As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released …

I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren’t a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).

Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam’ s DRM didn’t do that.

The HL2 disc installer didn’t require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.

You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.

Steam wasn’t always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.

Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.

Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.

They aren’t trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).

The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.

For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.

The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.

As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can’t give it to Epic because they don’t want it.

If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.

Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.

The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.

Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.

It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.

Thats two hundred years and would cover the end of Plantagenet reign and the Tudor era.

Henry VIII reign happened during that period, at the beginning of your time period everyone would be catholic and at the end Queen Mary of Scotts was executed because the idea of a Catholic on the throne was unthinkable.

The UK is littered with castles and estates, normally they focus on specific historic events which happened at that location.

Nvidia drivers don’t tend to be as performant under linux.

With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.

Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.

Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.

Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.

AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).

The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of “Nvidia optimised” games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce “good” vulkan calls.

Wikipedia lists all 12 subs as having Rolls Royce Pressured Water Reactors.

Your PWR reuse idea is is kind of where Rolls Royce is looking to go with Small Modular Reactors (https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx).

I suspect refurbishing decades old PWR reactors would be far more expensive than just building new ones, for example a SpaceX Merlin engine costs $1 million and a Blue Origin BE-4 costs $15 million. Nasa argued it would be ‘cheaper’ to reuse Shuttle components for the Space Launch System (SLS). Refurbishing Shuttle RS-25 engines has cost Nasa $50 million dollars per engine, restarting a production line is costing $100 million for each new RS-25 engine.

Tactic developed by Wagnar.

The create a plan with fixed waypoints for a squad to run. They plan for 5-8 squads to run the route at set intervals.

The idea is each squad exposes the Ukrainian position so the next squad knows where to attack. By sending so many squads in a short space of time the Ukrainian position is overwhelmed.

Wagner would plan to have the first 4-7 squads made up of convict units with minimal training, with a trained well equipped squad operating as a reserve. The idea being as soon as a Ukrainian position looked to be close to failure the reserve is dispatched.

Fundamentally everyone apart from the well trained reserve exists to soak up bullets and explosives. They are “meat”.

The Russian army had “well” trained battalions, as those battalions are attrited it would shrink them down to maintain effectiveness.

With Wagner’s success they backfilled the battalions with convict and mobilisation soliders. Those soliders are used following the tactic above with the original remnants of the battalion representing the well trained reserve.

This is how Russia solved their inability to train new soliders

SpaceX are launching 26-52 satellites at a time and have sustained 3 launches a week for most of the year.

The satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit, without constant thrust, atmospheric drag will force them to re enter earths atmosphere within a few months. This means they aren’t adding to junk in space.

Unlike Nasa, ULA, Arriannespace, RoscosMos, etc… SpaceX have always performed 2nd Stage Deorbit burns, so they aren’t adding to Space junk by launching either.

The Low Earth Orbit is to ensure low latency and the need for constant thrust means the satellites have a short life expectancy by design. That is why SpaceX fought to keep the satellites as cheap as possible (e.g. $250k)

First stage booster reuse and fairing reuse means the majority of the launch cost is the second stage ($15 million).

The whole lot is privately funded

SpaceX have funded it privately. It apparently started operating at a profit this year.

If you read the reports…

Normally JPL outsource their Mars mission hardware to Lockheed Martin. For some reason they have decided to do Mars Sample Return in house. The reports argue JPL hasn’t built the necessary in house experience and should have worked with LM.

Secondly JPL is suffering a staff shortage which is affecting other projects and the Mars Sample Return is making the problem worse.

Lastly if an organisation stops performing an action it “forgets” how to do it. You can rebuild the capability but it takes time.

A team arbitrary declaring they are experts and suddenly decideding they will do it is one that will have to relearn skills/knowledge on a big expensive high profile project. The project will either fail (and be declared a success) or masses of money will be spent to compensate for the teams learning.

Either situation is not ideal

The GAO has performed an annual review of the Space Launch System every year since 2014 and switched to reviewing the Artemis program in 2019.

Each year the GAO points out Nasa isn’t tracking any costs and Nasa argues with the GAO about the costs they assign. Then the GAO points out Nasa has no concrete plan to reduce costs, Nasa then goes nu’uh (see the articles cost reduction “objectives”).

The last two reports have focused on the RS-25 engine, last time the GAO was unhappy because an engine cost Nasa $100 million and Nasa had just granted a development contract to reduce the cost of the engine.

However if you took the headline cost of the contract and split it over planned engines it was greater than the desired cost savings. Nasa response was development costs don’t count.

Congress reviews GAO reports and decides to give SLS more money.

The other person was just wrong.

Large scale Hydrogen generation isn’t generated in a fossil free way, Hydrogen can be generated is a green way but the infrastructure isn’t there to support SLS.

Hydrogen is high ISP (miles per gallon) by rubbish thrust (engine torque).

This means SLS only works with Solid Rocket Boosters, these are highly toxic and release green house contributing material into the upper atmosphere. I suspect you would find Falcon 9/Starship are less polluting as a result.

Lastly the person implies SLS could be fueled by space sources (e.g. the moon).

SLS is a 2.5 stage rocket, the boosters are ditched in Earths Atmosphere and the first stage ditched at the edge of space. The current second stage doesn’t quite make low earth orbit.

So someone would have to mine materials on the moon and ship them back. This would be far more expensive than producing hydrogen on Earth.

Hydrogen on the moon makes sense if your in lunar orbit, not from Earth.

I think its a self burn.

Person has never been in a relationship and so has no ex to photograph

@ergoplato I didn’t suggest that.

Personally I don’t think its ego. I think you have two issues.

The first is people go through stages learning DevOps. Stage 1 has people deploy a CI because its cool, they build a few basic pipelines and then 90% of people get bored. The 2nd stage is people start extending those pipelines, it results in really complex pipelines requiring lots of unique changes based on the opinion of the writer. You move to the 3rd stage when your asked to recreate/extend for a new project and realise how specific your solutions are.

Learning how to make minor tweaks and hook in a few key points to get what you want takes years. Without that most packagers will want to make big changes upstream which won’t go down well.

The second issue, I have met quite a few developers who become highly stressed when the build system is doing something they haven’t needed to do or understand.

A really simple example I have a Jenkins function which I tend to slip into release pipelines, it captures the release version and creates a version in Jira.

I normally deploy it first as a test before a few other functions to automate various service management requirements.

Its surprising how many devs will suddenly decide every problem (test failed, code failed review, sharepoint breaks, bad os update, etc…) is due to that function.

For me this little function is a test, if the team don’t care I will work to integrate various bits. If they freak out, I’ll revert decide if it is worth walking them through the process or walk away.

One of the reasons for the #DevOps movement is developers see building and packaging as #notmyjob.

The task would historically fall on the most junior member of the team, who would make a pigs ear out of it due to complete lack of experience.

This is compounded by the issue that most C/C++ build systems don’t really include dependency management.

Linux distributions have all tried to work out those dependency trees but they came up with slightly different solutions. This is why there are a few “root” distributions everything branches from.

That means developers have to learn about a few root distributions to design a deb/rpm/aur package systems to base their release around.

That is a considerable amount of learning in a subject most aren’t interested in.

The real question is why don’t package maintainers upstream a packaging solution?

It’s explained in the article

They basically made it law so the only regulation was “informed consent”, with informed consent you can launch private missions.

Government and private bodies were supposed to come together to come up with sensible rules. No one has done that.

So once the law passes nothing will really change, except government bodies will be required to figure out a framework to qualify private launches

The best theory I have seen is the Biden administration is trying to ‘manage’ the conflict. A belief they can dictate levels of aid to determine a geo politically satisfactory outcome.

Concerns around unmanaged escalation made sense but the UK has been pretty focussed on methodically moving up the escalation ladder to demonstrate Russia won’t resort to nuclear strikes (Brimstone, Challenger 2 tanks, setting up the F16 coalition, Storm Shadow, etc…).

The USA expects China to be the next conflict zone, that is a naval/air situation where ATACM’s can’t be used. Suffering a shortage of ATACM’s in the near term isn’t really an issue especially if you’ve already put in place contracts to address the gap.

Have you met any of the big IT supply subcontractors?

Many have built a business around highly specific contracts, the expectation is the service level agreements are technically met. Anything outside the contract is irrelevant and will not be done until a contract is in place. This is reflected in the culture of its staff.

For example if you raised a problem and a team had a 24 hour SLA, the team is focussed on closing the ticket within 24 hours, so they will look for a reason to close the ticket. If you outlined a problem and suggested the issue might be in X area, they will declare “User stated a problem in X, X dashboard is green” and close the ticket. 24 Hour SLA Met!

It might take you 20+ tickets before your actual problem is resolved but from their perspective that was 20+ tickets all completed within 24 hour SLA and that is the metric reported in the contact.

If you try and expose the fact it took 20 days to resolve your problem, staff in these organisations will close ranks to protect each other and the business will protect them on the basis it undermines the metrics for the contract.

It really isn’t surprising

Clearly you haven’t used Kbin.

KBin’s have two distinct views “Threads” (Reddit Style) and “Microblogs” (Twitter), the default view is “Threads”. You won’t see posts in the Thread view and you won’t see Articles/Threads in the Microblog view

Its an option similar to Top/Hot/Newest its existence doesn’t hurt

Maybe I am old but I don’t understand the NEED for a mobile application.

The kbin website works well on desktop and mobile web browsers with no render issues. The lemmy mobile apps all seem to be “alpha” quality.

Why is a buggy app better thana working website?

I choose an application or website based on which one works best. For example I browse Amazon via the web browser on the phone since the mobile application takes 2-5 seconds to load.