AnyOldName3

It’s been the default since 2015 when Windows 10 launched, although there was an obvious button to opt out during first-time setup back then which was then respected permanently. It’s got gradually less prominent over time, and maybe the article’s just doing a really bad job of explaining that it’s no longer something where your initial preference is permanent and it’ll change back to the default every so often.

It’s a silly flag to use as it only works when running 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Windows, and if you’re compiling from source, you should also have the option to just build a 64-bit binary in the first place. It made a degree of sense years ago when people actually used 32-bit Windows sometimes (which was usually just down to OEMs installing the wrong version on prebuilt PCs could have supported 64-bit) if you really wanted to only have one binary or you consumed a precompiled third party library and had to match its architecture.

They tried. UWP and the Windows Store did loads to boost security and make the source of apps verifiable, but people hated it and barely used it, so the holes they were supposed to patch stayed open. The store itself did have the problem that part of its raison d’être was to try and take a cut of the sales of all software for Windows, like Apple do for iOS, and UWP made certain things a pain or impossible (sometimes because they were inherently insecure), but UWP wasn’t tied to the store and did improve even though it’s barely used.

They update on two Tuesdays a month, and have done that at least since XP. Even with the most reboot-keen settings, the update doesn’t happen until the time of day you’re least likely to be using the machine based on when you typically do it. It tells you when that time will be and gives you several hours of notice with a popup with the option to delay. Depending on the variant of Windows you’re using, you have settings to delay a forced reboot for up to a week (Home), a month (Pro) or forever (Enterprise). Obviously, that’s not enough to make sure no one ever gets updates forced on them when they don’t want them, and it would be nice if there was a way to distinguish users who know what they’re doing from users who don’t so people who do could be given more power to control if and when they install updates, but it is enough to ensure that checking the equipment before you use it is enough, potentially two weeks in advance.

!openmw@lemmy.ml has less than 150 subscribers, so it’s definitely not large. We’re already swamped with infrastructure work for the stuff we already self-host, so I don’t think we’ll be running our own Lemmy instance any time soon.

OpenMW’s official Lemmy community has been on lemmy.ml since 2021, way before lemmy.world existed (and most other instances, too), and way before there was any inter-instance drama. It’s becoming increasingly likely that it’s not going to be a suitable long-term home, but we’d be much happier if we could migrate the existing community rather than start from scratch with a new one. Is there any way to do that yet?

It doesn’t necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don’t have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that’s potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it’s something tests detect, it’s probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it’s viable to just ignore it. If it’s something tests don’t detect, it’s just as easy to ignore whether it’s because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.

The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there’s the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it’s now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone’s so tired from crunch that they’re less productive than if they worked normal hours.

Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.

I’m thinking more for the scale of something like OpenMW, as we’ve got more frequently asked questions than we could hope to put on an FAQ page. In the olden days, stuff showed up from our forums when people googled it, and now it doesn’t, so we get loads of questions through Discord, and very rarely one from Matrix.

If past support questions showed up in searches, then more users would be able to help themselves and would never need to ask for support, so it wouldn’t matter as much what platform it happened on.

Personally, I think it would be good if support discords were all bridged to matrix spaces (currently doable, but matrix needs locking down more than discord to stop spam as the tools to prevent and remove it are worse) and the matrix history was archived somewhere search engines could index it like mailing list archives are (currently not doable). That approach would let users use what they want without forcing anyone else to, and keeps self help as easy as it was in the days of forums.

I think you’re reading things into my comment that I intentionally didn’t put in it. I’m just making the point that games already don’t get to control the amount of hardship the player experiences because some players start out better than others, and some improve faster than others. If a game has a fixed difficulty level, there’ll always be people who find it easier than the developers intended, and people who’d still be unable to finish it with thousands of hours of practice (and plenty of people will play for ten or twenty hours before deciding they don’t have time to find out if they’d eventually get good enough). On the other hand, if a game’s got several modes, then there’s a good chance a player will pick a difficulty level that’s too easy or hard for them, so it could make the problem worse, but, critically, it wouldn’t be what introduced it in the first place.

Regarding your point about Animal Farm, it’s a bit more like deciding not to read an encrypted copy of the book. It might be a trivial Caesar cipher that could be easily broken, and you could be reading about some animals being more equal than others in a few seconds, or it could be modern AES that can’t be broken before the heat death of the universe, or it could be anything in between. If you don’t quickly make enough progress to see that you’re actually going to get to read it, then you’ve no way to know whether it’s seemingly insurmountable or literally insurmountable.

If someone’s saying they don’t have time to get good at Dark Souls, they’re agreeing with you that not everything has to be for everyone, and they’ve decided that Dark Souls isn’t for them. They don’t have to be happy about that, though, especially if they’ve had to pay for the game to find out.

Different people have different skill levels, so will experience different levels of hardship. Someone who’d played every Dark Souls game ten times (which isn’t that rare) would find Elden Ring much easier than someone who’d never played a soulslike before. If the difficultly could be scaled to normalise for that, then everyone would have a more consistent experience closer to the intended one. It’s probably not remotely practical to achieve that in every case, though.

It’s a 250W+ part running at around 1V, so it’s going to draw a lot of current. Power is supplied via many pins on the back of the CPU, and they’re connected to many traces, so it’s not putting all that current through just one. It still puts out a lot of heat anyway, which is why modern motherboards have large heat sinks, sometimes with fans, on their VRMs.

It’s super quick to swap it on Windows once you know the problem exists and know where to look. You just click the audio icon in the system tray and change the output device in the dropdown from the headset version of the device to the headphones one, and it enables all the higher-bandwidth modes. I’m not sure there’s user-accessible control over which specific codec gets used, though.

Some Bluetooth controllers can’t handle the bandwidth required for sound input and output at the same time unless it’s at very low quality, and if Windows suspects such a device is in use, it defaults to the low quality mode as users are more likely to be able to tolerate it than tolerate their headphones not working at all. It’s overly cautious, though, and uses the low quality mode far more than it has to.

Circumventing DRM is illegal under the DMCA, but the DMCA has an exception saying you’re allowed to ignore parts of the DMCA if it’s for purposes of interoperability between different computer systems. It’s that exception that makes emulators legal in the first place. However, there’s no case law setting a precedent as to whether the DRM circumvention prohibition or interoperability exception wins when both apply.

That means that the decryption is in a grey area if it’s part of an emulator, but definitely illegal if it isn’t.

We also don’t know if this is an argument Nintendo relied on to stop Yuzu. Their initial court documents claimed things like emulators being totally illegal and only invented for piracy, which weren’t true, and they settled out of court, so the public can’t see what the final nail in the coffin was. It could simply be that they’d make Yuzu’s position expensive to defend with spurious delays until they were bankrupt or shut down and gave them all their money, which doesn’t require Nintendo to be legally in the right.

Not long before this, Dolphin’s Steam release was cancelled because Nintendo asked Valve to block it, so the Dolphin team double checked they were entirely above board with their lawyers. Despite Dolphin containing the decryption keys from a real Wii, and using them to decrypt Wii games, they were confident it wasn’t at risk. The keys are an example of a so-called illegal number, but they’re generally believed to not actually be illegal (hence the Wikipedia article about them featuring several examples). The decryption should be safe as the lawyers thought that if push came to shove, the interoperability exception would beat the DRM circumvention prohibition.

Look at the wheels to check for bogies. A train or tram without bogies will come to a stop. One with bogies will multi-track drift until the tracks get too far apart.

WSL2 is, but WSL1 implemented the Linux kernel API in NT, so ran things directly.

You dun goofed here. You don’t need to agree to the GPL to use GPL software, so the Next button shouldn’t be greyed out when the checkbox is unchecked. You also only need to show the user the GPL when you give them a copy of the software, so there’s no need to show it during the installation process.

I never said I preferred Outlook to Thunderbird, but both are generally horrible.

It affects Windows 10, too.