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Well this sure is interesting, Valve have announced some flaws in their Steam Hardware Survey that caused cyber cafes to over-count users.

Here's what Valve said in full:

The latest Steam Hardware Survey incorporates a number of fixes that address over counting of cyber cafe customers that occurred during the prior seven months.

Historically, the survey used a client-side method to ensure that systems were counted only once per year, in order to provide an accurate picture of the entire Steam user population. It turns out, however, that many cyber cafes manage their hardware in a way that was causing their customers to be over counted.

Around August 2017, we started seeing larger-than-usual movement in certain stats, notably an increase in Windows 7 usage, an increase in quad-core CPU usage, as well as changes in CPU and GPU market share. This period also saw a large increase in the use of Simplified Chinese. All of these coincided with an increase in Steam usage in cyber cafes in Asia, whose customers were being over counted in the survey.

It took us some time to root-cause the problem and deploy a fix, but we are confident that, as of April 2018, the Steam Hardware Survey is no longer over counting users.

It's good to see Valve be open about this and get it fixed, as many people suspected issues for a while now and it's interesting to see some validation of certain theories about cyber cafe use. The funny thing is, someone mentioned this to me on reddit today and I didn't actually think it would have been such a big issue, so it's fun to be wrong.

It's also interesting to note, that according to what Valve said, you're only supposed to be counted once a year, although many of us have seen an issue where it will come up many times within Windows or while using Steam with Wine and rarely on the native Linux client. For all we know, this could have been part of the issue that's now solved.

We will be tracking it on our dedicated page. It certainly will be interesting to see what happens in future. What are your thoughts?

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Steam, Valve
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wvstolzing May 10, 2018
Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: devnullIt's more common then you think. There's a reason NVIDIA actively tries to prevent such installs.
Why would they care enough to do that? Do you mean that they don't actively support them?

IIRC, nvidia supports that feature only on their 'pro' models (the Quadro, etc.). The reason why it takes a convoluted hack is that consumer models hide the necessary info, which is by design on nvidia's part.
tonR May 10, 2018
Quoting: wvstolzingCan you boot into a full desktop environment with that? I thought PXE boot did just enough to get a barebones boot image from a TFTP server, only to start an install on the local system. Just to try it out, I once installed Fedora on my laptop with a setup like that (PXE boot into tiny installer over TFTP, download everything else over http from a Fedora mirror), and I thought it was neat -- but booting into a complete system, and *using it* like that would be considerably neat-er!

I'm curious because I eventually want to set up a couple of thin clients around the house, connected to my main desktop, once my other ancient computers kick the bucket entirely. So far I've tried multiseat (which is pretty trivial to set up thanks to systemd), though that's limited to the number of graphics outputs one has; VNC works ok with a bit of pulseaudio twiddling to get accompanying audio, but it's really slow.

...a quick google search suggests that even Raspberry Pi 3s are capable of this. hmmm...

Sorry about the wildly off-topic post, though. Slightly more on topic: 'cyber cafe's were huge in Turkey in the early 00s; I had Starcraft-addicted cousins who practically lived in those places. They're all but extinct nowadays though.
I think you're misinterpret my comment. I was talking about;

Steam hwsurvey which related to;
cyber cafe (CC) which related also with;
PXE/network booting system which was/is used by some CCs especially;
50++ computers CCs where almost all CCs using;
Windows.

I think you should seek help on GoL forum here. Some GoL readers may help you with your problem(s). Just open a new thread/topic there.
MayeulC May 12, 2018
Quoting: wvstolzing
Quoting: tonRYes PXE, most of big cyber cafe (50++ PCs) use this system. Easy to maintain. But, if BSOD..... :'( Good luck to employees. :D

FYI: Some of my friends worked/working in cyber cafe. That's why I know some 'stories'.

Can you boot into a full desktop environment with that? I thought PXE boot did just enough to get a barebones boot image from a TFTP server, only to start an install on the local system. Just to try it out, I once installed Fedora on my laptop with a setup like that (PXE boot into tiny installer over TFTP, download everything else over http from a Fedora mirror), and I thought it was neat -- but booting into a complete system, and *using it* like that would be considerably neat-er!

I'm curious because I eventually want to set up a couple of thin clients around the house, connected to my main desktop, once my other ancient computers kick the bucket entirely. So far I've tried multiseat (which is pretty trivial to set up thanks to systemd), though that's limited to the number of graphics outputs one has; VNC works ok with a bit of pulseaudio twiddling to get accompanying audio, but it's really slow.

...a quick google search suggests that even Raspberry Pi 3s are capable of this. hmmm...

Sorry about the wildly off-topic post, though. Slightly more on topic: 'cyber cafe's were huge in Turkey in the early 00s; I had Starcraft-addicted cousins who practically lived in those places. They're all but extinct nowadays though.

I' ve done such setups in the past, it works quite well: PXE serves the kernel (&initramfs) trough tftp, the root filesystem is mounted trough NFS.

You just have to mount a couple directories on a local disk or a tmpfs (usually things like /var or /var/run, /tmp, etc; I don't recall exactly).

Though most likely those cyber-cafés load a grub-like imager trough PXE, I've seen some of these in the wild. They can check the hard disk, install a new system image, etc. Pair it with wake on LAN and multicast to quickly upgrade your whole infrastructure.
wvstolzing May 12, 2018
Quoting: MayeulCI' ve done such setups in the past, it works quite well: PXE serves the kernel (&initramfs) trough tftp, the root filesystem is mounted trough NFS.

Thanks, this gives me something to go on.
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