It’s uncommon, absolutely. But I bought Super Mario Odyssey around the third time I got an alert that it was on sale, for $50 or so. This took a couple years, so it’s reasonably rare, but if the future looks like the past, it will happen
The Switch was the generation where I really started to have adult money, and while a lot of the games I got were lower-priced indie titles, I did get pretty much all of the big 1st party titles.
There’s a reasonable chance I get a Switch 2, but I’m not gonna be buying a lot of games over $70, and the ones I do will probably be when they go on sale for like, 10-15% off. I suspect I’ll be buying fewer games this generation, and I’m okay with that.
It’s not that there wasn’t any political pressure. It’s that the slightest bit of pressure caused them to pull the plug swiftly.
I think the companies who were led by people personally antagonistic to DEI already weren’t doing it. They started it when the political winds were in favor of DEI, found that it did something beneficial for them that was worth the investment (ultimately, increasing profits, probably through PR) and reaped what they could. But the slightest headwinds caused them to drop it, for lack of confidence it would be worth the continued investment. For others, it was beneficial enough this pressure didn’t change their decisions.
None of this is likely coming from company leaders caring about DEI for some sort of principled reason, just companies who care about only one thing, reassessing the value of DEI in terms of that one thing, $ return on spend. This is a group who needs subtler treatment than the anti-DEI crowd, this is fair weather friends who don’t care. What little we can do is reward those who don’t give in to the slightest push.
The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.
Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.
I’ve been using Cinnamon for most of the last decade, but switched to Gnome3 recently, heavily customized to work like Cinnamon. Basically because Wayland is finally stable enough to use.
If Cinnamon gets Wayland support working well, that’s my choice. Otherwise I’ve got some Gnome3 configs that make it work pretty well, and I’d happily run it into the ground too.
It sounds like they sent emails to the district and made some noise in online spaces that made their intentions clear. If it was just wearing wristbands as silent protest, we’d never have known, but they told the district via email, the general public online that they were going to do someone bigoted, and then they did a minor version of it.
Imagining the perspective of an administrator, they really should do something about that to protect their students. And it seems like they went with a temporary ban, which seems proportionate.