There's one person whose invitations we dread because we know for a fact that declining them is seen as a personal affront. Last Christmas we spent *hours* trying to craft responses to one party we had to decline over and over again, aiming to create the least offense possible. Since that wasn't the response they wanted, the person in question will no longer speak to us at all – and since they're family who live a mile or two away, that's kind of awkward. On the plus side, at least we no longer have to waste time trying to figure out how to say "no" politely.

If you consider timed exclusives to be shitty behavior then Death's Door, Twelve Minutes, Scorn, High On Life, Sommerville, Arc 2, The Last Case of Benedict Fox and more are all similar Xbox examples from the past couple of years. It's simply normal industry practice because getting promotional tie-ins turns out to be valuable, focusing on a single console can simplify things for a developer, and reducing risk with financial support during development is extremely attractive. It's a risky, hit-driven business so anything that can be done to mitigate risk for a developer or publisher tends to look like a good idea.

Mass Effect was an Unreal Engine title. Support for other platforms was already provided by Epic, and yet it took five years for the popular title to make its way to PlayStation. That's not a challenging port, but a contractual exclusive. So I enjoyed it on my 360 because the investment by Microsoft in bringing a formerly PC-centric developer BioWare to consoles helped them grow and find a new audience.

You mean aside from the obvious? That Uncharted 3 was developed in-house by a studio Sony nurtured from humble beginnings? One that hadn't made a title for any other platform since Way of the Warrior for the ill-fated 3DO? You should no more expect a Sony first-party title to ship on a competing console than one of Nintendo's flagship titles.

Marketing deals with timed exclusivity are pretty common, and every console vendor has taken part in this practice over time. Mass Effect was exclusive to Xbox for a long time back in the 360 era and it was a compelling reason to own the console. These games also come to other consoles in time once the exclusivity period expires which gives consumers a choice. The publisher also makes these decisions on a title-by-title basis and will tend to gravitate to where the customers are - which is how market forces are supposed to work. Is it imperfect? Of course. Capitalism has a whole lot of flaws that lean into exploitation and abuse of power. It also has some beneficial tendencies. Only in a society where the public interest is represented through effective regulation do we avoid the worst excesses.

They have acquired multiple developers that had games in development as cross-platform titles. These would have offered consumers a choice of where to play the games, allowing normal market forces to encourage targeting consumer preferences rather than attempting to dictate them. Instead, the edict came down that these would not be released for competing consoles following the acquisition - using Microsoft's deep coffers to stifle competition. It's a subtle topic because there certainly have always been first-party titles that aren't available across multiple platforms, and exclusives borne of funding offered by a single platform. These are also market forces at work: creating unique software as part of the value proposition of a hardware ecosystem, or backing development that otherwise wouldn't something a developer or publisher would undertake on their own. It's much more recent that we're seeing industry players outright buying entire healthy publishers to exercise their influence.

Too right. Calls to shut down Siri are just sensationalist drivel. Apple has integrated Siri throughout their product line and won't simply abandon it. They may flail while competitive offerings get better, but that just creates more incentive to solve the organizational problems and make Siri a better product. Whether it happens under the watch of the people currently in charge, happens through an acquisition, or some internal team shows initiative and comes up with a better approach is unclear - but you can bet Apple is debating these things internally.

The praise is definitely over the top, and it does have the feel of a concerted marketing campaign. To be clear: it's nicely done. The number of unique physics-driven puzzles in the game and the amount of freedom afforded the player is unusually high for a game that isn't *just* a playground. It doesn't tend to break in odd and spectacular ways, and that alone is pretty impressive. ... but it's also strictly rigid body physics with extremely straightforward properties and shapes. (Okay, so there are bodies of water and lava, but they're generally static volumes that only change in completely scripted fashion.) It makes for a good, satisfying game, but the hyperbole may lead people to believe it's an unprecedented achievement when it's really just a solid application of what has been done before.

A huge part of the challenge of commercializing promising technology is getting your timing right. The Apple Newton and Windows for Pen were simply too early despite having a reasonable conceptual grasp on an enormous opportunity. Viable wearable technology and meaningful applications thereof are probably not just around the corner, so pushing hard today is likely to lead to a lot frustration and not much mainstream traction. Others have shown a much, much more nuanced approach that allows them to keep a toe in the water and build up some market awareness and infrastructure without committing to a huge investment and market push until the time is right. I think both Apple and Sony seem to have a saner strategy as a result.

I was already contemplating retirement in the next couple of years, so it was pretty easy to choose to do so rather than return to an office environment.

That's the bottom line, really. If you want to write software that gets every single edge case right, it takes a lot more time and costs a lot more money than doing a half-assed job of it. In far too many cases, the half-assed version can generate almost as much revenue for a tiny fraction of the cost. The economics just aren't there to support writing bug-free code. One of the hardest problems in software is determining what quality level to insist on. No matter who tells you otherwise: developers are bad at it, managers are bad at it, pundits and critics are bad at it, and so are executives and lawyers. Finance people and politicians are exceptionally bad at it. The problem is made dramatically worse by the fact that there's no one-size-fits-all answer, and the best answer often changes over time. It's then made impossible by the fact that nobody can agree on what "correct" behavior entails in the first place.

I must have missed the part where meaningful scientific debate requires ad-based monetization of misleading information aimed at the general public.

What incentive would anyone have to invest in the products I lease once I'm no longer in charge of making the decisions? Sorry, but no. I have zero interest in ceding ownership of parts of the system that can be meaningfully differentiated (unlike raw bandwidth, storage, or cloud compute.) Recurring revenue is a dream for every company on the planet that wants to stop competing on the basis of what it actually has to offer.

... and yet the "news" was all over the Internet, making his invalid "facts" common knowledge. It's a shame we don't have a much better way of handling this kind of event as a society. Measuring the memory impact of an app is a pretty complicated affair, not for the faint of heart. Do you count mapped memory from shared libraries? Not at all, or amortized across the number of other processes? Is clean memory backed by filed that can be discarded and reloaded measured differently than dirty memory that needs to be swapped out under memory pressure? Should you measure discardable / purgeable memory that can be used for efficient caching? There are better tools on macOS for getting a starting point with all of the above than the classic Unix fare. From Terminal.app the following is a decent starting point: footprint -t Safari

The phone I've been using for several months contains Apple's 5nm A14, so it's very much in production. As is the M1 CPU in three Mac lines that have been available for well over a month. Your point stands, however, that Apple still sells plenty of hardware with 7nm designs.

This sounds a whole lot like the diamond mining business getting worried about their competition and trying to legitimize differences that, for all practical purposes, don’t exist.

"Far" fewer units? They're citing targets of 20-33% lower than the PS4 launch with what is unambiguously a more ambitious design against the backdrop of what is likely to be the most severe economic depression in generations. It seems mildly conservative but utterly warranted given the circumstances.