In this day and age, accepting cash payments is the least shady and most customer friendly thing of all.

It’s the ones who want to know ALL about you and partner with payment processors who want to know ALL about you that are shady.

Surelly the right answer would’ve been “Go back to Europe”.

(Mind you, as an European, please don’t).

Mate, the horse whip and the wheel were Technology back when they got invented.

It’s a massivelly generic word.

Absolutelly some Technology has reduced drudgery. Meanwhile some Technology has managed to increase it (for example: one can make the case that the mobile phone, by making people be always accessible, has often increased pressure on people, though it depends on the job), some Technology has caused immense Environmental destruction, some Technology has even caused epidemics of psychological problems and so on.

Not only is there a lot of stuff in the big umbrella called Technology, but the total effect of one of those things is often dependent on how its its used and Capitalism seems especially prone to inventing and using Technology that’s very good for a handful of people whilst being bad for everybody else.

One can’t presume that just because something can be classified as Technology it will reduce drudgery or in even that it will be overall a good thing, even if some past Technologies did.

Best Windows built-in way to open files with Unix end lines.

Pfew … I moved to Linux just in time!

I suspect we’re running with different versions of “middle-class”.

In Europe middle-class used to be about the kind of work one did and roughly correlated with doing or not manual work - those doing manual work were considered working class and those doing office work were middle class.

This tended to also match incomes, so middle-class usually had a middle range income, higher than the working class but not as high as the rich.

This all sorta matched because non-manual work was generally either some kind of management position or some position requring higher education - such as, say Medical Doctor, Engineer or Architect - which very few people back then had.

It wasn’t about what an income could buy, it was about the kind of work people did, their level of formal education and the level of their income compared to others.

Things have however changed a lot - a much higher percentage of people have higher education, most of the income advantage of higher education is gone and in general all layers but the rich have fallen down in the income ladder - were there was a middle class there is now mostly a gap and essentially the working class and the middle class have been squeezed together.

IMHO, what we have nowadays is a two class system:

• The Owner Class are people whose income is mainly from the ownership of things, not work.
• The Working Class are people whose income is mainly from working.

However we were talking about the 60s and I do belive there was actually a “middle class” back then, at least per the definition we had in Europe.

The existence and purchasing power of the minimum wage is applicable to the working class and the poor, not the middle class unless your theory is that there is no such thing as a working class or poor and “middle class” starts at the bottom of pay scale, which would be strange given that being “middle class” at least back in the 60s was about what kind of work people did and were did they sit in the income scale relative to other people (hence the word “middle”) - so office workers back then were typically middle class whilst blue collar workers were typically working class, both due to the latter doing “manual” work unlike the former and having a lower income relative to the former.

That explains why I misunderstood your point as meaning that the minimum could not buy all that much, which per your clarification in this post is not what you meant.

Granted, compared to today, the working class of the 60s had more purchasing power than much if not most of today’s so-called middle-class.

The previous poster’s point wasn’t that there wasn’t a middle class, it was that blue collar workers and traders aren’t middle class which would be correct per the definition of “middle class” I provided in the 1st paragraph of this post.

So a 1960 minimum wage could buy an average home with 5 years of 40h/week and you don’t think that’s a “pretty good life” compared to the current situation?!

One of the biggest problems nowadays is exactly that the house-prices to incomes ratio is several times what it was back then.

Ah.

I have so far avoided that specific pit, but that’s because for maybe decades now and still whilst using Windows as my main I’ve avoid proprietary solutions (except for games) and went for Open Source ones instead, which has yielded the benefit that since I moved over to Linux for good a few months ago, I have yet to be faced with needing something I used to use in Windows and not finding a Linux native version.

I’m sure I’ll end up in the same kind of situation you describe.

By the way, have you tried “Bottles”? From what I’ve heard (but did not test myself yet) it might help there and it’s not specifically for games.

A lot of this was already talked about by the traditional Left, way back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The discussion back then was all about Power, and by that I mean the capacity of forcing or blocking others from doing what they want, not just the version of “Power” talked about the useful idiots nowadays which only sees the Power of the State, never the Power that comes from Money and Ownership.

This is why some of the suggested solutions they came up with back then explicitly involved things like Confiscating the Means Of Production and Land Reform, which, whether one agrees or not with it, at least recognized and tried to address the Power inherent in the Ownership of that which is needed to produce things for the rest.

The problem is that the supposedly Leftwing (but really mostly Liberal and not even honestly so) thinking since at least the 80s pointedly avoids talking about the Power Of Money as if people’s life’s aren’t shaped by access to a place to live, access to food, access to healthcare and the time they have to spend working being defined by how little of the product of their work ends up in their hands, none of which is trully their choice nowadays.

Maybe we should start again looking back at some of the best things from back then, such as Social Democracy.

Well, in the Post 2008 Crash World with the most favorable policies for the Asset Owner class since the time of the Monarchy, after the rich finished draining the Poor and Traditional Working class using rent-seeking anchored on their control of assets connected to life essentials (most obviously, Housing) and, especially in the West, their leverage of the Demand Side for Work thanks to having sent most jobs abroad with Globalization (something which was itself pushed by the rich in the 70s and is core in Neoliberalism), they would obviously go after the Middle-Class next.

I mean, did anybody really expect that the Greed of the Owner Class would somehow magically stop when the only large pool of wealth left out of their hands was the one held by the Middle-Class?

What I find funny in all this is the “Modern” “Left” parties were the scions of the Middle-Class obsess over Supposedly-Left-but-really-Liberal ideas (mainly Identity Politics) having forgotten the core concern of the old-fashioned Traditional Left (such as Communism, Socialism, Social-Democracy and independently of one agreeing with their actual solutions of not) which is about Power (in the sense of who, if any, can impose their will on others directly or indirectly) hence totally ignoring the detail that 4 decades of Neoliberalism have de facto turned Money into a Power far above the State, and which most definitelly forces on others choices such as were to live, how to live, and what to do.

The “Modern” “Left” thinking, birthed in the 80s from some ideas from American think tanks and without Equality explicitly as an Ideology (instead they had some pre-made policies for “Equalities” - i.e. Equality on a group by group basis, with how much each person’s deserving of fair and equal treatment and access to things in life depending on their “group” membership defined by their genetics, religion, gender, sexual orientation or place of birth - that avoided like the plague even mentioning Equality For All, the only real Equality) were useful idiots for the Neoliberals and now here were are, when even those priviledged scions of the Middle and Upper Middle-Class are starting to be squeezed by the wealthy, whose power they so pointedly avoided talking about and criticizing, must less trying to control and reduce.

Con-fucking-gratulations!

I just use Lutris, which generally does most of that work for me.

Calling them “prefixes” is about the total of the confusion. Call them “instances” or even just “boxes” and it’s suddenly clear what they do.

(The only reason I’m not using “sandbox” is because they don’t really provide sandboxing from a security point of view, only a kind of separate instance with its own configuration but with access to everything via the Z drive)

Once you figure out that using a different “wine prefix” only really means a separate “Windows” with it’s own config and file structure there’s nothing confusing about it.

(Neue)Nazi-loving hypocrite!

We’re talking about fingerprinting stuff coming in via HDMI, not stuff being played by the “smart” part of the TV itself from some source.

You would probably not need to actually sample images if it’s the TV’s processor that’s playing something from a source, because there are probably smarter approaches for most sources (for example, for a TV channel you probably just need to know the setting of the tuner, location and the local time and then get the data from available Program Guide info (called EPG, if I remember it correctly).

The problem is that anything might be coming over HDMI and it’s not compressed, so if they want to figure out what that is, it’s a much bigger problem.

Your approach does sound like it would work if the Smart TV was playing some compressed video file, though.

Mind you, I too am just “thinking out loud” rather that actually knowing what they do (or what I’m talking about ;))

Well that makes sense but might even be more processor intensive unless they’re using an SOC that includes an NFU or similar.

I doubt it’s a straight forward hash because a hash database for video which includes all manner of small clips and has to somehow be able to match something missing over 90% of frames (if indeed the thing is sampling it at 2 fps, then it only sees 2 frames out of every 25) would be huge.

A rough calculation for a system of hashes for groups of 13 frames in a row (so that at least one would be hit if sampling at 2 fps on a 25 fps system) storing just one block of 13 frame hashes per minute in a 5 byte value (so large enough to have 5 trillion distinctive values) would in 1GB store enough hashes for 136k 2h movies in hashes alone so it would be maybe feasible if the system had 2GB+ of main memory, though even then I’m not so sure the CPU speed would be enough to search it every 500ms (though if the hashes are ordered by value in a long array and there’s a matching array of clip IDs, it might be doable since there are some pretty good algorithms for that).

Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.

Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.

“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because the conditions for something different haven’t yet happenned or it simply hasn’t been in their best interest yet to act differently.

If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” in a way such that they can’t legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.

Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.

To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.

Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.

That’s just how it is.

Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until there’s no way they can avoid their promises, but that just me), or that one knows the risks but still thinks that it’s worth it to purchase from Steam for many games and that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.

Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” and similarly those being (so far) less enshittified than other similar artificial restrictions on Customers out there do not make them a good thing, only so far not as bad as others.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here in Lemmy: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having knee-jerk pro-Steam reactions based on fucking brand-loyalty like mindless pimply-faced teen fanboys. (Apologies to the handful of wise-beyond-their-years pimply faced teens that might read this).

It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.

Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.

In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.

PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.

If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.

“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.