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A comment on Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself. Parent comment

Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by toomuchtodo on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @12:17PM (#18451551)
Internet transfer capacity is not wasted unless it goes unused (or data transferred caused other data that was needed urgently to be queued). For example, you could say any links not currently near full utilization are going to waste.
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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by egypturnash on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @12:28PM (#18451680)
If a hard drive doesn’t need to spin up because the patch you’re serving a zillion copies of fits in cache, you’re saving the power to run it and the heat it would have generated.

Similarly with all the other resources that would be used on its journey between the data center and the end user. You’re wasting time if you could send an efficiently-generated 2 gig patch instead of a 60 gig file, especially for users in remote places. You’re taking up more space and cycles on your CDN. CPUs switch from idle power consumption to active. Every stage you can think of takes some amount of power and other resources, and if you’re delivering an unnecessarily huge file, you’re wasting everything it took to run all the steps along the way.

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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by toomuchtodo on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @12:40PM (#18451817)
Human time is most valuable compared to the various waste you mention (cycles on CDNs, power, heat, etc).
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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by CydeWeys on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @01:24PM (#18452313)
And a lot of human time is being wasted waiting for update operations that take much longer than necessary.
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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by TeMPOraL on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @04:07PM (#18453947)
Yes, the oft repeated mantra in this industry. It's a cute thing to say when it's about saving your (developer) time by externalizing energy use on other people.
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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by toomuchtodo on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @04:11PM (#18453992)
The world is awash in energy. Time is fleeting. Sort of a cheap shot to call it "cute" when it's factually accurate. I'm sure your time is worth more than overly optimizing every technical process to save a few KwH of power.
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Re:Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself by TeMPOraL on Wednesday November 14, 2018 @04:21PM (#18454083)
A few kWh of power times a million users. I'm not complaining about individuals buying time by paying for energy. I'm talking about saving little time for yourself by burning a disproportionate amount of power, distributed among all your users.
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