Yeah they had their chance. Audio streaming services have (mostly) managed to figure out licensing agreements so all music is on all platforms.

Video streaming services all created their own walled gardens with various levels of advertising. Paramount even offered an advertising free tier but would happily advertise their own shows before other shows (noticed specifically on Star Trek shows but I imagine other providers do it too).

In the end… Fuck them. I give up on trying to figure out streaming video with all its complications. Back to the seven seas to procure my own.

Yeah also early 40s. Hoped to retire in 3 - 4 years or so based on my finances but it’s getting harder and harder to stick it out.

We’re just going to NIMBY the problem onto someone else?

As is tradition.

Yeah it’s particularly weird in this case because Ubisoft and Valve both have publisher, developer, and distributor departments within each company. So the agreements they signed and put into place are probably somewhat complex.

Looking at the Steam page though it says

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Publisher: Ubisoft

So in this case it’s whatever Ubisoft as a publisher signed / agreed to with Valve when they accepted their distribution terms. These are probably not the same boiler plate terms an indie dev would sign if self publishing.

Yeah but it’s fairly simple.

You can generate Steam keys using the Steam developer tools. This allows a game key to be purchased on any storefront that supports selling them, which can then be activated on Steam.

The main requirement? You can’t price those steam keys on a 3rd party store cheaper than on Steam itself.

For that, it means if the 3rd party store takes a smaller cut than Steam itself would take, the developer makes a bit more profit through almost no additional effort. Steam is the system users use to download and update the game, and cloud save syncing, and community guides, forums, workshop, etc.

The developer is, afaik, more than welcome to also sell a UPlay key if they partner with Ubisoft at any price point they want (regardless of the Steam price) because Ubisoft is the taking on the burden of distribution, etc.

The only price requirement Valve imposes is on selling Steam keys on 3rd party storefronts. Not UPlay keys. Not Xbox keys. Not Epic Store keys.

Edit: and I read the article, while albeit short (can’t access the linked Bloomberg article sadly), they claim exactly that, that the version on UPlay was significantly cheaper than the version on Steam for essentially the same game. Valve was arguing that Rainbow Six Siege needs to change their pricing on UPlay or they would be delisted.

Counterpoint: just look at the Air Canada crash that recently happened where a controller let a fire truck cross in the path of a landing aircraft.

Planes may have all this technology but that only involves what’s happening in the air, not on the ground.

Now maybe all ground crew could have vehicles equipped with transponders and tracked as well, but there are also incidents of people randomly ending up on the runways / taxiways, or animals, or non airport vehicles.

Yep. Back in the day all the MUD servers ran on Linux. I wanted to set up my own. I knew my cousin used it so I asked him about it.

He never answered my questions directly. But he did show me how to look up the answer to my question using man pages and/or search for info online.

That first install was so painful… My friend and I didn’t know how to set up the network and it turns out the tulip driver wasn’t installed by default. So we’d boot to Linux, try something to get the network working, write down the error message on a sheet of paper. Boot to windows to research the fix to the error message. Rinse and repeat until we finally got it working.

There’s a concerted effort across many dataholders (at least /r/dataholders for sure) to make a full site wide backup across at least 3 copies across volunteers machines before it shuts down.

Alongside the backup team, another team is working on the best way to distribute to others after that (magnet links, archive.org, etc.).

https://minerva-archive.org/

If I recall correctly compression, especially lz4, has been shown to impact performance negligably.

That’s gonna make for an awkward all hands meeting.

Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

Ooohhh I did that test when I got a new speaker / amp setup at my PC and as a musician I thought “I got this”. Plus I was trying to decide if Tidal was worth upgrading to from Spotify.

I did slightly better than average. Like just slightly. I might have the results somewhere.

I ended up doing Tidal’s free trial. I couldn’t tell a difference. Went back to Spotify. (though now my group of people are on an Apple Music family plan).

I mean I’m sure it was a mix. There are a lot of stories out there about how if you didn’t stay on top of your outsourced factory they would look everywhere to cut corners to save a few extra cents here and there.

You (used to?) have to constantly check production quality and make sure nothing was changed out for a low cost part or lower cost source material. Otherwise your product quality falls off and you’re losing money on warranties and repairs and losing customer goodwill.

The other thing that happened is these factories, once they had your design, would make the same thing with lower cost parts / materials as a knockoff and sell it unbranded, as they don’t care about US or European IP Laws. Word might get around that “hey you can get the same brand X product as brand Y or from Aliexpress and save 50%”. Now they’re undercutting you, and you lose customer goodwill because people think your product is overpriced. Then the knockoff fails and they are happy they never bought your product in the first place because they think yours would have failed too. Through word of mouth people say “oh that broke after a month” not realizing the offbrand was made with shoddy materials, less screws, cheaper batteries, an inferior screen, literally anything they can do to save money.

Firefox w/ uBlock Origin is still fine.

Yeah I work at MSFT on a completely different team.

Teams recently asked if I wanted this and I was like… “sure!”

Now when I’m in the office and people check my status it tells people my desk location and when I’m WFH or elsewhere it tells people I’m not in the building. I don’t get people asking “hey are you in today?”

A lot of people in this thread are taking the headline literally like it’s “are you online or away?”. No. This is more of "are you at your desk in the office or working from a different building or from outside the facilities.

spice satellites

The spice must flow.

Netflix charges me, a single guy, for 4 simultaneous streams if I want 4k. So I shared with my parents.

Then they had the audacity to stop people from password sharing or to charge even more if you want to share. I set up an automatic email forward so my parents get every sign in related email.

This is what my friend and I do now.

Proxmox on bare metal.

Currently messing around with Talos Linux in a VM.

Republicans will promise them back in the form of tax cuts.

You forgot this part: “… For the rich”

For Microsoft 365 / Office 365.

This guy did just that:

https://youtu.be/qy_9w_c2ub0

Thought it was a really cool idea / project. Essentially a modified Z Flip.