Actually they used to be pretty good back in the 80s and early 90s when they were a hardware maker and the company was always headed by somebody from the Engineering division - they made high quality consumer electronics at reasonable prices.

This is how they built quite the brand name.

Then in the late 90s (if I remember it correctly) they bought a major movie studio in the US and after a few years the top job went to somebody from the Media division.

After that all their electronics (such as Bluray and the MiniDisk) was locked down by design, quality fell a lot, they started lobbying heavily for things that would make Intellectual Property more valuable such as extending the duration of Copyrights, the DMCA and Anti-Circumvention legislation, and became so anti-consumer that they even put out music CDs with rootkits for people who listened to it on a PC.

But yeah, for over 2 decades Sony has been pretty much Evil.

That is not informing the potential buyer in a simple way, that’s hiding the information in a different page, one which is a long text made up of legalese which one need Legal Training to fully understand.

You’re just making my point.

You know what would be a simple, obvious, honest way of in that page of telling the purchaser that they’re buying a license?

• To the left of the discount and the price put the text “BUY A LICENSE FOR:”

“Strangely” Steam chooses not do any such thing or similar and instead chooses to “inform” buyers with a link to a different page which is a wall of legal text.

I’m just correcting that incorrect statement of yours that:

Nobody is saying you cannot do on Steam, the big difference is that you can do that on 100% of Gog games, on Steam only on a very small percentage. (emphasys mine)

What the previous poster described is in fact possible with much more than “a very small percentage”.

Mind you, I agree with you on what you just wrote in this last post of yours and in fact made the exact same point in response to the previous poster.

It’s just that “very small percentage” part that I disagree - if you’re technically proficient you can “hack” your way around Steam’s closed system for most games since it’s not really closed tight.

Then again a total impossibility of installing and running most Steam games independently of Steam if one has the right technical knowledge is not really the problem with Steam. The problem with Steam is threefold:

• It’s designed so that only people with a certain level of knowledge can actually do that, those being a minority of Steam users.
• Even such “hacked” access is unreliable - maybe it will work easily, maybe it will be hard, maybe it won’t work at all.
• There is no way to, before buying a game in Steam, know if that’s one of those games which can be installed and run independently of Steam in that way or not, so one cannot make an informed purchasing decision on a game being possible to install and run without Steam or not.

The whole “it’s not totally impossible” thing is just a trick that the previous poster and other such Steam fanboys try to pull when confronted with people pointing out that GOG is open and Steam is not: they misleadingly equate “the dependency of games on a central system can usually be hacked around in Steam” like to like with “GOG’s is a purposefully open system that sells games guaranteed to not dependent on a central system” which is something very different in terms of intention of that feature being there, how well informed a potential buyer is of it before a purchase, the ease of use of it and how guaranteed it is for that to be the case. That’s deeply deceitful, not even an apples and oranges comparison but more an apples and ghosts one.

Long document full of legal language than can only be truly comprehended by those with Legal Training isn’t at all the same as BIG FAT TEXT INDICATING IN A SIMPLE WAY THAT THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE.

Absolutely, in the absence of actual Pro-Consumer Regulatory Obligations, the whole “Agreement” is a valid way for sellers of digital media such as Steam to legally cover their asses and not actually saying to prospective buyers the true nature of what they’re buying.

It is, however, not a means to help a purchaser make an informed purchase, rather it’s a way for Steam and other such stores to, in the current legal and regulatory environment, legally get away with doing the very opposite and obfuscate the true nature of what the purchaser is purchasing.

Think about it this way: if the intention of Steam was to be honest and make sure purchasers were making informed purchases, then why not inform purchasers upfront in the product page in a simple way that what they would be buying was a REVOCABLE LICENSE rather than ownership of a PRODUCT, and even explain the difference, rather than hide it in a long document that requires Law training to fully understand?

The fact that it’s legal to have a purchase flow that looks like you’re buying things without the seller being legally obliged to have a disclaimer in big fat letters that says something like “THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE, IT’S A LICENSING AGREEMENT. LICENSING AGREEMENTS CAN BE REVOKED AT ANY TIME AND YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO THIS MEDIA YOU ARE LICENSING” is the actual problem.

IMHO, Corruption amongst Lawmakers and Regulators is the actual problem.

People should be avoiding like the plague any stores whose media they can’t actually download and keep in an open DRM-free format in their own devices, but they don’t because they’re not aware of it as the whole thing is one big bloody mess of expert legal domain and the fraud of misportraying a sale to be one things whilst it is a different thing being totally legal when it comes to digital media.

Can’t blame people for not understanding this and thus not navigating it in an informed way, but I sure can blame Politicians and Regulators for not doing their jobs which is to make sure that sales are fair and the consumer can make an informed choice when evaluating a potential a purchase.

Actually, FYI, you can do that for a large percentage of Steam games, maybe even most, if you use the Goldberg Emulator that replaces the steamapi DLL.

Steam DRM is one of the easiest to bypass around, and I like to think that’s very much a purposeful choice.

However, the entire thing is designed for it not to be easy to do for somebody with the technical know-how of the average gamer, plus it’s not reliably possible and there’s no way to know upfront if it will work or not when making a purchasing decision on a game in Steam.

Meanwhile “No DRM and with downloadable Offline Installers” is literally the Unique Value Proposition of GOG as a games store - access to download offline installers is there in the games page after purchase and that installer is guaranteed to work forever and ever if you still have the hardware and OS version supported by the game.

Not reliably as there is no contractual limitation on games having their own phone-home DRM plus some games are tightly integrated with Steam features (which Steam incentivizes) and don’t work well offline, plus you need to known were the installers are cached as you can’t just download them to a location of your choice and how to use stuff like the Goldberg Emulator otherwise only games which have ZERO integration with Steam will fully install and run offline.

In GOG, access to download the offline installers is right there in the product page in your library and contractually the games can’t have any DRM as “No DRM” is GOG’s unique value proposition as a games store.

Steam doesn’t make it too hard to go around the phone-home DRM they put in place (making it better than just about all other phone-home DRM out there) but that’s not at all the same as “here are the installers for you to use whenever you want online or offline and they’re guaranteed to have no DRM”.

Do not worry, Sony is not at all known for taking away from people digital media which they keep in their servers for those people

/s (just in case)

In most countries Management is not Meritocratic - people whose job is Organizing, Tactical Planning and even Strategical Planning are in practice selected on Networking (the social kind, not the tech kind), Social and Image Management skills as well as Knowing The Right People (which often is Coming From Well Off Families And Attending The Right Posh Schools) instead of concrete metrics on the skills they’re supposed to have and apply on the job.

Since performance measuring in that domain is often pretty nebulous (especially in IT), it’s a lot easier to get away with being mediocre at the job than it is in more strictly measurable domains where results are clearly PASS/FAIL.

So you get tons of Shoot From The Hip, Make It Up As You Go and generally insufficient problem space analysis, none of which conducing to reliable, sustained and robust outcomes. Since generally the management pyramid is people like that all the way up, the higher ups just see the inevitable problems that emerge later as “just the way things are” because they themselves did the exact same thing, and often even promote such people because they’re like them:

The

• Some manager does insufficient upfront analysis and preparation, and then, when things needlessly blow up because of that, in a “superhuman effort” “saves the day” by avoiding catastrophe, hence is seen as a hero and gets promoted.

is very common exactly because upper level management themselves work in the same way and are thus unable to spot the causal relationship between not doing something they themselves don’t do and the later crisis when a “unknown unknown” that should’ve been a “know unknown” for which there was already some defensive planning turns into a near catastrophe for which in their eyes “nobody could have seen coming” is a valid justification.

Mind you, this actually varies quiet a bit from country to country as the overall management culture is not the same - in my own professional experience it’s not at all the same thing in Northern Europe and Scandinavia as it is in Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries and in turn between those and Southern Europe and Latin America.

Well, the upside of PCs is that you can keep on upgrading just parts of it, whilst console upgrading is generally just buy a new one, something that has become even more so around the late 00s when the upgrade cycle slowed down quite a lot, even for gaming PCs.

I think (but am not sure) that as long as you didn’t aim for top of the range parts and instead used the ones just below (generally much cheaper for only a little bit less performance) all in all it was cheaper to just keep upgrading one’s PC than keeping on replacing one’s console with a new one as they came out.

Mind you, I’ve jumped out of the “keep up with the latest titles” threadmill over a decade ago since, with the notable exception of Indie titles, I don’t actually find them as entertaining (they’re generally very “guided” linear experiences whilst I like lots of freedom and high complexity) plus I discovered that I derive far more enjoyment from great gameplay than I do from great graphics: the latter can indeed be amazing and impressive for the first couple of hours, but it’s the former that gets me back to a game again and again and again, even years later.

PCs and Patient Gaming is way cheaper than consoles, though I guess that by now there’s also a lot of Patient Gaming in consoles since people keep on using the older one rather than buying the new on.

Further, upgrading one’s PC or even just knowing what kind of things are better to upgrade at any one point and how to chose the right parts for upgradeability (such as enthusiast motherboards instead of just cheap ones and the kind of CPU socket that was recent enough that was likely to keep getting new CPUs for a while) requires quite a lot of technical expertise and is beyond most people. even gamers.

The first part it is indeed true.

For the second part it really depends: one thing is a technologically naive person who gets themselves into such a situation because of not knowing better, a whole different thing is somebody who should know better but still go in because of convenience and hoping for the best.

In my eyes the former are victims, but not the latter, so I’ll definitely blame the latter for jumping in with some awareness of the risks thinking “I will probably be alright” - if you jumped in the pool were you knew there was a shark and got bitten that’s on you.

I also definitely blame fanboys, because their actions help pull in more of the first kind - when one is too ignorant about the broader implications of a choice, they shouldn’t be actively be trying to get other people to make that choice.

I’m a gamer from back in the days when a “games console” was a ZX Spectrum or an Amiga, not an open standard like the PC mainly because back then nothing was standard, but far more open than modern consoles.

Then came the PC and for a time it was the dominant platform for games (basically the good old days of Shareware and a few years after).

Then consoles were reinvented, with the modern console business structure and tech stack which most present day gamers are acquainted with. This time around consoles were a locked down tech and the business was a walled garden model.

At that point I was so used to PCs and to piracy as an alternative to source PC games (or even just a way to unlock purchased games by cracking their DRM), that I never really jumped into modern consoles as it was too locked down. Also by then I was already a Tech professional and aware of the risks of jumping into a tech stack wholly controlled by a 3rd party.

So, yeah, here we are now with the closed down walled garden tech stack were there wasn’t even a proper piracy culture to disincentivize abusing locked-in customers having enshittified to extreme levels.

This shit was entirely expectable already back then.

I hope that the whole modern day business model for game consoles dies a horrible death, though people being people I expect that a decade afterwards they will get swindled again en masse by a reinvention of this console model.

It’s their walled garden, which they control and were they get to do whatever the fuck they want.

Never, ever jump into a tech stack which is a walled garden, because sooner or later you’re almost certainly going to get shafted by those who control it. This applies just as much as a tech consumer as it does as a tech professional.

I yearn for the time when our need to celebrate LGBTQ+ orientations is the same as our need to celebrate heterosexuality - i.e. that it’s all treated as absolutely normal, same as, say, hair color or the color of one’s eyes.

I’ve actually lived for almost a decade in The Netherlands, and it’s pretty refreshing* when nobody actually gives a shit either way about anybody else’s sexual orientation outside a romantic/sexual context.

*compared to most Anglo-Saxon countries, whose culture IMHO is seriously socially backwards compared to the Dutch, being still stuck in a mindset anchored on the idea of LGBTQ+ people as a different kind of people, rather than the flat egalitarian view that people are people are people and sexual orientation is just another absolutely normal human characteristic that can take many forms.

👍

There’s dozens of us!

Back in the era of physical media PC games too could be bought and sold used (though only some: it really boiled down to whether it used phone-home DRM or not, something which in the PC world was all over the place).

But yeah, you were right that console games could be bought and sold used in a much more standardized way, whilst that wasn’t really a value proposition in the PC were such possibility was not at all a standard feature of PC games and it wasn’t really reliably supported in the broader ecosystem (for example, with game stores not usually buying back used PC games as they often did for console games).

Naturally, as a unique value proposition (vs PC games) used as bait to get users inside the console walled garden in earlier days, this feature of console games was taken away from users with their enshittification.

Personally, I always thought that in the PC world the absence of this was balanced by games being a lot cheaper and even piracy for those for whom even the cheaper PC games weren’t cheap enough, and in the long run, as we see, the “much cheaper” part is being way harder for PC publishers to try and undo (they’ve definitely tried of late, and IMHO it’s failing which is why AAA game publishers are bitching and moaning that their market share is falling) than the used console games market was, and the piracy part is even harder.

If there’s one think I learned early on in Tech as a professional already back in the 90s is that in the mid and long term sticking to open tech will save you from getting squeezed, both as a professional when choosing 3rd party tech stacks and as a consumer. This has just become more so as the normalization of always-on Internet connectivity meant that the external 3rd party could control much more tightly and and in realtime how the software they provided was used, including adding further restrictions on use at a later stage.

If you go by the definition of “console” than includes things like the ZX Spectrum or the Amiga, then you are partly correct (you got my age wrong) as all home computing started with such “consoles” (and then there was a time when it was pretty much all PCs, and then came the modern consoles which are the ones I was talking about).

Technically speaking the modern age “console” was a reinvention of the “game consoles” of the pre-PC era, only originally the “closed system” nature was mainly a technical limitation as there was way less uniformisation of things like CPUs, whilst the closed system nature of the modern age consoles was a choice.

Having lived and used computing devices in both eras, I would say that the modern ones have almost nothing to do with the original ones, especially the business model - things like the ZX Spectrum tried to be open and educational (for example, by including a built-in BASIC language interpreter) whilst things like the PlayStation are almost the opposite.

And Starlink satellites are small and in Low Earth Orbit, already inside (the very top of) the atmosphere so they have to use fuel to stay in place and de-orbit naturally when they run out of fuel purely because of atmospheric drag, so they last 5 - 10 years up there and then have to be replaced.

A whole data center would be much larger and replacing one every 5-10 years would be insane, meaning they would actually be higher up all the way out from even the thinnest part of the atmosphere, more distant from the surface hence with more latency.

“Black body radiation” is the physical process by which you “dissipate” (the correct word here is “radiate”) heat in space.

In space you can’t just have the heat be passed from the radiator to some “substance” that fills space (like on Earth the heat is passed to air or to water that then gets released to the environment) because almost all of space is empty of matter (not exactly: there’s incredibly low density stuff in it, mainly ions, but such low density means pretty much no available mass to sink the heat), so the only way for that heat to leave is the natural physical process of a warm body emitting photons merely because of its temperature (the wavelength of which depends on temperature) which is called Black Body Radiation.

As others have pointed out, it’s a way less efficient process that dissipating heat by it being passed from the radiator directly to some substance that’s part of the environment (i.e. transmission).

At some point Sony bought a Movie Studio in the US and a few years afterwards the company leadership started coming from their Media division instead of their Engineering division.

This was in the early 00s.

That was when Sony started enshittifying, with things like locking down their consumer devices (not just to block copying but also to do things like segment markets via region locking) and at one point they even shipped Music CDs with a PC Rootkit (the infamous “Sony Rootkit” scandal).

IMHO, Sony was maybe one of the first large companies to start enshittifying.

I’ve actually been boycotting Sony since then, so roughly for 2 decades now.