I think the problem comes when someone makes a cool, fun, silly little game that is otherwise great when played with randoms, and cheating just sorta spoils it.
Case in point from a few years back - Fall Guys. Silly fun, sloppy controls, a laugh. And then you get people literally flying around because they've installed a hack, so other players can't progress as they can't make the top X players in a round.
So to throw it back - it is just a game, it's so sad that a minority think winning is more important than just enjoying things, or think their own enjoyment is more important than everyone else's.
As an old-timer myself, we thought it was despicable when people replaced downloaded skins in QuakeWorld with all-fullbright versions in their local client, so they could get an advantage spotting other players... I suppose that does show us that multiplayer cheating is almost as old as internet gaming.
You comment as if having windows ensures you have perfect laptop power management every time.
It doesn’t. I’ve had windows laptops that burn power when closed and apparently sleeping (in fact we still have it, a Lenovo yoga device), or just run up the fans when idle.
I’ve also had a MacBook that once in a while would be hot and thrashing its fans when I retrieved it from my bag (retina MBP 2014 IIRC)
Could barely tell what was going on, everything was so dark, and black crush killed it completely, making it look blocky and janky.
I watched it again a few years later, on max brightness, sitting in the dark, and I got more of what was going on, but it still looked terrible. One day I'll watch the 'UHD' 4k HDR version and maybe I'll be able to see what it was supposed to look like.
Problem is, you’ll have to find a high bitrate version. Whatever they streamed on HBO the day of release was really shitty bitrate which crushes detail in detail-starved scenes like these
I tried a load of different versions including blu-ray rips IIRC, and it was all just as bad.
When I last rewatched it (early pandemic), as far as I could tell at the time there was no HDR version available, which I assume would fix it by being able to represent more variation in the darker colours.
I might hunt one down at some point as it does exist now. Though it still wouldn’t make season 8 ‘good’ !!
> a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education.
Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Yes, there will likely be that phenomenon, but will it occur faster than the approx 2% level of optimum inflation?
>>The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Creating a universally-available baseline lodging situation for everyone is certainly a public good that would yield a LOT of benefits from eliminating homelessness (benefiting not only the homeless but also everyone who their problems affect) to promoting family stability.
Whether the best way is to incentivize a glut, subsidize social housing, or just provide a housing stipend for anyone in need, another system, or some combination of all-of-the-above should be subject to study and experimentation.
I upgraded to windows 11 as soon as it was offered. Even went out and bought a tpm addon for my motherboard - not that I needed one 100% but activating the onboard one on Zen 3 at the time was thought to cause stuttering…
Anyway, why would I do that?
Well, I got windows free at some point, a lot of years ago, and I am happy enough to jump through a few hoops to keep that going. I don’t use it day to day, I’m not sure why anyone would. I use MacOS and Linux as daily drivers.
But once in a while there’s a game I want to play that’s not that Linux-friendly, and there’s windows up to date and supported, without MS getting another cent out of me since about 2009. What’s not to like?
Nokia was already fucked because it had set up a system in which internal divisions designed competing phones, as a result it had flooded the market with similar but-not-quite-the-same handsets with overlapping features, and it had missed out on usability advances that iOS had made.
Symbian was undergoing an overhaul which would eventually lead it to be ’good’ again, but by then it was too late as Android and iOS were already eating its lunch. And around the time of the N9 launch (touchscreen-only Maemo/meego phone), Stephen Elop took the helm and issued the famous “burning platforms” memo which put Nokia on the path to windows phone exclusivity, purely to the benefit of Microsoft, who delivered the killing blow by first forcing the doomed “Windows Phone” onto them, then buying the mobile phone division so MS could churn out more doomed handsets for their stillborn mobile platform.
tl;dr - The company was a clusterfuck riding on name recognition and then an MS plant killed it.
Linux on the N900 was neither here nor there. It was a skunkwork effectively, a niche device for nerds (and a great one). But it neither sank the company nor could have saved it.
The N9 could have saved the company in my opinion. It was great. I had it for some years before it broke and then found the Android I had afterwards to be poor compared to it.
> A quick glance at the forums also confirms that USB port was poorly designed and is prone to breaking.
That was the death of mine. I had an external battery charger that I could use to charge the machine overnight, but it was too much of a hassle so it got recycled and I moved on to a Galaxy Note, which everyone laughed at for being enormous but now look at us, the base iPhone 17 is around the same size...
The N900 was a great little device, it was like having a tiny computer with full keyboard in my pocket. It's just a shame the built-in FM transmitter didn't work reliably, because I used it to listen to music in the car a lot.
It was also amazing to be able to download the whole world's map data (such as it was in 2010) to the device, so the GPS navigation still worked off-grid (deep-outback Australia in 2010 was not always that good for data connections).
This is considered a startup phase AFAICT, with others being looked at as necessary.
> The ban applies only to actually logging into the service - everything can still be viewed when logged out. Users are still being tracked while logged out.
Sure, but it stops kids bullying each other, and a service you can't fully interact with is not very interesting, stops kids putting their pics/videos/whatever online.
> Reddit (and possibly other services) are complying simply by using heuristics to detect under-16 users - they're not even employing any reliable verification measures.
They are using heuristics and then an external verification service if the heuristics set off an alarm. It's not perfect at present, sure, but I don't think it has to be.
What "they" want is secondary - it's a pretty popular move here in Australia, it's what people largely want.
Labor have been failing at giving people what they want recently, and are generally considered rather lacklustre and weak. But like the vaping ban (which was predicted to be and has now been confirmed to be a backward step), this is something parents are generally happy about.
My favourite micro pressure-group in Australia is the Pedestrian Council of Australia.
Whenever there's talk about car safety measures, e-scooters or anything else, the press goes to the official-sounding "Pedestrian Council of Australia" for comment. And obligingly, Harold Scruby who is the CEO, Chairman and entire membership of said council will hold forth.
He's been spectacularly successful at getting himself listened to, as if he represented something.
I thought you were making this up, as it sounds too ridiculous to be true. But no, it's a real thing.
The key to his success seems, at a glance, to be raising his media profile by taking controversial positions (which I suspect he may not sincerely hold) that guarantee news coverage. Similar to how populist politicians in the UK game the BBC's "balance" policy by always taking a contrarian position to any given topic to secure an interview or place on a discussion panel.
Case in point from a few years back - Fall Guys. Silly fun, sloppy controls, a laugh. And then you get people literally flying around because they've installed a hack, so other players can't progress as they can't make the top X players in a round.
So to throw it back - it is just a game, it's so sad that a minority think winning is more important than just enjoying things, or think their own enjoyment is more important than everyone else's.
As an old-timer myself, we thought it was despicable when people replaced downloaded skins in QuakeWorld with all-fullbright versions in their local client, so they could get an advantage spotting other players... I suppose that does show us that multiplayer cheating is almost as old as internet gaming.
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