I’m truly, totally, completely shocked … that Windows is still being used on the server side.

There are gamers and there are gamers.

Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.

I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.

Lying and misportraying themselves in social media is nothing for a country were most people are fine with murdering tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity.

This is nothing given the depths of their depravity.

It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.

Yeah, the word “buy” in this is just one element of a broader pattern, and whilst per-se it isn’t sufficient to distinguish between acquiring a thing or getting access to a thing, in these cases of mounts, armor and so on being sold in games, the entire framing wording and even store structure around it tends to lead people towards concluding that the meaning of it is for “acquiring a thing” not for “getting access to a thing”, especially because in the absence of domain specific clarification (an absence I believe is entirely purposeful) people who aren’t intellectual property lawyers and fully informed of the subject matter will tend to for virtual goods use the same logic to deduce the full meaning as they would for equivalent goods in other domains, specifically physical goods.

This is why also in the physical world legislation forces some kinds of business transactions with consumers to explicitly use the words “rental” or “lease” in order to make clear the nature of the transaction but might not have any such requirements for business to business transactions because businesses are assumed to have the capability to assess the full contract.

Ultimatelly it boils down to whether people have spent the money to have something or to use/enjoy something.

Which is probably why most people who disagree with selling of items, mounts, armor and so on, don’t find it problematic when what is being sold is access to game areas: the former are things (even if virtual) and people tend to treat them as something which they have, whilst the latter is just access to new experiences, like buying a ticket in a carnival to go on a Ferris Wheel, and is thus not something people tend to feel like they own it.

So yeah, the problem is the preying on people’s instincts around ownership versus mere rental - in their stores these things are invariably framed as being a purchase (buy! buy! buy!), not something you are purchasing temporary access to - on things whose mere existence depends on the whims of a company and which can be taken away at any time.

Mind you, in the Age Of Enshittification this kind of scam has extended to even hardware which is powered by software that requires access to 3rd party servers.

Well, I meant it in the sense of End-Customers.

As you rightly point out Denuvo’s own Customers are other companies.

The problem are Customers, who don’t just accept things that bring zero benefits for them whilst making their life worse.

But worry not, Denuvo does a great job at getting rid of those.

If only they were just locks.

I think it’s a better metaphor that they removed all windows, made the walls 2m thick cement and replaced the door with a 10 inch thick heavy steel door.

Absolutelly, it makes it very well protected from unauthorized outsiders just coming in … at the cost of living in a bunker with no natural sunlight, stale air, mold and having to push a 2 ton door to get in or out.

Now, some people might be ok with living in such a bunker for their own personal protection, but very few are ok with living in a bunker to protect the software in the computer they have in their bunker from being copied.

People are pissed because Denuvo makes their life harder whilst having literally zero upsides for them personally.

Well, cats as a bit more on the slicey and dicey than on the grindey side of breaking up things.

(One shudders to think on what cats would do if they could actually use knifes)

I was too tired to go beyond “1nm = 10^-9 hence 1 billion” and actually do the maths ;)

Before transistors there were vacuum tubes which did the same thing but using very different principles (and were also way bigger, even than traditional transistors and billions of times more than the transistors in the most modern ICs)

Before electric milling or even steam milling, flour used to be milled using watermills and windmills which, IMHO, are way cooler.

I’ve done this almost from the very beginning (back in the 90s) and always had very small mobile communications costs because I could easilly change providers and plans and even do things like use a local SIM card whilst abroad to avoid roaming costs.

I wasn’t criticizing the value of Art, just pointing out the horrible economics of it from the point of view of the vast majority of its practicioners and having a go at explaining it.

And yeah, a lot of people in present day ultra-materialist Consumer Society don’t see the value of Art even all the while they consume its products (such as Music and Films).

Well, attempting to become an actor the old fashioned way (no degree) could be far less expensive if it wasn’t for the massive house price bubble in the city were most of the work (and netwoking opportunities) are - London.

Also since my contact with the Acting World was via a few years of Acting Lessons (in my case purelly because I enjoyed it rather than having any ideas of going into it) which seems to be quite a common side-gig for such people, I did meet a significant number of actors and actresses who weren’t from rich families and just kept limping along for years after having taken an Acting Degree, doing maybe one play a year (and hoping it would run for longer than one month) whilst doing other work in between (such as working at a pub or giving Acting lessons to amateurs like me) to make ends meet.

This was a decade ago and expenses for living in London, namelly housing, have gone up a lot since.

There’s a bio from Michael Caine and reading it knowing present day Britain makes it pretty obvious that the conditions that allowed so many working class lads to get were he got back in the 70s (and which, by the way, also applied to that generation in the music world) aren’t there anymore - nowadays if mommy and daddy aren’t at least upper middle class or wealthier, it’s pretty much impossible to make it in the career even with a scholarship to a good Drama School because of how stupidly expensive London is. Personally I think this reflects negativelly in the quality of British Actors and even up to a point in how much and how well certain kinds of life experience get played (i.e. based on stereotypes and shallow rather than realistic).

And all this is without going the whole “connections are crucial” part of it which means the scions of the right people get all kinds of chances giften to them whilst the others are fighting for crumbs.

In the UK I got quite close to the Theatre World for a while and for Actors in the UK at least the problem seems to be that way more people go into Acting over there than the need for Actors with the result that most earn less than minimum wage in average from Action (which is possible under UK work laws because actors are freelancers and most spend long periods without any income from it between jobs).

Judging by other areas such as Tech Startups and Game Making and from what I know indirectly from the Fashion World, which all seem to be quite exploitative and pay below average for most people working in it, I think all professions that have an image of Glamour (in a broad sense) end up with most of people working there making comparativelly peanuts even if there are a handful of superstars and high level managerial types making tons of money.

Also, by the way, Architects make good money. Graphics Designers, on the other hand, not so much.

More like “I sure hope I didn’t pack a bottle of water by accident” (or any other liquit in a container of more than 100ml).

Indeed.

60 years ago we were supposed to having to work very little by now thanks to automation, then automation came and instead of the productivity gains of it ending up spread across society, what happenned instead was that the extra productivity went just pushed up dividend and CxO pay higher and due to the reduced need for workers due to automation the purchasing power of salaries actually went down (for example, in the US the percentage of corporate revenues that went to pay salaries fell from 23% in the 70s down to 7% by 2014).

Expecting that, under the exact system that’s been moving us more and more towards Dystopia with each wave of automation, AI would somehow end up making things better for most people rather than better just for the Owner Class and worse for part or most of the rest, is pretty ill-informed and naive.

Valve is a much, much bigger company than GoG, plus Valve’s Linux strategy is really a “have our own console on the cheap” strategy.

But yeah, GoG should be doing more for gaming on Linux, maybe not as much as Valve but proportionally so. At the moment they’re doing almost nothing at all: they have Linux offline installers available for games which do support Linux directly, but that’s it.

So whilst I find it unrealistic to expect that GoG should be contributing to gaming on Linux as much as Valve, I do agree they should be doing more.

PS: Mind you, I’m not trying to make the case that GoG is perfect and Steam is shit, I’m trying to make the case that open and flexible to use is better than closed and tightly integrated with a specific store, which is why I generally prefer GoG with their offline installers, as well as Lutris + Wine (quite independently of GoG) and would be happy enough even if Lutris had no GoG integration since long before moving my gaming rig to Linux I had the habit of downloading and using the offline installers and did not at all use GoG Galaxy.

If there’s one thing that 30 years of being a Software Engineer have taught me is that you want your system to be as decoupled as possible from any business, because even if they are nice at the moment that’s no guarantee that at a later date they won’t leverage people having their systems integrated with theirs to take advantage of their customers (the phenomenon of enshittification being a good example of that).

BDY sells their vehicles in Europe.

I do believe the safety regulations in the EU are actually stricter than in the US.