That’s because employees are seen as a liability, while holdings are seen as value.

Basically, employees need to be paid, so having a lot of employees hurts your company value. But owning immaterial things helps company value, because you don’t need to pay for ideas beyond the initial investment.

So headlines like these are common any time a company is looking to boost their stock. Lay off a bunch of employees to reduce cash out, use that freshly gained cash to buy intellectual properties (or buy the companies that own that IP) and then sit on the IP because actually using it would require employees like the ones you just laid off. You don’t care about actually leveraging the IP, because simply owning it is what gives you the value bump. You’re not worried about income from those IPs yet, because you’re just trying to make the company larger with the existing cash you have access to.

Yeah, I quickly installed a Containers mod to deal with items. They automatically grab the items (based on how the item is tagged in the backend) so your inventory is just sorted into “melee weapons”, “jewelry”, “books”, etc… The only downside is that encumbrance can sneak up on you, because your inventory doesn’t look full when you open your character sheet. Luckily, sorting by weight still works, so you can see which containers are the heaviest and start with those.

The dude’s arguments sound like the kind of stuff that is frequently parroted by SovCits. My bet is that this dude is so nutty that no lawyers were willing to take him on as a client even if he asked. But I doubt he asked, because SovCits often believe they know more than the lawyers do.

The stuff about not owning the company reeks of SovCit “I’m a man acting as an agent on behalf of my name” bullshit. The rest of his arguments also sound like common SovCit “throw legalese at the wall like it’s some sort of cheat code” stuff.

I mean, they landed Gary Bowser in prison for 10 years for something very similar. Dude was just installing mod chips in Switches. He got out after only a few years due to a degenerative disease, (I think he has ALS, but that’s just off the top of my head,) but he still owes Nintendo $10M and they’re basically garnishing 30% of all of his pay for the rest of his life.

Nah, Yuzu is still working fine on mine. Basically, if you had the emulator installed prior to the takedown, EmuDeck will continue to use it.

Which is honestly a pretty good argument for just installing every single emulator (even if you never think you’ll use them!) because they don’t really take up that much space, and you could potentially lose access to them if you never bothered before a takedown.

You don’t need to run it on a pi. In fact, I’d actually argue against it; A pi will be underpowered if you’re ever needing to transcode anything. Transcoding is what Plex/Jellyfin does if your watching device can’t natively play the video. Maybe you have a 4k video, but you’re playing it on a 1080p screen. That video will need to be transcoded from 4k into 1080p for the screen to be able to display it. Or maybe the file is encoded using ACC (a fairly recent encoding method) which isn’t widely supported by older devices. This often happens with things like smart TVs (which often don’t support modern encoding and need to be transcoded even if the resolution is correct.)

Basically, if you’re 100% positive that every device you’re watching it on will never need transcoding, then a pi is acceptable. But for anything else, I’d recommend a small PC instead. You can even use an old PC if you have one laying around.

Or if you want to use a new machine, maybe something like an HP Elitedesk. They’re basically what you see in every single cubicle in every single office building. They’re extremely popular in corporate settings, which means there are a ton of used/refurbished systems available for cheap, because IT destroys the drives and sends the rest to refurb when they upgrade their fleet of PCs. So for the refurb you’re basically just paying the cost of an SSD they added in (to replace the one IT pulled out), plus whatever labor is associated with dusting it out and checking the connections to make sure they all work. You can pick up a modern one for like $250 on Amazon (or your preferred electronics store).

Worth noting that the elitedesk generations are marked by a G-number, so google the model (like an EliteDesk G9, G7, etc) to see what kind of processor it has; Avoid anything with an intel 13th or 14th generation CPU, (they have major reliability issues) and check with Plex/Jellyfin’s CPU requirements list to see if it supports hardware accelerated transcoding. For Intel chips, look for QuickSync support.

For storage, I’d recommend running a NAS with however many hard drives you can afford, and one that has extra ports for future expandability. Some NAS systems support Plex and/or Jellyfin directly, but the requirements for full support are tricky and you’ll almost always have better luck just running a dedicated PC for Plex. Then for playing, one of two things will happen. Either the device is capable of directly playing the file, or it will need to be transcoded. If it’s directly playing, the plex server basically just points the player to the NAS, and the player handles the rest. If it’s transcoding, the PC will access the NAS, then stream it to the player.

As for deciding on Plex vs Jellyfin, that’s really a matter of personal preference. If you’re using Plex, I’d highly suggest a PlexPass sub/lifetime purchase; Wait until Black Friday, because they historically do a (~25% off) discount on their lifetime pass. Plex is definitely easier to set up, especially if you plan on streaming outside of your LAN.

Jellyfin currently struggles from a lack of native app support; Lots of smart TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app, for instance. But some people have issues and complaints (many of them justified!) with Plex, so if the FOSS sounds appealing, then consider Jellyfin instead. Jellyfin is also rapidly being developed, and many people expect it to have feature parity with Plex within a few years.

And if you’re having trouble deciding, you can actually set up both (they can run in tandem on the same machine) and then see which one you prefer.

And the nice part about using a mini PC is that you can also use it for more than just Plex/Jellyfin. I have the *arr suite running on mine, alongside a Factorio server, a Palworld server, and a few other things.

Most of the episodes aired before at-home VHS was common, and TV stations weren’t in the habit of archiving their old footage for nightly broadcasts; The show was viewed as transient since it dealt with current events, and nobody expected people to want to re-watch old episodes. It’s likely that a lot of them aren’t available simply because nobody (including the tv station) has recordings.

358/2 was good, but different. I personally enjoyed the equipment/skill system, but I understand why lots of people didn’t; If you didn’t want to spend a lot of time managing your abilities and gear, it would quickly feel like a burden.

If you already have a NAS, (since SMB was mentioned, I’m assuming there’s some sort of NAS setup going) then you may even be able to host Plex directly on the NAS. It likely won’t be powerful enough for things like video transcoding, but just audio should be fine.

Now we just need a way to use that shelf with the same account so I don’t get booted from my steam deck games just because I left something running on my PC and vice versa.

AFAIK, this is also a licensing issue. When Steam was launching, game publishers were concerned that people would simply share an account. So part of Steam’s licensing agreement is that the same account can’t have games (even different games) running on two machines at the same time. It’s specifically to prevent account sharing, because people would just share an account with their friends; Booting them out of their game every time their buddy boots something up is a pretty effective countermeasure.

The “same game at the same time” part is a licensing issue. It won’t ever be “solved” because it would get Steam into legal trouble to do so, just like the Internet Archive recently FAFO’ed. In order for two people to play the same game at the same time, you need to own two licenses for said game.

But it does solve the issue of multiple people using the same library at the same time. Now your family members don’t get booted off of Skyrim just because you launched Persona. It basically combines your libraries, so any of you can choose any of the listed games to play at any time. Just like having a physical shelf full of CD cases.

You need to be friends for at least 30 days before you can invite someone.

“Secret” is a bit of a stretch. The playtest was offered to nearly all longtime Steam users. If it’s meant to be a secret, someone at Valve is getting fired.

Sure, but that feels a little bit like saying “We don’t need guards inside the prison, because we already have them patrolling around the perimeter.”

It’s important because it allows them to directly modify the CPU’s microcode. Basically, the CPU has its own set of instructions, called microcode, which controls how the chip functions on a physical level. If they manage to change your microcode, even a full system reformat won’t kill the virus; You’ll need to either re-flash the CPU (which is not something the standard user or even power user will know how to do) or replace the entire CPU.

Skyrim, Factorio, and The Sims 3 or 4 (it really doesn’t matter which one.)

All of them are open-ended and player-led, so there’s not a single set-in-stone story to play through and get bored with. All of them have extensive modding communities and support. And there is a variety of gameplay styles, so there’s something to suit various moods.

And all of them are notorious for hooking players. Nobody ever decides to boot up the Sims because it sounds fun; They boot it up on a whim, then come up for air three months later, wondering what the hell happened to all of their free time. Once you get sucked into Factorio, you’ll start seeing conveyor belts in your sleep. I played ~600 hours of it in just a few months, and that’s considered newbie numbers; There are plenty of Steam users who have tens of thousands of hours played.

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I think you dropped these.

At one point I was playing so much Factorio that I started seeing conveyor belts and assembly machines in my sleep

Factorio and RimWorld immediately come to mind. Even with the base unmodified game, you’ll likely get several weeks of gameplay out of Factorio. Then if you dive into modding, you’ll never put it down. Multiplayer is really nice too. And their big DLC just got announced, and is planned to drop in a few months. So now would actually be a great time to dive in, because you’ll get access to the DLC about the same time that you’ve burned through the content on the base game.

There’s also Curse of the Moon, which is an homage to the original 8-bit games. It’s not a modern metroidvania, but if you like the older pre-SOTN Castlevania games then you should check them out.