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.

Basic rule if someone claims X magically solves a problem they don’t follow X and are a huge generator of the problem.

For example people who claim they don’t need to write comments because they write self documenting code are the people that use variable names x1,x2,y, etc…

Similarly anyone you meet claiming Test Driven Development means they have better tests will write code with appalling code coverage and epically bad tests.

The butler informed me Kinder Eggs don’t make a nice pyramid, Lindt doesn’t stack and suggested I would offend her ladyship if I tried Heroes.

I have the staff practicing making a house of cards using After 8’s, the butler thinks its something those terrible colonialists would try but he sees no other option

One type of sweet!

Candy is the generic American word for sweets. American’s think chocolate should include stale milk and use Fructose! (cancer causing, obesity driving) Fructose in everything.

One could easily argue American candy has nothing in common with UK sweets (have you tried an American Kit Kat?).

Its like serving a German a Richmonds sausage, they’ll get confused.

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.

Using real world applications is changing the problem (what are you trying to solve).

My issue is teaching how you solve the problem.

As an example the indian method to teach multiplication is to draw lines equal to the first number, then perpendicular lines equal to the second and then count the points they bisect (e.g. draw 3 horizontal and 3 vertical lines and they cross 9 times).

Lastly I coach people in Agile (its a way of delivering stuff). An Agile team is brought together because a Product Owner has a problem and a vision on how to solve it.

The biggest factor in motivating a team and getting high performance is the product owners passion for their vision. You can have the most interesting problem in the world, if the product owner doesn’t care neither does the team.

I suspect the same is true of teaching

Mint was a reaction to Gnome 3, the unique workflow upset a lot of people and the people behind Mint decided to build Cinnamon desktop (its Gnome 3 made to look/work like Gnome 2). They needed a distribution to build/test their work and so based a distribution off of Ubuntu and called it Mint.

As a bit of explanation, there are only a few projects which attempt to build an entire linux distribution from scratch. This involves finding code from thousands of sources, work out packaging, etc… We call these ‘base’ distributions, Debian is the base distribution for Ubuntu, Ubuntu is the base distribution for Mint.

Ubuntu tends to be slightly ahead of Debian in the software versions it uses and automatically enables the ‘non-free’ repositories. Ubuntu tends to push some Canonical specific things like Snaps (which everyone hates)

I believe Mint rolls the Canonical specific things out of Ubuntu and you get the latest version of Cinnamon.

Its all a bit…

If its for work I would suggest picking a “stable” distribution like Debian, Kubuntu or OpenSuse.

A lot of people recommend Arch or Fedora but the focus of those is getting the very latest releases, which increases your chance of stuff breaking.

A lot of people will suggest niche distributions, those can be great for specific needs but generally you will always find Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL support for commercial apps.

I would also suggest looking at the KDE Desktop, many distributions default to Gnome but it is unique in how it works, KDE (or XFCE) will provide a desktop similar to Windows 11.

Lastly I would suggest looking at Crossover Linux by Codeweavers.

Linux has something called WINE, its an attempt to implement the Windows 95 - 11 API’s so windows applications can run on linux.

WINE is how the Steam Deck/Linux is able to play Windows games. Valve embedded it into Steam and called it “Proton”.

WINE is primarily developed by Codeweavers and they provide the Crossover application that makes setting up and running a Windows application really easy.

People will mention Lutris but that has a far higher learning curve.

There is an application database so you can see in advance if your applications would work: https://appdb.winehq.org/

Not really.

There are multiple ways to approach and conceptualise multiplication, division, simultaneous equations, binomial distribution, probability, etc…

I have met a few maths geniuses and we teach Maths the way they think and conceptualise Maths.

In my last job I was viewed as a superstar because I could take the algorithms the data scientists produced and explain them to non data scientists.

I didn’t change the underlying maths, I tailored what to explain and examples to use based on my audience. This tended to get people really excited at what the data scientists had done.

Its the same with teaching, people need to understand and conceptualise a problem in a way that makes sense to them.

The issue is we only teach one method for approaching Maths so if you don’t get it, tough.

In primary and secondary school I always struggled with Maths. During university I spent most of my energy reverse engineering the maths lessons so I could understand them.

Years later my sister was struggling with her Maths GCSE, I spent one evening explaining how I solve each type of problem. She went from a projected D to getting an A.

I was explaining this to an ex maths teacher who started asking how I approached things. Apparently I used the Indian method for one type of problem, the asian for anouther, etc…

The idea a student was struggling with one way of solving the problem and teaching them alternative methods never occurred because it was “outside the curriculum”.

These days I quite like Maths puzzles.

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.

Thats just national pride talking,

Personally I think Plymouth’s Pasties are superior to all other pasties (Ron Dewney for the win) and love them. But a pasty can only be so good and I accept people wouldn’t put it in a S tier for food.

Another example is Americans claiming Jack Daniels is the best whiskey.

Natural scrolling is the first thing I disable when forced to use a Mac, windows, gnome, kde, xfce, etc… all scroll in one direction.

Macos has a unique keyboard and a lot of unique non obvious and non discoverable behaviour. For example I use a lot of windows laptops, left and right click involve pushing the trackpad downon the left or right. Someone had to show me right click on a Macbook was a two finger touch. These deliberate non standard behaviours make switching devices really annoying.

I would argue KDE defaults should follow the most common behaviour across multiple platforms, with the option to implement specific quirks.

The move to default double click brings the KDE default into alignment with other platforms (single click isn’t the default anywhere else).

I would suggest a bigsur global theme that implements macos keyboard shortcuts, mouse actions, etc… would be a better compromise.

Activity Pub has a few parts, Lemmy implements the Threaded message part.

Mastodon implements a short messaging (posts) part. Meta’s Threads will implement this.

KBin implemented both parts, within KBin you’ll see microblog as an option for magazines (communities/subredits). This shows either ‘posts’ made to the magazine or posts with hastags associated with the magazine.

The posts and threaded message parts have overlap in how they work so mastodon users can see certain threaded messages and comment on them.

KBin/Lemmy should provide a combined local view for duplicated magazines/communities across the fediverse. Treating the concept like a hashtag.

The point of the fediverse is to distribute content so no one has a monopoly. People squatting on communities/magazines don’t understand there is nothing stopping people creating one on a hundred other instances.

Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.

Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn’t be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store and suspect it would be a tweak to the SQL query it runs.

Even if that wasn’t an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI/lemmy REST API. As well as retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client, for KBin it would be more work.

The combined view wouldn’t change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).

The solution here would be to default your local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop down so users can choose.

I would also configure things so instances can select a site wide default if they can’t moderate it effectively. For example pushing all posts to the star trek instance rather than local magazine with a mod who is MIA.

This would remove most of the concerns users have about the fediverse, since they wouldn’t be confronted by different instances. To them the fediverse is <insert instance> it would also encourage distribution of content.

I think there is a focus on C/C++ to justify Pythons performance.

There have been times when the performance of Node js/Python were part of the reasoning for choosing Java/Scala.

Each time you are regaled with how Python is C/C++ underneath and so faster. Each time you have to ask if they will write C/C++ libraries to ensure the application performance meets our needs.

Similarly any time you go near lambas you get a comment on how python lambdas are faster because its C running, where as Java has to start a virtual machine, etc…

3 different companies samething