I bought the founder's edition Stadia hardware and I'm thrilled with what I got out of it, personally. I got a free game system for years since they are giving everyone refunds. Played several AAA games I had no access to otherwise. Still going to have the, now free, Chromecast Ultra 4k with ethernet cable power adapter afterward too. It works fine even if I don't pair Stadia controllers with it.
This Ubisoft initiative to transfer licenses to PC is actually worthless to me since my PC doesn't have a GPU capable of playing games anyway and I have no intention to buy one.
Considering more people are reading these headlines than experiencing a round of google freebies for their shutdown, this is only going to work to limit consumer buy-in on whatever google decides it needs to do next.
Google is panically trying to find another unicorn, as it knows its current cash cow, ads, is holding almost all its eggs and could be facing its demise as online regulation only continues to strengthen.
Not to mention google’s perverse promotional incentives that ignore supporting products long term, focusing on launching new things instead.
Google, as it is right now, is a dying company. They need basically a complete overhaul, starting with firing the entire C-level, especially the true CEO, Ruth Porat.
As an aside about GPUs, things have changed a lot over the years. In the early 2000s games were being released that were impossible to run on high settings with current hardware, and your hardware was outdated after 3 months and obsolete after a year.
Today An RX580 (released in 2017) can be had for $100-$200 and is enough to comfortably run any modern game at quite nice settings. It's been a while since I looked as well, it's entirely possible the Ethereum swap is pushing card prices down even lower.
You only need the silly priced cards if you want to do something like play games on maxed out settings in 4k at a locked 120fps.
But consider the cost of power. For many people, especially Europeans, the power bill from running a gaming PC might be substantially higher than that of running a laptop + Stadia or GeForce Now monthly subscription.
Which indicates that something is wrong with the residential electricity markets. Google should not be paying substantially less for marginal electricity than Google’s customers.
(This is a major problem with California’s energy planning. On the one hand, CA (IMO fairly sensibly) wants users to switch from gas to electricity. On the other hand, CA’s electricity prices are so egregiously inflated that people have an economic incentive to switch from electricity to gas.)
Google have some datacenters with dedicated renewable power generation (e.g. Belgium) they set up themselves, so it makes sense sometimes their electricity is cheaper.
I'm not sure about in Europe, but in the U.S. at least a substantial portion of power generation is already from renewables. That doesn't really make it free, or necessarily even cheaper depending on the circumstances.
> Which indicates that something is wrong with the residential electricity markets. Google should not be paying substantially less for marginal electricity than Google’s customers.
Not at all. We want companies to leverage economies of scale. Efficiency should bring competitive advantage. Google often invests in datacenters in places based around where it's cheaper to power and run them, often owning the energy production.
Stadia Pro was 10 EUR. So you're not wrong, though it's easily within the margin of error for this ballpark estimate (e.g. I wish I still had 14 hours a week for gaming; the power draw could be off by a factor of two in either direction, ...). And in winter, using power for computing is just a roundabout way of heating your living area, so in a way, it's free. I wonder if increased electricity costs were a factor in shutting down Stadia.
Your hope is validated! I'm one of the greenest, least energy-consuming people on Earth. I live next to a hydro plant with capacity to spare, don't eat meat, don't own a car, have no drivers license, never fly, and my last holiday I cycled 600km [1].
I got a free game system for years since they are giving everyone refunds.
This will be a common attitude in the future as far as Google's consumer products go. People will buy them expecting them to shut down in a few years, but now they'll also expect a refund.
If you're a Googler who dreams of heading up a project to make something consumer-facing it'll be a lot harder to get buy-in from the board now that it'll cost so much more to shut it down (in dollars if a refund is given or in good will if it isn't) anything that's not a massive success.
Keeping services stable on life support is a muscle Google needs to build if they want to be relied on. Maybe that will happen when there’s an overt price tag on neglecting it.
I'll echo your sentiment. I got to game free for nearly three years and I get to keep any hardware I purchased to do so. I personally grew tired of Stadia due to the lack of public support and negative sentiment any time it was brought up so I'm happy to be getting my money back (especially seeing as some games are providing second licenses on top of refunds) which can go towards a GPU while being given time to finish any games in the coming months.
Yeah, this. My previous company got paid a lot of money to bring our titles to Stadia. And it wasn't worth it, as Google kept changing APIs and interfaces. And then nobody played the game. It didn't happen again, and basically everyone in this industry has been using Stadia as a punchline for years.
> On the Left, opposition to the West’s support for Ukraine isn’t difficult to explain. Leftist figures such as Corbyn, Noam Chomsky, and Australian journalist John Pilger generally view the United States (and the West in general) as the main engine of evil in the world
Maybe it's written from a European view point? Their left is so extreme that to them, the American left is considered center, isn't it? So our left's support of the war is being called center?
Not super interested in GMO or not myself, but knowing where beef comes from seems important. Outbreaks of mad cow disease tend to be confined to certain countries, so it's valuable to be able to know your meat isn't coming from one of those if you don't want to get a prion disease.
Meanwhile it's valuable for corporations to hide where the meat comes from since such a country might sell their beef considerably cheaper to offload it despite the disease. So it's one of those cases where the corporate interests (profit) are against the individual interests (not getting a prion disease) and having government step in and mandate country of origin labeling would be valuable.
I think the US tends to be less strict about meat anyway, though. Our grocery stores still package beef in carbon monoxide to make it look red even though other countries have decided that makes the meat look misleadingly fresher than it really is, for example.
As a mobile developer I generally see WEBP getting served to Android devices and HEIC to Apple devices. Is there any advantage to JPEG XL over those?
If our app supported older iOS devices, maybe JPEG would be needed as a fallback, but it seems like JPEG XL wouldn't be compatible with old devices anyway, right?
I don't believe any platforms or browsers have enabled JPEG-XL support yet, so right now you'd need to ship the decoder yourself anyway.
But, it's at least as much better than WebP as WebP was better than JPEG. And unlike HEIC, web browsers are considering supporting it, though AVIF is currently ahead of JPEG-XL in browser support.
JPEG-XL also currently beats HEIC and AVIF at medium to high quality, but it's a fair question just how much that's intrinsic to the format and how much that is from libjxl's tuning focus being at those quality levels; AV1 and HEVC encoders have mostly focused on lower bitrates in the range that video would use.
JPEG-XL is the ~best lossless image format currently available, though.
> though AVIF is currently ahead of JPEG-XL in browser support.
It certainly looks like AVIF is ahead because it has landed in and Firefox and Chrome, but it's blocked in Safari by a required OS change[0] (iOS/macOS support if I understand the comment correctly?). Additionally, there's no implementation in Edge (even though it's chromium)[1]. Sorry, I wish I had more details but I'm not sure where to look to find a status update on that.
Meanwhile, JPEG-XL has support behind a feature in every major browser except Safari[2]. As you and others have noted, there seems to be a lot of buzz and excitement around JPEG-XL throughout the ecosystem. The webkit folks seem to be making an effort to get the ball rolling[3]. I might be misinterpreting something but it all looks very encouraging at any rate. It almost seems like it might gain wide support in Firefox and Chromium (Chrome & Edge) around the same time with Webkit following (hopefully) closely thereafter. Heck, I don't see why Webkit doesn't just abandon AVIF and focus on rolling out JPEG-XL.
I think you might have that backwards. JPEG can be losslessly converted to JPEG XL with better compression (~20% smaller), but I haven't seen anything about going the other direction. I'm not sure how it would be possible with JPEG XL's different sized blocks and different available transforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL
The JPEG -> JXL conversion is reversible, so you can encode JPEG -> convert JXL -> convert back to JPEG as needed. You could potentially encode a JPEG-XL directly with the subset that can be converted back to JPEG, but it's not clear to me if libjxl currently implements that.
Either way, it's not that useful for anyone that's already deploying post-JPEG formats; even WebP should save more than 20%. Mostly it's useful for CDNs and SaaS companies like Cloudinary to transparently deploy JPEG-XL for JPEG-only customers.
Do you mean that you would want that to happen on the web server, if they detect a user-agent that doesn't support JXL, they would convert back to JPEG? That seems pointlessly costly in CPU.
Also like mkl said, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that JXL->JPEG can be done losslessly.
I bought a Yaris as my first car to go as cheap as possible. Even electrics were more expensive despite the tax breaks. My Dad felt like a new one would break down less than a used one too which is why we avoided used.
Yaris worked well in general. I'm not surprised it's popular with college kids. It was pretty bothersome, though, how at the lowest trim level they even disabled things like cruise control. I'm three times older than any college kid and it made my ankle ache on long drives.
One of my first cars was a geo metro hatchback - probably an equivalent. It was $6500 - a fortune (for me) at the time. But I did get around 50mpg. I took a long road trip across the country and averaged 64mpg.
At the same time here in New Zealand long journeys are 99% on two lane roads, with lots of corners and hills. Not sure how useful cruise control is for that.
I used to feel that way, then noticed my friend driving a Tesla. He had this neat use for the LCD that showed a map of where all the cars around him was as output from the sensors. Yes, theoretically, on a traditional car you can adjust the mirrors so you have no blind spot and check them all religiously before lane changes and the like - but I still felt he had more awareness of who was in what lane than someone in a traditional car would have.
I'm not hating on ADAS or even screens, FWIW I will not purchase a car without radar-based adaptive cruise control, it's a game changer and I know it's better than I am at maintaining attention over a long period of time. Nor would I begrudge anyone satellite navigation or a simple music interface.
What I am talking about is the habit burying all simple functions in menus or on touchscreens. Temperature control, vent direction, volume, fwd, back on music, basic menu navigation. Inevitably these cumulative seconds of searching add up to enhanced risk for pedestrians, cyclists and other motorists.
These days automatic climate control is usually pretty good. I've been using ACC since my 2000 Honda Accord EX. The only climate control feature I routinely mess with on my cars is to turn on the defroster, which at least for the cars I drive still have physical buttons. Other than that the climate control stays on automatic fan, automatic temp, and I rarely even adjust the temperature. On one of my cars even my heated seats and heated steering wheel come on automatically. Having manual climate controls leads to more distractions for me, as then I'm having to actually change controls.
> vent direction
I definitely agree this is pretty ridiculous. I don't quite get why its better, are cars with this feature automatically repositioning vents at times? I truly don't understand the value and agree with you on this. I shouldn't need a menu to open/close or reposition a vent.
> volume, fwd, back on music
Most cars have these on the steering wheel. The steering wheel controls really should be the driver's primary way of manipulating the stereo instead of taking a hand off the wheel. IMO putting the stereo controls on the touch screen ends up making me less distracted, as it essentially forces me to use the wheel and voice controls instead of messing around with controls away from actually driving the car.
Meanwhile, having the actual app available on the large screen means my passenger can dig through playlists easier, switch between apps easier, etc. It also means as we move towards having a large screen that its easier to glance and get a good idea of the map as opposed to having a smaller map in a navigation system.
I personally wouldn't trust optical systems, but to be fair I've never driven a recent Subaru. The radar on my 2014 Volvo is extremely reliable, even in heavy rain and I make heavy use of it in nearly all traffic situations. It only ever failed me once, and I can't blame it, since that was during the worst cloud burst I ever witnessed. The Autobahn went from "nice day with medium traffic" to "<2m visibility" in less than a minute, and literally everyone pulled over to sit that one out.
I kind of like how my BMW X3 looks like a spaceship, personally. Especially all the lights at night like in the door handles. Maybe someday we'll have the fairings of all cars 3D printed at the factory and customizable to taste when ordering, though, so we can make simpler looking ones too!
same, the door handles lighting up is such a nice touch. plus all the ambient lighting on the interior in modern cars.
I do have a preference for cloth seats and more buttons in interiors though. Leather invariably ends up cracking and looking like crap, and buttons provide a much more tactile experience.
Most likely true, but that doesn't mean it is useless. Adherents to the split universe religi...er...theory might be more content with their lives, experience less anxiety, etc..
At least where I work, the only thing project managers care about is releasing the next big feature for their resume or next promo packet. Making it work well or be well tested is very low on the priorities. In fact, if you time budget that in as an engineer, they'll find someone else to implement it who will estimate half the time.
Why wouldn't it? Bright light and dark light causes your pupils to dilate differently, right? That's muscles actuated by input from the retina. Focusing is also about shaping the eye using muscles. It would actually be kind of weird if retina input wasn't used to shape the eyes.
This Ubisoft initiative to transfer licenses to PC is actually worthless to me since my PC doesn't have a GPU capable of playing games anyway and I have no intention to buy one.