Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: sbolokanovLinux is an OS made for people who want power. If one doesn't want power, one shouldn't be playing with it.

This piece got me thinking... Why is Valve still supporting Linux, at this point, if it all comes to this?

Because their bribery deal with Microsoft must be continually renewed, and the threat of Linux must remain to keep the monopoly stronghold money flowing.

I'm sure I must have known something about this, but I've lost track. What deal?

I think he is referring to Linux being a leverage to prevent Microsoft from locking Windows to the Windows store only, like they wanted to do with Win8, back then.

I don't think that counts as a deal, let alone bribery. "Back off, I'm packing" is not a bribe.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: HoriWasn't "it" the neutral one?

"It" is for things (and most animals, I guess), while "they" is for persons with either unknown gender or where it doesn't matter.

I've got a question too, though. Please take it as what it is - purely an interest in the language and its current usage ("they" for persons wasn't a thing when I learned English in school...). I'm not aware of any gender "unusualities" (trans, demi/diverse gender or whatever) of Ethan Lee and think they're male. If that's right, how "usual" is it to use singular they/them in such a case? What would be the wild guess of native speakers which percentage of people would use these words in such a case?

Seems to be a dialect thing, and rapidly changing at that. Up until recently I'd say it was quite uncommon in North America, but may have been more common fairly far in the past, and has recently fast become more common again.
Liam seems to be saying it's more common in British English; Liam's British and I'm not, and I have no reason to disbelieve it.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: sbolokanovLinux is an OS made for people who want power. If one doesn't want power, one shouldn't be playing with it.

This piece got me thinking... Why is Valve still supporting Linux, at this point, if it all comes to this?

Because their bribery deal with Microsoft must be continually renewed, and the threat of Linux must remain to keep the monopoly stronghold money flowing.

I'm sure I must have known something about this, but I've lost track. What deal?

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Quoting: aokami

Quoting: ShabbyXIs it just me, or are these numbers surprisingly low? You would think there are many more PC gamers. Anyone knows how these numbers compare to playstation for example?

I'd mention other platforms, Epic Games launcher/store with a lot of free games over the last year alone.

I don't see how relevant that can be given that these numbers are a record for Steam.

Steam's numbers have continued to go up--we can speculate that they'd have gone up even more if it weren't for Epic and Stadia and whatever, but I remember just a few years ago the new record being around 15 million, not 25 million. Other stores are clearly not causing Steam to hurt in any significant way.

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Quoting: ShabbyXIs it just me, or are these numbers surprisingly low? You would think there are many more PC gamers. Anyone knows how these numbers compare to playstation for example?

There are many more PC gamers--that's just the number that were all online, on Steam, at the same time.

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Quoting: HoriWhat I mean when I say "it's like racism" is that if you hate a product just because it's Microsoft, is just the same as hating a person just because he's black.

Hating someone based on ethnicity/colour/etc no matter how good-hearted and/or respectable they might be, is psychologically the same process as hating a product no matter how good it is just because it's made by a certain company.
In those cases, the hate starts from the moment the decided factor is known (ethnicity / company) and before futher details (personality / usefullness) even enters the equation.
They both have the same psychological root.

Sure, the effect is not the same. Obviously hating a company is not nearly as bad as hating an individual - and doing it does not mean it's directed at people (or at least not any more than the decision-makers). But that was not my point. My point was the diagnostic, not the symptom.
Maybe I was just not clear with my statement.

Still an error. It's not about the product. Nobody's hating the product, they're just hating (and more importantly, mistrusting) the company. That mistrust is based on a long track record of untrustworthiness. If a con man wants to sell you a bridge and you refuse because they're a con man, it's not because you hate bridges, it's because you think the con man is going to cheat you. And if your enemy is selling perfectly good chocolate cakes and you refuse to buy one, it's not because you hate chocolate cakes, it's because you don't want to give your enemy money.

So clearly, if someone who was OK with Github before is now against Github because Microsoft owns it, it's not because they have changed their feelings about the inherent nature of Github. It is because they distrust Microsoft and so fear that Microsoft will use Github in a baneful way, and so it's better to get out from under any lockin or whatever that they might impose. And it's because they hate Microsoft and want MS to fail to make money or dominate markets.

Your analogy is utterly wrong, and it leads to completely mistaken and counterproductive prescriptions. Taking you seriously means letting companies, political parties and other organizations get away with anything and never calling them to account. It means buying more products from a company after their milk with Malamine poisoned your children.

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Quoting: HoriHating something just because it is owned by Microsoft is not very reasonable. And to go even further I find it to be very similar to racism except it's directed at companies instead of "races".

No. This is fundamentally wrong on a stack of levels, and indeed a somewhat offensive accusation.

First: Corporations are not persons, whatever their people may have managed to shoehorn into our legal systems. They are not the kind of entities that can bear rights, let alone equal ones. There is nothing wrong with hating them or being prejudiced against them either as a whole category or one by one. It isn't like racism any more than hating Harlequin Romances, or some particular Harlequin Romance, is like racism. People get equal rights, people should not be discriminated against on various bases, corporations do. not. count.

Second: Corporations are led by individual people and have different institutional cultures. It is possible to assess both the individual leaders and tendencies in the institutional cultures. So when it comes to deciding to hate a company, it is much more like deciding to hate an individual; you may hate a company because you assess its leaders as evil people, or you may hate a company because it seems to consistently do lousy things due to general policies and approaches, even if various different people are involved.

Third: Corporations are entities which have in common an objective to suck profits out of the world for their shareholders and top executives while giving as little as possible in return, whether to customers, employees or the countries they are embedded in. There is some wiggle room for style, but if they are publicly traded and large that wiggle room is small--to the extent that a corporation could be said to have a "personality", all of them almost inevitably have a psychopathic one. Technically, corporations can't be "evil", or even "amoral", because that kind of category just doesn't really apply to a legal fiction any more than "rights" or "racism". But to the extent that a corporation's actions can be mapped to anything "likeable" or "hateable", any given one is far more likely to be worthy of hate than liking. Disallowing negative references to things dedicated to institutionalized psychopathy is a bad idea.

Fourth: Microsoft in specific is in my opinion probably not that much more hateworthy than an average giant corporation . . . right now. But it is still maintaining a monopoly, which is inherently a bad thing. And anyone who knows Microsoft's history at all well is aware that it certainly used to be about as evil as they come. In the old days, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer did masses of things that were treacherous, probably illegal, and very bad for technology all at the same time, in order to gain and maintain their monopoly on desktop computing and office suites and try for the browser. Some argue that Bill has changed, but in those days he was an evil man. And they spread a vile institutional culture through the company, such that you could pretty much count on Microsoft's actions to be sneaky, underhanded, aggressive, and calculated to enhance their monopoly by damaging computing and consumers. Microsoft was about as evil as it is possible for a corporation to be without actually promoting infant mortality (like Nestle with baby formula in the Third World). So I think for those of us who have been around long enough to remember, you should cut us some slack for being slow to forgive. And if you're too young to remember and/or don't know much about their shenanigans from back then, you should just bloody well trust those of us who do know. It's not like they've ever done anything much to make up for those days.

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Voxels are one of those odd things that became retro despite never having managed to be current in the first place.

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Well. I hope it gets some LÖVE.

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Quoting: dannielloHmmm... I think that they missed the point. "Real" PC game console (Linux or Windows - do not matter) - will be too expensive for "average" KFC consumer.

But... Some potato based PC could be quite affordable (for example based on Raspberry Pi). What is needed? Computer capable enough to start browser - so almost everything nowadays. Unfortunately streaming services like GeForce NOW and Stadia require commercial, proprietary and spying Chrome browser. License for installing Chrome could be probably quite expensive if Google realizes that they could earn on it - probably they will force manufacturer to use not Linux but fully optimized for Google "telemetry" ChromeOS or Android.... Open-source Chromium could be the solution...

Raspberry Pi could handle start some old console emulators plus some small indie games "natively" on Linux. All other AAA games - access via streaming services like GeForce NOW website.

But a cheap potato wouldn't run hot enough to do the gimmick.

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