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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
Capcom shows off official video of Devil May Cry 5 on the Steam Deck
27 November 2021 at 10:49 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: GuestIt's not GNU/Linux desktop, and they aren't going to magically make native games available.
as they say, when the service is free, you are the product.
why do you think companies in linux break backward compatibility all the time?
to force companies to pay for techinical support.
i hate to say that, but i think canonical and others are selling US.
want to reach those millions of ubuntu users? want to make sure that your app wont break in our next update? then pay us, because, you know, it would be a shame if anything break, right?

sorry if it sounds like conspiration theory, it is.

Yes it both sounds like and is a conspiracy theory because that is not how reality works. There are no companies that create apps from which the likes of Canonical can blackmail money from. Nor are enterprises paying Red Hat for support due to their systems breaking left and right.

GTA modders behind re3 and reVC fire back in court
21 November 2021 at 5:05 pm UTC

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: psy-q
Quoting: NeoTheFoxAFAIK the repo contained nothing owned or copyrighted by Take-Two, the reverse-engineering effort is clean room [...]

It wasn't clean-room, unfortunately, the team decompiled Take Two/Rockstar's binaries to get there.

In a lawsuit Take-Two has to prove that the ones that uploaded the content actually decompiled the binaries or were aware of it (code being decompiled from binaries).
If X decompiles the binaries, send the code to Y without telling him/her that, Y publish it on, how exactly is Y guilty of something when X only told Y that he/she can do whatever he/she wants with the code received...
Y can't check a copyright claim in the case of a closed sourced code unless Y receive the code. And if X was smart enough to rename some easy to rename things (done with a simple search and replace) you end up in a situation where it's debatable if the code is stolen or not (history show us that more than one person discovered the same thing in same way).
Now if the decompiled code has been patched to fix bug situations changes dramaticaly because it's no longer looking like the original and it's no longer acting like the original... This can easily be explain by the fact that 2 people can think and code in a really similar way, but it's not identical way...
Take-Two has to prove some not easy to prove things and without providing their own code there is no real way to prove things. Once you provided that code in court things can easily go into even more similar situation showing up.

There is also another problem. What % of the code has to match to be considered breaking the law.
There are particular things that are coded in exactly same way (declaring variables, even variable names (some prefer a,b,c; others names, other a1,a2; but you will find code with same variable names doing the same blody thing), that part can't really be considered as breaking the law.
In fact it's open sourced code that you will be surprise to find out that can be found inside products that are being sold and nowhere they admit that they used open sourced code (breaking the license for that open source code. (I've found a browser game that used open sourced code and they were so dumb not to change the hardcode admin password; the admin page was exactly like in the open source code, the hardcoded admin password was the same. Illegal access if someone was going to troll delete players accounts or breaking the open source code license?)

Except of course that in this case X did all the steps (and bragged about it). X is Angelo "aap" Papenhoff that published the GitHub page and here is a YouTube video (he have since changed his username there to X) where he spends 1 hour decompiling a part of GTA and cleaning up the code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22BeuOOERLo. Take Two would have zero problems bringing up evidence like this once the case enters discovery.

GTA modders behind re3 and reVC fire back in court
21 November 2021 at 4:57 pm UTC

Quoting: emphy
Quoting: psy-q
Quoting: NeoTheFoxAFAIK the repo contained nothing owned or copyrighted by Take-Two, the reverse-engineering effort is clean room [...]

It wasn't clean-room, unfortunately, the team decompiled Take Two/Rockstar's binaries to get there.

Clean room or not is irrelevant. Since it requires the original game files, it should fall under fair use.

If it doesn't, it is time to ask pointed questions to the respective law-makers on why it doesn't.

Fair use does not cover this, the project does not fulfil the four statutory factors.

KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system
21 November 2021 at 1:15 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: [Linuxtayshady]I don't want to dumb down Linux for less inexperienced users, but Pop OS or Ubuntu are not good distros for beginners, Linux Mint is because it's made by people who know what they're doing.

You have two companies like System 76 and Canonical behind these distros and there's still so many bugs and issues with them. I would never recommend any GNOME based distro to any beginner, what a joke. Anyone who recommends these distros to beginners has no idea what they're talking about.

Just recommend Linux Mint, that's it.

There was this dumb shift from the community that Pop OS was the new defacto beginner distro and that was a huge mistake IMO. I heard that the developers of Pop OS want to move away from GNOME about time, GNOME3 needs to just die, fork off GNOME2 like Cinnamon did or just make something else. GNOME3 is a catastrophe and needs to be abandoned, and we need new toolkits to replace GTK so we no longer rely in anyway on the abomination that is the GNOME team. They are the worst thing to have ever happened to Linux IMO.

Sorry but that is just useless distro bashing. There is nothing inherently work with either Pop!_OS, Ubuntu or Gnome that makes them unsuitable for beginners, far from it and both Pop and Ubuntu are being successfully used right now by thousands of beginners the world over.

Gnome3 was a disaster at 1.0 but have been quite usable for several years now and while perhaps not perfect, far from "a catastrophe" and doesn't need to be abandoned. Such hyperbole is just silly and does not move any discussion forward.

KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system
21 November 2021 at 1:11 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: Glog78
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: NociferBut I do have one question: what if I intentionally do want to remove a "system critical" package like Xorg or my DE - how do I do it if package managers, both GUI and CLI, prevent me from doing so?
If you intentionally want to delete something, wouldn't you normally do it by, I dunno, using a "delete something" command of some sort, not by trying to trigger the deletion by installing a package? As far as I know, nobody's done anything to the stuff you do when you're trying to delete things.

Well it would happen if you where trying to replace say xfree with xorg or pulse with pipe-wire. Then you would remove what the disto have marked as an essential package and replace it with another which is what the Steam package tried to do here, the main issue of course is that there where no i386 version of the desktop or xorg available so apt replaced it all with nothing.

And that is something that the apt (and possible also yum/dnf/pacman) devs should take a hard look on, if a package have a hard dependency that requires it to remove packages but where the actual dependency doesn't exist it should straight out refuse to perform the action regardless of any "do as I say".

i can say for pacman --> unsatisfied dependencies are nearly impossible to install ...

I should perhaps have worded that differently. APT will not continue with a missing dependency either, the bug that happened was a bit more complex than that. What I really meant that the package manager should detect that a dependency wants to remove essential packages without replacing those with something else.

Now this is an extreme edge case, but since edge cases do sometimes happens which LTT is evidence of, if I was an APT developer I would have gotten hold of that broken steam package to see why things went the way they did and analysed if there was a way to detect it and avoid it altogether.

KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system
21 November 2021 at 12:33 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: NociferBut I do have one question: what if I intentionally do want to remove a "system critical" package like Xorg or my DE - how do I do it if package managers, both GUI and CLI, prevent me from doing so?
If you intentionally want to delete something, wouldn't you normally do it by, I dunno, using a "delete something" command of some sort, not by trying to trigger the deletion by installing a package? As far as I know, nobody's done anything to the stuff you do when you're trying to delete things.

Well it would happen if you where trying to replace say xfree with xorg or pulse with pipe-wire. Then you would remove what the disto have marked as an essential package and replace it with another which is what the Steam package tried to do here, the main issue of course is that there where no i386 version of the desktop or xorg available so apt replaced it all with nothing.

And that is something that the apt (and possible also yum/dnf/pacman) devs should take a hard look on, if a package have a hard dependency that requires it to remove packages but where the actual dependency doesn't exist it should straight out refuse to perform the action regardless of any "do as I say".

KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system
21 November 2021 at 12:19 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: AussieEeveeI agree in part. the CLI is not intended for newbies, but Linus was able to find a guide online and managed to bypass the protection offered to him by the gui, with only a single command and a verify command.

Adding protections doesn't make this dumbed down like Windows. It just adds protections.

Actually this raises a good point: what does the apt change do that would have made anything different for a youtuber who wanted page views? Type this, then type that. It doesn't matter if it's one line or ten - he would have followed everything written. So the change to apt? Yeah, wouldn't have done anything in this case.

Also, the original error message from the gui was exactly stopping critical packages from being removed! The original gui error message was stopping the very thing that was then done explicitly from the command line.

Well the problem was that the error from the Pop Shop was presented in such a way that Linus believed the problem to be with the Pop Shop and not with the Steam package. I think that is something that we can put down as a hard fact.

The problem is how we solve that misconception, will a more helpful error message in the shop help? Perhaps not, but then again a better message like the one KDE uses here (which matches what I requested in the earlier thread) will hopefully prevent a lot more of others in the same situation even though it would not have prevented Linus from continuing.

Because IMHO the major issue behind the LTT fiasco is that he (and his fellow Windows users) have a prejudice against Linux in that the graphical shops are unstable / don't work and that you have to use the terminal to get anything to work in Linux. That is not something that a new warning message will solve, at least not initially, perhaps on a long term though.

I think that it's important that we don't lock ourselves down in a nirvana fallacy where we will only accept a change if it solves 100%, every improvement is an improvement.

Wolfire versus Valve antitrust lawsuit gets dismissed
21 November 2021 at 11:59 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: TheSHEEEPAs a developer, if I sell something on a storefront, I'm fine paying the maintenance cost of what I actually use and a bit extra for the storefront's profit - but anything beyond that I'd not be okay with.

That is one of those things that sounds better in theory that they work in practice, e.g people tend to make the same arguments for paying taxes that they would like to pay taxes only for X and not for X+Y+Z when always ends up in situations like the US where nobody are willing to pay for infrastructure such as roads and bridges but every one uses them anyway so they tend to just disintegrate until they collapse in some huge accident.

E.g lets say that you don't want to pay for using the steam discussions pages, then your users will simply use some other games pages to discuss your game anyway (like how you'll find lots of PS4 and Epic games users using the Steam discussions pages right now). Or that when the cost of all services are no longer distributed equally over the entire user base then the extra cost per service will be much higher so if you really want to use 100% of the services that Valve have then you'll end up paying perhaps 40% or 50% instead of the 30% flat fee.

Wolfire versus Valve antitrust lawsuit gets dismissed
21 November 2021 at 11:43 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: pbApparently it pays off to be consistent.

Well here it does since one of the arguments was that Steam took 30% due to their monopoly position which was easily countered by the fact that the cut was 30% even back when Steam was a tiny lemonade stand at the street curb.

Wolfire versus Valve antitrust lawsuit gets dismissed
21 November 2021 at 11:41 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: TermyAsk basically all "premium" car manufacturers, many OEMs, Apple, furniture brands and so on - if you step outside of highly competetive and price sensitive areas like sustenance or low-cost/noname brands, 10% profit margin is all but "unheard of"...

Yeah we don't even have to go that far, Microsoft have a profit margin of about 40%. But I do think that one part of the problem in determining if the cut is reasonable or not is that we don't know the financials of Valve, we only know that they "make a hefty profit" but not how much and from where since they not only operate a store but also sells their own games and hardware.