Not really.
The N64 had extremely popular first party games. That's what saved Nintendo's console from going extinct. Another factor in Nintendo's survival was the global popularity of their handheld consoles. Even if you were not a N64 owner, chances are, if you owned a portable console, you had a gameboy.
The Dreamcast didn't have that privilege. I'm not saying Sega's first party games were bad, but they were nowhere near the kind of popularity (I don't necessarily link popularity to quality) that could sustain a console maker. As for Sega's attempt to enter the handheld market, it began and ended with the same console, the Gamegear. It's still a mystery to me why Sega dropped that market, it didn't sell as well as the gameboy but its sales were still very high and well within the scope of what would qualify as a success, it was a much better console than the various Gameboys until Nintendo released the GBA too.
Piracy was just as rampant on playstation 1 and just like the dreamcast, it didn't require the use of a modchip. Piracy did hurt the sales a bit (on the PS1 too), but it's definitely not why the console died.
The dreamcast issue is that no one wanted it. I was the only kid with a dreamcast in my entire school. The playstation won the previous console wars and the marketing surrounding the playstation 2 and its "emotion engine" (which in retrospect was full of bullshit and edited CGI) was so insane that it convinced people to wait for the PS2 and made them disinterested in anything that would've been released before it. You could say, Sega was already dead by the time they released the saturn as there were already very few people looking forward anything they'd make. People felt screwed by all the mediocre genesis peripherals (barely any game worth owning on megacd and 32x), the saturn did terrible, it's a miracle there was enough life left in Sega to even build the dreamcast.
Nintendo could've also died during that time period. It's only through the sheer strength of their first party titles that they could retain enough of a niche to survive. Something Sega didn't have. Sonic has never been their own Mario. They never had their Zelda or Mario and they didn't have much third party support beyond arcade developers. That really doomed the DC. EA refusing to make games for it didn't help. They tried to strongarm Sega into letting them be the only sports game developer for the platform, Sega refused and EA said they wouldn't develop for the platform then if they weren't given a monopoly on the genre.
With no strong first party games the kind that makes a ton of people buy a console solely for their sake, and with dropping third party support, the DC's sole niche was fans of arcade games, just like the Saturn. That's an extremely small niche. I still play arcade games to this day and thus keep up with the news in the genre and it's getting difficult for the specialized companies like CAVE to survive. They're now focusing on mobile games.. companies like Degica help retain the genre on lifesupport by porting the old ones to Steam but there's not much in terms of newly made games nowadays.
Sigh. Isolated doesn't mean they never, ever receive foreign influences. Take a look at their old, pre-iPhone cell phone industry. Japan didn't "invent" cell phone technology, so clearly they had at some point been influenced by foreign powers. But their own take on it has been developed in full isolation to the point where the Japanese themselves talk of their old smart flip phones as "galakei" in reference to the galapagos syndrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome#Mobile...
Funny you mention Wizardry because it's yet another example of galapagos syndrome in action. They took the basic ideas from the first Wizardry (even the spell naming schemes are still used to this day in games series like the Shin Megami Tensei) and then.. literally stopped looking at anything new in the series. It's like Wizardry 8 never happened in Japan. Their Wizardry clones to this day still play like Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, the first game of the series, just with "improved" (but anime-style) graphics. The innovations like the more open world, various interactions with world elements, improved positioning and movement to the turn based combat and so on. There's still no concept of movement and position (beyond being "frontline" and "backline" binaries) in games like Etrian Odyssey. And then games like Fallout came out and showed it was possible to integrate a large amount of variable interactions with the world and consequences to your choices and Japan was still making those Wizardry 1 clones as if the genre could never, ever improve on that basic game design.
It's only very recently in Japan, with the success of games like Skyrim outselling their own jrpg in their home country, that japanese developers started to take note that maybe, the genre could do better than replicate the same game from the 80s ad infinitum. Which is how they ended up with games like FF15 which finally dropped the primitive, limited combat system from early wizardries that weren't even position aware. I prefer turn based RPGs, but I would take the real time FF15 over a system that doesn't even simulate the space in which you fight ignoring all potential positioning and movement tactics. Something that even board based, pen&paper RPGs can simulate.
Their own take on the ability to feature combat in an actual environment usually precludes any RPG features other than pure combat, like Fire Emblem. They have good turn based combat but that's all there is to the game. No dungeons, no exploration, no world, not much choices, no nothing, just a series of combat missions after combat missions. It's the kind of hyperspecialization and narrowmindedness that led to the galakei and the inability to build anything like the modern smartphone.
Nintendo is another manifestation of the galapagos that has just recently started to panic and understand that they won't be able to go on forever like that. The next Zelda will finally let go of the template created by Ocarina of Time and will play more open. That's a start, considering how much they love to remake the same thing again and again.
http://digg.com/video/zelda-is-going-open-world-and-the-game...
No matter how hard you're wishing it to be true, does not make it so. PyPy will "have" to catch up? in the name of what? PyPy is but one of the many projects that are still thriving in the 2.x ecosystem, there's even a competitor to PyPy that was launched 2 years ago that is also a 2.x exclusive: Pyston.
https://blog.pyston.org
Yes, a very new implementation project that happens to focus on 2.7.
Python 2 gets all the better runtimes. Long after the end of life of the official CPython 2.7, we will still be running 2.x programs, and doing it on much better runtimes than CPython.
We've been hearing the same tirades of Python 3's future over and over again by its partisans ever since its release in 2008. 8 years have passed since then. 8 years will pass and Python 3 will still have nothing but a minority of vocal open source users. Python will be treated as a legacy language the way COBOL and BASIC are treated before py3 starts picking up any steam. That's kinda what some companies are already doing, like Dropbox. Switching to Go here and there, while keeping the maintenance of their very large 2.7 python codebase with absolutely no intention whatsoever of moving that behemoth to 3.x. Why bother? they could write new software features, fix bugs and so on instead of waste time on porting. Why waste so much time on porting when it brings so little benefits? Programming is ultimately about problem solving. Porting to python 3 doesn't make my software better. It's certainly not running any more efficient either, that's PyPy and Pyston territory (Using PyPy can allow you, under some circumstances, to seriously cut down the amount of hardware you need). It doesn't magically add new features, or fix the bugs.
Python 3 will go down in history as the best example of what you should never do while growing a language. People like to complain about C++'s complexity, but unlike Python 3, C++ isn't threatened by its own past selves, and that's despite adding features that are arguably far more compelling to look into than the various differences between Py2 and 3.
It's also very hard to regain lost trust. The trust that was lost after what was done to Python with Python 3 can never be fully regained. I can write software in C++, Java, C#, Javascript, Lisp, Perl 5 (which is still being worked on) and so on and have an expectation not to have to go through something like Py3. To a lesser extent, even Ruby, although it breaks compatibility from time to time, it never went through anything as major in a one time fashion as Py3 did, which is why the ruby ecosystem hasn't self destructed.
With moore's law being utterly dead, the fact that all the interesting improvements to language implementation are happening only to 2.x rather than 3.x really contradicts your idea that the future lies in 3.x.
The vast majority of python codebases are still in python 2, even though many of the popular framework have been ported to 3, and there's no reason for most of them to bother with the amount of work it can be to port to py3 when they're happy with py2. Whether it be devs like Dropbox or open source software like NVDA, they will stay in the world of python 2 for the years to come. The amount of customers they could get by supporting python 3 is definitely not worth the effort unless they get paid explicitly for it.
In terms of libraries, python 3 is "mostly" ready (though there are still issues with highly popular ones like wxwidgets. Or amazing tools like Pyjamas, which replicated GWT with Python instead of Java. Or Google AppEngine, which still shows no sign of moving to 3.) but large codebases outside of highly worked on web frameworks haven't moved on and there's not enough gain to justify the effort it takes to port them. The Python 3 debacle caused a lot of devs to also look at other languages for new projects. Old python 2 codebases will stay python 2, but new projects might not necessarily be python at all. The anger with Python 3 is real.
"Looking at these graphs, we can see that in the past year Python 3.x has grown from roughly 2% of the total downloads from PyPI to roughly 5-6%"
I expect things like AppEngine to deprecate Python rather than port to 3, when/if python 2 reaches EOL and not enough people gather to maintain or even evolve that old branch.
Python 3 users are a vocal bunch, but the war they're fighting is a lost one.
Not to mention wasting time that could have actually saved a life. MRI machines are highly expensive and there are always long waiting lists before you can get access to one because those things just don't grow on trees and are a limited resource (number of machines versus number of patients.)
Most doctors know better than to waste a MRI on someone that will not, in any way, benefit from it. Not when there are people with heart abnormalities or potential tumors to diagnose on the waiting list.
Unsurprisingly, the only people who agreed at first to do a MRI for his brother used an open MRI, which are far less precise than the closed ones, and usually reserved for the claustrophobic and morbidly obese. So he didn't take precious MRI time from people who actually needed it.
Saw that ad for what is borderline malware on a fresh install of windows 10 while trying out Microsoft Edge to see what it's worth as a browser. It's a google ad (you can always spot them through the X button), on a popular website.
As long as google doesn't do any real policing on what is permissible in their adnetworks, it will always be a user's right to protect himself. Television and newspapers have higher standards for ads, at least in my country.
This was also a reminder that Edge will not be a real browser until Microsoft adds the possibility of using an adblocker. No extensions, no deal.
The Dreamcast didn't have that privilege. I'm not saying Sega's first party games were bad, but they were nowhere near the kind of popularity (I don't necessarily link popularity to quality) that could sustain a console maker. As for Sega's attempt to enter the handheld market, it began and ended with the same console, the Gamegear. It's still a mystery to me why Sega dropped that market, it didn't sell as well as the gameboy but its sales were still very high and well within the scope of what would qualify as a success, it was a much better console than the various Gameboys until Nintendo released the GBA too.