blind3rdeye

@blind3rdeye@lemm.ee

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blind3rdeye,

Process explorer can do that. (The sysinternals tool.)

blind3rdeye,

What in particular do you feel like is missing? I mean, there’s a lot of stuff on Linux already. There’s no shortage of apps or games. But there might be some specific thing that you want that linux doesn’t have.

blind3rdeye,

I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista’s search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.

I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn’t work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.

And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go. But you’re right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)

blind3rdeye,

I don’t know how you can be pleased by anything. Isn’t your life tiring living the life of a zealot? Or do you have just an unsatisfiable need to complain?

wtf man. Did someone shit in your breakfast cereal or something?

blind3rdeye, (edited )

Terms like that matters more for some services than for others. For something like Spotify or Netflix, if they terminate the agreement it doesn’t matter much. You lose access, but there was no accumulated value. So you can just go somewhere with only minor inconvenience. Whereas on Steam, if they terminate the agreement then you could lose decades worth of accumulated games from your library - which could be very valuable. So that’s a big difference.

Now, it’s unlikely that Steam will just press delete on everyone’s account. But we can imagine a very profit-hungry leader taking over Steam and deciding to put the squeeze on their vast user-base. There are many things they could do; such as adding ads, requiring ‘consent’ to include spyware on your computer, or charging additional fees. Long term users would not be in a position to refuse these things, because their Steam library is being held as collateral.

If you trust that Steam is never going to give you up, and never going to let you down, etc. Then there is no problem. Things are currently going fine, and they may continue to be fine for a very long time. It’s just a matter of trust, and power, and hedging.

blind3rdeye,

Yesterday I bought something on Steam for the first time in many years. (I have a large Steam library, but in recent years I’ve been getting games from gog and itch instead.)

Since I hadn’t bought from Steam in a long time I figured I should read the “Steam Subscriber agreement” that you have to click to accept when you buy something. Let me just say now, the agreement is a very very bad deal for customers.

It goes to great lengths to make it very clear that you don’t own anything. You aren’t buying anything, you have no essentially rights. You are simply paying for a license subscription to use software with various conditions. Valve is able to end your subscription with no refund if you break the agreement. And the best bit:

Furthermore, Valve may amend this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use) unilaterally at any time in its sole discretion.

So by using Steam we’re putting a lot of trust in Valve; because the ‘agreement’ basically says they can do whatever they want, any time they want, for any reason they want.

Steam is quite good. I particularly appreciate their Linux support. But they are clearly using their position of dominance to make people agree to unfavourable terms. At the moment, things are fine. But make no mistake - when you use Steam, Valve has all the power. They can screw people over whenever they choose to.

With all that in mind, buying DRM free is better if you want to still have access to the software when a company decides to change direction for whatever reason.

blind3rdeye,

Nar man. It isn’t all about idiocy. Not everyone has your level of education; and even aside from that, people tend to grab bits and pieces of ideas that support what they already believe.

So if someone believes in god and the power of pray etc. but they feel that life still isn’t going there way - they might see some value in this ‘reason’. And even if this evil satellite thing is still implausible, a person might take bits of the idea to make their own version about something / someone else blocking prays. It could be 4G radiation, or vaccine microchips, or some other boogieman crap. It all feeds into a persons broader ‘understanding’ of how things could be even if they don’t take in the whole idea.

You and I are basically immune to this particular post. It just looks like total garbage immediately. But it is incorrect and dangerous to think that only ‘idiots’ can be conned or tricked. All it takes is for someone to post ideas on the boundaries of what you understand, with a taste of what you want to hear. That’s what hooks people in. For smart and educated people, that boundary of understanding can be pretty far in - but it still exists, and that’s where the manipulation can still get them.

blind3rdeye,

That’s a view I have for many things. The desire and possibility of, getting more money always distorts and corrupts. It makes pretty much everything worse by rewarding deception, externalised waste, and exploitation.

blind3rdeye,

I notice that 3 looks like a sideways ω, which is the symbol used to represent an ordinal number larger than all finite ordinal numbers.

In other words Valve might see 3 as essentially meaning infinity, and is thus unreachable. No matter how many new versions they make, they can never get to 3.

blind3rdeye,

No one is born knowing what those letters stand for. In fact, people don’t even know what letters or words are when they are born. So obviously there must be a point in each person’s life when they go from not knowing to knowing. That will happen at different time for different people, depending on who they talk to and what their interests are.

If you want to better understand how someone can not know what bdsm stands for, perhaps you should just reflect on something you’ve learnt recently. Anything at all. Just think about how you didn’t know it, but now you do. That’s how to works.

blind3rdeye, (edited )

Too real. I booted up windows last week because I wanted to test something quickly before going to bed… starting it and testing my thing took about 5 mins; but then shutting down took more than half an hour.

blind3rdeye,

It could be that the characters in the movie thought it was about energy, but were mistaken. (But to be honest, having a group of people believe that to be the reason is just as implausible as it actually being the reason - either way it makes no sense and we just have to suspend disbelief.)

blind3rdeye,

Good to hear! My main computer is my desktop, running Mint. (I’m using it right now.) But I also have a Surface Pro 4 that I use for work. It has no problems and works fine on Windows… but I have been wondering if I can move that away from Windows as well. So its encouraging to hear that it has worked for you.

Does Mint have good support for the stylus and touch-screen on the Surface 4? (I imagine the Surface tech might be specialised to Windows a bit, so I wouldn’t be confident those would work immediately in Linux.)

blind3rdeye,

It’s true. I installed Mint on this computer to dual boot with Windows, expecting a gradual experimental transition away from Windows. But it has been months now, and I haven’t used Windows on this computer at all, other than to just test a couple of things for a minute or so.

Switching to Linux wasn’t perfectly smooth. I’ve definitely run into some problems. But the functionality is there, and the problems are mostly about my lack of experience. I doubt I’ll install Windows on any computer ever again. Windows is getting more and more annoying with nags and ads and bloatware, while Linux continues to slowly but steadily improve.

blind3rdeye,

I agree that this is an easy way to try out Linux; but I wouldn’t advice doing it like this if you have intentions to eventually make Linux your main OS. If you’re using Linux in a virtual machine, then it will always feel like it’s another layer of work, another layer of abstraction, another few clicks to get started… it just adds a bit of friction. So although the virtual machine can show you what the OS looks like and how it works etc. The experience of possibly using it as a main OS will be skewed in a negative way by having to set up and run a the virtual machine.

So I’d say virtual machine is ok if you just want to look around for curiosity; but if you have intentions to make it your primary OS, then I reckon go straight to dual boot, and make Linux the default boot option so that the friction is in switching back to Windows rather than in trying the new and unfamiliar OS.

blind3rdeye,

Yeah. Timeshift is good. Fortunately, it is part of the default Mint install, and the Mint ‘getting started’ instructions say to set it up.

I personally needed Timeshift on my second week of using Mint. What happened was that I was that I saw some setting somewhere for linking a google calendar to the calendar app or something like that; and I thought “I don’t really want to see any mention of Google anywhere in the OS, even in a setting that I can just not use”; so I uninstalled the thing that lets you link those accounts… what I didn’t realise is that uninstalling that also uninstalled a heap of critical parts of the Gnome desktop. So after restarting, I had no desktop or anything.

Fortunately, Timeshift is super easy to use, and I fixed it in a few minutes. Easy to break, easy to fix.

blind3rdeye,

Maybe so, but it was still a janky story. A gigantuan struggle, with epic consequences… resolved by deus ex machina.

blind3rdeye,

Ah yes. How fitting for a young new person in the world. A reminder that 2°C of warming above the pre-industrial mean would be catastrophic, but also is a good lower-limit of what to expect based on current intentions.

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