> Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large, such that now we really have to consider blocking every acquisition, even though this one in particular I think wouldn't be all that bad and may actually be a positive for consumers.
As an avid world of warcraft player, the community as a whole has been hoping the merger goes through for exactly this reason. Activision has seemingly forced through a lot of bad changes over the years to try wring out as much money as they can.
I'm a part of the StarCraft 2 community and we were similarly hopeful about this deal as StarCraft has been neglected by the company for years. The community was already in full doom mode over Korean tournament funding getting pulled, this is not going to improve the atmosphere.
The reason we don't want companies to gain market power (the feared result of mega-conglomeration) is because it allows companies to charge more for the same or a worse product.
If this person believes that Blizzard being acquired by microsoft will result in a better product, then they expect the net benefits to outweigh the negatives of Microsoft's increased market power over the video games market.
Acquisitions that produce a consumer-surplus should be most welcome!
I'm curious on how a MS merger would be good? At the start, they would almost certainly try to merge user accounts into MSN accounts. Likely force a migration down the line, after merging doesn't work.
The way I think others are thinking about it is that to Activision, making innovative new franchises or long term investments in general is a big risk since they are 100% a games company. Whereas if Microsoft owns them may face less pressure to cut costs/long term investments since it would make up a much smaller part of Microsoft's financials.
Whether that is how things usually turn out in practice with these sorts of acquisitions is a question I don't have a good answer to.
Certainly many would be ok with it. The ones it will hurt will be the heavy users that have multiple accounts, is my guess. Also is annoying to families. Game accounts are just game accounts, even if that has grown. Giving the kids an MSN account did not sit well with me.
I and many other people had their accounts completely borked by the required migration. My lifetime license, gone, either through malice or incompetence. For trillion dollar companies, I always have to assume malice.
"The authors of this article, published in 2015, have written a response to their work in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. We urge our readers to consider the response when reading the article. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.responses#covid-..."
New to me, but did you read their response? It says "The study found that cloth mask wearers had higher rates of infection than even the standard practice control group of health workers" but they say that health care workers should follow guidance.
Would not standard practice be to wear proper masks?
Yes, here we go: "some subjects in the control arm wore surgical masks." And indeed, someone comments "The control arm had less than 1% of no mask use".
I could be wrong, but it seems like it wouldn't be difficult to outperform these implementations with a similarly hacky C implementation. I expect that blog post in the coming days.
Hey, author here. You are absolutely right - Go would have a hard time outperforming finely tuned C. Rather, the article was more focused on exploring concurrency mechanisms in Go. The (admittedly clickbait) title was more of a reference to the articles before it than anything else.
For a carefree 13 years old me, it was bordering on personal tragedy loosing 1 to 3 hours a day to damn Quake 3.
I have no words for just how bad it is to be in that state for a person in their thirties, with his/her social obligations and family.
Zynga obsessed adults spending 3-4 hours a day on that are way worse than kids doing the same.
And you add gambling problem on top of that. On mobile you don't even have to input your credit card yourself - Google built a whole freaking gambling/play API specifically for that. One click and it bills your cellphone account, if you live in a right country.
I'm curious how they took into consideration the fact that recent immigrants can often fall into the lower social classes while having many connections to family and friends in their home country. Edit: It seems like they didn't even look at the social class of the people they interviewed. They just focused on the GDP of their country which doesn't make any sense imo.
As an avid world of warcraft player, the community as a whole has been hoping the merger goes through for exactly this reason. Activision has seemingly forced through a lot of bad changes over the years to try wring out as much money as they can.