Kid_Thunder

Google Cloud definitely backs up data. Specifically I said

after an account is deleted.

The surprise here being that those backups are gone (or unrecoverable) immediately after the account is deleted.

Actually, it highlights the importance of a proper distributed backup strategy and disaster recovery plan.

Uh, yeah, that’s why I said

it is good practice and frankly refreshing to hear that a company actually backed up away from their primary cloud infrastructure

The same can probably happen on AWS, Azure, any data center really

Sure, if you colocate in another datacenter and it isn’t your own, they aren’t backing your data up without some sort of other agreement and configuration. I’m not sure about AWS but Azure actually has offline geographically separate backup options.

And the crazy part is that it sounds like Google didn’t have backups of this data after the account was deleted. The only reason they were able to restore the data was because UniSuper had a backup on another provider.

This should make anyone really think hard about the situation before using Google’s cloud. Sure, it is good practice and frankly refreshing to hear that a company actually backed up away from their primary cloud infrastructure but I’m surprised Google themselves do not keep backups for awhile after an account is deleted.

Even though costs of AAA games have gone up for some games (certainly not all) because of the size of teams/labor hours, so have the volume of sales. Publishers have made more and more profit while the average price of AAA games had stayed about the same for a long time.

Games selling in the hundreds of thousands was considered really good decades ago but now those are in the tens of millions.

Publishers aren’t having problems with profitability, so much so that they’ve been buying up large swaths of development houses and IPs and then dismantling them when they have a single flop.

EA’s gross profit in 2010 was $1.6B, in 2014 was $3.03B and in the past 12 months have been $5.8B right now according to macrotrends.

But the current trends are unsustainable

The current trend in profitability is increasing, not decreasing. It isn’t a minor trend or minor increases either.

Major publisher profitability has vastly increased in spite of stagnant game prices. They don’t have to increase prices to increase growth. It is simply that the market allows the increase of the price with more profitability and so they do.

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I was trying to find the old Level 3 blog post but didn’t because I believe they basically said that Comcast needed to upgrade its infrastructure and never did. Netflix was the cashcow they saw to essentially make them pay for it. As a Comcast customer, I see it as charging the customer twice – first for the Internet service for the content and again because Netflix is going to pass that extra cost onto you (and everyone else who isn’t a Comcast customer).

You’re right on about CDNs and edge / egress/ingress PoPs. It also keeps it cheaper for the likes of Netflix/Amazon/etc. in the long run with the benefits of adding more availability.

I found this wikipedia article about backbones and peering but it really isn’t that great but in the results it also came up with this pretty good presentation from Carnegi Mellon. I was only going to browser a few of the slides but the information isn’t really all that much and the illustrations are good. I think Prof. Nace did an excellent job here. Much better than I would have.

The problem historically isn’t that streaming services are paying for fast lanes but that they have to pay not to be throttled below normal traffic. In other words, they have to pay more to be treated like other traffic.

Even crazier is remember that there are actual peering agreements between folks like cogentco, Level 3, comcast, Hurricane Electric, AT&T, etc. What comcast did that caused the spotlight was to bypass their peering agreement with Level 3 and went direct to their end customer (netflix) and told them they’d specifically throttle them if they didn’t pay a premium which also undermined Level3’s peering agreement with Comcast.

Peering agreements are basically like “I’ll route your traffic, if you route my traffic” and that’s how the Internet works.

Why does it feel like EA tries really hard to kill off franchises with a loyal fanbase by constantly playing limbo under the lowering bar?

The conservative strategy has been to polarize politics in America in order to have a very aligned power. This means that if you aren’t 100% behind them, then you are an enemy to them.

It is only through this that the GOP can both say that they are protecting individual freedoms but limiting or taking them away (of course opponents to this will be quick to point out the one and only counter point which is fighting against restrictions of the 2nd Amendment and only that), say that they are for smaller government but yet want private companies to be regulated that attempt to censor hate and misinformation (which has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment when it comes to non-government entities) yet still say that they are for businesses to operate as unrestricted as possible. They are anti-union because they are corrupt and take away accountability yet strongly support the worst of the worst of unions – the police unions. The GOP constantly cries that there’s a nanny government, yet they push laws to restrict people’s choices, censor libraries and try to tear down citizen protections. The GOP cries that this country’s deficit is out of control but when they are in power, they over spend. They complain that public schools indoctrinate but at the local and state levels attempt to indoctrinate in public schools. They talk about needing to stay in power to turn America around, yet when empowered in all three federal branches fails to pass meaningful legislation and run the government that they are overseeing and yet blame the government because they will eat each other alive for their own individual gains.

There so much more but the GOP is a party of hypocrites. Without polarization mixed with some fear mongering their party would likely cease to exist with any real power because they do not stand for the ideals that their own voting base supports.

The GOP constantly tries to create an environment of being constantly under attack and spews hate. Their voter base is simply a product of that.

Samsung signed a deal so that they can use the Jibe API to be a part of E2E when using RCS.

Since I’m sure there’s Internet where you’re at, you can take a look from Verizon’s RCS roll out on messages+ in 2021 to Samsung’s S9, prior to relying on Google Jibe. Verizon did eventually switch to use Jibe for their entire RCS implementation now instead of relying on their own infrastructure as did T-Mobile.

Well sure. You’ve got to trust that Jibe isn’t man in the middling the key exchanges but regardless, it doesn’t change what I said.

Not true. Both Samsung and Verizon messages uses RCS, so long as your carrier has implemented RCS.

They are also the only RCS supplier on Android. A random messaging app can’t simply add RCS messaging functionality.

You are correct that an app can’t directly implement RCS but it can support it. RCS is implemented by the carrier, not by Google or any other text application.

RCS is an open standard that any carrier can implement to replace SMS/MMS. The only thing special that Google does is on top of RCS is provides E2E via its own servers for handling messaging. The E2E isn’t a part of RCS, though it should be IMO. Regardless, Google doesn’t ‘own’ the Android implementation because it isn’t a part of Android, other than it can support the carrier’s implementation of RCS.

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It looks like to me that its set up purposefully to obfuscate its structure. I’d also assume the reason for the loan for 15% of shares was so the parent essentially isn’t really just a sole owner to protect them from liability.

The best part is when the business customers had to use an AI chatbot for support which was as helpful as the AI Adbot.

Right now the closest we have to that is running ampere clusters. I’m saying that because it is going to be some years before any phone GPU/CPU is going to be able to effectively run a decent AI model. I don’t doubt there will be some sort of marketing for ‘boosting’ AI via your phone CPU/GPU but it isn’t going to do much more than be a marketing ploy.

It is far more likely that it will still continue to be offloaded to the cloud. There is going to be much more market motivation to continue to put your data on the cloud instead of off of it.

It’s already here. I run AI models via my GPU with training data from various sources for both searching/GPT-like chat and images. You can basically point-and-click and do this with GPT4All which integrates a chat client and let’s you just select some popular AI models without knowing how to really do anything or use the CLI. It basically gives you a ChatGPT experience offline using your GPU if it has enough VRAM or CPU if it doesn’t for whatever particular model you’re using. It doesn’t do images I don’t think but there are other projects out there that simplify doing it using your own stuff.

For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won’t or will stop supporting ‘legacy’ Android Auto apps, so AA dies ‘because developers aren’t supporting apps anymore – totally not our fault and we’re sorry to see this happen.’