sylver_dragon

While I hate the idea of people losing their jobs, stepping back for a moment and looking at what they are claiming, its not terribly surprising:

Spencer said the roles affect mostly corporate and support functions

When companies merge, this is kinda needed. You don’t need two fully functional HR departments. While the HR staff from the buying company will likely need to expand, it won’t be by the same amount as the HR department of the company being bought. As network functions are merged, you probably don’t need all of the IT staff which came with the merger. A lot of management functions likely end up merged, meaning redundancies. And this sort of thing is going to move through a lot of the non-project work functions of the company.

Yes it sucks. But, it’s to be expected in a merger. Now, whether or not we want this level of consolidation, that’s a different ball of wax entirely. The last thing we need is more studios falling under the sway of these massive companies. That’s the thing which should be drawing our ire.

The fact that the OS is replaceable sealed the deal for me.

And the default OS isn’t locked down and doesn’t try to prevent you from doing other stuff with it. What you want to do isn’t in the Steam interface? Switch over to desktop mode and you have full access to the underlying OS.

My only complaint with the Steamdeck is that I find using the touchpad on the right side for long gaming sessions hurts my hands. I 3d printed some grips which help; but, I think my hands just don’t like the orientation. Still love my deck though.

Been using the beta for a while and I gotta say, it’s pretty awesome. I just hope they have the purchasing as sorted as they claim. I’ve had so many issues in the past letting my kids purchase games.

What’s next?

We already got Windows taking timed snapshots, and ads in the Start Menu. I’m not sure I want to know.

This is going to suck for a lot of people. I’m all for encryption. If any of the laptops, in the business I work for, lack encryption, I’m going to throw a fit. But, for home use the situation is not the same. I’d argue that the risk of device theft leading to critical data compromise is pretty low and the risk of the user needing someone to perform offline data recovery for that user is much higher. And the number of users who will actually have the key saved in a location they can get to it, and provide to the data recovery tech, can probably be counted without taking off my shoes.

This is dumb. It’s yet another case of Microsoft picking a default for users which helps Microsoft but isn’t good for users.

Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.

At time of writing, it’s unclear what systems these hypothetical titles will release for, given King’s status as a mobile studio.
Building out bigger series like Overwatch and Diablo would be a boon, too.

You guys have phones, don’t you?

Huh and here I was complaining about the new episode of Futurama focusing on NFTs as being “out of date”. Guess everything old is new.

Does this mean that the main dashboard will go back to the original XBox 360 dashboard and not the ad laden abomination it quickly became?

As much “doom and gloom” as the article pushes, I kinda feel that the compromised keys being well known makes detection easier. The malicious binary needs to be signed with one of these keys, this means that there will be very specific structures (e.g. the public key) at well known locations in the file. This is exactly the type of threat which anti-virus is good at detecting. Assuming a network’s security folks aren’t completely asleep at the switch, these attacks should get picked up and blocked pretty fast.

There is a reason attackers spend so much time and effort obfuscating code and keeping files off the disk. While A/V may be a pretty terrible security control and easily bypassed in many cases, watching for files with well known patterns is one of the few things A/V tends to do well.

I do agree with what you are saying, but for a complete beginner, and a very general overview, I didn’t want to complicate things too much. I personally run my own stuff in containers and am behind CG-NAT (it’s why I gave it a mention).

That said, if you really wanted to give the new user that advice, go for it. Rather than just nit pick and do the “but actshuly” bit, start adding that info and point out how the person should do it and what to consider. Build, instead of just tearing down.

No, but you are the target of bots scanning for known exploits. The time between an exploit being announced and threat actors adding it to commodity bot kits is incredibly short these days. I work in Incident Response and seeing wp-content in the URL of an attack is nearly a daily occurrence. Sure, for whatever random software you have running on your normal PC, it’s probably less of an issue. Once you open a system up to the internet and constant scanning and attack by commodity malware, falling out of date quickly opens your system to exploit.

Short answer: yes, you can self-host on any computer connected to your network.

Longer answer:
You can, but this is probably not the best way to go about things. The first thing to consider is what you are actually hosting. If you are talking about a website, this means that you are running some sort of web server software 24x7 on your main PC. This will be eating up resources (CPU cycles, RAM) which you may want to dedicated to other processes (e.g. gaming). Also, anything you do on that PC may have a negative impact on the server software you are hosting. Reboot and your server software is now offline. Install something new and you might have a conflict bringing your server software down. Lastly, if your website ever gets hacked, then your main PC also just got hacked, and your life may really suck. This is why you often see things like Raspberry Pis being used for self-hosting. It moves the server software on to separate hardware which can be updated/maintained outside a PC which is used for other purposes. And it gives any attacker on that box one more step to cross before owning your main PC. Granted, it’s a small step, but the goal there is to slow them down as much as possible.

That said, the process is generally straight forward. Though, there will be some variations depending on what you are hosting (e.g. webserver, nextcloud, plex, etc.) And, your ISP can throw a massive monkey wrench in the whole thing, if they use CG-NAT. I would also warn you that, once you have a presence on the internet, you will need to consider the security implications to whatever it is you are hosting. With the most important security recommendation being “install your updates”. And not just OS updates, but keeping all software up to date. And, if you host WordPress, you need to stay on top of plugin and theme updates as well. In short, if it’s running on your system, it needs to stay up to date.

The process generally looks something like:

• Install your updates.
• Install the server software.
• Apply updates to the software (the installer may be an outdated version).
• Apply security hardening based on guides from the software vendor.
• Configure your firewall to forward the required ports (and only the required ports) from the WAN side to the server.
• Figure out your external IP address.
• Try accessing the service from the outside.

Optionally, you may want to consider using a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS) (e.g. noip.com) to make reaching your server easier. But, this is technically optional, if you’re willing to just use an IP address and manually update things on the fly.

Good luck, and in case I didn’t mention it, install your updates.

And the best part:
Larian isn’t going to get shut down by some shitty vulture capital firm which bought up a ton of studios and then killed them all when times got tough.

He was also constrained by some of the history of the game. There have always been spells in D&D which are better or worse. It’s become a bit of a joke that the first spell taken by any wizard is Magic Missile. Why? Because it’s been one of the most useful 1st level spells for wizards since early D&D. So, into the spell book it goes, and it was very often the one spell a first level wizard memorized.

I’m just glad that the designers are willing to take a critical look at their own work and say, “you know what, this sucks, let’s fix it”.

Since the article seems to have failed to link to it, here’s the actual data: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Maybe, though if you think about it, the idea is basically:
Hey, we borrowed all this money to buy up lots of companies. But rather than pay it back ourselves, we are going to put all of that debt on this one company we also bought (probably with some of that debt), because thay actually make money.

It’s a shell game to allow Embracer to walk away with all the profits and never have to pay their investors back. If Asmodee manages to pay off the debt, that’s nice for them. Other than the fact that they will be hamstrung by servicing that debt, rather than re-investing in the company. If Asmodee folds and gets auctioned off in Chapter 7, that ends up having no material effect on the leadership of Embracer who made the decision to take on all that debt. Either way, Embracer is jettisoning all responsibility for the choices the management of Embrace made.

This sort of leveraged debt buyout, loot the company, then jettison the debt tactic has been used over and over to destroy otherwise profitable companies in the name of short term profit for vulture capitalists.

They really buried the lede on this one. Sure, Embrace paid back a bunch of money using proceeds from the sale of Take-Two. That’s pretty normal business. But:

The company is also moving €900 million of its debt into tabletop publisher Asmodee as part of its plans to split into three separate entities.

It sounds like they are about to jettison the rest of their debt using Asmodee. Embracer will walk away with whatever money they have made and Asmodee will end up being crushed under most of the debt Embrace used to make that money. Vulture capitalism at it’s finest.

While Chism may be a worthless leech, he isn’t completely wrong. Valve’s ownership of Steam does put it in a privileged position, which could be abused in a lot of anti-competitive ways. The fact that it isn’t doing that is really only because GabeN isn’t the same type of leech which Chism is. He’s what a lot of people seem to want, a benevolent dictator. That said, when he finally kicks the bucket, or gets tired and sells the company, the future direction of Steam would be an open question. There may be a very good argument for Valve to be put under the microscope of the FTC for possible anti-trust breakup.

Java is dying in the same way that Linux is winning the desktop war, it’s always going to happen “next year” but never “this year”. I spent a lot of years as a sysadmin and while I would have been quite happy to piss on the grave of Java, we always seemed to be installing some version of the JRE (though, usually not the latest version) on systems. There is just a lot of software which is built with it. This was especially true when dealing with US FedGov systems. Developers for the USG loved Java and we had both the JRE and JDK (because why not require the Development Kit for a user install?) sprinkled about our environment like pigeon droppings.

That said, don’t get too caught up focusing on one language. A lot of the underlying data structures and theory will transfer between languages. What you are learning now may not be what you end up working with in the future. Try to understand the logic, systems and why you are doing what you are doing, rather than getting too caught up on the specific implementation.