Look forward to further increases in pricing, whether through subscription rates or ad frequency or anti-ad-blocker measures, I guess.
I was thinking the same thing recently after reading a statement by Deezer that their AI music detector now flags more than a third of newly added music. Even if it gets no listens, all that junk has to be processed, stored, and kept available.
The Xbox runs on a custom OS derived from Windows Core. Not the same as a consumer version of Windows.
[Edit] The answer you’re probably looking for is I/O. The PS5 is much faster than the Series X in terms of getting stuff off disk and actually using it. That more than compensates for the small speed advantage the Series X has.
I consider that the core of Windows (the NT kernel and win32 api) is actually a very polished gem but it is encased in layers of upon layers of barely polished turds ( winui, the win11 shell, the over agressive telemetry, forced ms635 integration, etc..)
I've heard that too. And also Xbox had 2 different DirectX APIs, one more customised to the console, and one that's the standard Windows DirectX which is not as performant. From what I've heard most devs used the latter as it made porting the PC version of the game easier, and sales on Xbox would be tiny compared to PlayStation (1/3rd the install base, sales even less than that due to Xbox users not buying games and just using gamepass) there was less incentive to optimise.
This was always the case. Ps3 was supposedly more powerful but devs didn’t care to make use of it and just port and move on to the next project. Only nintendo hardware seemed to get special treatment with game design probably because it was like a generation behind in power.
I was so excited for the Series X and it's just another crap-tier wannabe gaming PC, with none of the flexibility. It makes me so sad how miserable the XBox has become. I fucking LOVED the 360 back in the day, I used to run home from school to get on Halo 3 and play with friends.
And granted, those same friends and I still play Halo Infinite, but we're all on PCs. Nobody bothers with the goddamn XBox.
The Xbox died the moment they announced it would require a constant connection to the Kinect, and internet in order to function. Even after backtracking from that, it never recovered. There’s also just a lack of reason for it to exist anymore. The PlayStation fills the need for a high power console, Nintendo offers something portable and gimmicky, what would Xbox even offer here?
These days most consoles run fairly standard hardware and games are programmed to be generic and published on every console.
The PS4 lineup pales in comparison to the PS3 lineup, which pales in comparison to the PS2 lineup, which pales in comparison to the PS1 lineup.
Each generation has around half the number of games as the previous. This does get a bit murky with the advent of shovelware in online stores, but my point remains.
I think this only proves is that games are now ridiculously expensive to create and met the quality standards expected. Maybe AI will improved this in this future. Take-Two has confirmed that GTA6's budget has exceeded US$1 billion, which is mind-blowing.
Australia has long had fires. Fires are an integral part of Australia’s historic natural environment.
So much so, that Eucalyptus trees evolved to become a fire dependent species that benefits from regular burning. This is why they are so dangerous when planted in places like Los Angeles.
The 2019–2020 fires were so hot that eucalyptus trees actually struggled to reproduce. Trees with pyrophilic seeds that normally like a good scorching were instead totally consumed by the fires, and the soil got so hot that seeds already dropped and buried were burned to death. Trees that store energy in their wood (either underground or shielded by bark) got so hot that their normally safe wood burned.
Obviously not every tree died due to the fires, but the death and destruction left in the wake of this fire was on a scale far surpassing past fires. Not to mention the deaths of animals.
Recommended reading: The End of Eden by Adam Welz, which basically covers how global weirding and extreme weather events have pushed species already teetering on the edge of survival over the brink.
I’m not meaning that ocasional/limited forest fires can or not be healthy for forest. Just that the mentioned ones were all record breaking, and had a significant contribution to long lasting CO2 in the atmosphere, all of them were in similar orders than the 2024 fires.
And that carbon capture through planting trees may be something fragile and short lived.
