• 257 Posts
  • 193 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: December 2nd, 2024

help-circle


  • I’ve only purchased like 3 apps in like 15 years. Every now and then I donate to an open source project. I used to pay for Office, Adobe Cloud, Sony Vegas way back in the day. What happened was the free and open source became far beyond capable than my technical ability and if I needed pay software, it was for work at a company that purchased licenses themselves. It was fast forward in mobile apps. There was already 20 years of open source desktop software being adapted to mobile even if less limited it covered what I and many people would want to do with a mobile device was quickly covered.

    Now it’s a matter of getting people to stumble on your software first and get them to pay before they learn of any of the truly free stuff. Cloud services where storage/processing is fully off your device and way better in ways are what can’t be fully replicated as a free service for people. A NAS can work out to be cheaper for storage but way less functional and more hassle for most people





  • People like you can’t seem to differentiate wanting solid criticisms of Valve and Steam rather than just theory crafting all the worst things that can happen with them. The Steam hysteria makes no sense when its a storefront on open software platforms and the ones that are on closed software platforms aren’t doing what people are gearing Valve would do whenever Gabe dies or if Valve went public

    At least put effort into explaining why Steam will become this terribly blood sucking store on PC where people can download from numerous options as compared to platforms like Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, iOS where you don’t have freedom to install anything you want. As a developer you can’t just distribute software and have them installable.

    If people that wanted to make people concerned about Steam put more effort into their arguments, maybe people on Lemmy would give their concerns more credence. It’s surprising that on Lemmy, people who seem to value art and expression so much are so bad at expressing why people should be concerned about what they are concern about


  • Stop making excuses for every other company that has failed to compete with Valve. It has not been out of the price range for competition of other companies. Big publishers have been making storefronts for about 2 decades and proceeding to underfund and mismanage every attempt.

    Steam was not the first digital storefront on PC. They were not a huge behemoth company by 2014. They were not bigger than Epic was by the time EGS launched. Not bigger than EA when Origin launched. Not bigger than Ubisoft when Uplay launched. Not bigger than Microsoft when GFWL launched. Not bigger than Amazon anytime these past 15 years of digital downloads from them. I doubt it took Valve tens of billions of dollars to make 2014 Steam right before SteamOS launched, 2014 because not a single storefront platform has reached feature parity with end of 2014 Steam.

    Steam launched in 2003. A single ten billion dollars, I wouldn’t be surprised as about the accumulative revenue of Valve 2003-2014.

    Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else.

    What is the policy of any other store. Of you want a solution here go lobby the government you live under to mandate inheritance of digital goods

    We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library

    This is a game by game case as it’s up to what DRM is implemented if any. A ton of games you can just copy the folder around and click the executable. We’re you not around during the SecuRom and StarForce days. GFWL install limit days.

    Call people what you are yourself, a social media warrior, but that doesn’t make you any less ignorant of PC gaming markets than whomever you’re crying about. You won’t be taken seriously when you’re making excuses for a bunch of companies historically and a number to this day larger than Valve was when building Steam up

    Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)

    Valve isn’t in a vacuum. iOS, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo. All closed software ecosystems unlike a Linux machine or currently a Windows machine. Still waiting for that 2 minute advertisement to begin download or download fees on actual closed platforms. Waiting for public companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, … to start charging download fees and pre-download advertisements on purchased games.

    GFWL Gold subscription for online play is about 20 years old and failed spectacularly against a Steam that wasn’t even a tenth the userbase it has today. Now you’re losing hair over subscriptions to get advertisement free downloads of games you’ve purchased. Come back to reality of how the markets gone for PC gaming in the last 20 years



  • More subscription service pushing. Windows isn’t a source of revenue growth for MS, it’s a cheerleader. Lost subscription revenue for Windows on servers to Linux. MS SQL couldn’t stop MySQL, MariaDB, PostreSQL, etc. Games for Window Live and paid online gaming failed on PC. Windows Store has been a decade and a half dud. Gamepass looks stagnant and Xbox hardware in decline. Windows Phone failed - big reason Windows Store failed and no presence as a TV OS anymore besides the declining Xbox

    MS wants products where users are continuously monetized. The software storefronts haven’t worked out like they wanted so focus on subscriptions and advertising. Azure, OneDrive, O365, Copilot, Gamepass less focused on Xbox hardware, … whatever else they can come up with. Windows will advertise them sacrificing user satisfaction for Windows

    For MS it may be the right move. Don’t think there’s political willpower for trying again to compete with Android and iOS for mobile. Don’t think they’d even manage TV against Roku let alone Android TV or big TV makers like Samsung with Tizen. Apple would have to screw up hard with MacOS for those users to switch to Windows rather than sticking Mac or go to iPad’s. Android has a desktop cooking with an eventually graphics accelerated Debian VM. Linux in general still on the multi-decade nibbling towards the mainstream along with software like Blender, Krita, LibreOffice

    OS reccuring fees is a server and enterprise workstation support contract thing. Trying to do that to consumer desktop would kill it pretty quick. Windows is in a hard place of being a mature big money maker that doesn’t look possible for growth but still too big to cast aside. It’ll straddle the line of advertising where MS tries to not kill its market share but nag users to buy MS subscription services. More telemetry for advertising
















  • The US portion of the Vietnam war killed ~3 million Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian people. US bombings in Cambodia during the war lead to the fall of the neutral Cambodian government and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Immediately before the US portion of the Vietnam war, the French killed hundreds of thousands more. Immediately before that was fighting against Japan and France during WW2. Immediately before that, fighting France for freedom. The Vietnam war was incredibly long and killed millions and set Cambodia towards a genocidal regime.

    For Venezuela to be worse, millions would have to killed. Hundreds of thousands killed in neighboring countries. Chemical warfare employed that would lead to birth defects for decades to come. A neighboring country be bombed to civil war where a genocidal dictator rises power and commits a genocide. Venezuela then be successfully sanctioned to an extreme level of poverty for nearly 20+ years

    The sanctioning power is already falling apart and non-US centric trade routes are a lot more mature than the 50-90s. The US military runs with extremely expensive equipment compared to the 60s/70s. Slow to build. War in Venezuela means it can’t sustain a war in Europe, the west Pacific, or the Middle East. Russia-Ukraine, Iraq and Afghanistan, Ethiopia-Tigray civil war, Sudan civil war. Got to add up numerous wars to compare to just the US portion of the Vietnam war

    Also the US lost like 60,000 people in Vietnami believe France lost a similar amount as the US in the post-WW2 portion of the war

    Going back to the Korean war, that too was far more brutal than people bother to learn

    The Internet and the large Latin American population in the US may also lead to far more unrest in the US compared to Vietnam war American unrest. Venezuelan immigrants are substantial in the US compared to Viet people in the US during the Vietnam war

    The brutality of Vietnam and Korea is like taking the European portion of WW2 and putting them in single countries. Carpet bombing, fire bombing, massacre after massacre. There’s been nothing comparable since. The wars in Africa have had way less difference in killing equipment between the factions compared to Vietnam and Korea and strategy has shifted from destroying everything to being more economical with military equipment. Recall that the US had major factions pushing to use nukes in both Korea and Vietnam. I doubt that’ll be the case for Venezuela

    European and by extension American, Australian, South African, etc colonialism were far more genocidal than people get taught. By the 50s it was a lot less genocidal and look how that went. The previous centuries, elimination and replacement of local populations weren’t unpopular ideas, just impractical and not understood how to yet


  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mee_ka_tee

    A lot of ingredients especially if you make your own curry paste. Real easy to have too much or too little of anything. So many ingredients that you pretty much have to make a lot but it goes bad fast so you can’t really store.

    Plus some stuff taste a bit sour if boiled for too long and other stuff the flavor pretty much disappears if you boil too long so you have time it with when it’ll be served. And it’s just like any other bone stock dish where you can go hours to boil the bones. Then there’s if you’re doing just pork bones or you’re doing pork bones and fish bones. It’s a lot of timing that’s really not worth the effort unless the restaurant is in a community with a lot of Lao people that know the cuisine and buy it rather than buy stir fried noodles dishes. It’s a lot of steps. Sauteing parts, simmering parts, remove stuff in the pot to process process a bit to back in later or serve as a topping. There’s fermented beans to put in you’re high efforting this on the ingredients list

    I’ve seen it go off the menu at multiple restaurants in the city I’m in and when asked why, the answer is always because the community the restaurant is in doesn’t buy it and it doesn’t hold well while it stays on the menu in communities with large Lao, Thai, Cambodian, Burmese, Malaysian. Indonesian, Viet people. The people in these communities are all like, “oh shit I never seen this on menus and I don’t want to make that - too much work. Got to get that”


  • Signal is really simple and has a sizable userbase now. I’ve worked with people in non-tech companies and they’ll have signal installed because theres someone in management that cares for security to a degree and does official nonofficial team communication with signal

    Element/Matrix I think has a chance. The newest Element X app looks a lot better on the phone and on desktop. It’s progressing to good user experience


  • It’d be a forever war. It won’t be as terrible as Vietnam since they’re a lot further from arms suppliers than Vietnam but Venezuela still has a significant military. They have a varied terrain including jungles and mountain ranges. US has historically antagonized every country in Latin America including now neighboring Colombia and Brazil - Brazil itself having a significant arms industry. You may not have a steady stream of Russian fighter jets to Venezuela, but I’m certain missiles, guns, artillery would all manage to make it to Venezuelan resistance. I wouldn’t be surprised if people all the way out from Nicaragua would make their way into Venezuela to fight the US