other artists are about love or having a party).

I’ll never understand how this image wasn’t ridiculed from the start. I mean if you are talking about “trickling down”, wouldn’t the bottom be the place where the thing that is trickling down collects?

Of course money trickles down, it trickles down from the poor to rich.

C# isn’t exactly compiled, at least not into machine language. It is transpiled into byte code that is run on a virtual machine that on turn is an interpreter/JIT-compiler.

Depending on why someone is asking for a compiled language that may or may not be a problem, because to the one writing the code it looks like a compiled language, but to the one running it it looks like an interpreted one.

It’s fantasy comedy. It is to fantasy novels what Spaceballs is to Star Wars.

And which country are you from that you think you are entitled to throw the first stone?

Unless you actively pay attention it’s very easy to be logged into some Google service without noticing. At least I wouldn’t be surprised if chrome background services kept me logged into my work Google Mail account and kept tracking my IP.

The biggest question is how meaningful the IP alone is. I don’t know if VPNs assign people individual IP-adresses or if there’s some kind of NAT in use where people share an IP with translated ports. If the information is “there’s this individual VPN-user and we need to connect them to a name” then you shouldn’t use (the same) VPN for everything, but if it’s just “there’s another request from the same VPN” then it’s fine.

I don’t know. A VPN simply replaces your IP with one from their network, but you still have one IP that identifies you, right? So if you are using one tool to access YouTube while being logged into Google on your browser, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the VPN? I mean if Google just stores the IPs that were used to log into accounts they can simply look up who downloaded their videos, right?

Pretty much, but that explanation is way more complicated than it needs to be.

The image of “trickle down” compares money to water. If you drop water somewhere it will move downwards. But for some reason when people talk about trickle down economics they think that money will trickle down from the people will lots of money to those with no money.

If you go back to the image then water will trickle down to the place where all the water has ended up before, i.e. the ocean. Expecting money to trickle “down” from the rich to the poor is like expecting water to trickle “down” from the ocean to the mountains.

And there are lots of obvious reasons for that. A poor person will have to take a loan from time to time which means that they have to pay for no lasting value in return. They will also have less opportunity to save money by buying things in bulk or waiting for discounts. A rich person on the other hand has little reason to pay workers for something that does not end up making them more money.

OF COURSE trickle down works! I just don’t understand what’s going on in people’s minds that they believe the rich people (i.e. all the water) were at the top of the image.

There are lots of reasons why money trickles down from the poor to the rich. Expecting money to trickle from the rich to the poor is like pouring water into an ocean and expecting the mountains to get wet.

I tried using Osmand recently and unless I got something very wrong there is no free version to speak of. You get 6 free map downloads, and those maps are tiny. And when I deleted a map it turned out that it’s literally 6 downloads. Even redownloading the same map counts towards that limit. I was expecting that deleting a map would allow me to download a different one, so that the limit would only mean that I can have 6 maps at a time and change them every now and then.

With this limit the app is only useful for people who stay in the same area all the time, and then you don’t need a navigation app.

Can you elaborate?

I doubt that this move has made them much more “safe and controllable”, it just means that they depend on a different system. I mean as soon as a bug pops up in their software the rest of the world will be fine.