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I don’t think it’s a big deal where you start. The latest iteration of Riven will likely be the most accessible and that’s probably what matters most if you’re just starting out.
Much of the appeal (for me at least) is that the storyline is a Tolkien-like epic story spanning thousands of years. Myst takes place before Riven, and if you wanted to consume it in chronological order you would start by reading the books (which are surprisingly good). But it’s fine to go back and “fill in the blanks” if you play in a different order. It’s like reading The Hobbit after you read The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Also note that Riven and Riven 2024 are the same story so there’s no need to play both of them. Same with Myst, just pick the most modern iteration of it. The versions that allow you to move and look around freely take away a lot of frustration with trying to make out what the world looks like and finding clues.
And I don’t see why Arch is relevant to the discussion. My point is that software being non-proprietary is not a guarantee for preventing fuckery like Microsoft’s. Profit-maximizing companies will maximize their profits, proprietary software or not. Canonical, which sells a non-proprietary Linux distribution, is an example of this.
I think the article makes a good point, but perhaps I’m over-interpreting. It’s not that we should stop using strings. It’s that we should use the type system to separate different kinds of strings and enlist the compiler’s help to detect incorrect mingling of them. So for example a symbol type would only permit strings that contain ASCII letters, underscore and digits, and concatenation with / conversion to plain strings would be limited.
I don’t believe that. You can’t tell me there’s no difference in the amount of bias between Fox News and AP. Sure, we can’t reach some kind of theoretical 0.0 bias - even particle physics research is biased by assumptions. But at least it makes an honest attempt. Although the conclusions an article arrives at may be influenced by the author’s opinions, a journalist who is honestly trying to avoid bias would provide the reasoning, data and sources behind those opinions instead of simply stating them as fact. That gives me as a reader a chance to evaluate their merits.
The thing I’m really aching for in news media is journalism that rises above merely reporting events. “A guy got murdered yesterday” is not useful information for me. It’s barely even a data point, because I can’t read about ten such events and extrapolate anything meaningful from it. Other things like population size, number of stopped crime, completeness of data etc affect any conclusion that could be drawn from it
In fact I shouldn’t try to extrapolate from it, because I’m paying the journalist to talk to the right experts and hopefully also do research on their own, to figure out trends and cause-effect relationships. That’s meaningful journalism that helps me make decisions such as how to vote.
Media today has so much noise and so little signal. I don’t need a daily newspaper filled to the brim with events. I need perhaps a weekly magazine that I can read on a Sunday morning in half an hour, which teaches me something about what’s going on in the world without bias, and brings up the data as evidence. I wouldn’t mind paying for it and I’d take it on paper, though e-ink would be better. I’d trust it a lot more if ads were not mentioned anywhere in its business model.
I think renting should be renting, and purchasing should be purchasing. I’m okay with renting and what that entails (e.g. they might remove the service in the future and I won’t ever own the game). I’m also fine with buying games, and for some games that have a lot of sentimental value or replayability I do want to own them.
What I’m not okay with is the current state of affairs, where they make it seem as if you buy the game and you pay full price, but legally it’s only “licensed” to you and the license can be revoked at any time. It’s all the disadvantages you describe with renting, but with the price of buying. So that’s what I had in mind with my comment: I’d be content instead of angry if they offered a rental service with honest terms of service and a fair price, instead of the bullshit they’re pulling right now.
If there was a proper rental service I would likely rent a lot of games that I wanted to try out. Then I would go to GOG to buy DRM-free versions of the games I want to keep for a long time. Games like Civ5, RimWorld and Cyberpunk 2077. I think I wouldn’t need to rent a game for three years to figure out that I want to buy it, more like a month.
The problem is that they advertise it a certain way and sell preorders, and then the game doesn’t live up to what they advertised. Worse, they didn’t allow anyone to review the console versions which were so unplayable that Sony removed it from the store. It would have been fine if people knew exactly what they were paying for, but they were misled.
Sure, it was unmet expectations but even if the expectation was just 'it works", they still didn’t meet it. And that’s kind of the bare minimum to even be legal when you’re charging money for it. I disagree that the console versions were 7/10 on release - more like 1/10.
For most games, I’m fine with renting my games. If they charge a reasonable continuous rental fee and not a crazy one-off price that will make the game available for some unspecified amount of time at the publisher’s discretion. For example, I could imagine paying $2 / month to play Assassin’s Creed. And if it turns out to be boring I can just stop renting it.
The sites won’t say “we rip off our artists and they’re very unhappy about it”. In fact as far as I can tell from visiting spotify.com, Spotify is just fine. So this is apparently not a sufficient method for finding out if a site is a good way of buying music.
I checked a couple of songs on my playlist and didn’t find places that were obviously better than Spotify. Is Bandcamp better? How about Beatport? Being able to buy and download music is not a guarantee that the artist is getting paid fairly.
As a side note I’m growing weary of having to keep track as a consumer of the revenue streams and ethics of every brand out there. There’s a lot on my plate already. I wish that if musicians didn’t want me to buy things for a certain price or at a certain place, that they just wouldn’t offer it to me in that way. Or, if they were being coerced into it, that they would push for regulation to prevent that. But I have a suspicion that the principle of supply and demand dictates that selling music online just won’t be as profitable as they (naively) expect it to be. Too many musicians, too few ears.
As I’ve said elsewhere, raw bitrate means exactly the same between them, because the bitrate is the number of bits per second of video after compression. What you mean is that you set a target bitrate and the different codecs have varying success in meeting that target. You can use two-pass encoding to improve the codec’s accuracy.
But what matters is the average bitrate required by each codec to achieve the desired level of video quality, as perceived by you. The lower bitrate you need for the quality you want, the better the codec is.
Why does it need to reach 1 million names exactly? This is a petition, right?