In other news today...
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
none of them is suitable for quasi-realtime text conversations or impromptu voice chats
What about walking over to their office
¹.
¹ Yeah, I do go to the office most of the time, but even then I can't always do that, because some colleagues have offices in another city.
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
Force your employees back to office, loose half of them. Experienced by Grindr:
Dating app Grindr loses nearly half its staff after trying to force a return to office | CNN Business
LGBTQ dating app Grindr ended its remote work policies and forced employees to relocate. Nearly half of its staff left.
I heard a
theory that companies are doing this to avoid laying people off
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This post is deleted!
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Xbox is launching a Mastercard credit card in the US | VGC
It will be available to Xbox Insiders this month and other players in 2024…
A bit late to the party. Even Amazon gave up on this one. Apple and Google went in the sensible direction of been a wrapper around payment services.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Xbox is launching a Mastercard credit card in the US | VGC
It will be available to Xbox Insiders this month and other players in 2024…
A bit late to the party. Even Amazon gave up on this one. Apple and Google went in the sensible direction of been a wrapper around payment services.
In software, you’d think 20 additional layers of abstraction are useless overhead. But of course in finance, 20 additional middlemen all taking a cut of your money is a Feature.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Xbox is launching a Mastercard credit card in the US | VGC
It will be available to Xbox Insiders this month and other players in 2024…
A bit late to the party. Even Amazon gave up on this one. Apple and Google went in the sensible direction of been a wrapper around payment services.
In software, you’d think 20 additional layers of abstraction are useless overhead. But of course in finance, 20 additional middlemen all taking a cut of your money is a Feature.
You know what the odder thing is though. Micrsoft probably has the pockets, clout and infrastructure to setup a serious Visa/Mastercard competitor. That’s where the real money is but noone has really cracked that duopoly.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Xbox is launching a Mastercard credit card in the US | VGC
It will be available to Xbox Insiders this month and other players in 2024…
A bit late to the party. Even Amazon gave up on this one. Apple and Google went in the sensible direction of been a wrapper around payment services.
In software, you’d think 20 additional layers of abstraction are useless overhead. But of course in finance, 20 additional middlemen all taking a cut of your money is a Feature.
You know what the odder thing is though. Micrsoft probably has the pockets, clout and infrastructure to setup a serious Visa/Mastercard competitor. That’s where the real money is but noone has really cracked that duopoly.
Eh, the story is that they made a deal with a bank to put an X-Box picture on the card and to get some kind of points for their store.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Xbox is launching a Mastercard credit card in the US | VGC
It will be available to Xbox Insiders this month and other players in 2024…
A bit late to the party. Even Amazon gave up on this one. Apple and Google went in the sensible direction of been a wrapper around payment services.
In software, you’d think 20 additional layers of abstraction are useless overhead. But of course in finance, 20 additional middlemen all taking a cut of your money is a Feature.
You know what the odder thing is though. Micrsoft probably has the pockets, clout and infrastructure to setup a serious Visa/Mastercard competitor. That’s where the real money is but noone has really cracked that duopoly.
They slap the Microsoft brand on everything because they still believe they have a positive brand that helps sell things, but deep down, they know that nobody besides C-suite idjits would trust Microsoft with their money.
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@DogsB I'm more pessimistic on that. I suspect Microsoft also bows to the likes of Visa and Mastercard. And neither of those two have any interest in allowing more competition in the market.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
You know what the odder thing is though. Micrsoft probably has the pockets, clout and infrastructure to setup a serious Visa/Mastercard competitor. That’s where the real money is but noone has really cracked that duopoly.
Setting up a serious Visa+Mastercard competitor is a lot of work, since you'd need to make deals with basically all the banks in the world, and then there isn't really any new service to offer to distinguish yourself, so you'd have to compete on price, but they would quickly match, which would make them make less, but you wouldn't get much foothold in the market.
I believe in the USA, where the cards started outside of banks, the situation might (still) be a bit different, but in most other places the cards are issued by banks, the terminals are also provided by banks, and the two card companies mainly act as a compatibility layer connecting all the banks together. The banks all deal with those two companies, because all the other banks (and some big businesses) deal with them. They won't be interested in dealing with a new one until it has contracts with significant fraction of the others, but that means getting the first batch of contracts will be nearly impossible.
Microsoft has their own steady stream of revenue. They don't feel a need to go into a new line of business. I'd call it a sensible approach.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Setting up a serious Visa+Mastercard competitor
Everyone's talking like Discover is not a thing.
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@jinpa Because it isn't. Around here, nobody's ever heard about anything except Visa, Mastercard and very occasionally AmEx.
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All 4 (Discover, American Express, Visa and Mastercard) are worldwide and have established networks in about 90% of the all countries in the world. Of the 4 Discover is the smallest. Technically I do believe that American Express has the largest number of locations in which they are accepted (they got a bunch of vendors to sign exclusive deals with them by offering no fees to the vendor) but Visa and Mastercard are certainly the most well known.
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@Dragoon the only time I notice “American Express” is when it says “we don’t accept American Express because it has triple the fees”. The only time I’ve seen Discover is, well, never.
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@topspin I think it's going through the "Diner's Club" name in some places in Europe. But even then it's probably a lot more miss than hit. (I briefly searched for it to confirm that I wasn't hallucinating this and apparently they still exist.)
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
All 4 (Discover, American Express, Visa and Mastercard) are worldwide and have established networks in about 90% of the all countries in the world. Of the 4 Discover is the smallest. Technically I do believe that American Express has the largest number of locations in which they are accepted (they got a bunch of vendors to sign exclusive deals with them by offering no fees to the vendor) but Visa and Mastercard are certainly the most well known.
Discover is primarily US based - it's really not as widespread as you'd think, they've made a number of agreements but they're largely unknown in Europe.
AmEx is better known here but a lot of places don't want to take it because it has higher fees than Visa or MasterCard.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
Discover is primarily US based - it's really not as widespread as you'd think, they've made a number of agreements but they're largely unknown in Europe.
Yeah, they claim that they have coverage in over 200 countries worldwide but I am sure they count the single business that takes them as "coverage in the country" for that number.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
AmEx is better known here but a lot of places don't want to take it because it has higher fees than Visa or MasterCard.
During the quarter century I worked for AmEx it always tickled me that they wanted to known for being worldwide despite the very name referencing one country (Visa began life as "Bank Americard" and may have changed to its present name for that very reason).
AmEx further amused me by insisting upon non-US spelling for both words in its signature (literally) product, "Travellers Cheques".
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
none of them is suitable for quasi-realtime text conversations or impromptu voice chats
What about walking over to their office
¹.
¹ Yeah, I do go to the office most of the time, but even then I can't always do that, because some colleagues have offices in another city.
If I had to walk over to their office, their office is 1000+ miles away.
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@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
You know what the odder thing is though. Micrsoft probably has the pockets, clout and infrastructure to setup a serious Visa/Mastercard competitor. That’s where the real money is but noone has really cracked that duopoly.
Setting up a serious Visa+Mastercard competitor is a lot of work, since you'd need to make deals with basically all the banks in the world, and then there isn't really any new service to offer to distinguish yourself, so you'd have to compete on price, but they would quickly match, which would make them make less, but you wouldn't get much foothold in the market.
I believe in the USA, where the cards started outside of banks, the situation might (still) be a bit different, but in most other places the cards are issued by banks, the terminals are also provided by banks, and the two card companies mainly act as a compatibility layer connecting all the banks together. The banks all deal with those two companies, because all the other banks (and some big businesses) deal with them. They won't be interested in dealing with a new one until it has contracts with significant fraction of the others, but that means getting the first batch of contracts will be nearly impossible.
Microsoft has their own steady stream of revenue. They don't feel a need to go into a new line of business. I'd call it a sensible approach.
The vast majority of cards are still issued by banks here. They just use MC or Visa as their payment processors. Debit cards have their own bunches of networks (including MC and Visa) in addition to the already mentioned Amex and Discover.
Even the original Diner's Club was bought by Citibank in the 1980s. Now it's owned by Discover.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
none of them is suitable for quasi-realtime text conversations or impromptu voice chats
What about walking over to their office
¹.
¹ Yeah, I do go to the office most of the time, but even then I can't always do that, because some colleagues have offices in another city.
If I had to walk over to their office, their office is 1000+ miles away.
Would you walk 500 miles
And would you walk 500 more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at their door
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
none of them is suitable for quasi-realtime text conversations or impromptu voice chats
What about walking over to their office
¹.
¹ Yeah, I do go to the office most of the time, but even then I can't always do that, because some colleagues have offices in another city.
If I had to walk over to their office, their office is 1000+ miles away.
Would you walk 500 miles
And would you walk 500 more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at their doorI thought of that too but then “an emergency” came up I had to deal with before writing out the lyrics.
(Emergency? We did a theme update and now the icon next to “Login” is the wrong icon. Cause: hipster web font was cached and insufficient cache cleared had occurred.)
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Have our
friends not yet informed us that their home country is the only place in the world where a red wine flooding could be experienced?
Road turns into river of red wine
A river of 2.2 million litres of DOC red wine suitable for consumption, has flooded the streets of São Lourenço do Bairro, in Anadia.
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
A river of 2.2 million litres of DOC red wine suitable for consumption, has flooded the streets of São Lourenço do Bairro, in Anadia.
If you drive over the wine, you can be charged with DOI
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Details are still sketchy but... the game engine Unity announced a new licence change coming in for 2024: https://unity.com/pricing-updates
Basically if your game goes over a certain amount of revenue + installs, you as the developer get to start paying Unity per install.
The exact amounts/tiers depend on what Unity licence you as a developer have.
The other amazing highlights of this:
- uninstalling + reinstalling, or installing on two computers = 2 installs
- charity/bundles will apparently somehow be exempt (but no-one knows how that's going to work)
- no clarity on how licensing via, say, GamePass is going to work
- the assumption is that game demos count towards the same limit
Just think for a moment: if installing a game sends home telemetry to the engine manufacturer, what are the chances that someone is going to fuck with that, say via piracy? Or, say, automating install + boot + uninstall + repeat of a game for a developer you don't like to make them pay actual money.
Unity seems to be under the impression that this won't happen, and that they're going to put some kind of anti-fraud measures in place.
This also comes on the heels of dropping out the 'plus' plan with the effect of pushing people up onto the pro plan (= price hike of $1600 per seat per year for many users)
This even comes into effect, apparently, for games already released using Unity but counting new installs from 1st January.
I bet Unreal, Godot, GameMaker et al are loving this free promotion today.
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@Arantor
I see the executives at Unity went to the same business school as he-who-killed-the-blue-bird
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@izzion said in In other news today...:
@Arantor
I see the executives at Unity went to the same business school as he-who-killed-the-blue-birdThe Unity CEO is formerly EA CEO...
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@Arantor On the upside .... this could put a dent into stupid "free to play" games. Imagine you develop one of those and actually make it. The moment your µtransactions hit the revenue limit, you're on the hook for all those f2p installs.
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@cvi You're only on the hook for ones once you hit the limit.
At the bottom end, this is 200k lifetime installs + $200k revenue in last 12 months, once you hit that you start paying $0.20 per install.
If you pay for the bigger (more expensive) plans, this can drop to as low as $0.01 per install but only at the very highest tiers.
And you get billed monthly for this even if your storefront pays you less frequently...
The stupid F2P games likely will just get more aggressive about monetisation and self-select out of the market once the revenue drops off (and reskin it, push it out for a new game with a new lifetime install + revenue counter)
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
(and reskin it, push it out for a new game with a new lifetime install + revenue counter)
Hey, if it works for movies
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@Arantor I actually didn't register that it was a monthly fee. That's kinda rough.
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@cvi It's a monthly fee for incremental installs.
So if month 1 you hit $200k revenue and 199,999 installs, you're not liable.
Month 2, you hit 400k lifetime installs, you're due to pay 200k * $0.20 for that month.
Month 3, you hit 1M lifetime installs, you're due to pay 600k * $0.20 for that month. NB This doesn't matter if you racked up zero extra revenue in that time, it's only once you hit $200k revenue it matters, the install fee just mounts up regardless as long as that revenue was in the last 12 months.The thing about this is that it's installs, not seats. Someone buys the game, installs it, uninstalls it, reinstalls it, that's now 2x installs for the metrics.
And don't forget that mobile devices can offload apps that you're not using and reload them if you want them again - is that a second install? (Cursory thinking says yes. Unity yet to confirm.)
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@Arantor well then, just do what the mobile “games” do and reskin the same shit every week.
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@topspin that’s exactly what’ll happen in the F2P arena - as soon as they start hitting a point where it’s not as valuable to leave it up for long tail value, they’ll pull it from the app stores, reskin it and shove it up again.
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@Arantor Apparently they're already backtracking on the installs. Only initial installs will count. (Slashdot)
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@cvi I don’t think it’ll help, there’s already a lot of distrust going on and this clarification is going to be viewed with a “so they’re still going to track installs, and who’s to say they won’t try this again in a year’s time” floating about.
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@Arantor It's also not the first time they've made unpopular decisions recently. Didn't they put a lot of money into a weird company recently? (Not Weta, which is also a bit of a step away from games, but at least that one makes some amount of sense.)
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@Arantor It's also not the first time they've made unpopular decisions recently. Didn't they put a lot of money into a weird company recently? (Not Weta, which is also a bit of a step away from games, but at least that one makes some amount of sense.)
You mean ironSource? Among which whose products include an installation SDK that could charge for installs?
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Unity clarifies new fee plans amid developer backlash
Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inboxAt a glance Unity has provided more details…
Studios with titles heading to Game Pass or other subscription services were also assured that the fee would be charged to the distributor, e.g. Microsoft.
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iPhone 15 Pro will run native versions of AAA titles
AAA games like Assassin's Creed Mirage and the remake of Resident Evil 4 will soon be available to play on iPhone 15 Pr…
I’m still waiting on the sideload saga before paying for a new one. As it stands a more powerful phone does nothing for me because I can’t do anything with it. Mostly I just want to sideload retroarch in a way that isn’t a complete pain in the hole.
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@DogsB there’s a strong vibe floating around that the EU is going to kick them up the arse if they don’t start allowing side loading and(/or?) alternative app stores b/c anticompetitive otherwise.
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@topspin Weta Digital, VFX studio for movies. Think they did non-digital stuff as well (e.g., LOTR movies), but the part that is with Unity comes from the VFX part. (I think there is a non-Unity Weta VFX now that still does VFX, but the software people from former Weta Digitial are being integrated into Unity. Or something.)
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Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter?
A subtle change to a vital piece of equipment almost derailed a major project
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@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
A subtle change to a vital piece of equipment almost derailed a major project
What's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter?
According to some people, it is Elon Musk
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@Gern_Blaanston said in In other news today...:
What's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter?
According to some people, it is Elon MuskProbably the same people who hardcoded a ton of stuff in Twitter code referring to that data center.
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
@Gern_Blaanston said in In other news today...:
What's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter?
According to some people, it is Elon MuskProbably the same people who hardcoded a ton of stuff in Twitter code referring to that data center.
Sounds like Musk can add "Chaos Monkey" to his CV.
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@Watson I just hope that the incompetents who owned and ran it before he acquired it add WTF'er to their CV's.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
A subtle change
Not checking what you're actually reading is a small
But
is a unit that apparently can't regulate power and will happily short itself just because available power is more than expected.Could you imagine if, say, AirPods blew up because you hooked them to a 5v 2.5A Quick Charger dongle?
