Yeah. I wanted to play Midtown Madness 3, after loving and modding the first two. But it was Xbox exclusive. I refused to save up for one, or ask for one as a gift. I was eventually gifted one, with MM3, and it is the only game I have for the Xbox.
When Halo 2 for Vista dropped, and they tried to force players to Live Gold bullshit for voice chat, but we were all using Xfire. Eat shit, I’m not paying $10 a month to do something I can for free that my friends all have already. And I wouldn’t play another Halo title until the MCC dropped on steam - fuck locked down hardware and arbitrary limitations on the software and os. And they want money for that shit? Lmfao.
My deep… ‘loathing’? For the dumbass decisions ms made regarding gaming for windows from 00 to 16, arguably longer. With ms driven by greed, and most folded for the games and series they loved… but I’m an absolute pain in the ass, never forget, never forgive kinda guy. I have a couple series of ms titles I like and buy, but they can fuck off with trying to get another red cent from me. Their slow sinking into stagnation and failure is… closure, for all the debates and arguments about how fucking stupid it is to pay for the ability to play with others, after already buying their box, and after already paying for internet. And then they can kill the servers at any time, and nobody seems to bat at eye. Yet I have games that are 20+ years old that I can run a server for and boom, me and friends can play. No money, no limitations, no bullshit.
They fucked themselves. I’m just watching the ship sink. 🍿
So there’s a lot of assumptions in this thread, but this specifically is just wrong. The cars do not need to have a constant connection with camera feeds and logic flowing to and from hq. They do nearly all processing on the vehicle, and comms to hq is used for location, status, etc but absolutely does not require the logic sent remotely to actually drive the vehicle.
I can’t list sources because of an NDA (I am the source, nobody else is going to back me up), but I’ve seen the systems, I’ve been inside the AZ waymo hq, seem how hq interacts with the vehicles, the location and size of the compute system that does all the logic, I’ve seen how it works way beyond what the media has seen. I’ve rode in one of their test mules, with techs answering a slew of questions that I posed, and asked about the hardware and debug/test software that the public simply can’t see.
I’m not sure why this happened - most people spouting this or that are just wrong. As of a decade ago, the cars were capable of handling failed stoplight and situations like that. They are also capable of being remotely controlled - someone above claimed otherwise, but they absolutely can be. Only in situations where the car is stuck or acting erratically (you call the hq via a button in the car, and they can pull up the vehicle and see everything about it, and if necessary, take control).
Either someone broke something regarding this situation (handling failed lights, etc) that was previously working, and this is the first time the issue has shown itself… or the power outage hit their ca hq, and when the cars couldn’t stay connected for X amount of time, they went to failsafe mode. I’m leaning heavily towards the latter - there is very little data flowing between vehicles and hq (unless remotely diagnosing or controlling), but there is a bit (location, speed, status…), and maybe when hq went offline for a few minutes, it’s a safety thing (think about someone trying to steal a Waymo car, for example, by trying to sever the connection, physically blocking it in, etc). That’s just speculation though, but it’s all I can think of.