The USA apparently sees these little wars as investments or something. It's getting too expensive: cut losses and pull out the troops.
A real "USA loses" scenario involves the White House flying a foreign flag. A real defeat of the USA would probably shock americans to the core. Fully expect them to lash out with nuclear weapons if such a thing ever happens.
It's not victory, but it sure as hell isn't defeat either. More like a tactical retreat or something.
Defeat is the US military getting routed and decimated. Defeat is US aircraft carriers sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Defeat is Washington getting nuked.
What actually happens is the opposite. Americans show up and inflict staggering casualties while suffering a relatively small anount. Then they suddenly leave for some idiotic reason like the president wanting reelection.
America's enemies don't need to actually win, they just need to resist as long as possible and drive up the costs of the war via asymmetric warfare.
That just means the military, aircraft carriers, all that, were so ineffective that the enemy didn't even need to bother destroying them to achieve victory. It doesn't matter what would have happened if various parameters were different, if only we had gone all out this one time, and the point of war isn't the act itself of making cool trucks shoot at each other, and it's silly to argue that your home isn't insecure after a thief absconds with your valuables, but failed to pick the lock you put on the chest-high fence gate.
(Pardon my silly phrasing, I mean no hostility or condescension!)
Idk, spending 10x less time dictating a thought to a coding agent and publishing it immediately is incredibly valuable. Take it at face value and don’t overthink the style.
I work in the refurb department of an ewaste recycling company. Because we don't have a Windows OEM license, we officially can't install Windows on any of the PCs we sell. (I'll direct people to download the Windows install media if asked.[0]) On the systems I sell[1], Linux Mint has a nice OEM install option that after installation, there's a 'ship to customer' script[2] that starts an OOBE after the next boot, so I don't have to make up a login, and hope it doesn't get lost anywhere.
I'm not sure how many people keep the Linux install after they buy it, but it's cool to think we're helping move the needle on this! FWIW, I've had several people directed to me specifically for Linux systems, so I know it's more than 3.
Yes, I run Linux everywhere at work (it's the wild west without a Windows domain), and at home.
We have certifications to keep which are pretty important for the business model (data security, ethical disposal and recycling)[0]. The auditors keep tabs on our retail channels.
Disclaimer: I am an employee, I did not found the company.
I am curious what is considered a grey market license here? I would guess legal departments only see 2 colors for their licenses, so what makes it a middle-state?
There are websites which will sell you a license key which is real and valid but is not sold directly by Microsoft or an authorized OEM. These keys could be volume license keys that are being "misued" by reselling them, they could be keys from another country being used in the US (for example), or in rare cases they could be keys that were 'stolen' from someone else (e. g. copied and used).
That's a 'gray market' key. It's 'gray' because you don't know the provenance, and so in the worst case, you might end up with the key being deactivated, theoretically.
But I've sold computers with gray market keys on them for years and never once has a key been deactivated. I have had keys come up as not usable, in which case I typically ask for my money back.
Most of the time, from what I've seen, it's the first case - a volume key being resold.
The law is more grey than either black or white. People get in trouble when they think they know something is cut & dried when in fact it's always arguable.
Some other commenter recently said "the law is not autistic".
In this case of course, there is an ocean of valid keys that were purchased or otherwise obtained legally, but under terms that said "you can't resell them or use thim for this or that purpose" but those terms may just be wishful thinking. Just because you write down a demand, even in a contract, even in a contract that both parties agreed to, doesn't garantee you actually ever had a right to that demand or that the other party is obligated to honor it. It might be, or it might be only in some juristictions and not others, or anything else could happen if you put it to the test, and whatever result might even not be final even if you do get your way.
Even if the act of selling or using the key was able to be squarely established illegal, that does not necessarily matter to any downstream recipients. Maybe the key itself is still invalid and MS can detect it and invalidate it any time they want, but that doesn't necessarily mean the end user in in any legal risk since a lawyer might be able to argue that they didn't knowingly do anything wrong (they just bought a computer). Even the recycler might be able to say the same thing, that they just bought keys from someone else. Their legal obligation and cuplability would have to be proven, not just assumed.
The world, including legal departments, has almost no black or white anywhere in it. Merely people with interests in trying to convince you that there is black & white, and they know which is which, and you better give them everything they want with no questions or contest.
A local thrift store has been slapping Ubuntu on every computer for over a decade. The easiest part is you can just clone it from one computer to the next and it'll Just Work™.
> Here we reach a point that is simultaneously the platform’s greatest advantage and heaviest burden. Due to such deep integration with dedicated and expensive hardware, IBM i is an “elite” system, in the less positive sense. A mere mortal, computer science student, or enthusiast has no chance to “touch” this system in the comfort of their home. You cannot download an ISO image from the internet, install it on a virtual machine in VirtualBox, or run it on your laptop. The barrier to entry is set at the price level of an IBM Power server, which effectively cuts off the supply of “fresh blood” and makes knowledge of this fascinating architecture passed down almost like guild knowledge, only within large organizations.
I took a course about these back in college. I thought it would be mind-expanding to see how computing could be outside of conventional Windows/Unix/Linux inspired environments, and use something with a very different design. The instructor had a desktop of one of these in his office. I remember logging into an official IBM educational system with a terminal emulator for an assignment.
Unfortunately, the instructor left about a month in, and I switched to a course involving UML modeling for programming Lego Mindstorm robots. Being hands-on with Mindstorms was cool, but I wonder what could have been had I finished the other course.
You can get IBM i (OS/400) running at home, but the hurdles are many. You need to have one of a specific set of PowerPC servers and need to "acquire" an operating system image. Which will be running in unlicensed demo mode. This YouTuber did it.
It's long been said that the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of the AS/400 is IBM itself. They offer classes, but don't make it easy - you have to join COMMON (their user group) and/or be enrolled in a university.
> passed down almost like guild knowledge, only within large organizations.
That's the part that always killed me about trying to set foot into IBM mainframes. "Ask your system programmer". "Ask your X/Y/Z". Even when they finally decided to ease up and let people touch z/PDT, they had to make it a massive learning obstacle course to be blessed enough to buy a license (and now that's gone).
Not all of us can go out and acquire an entire IBM z and be blessed enough to be able to throw it in our basements to build up our knowledge on. :\
Amusingly, however - IBM did produce - or worked on - a Laptop AS/400, based on PowerPC for purely internal use. I believe it was designed for sales/marketing types to take on the road for demos
I was familiar with both the "laptop AS400" and the PowerPC thinkpad - these were different hardware unrelated to each other. I believe the sales demo machine was a CISC architecture demo machine that predated PowerPC, but I'm not 100% confident here. I never laid eyes on the AS400 sales demo machine but we were told about it in IBM AS/400 training school. I also had one of the PowerPC laptops running AIX for a while, nice little machines for the day.
Yes. I could not fathom why anyone would want to run anything besides AIX on them though. You can run all the other OS's on cheap commodity hardware, the draw for me was having an AIX system to work with.
> If you think you’re going to work there and, say, “have free weekends,” you are fooling yourself. The “entire team shows up to the office 7 days a week,” Zietz wrote in a LinkedIn post two weeks ago.
Sounds like LemonLime is a recipe for burnout.
And in-office the whole time? Your power-trip and/or real estate portfolio is showing.
> Most of our oxygen comes not from forest but from oceans (specifically from phytoplankton, algae, and photosynthetic bacteria). Between 50-80% of it in fact.
That fact checks out: about 70% of the earth's surface is covered by oceans. It follows that most photosynthesis, thus oxygen comes from oceans.
> there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters
Are multiple/simultaneous playable characters a common feature of adventure game design from LucasArts alum? I played Broken Age and thought the idea was novel, but recently played through Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated. So many people say that adventure games are nostalgic, but the ones I played growing up were Kings Quest 6 and Myst (games with only one playable character). These other multiple character adventure games are nowhere near enjoyable for me.
I have generally found it to be some tedious bullshit that stretches out the length of the game far, far too much, and I grew up playing a lot of these point and click adventures.
Seems to be a tradition rooted in the original Maniac Mansion. In Thimbleweed Park the multiple characters became tedious due to having to walk multiple people all over and pass items between them, though I enjoyed being able to see the world through the different lenses of how Ray and Reyes vs. Ransome vs. Delores react to things.
Day of the Tentacle (which coincidentally I've replayed in the past week) executed the multiple characters mechanic the best I've seen, since each character was confined to their own area (past/present/future) and you could instantly pass items between them.
And honestly the Lucas Arts puzzles were serviceable (their philosophy was always "you can't go wrong" (with very obvious but little exceptions), the Sierra "logic" of fucking you silently in the middle of the game was just tiring. Nobody got time for that
> Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated.
I've not played that in decades, but I remember liking the mechanic. For the most part it wasn't much different from one character with more freedom to move between areas (timezones in that case), but the need to pass objects through time added some variety and humour (send hamster via freezer, but then how do you warm it up again?).
A strange take, as the Lucasarts multi-character games, like Dott and Maniac Mansion at least try to push you forward and have reasonable hints. KQ6 has fewer nonsensical dead-man-walking situations (you should see how much worse earlier installments were), but it still has them. Oops, the game is unfinishable now, because of an item you don't have, and it's not even hinted that you need, or you could have obtained earlier!
Thimbleweed park is, if anything, on the easy side of the genre. Not quite as easy as Loom, but it's still on the easy side, and with a built in hint system. Day of the Tentacle's main problem is dependence of US culture. Just like the old "monkey wrench" thing in Monkey Island 2, using an actual monkey as a wrench. Still, in DoTT, you get in-game dialogue that will basically teach you some of it, although it doesn't work quite as well.
The complaint would make more sense if it was limited to Zak McCraken, as that one really s quite tough and random.
I heard Charles Cecil make the same comment about "monkey wrench" in a recent podcast interview, and I must say it was not my experience at all. In my world (45+ years in Western Europe), monkey wrench and pipe wrench have always been synonymous. An adjustable spanner is another tool entirely.
Steam has a CLI that installs games. I’ve been meaning to use it to install each of my games and archive their installation for future offline use.
That’s not as convenient as an easy-to-download offline installer, certainly, but seems workable in theory. Maybe I’m unaware of limitation(s) to this approach?
SteamCMD doesn't strip Steam DRM - even with files backed up (which the Steam GUI will do, no need for SteamCMD), you wont be able to use them without an internet connection and authenticating with Steam every now and then.
GOG's bundles are offline and DRM free. You could store them on a disk, and 30 years from now reinstall and play on an airgapped computer with no authentication required.
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