• 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 7th, 2024

help-circle



  • Why would you want backwards compatibility? To play games you already own and like instead of buying new ones? Now now, don’t be ridiculous.

    Sarcasm aside, I do wonder how technically challenging it is to keep your system backwards-compatible. I understand console games are written for specific hardware specs, but I’d assume newer hardware still understands the old instructions. It could be an OS question, but again, I’d assume they would develop the newer version on top of their old, so I don’t know why it wouldn’t support the old features anymore.

    I don’t want to cynically claim that it’s only done for profit reasons, and I’m certainly out of my depth on the topic of developing an entire console system, so I want to assume there’s something I just don’t know about, but I’m curious what that might be.






  • If it’s real, I’m confident he had some competent assistant hire a competent crew for that photo-op. I’m guessing a competent PR consultant suggested a good photo-op in the first place, hit the right buttons to appeal to his wannabe cool image.

    If it’s fake, some competent developer created a good tool, fed with competently selected data to create a rather convincing image.

    What I’m trying to say is that there most certainly were several competent people involved in the making of this picture.

    Just not the subject.



  • Both Medieval Europe and Antiquity were defined by wealthy landowners and poor workers. We don’t always see a whole lot of that in the writings that have survived until our time, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

    Most of the ancient sources we have were written by people with the both leisure to learn, travel around and write stuff down and the connections to have their writings be considered worth duplicating and preserving. In a word: the elites.

    The issue here is that the poor and destitute didn’t exist in a vacuum just because resources were scarce. Even in bad years for the peasantry, the elites generally did fine.

    These ancient sources don’t always spell that out, because it isn’t worth spelling out to them: this is just how they and their peers live. Most of these elite members owned property or the workshop and tools with which their workers labored.

    By and large, they were rich. Whether that richness is defined in numbers on some net worth estimate or just in the amount of things they owned, the result is the same.

    And even in Ancient Greece, the rich had to make some contributions back to the community (except for Sparta, but they’re a whole different beast of exploitation). Philanthropy has its roots there, even if it is a far cry from what we would term Philantropy today: The wealthy either voluntarily or out of obligation funded buildings, artworks etc. for the general public.

    What changed with Industrial Capitalism and later Globalisation was mostly the scale of exploitation. But the principle - an owner class exploiting a labour class - has been around forever.