I’ve had fewer problems with GoG + Lutris in Linux than I’ve had with Steam in Linux, to the point that I had to pirate one of my Steam games in order to be able to run it in Linux (the pirate version runs just fine).

Mind you, I get the impression that older AAA games are the most problematic ones, thought that’s maybe because I don’t run anything with Kernel Anti-Cheat and nowadays don’t really do online gaming (in fact all my games in Lutris are run inside a firejail sandbox with network access disabled).

For sandboxing in Lutris you’ll want to have a look at the “Command Prefix” option under “Runner options” - whatever you put there prefixes the command that runs the game, which is exactly how sandboxing with things like firejail works (i.e. you start your stuff from the command line with firejail firejail-args your-stuff your-stuff-args so you literally prefix your command with firejail).

It’s possible to configure it game by game and also as a global default for all games which you can then override for only some games (this later is how I run it).

Lutris also integrates with Steam so you can run Steam games from it.

Same here and for me too it was gaming holding me back, though I mostly buy my games via GoG hence use Lutris and it’ve had a pretty low rate of games that won’t work at all (and, curiously, one of them which won’t work in Steam works fine if I use a pirated version with Lutris), though maybe 1/3 require some tweaking to work properly.

It’s also interesting that by gaming in Linux with Lutris I can make it safer and protect my privacy because Lutris let’s me do things like run the game inside a firejail sandbox which I have set up as default for all games including disabling network access for the game.

Still have the Windows partition around just in case, though the only time I booted it in the last several months was to clean up some of the stuff to free one of the disks to make it a dedicated Linux disk.

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.

Any unbiased “what if candidates had done things differently” evaluation must include the actions of all candidates that resulted in a Democrat loss. This means it should include how much Clinton herself screw her own chances, for example by comparing the votes she got on those states with the votes previous Democrat candidates got in those states.

(I strongly suspect that Clinton has a far larger proportion of the blame for her own defeat than all 3rd party candidates put together)

This focus on blaming everybody else but your own leaders is just the traditional tribalist mindset of “the chief is good, it’s everybody else whose a problem”. The decades long enshittification of the Democrat Party is mainly the product of its supporters acting as mindless tribalists rather the rationally, thus not holding their “chiefs” to same standards as they do everybody else.

Unsurprisingly we see the very same problem of the Democrat Leadership having carte blanche from the party fans to do just about everything and even damage their own electoral chances - with, as we see right here, the members of the tribe eagerly scapegoating it all as being the fault of 3rd party candidates - with their support for the Israeli Genocide.

Curiously, it’s one of those words that for me feels enjoyable to use yet I seldom have a chance to do so :)

If you’re getting back pain from an office chair then your arse is likely too far forward when you’re sitting and you’re putting pressure on your spine due it being at an angle other than 90 degrees from the seat, or your table is too low, lowering your arms, so you’re bending forward.

You’re suppose to feel your arse pushing against the back of the chair not leaving enough of a hole between the chair and your lower back that you can fit an arm in it, and when your arms are resting on the table (which they should be pretty much all the time if your keyboard and mouse are sufficiently forward) you should feel no pressure either downwards or upwards on your shoulders

I’ve been coding for over 3 decades, often for massive long hours (to the point that by the age of 17 I had RSI due to how my wrists were resting at the edge of the table and some years later when already doing it professionally went to the doctor with chest pain - which I feared were due to a hearth condition - which turned out to be work posture related) and at some point in my mid 20s I moved to The Netherlands and to a company which had its own Ergonomics Consultant (this was back in the peak of the 90s Tech boom so there was lots of money sloshing around) who would come around when you joined and adjust everything for you (they even had tables with adjustable height) and explain you all about the correct work posture.

Been following that advice and haven’t had posture related problems since then whilst always using pretty standard office chairs (always with adjustable height, tough).

I have however seen plenty of people doing the lazy (and stupid) posture of being all the way forward on their chair and quite a lot with arms too low or too high (which is more understandable since most cheap office tables don’t have adjustable height).

Yeah, that’s quite a shrewd way of going about it.

Since it’s not emitting anything the power it needs will be way less that something emitting its own signal and then checking for bounces which is how I naveivelly expected it would work.

Cheers for the detailed explanation.

If I remember it correctly, it’s not just the overall capacity but also the how much the voltage drops as the current being drawn goes up (i.e. their internal resistance).

You can pull several Amps out of an AA without its voltage dropping significativelly though it does accelerate depletion quite a lot if you do it in a sustained way (the volage curve of alkaline batteries actually depends on how much current you draw so if you just draw at say 100mA the “knee” in the curve were the voltage drops down from around 1.5V to a value too low to be useful is a lot sharper whilst if you draw 1A it’s a lot softer with the voltage starting to sinking much sooner for the same fraction of total charge drawn).

Or in other words, the 9V battery might no be able supply enough peak current whilst still remaining close enough to 9V.

(It was actually quite a commonly reported problem in Arduino forums that people used 9V batteries for things like motors and then had weird power drops or the motors didn’t actually work as expected even though theoretically everything seems to be in spec for them)

You should probably test the device under “in use” conditions with a 9V battery rather than just in standby before you replace the current setup with a single 9V battery.

It’s not what makes them money so they don’t really have the business incentive for maximizing hardware sales that leads to a relentless pushing out of new versions of their hardware that are barely better than the last one and all manner of tricks for early obsolescence of older devices (things like purposeful OS and App under-performance and even incompatibility with older versions of the hardware).

Also in the big picture of gaming the Steam Deck is tiny and in its early stages, so business-wise is not the time to go down a strategy of relentless new hardware versions and enshittification, quite the opposite.

Absolutely, they’re doing the right thing and as the right thing aligns with their business objectives it’s a bit wishful thinking to claim its because they care so much about their customers as people.

Personally the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the one I find that really beats all others in this.

It’s a well known phenomenon that the more people self-compliment about some great quality they have, the less that is the case.

A similar thing seems to happen at a political level - the countries were politicians just harp on and on about how great their Democracy is (in the case of the US) or how old it is (in the case of the UK) have the most flawed Democracies (if they even count as Democracies given how far they stray from the “all votes are equal” criteria) whilst in the best Democracies out there (like The Netherlands where they have Proportional Vote) they never talk about how great a Democracy they are.

I believe it’s called Overcompensation.

Personally ever since I figured this out I treat such self-complimenting boasts (both at an individual and at a nation level) as big red flags and so far that rule of thumb hasn’t failed me.

True - the US of late has been a great inspiration for what NOT to do.

That explains the US, but that’s about it.

For example Europe there are no movements towards making abortion illegal, quite the contrary.

That’s because when talking to tribalist types, you’re seen as either with them or against them and in a system with 2 political parties “against them” means “supporting the other guys”.

There is no independent thinking amongst the “party supporter” masses, only following and parroting of the party messages, so the idea of somebody being a genuinely independent thinker guided by personal principles rather than following some tribe or other is anathema to them.

Liberalism isn’t the same as Left. It’s not even in the same political axis.

You can’t really read “more liberal” as being the same as “more leftist”.

Left would be something like: “I want the greatest good for the greatest number”.

Liberalism would be something like: “I want people to have the most freedom to do whatever they want”.

You might notice that these two things collide in things like the existence of the super-rich, were for a liberal that’s a good thing (they have maximum freedom) whilst for a Leftie it’s a bad thing (wealth concentration reduces the access to resources for the many hence it directly goes against the greatest good for the greatest number).

Similarly centralizing control of part or the whole of the Economy (which decreases trade freedom) to achieve greater equality is absolutelly valid within the Leftwing principles and entirely against Liberal principles.

it’s only in places like the US, were the entirety of Leftwing is about 4 congressmen, that Liberalism gets confused with Leftwing.

Exactly.

You commonly get plastic protectors like that with UK plugs which have squarish metal pins with hard corners - example - but I don’t remember ever seeing any such things coming with EU plugs, of which there are two two types but both with all pins having round tips - example.

This is consistent with the explanation that those plastic covers are to protect everything else from the plug pins, hence why they come on plugs whose pins have tips with hard corners that more easilly perforate or shred things but not on those with tips which are rounded.

In the specific example of this post, two of the pins are have hard corners and although the other does not, the plastic protector covers all 3 probably because it’s just a more stable fit (and it looks better) if it slots in all 3 than in only the more dangerous 2 even if it’s not doing much for the round pin.

At some point in my career I’ve actually designed mission critical high performance distributed server systems for a living, so I’m well aware of that.

You can still pack thousands of users per server and have very low latency as long as you use the right architecture for it (it’s mainly done with in-memory caching and load balancing) when you’re accessing gigantic datasets which far exceed the data space of a game where the actual shared data space is miniscule since all clients share a local copy of most of the dataspace - i.e. the game level they’re playing in - and even with the most insane anti-cheat logic that checks every piece of data coming in from the user side against a server-side copy of the “game level data space” it’s still but a fraction of the shared data space in equivalent situations in the corporate world, plus it tends to be easilly partitionable data (i.e. even in MMORG with a single fully open massive playing space, players only affect limited areas of the entire game space so you don’t really need to check the actions of a player against the data of all other players).

Also keep in mind that all the static (never changing or slow changing stuff) like achievements or immutable level configuration can still be served with “normal” latencies.

Further the kind LVL1 ISP that provides network access for companies like Sony servicing millions of users already has more than good enough latency in their normal service and hence Sony needs not pay extra for “low latency”.

Anyways, you do make a good and valid point, it’s just that IMHO that’s the kind of thing that pushes the running costs per-player-month from one dollar cents or less to, at most (and this is likely quite a large overestimation), a dollar per-player-month unless they only have tens of players per-server (which would be insane and they should fire their systems designers if that’s the case).