This is also now the first thing that I find it truly useful for in a non-coding role: researching how to do things in Azure, which I have not used before.
It makes sense as long as building hardware optimized for games is either significantly cheaper, or yields a better customer experience, than the available alternatives.
To most people, a separate gaming appliance is seen as convenience, not waste.
I really don't think having a custom CPU and hardware architecture different from PCs is the defining property of a gaming console. Nobody cares about that except developers and hardware nerds.
A console is a computer purpose-built and streamlined for playing games. No more, no less.
A game console is also locked down from the user, usually because the company is selling hardware at a loss, wants to maintain control, and wants to prevent cheating in online games. May also have exclusive games tied to the hardware.
The line is far more blurred now. The Steam Machine is a purpose built device streamlined for playing games. Yet without any hardware modifications you can put it on your desk and load windows on it. So it's clearly a PC too.
The nitpicking on language here is entirely due to the fact the distinction is no longer clear like it once was.
Locked down OS and hardware, or not usable for general compute for some other reason. 20 years ago you could have a gaming PC with discs like a console, but again the console was locked down.
Maybe, idk, no horse in this race. My newest console is a GameCube, and my Mac can run approximately 2 games. Just saying there's a delineation between PC and console.
Yeah, we're pretty good at making pretty damn anything "fit for human consumption", including quite a few things that are outright poisonous if consumed unprocessed.
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
> I think the framing is a bit off. It sounds transactional and by the numbers.
It's really not possible to avoid that when, at the end of the day, you're doing it to make a living for yourself and your employees, not doing charity work in your free time because you enjoy it.
> The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
Yep, but that's then called market research, not customer support.
The comment is basically doing exactly what it accused OP of doing: behaving as if the commenter has "singularly thought through every problem in an armchair" and knows better than OP who actually tried doing it.
Could be an armchair, could be a toilet, either seems a reasonable standard for a commenter on a messageboard, are we expecting a focus group or something?
Just like something that has no direct physical/chemical/biological mechanism to improve your condition can still do so if you believe it will (the placebo effect), it can also worsen your condition if you believe it will - that's the nocebo effect.
No, that's missing a crucial distinction. Writable CDs and DVDs used to be made with organic dyes, and yes, with BD-R the new LTH technology is inorganic and probably longer lasting.
But read-only media has always been pressed and then vacuum coated with aluminum. No dyes.
And the main component for both is always polycarbonate, which is organic, and probably won't last 100 years. There were some problems with early DVDs where the polycarbonate was not sealed propery, which led to oxydization of the aluminum layer, that's probably what GP observed. And of course that can happen through degradation as well.
In theory, it's possible to make these discs from glass, which should indeed last thousands of years. I've even heard that some glass music CDs were made for Hifi enthusiasts in Japan.
Not all polycarbonate is created equally, or at least it wasn't in the past. M-discs, for example, are rated to 1,000 years. Most folks only seriously believe they'll be good for a few hundred at the outside, but they WERE tested at 85% humidity and temperatures up to 185 degrees for extended periods of time. That's not the same thing as aging, but it's a pretty good stand-in.
The funny thing is... The rumor is that M-disc and normal discs are basically the same now. They're made on the same line and labelled differently from what I've been told. I can't vouch for it, but it makes sense and I've seen some folks online posted various test results that seem to back that up. The fancy Japanese certified archival discs are the same way. They're made on the same lines, just maybe examined a bit more carefully before packing.
I hadn't heard about those glass discs! Very cool. Now I kind of want one.
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