Another smooth and easy update. Manjaro always just works.

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It of course doesn't supply the assets needed to play the game, you need to buy a copy of Majora's Mask yourself.

Right, "buy". ((nudge nudge wink wink))

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My first encounter with in-game advertising was SWAT 4 when a patch added advertising like movie posters on walls and images for real world products on televisions and computer monitors. It didn't seem like a big deal at first, until I realized that posters wouldn't show bullet holes, and monitors designated for ads were suddenly indestructible. I installed a mod that blocked the advertising server so I no longer saw the ads, but it couldn't restore full interactivity to the game world.

The fact that it made the game slightly less enjoyable really left a bad taste in my mouth.

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Half the video is watching a download progress bar. They could have thrown a dissolve in after a few seconds, and nobody would have been confused.

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This reminds me of a scene from the movie TRON:

Dr. Walter Gibbs: "Computers are just machines; they can't think."

Alan Bradley: "Some programs will be thinking soon."

Dr. Walter Gibbs: "Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking, and the people will stop!"

You have the one fellow from Paradox saying, "For myself at least 0% of in-game assets include any sort of AI."

Perhaps not directly, but he was no doubt influenced to some degree by ideas generated by the AI either by himself, or other members of the team.

The real problem for AI, I think, is that it doesn't create, it just iterates based on something that already exists, often without identifying the source, so it can easily lead to someone inadvertently copying other people's ideas without giving them due credit or compensation.

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Controller customization has become so complex, you almost need an instruction manual at this point to figure it all out.

One of the interesting tweaks is that Valve adjusted the CSS to "reduce feature leaks", I guess they're growing a little tired of certain people scraping it constantly to see what they're working on. I wonder if they have something specific coming up they don't want spoilt? What do you think?

Half-Life 3 confirmed! \o/

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A lot of industries, not just gaming, are still correcting after the China flu bump when people were forced to stay home for months and had government assistance money burning a hole in their pockets. Businesses ramped up production to meet the suddenly skyrocketing demand, and now that the good times are over, they have to trim the fat.

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A wholly predictable outcome, and ultimately a good one. The government should never get involved with telling businesses how to sell their products. Of course there should be protections against outright deceit and fraud, but as long as a company is upfront and honest about exactly what you're buying, then the government needs to stay out of it.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain ManYou mentioned your son is a business owner. Tell me, would he continue to pay a team of employees who are costing his company literally more than they're worth? Would he cut his own salary in order to keep them around? I suspect the answer to both questions is no.

I suspect he'd get them to do something else that wouldn't cost the company more than they're worth. Probably he isn't stupid enough to hire a team of employees to do money-losing stuff in the first place. But I'm definitely sure that if he managed his company into a money-losing situation and really had to cut employees, he would tighten his belt too--he would not tell the remaining employees "Yeah, you know those guys we had to let go to save money? I took their salaries for myself, actually three times that, because screw that 'saving money' stuff."

Okay, so that's the fantasy version of running a business. In reality, it's often not possible to move unproductive employees into a more productive role, and things can change that can cause a potentially profitable department to become a financial anchor dragging down the rest of the company, and when that happens, you gotta cut people loose. That's just the way it is.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain ManLike I said, if increasing profits was as easy as handing out raises like candy, then everybody would be doing it.

Funny nobody told the CEO that. How are you managing to not see that your argument is utterly inconsistent?

Look, there's two basic kinds of bosses of a company. There's the kind that people who wish our system worked as advertised think about: People like my son-in-law, who started from nothing or not very much and built up a business from nothing and who know it inside and out. They do exist, there are even quite a few of them, although they tend to be the bosses of small companies. And then there's the kind that was born either rich or well-to-do, went to a prestigious university and got an MBA. They know how to schmooze with other rich, connected people and how to maximize stock price next quarter so they can make a bunch of money from their stock options. They know a bit about how to move money around in companies. They know nothing about the specifics of any given company or how its business actually works, because they have been taught that money and people are completely universal and exchangeable and the specifics of the business don't matter if you know how to move money. They tend to move from company to company, often in quite different kinds of businesses because they think the specifics don't matter. And when they lay people off, it is usually because although in the long run those people probably contribute to the bottom line, in the short term dumping them will goose the stock price because most of the investors are ignorant and they only see (reduction in expenses == bigger dividends next quarter, or money plowed into share buybacks). And that second kind, is the kind that give themselves $26 million-a-year raises. And they are the kind that are most influential in the economy.

Also the kind that gives you situations like Boeing, where the product goes to shit because of all those years getting stratospheric stock prices from the visionary cost-cutting. Of course by that time a few people have made a stack of money--all the layoffs and outsourcing and elimination of quality control did create that result, so in that sense it wasn't stupid. But it wasn't good for the company, or the workers, or the customers, or the people who got killed in the planes, or the murdered whistleblowers.

You are generalizing to a ridiculous degree.
CEOs of large corporations are not all clueless rich kids just as small business owners are not all virtuous. Furthermore, you don't know anything about why the layoffs happened in this specific case, but that's not going to stop you from accusing the CEO of being evil. I doubt it was an arbitrary decision. Most likely he had other managers and company accountants advising him and answering questions -- How long have they been working on this game? How much money has it cost us so far? How much longer until it's ready for release, and how much more will it cost? What are the projected sales? What is the expected profit? -- and then he made the best decision for the company based on that information.

You mentioned your son is a business owner. Tell me, would he continue to pay a team of employees who are costing his company literally more than they're worth? Would he cut his own salary in order to keep them around? I suspect the answer to both questions is no.

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