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Comment Depends on what Apple lets PWAs do (Score 1) 18

The right decision would be for a news site and storefront to have platform-agnostic web sites, not applications you have to install.

And the right decision would be for phone operating system publishers to provide functionality in the included web browser to let a website act as a progressive web application. Safari for iOS has a history of lagging behind other platforms' browsers in PWA features.[1] This is particularly evident with respect to what the browser allows websites to do in the background. For example, Apple implemented Push API seven years after Mozilla did, and it requires the user to add the website to the home screen to enable PWA features.[2] Do you want Nintendo Music to pause when you switch to another application? Or if you've chosen to let Nintendo's website notify you when something becomes available, do you want to miss the notification if Safari suddenly decides that your domain's notifications shall be silent (without vibration, without sound, and at the bottom of the list)?

[1] "Progress Delayed Is Progress Denied" by Alex Russell
[2] "Push API" on Can I use...

Comment Re:Very few things are cheaper in the "cloud" (Score 1) 70

But for compute, or storage, or bandwidth: on-prem will always win in cost.

With two exceptions I can think of. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it:

1. For lightweight web hosting, a low-end VPS from a company like DigitalOcean is likely to be less expensive than upgrading a home office from home-class home Internet to business-class home Internet to unblock inbound ports 80 and 443.
2. SMTP is still an old boys' club, with major mailbox providers (such as Gmail and Outlook) blocking connections on port 25 from on-premise IP addresses as likely sources of spam.

Comment Re: What exactly is "Steam" anyway? (Score 1) 162

I think one valid complaint is the use of DRMs.

I am in every way anti-DRM, but it's ubiquitous. A lot of publishers won't publish on GOG for this reason. I agree that Epic is arguing in bad faith. The enemy of my enemy is convenient, nothing more, so I am not delusional about Epic but I still enjoy their actions.

They are basically throwing money to become relevant enough that they can be profitable without having to throw money. If that ever happens, you can be sure that there will be no more free games.

TBH I usually forget to go look at the free games they are typically so underwhelming, though there have been some legitimate greats too.

Meanwhile Steam is sustainable and superior on features.

There are only two features of Steam beyond buying installing games which I care about, and one of them sucks. I like that it handles updates for me, but that is also the bad one, because practically none of the updates are differential. I want them to make that easier so that publishers actually do it. I know that it requires significant support from publishers when they use packed data files, but even that is something that could be addressed. (If the files are compressed individually instead of using compressed archives, then binary patches are feasible.) The other feature is Proton. Anything else including friends, achievements, and even reviews is all optional to me. I enjoy some of those features, but I would still use Steam without them.

Comment Re: So this is actual profit (Score 0) 118

And ammo. Yeah some people have thousands of rounds of ammo. The military has millions of rounds, and enough men to go with them to effectively utilize suppressive fire. If you do get in an old-fashioned firefight with soldiers they can simply outbullet you if for some reason they don't have an armed backpack drone. Which by the way they totally do.

Comment Re: 4.3% (Score 0) 118

You get that the unemployment rate is literally designed to be a falsehood because it stops counting people when they have been unemployed for a while, right? The methodology used for it has no concept of who is looking for work at all, it's based on a fundamentally bogus assumption that people who haven't found any for long enough aren't looking.

Comment Re: I think it's more than slavery (Score 1) 118

If people don't buy stuff eventually the corporation collapses. The principals can make a profit before then, but repeat this enough times and the whole boat sinks as it happens to too many major employers at once. Hence too big to fail, which is of course the result of failure to enforce antitrust law.

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