And how about all the games no longer on the App Store?
Say, Flight Control (one of the first games to hit a million unit sales), or the Infinity Blade series (which wiki says was removed due to incompatibility with newer Apple platform changes)?
Both of those examples are old and precede current efforts. Plus, for the third time:
> Whether they’re succeeding at it is another story.
I’m not arguing Apple excels or is even decent at video games, I’m simply pointing out that it’s clear they are interested in having them on their platforms.
Part of what makes this outrageous is that the install size itself is probably a significant part of the reason to install the game on an HDD.
154GB vs 23GB can trivially make the difference of whether the game can be installed on a nice NVMe drive.
Is there a name for the solution to a problem (make size big to help when installed on HDD) in fact being the cause of the problem (game installed on HDD because big) in the first place?
For example, I will never need anything more than the full client, whereas if I want to play on a laptop, I won't really need more than the minimal client (limited textures and no interiors for planes).
The fact that this isn't commonplace in every engine and game out there is crazy. There's no reason why the same approach couldn't also work for DLCs and such. And there's no reason why this couldn't be made easy in every game engine out there (e.g. LOD level 0 goes to HQ content bundle, the lower ones go into the main package). Same for custom packages for like HDDs and such.
Can any games these days be reliably ran on hdd's with max 200mb/s throughout (at best)? Or does everyone get a coffee and some cookies when a new zone loads? Even with this reduction that will take a while.
I thought all required ssd's now for "normal" gameplay.
Until you get to super-high-res textures and the like, the throughput isn't nearly as important as the latency.
At 200 MB/s the way hard drives usually measure it, you're able to read up to 390,625 512-byte blocks in 1 second, or to put it another way, a block that's immediately available under the head can be read in 2.56 microseconds. On the other hand, at 7200 RPM, it takes up to 8.33 milliseconds to wait for the platter to spin around and reach a random block on the same track. Even if these were the only constraints, sequentially arranging data you know you'll need to have available at the same time cuts latency by a factor of about 3000.
It's much harder to find precise information about the speed of the head arm, but it also usually takes several milliseconds to move from the innermost track to the outermost track or vice versa. In the worst case, this would double the random seek time, since the platter has to spin around again because the head wasn't in position yet. Also, since hard drives are so large nowadays, the file system allocators actually tend to avoid fragmentation upfront, leading to generally having few fragments for large files (YMMV).
So, the latency on a hard drive can be tolerable when optimized for.
> On the other hand, at 7200 RPM, it takes up to 138 microseconds to wait for the platter to spin around and reach a random block on the same track.
You did the math for 7200 rotations per second, not 7200 rotations per minute = 120 rotations per second.
In gaming terms, you get at most one or two disk reads per frame, which effectively means everything has to be carefully prefetched well in advance of being needed. Whereas on a decade-old SATA SSD you get at least dozens of random reads per frame.
It depends a lot on which org they go into, and the motivations of the P&L owner of that division.
IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.
My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.
Steam is also a launcher and when I use it as a launcher I don't want to see ads for the store and burying a setting to turn if off in the settings is not sufficient.
At the very least let me turn it off on the pop up.
What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.
The steam store used to burn CPU on Windows until at least up to 2017 (on fresh install it would a strong PC stutter on startup). It tries to kill your DNS resolver on linux when downloading games (~20 requests/sec when) which actually decreases your download speed by a bunch. This bug has been documented in 2014, and was still present last time I had to debug this a year or two ago.
I measured an LCP or 3.5s + significant layout shift.
The images are poorly optimized jpegs, instead of WEBP/AVIF.
The start page takes a cool 6MB.
A games page clocks in at around 12MB before the video starts loading including a whopping 4MB JS.
None of the links appear to utilize preloading and it's and old school multi page app, so navigation takes a long time.
I don't have a way to measure it, but subjectively it performs worse in the Steam client than in a browser.
Likewise I think it is extremely dubious that models can be copyrighted at all, for the exact same reason you can't copyright a phonebook or database. The entire regime of claiming to release models under various licenses is bullshit, because you can't copyright rote transformations of things either.
It's completely different from a phonebook or database, which are mere compilations.
If something is considered sufficiently transformative, then it can be copyrighted. If you do a bunch of non-trivial processing on a database to generate something new, you can copyright that.
And LLM training is in no universe a "rote transformation". It is incredibly sophisticated, carefully tuned, and results in a final product that could not possibly be more different.
This is definitely going to be argued over in court at some point, along with many other questions about AI and copyright.
Speaking of which, why is it taking so long to get a supreme court decision on whether or not training counts as copyright infringement? The only court cases that have been resolved so far have settled on unrelated grounds without touching the core issue.
Such a policy will collapse the markets almost immediately. Everyone who would have held onto their assets will suddenly have to sell to cover taxes. This will cause a spiral of fire sales.
"A number of my friends who belong in the very high upper brackets have suggested to me on several occasions of late, that if I am reelected president, they will have to move to some other Nation because of high taxes here. Now, I will miss them very much." (audience breaks into laughter)
- FDR
(Spoiler alert: The rich always act like victims and whine about having to move.)
The Netherlands has had a form of "Box 3" wealth/unrealized capital gains tax for years. (This is just an update to existing policy.) So far, the country has not imploded.
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