This is crazy, friends told me apple was good on this, before we had to get a phone for our self, I now think they simply don't understand whats happening. It looks fine to non-tech parents i guess.
The question is, what can be used as an alternative?
I had first tried an old Android phone, but theres no way to disable app store, so kid figured out he can watch app store videos with no limit...
While I support protecting insects and I literally see how their amounts decreased since I've been a child, I wished people would stop the alarmist "food supply in danger" headline. It's not, at least not because of the insects. Most of our food supply is not dependent on wild insects, instead people usually pay for cultivated bees to pollinate their plants. Business is too serious to rely on circumstance.
The real problem is that loads of the wild plant life depends on wild insects, and we do not want to lose that.
Don't get me wrong. Neither I deny climate change, nor do I say we should destroy nature as much as we do.
But we need to start talking the truth instead of invented talking points, or people won't take science serious anymore... even more than they already ignore it.
Interactions between species are scarcely understood in general, if they are known at all. It's only very recently that the existence of mycelial networks was discovered. It's only very recently that the importance of micro biome and it's role in health is starting to be recognized. It's only in hindsight that impact of the near extinction of vultures in India on human health was understood.
History has shown industrialized humans to be dangerously ignorant of environmental systems, and almost every action we take with regard to these systems is destructive. Every extinction is irreversible. Things are so wildly out of equilibrium now that it's no longer possible to return to the equilibria from our past.
Ecological collapse isnt some mild inconvenience that makes milk more expensive. Once it has happened, ecological collapse cannot and will not be undone by the seriousness of "business." This type of thinking embodies exactly the kind of arrogant hubris that led us into this situation. The negative feedback loops that have kept earth habitable for us so far aren't laws of nature, and no-one knows how far they can be bent before breaking, or how they even work.
I loved Red Alert 2 so much at release. Always was the pinnacle of (single player) RTS for me. The over-the-top characters, the cheesy story, the terrain interactions...
Everything afterwards felt lame and was geared too much towards multiplayer balance, which does not interest me the least.
Starcraft becoming uber popular in Korea I think really hurt the RTS genre. I did play RTS games online when I was younger. But I think you're right, Everything went from lets make a fun game with a cool campaign, to lets make an Esport. Company of Heroes 1 to 3, Dawn of War 1 to 2, Age of Empires 1,2,3 vs 4. You can really see this.
I think the campaigns of StarCraft II are amazing (never played Broodwar unfortunately). However I kinda agree that StarCraft's success hurt the RTS genre, because it's just so freaking good. 15 years since release and there are still tournaments played, it's fun to watch and projects like Stormgate have a really hard time, because SC2 is the bar and it's super difficult to reach. In terms of unit legibility, responsiveness, balance, etc. The bad thing is, it's not an approachable game at all, it mainly is interesting in the competitive/eSport scene.
If I watch YT videos a la "New RTS games 2025/2026" there are very interesting projects which give me hope that SC2 is not the end of RTS games.
A lot of the new RTS games I think just end up trying to be StarCraft but not. Grey Goo for example was one that came out a few years ago and it was just Starcraft with a new skin. I am not saying Starcraft is a bad game, its a fantastic game (though I do prefer Warcraft). But it kind of sucks the air out of the genre.
Starcraft and Starcraft II, and Warcraft I,II,III had great campaigns. So it is kind of ironic that a lot of the games copying them cut the campaigns for the esports focus.
I think you're stretching your point too far if you think Grey Goo was just a SC clone... Grey Goo is clearly in the the C&C branch of RTS more than the StarCraft branch, and of course made by Petroglyph. It's macro-heavy base-building, not micro-heavy, even as the Goo, it doesn't play the same as SC at all. It's also more than a few years old now (10)... On release the focus was the campaign, it didn't even release with replay or observer mode for multiplayer.
Tempest Rising is a newer RTS (this year) that's also in the C&C style, its highlight is the campaign. (Multiplayer I think is basically in the go-to-discord phase already.) The real problem is that RTS is just an unpopular genre, whether it's taking design inspiration from the C&C branch or the SC branch.
The first StarCraft was Blizzard North at its peak. I recall how difficult it was to win just sending all your troops towards the enemy, because every unit had a comparatively cheap counter.
It was particularly visible in how, if you edited the map so that every pile of resources was 50k, so essentially endless, you'd arrive at a stalemate.
> It was particularly visible in how, if you edited the map so that every pile of resources was 50k, so essentially endless, you'd arrive at a stalemate.
Given (effectively) unlimited resources within base distance, Zerg undoubtedly have a fairly substantial advantage and will probably win. Assuming comparable player skills, of course.
Their remax time is 1/3-1/4 that of Protoss/Terran, they can tech-switch near instantaneously, and they have some of the most powerful endgame meta. This was true for SC1 and Brood War, and it's even more true for current SC2.
StarCraft was actually built by Blizzard Entertainment (formerly Silicon and Synapse), Blizzard North (Condor) were the team behind Diablo and Diablo 2.
If you think Grey Goo for just Starcraft with a new skin, check out Stormgate. They went so far to replicate almost all UI elements and put them in similar spots. With even things like the top ability bar which resembles Spear of Adun/coop commander interfaces in SC2.
It's a bit weird to me that AoE 2 is the most popular of that series, considering how much more streamlined and balanced Age of Mythology is.
For example, getting to the 3rd age in AoE 2 ASAP is basically mandatory, but in AoM you can potentially start attacking from the 2nd age. On top of that, getting to the 3rd age in AoE 2 takes much longer than AoM. So there's basically a whole lot of wasted time at the start of an AoE 2 match.
You don't need to get to the 3rd age in AoE 2 necessarily, unless you're just sticking with a certain strategy or playing a certain map that warrants it. There are whole metas around going offensive in different ways at each age - drush (dark (1st) age militia units), scout rush, archer rush, tower rush, etc., before getting into the 3rd (castle) age. Usually you start with a scout, and if you're not using it for hunting then presumably you're using it for scouting and if an enemy villager strays too far from safety you can try picking them off. Better players can steal the opponent's boars or sheep, re-locate your town center with higher HP next to your opponent, etc.,.
Genres also come and go. Arena shooters are also out for a long time, compared to 95-2005. Or point and click adventure games. I think there are a huge amount of players who are genre agnostic, or, not even "gamers", and just jump from one type of fun to the next.
We still play Company of Heroes 1 as a LAN party game, after almost two decades. It's interesting to see the graphics and gameplay hold up pretty well.
It was sad to see the slow and steady enshittification with 2 and 3. The online community is pretty toxic too.
I love that they don't take themselves too seriously in this series. RA3 had some hilarious cutscenes with characters barely holding it together (the Soviet Premier was an underrated Tim Curry role IMO).
It's a shame the campaign of RA3 was boring. They got the theme and cutscenes right, but the campaign missions were rather slow, generic and forgettable.
It's the opposite of C&C3, which had a good campaign but the theme was a step back from the scifi of Tiberian Sun. Especially the GDI/NOD units were way less futuristic, and the alien ones were a bit too similar to each other in style. The cutscenes were also mostly boring compared to earlier games.
If I recall correctly, the expansion pack for C&C3 was much more interesting in these aspects, but the gameplay suffered.
He looked up! It's vital to mention that in this moment, renowned character actor Tim Curry, to highlight the fact that he was going to space, chose to look up!
There's a lot of things going against the RTS genre.
They're technically challenging to make and creatively hard to balance.
The public doesn't want to pay $60 upfront for a campaign when fun freemium games exist.
The UX does not work well on controller so a huge amount of console players will be out of reach.
Games tend to be quite long and because it's not team play matchmaking matters a lot. This push multiplayer into being highly competitive and not pushes out the casual players.
Seems like Clash Royale likes are the best we've come up with to modernize the genre but of course its very different.
It was so fun even just as a sandbox. Like Age of Empires 2, they somehow just got the feel of everything so perfect. Deploying G.I.'s in sandbags and getting them promoted to veteran, so fun! Chaining prism towers, how delightful!
I don't think it did, or at least not the version I had, though it's entirely possible I am misremembering. I know for certain we did the same thing with StarCraft as well. Somehow, we got multiple instances of RA2 running on a LAN.
I got really into C&C with Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 was a big change but I fell in love with it for the same reasons you mentioned. It's been the most disappointing part of seeing them open source all the old games. That this amazing game AND Tiberian Sun won't be part of it because they lost the code.
The "we made units this way because it's fun" philosophy is sorely missed. Every game feels like it goes through a tuning phase just for esports. Even if the game isn't out yet.
rules.ini and rulesmd.ini are the 2 text files, in my life, I've spent the most time with.
I'd probably lose another week if I had easy access to RA2 modding. Or let's say "experimenting and watching the AI burn" not to disrespect the real modders.
> I feel that my clients and I never had significant difficulty in finding providers
Yes, for professional uses. But we lost the next generation of devs. You could put PHP on any shared webspace and people started messing with it and from that messing, the next generation of open source PHP programmers came.
I have been using Perl for almost 30 years now, privately and professionally. People here tend to say, Perl 6 or Python killed it, but that's not what I experienced in those 30 years. Not that simple.
It was a combination of things, the Perl 6 announcement was one of the smaller parts actually.
- TIMTOWDI lost against "batteries included", and it lost big: It's not so much that the simpleness of the Python language won over Perl, the real and absolutely major problem at that time was the success of CPAN, which "killed" Perl 5. Perl 5 would have needed ONE object system, ONE base exception class, ONE way to do function signatures. Instead at the time, it came bundled with a bunch of Perl 4 utilities which nobody dared unbundling, CGI and a handful math functions. Being able to pick is nice, but everybody else did pick, too, and so if you used any CPAN dependencies, you soon had 3 incompatible object systems, 4 type systems, 5 exception systems co-existing within your project. A problem Perl has to this day and the reason why my team tends to re-implement stuff instead of pulling in dependencies. Python's "batteries included" approach easily won out, because stuff worked with each other and you didn't burn then scarce RAM on having different implementations of the same thing.
- Perl started to lose at the low-cost hosters against PHP already pretty early. It was easier during a certain time period to have a halfway performant PHP installation than a performant Perl installation. Hosters usually only offered CGI for Perl, not mod_perl, while PHP usually was offered as FastCGI module or mod_php which supposedly was easier to install. No low cost hoster wanted to mess with mod_perl, because it always was a hassle to setup.
- Speaking of mod_perl, things in the web dev sector still stayed pretty stable as long as Apache 1 ruled. People had to use mod_perl, but then you had a pretty performant solution. Then Apache 2 came around but mod_perl 2 wasn't ready for a long time (honestly I don't know whether it ever became ready). The Perl community at that time appeared entirely unprepared for that. While Python users were accustomed to run standalone Python servers behind proxies, Perl always was relying mostly on mod_perl. But threading in Perl stagnated and ran against a wall, and Apache 2 preferred multi process multi threading modes versus the simpler prefork multiprocess model that Apache 1 and mod_perl 1 ran on. This was the time were you could basically feel the creaking and everything breaking apart: suddenly there was no clear path forward, with mod_perl2's stability issues and the general threading stability issues of Perl 5.
It took years for the community to recover from that and focus on things like the Python-inspired PSGI/Plack as a way forward.
So, how does Perl 6 fit into this? Yes, in the early 2000s we did think, it would be just around the corner and be a clear upgrade path and solve everything wrong with Perl 5. Nice fantasy at the time. But at the same time, people were busy with far more pressing immediate problems, like how to migrate away from mod_perl1. When Python's WSGI and soon after that, Ruby on Rails came, they pressed directly into the vacuum left open by the mod_perl 2/Apache 2 disaster and this is actually what sealed the deal, IMHO.
> No low cost hoster wanted to mess with mod_perl, because it always was a hassle to setup.
I am not aware of any way (back then) to run mod_perl, which was powerful enough to facilitate developing Apache modules directly in Perl, safely in the shared hosting environments that most people used in the 2000s. If you wanted Perl, your options were either classic CGI, with the overhead of script recompilation and a new perl process spawned for each individual HTTP request (even if initially handled by the same Apache process), or paying up for a dedicated server/VPS just so you could run mod_perl.
How the Perl community thought this was an acceptable state of affairs, especially given how big of a driver webdev had been of Perl uptake during the .com bubble, when Perl was affectionately called the "duct tape of the web," and how they just sat by and let PHP eat their lunch, I'll never understand. But the attitude of the Perl community then was this mix of old-school UNIX/USENET "RTFM" culture and a dubious sense of cockiness (instilled through catechisms and catchphrases, like JAPH), so they weren't going to bend-over backwards to attract and accommodate new blood, expecting Muhammad to come to the mountain.
I'm not even sure you can generalize to "in the EU" here. A lot of contract law might be different between countries.
So for example, in Germany, an EULA would be considered an AGB, and subject to §303 BGB and following paragraphs, which e.g. means, "surprising" clauses which you cannot reasonably expect beforehand being part of the EULA would be unenforcable or §307 BGB would make certain kinds of one-sided/lop-sided clauses unenforcable.
Other EU countries might have other laws. I'm not really sure this is an area of unification, and a lot of the commonalities there is might be more due to the common heritage of Napoleon's Code Civil which underlies contract law in many european countries, instead of EU unification efforts.
Have to insert my regular rant that while I wholeheartedly support compensating font creators, pay-per-view licensing for fonts is ridiculous and must end. Offer manageable flat fees, more people will license. Continue this license policy and stuff like in this article, even more people will run to open fonts.
I will not pass on the opportunity to agree with you. Webfont licenses are a joke and type designers who sell typefaces that way should feel ashamed. You're selling a digital asset. Set a price and be done with it.
Sometimes apps will randomly appear to have time limits which the parent has never set also.
It's really a bugfest through and through.
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