Here’s a made up example. Suppose you have a choice between compressing a game:

• to 10 GiB, and it takes 2min to unpack it in a certain machine
• to 3 GiB, and it takes 8min to unpack it in a certain machine

The download size difference of 7 GiB only costs me another 60-80s to download as long as the Steam servers are serving well. So funny enough the first option would be better for me.

some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales

Name and shame:

• Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen
• Pitchbook‘s Eric Bellomo

What a stupid idea. These forced comparisons to consoles lead people way astray.

Obviously the strategy of a closed ecosystem vendor who can expect to sell new software for each generation of hardware wont at all work for the vendor of a device in an open ecosystem who must expect people to play their pre-existing libraries, and who must expect that people could buy their hardware for literally any other computer use than the software they sell.

Hey mild necro after a week, but it seems to be happening already. The new beta is 64bit! https://lemmy.ca/post/55858408

Since you mentioned GOG, another relevant thing about them is their game preservation initiatives. Games that get the Good Old Game stamp from them get some engineering effort to be packaged in a runnable way.

If you still have an MBR you have bigger issues. Working with ESPs in a GPT partitioned disk is much more stable.

Ah yes it looks like they did say that support for 32bit Windows is stopping soon:

• The Verge - Steam is dropping Windows 32-bit support in 2026
• Tom’s Hardware - Valve to drop Steam support for 32-bit Windows versions next year
• Valve FAQ - Windows 32-bit OS Support

Thanks I had missed this completely!

I assume this is the first step for them to move the client itself to being a 64bit executable later.

That’s a good sign, that Valve is moving at least the runtimes to 64bit only. Maybe that means the client is under similar scrutiny internally. Recently when Fedora was discussing dropping more 32bit libraries Steam came up as a big issue.

The bad config file is somewhere in the middle of the chain of causality.

They changed database permissions, revealing a dormant bug in a database query, leading to config files being generated badly with duplicate lines, making them too large for intake by the bot detection service, which didn’t have good input validation and made the process panic instead, ruining the service.

I thought Deep Rock Galactic was PvE anyway

That reminds me of something similar my ISP said. “Don’t be afraid of the bandwidth”, if you give your customers more bandwidth they aren’t actually going to fill it, they’ll still run roughly the same downloads just more quickly.

Here it’s at 12:10 in this video archive of their talk at RIPE: https://ripe84.ripe.net/archives/video/797/

And here when they gave the same talk at SwiNOG they also mentioned how their network ring in Wintherthur is still pretty much equally loaded after 10G and 25G home connections became available: https://youtu.be/wXmJCzMeIBo?t=1195

It may act on the whole market, but it doesn’t have the same impact on every OEM.

It’s a bigger issue for Valve than the console competition, who have established supply chains potentially with fixed prices for certain terms or at least more significant volume discounts, and proprietary compatibility hurdles binding their customers, so they can sell hardware at a loss if they want to.

If Valve sells the computers at a loss they run the risk of people buying them for other uses, without generating corresponding Steam profits.

I originally thought the Steam Deck would be enough for that, but it appears not yet. Maybe the combined share can move the needle

Probably like 30 out of the 200. It really is a ridiculously common name.

Edit: I just looked it up, 20% of South Koreans are called Kim.

Yeah I don’t know why anyone entertains the idea.

Lifting things to LEO still costs around 2000 USD per kg, even with modern cheaper prices thanks to reusable rockets. For a datacenter presumably you’d have to go higher where you have less drag, because you can’t keep doing burns for repositioning. So that sounds like it would already make everything so much more cost prohibitive. And the vibrations of a start are probably also not trivial, if your components are all hardened instead of off the shelf that will cost you more too. I see no world where that’s more economical than buying some cheap land in flyover USA and have truckers drive things there.

Regarding maintenance there are some approaches where you build more redundancy ahead of time and then let broken things rest in place. At least that was the spiel an Azure evangelist gave us once when I was an intern at a webdev shop (in 2012). But still, once enough breaks down (I think it was a third of components) they would usually then exchange an entire container. So yeah still not great for space.

The energy I don’t know about really, but at least it doesn’t sound impossible that it could be decent for solar, as long as you can deal with more and more holes in your solar sails over time. At least you wont have to deal with diurnal cycles I guess. But the heating is really the killer issue imho. You’d have to radiate off heat in a massive scale. Heat management for the ISS is fairly complex already. I don’t see how they would efficiently do this on a 5 GW scale. And once again a component level issue: all your cooling from the rack out has to be set up for it. No more fans local to systems, everything is heatpipes that need to connect to the entire spacecraft somehow.

Haha does this mean they removed only the BypassNRO script, but not the underlying regkey?

That was actually preinstalled by IT at my workplace! It’s a pretty nice little archiver. Seconded.

I realise you have to be somewhat off the rocker to be a billionaire CEO, but Pat is showing more of that than I expected here.

To make the desktop experience bearable: AltTab, Forklift, Rectangle, Ukelele, MonitorControl, Amphetamine, Firefox, Thunderbird, qView and duti to set the latter three up as the defaults.

As a package manager I’m pretty happy with nix-darwin, now I get all the CLI tools there, and what isn’t packaged, like wireshark for example, I get through my nix-controlled homebrew.

Coming from a Linux userland you might want to replace some coreutil packages with their GNU variants. I ran into one case where the GNU grep was much faster than the BSD version preinstalled in macOS for example.

What I haven’t found a good solution to yet is Filesystem support. Both NTFS and ext4 are missing. I currently have a Linux VM just for that. I think Paragon sells a driver, have been meaning to look into it more, but haven’t.

Edit: To be fair to macOS the App called Preview is a pretty good PDF reader in my view.

PS: If you ever need to use dd on macOS, be aware that there are /dev/rdisk handles instead of /dev/disk for the un-buffered access. Its significantly faster for dd shoveling.

PPS: You will probably have to turn off what they call “natural” scroll. macOS inverts the default for some reason.

No, 27,38 years

when I look at Gnome I don’t doubt for a second where I want to be

Yeah me neither, from the other side, lol