TheGrandNagus

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago to Technology in Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off

"A lot"

Yes, a lot.

Can you play the games by purchasing them and then not having to ever download them using Steam?

Yes.

The only DRM free games are physical copies

No. Evidently you don't know what Digital Rights Management is.

If you can run it with no launcher, no software verifying purchase, you can back it up, copy it, distribute it, etc, then it's not DRM.

otherwise you rely on a specific service to be able to play, even if it's only once (like with GOG), it's a form of DRM.

Wait, what? You think buying a DRM-free game from a storefront is a form of DRM?

Ok then, let's use that logic. Buying a physical game from a shop is therefore also DRM, because you have to buy the game from them.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago to Technology in [Louis Rossmann] Google supports right to repair? Think again.

Cool story bro. Keep crying about people who do good things.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago to Technology in Robot baristas and AI chefs caused a stir at CES 2024 as casino union workers fear for their jobs

My experience with engineers is kinda the opposite. They love simple, robust machines that they can depend on.

It's the people at the top and venture capitalists that want flashy gimmickry that they can market.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago to Technology in Robot baristas and AI chefs caused a stir at CES 2024 as casino union workers fear for their jobs

Yeah, let's just force those pesky jobless into camps. Great idea.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in Visits to piracy websites have increased 12% in the past four years

I was happy to pay to access content. Then it changed. First with the content getting worse and the price increases, but then - and this was the straw that broke the camel's back - when Netflix made the no account sharing decision.

I'm a single person household, and I don't watch much TV. I can't justify that shit. "But the lowest tier" - fuck no. I'm not paying for a low bitrate 720p stream with ads.

If they had been just a little less greedy, I'd have happily continued giving them £18/month for literally the rest of my life, but no. They have to chase infinite growth.

I already had a Plex server for films and stuff that weren't available on Netflix, but now I've gone full piracy.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago to Technology in Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off

DRM is not the same as a subscription.

And a lot of games on steam don't have the DRM, you can just buy and keep the game files. I do wish they'd make it clear on the store page or give me the option to filter out DRM games though.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago to Technology in Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off

Yeah, people in this thread are saying this is absurd and nobody will go along with it, like have they met gamers from outside Lemmy?

In the wider world, people think I'm insane for not loving Microsoft's game subscription service. Even here and on Reddit I've received flak for not wanting games as a subscription service. It's weird.

Game subscriptions will happen. The wider market, unfortunately, loves the idea of paying a monthly fee to play games.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago to Technology in App Store to Be 'Split in Two' Ahead of EU iPhone Sideloading Deadline

I absolutely do see people simp for Microsoft

E.g. when Microsoft was buying Bethesda and Activision, threads were full of people saying it was great, and those who said otherwise got a lot of hate for it.

I've seen people fanboying over Windows too

We see it with Tesla

We see it with Nvidia

Apple is the posterboy of megacorps that people simp for, but they are far from the only one

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago to Technology in Amazon has been listing products with the title, 'I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy'

I find myself half agreeing with this and half disagreeing.

Should we not hold Amazon accountable for not vetting what's on their store?

If I went in to a physical shop and bought a knife, then when I got home the handle fell off, is it not reasonable to be angry at the brand and the shop I bought it from?

Yeah, it's not their product, but they gave the product their approval in the form of carrying the item for sale.

If Amazon marketed themselves as an open marketplace, like eBay, I'd say fair enough. But that's not what they do, Amazon markets themselves as an online store with their own warehouses. They're more akin to an online supermarket.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Memes in No choice was given

I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, philosophically, the user should be in charge of their PC, and updates should happen at a time of their choosing.

On the other hand, people are idiots. Especially the type of people who think they know everything but in reality don't. The type that will search for registry hacks or scripts that disable updates, and proceed to live without any security patches, putting not only their own system/data at risk, but others too.

It's probably a necessary evil that MS forces security patches on users.

What isn't so forgivable is them pushing all the other crap on people, or why the updates take so fucking long on shutdown/startup. That's what they need to improve. Far fewer people would care about avoiding updates if a reboot after an update was imperceptibly different to any normal startup, like it is on Linux.

MS is a $3tn company. They can achieve this if they want to, but they see spending money on Windows as a waste of money - why improve something when you've already cornered the market? It doesn't benefit them. It doesn't make them more money. Windows is dominant either way, they get their licensing fees either way. Improving Windows damages Microsoft.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago to Memes in You liar!

A washer or dryer is never late. Nor it it early. It finishes precisely when it means to.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Memes in I'm really getting over the enshitification of the internet.

The only other good term for Enshittification I've seen used is Platform Decay. It was even coined by the same person who coined enshittification.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to linuxmemes in E!!!!!

What I'd like to know is:

1. Do modern systems - say within the past 10 years - still operate in this way when a PS/2 keyboard is plugged in (yes, some motherboards still do have PS/2 ports, bizarrely)? Or have modern CPU architectures, microcode, and updates to the x86 instruction set removed it?

2. Does it still work this way when you plug a USB keyboard into a PS/2 port via an adapter (I'd imagine yes, but I don't actually know)

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to linuxmemes in Not really, since I'm the admin 😁

Plenty of Linux projects have had a focus on UX.

Back in the day, Ubuntu made huge strides in UX and usability, and they're still riding the coattails of that success even now that they've shifted to the corporate sector.

ElementaryOS came out and was super polished, simple, and beautiful. That's still kinda true, but their small team has meant that they're now falling behind the likes of Gnome, who've set out to do a similar thing.

The Cinnamon desktop is ugly out of the box, but other aspects of UX have been pretty great - everything is simple, they were pioneers in making everything a GUI option, rather than the last 5% of things having to be done in a config file or via terminal.

And finally, Gnome. Extremely polished, consistent, beautiful, and heavily UX-focused. That applies not only to their own system, but also to their third party app ecosystem. Just look at the apps on Gnome Circle - a Gnome project for showcasing apps that nail the Gnome design guidelines. Tell me they don't look like they have a focus on UX.

Honestly, even MacOS struggles to feel as UX-focused as Gnome, and that's saying something. UX is like, Apple's entire schtick. Everything from trackpad gestures to UI elements, subtle animations, etc in Gnome is about UX.

Tbh, Gnome is sometimes so focused on UX that it arguably becomes a detriment to their development cycle. They'll spend months deliberating on things like accent colours, chatting about all the potential ramifications, legibility, how it can inadvertently lead to destructive user actions, and the best way to implement it as a feature, rather than just doing it and moving on to the next feature.

Even KDE Plasma, which is often mocked for being hilariously inconsistent and filled with bizarre clunky UX, has made major strides in the past couple of years, and Plasma 6, releasing very soon, will fix a bunch of fundamental things that currently hold Plasma back from being consistent, and a significant portion of bugs have been fixed - it looks like it won't be the buggy mess that Plasma 4 and early Plasma 5 was. We're about to see a major improvement.

TheGrandNagus , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to linuxmemes in Not really, since I'm the admin 😁

IMO the biggest problem is simply that not enough devices are sold with it.

The amount of people who want to/can be arsed to/even know they can install an OS on their PC is pretty small. And even then, most that can will just stick to what they know (this is obviously part of the mindset issue that you speak of).

If mainstream devices were sold with Linux on them, it would get over that hurdle, and also get over the daunting hurdle of "ok I want to switch to Linux, what's a good distro?" hurdle, to which people online will say everything from Debian to fucking Arch Linux.

Chromebooks (bastardised though they may be) and the Steam Deck prove that Linux isn't unviable. People just won't install it of their own volition.