mpantone

Guys, professional sports leagues are complicated. The league is a business but each team is also its own business. And when you get 20-30+ billionaires in a room, they're bound to have some disagreements about what's in the best interest of the league and their individual operations.

Since some people don't understand, it should be pointed out that stadium financing varies case by case. Sometimes the venue is largely financed through taxpayer funds (like via a bond measure).

Some venues are almost completely privately funded.

Oracle Park (originally Pacific Bell Park) -- the San Francisco Giants ballpark -- was almost completely funded by private sources. In fact, the team paid off its loan a few years ago and is in the clear. When the team owner threatened to move the franchise to St. Petersburg, FL, a new ownership group emerged to keep the team in San Francisco. Several attempts to get taxpayers to pay for a new stadium failed so the ownership group came up with a plan to use private investment.

Even the Giants ownership group doesn't always agree amongst themselves so the decisions are mostly influenced by the majority owner despite the fact that person has a very low public profile and conducts business behind closed doors, away from television lights and press conferences.

The Green Bay Packers are another example of varied ownership which is technically a publicly held non-profit group. Shareholders are limited to 200,000 shares which amounts to about 4% of outstanding shares at this time. Thus, there is no majority owner.

So yeah, there's a representative from the Green Bay Packers ownership group (probably Mark Murphy, president) sitting next to Jerry Jones in league ownership meetings. But Murphy doesn't own the team, he represents the ownership group.

elijahg said:

iOS 16 has some pretty glaring bugs still.
...

Do they do no regression testing at all at Apple?

 This is why for the past 3-4 years I wait until Q2 the following year to upgrade to the latest macOS and iOS. It makes for a less hair-pulling transition and user experience.

I'm on iOS/iPad OS 15 and macOS Monterey and I won't transition to iOS/iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura until April 2023.

Apple's software QA has really gone down over the past five years. Not worth it to be a beta tester which is basically what you are through the x.3 release these days.

It got significantly worse with macOS Crapalina which I never ran as the primary operating system. I tested it multiple times on a practice drive but ultimately spent 1.5 years on Mojave before upgrading directly to Big Sur (somewhere in early 2021) bypassing Crapalina completely.

The saddest part of Stadia’s shutdown is that Google’s game partners didn’t receive any notification.

https://www.pcgamer.com/stadia-game-developers-had-no-idea-google-was-killing-stadia/

Google didn’t just screw some of its employees, it unapologetically screwed a bunch of third party developers.

Sure Google can offer displaced Stadia employees opportunities to work elsewhere in the company but employees working on Stadia games for developer partners are left out in the cold holding the bag.

Not cool Sundar, not cool at all.

rezwits said:

How in the F, does Microsoft pull this off?  Doesn't Xbox have a similar "streaming" service?  Thru the browser or something?

Yes, through the browser.

It's important to understand that Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Google all took different approaches in cloud game streaming.

Microsoft has content both as a studio and as a publisher due to its long experience with Xbox. Google had nothing and they really aren't a content company.

Meanwhile Microsoft acquired Bethesda/ZeniMax and is trying to acquire Activision-Blizzard. Microsoft made studio acquisitions primarily to prop up their portfolio to drive subscriptions to the Xbox Game Pass. The xCloud game streaming service is an add-on benefit to Game Pass subscribers and leveraged off Microsoft Azure datacenters.

Microsoft already knows how to run a successful gaming business. Same with Sony and Nintendo so those two will have a better chance of success at cloud game streaming when they tackle it head on. Nintendo has a few cloud titles available through Switch Online but they are taking a very cautious pace.

Non-gaming companies like Google and NVIDIA have a much steeper learning curve.

tht said:

It's amazing how keyboards can have so many keys, yet have these weird imperfections. There isn't one perfect keyboard, or mouse for that matter.

Some of the keys on the Mx Mechanical mini for Mac keyboard don't look to be standard width and are less wide. If it is for Mac, why are the functions in the function key row different from a Mac laptop keyboard? There's always something.

This is a 65% keyboard. The normal keys are all regular sized keycaps. The lens on the camera might be making things look different but all the central keys are the same dimension.

The other keys (tab, caps lock, shift, control, command, option) have to be adjusted for the constraints of the 65% layout which is one key wider than the main layout.

It should be pointed out that Apple themselves have futzed around with the keyboard layout on their smaller keyboards:



See how the four arrow keys are half sized? Here the function key is on the lower left. That key is elsewhere on the full sized wired keyboard.

There's a standard width between the center of each of the main keys. In the case of the Logitech keyboard and this Apple wireless keyboard, the keycaps are narrower than the base of Cherry MX keycaps.

Note that the ASD and ZXC rows are offset by half the width of a standard key. That's normal. Same with the 123 and QWE rows. However the offset between the QWE and ASD rows is much smaller. Again, this is normal and it's not specific to Apple/Mac keyboards. It's the same if you look at a PC keyboard. This layout has been like this for decades.

There's generally no standard for the function key row apart from putting the Esc key in the upper left and having twelve function keys due to software conventions. The alternate functions (screen brightness, keyboard brightness, media control, volume control) are all at the discretion of the keyboard manufacturer. As you can see, this keyboard uses F4 for the now-discontinued Dashboard.