Haha yeah. People are so accustomed to short TLDs that ‘smith.technology’ just intuitively feels kinda wrong, and it still feels that way to me, even as a tech person who knows it is perfectly valid.
You’re thinking like “smith dot technology dot what?”
Another reason is brand identity.
Using ‘.tech’ or ‘.flights’ or .sports’ for your site feels too “on the nose” and gives vibes of like browsing some directory where things are categorised and sorted. Even worse it implies there are other sites under the same category, and those other sites may be competitors, and this dilutes strength of brand.
lt also suggests strongly what the business does, and while that might seem desirable at first it actually isn’t from a corporate perspective because it means the company becomes tied to their business area and can’t expand and grow out of it into other things.
I think this is a major part of why descriptive TLDs continue to be less preferred over ‘meaningless’ two letter TLDs, because companies want the focus to be on the main part of the domain, not the TLD.
That is likely part of it and also explains why languages like Japanese are more tightly grouped, as there is less spread in word length for Japanese versus English or Italian.
I would imagine this is because there is a ‘comfortable’ rate of information exchange in human conversation, and so each given language will be spoken at a pace that achieves this comfortable rate.
So it’s not that the syllable rate coincidentally results in the same information rate, but the opposite - the syllable rate adjusts to match the desired information rate.
You’d be surprised.
I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who use their Instagram or Facebook as basically the history of their social lives, where all their memories are, the local copies long gone.
It’s a terrible idea, but I’m certain people are doing it.
YouTube videos degrade in quality over time too, as they reencode from one codec du jour to the next.
Heck, even Google drive pulled that stunt where they stopped storing photos in original resolution.
Point being, none of these companies exist primarily to archive your content - they exist to monetise it.
If you want to safeguard your content in original quality, then you need to either put it on a cloud storage that you are PAYING for, or keep it on your own hardware (and with backups)
Japan is like this too, and I loved to see that when I was living there.
The bus drivers often wear nice uniforms and white gloves, and clearly take a lot of care in their appearance and work. And people give them respect.
I wish it was like that everywhere, because being able to have pride in what you do and be respected for it is such an important thing that everyone deserves to have - regardless of what your job is.
I feel trypophobia quite strongly with some triggers, even things like budding plants pushing through the ground can make my akin crawl. But for some reason crumpets are okay.
I guess my brain just sees the crumpet texture as being like a macro bread texture, which is okay because it’s kinda bready.
Parents grew up in the era before modern computers.
So it’s all magic to them.
The middle generations grew up in an era where computers were becoming common, but they were still nascent; you were frequently exposed to technical concepts and had to know some things about the technology to have a productive time using it, and there were often times it all went wrong and you had to look “under the covers”.
So we know what we’re doing.
And then kids now have grown up in an era where computers have become fully commoditised as phones and tablets, and the abstraction of the complexity behind a nice user interface is complete. A lot of kids have no idea what a ‘directory’ even is, because they’ve never had to know that.
So it’s all magic to them too.
The review also labels it as an FPS, so yeah.
And the other three quarters haven’t even tried it and rightfully don’t care
In English too, the colloquial name for tardigrades is “water bears” :D
And so, the world lost absolutely nothing of value.
There are some ways in which the newer shows like Discovery are realistic, but there are also ways in which they are stupid.
For example, two federation officers in a life or death situation where they have two minutes to solve an urgent crisis, and they decide to spend 60 seconds of that having an emotional heart-to-heart.
If that was in TNG, they’d have got the job done like professionals, and then had the friends chat later in ten forward. Because that’s how people with jobs get their jobs done.
TNG era was quite cheesy in some ways, but it kept characters real in that they always acted appropriately for their role and position, not just like a bunch of emotional oddballs who get to be in charge of a spaceship for some reason.
I agree with all of that, pretty much.
If Asus or whoever else dropped a “steam deck killer” I’m pretty sure Valve wouldn’t even blink.
Valve didn’t make the deck because they wanted to make money on hardware. I expect very much they made it specifically because they wanted to encourage the move of steam gaming from the PC to the couch, and they needed some hardware to prove their point with - like with the Steam Link where they tried this before, and that time failed.
If it later ends up being other companies in the long run who make the hardware then no worries, the mission was already accomplished.
Even being prerendered, it was an intensely impressive game for 1993.
And it’s not like they didn’t have plenty of problems to solve.
Here’s an interesting interview with founder Rand Miller about developing Myst and how they were barely able to make it work due to the limitations of CD drives.
This is a tricky one, honestly, because the steam deck straddles the line between PC and console.
If you were a Sony fan, you’d be rightfully upset if Sony released a new PlayStstion every year, and made new games only for the new hardware. It’s just not long enough to feel the hardware has ran its lifespan, and you feel cheated.
Conversely in PCs, the expectation is that the hardware slowly improves constantly, and new hardware doesn’t stop you playing all the latest games on your old hardware; the only limiting factor is how far your old hardware can be pushed before the performance is too poor. And that is YOUR choice as a user, not an artificial choice imposed on you.
I’d expect that any Steam Deck 2 is going to be more like the PC model - it won’t create exclusives or stop people playing the new games on their old deck, it will simply be better and faster.
So on that basis I wouldn’t personally have a problem if Valve put out a deck every year.
All that said however, I think waiting several years is the smart business move. People have longer to enjoy their hardware while still feeling like they have the “latest model” - it’s psychologically better from the consumer perspective.
There may also be an argument that longer release cycles makes things less complicated for devs (less devices to test on) and also keeps the hardware going for longer, because devs will be incentivised to optimise performance for the current deck (which they might not be as much after a new one comes along)
An allegory, perhaps.
There’s also the option of electronic scales which are rechargeable via USB