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Whey you bad from?

written by owen on 2019-May-11, Answer this question²

Technology » Stadia is trash (cloud gaming)

written by owen, published 2019-Apr-11, comment

Stadia was launched recently in the usual "lets throw it out there and see how many bored techies will hype it up". The claim is that it will allow gaming on any device (phone/laptop/desktop/washing machine) with "no hardware acceleration" which is a lie because browsing the web or watching video in a browser at any resolution above 480p requires some form of modern graphics card or you get a slideshow. The next big feature is allowing developers to write custom "cloud games" because console hardware is holding game developers back. lol I am not sure what is holding them back or back from what? world domination?

Stadia is going to "#change #gaming" seems to be the hashtag but these pundits have not finished a full game in 10 years and probably spend all their time re-spawning constantly in fortnite. Their brain is hooked on the unpredictability of game, the actual game itself is pretty repetitive. There are too many games and not enough time to play them. VR gaming is never going to get better. No matter how hard you pray. Stadia comes with high internet requirements and If you can afford to pay for the internet then you can more than afford buying games on other platforms. So the target make for this is kinda confusing but there are other issues;

All games should be cheap/free

I wish I could buy 5 BMWs but I cannot afford to buy everything I want or need. I would not even rent a BMW because renting is for people who never learn to buy. It is the same with video games just because they are expensive does not mean that they should cheap. If somehow they become cheap then it is some form of trap. If they can't catch you with $59.99 they will catch you with $9.99 a month for 10 years until you realize that you are wasting your time playing trash games instead of buying and playing only the good ones you like. Playing only the games you like is cheaper and gives you more fulfillment. Variety may be the spice of life but you cannot survive eating cinnamon alone.

Hidden Costs

The cost its not just $9.99, you have add the cost of internet into the mix - thats what? Roughly $50 a month? There has never been a more exciting time to be a developer - slaveSo you paying $9.99 for Stadia, $50 for internet and $2 per game to rent it per month? $60 a month to play fifa. While you watching advertisements between every match, lol. I dont see the costs netting out at all. At least console FIFA only releases a new copy every year. On Stadia they can release a new version every month - they could even sell you DLC teams that are priced based on real time ranking. The possibilities for micro transactions are endless.

Better graphics on the cloud

We have been chasing the graphics monster since the 90s. PS1 games are pretty much trash if you try to play them now. We had the Xbox360 red ring of death issue because we ran the consoles too hot. Now consoles use 8 gigs of RAM a jump from 256 mb the last generation. Game consoles use as much electricity as desktop PCs. Games are getting more expensive to make because they require more 3d art. We are basically playing 70s pacman with better graphics. Now we want to jump to the cloud so we can get better graphics - everything else be dammed.

Virtual Goods

I see people selling PS4 and Xbox accounts with 15 DLC games bought online. lol. Why try to sell your virtual trash unto someone else? Just keep it or give it away. It is so easy to buy games as DLC so no one wants to buy your crappy virtual game collection with 4 copies of FIFA and 3 Cod games. Luckily Stadia will certainly save these people some money in the short term but they will spend more money keeping the service active even when they get bored with it - too many options. There wont be a console gathering dust under your tv to remind you of wasted money - it will only be a monthly line on your bank statement - dust free but ever present. The good thing with Stadia from my point of view is that when these people finally realize that there are wasting their money and time then they will have nothing to re-sell so no more threads online trying to sell virtual goods that have no real value.

All that is old is new again

We are slowly going back to the days of blockbuster and game arcades where you rent videos games or you put a coin into a machine to play. The popular arcade games would cost more because more people wanted to play them so the arcade owner would bump up the price of the tokens. We stopped doing that when home consoles came around and we could pay a set price for our games and play them forever. In a arcade setup some times your favourite game would disappear because it was not drawing a big enough crowd. This will be the reality of gaming on Stadia: most games will be made as multiplayer first - battle royale or mobile trash because developers will avoid less profitable genres. Profitability will be tied to popularity or some other blackbox ranking system or A.I. or whatever.

Conclusion

I personally would rather not be totally dependent on something I have to pay for monthly for my entertainment. And you certainly know that advertisement are going to be inserted directly into your games if the service takes off. It will no longer be about what games you like to play but what games work best as multiplayer. Consoles bring diversity to gaming. Platforms like these are only interested in keeping you hooked on the fear of missing out. If you cancel your subscription - you will miss out. Bad habits that cost money are the worst kind of habit to pickup.

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Blog Jamaica » Paper Straws, Ghetto Paradise

written by owen, published 2019-Apr-05, comment

Paper straws are actually cooler than plastic straws. They can come in multiple colours. Besides the fact that you have to make paper in order to make them. Not lasting forever is actually a good thing. All we need to get rid of now are those plastic pieces at the top of the cups.

The recent ban on plastics (though late in coming) helps in our move to get rid of all plastics. Especially the ones that eventually end up in the sea (despite our efforts). Some Jamaicans on a whole are simply liter bugs or lazy or have no proper garbage collection facilities. The problem is multi-dimensional. it is the human condition.

The burden of plastics affects everything even computers tech that get slower over time because the software industry likes to build and ignore hardware to encourage constant re-buying. Constantly adding bloat in the pursuit of being modern.

There are more people, more cars, more everything but the environment is still the same size.

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Logbook » Rapture

written by owen, published 2019-Mar-26, comment

I had a fast and the furious moment last week when I came up a newly fixed bridge that was unpaved. The back of the car then proceeded to under/over steered as the unpaved road surface provided no traction as I rounded the corner. You can imagine the frantic movements that took place as the car lost control on what felt like skating on ice. And before you even say it I was not speeding. I never go much faster than the speed limit - much less rounding a corner. Worse that could happen is that I bang the car up in a way that would be hard to fix. Luckily and with heavenly mercy I managed to get the car back under control.

A near death situation is nothing new. Everyday is a jungle in one way or the other. If anything events like these only reaffirm what I already know about physics, life and finances. The never ending march toward chaos does not help anything either. Everyday is Christmas and every night a new years eve.

I have stuff to do and it is approaching my birthday - yet again. Putting myself in an awkward situation is not what I consider fun. But sometimes you have to take one for the team and just hope that you survive at the end of it all. Just another hurdle after hurdle - whatever people are complaining about now is just one step in a series of things that people will complain about late. People are short sighted.

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ChangeLog » The search problem part 4 (programming)

written by owen, published 2019-Mar-16, comment

When I started on the 1.4 update I quickly realised that the index could not be updated in one go anymore since I had increased the crawl depth to 4 levels deep. this would be a problem since if the crawl does not finish then there would be no index on which the search engine would run. I needed another cache. Now enters the path cache. As I crawl from link to link I need to keep track of how far I am into the rabbithole and where I have already been. before all I had to do was make sure I was not wasting time re-downloading html but now even the cached html is too much for my little old machine. Here are the results of the new cache;

path_cache is 199 mb, 5355 files
build_cache is 209 mb, 30,012 files
html_cache is 1.81gb, 50,411 files

html_cache is loaded from reading the website raw html.
build_cache is created from reading the html cache and gathering some meta information which will later be used to build the search index.
This new path_cache allows me to crawl deeper into websites while still being able to continue if I time out/crash. Originally I could go 3 links deep with only the build_cache and the html_cache but now that I have added a 4th level I can no longer move through all the cache files quick enough to build a search index. So the path_cache is sorta like leaving a train of bread crumbs to grandma's house. Hopefully when I am finished with the trail I can build a new search index.

So the index finally updated and the result is a quarter the size of the previous index (4.2 KB) which means that I am probably missing a tonne of links or my index has become super efficient. I tend to lean towards the later since I am coming down from a 15.7mb index. I know that it should not be possible to have duplicate links so I must be missing a bunch. I will have to test it to see or build a comparison script.

I eventually fixed it. It turned out the levels that I had implemented in the new path_cache system were not deep enough to actually leave the root website. I have to be constantly checking to make sure I am not crawling in circles. The list cache is now bigger 18.9KB (most likely because of dumb the link structure of visitjamaica). Searching takes like 5 seconds on my personal computer.

I also added a new list of crawled links totalling 5474 links (331kb).

The next task will be finding a way to divide up the search db into smaller chunks for faster searching. Of course dividing will result in many more files and duplicate information everywhere but that is the sacrifice that will have to be made inorder to speed up the search.