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.

What! A! Surprise!

I’m shocked, I tell you, totally and utterly shocked by this turn of events!

I was curious enough to check and with 2KB SRAM that thing doesn’t have anywhere enough memory to process a 320x200 RGB image much less 1080p or 4K.

Further you definitelly don’t want to send 2 images per-second down to a server in uncompressed format (even 1080p RGB with an encoding that loses a bit of color fidelity to just use two bytes per pixel, adds up to 4MB uncompressed per image), so its either using something with hardware compression or its using processing cycles for that.

My expectation is that it’s not the snapshoting itself that would eat CPU cycles, it’s the compression.

That said, I think you make a good point, just with the wrong example - I would’ve gone with: a thing capable of handling video decoding at 50 fps - i.e. one frame per 20ms - (even if it’s actually using hardware video decoding) can probably handle compressing and sending over the network two frames per second, though performance might suffer if they’re using a chip without hardware compression support and are using complex compression methods like JPEG instead of something simpler like LZW or similar.

I actually got some somewhat more recent AAA games from GoG (a store which I favour because of their No-DRM rule, though there’s a handful of games were it’s “kinda”) and I literally can’t get around to them because I’m just enjoying 15 year old games or Indie title as I tend to favour open-ended games.

Why should I buy, say, “must register and log-in to Rockstar services” Red Dead Redemption from Steam if my entertainment needs are fully fulfilled already and there’s even a backlog of “bought them but haven’t got around to try them” games (including stuff like Prey) plus a bunch of Indie infinite-replayability games (like Terraria and Rimworld) which I haven’t played for long enough now that they’re fun to play again?

This is not just to illustrate the point: I’m genuinely not getting around to play something like Prey, much less buying the original God Of War (available from GoG hence DRM-free, unlike Ragnarok) because I keep just having fun from a mix of really old games and far less “graphically impressive” open-ended Indie games.

Server-side checks cost processing power and memory hence they need to spend more on servers.

Client side kernel-level anti-cheat only ever consumes resources and cause problems to the actual gamers, not directly to Rockstart’s bottom line (and if it makes the game comms slightly slower on the client side it might even reduce server resource consumption).

If Rockstar’s management theory is that gamers will endure just about any level of shit and keep on giving them money (a posture which, so far, has proven correct for just about every large game maker doing that kind of shit) then they will logically conclude that their bottom line won’t even suffer indirectly from making life harder for their existing clients whilst it will most definitelly suffer if they have more server costs due to implementing server side checks for cheating.

I played WoW right when it came out, on a PvP server.

There was already a subset of the crowd just like there back then - some people rushed game progression to have higher levels as soon as possible only to then hang out in beginner areas and “pwn” significantly lower level players.

That’s around the time when the term “griefer” was coined.

In these things the real difference is how the servers are structured rather than the human beings: if the architecture is designed so that there is some way to filter players (smaller servers with moderation or some kind of kick voting system that bans repeat offenders), griefers end up in their own griefer instances griefing each other and the rest can actually play the game, otherwise you get a deeply beginner (or people with less time, such as working adults) unfriendly environment.

As somebody else pointed out environments were people run their own servers tend create those conditions at least for some cases (basically if there’s some kind of moderation) whilst massive world centralized server environments tend to give free right to people whose pleasure in a multiplayer games derives mostly from making it unpleasent for others (in game-making, griefing is actually recognized as one of the 4 core types of enjoyment - along with achiving, exploring and socializing - people can derived from multiplayer games)

The American election propaganda machine is at full throttle and most of it is incredibly infantile, at least for the level Lemmy tends to be at in average on non-tribalist subjects.

If I wanted clubist cheerleading, my own country has an overabundance of football (soccer for Americans) coverage on the News and they tend to go out interview people wearing full-blown team colors at the entrance of major games and ask them “who do you think will win?” (which is about the stupidest question you can ask anybody who is obviously a fan of a club).

The only two things that all the political coverage in Lemmy is teaching me is that in America not all brainless simpletons are siding with Trump (as so much shit from the other side also is Highschool Playground level bullshit) and just how downright mindlessly moronically tribalist power duopoly fake democracies are - no doubt compensating for how little true choice they have - which definitely incentivises me to fight for genuine Democracy were I live and avoiding that the local backwards, unworldly and provincialist politicians get any more ideas from the US.

And opposums, bats, bunnies and NSFW.

Their patents are not for technological innovative things at all but are for things like "presenting a confirmation pop-up window after resuming a game from sleep” or for in a isometric game projecting a shadow for a character that’s behind something so that the player know it’s there.

They’re the kind of obvious solutions that any expert in that domain would develop independently if asked to solve that problem, and patent applications for shit like that would be laughed out of the Patent Office anywhere else than Japan (and in the US before their Patent System went to shit in the late 90s).

I very much doubt this shit is valid in Europe unless there’s some kind of Treaty that means Japanese patents also apply here. If taken to court in the US such patents would most likely be invalidated - the problem in the US is that the Patent Office will accept any old bollocks obvious to doman experts and containing zero innovation, not that Patent Law actually protects this shit and they will be upheld if somebody has the money needed to dispute them in to Court.

However this is Japan and the Japanese Patent System, so it’s probably rotten to the core.

In my experience working with Designers for web and app design, they always had trouble with dynamic stuff at all levels, from program flow and elements which dynamically collapsed or expanded to using animation to illustrate things or call attention to something.

Don’t get me wrong, as a programmer I was like a toddler next to them when it came to even just awareness of the concerns related to merelly visual organisation, not counting all sorts of other concerns in a visual design some of which I’m sure I’m even not aware exist. It’s just that when it came to dynamic elements their expertise was comparativelly non-existent and they have little or no tendency to use such capabilities, even in things such as apps where they’re reasonably easy to do.

This made me think that the whole unofficial production of everyday devices with explosives in Hungary was a great opportunity for well connected Hungarian criminals wanting to get their hands on what are probably military explosives which is typically highly controlled stuff hence valuable.

I’m wondering if some of the stuff which was suppsed to have been used for this won’t pop-up elsewhere in the EU in the hands of some criminal group, possibly even used for a terror attack.

The possible implications of this shit just keep in getting better and better.

The point being that sometimes things that look “clever” if you only look at the obvious primary effects are not at all clever when you also consider secondary effects.

If only when it comes to “ease of eavesdropping” it might very well be in the best long term interest of the Israeli Security Services that the rest of the World keeps on acquiring Made In Europe and Made In US devices which this action will likely impact (one thing are accusations of “backdoors” in certain devices a whole different thing is seeing on TV a mass attack were a batch of devices all made in a nation allied with Israel contained explosives and that were detonated in all manner of arbitrary places hitting thousands of arbitrary people).

Then there’s the possible impact on Israeli Allies’ exports of electronics given these pagers were specifically manufactured in Hungary (a very strong ally of Israel) by a company licensing the brand name - is it really a good idea for anybody in a political, state or security position in any nation not allied with Israel to buy any device with remote access capabilities from made in any nation allied with Israel or with a significant part of the supply chain passing thorugh one of those nations. If they’re willing to have explosives put in them and detonated in the middle of crowds of civilians, what else are they willing to do - it’s the same reason why buying Security Software from an Israeli company is extremelly stupid for any company (even in allied nations) only now Electronics is also included, there’s very obvious proof that they will do just about anything (rather than merelly an unproven risk of industrial espionage) and the risk also includes things sourced from nations allied with Israel.

Time will tell just how big those two classes of secondary and tertiary effects really are.

Mind you, as I see it anybody who gets in bed with ethno-Fascists like the Zionists deserves all the damage that comes from them having no limits whatsoever to what they’ll do.

They were on TV over here (Portugal) doing a press conference were they explained the devices were made in Hungary by a company which licensed the brand name from them (a Taiwanese company) so the manufacturer’s name (which I totally forgot) is definitely out.

The obvious solution is to just procure their equipment from China only as they are naturally not allied with Israel if only because geostrategicaly they’d adversaries of the top Israeli ally, the US.

Given the indiscriminate nature of this attack this might imply purchasing decisions all over the World from much more than merely “members of groups deemed terrorist by the US”.

Specifically in Hungary, same country that has been voting with Israel in the UN and also has a Fascist government.

It sure makes manufacturing involving explosives much more easily to go ahead if the local government has approved of it.

I’m curious what this will do to the “Made In EU” brand in the rest of the World.