Maybe they weren't allowed to not try? Like adding Denuvo to your game doesn't stop piracy, but your investors will be angry if you don't make the (wasted) effort at due diligence.
Those toolkits don’t even seem to be intended to stop piracy - they seem to add value by slowing it down long enough to make the first 2 weeks (days) of sales. The people using them usually understand that.
Just to clarify something - these toolkits have gotten to a point where they can now go months without being broken. Yes everyone involved knows they will get broken eventually - but as you noticed the intention is to protect the majority of the sales which happen within the first weeks after launch. Just wanted to make it clear that the timescales have shifted from just hours and days to months lately.
Yes, but the point is that the motivation for taking these actions isn't for them to be effective, but to satisfy performative requirements imposed by external parties.
There is an old saying "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM". This is just yet another facet of CYA where we know it's of limited utility and the cracking will happen either way but if you specifically argued against Denuvo before the cracking happens it's your ass on the line for it.
In a fully agentic shopping experience, it's not obvious to me that providing a better product works to drive sales. Bargain-basement stores can make up a story about how their goods are lovingly handcrafted for decades of durability (adversarially tested against the most common agents, so they'll believe it) much more efficiently than I can honestly provide one.
How would the agent know it's a better product? All it has to go on are whatever bot-generated spam reviews and prompt injections that they can scrape.
You can't only compare doormen to doormen, because the number of people and doors have increased too. You need to compare doormen to doors. All the apartment buildings I've known people live at on Manhattan have only had automatic doors. You need to show that automatic doors replaced unguarded doors.
1) What proportion of doors had doormen before compared to now?
2) What proportion of the population was employed as doormen then and now?
3) What proportion of the population benefited from doormen then and now?
I don't think that's necessary to refute the original point. The point I was disagreeing with was that automatic doors have "won" and doormen are no longer relevant. Whether 25,000 is a higher proportion of New Yorkers now than it was in 1930 isn't really a key point. 25,000 remains a large enough number that it is not true that doormen have been wiped out.
That said, to your actual points, as an intellectual exercise: while the population of New York has increased since 1930 (from around 7m to around 9m), the number of doormen has gone up much much faster (from "a few thousand" according to NPR to 25,000). So on the criteria you listed there, the number of doormen has increased as well.
None of that has anything to do with why starcraft is popular, though. Starcraft has a long history of organized professional competition, and that's responsible for sustaining interest in the game.
At first people played Starcraft for the campaign, internet access in late 90s wasn't common enough for a game to thrive on mostly online multiplayer. And it was popular back then. And playing on LAN was more of "20 mins no rush" thing.
A campaign is not enough to sustain a game's popularity for decades. Use Map Settings and the competitive scene did that. The latter of the two is still around and single-handedly explains the game's continuing popularity.
By the time my crowd had reliable enough connections for multiplayer, the number of people who knew and liked Starcraft from that campaign was much higher than the number who'd either gotten to love TA from the campaign or from vs-computer matches.
I beg to differ, I loved the TA campaign. Going from one lone commander with their side on the brink of defeat to orchestrating a final titanic clash of armies as you conquer the homeworld of your opposition was epic. SC never clicked with me in either gameplay or story.
Unfortunately did not even come close to capturing the magic of the original or TASpring / BAR though, sadly. I wanted to like it but it suffered from a lot of sequelitis.
That game always felt more like supreme commander then TA to me... Personally I preferred the foss games spawned out of the spring engine like eg zero-k and the previously mentioned beyond all reason over it
It's true that the game director Jon Mavor, who wrote the graphics engine for TA, was also the lead programmer on SC. And he's not the only point of confluence between the two games.
I did really like PA, and still play it more often than SC/SC2/TA, but the UI was completely broken under Linux for a while (after a few years, it started running with software rendering, now the community more or less fixed it). To their credit though, they did have a Linux build.
Asking why someone is visiting is also pertinent to the border agent's direct job, because different types of visits require different documents, such as a work visa.
The point of LEAPS is you don’t have to perfect the timing. You buy far enough out to avoid theta decay, and far enough out of the money to minimize risk.
Regardless of timing, for shorts to pay out requires the market to actually correct itself. You won't be able to get your magical shorts money until the price of ram goes back down anyway. The market will remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
The price of RAM does not need to come down in order for a way-out-of-the-money January 2027 put on NVDA to increase in value from its current purchase price.
How does buying long term put options require perfect timing? The whole point of a long term put option is that you only have to be right at some point between when you buy it and when it expires.
No, put options suffer from time decay and IV crush. A $1,000 MU put for December 2027 was at about $200 today. So if Micron dropped tomorrow, you'd probably start making a bit of money, although the delta is only -0.32. But if you held all the way to December 2027, Micron would then have to drop all the way to $800 before your position is profitable.
When and how that transition happens is subject to a number of complex factors, and it's not even necessarily the case that incremental drops in the stock will produce incremental gains for your put option.
This is a really bizare argument for anyone who actually knows about options and trades them. If your thesis is that RAM is in a massive bubble and Micron is going to crash when it bursts, you don't express that thesis by buying a put struck around Micron's current bubble price. The fact that you chose a $1000 strike as your example is weird because that's basically the most expensive way to make the argument you're supposedly making.
"IV crush" is an especially strange objection in this context. IV crush matters when you buy options at elevated implied volatility and that volatility collapses. If Micron suddenly drops hundreds of dollars because the alleged bubble is bursting then the implied volatility would sharply rise, which makes your put more valuable, not less. Invoking "IV crush" here mostly makes it sound like you've heard the terminology without thinking through how it actually applies to the scenario you're describing.
If you genuinely think Micron is going to collapse sometime over the next two or three years because this entire RAM shortage is an overhyped bubble, then the obvious trade is to buy puts around where you think the stock should return to once that bubble disappears. Micron wasn't remotely a $1000 stock before this run. We can be generous and use a $300 strike since even though that's still 100% higher than Micron's price prior to this run-up, it gets the point across.
A long dated $300 put is currently around $7 per share, so one contract costs roughly $700. If Micron eventually falls to $200, that contract is worth $10000 at expiry. At $100, it's worth $20000. If the crash happens well before expiry, it can be worth even more than its intrinsic value because there's still time value left.
If you're claiming to be certain that a gigantic bubble is going to burst and wipe hundreds of dollars off the stock price, there are long dated far out of the money puts specifically capable of expressing that position. Pointing at an expensive $1000 strike put and saying "look, options are complicated" is just a weird or rather superficial misunderstanding of some financial concepts.
I personally use options for hedging, which I think is generally the responsible purpose of them.
It's true that you can get something like a directional bet by going far enough out of the money with strong enough conviction never to exit the position early. But this also exposes you to a lot of risk that it might not pay off even though the original idea was correct. Microsoft crashed in 2000, but it never returned to its pre-1998 price, because there was some real value in the dotcom bubble and they were able to capture a disproportionate fraction of it.
None of that helps you get memory now. You're not going to see your payoff for 2-3 years or whenever the bubble bursts. At which point the bubble has burst and you can simply buy ram at a normal price again. And the thesis of this discussion is that we can't buy memory at a reasonable price now, not 3 years from now.
This isn't an abstract discussion about the usefulness of options trading or other hedging strategies. You want to pay for ram today by betting on returns years in the future? Risky play! Hope you can stay solvent.
Ha, same! As teenagers me and my friends got into it and we'd play by sneakernet. Every day at school we'd exchange floppies with that day's turn. It sounds insanely slow but turns in Stars! could easily take an hour to prepare one the game got going because of all the micromanagement required to handle a large empire. So it fitted OK around homework and dinner.
I played a lot of it back in the day... makes me nostalgic to play again. But this emulator requires Intel and I have ARM Macs.
Probably these days it wouldn't be hard to vibe up a modern equivalent especially with the MCP the author talks about.
Works perfectly fine in Crossover. Enable Hires in a bottle, Configure Wine to 217ppi under Display tab, copy Stars-x86.exe to C:/Prog(x86)/Stars/, simulate reboot, wait a minute for Crossover to rescan, double-click Stars-x86 icon. It launches behind other open windows so click the dock icon or cmd-tab to it once it’s running.
However, I believe the first shareware version I had was 1.x (distributed via CD that was packed full of shareware) which was significantly different. I remember mining fuel, which tracks with the above link.
Stars! was one of my very first video game purchases. I remember mailing a money order, and recieving a copy in the mail - I didn't have internet at the time. I'm not sure I even knew the internet existed then, although I would soon after if not.
AFAIK this was the case. I played a lot of Stars! (almost exclusively the shareware) and it had all the races and tech trees. It showed higher level tech trees but those were only available in the registered game. Map sizes were also limited in the shareware. Later versions might have required additional resources for the retail upgrade but I believe the version I had (2.5?) could become the full registered copy with just a key.
The shareware version I had was missing stuff until I upgraded. It was before 2.0 came out, but I don't remember the details after all this time. I believe it didn't have all the techs? Something important wasn't available.
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