Yeah, I'm not saying Libre office isn't...fine, or that development tools on Linux aren't good or even better. But the idea that all Microsoft software sucks is as demonstrably false as an opinion statement can be. They're really good, and with Office the alternatives aren't close. Do most people need all the functionality in Excel or PowerPoint? No, but they're great pieces of software and ignoring that is just plain tribalism.
Let's not get carried away. Office suite (particularly Word, PowerPoint and Excel) is some of the best software I've used. Crazy powerful, easy to use, consistent across iterations. Outlook could have some QOL things but it's still better than Thunderbird. VS Code is awesome too.
You're getting at my favorite article of all time, The Shockingly Simple Math of Early Retirement. Say what you will about Mr. Money Mustache or even early retirement in general, but this article really is the absolute simplest and best way to think about retirement savings. It's why I often feel poor or pressed for money but never worry about retirement, because I max it all and pay myself first, and I know as long as my percentage is high I'm on track.
Plus even before I could max my 401k and Roth (and we recently had a kiddo so had to stop Roth for a bit) or get a high savings rate, I put in way more than was comfortable because the power of compounding is worth rice and beans and not going out drinking for a bit. Now that I'm middle aged my nest egg is huge, and we've been slowly able to lifestyle inflate. But I am soooo glad my younger self saved like crazy. Time flies by, and money compounds before you know it.
Well frankly I don't think the original point was super well made, since folks are talking about entirely different points now, but I'd agree with soccer, and tennis and golf in particular really being comfortable with far more silence in broadcasting - but that's true on both sides of the pond. But the idea that surface level analysis is unique to American sports coverage is pretty false in my experience. Every sport I know a lot about seems covered at surface level - every sport I don't know a ton about seems covered great. But I'll say despite knowing a ton about amfootball the broadcasting is still pretty impressive. The soccer analysis I've seen is pretty good too but I'll admit my depth of knowledge is much shallower. But there is definitely a size of audience and sportscaster population issue as well, because small sports I know a lot about have much worse coverage.
I absolutely agree that US broadcast networks show more player centric fluff portions than English or Spanish broadcasts (the only other languages I've watched). But the original post was more about surface level analysis, and that's more about audience size and quality of broadcasters IMHO. But yeah, fluff, particularly between plays/matches, is crazy annoying. I hate US Olympic coverage when I can juxtapose it with BBC.
This is hilariously false. It's a major vs minor sport thing and having a population of talent to draw on. Top top top euro soccer announcers are just as amazing as top top top US basketball and football announcers, but as soon as you start watching a handball broadcast there is very little separating it from a rowing broadcast or a darts broadcast or whatever. Sometimes you get a good play by play announcer but color is almost always rough, because it's insanely hard, not because Americans are bad at it lol.
I've done sports announcing, and come from a journalism family where my dad taught radio broadcasting.
Sports casting is hard. Like really, really hard. It is very easy to criticize the way someone does it, but it is incredibly difficult to fill hours of silence. I did live commentary for college wrestling, and I was a very knowledgeable high school wrestler, but frankly sometimes there just isn't something exciting or even describable happening. Jockeying for control, positioning, or feeling out an opponent - sometimes the announcing is "they continue struggling!" Then you think of a sport that isn't nonstop action like American football, or God forbid, baseball? Huge swaths of time where there is nothing to say. This is why professional sports casts on major networks have huge teams. They can pull up obscure stats that don't really mean anything, instant replay analysis done nearly live, and a ton of graphics to keep things moving and exciting.
Then you have the issue others have talked about, where your audience may have almost no knowledge of what to you is a deeply technical sport. So every time you explain a wrestling move, or defensive pass coverage, you have to assume no knowledge. You have to explain why someone is doing something, but luckily that actually fills up a bit more time because God forbid you have dead air on a broadcast, so of course you do it. And the type of deep analysis a knowledgeable fan might want is actually really hard to not only come up with live, but while watching something live without the benefit of watching a replay or a better camera angle.
Anyway, my point is that you should try to do an entry level sports broadcasting exercise. Turn the sound off on a game, and try to cast it and record yourself. You will be absolutely shocked at how much silence there is, or how many asinine things you say. Even the "worst" broadcasters that you experience on any major network have such insanely deep knowledge and an ability to just keep spewing information and anecdotes out that I promise you would be so much more impressive if you heard an amateur, or better, tried to do it yourself.
They used to be good. They were cheap, you could flash them with custom firmware, they were very need friendly. They just gradually got worse and worse though, starting with them wanting to keep you in their app. It's always garbage profit seeking. No one is happy being good to consumers if they can make more money not doing so.
There's so much on the internet of decisions and mistakes I could never in a million years fathom making that are incontrovertibly true based on video, news articles, whatever.
So something like this, that I could EASILY see myself doing, is really hard to call fake.
Wizards Of The Coast: Ha, it will never affect us if we change our licensing and hurt the little guy. End consumers don't care and no one reads these things anyway. "We have an announcement about changes to our EULA!"
Internet and DND community revolt, Pathfinder 2 sees a massive boost, and content providers are scared now.
Unity: Surely nothing similar could happen to us if we change our licensing? "We have an announcement about changes to our EULA..."
The Unity training materials are amazing. I took their beginner programming course and even made a tiny little game of my own afterwards. I had plans to make a real game later for fun. It's awesome software and they have a great ecosystem for beginners with no experience.
So it's a huge loss, but why would I support them now when Godot exists? The only prospective user I can think of now is someone with no experience that needs all the tutorials, so they're only using them to learn and have no dreams of making a successful game. All the wannabe devs who think they're going to make the next great indie hit (and trust me based on game dev forums - there are a ton), why would they set themselves up to pay a ton of money to Unity when starting out? The people they're going to hold onto are those who don't have the skill or resources to switch, which probably coincides fairly well with those who don't have the skill or resources to make a commercially successful game. So they've limited the amount of money this move makes to existing games they can squeeze some money out of, and maybe some potential breakout hits from people who are pot committed to Unity and not skilled enough to switch. It's a crazy move.
Unreal could do the exact same thing. Obviously preaching to the choir on a Lemmy instance of all places, but open source is the only way to be safe for the future. If you're already making the switch because Unity forces your hand, you might as well go with the long runway.
The US intelligence community, or a subset thereof, apparently.
I have no idea his personal skill level or knowledge, but without putting him on blast I know his company has been involved in big stuff. He could theoretically focus more on a different aspect of security and have got this part wrong, I don't know the details of his job very much by design.
Could be. I had the same objections, and brought up how I thought Norton and McAfee were supposed to be garbage. His take was that McAfee had cleaned their act up and was best in class in addition to Windows Defender. I mentioned elsewhere but he's in the Intelligence Community so he may have reasons he can't tell me, or just looking at different attack vectors than your average sysadmin. I'll ask him.
He's in the IC (and so is the other guy who recommended it), so less "sysadmin best practices" and more "stopping state actors" practices, so maybe that has something to do with it. I'll tell him the Internet thinks he's wrong and see what he says. He definitely wasn't saying it was great at the time, just that it was needed in addition to Defender and was way safer than Kaspersky which is basically spyware.
Yeah it shows really bad local party vetting/onboarding process which is par for the course for Virginia democrats. This would be a potential issue in a city council election, and this is state delegate level - you gotta get in front of that beforehand since you know it'll be released. Unless they wanted the free publicity (totally possible advanced election calculus, but I doubt it), this seems crazy to let slide. I don't know the district, but Richmond suburbs isn't gonna be the most progressive area.
Yeah, I'm not saying Libre office isn't...fine, or that development tools on Linux aren't good or even better. But the idea that all Microsoft software sucks is as demonstrably false as an opinion statement can be. They're really good, and with Office the alternatives aren't close. Do most people need all the functionality in Excel or PowerPoint? No, but they're great pieces of software and ignoring that is just plain tribalism.