It has the best gameplay in the trilogy, and the companion quests are excellent, but it completely shits on the lore established in ME1 and the change in direction of the story set up ME3 to fail. It’s a great game, but in the wrong place.
One of those games where I absolutely love the concept, and the atmosphere is great, but the implementation is kind of a disaster. Has so much good dialogue and moody technogothic art that they forgot to add a game. Also a bit disrespectful of your time; it’s very easy to mess up early and keep playing it for hours when it’s become unwinnable - do better the next time.
Am pretty sure the manual describes a whole pile of stuff that never actually got implemented, much like XCOM: Apocalypse. It won’t help you much - maybe find a walkthrough instead of you actually want to see it all. It’s one of the games that I’d love to see a remake of - there were a lot of games in the early 90s where their huge ambition exceeded what was feasible at the time.
Compared to Arena, which is infinitely large, then Daggerfall is only 0% as big. But despite being however many hundred thousand square kilometres it is, it seems empty, since it’s all just meaningless procgen. Morrowind feels much bigger, because it’s actually full of stuff.
You’re right about it being legendary - Ubisoft certainly seem to have been inspired by the enormous map filled with really repetitive quests. But there are more important things than size.
Both GOG and Epic stores are quite full of games. Give developers the chance to sell things, and they’ll take it.
GOG doesn’t have everything since they require DRM-free, but I do most of my indie-game purchases on there. GOG have said in the past that their most-requested feature from developers is “can you make your achievements / social integration just basically exactly the same as Steam, so that it’s easier for us to integrate?”. Means game updates sometimes take longer to arrive, but hey.
Heroic launcher starts faster than Steam, so I’ll grab whatever’s free on Epic that week while waiting for it to load; but fuck giving Tim Sweeney any money obviously. Seems to have quite a variety of stuff, tho.
The problem with displacing a company with established network effects is that simply “just as good” isn’t enough - you need to be much better to start moving people over. And I’m not really clear what “much better than Steam” looks like. They have great Linux support, great workshop integration, regular sales, the forums are well-regulated, and so on.
If you’ve a fishing shop near you that’ll sell you a tub of mealworms, then you could make a new best friend…?
It’s how I installed Arch btw on my desktop, tiny boot image basically downloads the installer into RAM - NetBoot.
But yeah, if you’ve got a computer that’s old enough to be fully supported yet new enough to have the UEFI for hardware, an ethernet network which is robust enough to download full system images on every restart yet simple enough for the firmware to understand, and tonnes of memory free to hold the whole OS at all times, and you can tolerate the fact that restarts take ages, then it works great.
I think the detailed description of this vulnerability described it as non-persistent in UEFI, but that you could install something that runs before secure boot that would be persistent. I think that’s splitting hairs, though - if you’ve been compromised by someone that has the skills to pull this exploit off, then they can probably chain something else into it now that they’ve got basically bare-metal access.
You also need to have sufficiently infiltrated the target’s local network to masquerade as a PXE server, and be in a position to force a server to reboot / just wait for one to reboot. Yes, a few places have large, fairly open networks with a lot of devices configure to PXE boot and they should apply the update before the next reboot, but vast majority of people, no issue at all.
What you going to be making the guns from, if you’re not importing Canadian iron and steel any more?
Can still set up a header-matching rule - just need to mark the email with a label, so you can report it without even having to read it.
No toast or beer would be a blow. But as long as there’s beans, we’ll be alright.
Can’t copyright gameplay mechanics, and the plot is basically “get a team of misfits together to battle an incoming evil”, ie. it’s Seven Samurai IN SPAAAAACE. Plus, one of the big criticisms that I saw about ME:A is that it’s lazy; it’s the same old aliens as we’ve seen before even though that makes no sense in a new galaxy, and the plot is just trotting out some weary old tropes. Very risk averse, very insipid.
So yeah:
could spend millions getting the IP off of the shitty owners, to make a very safe and boring addition of the ME games
make a completely new game with similar mechanics, but take some risks with the story. A fun game with a stupid plot is still fun; a fun game with a great story is exceptional. So why not roll the dice? You can get the staff easily enough to form a new company.
If it was just “Fortnite but a bit better”, then very few people would play it, as having a lot of people to play against is important and network effects would keep them on Fortnite. (See also every other “X-killer” - Facebook killer, WhatsApp killer, e-Bay killer, etc. A slight improvement will not do.) Also, Fortnite wasn’t really the game it is until they cloned PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds into it, so it needs to be:
something with a really compelling gameplay loop that’s good with a few people but gets better with more people
not a Fortnite clone, nor something that could be introduced into Fortnite as a game mode
Like you say, just a clone will not do. Need some really exciting innovations in gameplay, which is not Ubisoft’s thing, to put it kindly.
If you’ve ever played or watched cricket, which is a very imperial kind of game, then the pitch (the distance between the wickets) is exactly one chain, and the field (the whole playing ground) is typically one acre although it isn’t standardised.
Cricket ball is leather, about the size of your fist, and surprisingly heavy. A chain is about as far as you can throw such a ball over-arm, and an acre is about the circle of how far you can smack such a ball with a bat before it touches the ground.
An NVidia GB300 fills a whole rack on a server, doesn’t have display outputs, draws 1.4 kW of electrical power, and requires mandatory liquid cooling capable of dissipating 1.4 kW of heat. Not a good match for a standard desktop system. I understand that they’re also optimised for churning through huge amounts of low-precision floating point, aka. an AI workload, rather than being truly general-purpose cards.
If you have any use for eye-watering amounts of CUDA calculations, then they might come in handy. I remember back in the day, if you had two graphics cards in SLI, that the Batman: Arkham Asylum game gave you the option of either using both cards for rendering, or one card for rendering and one card dedicated to PhysX calculations. You could use one of these GPUs for amazingly good-looking fog effects, assuming you had another GPU capable of rendering the graphics and outputting it? Not very sensible, tho.
I suspect that unless you work in a very compute-heavy industry (AI research, but maybe aerospace?) then you won’t have a use for these cards that would justify how expensive they are to run.
With my ‘security hat’ on, I’d have to say you shouldn’t use anything that’s no longer receiving updates. But that would create a lot of e-waste for no reason.
To see if your phone’s browser is still receiving updates, you can browse to:
https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
That has a grid showing whether your browser was willing to connect to sites using the compromised keys. If your browser is using its own cert style and still receiving updates, should be all green ticks. If so, then you can still use the phone for browsing internet. Be aware that using other apps on your phone (like eg. your email app) could be read easily by third parties, especially if you’re connected to unfamiliar wifi.
If it’s all red, maybe try another browser? Or relegate that device to being a dumb phone - switch off its data connection, phone calls only.
Assuming that the device hasn’t been updated yet, yeah, this is what it allows you to do.
If you connect your device to a ‘fake’ router that’s completely under your control, then when the device attempts to connect to its remote server, you pretend to be it, and provide a certificate signed by this ‘trusted’ authority. Device will accept it. Make another connection to the real remote server. Decrypt what the device sends you, and send it on to the remote server; it’ll believe that you’re the android device, and respond with a message that you can decrypt, store, reencrypt with your fake key, and send it to the device. Repeat.
You’ll only be able to impersonate the API until the keys are revoked by an update. That’s maybe not so useful. However, any other connection that can be MITM’d and include other personal information - your bank card details, say - can be read, too.
As regards the data centre equipment; the SSDs and hard drives used for storage would be reusable by regular people. Those will be nice to have.
The memory is the high-bandwidth kind that is not be usable on consumer motherboards. The ‘graphics cards’ are the size of filling cabinets, require external power supplies and cooling, don’t have video outputs, don’t have drivers for graphics output. If you don’t have a requirement for serious parallel computation with a very high uptime, then it’s not worth the cost of powering them up. If/when the bubble bursts, all that shit is going to landfill.
Latest version of Unreal engine plus a fully slop game on top? Reckon you might get 13 fps to go with those 13 fingers.
You’d potentially end up with some slightly nonsense results, like having districts that are divided by a river. Doesn’t make sense to allocate public services that way - are you going to maintain the roads that aren’t connected to the rest of your district by road?
I think that this is seeking a technical solution to a human problem. Life doesn’t really work that way. Still leaves the potential for shenanigans that could no longer be argued with, because it’s “fair”. Having the election districts be drawn up by a truly independent body would be better, no?