She/They
Bane of avocado toast enjoyers.
It’s not a competition, all operating systems suck.
I’m curious whether the increasingly invasive telemetry of modern Windows will have legal implications surrounding patient privacy here in the US. I work IT in the healthcare field, and one of our key missions is HIPAA compliance. What, then, will be the impact if Microsoft starts storing more and more in-depth data offsite? Will keyboard entries into our EHR be tracked and stored in Microsoft’s servers? Will we subsequently be held liable if a breach at Microsoft causes this information to leak, or if Microsoft just straight-up starts selling it to advertisers? Windows is our one-and-only option for endpoint devices, so it’s not like we can just switch.
I genuinely don’t have the answers to these questions right now, but it may start to become a serious conversation for our department in the future if things continue at the trajectory they’re going at. Or, maybe I’m just old and paranoid and everything will be okie dokie.
Are you doing personal file storage, or is this for backups from a server? If it’s the latter case, and if your use case would benefit from deduplication, you could just stay on Backblaze and use something like Duplicacy (available as a free CLI app or paid web UI) to deduplicate and encrypt your files. This is the approach that I use for my homelab. The only issue you run into is that, in the case of Duplicacy, you have to use the CLI or web UI to restore your files (and god help you if you lose your keys).
Tencent only owns a minority share in Larian. (Some resources say it’s around 30%; this is the source used in Wikipedia’s article.)
The most important of these is undoubtedly the studio founder Swen Vincke, who still heads Larian to this day - but not only as managing director, Swen also makes creative decisions. Because Swen also owns the majority of the studio - the Chinese publisher Tencent holds only a minority of the shares - Larian is immune to the waves on the stock exchange, to which CD Projekt, for example, is exposed. (Translated from German to English using Vivaldi.)
Just do what I did. Build a server that runs a Windows VM with GPU passthrough with the intention of using it as your own cloud gaming service, realize the performance is shit because you bought old Xeons with horrendous single-core performance, and give up and just accept that some games won’t be playable because of anticheat. Nvidia please make GeForce Now usable at more than 1080p60 on Linux
I think it definitely depends on the sort of game. I don’t mind paying AAA pricing for a game that actually feels like the studio gave a rat’s ass about providing good value. BG3, for example, was very much worth what I paid for it even just with the ~100 hours I got out of my first playthrough.
Of course, there have also been value kings that I’m not sure will ever be beaten for me in terms of price to hours played. Minecraft and Terraria are good examples here. I got Minecraft during either late Infdev or early Alpha, and so I paid fuck all compared to the current price. Considering I’ve probably put tens of thousands of hours into that shitshow in the over 13 years that I’ve played it, and I’d say it’s more than been worth it. The same goes for Terraria. At 1.5k hours of playtime and counting, it’d’ve been worth it to me even at far more than the $10 price tag that I (probably) got it at way back when.
So tl;dr, I’d say that if a game is truly well-made and enjoyable, then I don’t mind paying whatever the devs need to charge to keep their doors open. Bonus points if I can purchase the game DRM-free somehow.
Been playing TS4 again, lightly modded to facilitate poly relationships. I’m not a fan of the shit storm of DLC that’s basically the staple of the game’s monetization at this point, but that’s nothing that can’t be solved on the high seas. Otherwise, I still enjoy the series a lot. (Also, shout-out to the various weird spinoffs like Castaways.)