AnyOldName3

It makes sense, but it also makes sense to design society so that situations where it’s helpful happen as rarely as possible. If some people are predisposed to being a good firefighter, it doesn’t negate the fact that you don’t want buildings to catch fire in the first place, so you still want to teach children not to play with matches, teach adults not to keep lighter fuel near their heater, and ban companies from selling combustible cladding to insulate tower blocks. Prevention is better than cure. You just then have a load of people who aren’t great at being anything except a firefighter, ready for fires that never happen, and under the current system, forced either into jobs they’re bad at, or into chronic stress to get consistent productivity.

As a counterpoint, I’ve had Ubuntu’s installer and grub’s updater overwrite and break Windows’ boot files several times, but never had the opposite happen (I’ve had both destroy themselves, though). Thankfully, I know how to rebuild the necessary parts of a Windows install, so it’s never been a catastrophe, but it’s irritating to see what’s always been the source of the problems I’ve had be held up as infallible. Possibly this is a problem unique to Ubuntu - I’m happy to blame Canonical - so maybe it could be entirely sidestepped with other distros.

It also doesn’t help that once you’ve paid the large fee for the Pro version, it doesn’t actually guarantee any support if you encounter a bug. You get access to a different issue tracker, and might get a Unity employee to confirm that the bug exists after a couple of months (and maybe close it as a duplicate, then reopen it as not a duplicate when the fix for the other bug doesn’t help, then reclose it as a duplicate when it turns out the fix for the other bug also doesn’t fix the other bug, and at the end of a multi-month process, there still being a bug with no indication an engineer’s looked at it).

Anyway, I’m glad to no longer be working for a company that uses Unity.

It’s easy to get pressured into thinking it’s your responsibility. There’s also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it’s what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.

There was an EU-wide one that gota lot of its funding redirected to AI stuff recently that you might be thinking of.

No, that is an entirely unrelated bad decision. It being okay to not have a popup to opt out of secure boot when it does its one job and notices you’re about to run insecure code in kernel mode doesn’t make every other user-hostile thing Microsoft ever does magically okay.

It’s upstream GRUB that’s decided the older GRUB versions are insecure and not to be trusted. Microsoft just propagated that to machines running distros that weren’t shipping patched GRUB builds yet. Up-to-date Debian wouldn’t be affected provided that they downstreamed fixes quickly.

https://fedia.io/m/linux@lemmy.ml/t/1111595/-/comment/6916699 says that Debian’s GRUB wasn’t affected, but another part of the boot sequence was.

You can’t trust users to make informed decisions about cybersecurity as most users don’t have the necessary background knowledge, so won’t think beyond this popup is annoying me and has a button to make it go away and I am smart and therefore immune to malware. Microsoft don’t want Windows to have the reputation for being infested with malware like it used to have, and users don’t want their bank details stolen. If something’s potentially going to be a bad idea, it’s better to only give the decision to people capable of making it an informed decision. That’s why we don’t let children opt into surgery or decide whether to have ice cream for dinner, and have their parents decide instead.

The comment you’re quoting was replying to someone suggesting a warning popup, and saying it would be a bad idea, rather than suggesting the secure boot UEFI option should be taken away. You need at least a little bit more awareness of the problem to know to toggle that setting.

Mono died because Microsoft bought it out and used parts of it along with parts of regular .NET to make the modern cross-platform MIT-licenced .NET implementation that’s used both on Windows and elsewhere. There’s no need for an open source third party .NET implementation if the first party one is already open source.

It does ask, but often the Yay, thanks for changing my setting that I didn’t ask you to change button is much more prominent than the Wtf I didn’t ask for this put it back how it was button, so people think they’re being told rather than asked and just confirm it without realising they had a choice. Also, a lot of people just click the Next/OK button without reading and are surprised by the consequences. It’s not a major difference than just changing the setting of people don’t realise they’re being asked to opt in and can therefore opt out, but it is a bit of a difference.

A vote for neoliberals is a vote to not have fascism for four more years. America’s voting system doesn’t allow the never-have-fascism votes to be pooled with the delay-fascism votes, so unless there’s a decent chance for a mass swing of voters from delay-fascism to never-have-fascism, trying to encourage a small-scale swing only makes immediate fascism more likely by weakening the only thing with a chance to delay it.

If the plan is to try and encourage the Democrats to have primaries that actually have the power to move the party left, now is not the time to withhold a vote in protest as there’s a good chance that even if it did convince them, there’d never be another election that wasn’t rigged so they’d lose it no matter how popular they were.

It doesn’t necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don’t have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that’s potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it’s something tests detect, it’s probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it’s viable to just ignore it. If it’s something tests don’t detect, it’s just as easy to ignore whether it’s because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.

The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there’s the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it’s now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone’s so tired from crunch that they’re less productive than if they worked normal hours.

Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.

You can lose trademarks, but this is a copyright issue. You don’t have to defend copyright to keep it.

I think you’re reading things into my comment that I intentionally didn’t put in it. I’m just making the point that games already don’t get to control the amount of hardship the player experiences because some players start out better than others, and some improve faster than others. If a game has a fixed difficulty level, there’ll always be people who find it easier than the developers intended, and people who’d still be unable to finish it with thousands of hours of practice (and plenty of people will play for ten or twenty hours before deciding they don’t have time to find out if they’d eventually get good enough). On the other hand, if a game’s got several modes, then there’s a good chance a player will pick a difficulty level that’s too easy or hard for them, so it could make the problem worse, but, critically, it wouldn’t be what introduced it in the first place.

Regarding your point about Animal Farm, it’s a bit more like deciding not to read an encrypted copy of the book. It might be a trivial Caesar cipher that could be easily broken, and you could be reading about some animals being more equal than others in a few seconds, or it could be modern AES that can’t be broken before the heat death of the universe, or it could be anything in between. If you don’t quickly make enough progress to see that you’re actually going to get to read it, then you’ve no way to know whether it’s seemingly insurmountable or literally insurmountable.

If someone’s saying they don’t have time to get good at Dark Souls, they’re agreeing with you that not everything has to be for everyone, and they’ve decided that Dark Souls isn’t for them. They don’t have to be happy about that, though, especially if they’ve had to pay for the game to find out.

Different people have different skill levels, so will experience different levels of hardship. Someone who’d played every Dark Souls game ten times (which isn’t that rare) would find Elden Ring much easier than someone who’d never played a soulslike before. If the difficultly could be scaled to normalise for that, then everyone would have a more consistent experience closer to the intended one. It’s probably not remotely practical to achieve that in every case, though.

They might be. They’re clearly a major shareholder in Boeing.

In the olden days, online games didn’t have servers run by the publisher, they came with a separate program users would run to host their own server. Things like Minecraft still work that way, although I think there are servers run by Microsoft too now. For some games, this will be more complicated than others, but it’s not impossible.

Circumventing DRM is illegal under the DMCA, but the DMCA has an exception saying you’re allowed to ignore parts of the DMCA if it’s for purposes of interoperability between different computer systems. It’s that exception that makes emulators legal in the first place. However, there’s no case law setting a precedent as to whether the DRM circumvention prohibition or interoperability exception wins when both apply.

That means that the decryption is in a grey area if it’s part of an emulator, but definitely illegal if it isn’t.

We also don’t know if this is an argument Nintendo relied on to stop Yuzu. Their initial court documents claimed things like emulators being totally illegal and only invented for piracy, which weren’t true, and they settled out of court, so the public can’t see what the final nail in the coffin was. It could simply be that they’d make Yuzu’s position expensive to defend with spurious delays until they were bankrupt or shut down and gave them all their money, which doesn’t require Nintendo to be legally in the right.

Not long before this, Dolphin’s Steam release was cancelled because Nintendo asked Valve to block it, so the Dolphin team double checked they were entirely above board with their lawyers. Despite Dolphin containing the decryption keys from a real Wii, and using them to decrypt Wii games, they were confident it wasn’t at risk. The keys are an example of a so-called illegal number, but they’re generally believed to not actually be illegal (hence the Wikipedia article about them featuring several examples). The decryption should be safe as the lawyers thought that if push came to shove, the interoperability exception would beat the DRM circumvention prohibition.

Look at the wheels to check for bogies. A train or tram without bogies will come to a stop. One with bogies will multi-track drift until the tracks get too far apart.

Really, this is the games’ fault, at least if they were released in the last ten years. That’s how long Documents has been a subdirectory of OneDrive by default. If you’ve built software that can’t handle that gracefully and released it since, that’s just negligent. It’s not like the windows documentation doesn’t tell you places that wouldn’t have this problem where you can store machine-specific data.