LOL.. His article also mentioned the expansion packs. I was so juiced when I got a video card that supported the advanced texture pack for the original Unreal Tournament. I think it was because I finally bought a video card that supported hardware T&L. I kept the box for UnrealTournament for years.
I mean, there was something to playing a game after spending half a day waiting for it download that made it more exciting. Food that you cook tastes better; games that you waited through five frozen Windows 98 progress bars to play are more fun.
That is so true. I remember getting Half-Life for the first time—my parents gifted it to me, and then it got delayed so many times. I thought I was going to die. Then, I cracked open that CD-ROM and the box 1998. Ahh, the late nights and overclocking my graphics cards and CPU and blowing a fan on my box so it wouldn't freeze or randomly restart.
Thinking back, it's kind of something about how unreliable the whole thing felt, where if you managed to get it to work for an hour straight, it was a big deal. Kind of like finding a video on the internet that actually played.
That's what I'm talking about - the act of getting in the car (or convincing your mom to take you) to go to the store to pick up the box, read it over, anticipate what was coming, buy it, read it more on the way home (after suffering through some grocery shopping or god forbid - trying on clothes), then to put that CD (or in my earlier days, 20 floppy disks) in the drive and load it up. That was all glorious anticipation. Then if the game turned out as good as you hoped, glorious nirvana.
and you always knew it would be good if the box had one of those flaps on the front that you could open and see big (sometimes kinda textured?) pictures
I'm not convinced that open source table formats like Iceberg are really going to catch on. I don't see how any db engine will ever perform as well as on its own format, nor offer the same rich functionality around the data. I'm especially bearish on universal engines in front of other engines, headless metadata layers, and all the other things that engineers dream up that are technically possible but are most likely economically, culturally, and practically impossible. Time will tell.
I feel like "X in a Box" is a response to SaaS app monetization - licenses keep going up, the apps aren't getting massively better to justify it, and non-large enterprises now want something like the old model where software was more of a capital investment rather than an ongoing cost center.
SaaS caught on because it solved many of the old problems, but eventually many of the new problems will grow worse enough the old model will come back for a time, and equilibrium eventually sets in.
Also I miss Games In A Box because it made it more fun to go shopping. Shopping on Steam for new stuff just...isn't that fun, not in the way it was when you were going box to box hunting for new unheard of treasure. Ahhh, I miss that
Yeah, I agree with that. Buy a bunch of messy things in fast and easy ways seems great, then it's a mess, and suddenly people are like, eh, maybe i'd be nice just to buy one big thing all at once and not worry about anything else. And I'm sure in 2032, someone will break that X in a box, and sell all its parts.
So where's the spin-off company that does something actually useful with the Spotify data, which is readily available via API IIRC? (Which keeps someone or10 employed with the constant changing-ness of APIs, for lack of a better made up word) That said, I find the backlash for the outlandishly specific genres created by Spotify interesting, and probably indicative of a "that's too much AI" situation.
Anytime I read about all of these different components, platforms, changes, what have you with the way data is stored, managed, calculated, communicated, I think, well this will keep us readily employed, whilst we fend off the chants "can't we just get that in Excel?" from various people who just want a fancy spreadsheet clowning around as an actual application. I'm here for it, for the most part; I basically "make dashboards, forever" for a living, but still remain skeptical to any revolutionising aspect being sold, and whether it gets relegated to the pile of "hey, remember that thing?" technologies.
I'm honestly surprised that Spotify doesn't have an OkCupid style blog about what people listen to. They have this data that's a rare combination of very interesting and not all that sensitive (it's not Uber, AmEx, or whatever), and they don't seem to do much with it.
On the data platform stuff, there is a little bit of me that wonders how much these things are science projects for the people who implement them. Which is fine; it's fun to build cool new things and all that. And I don't think that they're useless, or even worse than the boring "database in a box" setup. But it does seem like people *want* them to be better, so that they can play with them.
And I have no idea how copyrights and IP works on Substack, but I hereby grant Justin Timberlake full rights to everything in this blog, to make whatever songs he wants.
I didn't even get a Spotify Wrapped but I got "tracks most played this month". Either that is for people who actually pay or they figured out that I did not play any one song enough. (The year of Dua Lipa's "Levitating" that was my Spotify Wrapped for all intents and purposes)
This year I was so out of it that Jon Caramanica mentioned Tommy Richman's "Million Dollar Baby" in his meditation on the year in pop and I have never heard it.
You can only get to it on the mobile app, but I don't know, maybe you have to listen to a certain about of stuff to get it? Though if you somehow avoided "Million Dollar Baby," that's really something, given how much they seemed to push. Next thing you're going to tell me is that you've never heard of Chappell Roan.
Am I broken? I still miss my cd-rom cereal box gaming days. Also, liking the thought of buy-a-box-database
LOL.. His article also mentioned the expansion packs. I was so juiced when I got a video card that supported the advanced texture pack for the original Unreal Tournament. I think it was because I finally bought a video card that supported hardware T&L. I kept the box for UnrealTournament for years.
Speaking of new hardware, I still have no earthly idea what this thing does, but I was very excited when I got one: https://retrovgames.com/originanl64expansionpak
Buying boxed games was definitely a better buying experience.
I mean, there was something to playing a game after spending half a day waiting for it download that made it more exciting. Food that you cook tastes better; games that you waited through five frozen Windows 98 progress bars to play are more fun.
That is so true. I remember getting Half-Life for the first time—my parents gifted it to me, and then it got delayed so many times. I thought I was going to die. Then, I cracked open that CD-ROM and the box 1998. Ahh, the late nights and overclocking my graphics cards and CPU and blowing a fan on my box so it wouldn't freeze or randomly restart.
Thinking back, it's kind of something about how unreliable the whole thing felt, where if you managed to get it to work for an hour straight, it was a big deal. Kind of like finding a video on the internet that actually played.
That's what I'm talking about - the act of getting in the car (or convincing your mom to take you) to go to the store to pick up the box, read it over, anticipate what was coming, buy it, read it more on the way home (after suffering through some grocery shopping or god forbid - trying on clothes), then to put that CD (or in my earlier days, 20 floppy disks) in the drive and load it up. That was all glorious anticipation. Then if the game turned out as good as you hoped, glorious nirvana.
and you always knew it would be good if the box had one of those flaps on the front that you could open and see big (sometimes kinda textured?) pictures
Yes!
UT ah the good old days. Quake 3 vs Unreal Tournament LAN parties.
I'm not convinced that open source table formats like Iceberg are really going to catch on. I don't see how any db engine will ever perform as well as on its own format, nor offer the same rich functionality around the data. I'm especially bearish on universal engines in front of other engines, headless metadata layers, and all the other things that engineers dream up that are technically possible but are most likely economically, culturally, and practically impossible. Time will tell.
I think I mostly agree with that. It seems that the pattern here isn't quite bundling and unbundling, but more something like:
1. Make fancy new proprietary thing.
2. Generalize parts of the new thing, so that it's somewhat composable in this mix and match way.
3. So, you can, in theory, built your own version of the proprietary thing.
4. But by the time you have the pieces to do that, the people who made the fancy proprietary thing have made new fancy proprietary stuff.
5. So the thing you can build on your own keeps getting better, but it's never as good as the proprietary option.
Benn coming in hot with my pivot to Databox... Embargo is until the new year dude!
See you on the other side
i'm just seeding the market for you. Though I guess I'm supposed to do that on Linkedin.
I feel like "X in a Box" is a response to SaaS app monetization - licenses keep going up, the apps aren't getting massively better to justify it, and non-large enterprises now want something like the old model where software was more of a capital investment rather than an ongoing cost center.
SaaS caught on because it solved many of the old problems, but eventually many of the new problems will grow worse enough the old model will come back for a time, and equilibrium eventually sets in.
Also I miss Games In A Box because it made it more fun to go shopping. Shopping on Steam for new stuff just...isn't that fun, not in the way it was when you were going box to box hunting for new unheard of treasure. Ahhh, I miss that
Yeah, I agree with that. Buy a bunch of messy things in fast and easy ways seems great, then it's a mess, and suddenly people are like, eh, maybe i'd be nice just to buy one big thing all at once and not worry about anything else. And I'm sure in 2032, someone will break that X in a box, and sell all its parts.
The old becomes new becomes old become new, again and again~!
So where's the spin-off company that does something actually useful with the Spotify data, which is readily available via API IIRC? (Which keeps someone or10 employed with the constant changing-ness of APIs, for lack of a better made up word) That said, I find the backlash for the outlandishly specific genres created by Spotify interesting, and probably indicative of a "that's too much AI" situation.
Anytime I read about all of these different components, platforms, changes, what have you with the way data is stored, managed, calculated, communicated, I think, well this will keep us readily employed, whilst we fend off the chants "can't we just get that in Excel?" from various people who just want a fancy spreadsheet clowning around as an actual application. I'm here for it, for the most part; I basically "make dashboards, forever" for a living, but still remain skeptical to any revolutionising aspect being sold, and whether it gets relegated to the pile of "hey, remember that thing?" technologies.
Also, Postgres in a box should be a song.
I'm honestly surprised that Spotify doesn't have an OkCupid style blog about what people listen to. They have this data that's a rare combination of very interesting and not all that sensitive (it's not Uber, AmEx, or whatever), and they don't seem to do much with it.
On the data platform stuff, there is a little bit of me that wonders how much these things are science projects for the people who implement them. Which is fine; it's fun to build cool new things and all that. And I don't think that they're useless, or even worse than the boring "database in a box" setup. But it does seem like people *want* them to be better, so that they can play with them.
And I have no idea how copyrights and IP works on Substack, but I hereby grant Justin Timberlake full rights to everything in this blog, to make whatever songs he wants.
I didn't even get a Spotify Wrapped but I got "tracks most played this month". Either that is for people who actually pay or they figured out that I did not play any one song enough. (The year of Dua Lipa's "Levitating" that was my Spotify Wrapped for all intents and purposes)
This year I was so out of it that Jon Caramanica mentioned Tommy Richman's "Million Dollar Baby" in his meditation on the year in pop and I have never heard it.
You can only get to it on the mobile app, but I don't know, maybe you have to listen to a certain about of stuff to get it? Though if you somehow avoided "Million Dollar Baby," that's really something, given how much they seemed to push. Next thing you're going to tell me is that you've never heard of Chappell Roan.
Have absolutely heard of Chappell Roan and did listen to that entire album
Spotify would have it no other way
As a former employee of CompUSA and also a random software retailer called, creatively, “Software @ Cost + 10%” I approve of this message
Gonna start a VC fund called Two+20.
Two things
1. The knitting together of the stack is the job data platform engineers are spending all their time on which is a problem orchestra solves
2. Postgres in a box is a fun idea, indeed, and is the business of the the ex Astronomer alum Ry Walker of Tembo (so Taylor is too late :) x )
Astronomer alum (tautology)
But, like, doesn't that just mean it's another thing I've got to buy?
no of course not
ah right of course, silly me
"An ability to decision which engine is best suited to execute a given workload."
I can't get past this horrible verbing of a noun from Tristan Handy.