Tag Archives: Apple

June 22, 2020 · 04:00

The start of a joke

We all have these moments, it all starts with a joke, and 15 months later the joke can walk. There is within us all an innate ability to rely on the absence of proper decorum. It is nothing serious so to say, one might remember the story on how Peter Dinklage broke his neck on a ladder whilst climbing a Bonsai tree. The so-called joke is lost on us, that is until we know what a Bonsai tree is. No matter how we feel, the side of what is called inappropriate jokes is within us all, and the funny part of it is that for the most there is no malice attached to it. That is actually an important part. So as we became part of the Politically Correct humour brigade we threw away a side of us, we actually became less. 

That sense of humour is actually an important side, not because it matters, but because it does not. It is in that flair that we see ‘America trying to ‘rule the world’, says Russian spy chief’, the man is incorrect (ofcourse), yet the feeling has been brought and we need to see the American failing to a much larger degree. We might consider the quote “Russia doesn’t trust what the British government says about the Salisbury poisonings” and Sergei Naryshkin would want us to believe that this is what it is, but it is not all and by no means the focus of what needs to be. You see, even as we know that greed driven America is on its last legs, we have no real idea on how far along Russia, China and India are on that track. They are far along, just the ‘how far’ is not a given and it matters, it matters a great deal. You see the interview on the BBC gives us an interesting quote: “Using weapons like cyber attacks and disinformation, the European Union only recently accused Russia of a campaign of disinformation over the Coronavirus. Why is Russia doing this?” This in a light of massive misreporting by the EU members themselves? And the part where he basically accuses Russia is another matter. I actually do not know whether it is correct or incorrect, what I do know is that I have not seen the evidence, as such I do not trust any of it. Evidence is key and the BBC knows this, as such the question as asked is giving us a stage that is not about Russia, but on the non-reliability of the BBC, does that make sense? 

Now, as for the misreporting, if the EU is setting itself so high above others, it seems only fair that Russia would have every issue of IT and data collection that is in equal if not on greater measure than the EU (or America for that part). I am not stating that their technology is flawed, but they have less resources committed to technology and data collection, that much can be seen on any tourist trip to the good old CCCP. And in that same setting when we see Russian hospitals, we might notice a lack of computer driven states, as such data collection is all a bust. 

It is a choice Russia made by America letting them not be able to buy any American computers, or so the story goes. Even as we see one side, we forget about the other side. I am not claiming that Russia is innocent, I am claiming that we do not see the whole picture and the BBC interviewer reminds me on a conversation I once had with a protestant Pastor, And I stated: “We both serve the lord, you in your way, I in the way he wanted it to happen”, it is nice to claim thesis of real truth, but that side tends to be undetermined. And it also sets the tone that god needs to be served, by what standard, on whose call? Where did he say that this was so?

From the cold war I would see Sergei Naryshkin as my opponent, yet this is not the cold war, and that does not mean that Sergei is no longer my opponent, but there is a larger issue over the last weeks where we have to wonder who the BBC serves, as I see it, they serve the people a lot less, so who are their stakeholders and shareholders? So in that matter, who took a long hard look at the BBC Bitesize GCSE Business Studies? I am merely asking. Or we might look at the fact that Freud could not get into the nightclub because he forgot his ID, or perhaps what does Freud says comes between fear and sex? Funf! That last joke made no sense unless you know German. And that is where we are, it is not lost in translation, it is that some media is intentionally depriving us of the translation that needs to be.

And we actually have to be aware. It is easier if we turn to Russia (as less speak it), and we will be offered pancakes whenever we set that stage (it is a ‘blin’ joke) and here we need to see that translation software could not see the difference. That is the story, the sources state that Russia at present has a debt that is only 0.04% of the American debt and that is a gamechanger. In all honesty, I personally do not believe it, but the truth of the matter is that I actually do not know, Russia does not hand its budget choices to the media and the ones they do give are debatable on a few sides. And in that stage is America, it is on its final legs and they have no plan to take care of the 25 trillion they owe. So in that approach we would see that ‘America trying to ‘rule the world’’, is incorrect, they merely are trying to bleed others to the same degree, or find a way to dampen the economic bleeding that they are facing and that is a tall order, in that it seems that larger companies are setting pressure on governments to let them continue the financial bleeding, yet when we realising that the US government gets (at best) 10 cents on the dollar, these board members are setting pretty for the next 3-4 generations, so where was the BBC to this level of disinformation?

I am (in part) grasping at straws, there are sides that I cannot prove, as such it is to be seen as speculation and I am not telling you different. I am speculating and it matters, but ask yourself, how much digging has the media done lately? It does not prove me right, but it should give you a few questions. And that is all before China is added to the equation. Yes, for the most we are focussing on Huawei, but China is to some degree an actual danger to the west. Focussing on Huawei is stupid, but the risk of China actually exists. There is in part the stage where American business are colouring Huawei black which opposes black lives matter (a joke, I could not resist), but the colour of fear is there, and those in fear are losing their mind with the American economy skating so close to the abyss and that part is ignored by too large a population. All this especially in a stage where this holiday could end up being one of the darkest in American history, and that is before people realise that the US is facing the fear of trainloads of evictions right as we see new spikes in the Coronaviral population. And this part is not small, the US is looking at no less than 3% of its population becoming homeless if rents are not protected, a stage no nation has ever faced in history to this degree. 

As such the General owing rent is not a general, he is a left tenant. Yes another joke but if we consider who are in the hot zones for rent, my view is not that far off. So why the jokes? Jokes are a form of creativity, wordplay and sometimes out of the box thinking and to evade the traps we are given in 2020 we need all three to stay standing. We can blame so many people, but in the end blame does not get us anywhere, and lets face it, the Russians will at most send us pancakes. Consider that I am on average an average person (misplaced humility), in the stage of 2 years I came up with new 5G IP, a stage of optionally setting the work environment towards 3 videogames and one expansion and I came up with the theoretical stage of a new weapon that takes care of the Iranian fleet. I am merely one person, so what else is out there and how much IP and ideas are floating around whilst some players are servicing their needs through the speculated approach of misinforming others?

So if we continue on that same track we need to get the joke legs and see how it solves it for us. Yet expecting others to solve dilemma’s is a two edged sword and we need to be aware of those dangers. On the grand scheme of things, the Coronaviru is not the danger, I am not worried about the 10% dying, I am worried of the 90% that has nowhere to go, as such we need the economie on a much better schale and in that we need to stop greed, we need to halt it completely, we cannot afford the stage it leaves the others. I am capitalist enough to not diminish it completely, because greed is a forward momentum force as well, yet the idea that Apple is now a 1.5 trillion dollar business, whilst their stores are nothing more than glorified display cases and I have been waiting for my laptop for 6 week, because it all gets made in the US, and the stores merely point (for the most) towards setting up an online sale should have been raising questions with over half a dozen governments, the stage is too weird and they get tax returns that no company has ever dreamed of, we need to change and the politicians are staging this through levels of inactivity that are unheard of.

And now as the economy collapses, we see protests, yet they go nowhere, because the tax laws remain untouched to the largest degree. So these politicians might be deductible, but they remain taxing on their best days.

In this I feel it is appropriate to end the story with a da dum dum.

Happy monday everyone and remember that if you wake up today before 17:00 you did something wrong.

 

 

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June 19, 2020 · 01:39

Contemplations

We all contemplate, we consider, we weigh and we make decisions after the contemplation. Yet it is not always that simple, at times the contemplation comes after what preceded. I cannot continue my novel until the laptop arrives, and even as it is completely unrelated to the idea I had for an optional TV series, the idea is still sound, as such I am considering whether the elements in it can be added to my novel, I am only at 60,000 words, it is something that I have to contemplate. We all have similar issues, it is notalways about writing, or playing a game, some contemplations are serious, some are not, yet they too tend to refract into serious parts of our lives, even if we are not initially aware of it. 

It is not the only thing that I am contemplating. I have seen over the last few days all kinds of messages, ‘tweaked’ advertisements and messages of a sort on how we can change business decisions after the Coronavirus. I am baffled on the premise of ‘new approaches to business’, I am willing to accept that new business is where you find it, yet the oversized issue is misreporting, mismanagement of government funds and mismanaging of attempts to look cool, all whilst we know that actual scientists need actual time to investigate. The greed driven elements before the Corona situation had created empty shells with the idea that some time in the future it would fix itself, all whilst those elements knew perfectly well that these things never fix themselves, they are merely pushed onto the next administration. An abuse on a global scale and the people see the impact now, they now get to live in a new situation and they elected the people that put them in that position. These governments never went out to muzzle the EU to the degree needed, as such well over € 3,000,000,000,000 in debt, as such the EU had no reserves left for what is coming now. And it did this after it was clear that the first trillion did not do what they hoped, yet they wanted it, because money has to roll and as such another stint of spending became the concept of normal. All this, whilst the proper stage of properly setting up tax laws for corporations have never been done, delayed decade after decade. All this whilst the EU had no issues to reject (in November 2019) any move to show names of those using tax avoidance a stage where the people would see the proposed situation where firms had to reveal profits made and taxes paid in EVERY EU nation they operated in, I reckon that the FAANG group has powerful friends all over the EU, and these 12 members should be looked at with a lot more scrutiny. The FAANG group is avoiding an estimated $500,000,000,000 a year, as such the irony is laughable, it would have paid for the issue they face now and in that same setting education and housing in Europe would be close to fixed, a stage history never had before. Yet, those with a low tax shelter option were happy to reject, they included Ireland, Hungary, Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Austria, Croatia and the Czech Republic. We all see the damage, but we are all so relieved that Apple is now a $1,500,000,000,000 company, Yes, at what expense? It is food for contemplation.

So as we see not on how we can work from home and what we need to do it properly, I wonder what happened to all those tax reductions in the 90’s so that we could work from home, there is an apparent lag in what was regarded as enough and is now showing to be inadequate. So whilst some applaud ‘EU did not witness any major internet congestion’, it comes without the mention that Netflix and YouTube slowed down services to avoid congestion, apparently full services are not possible, but that is a story for another time (in the very far future if it was up to them). So whilst BEREC (an EU regulator) was all about the reporting mechanism to monitor internet traffic, we see that I gave you the links yesterday to other people who see that most of them cannot even report the amount of people getting the Coronavirus and optional those dying from it. As such we see another optional example that human lives matter less than any danger to what is laughingly called ‘the economy’, weird is it not? 

OK, I agree that one is not the other, but it seems that when the economy is in danger a whole additional range of support services come into play, when the lives of people are on the line, this support is seemingly missing. The EU shows even more signs of lag on different levels. In other news (as stated in my previous blog) we see Humanitarian actions that are empty and other pacifist actions that are useless, yet their actions pushed close to $13,000,000,000 out of UK and US hands and handed it to both Russia and China, in addition there are several damaged deal thatSaudi Arabia had with Germany, but I have no numbers on that. So whilst I am not anti-Humanitarian, I am a pragmatist and it seems that hollow actions are just that hollow in a time and age that none can afford, even now, we seem to be utterly anti-Saudi Arabia, yet there is no factual reason to do this. In opposition we see that the actions against Iran are close to non-existent, all whilst Forbes reported yesterday that there are 100 new naval vessels in Iran, it seems that there is a lot to contemplate, especially as some EU players are hiding behind the Nuclear deal like it is a Santa wish list, all whilst we see from several directions, some less than a day old ‘New tensions dim hopes for salvaging Iran Nuclear deal’ and ‘New IAEA report is reminder of old problems with the Iran Nuclear Deal’ a stage that shows that Iran does what it pleases and takes no time to be civil about it, when it is conventional it is one thing, the nuclear side is a direct threat to Israel and Saudi Arabia and the EU players are willing to burn those two elements if they look better, because Iran will make some bullshit excuse on how it was not their fault, that it was a fanatic and they possibly misjudged the situation and those European players will all nod in agreement, their pockets optionally lined with income never earned. And we are all letting it happen.

It is perhaps our greatest flaw, we do not act when we should, we let greed driven motivations overwhelm our needs and we seek to blame someone when we all let this happen, as contemplations go, we have to think through a lot at present and we need to do it faster.

 

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June 13, 2020 · 16:57

To knowingly intentionally ignore

There is a state in any person’s mind to ignore anything that does not fit the need of the receiver. This is not a bad thing (at times), and we can ignore all we can, yet to deceive ourselves that it does not exist is another matter. 

To look at the station we need to look at the consideration of two settings. The first is ‘an organized effort to gather information about targer markets or customers’ this is the foundation of market research. After this we consider the second part, which is ‘the process or set of processes that links the producers, customers, and end users to the marketer through information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems’, as I personally see it, some do not see the difference (or ignore that there is one), or as I would imply, to knowingly use one as the other. The first difference is the population. In market research we investigate a population and we set our hypothesis based on the station of it. We dabble, we slice and dice this population, and we draw conclusions. The problem is that some hide behind the slicing and dicing, calling it the arbitrary process. For the most I have no issues with it, or better stated I do not care one hoot about some of these analysts. Yet lately I see the impact of decisions and business processes and I wonder if the people accepting the marketing stories whether they are in the dark, they do not care or if they are clueless. 

It started with Microsoft, then Ubisoft, after that there was a stage at Apple as well as a stint in the US administration. All acts based on what some would call ‘a market research into the people and the impact of view’ yet it seems like the marketing research of passing a bitter pill to the extent of surviving the action. That is clearly how it feels and the first act on my side was remembering a previous conversation, a conversation I had roughly 20 years ago. The premise was that a board was cutting expenses and setting the stage of having the environment where they stopped getting a 90% approval on their product and settling on an 80% approval. It is a dangerous and slippery slide. Yes it seems cheaper and it might in the beginning be cheaper, yet the station as we see it is dangerous as the degrees of freedom diminish (intended pun). As a product drills down in different areas, the 10% shift implies that on three fields the danger grows that the overall approval rate is optionally down to 60%, especially if the 20% missed rate hits any consumer 3 times. This is where Ubisot is at present and that is where Microsoft was in the last few years. In that stage we see “to develop technology that will enable them to stream games to whatever piece of tech a person is holding – be that a smartphone, console, or something yet to be invented”. It is the Ubisoft statement and that is fine, yet with the testing and inadequate versions over the last two years alone gives the consumer (the player) a much larger lag, especially when these players are only relatively happy and get hit again and again with downloads that tend to exceed 20 GB, how long until the player has had enough?

It is nice to drill down unto a group of satisfied players, yet the larger issue is that the non players are too often disregarded making the story told one that is largely built onto a shallow base of shifty sands. My view is supported by one small detail, as the PS5 was viewed, we saw an absence of Ubisoft games, the station of that 20% is now growing is it not? One of the largest software makers in history had no business not being present at this Sony show, whether they are going forward on both systems or not. It seems to me that this is not a small part, this is a much larger part and it seems to me that the predictions that I gave last year is slowly coming to fruition. 

Could I be wrong?

Absolutely! I cannot state that there is certainty, that would be short sighted on my side, but the symptoms are there, the lack of excellent gaming, dozens of updates that are several GB in size, there is a lack of testing there is a lack of listening to the gamers and the ones setting the stage of listening are rolling the dice which they optionally loaded themselves. They look better that way, yet the consequences for Ubisoft seem better, until the gamers move away, when you set the stage of a non-assassins creed game to call it that, something they did once before, the stage changes. Even as we were given last year “Ubisoft didn’t provide numbers, but said that it had made a “sharp downward revision” in the revenues expected from both games, which it blamed on a failure to differentiate Breakpoint from its predecessor, an overall lack of interest in sequels to live games, and excess bugs for the game’s failure.” (source: PC Gamer) There are two parts in this, the first is that the game sucks, the basic failures seen only yesterday by myself give a larger rise to that Ubisoft has much larger issues at present. The fact that I ended up with the game at 20% of the full price only 6 months ago, and the fact that to start the game I needed a 38GB patch shows that the issues are close to massive. It is not ‘to differentiate’, but to ‘properly code’ a game that is at the core of it all. The difference of Market research where Ubisoft investigates their game against ALL gamers, to a stage of Marketing research where Ubisoft merely investigates the Ubisoft players is part of that optional setting. When anyone hides behind the message and not behind the quality of product, we have a much larger issue and in the next console war, it would optionally set the deck to a very different stage. 

This is not about Ubisoft, Apple and Microsoft have shown similar failings for too long, and the stage where the US administration is in shows similar flaws, even as it is not a product, trust is, and it is faltering on several levels in the US. We can blame several stages in this, but it is not the blame, it is the investigation into the analysts and the conclusions drawn seems to be a much larger stage of marketing research, not market research. One optional stage is the way evidence is rejected and optionally completely ignored. We might look at the Coronavirus, it is not the point, that element merely brought it to the surface faster. Huawei is the first one that matters, no evidence was ever brought to light, it shows a stgs where the US is close to economic collapse, at that stage we see the greed driven marketing research where the actions are at disposal to the US assets, not the US citizens. This matters because it shows that the slicing and dicing of data is not getting the attention it is due, it is happening on corporate and political levels and elements like ‘How Austin Tech Is Democratizing Data’ might seem nice in theory, yet the larger issue is that some views are now seemingly solely supported by the topline makers, not actual academics with the education required to make some conclusions based on data, not the presented views that those in charge of governments and corporations would like it to be. So when we learn that “Imagine business analysts, marketing teams and even the C-suite having the power to interpret data without the help of the entire IT department”,consider that we are now in a phase where those who have are about to decide the fate of those who have not and those people are in for a massive rough ride, or so they believe. When we see the corporate players like Ubisoft and Microsoft folding on strategies as they lose larger and larger market shares, we will see destabilisation of a much larger degree and there the game is up for grabs. Even as some resorted to terms like data democratization, it is a much older principle, it is the discrimination between those who matter to some, against those who do not. Corporations will find out the hard way what their choice brings them, in politics it is a different story and the impact there is nowhere to be seen. We cannot predict it until it is too late and there I expect (or is it dare I expect?), is the stage larger, even as places like YouTube is flooded in some positive light, the negative impact is much larger. The US riots are merely a consequence to part of what happens in data, it is not the cause but there will be much larger and much more defining then we ever expected, the problem there is that after the fact, repairing damage is close to impossible. You see it is not ownership of data, it is the fact that decisions are made on a level where too much data is disregarded. Hiding behind entrepreneurial action is close to a farce. The largest danger of misinterpretation and as the sources are less and less trustworthy and that is disregarding any ethical consideration, or to make it slightly more simple, as data democratization moves forward, the essential part of comprehensive information will be filtered and optionally disregarded too often, a such a full view is not available, implying that the decision makers are merely looking at a limited scope and consider that action when it is done by a billion Euro company. 

We are only seeing this because the surrounding scope was pushed to the forefront, as such those reacting are doing it too late having to disregard increasingly larger consumer markets. When was the last time that such an action was an actual benefit to that company?

 

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June 12, 2020 · 07:27

Playing the fifth station

I am watching what is to come and even as the first part was not my bag of tea, the New Spiderman game definitely was, a new Gran Turismo and now I stop with shouting titles, a lot more publications will do that. What was interesting was the response the game makers had (the man behind Insomniac games to name one), the additions that the PS5 enabled, and so far I am watching actual gameplay and it is blowing me away. The presentation is giving new titles from franchises we love and new titles from origins we never saw and so far it is pretty mind boggling, but Sony is pretty good in that respect, so I am not overly dumbstruck, yet the graphics and the environment as we see it in the game Stray leaves me with thought, Sony, not unlike Microsoft is going in a direction we expect, as such I see a gap that players like Apple and Google can touch on. Sony has well over half a dozen exclusive titles that players want, and there we see the first part that I sort of expected. We see the exclusive and the likely less exclusive games, yet after 30 minutes still nothing from Ubisoft. I am certain that Ubisoft will be on the PS5, no doubt, but the stage where the small software houses are taking the limelight and sharing it with Sony shows just how bad the stage of Ubisoft is at present. Then we get to see Ghostwire, a game teased before, now we see it on the PS5 and this game alone is reason to get the PS5, and even as it is not the most expected game, it is certainly taking the limelight and that is a new feeling. When we see what comes with Hitman 3 I feel certain that no Microsoft Hype has a chance at present, I am cautious because their show a few years back was really good, but they have to take all the stops out to even equal what Sony is bringing. And that is important here as Hitman is most likely coming to both systems. With a lot of titles handing out the Holiday 2020, the expected image that PS5 will come with an overwhelming amount of launch titles (or first month titles). At the end of the presentation it is clear, there is no Ubisoft, they are in trouble, because there is no way that they want to miss the event, Bethesda was there with 2 titles, so why not Ubisoft? 85 minutes after the start, we get the power hammer, Eloy is back and what we see on PS5 blew me away, Horizon 2, Forbidden West is a PS5 Gem andI can’t wait to get my fingers on this console, which was shown right after, it is gorgeous, you should see the video on YouTube yourself and see what is there, words cannot describe it. No matter how some Microsoft fans shout that their system is the biggest and the strongest, without good games it does not add up to much, so far they are 3 million systems behind Nintendo and that is not all, 4 reviewers were completely blown away, it is that overwhelming and most of us will be waiting with bells on for the next 20 weeks. 

Sony, you’ve done it again!

 

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June 12, 2020 · 01:18

Between fact and speculation

There are two parts in all this. The first is fact, the second is speculation, the facts come from what we know and have seen. First fact given by the BBC is that the PS4 has so far sold 108 million worldwide, the Xbox 49 million, which is 3 million less than the Nintendo Switch, The PS4 and Xbox both started in 2012. The Nintendo in 2017, surpassing the Xbox in half the time. As such, that so-called strongest console was surpassed by the weakest console and in 4 hours we get to see what the new PS, the PS5 will bring us. In all this there is no surprise for me, I saw this coming in 2016, and as the Xbox One X showed us the face of Microsoft and their short sightedness, I saw how they would lose the market more and more, even as Microsoft is trying to create hype after hype, selectively giving us missing information, the consumers are waking up to the colossal error that Microsoft has become and I firmly believe that it is about to get worse. If it was up to me I would direct Google and Apple towards alternative paths making Microsoft the system in 4th or even 5th position. I am that mean at times. 

Speculation

Speculation is another path, yet that is not about the hardware, that is set to the business practices of Activision and Ubisoft. To give you the example, I have been an Elite fan since its release in 1985, In 2016 it was on early release on the Xbox and it was pretty much the ONLY reason I got it. The game is still fantastic and since that point, over 3 years, the game has had a speculated 53 updates, the last one 3.4 GB, Ubisoft released AC Odyssey in 2018 and has a speculative 54updates, the last one 24 GB, almost 800% of the Elite Dangerous one. Activision seems to have a new record, Call of Duty has seemingly a 85 GB patch. That is way too massive and games on the PS5 will end up being larger, a lot larger. Under that given situation, the entire patch system needs to change. Ubisoft especially (Breakpoint 38 GB, AC Odyssey 2 GB) is a setting that gamers will no longer accept, it is a little bit ridiculous that Ubisoft cannot properly test its games. The AC series especially has shown a lack of proper testing, yet that will dwarf in both the PS5 and Xbox X series life. Under the new setting, the makers can hide behind ‘everyone has broadband’ and ‘there is unlimited download’, yet it is clear that rural Germany and France are not on the big internet page and the entire Coronavirus work at home part with congestion all over the place, in the same setting whilst players like Netflix is pushing 4K series more and more, the entire mess of congestion will only increase. Players like Ubisoft will not survive the quality they have brought so far and there is no doubt in my mind that both Sony and Microsoft will have to protect their player sooner rather than later. This is the speculative part and we will hopefully learn more in 4 hours when Sony gives us the works on the release of the PS5. The time of  release is nearing more and more. As I see it, it is a mere 22 weeks away and some will have to save up for both a 4K 125Hz TV as well as the PS5. As I see it, Sony is extremely likely to have a massively great 2020 soon enough and an even better 2021. None of this matters to Nintendo, it will work great on the new TV and they have already surpassed Microsoft, who will need the largest part of 2021 just to break even with the weakest console. They are not in a good place and whatever hype they create, it will not look good, yet that is still speculative of me and I hope to be proven right no later than March 2021. 

Gaming is about to change and we are only hours away from seeing it ourselves. 

 

 

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May 26, 2020 · 01:03

Open Targets

We all have that point in time when we see a person we know, and when we see that person, we wished we had a paintball rifle, that person is the target. That person optionale did nothing wrong, it is a variant to “Slap your annoying coworker day”. I feel certain that more than one person had me in mind and that is probably why my title as ‘certified psychopath’ gets me out of hot water. Iget it, I tend to be goal driven and I have zero regard for diplomacy (most of the time), yet it also works in opposition. I get annoyed when some boss gives me the run around instead of giving me the direct message. There is nothing as hateful as a manager keeping you on a leash instead of giving the bad news up front, which he has had for 3-4 hours. So wasting time on long rides whilst the short message would have changed the dynamics towards the goal. 

Yet the larger issue is not the manager, it is me. I am aware that I have flaws and faults (we all do), yet I present the flaw as a strength, and that is where things get dicey at times. I feel that I am on the right path, but I also understand that those drowning in diplomacy have a case. In this setting we look at Ubisoft, it is hit hard by the Rainbow Six clone (I would call it a rip off), and Apple and Google are actually in hot waters over the entire setting. This is nothing less than copyright infringement. This is a lot more than a clone, this is more than some copy lookalike. Several people, or better stated, several gamers could not tell the difference ad that is a bad thing. Ubisoft has many flaws, but in the titles they believe, they have pumped cash into them and Rainbow Six is an important IP revenue for them. As such the game Area F2 is a much larger concern and the impact on Alibaba will also be significant. It is my issue here that I fail to see how Area F2 even made it onto the App sites in the first place. And that is before we take a look at the Nintendo app store. There is a larger flaw and even as I enjoy slapping Ubisoft, I am also protective of games and Ubisoft does deserve every bit of protection here. There is a larger stage, not merely of what is missed, but of the things we see that require a larger consideration, apart from Alibaba getting every bit of software scrutinised, before it is allowed online. The larger stage is how can we prevent this larger stage exploding. In today’s stage we see that videogames get the initial 30-60 day joust for revenue and that leads to a 60-120 day revenue boost. Basically Area F2 screwed that up for Rainbow Six and they should pay for it, optionally using the Alibaba credit cards. In today’s stage it will be a massive invoice, and as I personally see it, Ubisoft is entitled to those funds. The stage for Alibaba changes even further when we consider the historic stage that Call of Duty and Medal of Honour had, they looked alike but were different in several ways and it kept both alive. In this stage where people cannot tell the difference between Area F2 and Rainbow Six siege there is a much larger and a different stage. Copyright infringement is not new, not even in gaming, but the fact that people cannot tell the difference is pretty new and very unique, and I wonder what play will be set in motion to stop this from happening again, in all this, I do believe that Alibaba will take a large hit to their value, I personally believe that Ubisoft has all the rights it can to divert damage to its IP and let it all be paid by someone name Ali Baba

It reminds me of an old publishing joke, you see the book ‘Ali Baba and the 40 thieves’ was politically incorrect, it was republished as ‘Ali Baba and the 40 fighters for the Palistinian cause’. I wonder how it sounds when the third edition is staged as ‘Alibaba and the 40 game programmers’, yet in all this it is still early days, I will keep my eyes on the court case, because the impact will be a lot larger than most of us can imagine. The only thing I wonder about is how they got it looking alike so fast, there seems to be a factor of intent in all this, so there is every chance that Alibaba will go to court against the people who made Area F2. 

 

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May 9, 2020 · 14:26

Shame of choice?

I have been around for some time. In this time I have always accepted the choices I have made, and for the most, I have had one regret, that was around 2001, it was a choice and I accept responsibility for the choice I mader, I might not be happy about it, but that is life. In that frame of mind I am or the most a Republican, I believe in Republican standards, yet until January 2019 I had never expected to be ashamed of that. The entire Huawei situation and as the Guardian reported 6 hours ago, ‘US blocks vote on UN’s bid for global ceasefire over reference to WHO’, the idea that the Trump administration opposes mention of the WHO must be one of the most fucked up situations that ANY commander in chief of the US in the history of that nation has set up. The stage is even more diluted when we see “Donald Trump has blamed the WHO for the pandemic, claiming (without any supporting evidence) that it withheld information in the early days of the outbreak.” In all honesty, from that pointof view, when people are THAT stupid, I will had all my IP to Huawei (hoping that they will pay me) there is no chance that there can be any hope for the US in a stage where Trump is president. The man gives rise to chimps being more intelligent than people. To give further notice, I grew up seeing and accepting that Russia was the great evil in the 70’s and 80’s, I was in the mistaken understanding that the US was the bastion of actual freedom, how wrong can a man be?

When the elections were held, it was my opinion that Clinton was the wrong choice, her bungling of the entire Benghazi situation, in light of all the spin and misdirection was reason enough. If she could not get that right, seeing her in charge of the US was in my personal view a massive mistake. I had no idea that the baboon chosen would be even worse.

And the American people are about to find out why. The economic disaster that the US now faces is estimated to outdo the Depression that preceded WW2. 

In all this, I expect that Google, Apple, IBM and Microsoft will see a massive brain drain towards Europe and Asia. I personally expected my IP to be valued no less than $2 billion, yet I personally do not see the stage where the US will honour anything, as such and to protect my IP (which is based on new 5G principles) I have no option but to offer it to Huawei and hope for the best. Even if I end up with nothing, I will set in motion gears (already done) that will push it all to the public domain. Even as that leaves me with nothing, it will be evidence that I was right all along, which will boost my ego and place me on the high moral ground, merely for the view it gives me, above the presenters, the bullet point people and the proclaimers towards their own bonus, their own needs, not the corporate needs. 

I always saw myself as a Republican because personal freedom is where it is at, not the constrictive laws that binds all together behind a fence of rules, less laws and more freedom, yet that freedom comes with personal responsibility, I never doubted or opposed that. I wonder how people will react when the works of Stephen Moore, the one economist that supports the Republican plan reacts when the flaws get out into the open and he is asked critical questions. What do you do when people set the election of a president above the value of human lives? The quote “If we don’t get the economy reopened, we go into november with a severe depression, then you’re looking probably at President Joe Biden”, yet the stage of how many will die as a feigned economy will reopen, one that has an additional $3,000,000,000,000 debt. Bloomberg did not go deeper into that part, yet the question is out there “Why was this not investigated?” Lets not forget that this is the same Moore who set the 2012 taxcut exploding the budget without producing an economic boom (source: NY Times), so where is the evidence this time and in support of that, what are the speculated death numbers? We know that the, so-called expected 1.8% mortality rate that President Trump stated months ago was a joke and he made the claim in a time when it was already well over twice as large. That beside the point of a lacking “intellectual gravitas” as some stated. The NY Times article is still an important read. He makes statements on pandemic culling that sets the stage that precautions like New York are not needed in Lincoln, Des Moines or Boise. That is as I see it the first flaw. If the US had shut its borders a lot sooner, there might have been a small gesture of hope, but that was not done. The interview gives off the noise of ‘lets not set all urban areas the same’ yet the flu will get to any stage where people are together, that is the premise and I am not a health expert either. We see at present that 1/3rd of all infected in the world are in the US. Almost one in three of all global deaths are in the US as well. Those are directly seen numbers and there is every indication that a lot of the numbers of those passing away of the Coronavirus are not showing up, so the numbers might be higher. It amounts to the entire population of Lakewood City California. Not really an urban place is it, but that is the size of the issue and I expect that the station of care includes Lakewood City, not excluding it. 

Numbers are easy to misdirect, lives less so. I understand (not completely agreeing) with Stephen Moore, yet opening as soon as possible will set a much larger stage as the US enters Christmas, and the outgoing president should consider the legacy he is about to leave the US, the outbreak might not be his fault, but the consequences of his actions are and as such I am horrified that they were made by a Republican. 

Even my own reaction, the fact that my chances are much better turning to the Chinese than the Americans is still a debate my two guardian angels are having on my shoulders (the good one on the right shoulder the other one on the left. It is leaving me rather unhappy. It is like listening to the book of Good Omens on a daily basis, unnerving to say the least.

Yet I also accept that there is a larger group of people that sets the accusation that the WHO cannot handle the pandemic. Yet it is also a stage where the US and UK largely disregarded the warnings, I saw the pandemic coming close to two weeks before the media accepted it, even as the the dictionary version of pandemic was surpassed days before I stated it, the media did not follow and questioned this part for the longest time, yet we are not looking at that, are we?

There is a much larger stage that the media is ignoring, but we let that slip, the entire issue is now on the US blocking a UN vote as it indirectly makes mention of the WHO, I wonder if the elected US official is 5 years old (a speculative assumption on my side). There are larger fish to fry, but at present we need to be asking more and more questions of the Republican political base and most media outlets are not doing that and we need to see and wonder why that is. As I see it, there is within me, a much larger fight going on. I feel ashamed for being a Republican, I wonder if I have been wrong on that choice for a much longer time, and it worries me.

It is an internal fight I never had before and that too worries me. 

 

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May 6, 2020 · 01:28

Nature of the beast

There was news on how Samsung failed the net mobile options, the news was given ‘Exynos 990-powered Galaxy S20+ flops hard in gaming’ what I read came from NotebookCheck, and it is important that even as I am no friend of Samsung (due to their own doing in 1985), I tend to not be a Samsung hater. Let us not forget that I love Nintendo and I personally hated the WiiU, I also accept that sometimes a failure precedes a success like the Nintendo Switch, so Samsung might optionally be down,but they are not out. In the end the article lets out that it is basically not the fault of Samsung, but the chip (and its makers) is the cause of all the viewed hardship. The Exynos 990 seems to be below par on a few fields as such depending on that chip caused the project to go pear shaped. This is the direct result of choices, sometimes they blow back on us (WiiU anyone?). Yet in the field the hidden message is often missed. As stated ‘after 10 minutes of running PUBG Mobile, the galaxy S20+ was dropping frames to 50fps (something some recent consoles could not maintain), and as low as 40fps by the 20 minute mark’ the story is nowhere near over and Samsung has time to get up to speed in more than one way.

The writer goes on stating how it is that a $200 solution called Redmi Note 8 Pro did so much better. It is interesting that merely one example was matched. Still it is a mark on the status list of Samsung for now, yet a firm that is in the top 5 of most registered patents in the last years does not have merely one push towards the top and even as (for now) the S20+ is not likely to be a pushing power to the top, Samsng has had its share of true innovative successes and as such it will bounce back, it has done that a few times, and I have no doubt it will do so again.

They are not alone, even as Apple has no recorded future failure yet, it seems that not unlike the time of the PowerMac, they face a new chiprace. The news is that Intel just cannot get their response rate right and as we see that, Apple is considering a new path, one that is RISC or ARM, if it is the RISC, we see a return to happy times (ME: happy happy joy joy), yet that is because I am not a chip man and I know little of the ARM, I merely remember the good times of the RISC (I still have my RISC G5), that systems outdid anything available in those days and made no noise. Still that is not enough for you to rely on. In my mind I see another field starting up, all the APP developers relying on little INTEL options to get whatever they made go faster will have to rethink their options, there will be a weeding in the ranks of APP developers soon enough at that point, not to mention the people making PC games and including Apple as an option, it sets the optional parameters that the design for Apple needs to be truly for Apple. These two matters are a larger stage, last year the Irish Times reported on the collaboration between the two in regards to the iTunes movies, but I wonder if it stops there, Samsung has a much stronger infrastructure, Apple has a few unique designs and a following of millions, I wonder if there is not a larger space for more between the two, they must realise that the changed setting of Covid requires a different stage of thinking for the near future, their approach to almost unaffordable phones is nice, but millions of people are getting laid off, people who used to buy their products and that is off the table for the next two years, if not even longer. 

The changes that we are seeing will demand the largest players to find symphony and chorus between them instead of relying on the powerful solo acts that no one can afford. As such we will see a few more surprises in 2020 and 2021. Some might think that the markets will settle again, but they all forgot that to appease Wall Street too many companies were on a 90% stage with no reserves, now it shows as the bankruptcy numbers are going through the roof, even smaller players like Virgin are running for their life laying off thousands of people, without reserves there is no continuance for any of them, they ignored the common setting for keeping reserves and a 2 month shutdown was enough to make most of them buckle and it will get worse, the EU (those pulling the strings) have achieved in delaying Basel III for another year due to Covid implications. The FSB stated in one of their reports “Funding markets have been under strain amid extreme demand for cash and near-cash assets” it is a stage that is escalating, mainly because of a lack of reserves and it hits back at Samsung as well. This one failure is optionally no biggie, but when you consider that the next two years will be washed from larger revenue and profit in a stage where the time was not great to get a failure to deal with is not great, it is all about the reserves and to appease the markets too many players left ‘margin’ on the side for good reporting, it stands to reason that bad news will rule the news on several fields and it seems that Samsung will join that group that ends up having not great news, and optionally they have marginally good news that will get a downward revision up to 60-120 days later, can’t have the current quarter down, can we?

We can look and see how separate events do not add up and that would be fair, there is however a much larger field in sight and in that field the S20+ failure comes at a bad time, yet they are not alone Apple is in a similar place and forgoing individuality for 2-3 years and set combined products might be the good path for those two players. Samsung could revert to another path but overall they are not in charge, their shareholders are and they fear recession like the black plague. This is merely because 2-3 years could result in a stage of no reserves with a much stronger push towards a 3-5 year stage of no consumers and the shareholders fear that much more than anything. 

Is it not interesting how shareholders make a large company much easier to anticipate?

I have no doubt that Samsung will survive this era, just like it did in 1985, so far history has proven me right again and again, yet the entire Corona escalation is new to too many players and to me too, as such there is a lot we cannot see in a stage of feigned ‘non-panic’, even as these people have no idea just how bad things can get, and they need their shareholders to have faith, as such there remains an unknown. 

Time and profit are the ruling elements of the beast that devours, for the most it devours profit, yet what will it resort to when there is no profit?

 

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April 29, 2020 · 00:28

Parallels

I started playing a new video game. Well, it is not new, I have played it 7 times (I think), I played it on the Xbox 360, the PS3,the Xbox One and the PS4. The game was released on 11/11/11 and it is called Skyrim. I have loved this game since its release and it all started with the predecessor Oblivion. So how does a game become this amazing? There is a parallel with the series I Claudius made in the 70’s. You see there are two distinct differences, this game is great, not great through marketing (Microsoft never learned that lesson). In I Claudius its greatness came from 4 elements. 

  1. The Script
  2. The Cast
  3. The Director
  4. The Environment

I believe that games have a similar side to it, and we can see the difference between a good game and a great game. Even as there is no real cast in Skyrim, the makers have to define the characters, on TV they are played but the impact is similar. It is the environment that has the greater pull, whilst it was Roman times for Claudius, the medieval era that the Elder Scrolls exhibit have a similar pull on people.

It drove me to make the first design for TES: Restoration, yet in all this, I do recognise that another Skyrim was not going to make it, gamers are innovative driven not iterative and we have seen this going back to Tomb Raider 2 (1997) and even before that. 

The first question becomes ‘How can we continue a franchise and remain innovative?’, the second one is ‘How can gaming be pushed towards future greatness?’ In the first case we need to investigate, the second one is for the visionaries. The first question is important because what was released between Assassin Creed 2 and Assassins Creed Origin was less and less and almost destroyed the franchise, it is nice that Ubisoft remains in denial and after that makes a ‘Looking towards the future comment’, yet the issue is much more important than you think. 

Great gaming does not happen overnight and places like CD Project Red are really rare. A lot of game designers tend to be one trick ponies when it comes to great games and so far they pulled it off more than once, as did Bethesda as did a few others. Yet the ones that do are a minority and in the light of console wars investigating what is possible matters, good gaming is good for all, the era where Microsoft and Sony keeping each other one their toes driving gaming is almost a thing of the past and we need to see better games to resolve that issue. It does not matter how it goes, but at present only Sony and Nintendo remain great, Microsoft a lot less so and as such it will impact great gaming for Sony players down the line. 

As to how to fix this, I have no idea. Yet the thought does propel me forward and I Claudius is still a prime example of what makes a product great. The fact that it can stand against any drama produced almost 50 years later is proof of that, yet in that regard looking at the elements help us. The two elements that are the strong drivers here are the Script (the game story) and the environment. In that regard Bethesda is sitting pretty for now. Evenas there is no finality towards Hammerfell (2021), the signs are good and as I personally see it, it would also benefit my idea of TES: Restoration. It doesn’t change the premise, it merely makes it larger and the new consoles are ready for that, the fact that PC’s need to reserve 150GB for the new flight simulator confirms that and gamers do not care about that space, they will do a lot more to their budget to get the best out of games. Thousands of Elite Dangerous fans are evidence of that, they beat flight simulators fans almost two to one on hardware. Andforthese fans storage is an important element (another thing Microsoft never learned in 8 years). And the setting is not PS5 against Microsoft, it is old, stale and Microsoft lost. It is getting The Apple and Google Solution to par off beyond Nintendo. It is not an easy trip but it can be done and a few good games is all that is needed. Not games already released (Diablo 3 and Skyrim), but actual new IP that the others do not have, that makes any new great game 5 times the challenge for the existing consoles. And it can be done, in all this I refuse to discard Apple, when it comes to TV Shows, they are showing to give Netflix a run for their money, and if they can do it on TV, they can do it on gaming too. 

It is a wild west of digital format and both Google and Apple are on equal footing for now, yet the stage in 2022 is not known and cannot be set until the IP comes out for comparison. So all the junkies that are hardware driven will learn a very interesting lesson, the lesson that it was never about the hardware. The CBM64 people saw it, the PS1 and N64 people lived it and no one seems to catch on. It has always been about great games and as we see copies of great amiga games arrive on Android the decision makers are starting to wake up, yet they lost dozens of opportune IP that is now in the hands of those making a few dollars from microtransactions. It is the loss that we have seen over a year and the larger players are apparently not catching on, so where do the gamers stand?

Well, that remains to be seen. I Claudius was almost never a reality and so far has never been remade. The chance of equalling I Claudius is rare to say the least and surpassing it will be almost impossible. It is the impact of a near perfect TV series and games have had that same impact. On TV we saw other series making it good, even great and games can do that too. Will we see it? I have no idea, but if I can come up with 4 golden idea’s in a year there is no way that there is no one else doing that same thing. My biggest issue is that it is unlikely to be Ubisoft, it is more and more likely that several indie developers are sitting on that great idea and finding them by the right people is what counts towards the next console battle. As I personally (and speculatively) see it, someone (high up) at Microsoft will open their mouth making a needed jump to their precious Azure solution, making the game a no go, as such I am more and more curious on what Apple and Google pull off. They might have what it takes to become a member of the big 4, the question at this point will be, does Microsoft have what it takes to remain one of the big four in 2023. The game is open for a lot of players, yet will they have the software to make it count?

 

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February 11, 2020 · 17:26

Value of original gaming IP

When my mind designed the sequels to a new Elder Scrolls game, Far Cry and Watchdogs I did not care about the revenue, I did not care about the revenue factors in gaming franchise, I was merely one creative mind devising new ways and new stories, because the story is everything, it really is. 

Consider the intro and staging of Far Cry 3 against Far Cry 5, the stage of Assassin’s Creed 2 versus AC Unity, or AC Origins versus AC Odyssey and you might get a glimpse of that setting. In all honesty, I never considered revenue in any of it, but I realise that it is a driving force of the houses that publish them. Lets face it, would Mario exist if we did not consider the value of the $650 million it represents? In that same light Call of Duty, GTA, FIFA and Zelda, they all represent a serious level of coins. As such I see the need to continue some franchises, yet  wonder when we test their push for the storyline, how far will some get?

Consider in all this that the Elder Scrolls represent less than a billion, Skyrim alone represents half a billion dollars and has sold over 20,000,000 copies. And let’s face it, we always want to do better than the previous one, which is what drove me to set the story design of Elder Scrolls: Restoration.

Yet even as we see more versions of a game, Apple and Google are driving the need for original IP, it is the larger drive in gaming, not because it is Apple and google, but because the makers see that the original IP can be the beginning of a massive drive towards a system. There is also the fact that when we get a new system we do not want to play the same game over again on that system. 

Yet there are exceptions and they tend to be System driven. The Last of us on PS3 and PS4. Skyrim xbox360 – Xbox one and PS3 – PS4. Pretty much anything involving Mario, and the list goes on, yet Google and Apple do not have that yet and they need to rely on original IP to get the people in. That part was shown all the way back to the Nintendo 64 and the first PlayStation. 

IP that is owed is easier to evolve and more important, when the first game is a hit, it tends to be easier on revenue expectations as well. However, as we look at Apple, we see the need and the logic to have the subscriptions, yet when we see a game like Pilgrims with a mere 14,000 subscribers, the path for Apple is still less than stellar. Now we can push franchises like No Man’s Sky (Hello Games) there, however if Apple is to make a name for itself, it needs original IP, an original RPG, and original racing game and so on. that will drive sales, that will drive longevity in gaming and in a $120 billion industry last year alone, it makes sense to carve a name for yourself.

Yet there is also the stage where the expected and the non-considered walk. When I started to first design an original IP, was it truly original? It was (for the most) and I even added a new game mode that none had considered. Arcade is the way we consider, yet who has considered ‘historically accurate’ as a game mode? 

In this I wanted a more original RPG were the stage is Scandinavia (Norway and Sweden mapped), where you start in the land and get a choice of three places to start, from there you grow your village, grow your interest on the terrain and grow, after which you need to plunder, need to destroy your neighbours and add to your place (and take it from there), an RPG where you can set the rune tone to one god and receive the back handed prayers in success. Yet how can we link ‘Arcade’ and ‘historically accurate’? Well there we get the test of how good a person can play and basically they play two games. Even as a person buys provisions (with real cash) to get an advantage, they buy more, because the purchase in an arcade also comes with a ‘boon coin’ in the ‘historically accurate’. So if a person buys a load of fish in Arcade, they also get a boon coin with a fish in the historically accurate, which sets the chance to find a fish shoal to 100% there. Get two for the price of one. The same for weapons where a kart is bought for one side and the other side gets the smithing coin, giving them a 100% chance of a quality forged weapon. I even set out the stage that an actual player in one village would influence the growth in the virtual version where another player is a neighbour (like choice of stone, location and direction of growth)

I also wanted to make sure that ‘historically accurate’ was there to show that life is not a game and when we slice and dice like in Viking: Battle for Asgard, yet I thought that the game was too small, it was too easily defeated (except the boss at the end) and even as the game had good points, I wanted to see this game in a much larger setting. I wanted compelling to translate to addictive and I wanted a lot more to stand out, I also wanted to make sure that the choice of a god rune had a much larger impact, so over time as people played the game, they would have a new experience if the village rune stone was not set to Odin, but to Loki, Thor, Balder, Frigg, Vidar, or Tyr. What benefit do you want to see? And when chosen in Arcade it will be the set stone for ‘historically accurate’ as well. As such as the history of your village evolves we see that people realise that the impact one would hope for in Arcade would have a different term in the ‘historically accurate’ (HA), we forget in playing that famine was a real think in those days, as was disease and that could go from village to village. We could push it to Greece on the same premise and see where this leads, yet Scandinavia where the weather would have a much larger impact seems to be a more preferred personal feeling in this. So how many games take that into consideration? 

Yes, games like Fallout have a survival mode and there we see “The only means of physically saving the game is to sleep in a bed, on a mattress or in a sleeping bag. The exit save function is still available, but is a temporary save that is deleted automatically upon loading“, it is almost like hardocre mode in Diablo, how many times did you have to die before you figured out that running into batle is as stupid as it could be? As such the HA mode will give the player a much larger consideration to what he’s doing, it is not intend to drive microtransactions, which is why you can optionally only buy stuff in the arcade mode and only the real gamers and winners will get through the game without ever buying anything, that is why I would add an achievement named ‘no purchase required’, how many games heralded the need to not embrace microtransactions? 

It was a stage that my mind evolved over a few days and that is the easy part of the creative element in a game, I wonder how many creative minds are out there in the gaming industry, because I feel personally that people like Sean Murray and David Braben are as rare as it gets in this industry (no insult to other game makers intended), for me it is a stage where I see where places like Apple Arcade (and Google Stadia) are and where they go, so far I am actually not that impressed, not when it comes to companies this big.

 

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