addie

Both GOG and Epic stores are quite full of games. Give developers the chance to sell things, and they'll take it.

GOG doesn't have everything since they require DRM-free, but I do most of my indie-game purchases on there. GOG have said in the past that their most-requested feature from developers is "can you make your achievements / social integration just basically exactly the same as Steam, so that it's easier for us to integrate?". Means game updates sometimes take longer to arrive, but hey.

Heroic launcher starts faster than Steam, so I'll grab whatever's free on Epic that week while waiting for it to load; but fuck giving Tim Sweeney any money obviously. Seems to have quite a variety of stuff, tho.

The problem with displacing a company with established network effects is that simply "just as good" isn't enough - you need to be much better to start moving people over. And I'm not really clear what "much better than Steam" looks like. They have great Linux support, great workshop integration, regular sales, the forums are well-regulated, and so on.

It's how I installed Arch btw on my desktop, tiny boot image basically downloads the installer into RAM - NetBoot.

But yeah, if you've got a computer that's old enough to be fully supported yet new enough to have the UEFI for hardware, an ethernet network which is robust enough to download full system images on every restart yet simple enough for the firmware to understand, and tonnes of memory free to hold the whole OS at all times, and you can tolerate the fact that restarts take ages, then it works great.

I think the detailed description of this vulnerability described it as non-persistent in UEFI, but that you could install something that runs before secure boot that would be persistent. I think that's splitting hairs, though - if you've been compromised by someone that has the skills to pull this exploit off, then they can probably chain something else into it now that they've got basically bare-metal access.

You also need to have sufficiently infiltrated the target's local network to masquerade as a PXE server, and be in a position to force a server to reboot / just wait for one to reboot. Yes, a few places have large, fairly open networks with a lot of devices configure to PXE boot and they should apply the update before the next reboot, but vast majority of people, no issue at all.

Can still set up a header-matching rule - just need to mark the email with a label, so you can report it without even having to read it.

In exchange for being able to check what the charge is on our car - basically, whether it's time to leave coffee shop - I get one of the most information-stealing, asks too-many-privileges apps on my phone. And it's quite hard to do without it with an electric car. Looking at you, Ford, although I understand all manufacturers do the same.

MFAA and a password in exchange for eg. an OAuth token so that you can manage the devices on your account, and then use your phone's usual security to control access to the app, would be one thing. But this looks more like the security team has made some demands, and the developers have implemented it in the laziest, MVP-compliant, way that they can.

No toast or beer would be a blow. But as long as there's beans, we'll be alright.

Can't copyright gameplay mechanics, and the plot is basically "get a team of misfits together to battle an incoming evil", ie. it's Seven Samurai IN SPAAAAACE. Plus, one of the big criticisms that I saw about ME:A is that it's lazy; it's the same old aliens as we've seen before even though that makes no sense in a new galaxy, and the plot is just trotting out some weary old tropes. Very risk averse, very insipid.

So yeah:

• could spend millions getting the IP off of the shitty owners, to make a very safe and boring addition of the ME games

• make a completely new game with similar mechanics, but take some risks with the story. A fun game with a stupid plot is still fun; a fun game with a great story is exceptional. So why not roll the dice? You can get the staff easily enough to form a new company.

Yeah, more of a "visual novel using the 'sims' engine". If you were expecting "the sims" but with medieval architecture and activities, then that's not what this is at all.

If it was just "Fortnite but a bit better", then very few people would play it, as having a lot of people to play against is important and network effects would keep them on Fortnite. (See also every other "X-killer" - Facebook killer, WhatsApp killer, e-Bay killer, etc. A slight improvement will not do.) Also, Fortnite wasn't really the game it is until they cloned PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds into it, so it needs to be:

• something with a really compelling gameplay loop that's good with a few people but gets better with more people

• not a Fortnite clone, nor something that could be introduced into Fortnite as a game mode

Like you say, just a clone will not do. Need some really exciting innovations in gameplay, which is not Ubisoft's thing, to put it kindly.

An NVidia GB300 fills a whole rack on a server, doesn't have display outputs, draws 1.4 kW of electrical power, and requires mandatory liquid cooling capable of dissipating 1.4 kW of heat. Not a good match for a standard desktop system. I understand that they're also optimised for churning through huge amounts of low-precision floating point, aka. an AI workload, rather than being truly general-purpose cards.

If you have any use for eye-watering amounts of CUDA calculations, then they might come in handy. I remember back in the day, if you had two graphics cards in SLI, that the Batman: Arkham Asylum game gave you the option of either using both cards for rendering, or one card for rendering and one card dedicated to PhysX calculations. You could use one of these GPUs for amazingly good-looking fog effects, assuming you had another GPU capable of rendering the graphics and outputting it? Not very sensible, tho.

I suspect that unless you work in a very compute-heavy industry (AI research, but maybe aerospace?) then you won't have a use for these cards that would justify how expensive they are to run.

With my 'security hat' on, I'd have to say you shouldn't use anything that's no longer receiving updates. But that would create a lot of e-waste for no reason.

To see if your phone's browser is still receiving updates, you can browse to:

https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/

That has a grid showing whether your browser was willing to connect to sites using the compromised keys. If your browser is using its own cert style and still receiving updates, should be all green ticks. If so, then you can still use the phone for browsing internet. Be aware that using other apps on your phone (like eg. your email app) could be read easily by third parties, especially if you're connected to unfamiliar wifi.

If it's all red, maybe try another browser? Or relegate that device to being a dumb phone - switch off its data connection, phone calls only.