Some IT guy, IDK.
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Yeah, I have a ton of time into HL/HL2/CS:GO/Audiosurf/PvZ
Pretty much all of that was lost.
I did a quick Google search and according to some commenters on websites, the great reset was around 2010.
I’ve been on steam since the early days, I think I installed it around the time that blue shift came out? I forget. But back then, if you had any HL2 title, and you put that into steam, you would get what is now known as “the orange box” (more or less). So, yeah, I got a bunch of valve games basically free and I’ve only expanded that collection.
Recently I’ve tapered my spending on games because life/work/family doesn’t allow me a lot of time to play. Which is probably why I like satisfactory so much. If I get an hour, I can build my factory, save it half complete and go back and continue building later.
The biggest thing that I feel like SF has going for it, is that they give you all the tools, tell you the objectives and let you figure everything else out. You have 100% control over how you accomplish the task at hand. You can save/quit anytime you would like, and there’s no demands to get things done in a particular timeframe.
You can save halfway through a build, and you’ll come right back to where you left off. Most games now-a-days are match based, once you’re in a match, you feel obligated to finish the match, and there’s seasons or limited time objectives that you must play a minimum amount in order to even have a chance of getting… There’s just so much pressure, micro-transactions, and effort required.
We’ll be waiting a while.
They split the original game into three parts. Remake, rebirth, and re-something? IDK.
Rebirth, aka FF 7 remake part 2 (of 3) is coming to PC soon ™. They’ve officially confirmed it and published minimum and recommended specs to play it. So it’s a waiting game for that right now, and it’s not even the end of the story.
What’s next: they’ll put out part 3 as a PlayStation exclusive in a year or two, plus or minus 1-3 years. It’ll be exclusive for about 2 years. So we might get all three parts on PC by … 2032? Maybe sooner?
Unless you own a PS 5, you’ll be waiting a while. If you do, you’ll still need to wait to get all three, but it will be less of a wait than the PC people, like me, will have.
I feel like a game like Borderlands needs to lead, not follow. They took some risks with BL3 that did not pay off, but the playability of the game was significantly improved.
Naming a character “skibidi” is moronic in the sense that, this is already a meme. If it get put in the game, they’re just trying to be cool for the sake of it. It’s a very “hello, fellow kids” kind of thing.
Borderlands, instead, should have some creativity with what’s being said and done in the game. Take a look at Tina for a second. When she’s introduced, she’s unapologetically strange. You either work with her on that level, or not at all. IMO, that’s why Tina is a fan favorite. The absurd and borderline insane statements she constantly makes is the reason that she is so well liked. She makes sense in an almost frightening and sociopathic way… And we love that about her.
Going to the length of dragging Gen Z memes into the game for no good reason isn’t going to help, and will, in all likelihood, make things very bad. It’s just, in bad taste, lazy, and a cop out IMO. With such interesting and absurd stuff already in the game, like butt stallion, CL4P-TP, BNK-3R, and more than I could possibly think of or remember that are amazing… They’re going to stoop to a pop culture meme instead?
Borderlands is about being weird and original with stuff, and some things really work, others, not so much. And that’s what made the series great IMO. They took chances, and went out on a limb for a joke, sometimes literally.
I mean, who can forget shooty mcface? That’s a footnote in a quest and it’s honestly really funny, weird and something that sticks with you. That’s what Borderlands should be. It’s not some meme pop culture reference machine.
The big thing with steam is that it had, what was, at the time, a leading developer, valve, behind it. So it was a no brainer to manage your valve games.
As other games were added to the service it just became convenient to pick them up on steam.
Now, I consider a game “not released on PC” unless it’s on steam.
Honestly, I didn’t expect that Epic would be okay with this.
It’s nice to see, and bluntly, after a game has gone through all the different stages of buying and owning, why not make it free? Makes it that much easier for nostalgia nerds to have awesome LAN parties.
I don’t think this makes up for the long list of consumer hostile things that Epic has done, but it doesn’t hurt.
The next thing I’d like to see is to have games open sourced when stuff like this happens and the game is well into obsolescence. At least someone can pick up the mantle that studios don’t want to have anything to do with, when it comes to making the game compatible with newer operating systems, or alternative operating systems (like Linux, though I think UT supported Linux), or so that it can be built for new architectures like Apple’s new arm based silicon.
There’s no profit in the game anymore, so just let people have it so they can fix what you don’t care about anymore.
I’m not going to defend Ubisoft here.
I will make a comment about NFCs. Basically, if you’re trying to validate a set number of items in a digital market, NFTs are not the worst way to do it. In the context of a video game, it would be that you have the NFT for, let’s say, a limited character skin, associated to your game profile/account/whatever. As long as that token is attached to your account, you get access to that skin. If you trade it out, you lose access to that skin in the game… As an example.
NFTs would accomplish that goal, while being (at least in theory) decentralized, and in theory it’s immune to errors and exploitation.
All of that being said: there are much better ways to accomplish the same with less. Any blockchain, by its very nature, will eventually become a slow, unmanageable mess because anything written to the ledger is immutable. So the ledger will continue to grow and grow and grow until it’s so large that it’s unmanageable, slow as shit, and just garbage to try to use/work with.
For shit like digital art or whatever, NFTs make even less sense. All you’re actually buying is essentially a receipt that you paid money to someone for the receipt. It’s a lot like going to a store to buy air. You pay for it, get your receipt and now you “own” some air. The only thing that proves you “own” air, is the receipt. If you lose the receipt, oh well, you can’t prove you “own” the air anymore, but you’re still 100% able to use the air, to fill your lungs, and breathe for another day, whether you “own” it or not.
The only difference with a “web3” game is that owning the NFT may give you access to stuff inside the game that you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Great in concept, horrible in practice.
I would expect that Gabe is trying to hedge his bets and make the company more of a co-op, where several key figures in the company as well as himself, own the majority, so that there’s accountability in what everyone decides.
That way if someone’s kid ends up inheriting stock in valve, there’s a way to block them out of major decisions if there’s a need to.
If that’s indeed what’s happening, then it’s a very long-term play by Gabe. He’s looking so fast ahead, so that long after he’s departed the company, the values that make valve great (and successful) will endure.
It gets really good when you get smart splitters. You don’t even need to really progress much in the game to get there, you just need to fill out the caterium tree in the mam. Then you can have one input for all your biomass stuff and smart splitters that take it to the constructors that will convert it to biomass, then into the constructors that will convert it to solid biomass, then into the burners. 👍
I used to build such lines in update 8 that output to a bin and I’d grab it for the burners… Just collect whatever biomass I can while I’m out getting things done and dump it every time I get back to the hub area where it was setup with the burners. It was a little ritual I had. The input on biomass burners will really cut down on how much time I have to think about it.
:)
I’m playing 1.0 now, I just unlocked smart splitters, and I have to rebuild my biomass processing as a result.
There’s also the dimensional depot which I rushed to, and that’s a complete game changer. Finally got enough materials to just set it up on my production lines, and I’m planning to add one for biomass, so I always have a little biomass in the depot for when I’m out and about and a drop pod needs power.
I want to go back and play through the whole series again, but the nuances of the older games that were fixed in the more recent games always throws me.
I play on PC and it’s very very obvious that kb/mouse was an afterthought for some of the games… I just hate doing fps with a joystick/thumbstick.
Either way, I’ve redeemed this for all of my copies of Borderlands. So the next time I log in, I should have golden keys for days.
The movie, that came out like, a month ago?
I was always planning to watch it when it went to streaming/home video kind of release. I rarely go to the theatre anymore.
I’m also waiting on the same for the new Deadpool + Wolverine movie…
Considering the little I’ve heard about it so far (trying to avoid spoilers), it seems like I should skip the Borderlands movie, but I’ll probably still watch it.
This is something that simply, should not happen. This kind of mishap should have been weeded out during R&D.
I won’t say any more on it right now, and I definitely won’t excuse the behaviour. I do, however, want to give advice to anyone affected.
If you can RMA, then do it. If you just don’t want to deal with all that, and you want it fixed, whether you’re directly affected, or if you just have a hot/slow GPU, I strongly recommend redoing the thermal material. You don’t have to go all out with fancy phase change material or anything (though, that is definitely an option if you want to spend the money on it), but repasting shouldn’t be difficult.
My recommendation is to do a small amount of research and try to find something that’s not too expensive that is hopefully non-conductive, so any screw ups don’t end your card. If you can get thermal pads that are the right size, you might as well replace those at the same time.
Most of the time, getting the cooler off is simply a matter of taking off the backplate, unbolting the cooler from the GPU chip location (remove the tension bracket), then carefully pulling it apart, and disconnecting any fan cables/RGB as you go.
Clean existing thermal compound off with tissue/paper towel, etc, then clean and polish the surfaces (both the GPU and the cooler side) using alcohol, generally isopropyl, and either a microfiber cloth or something else lint free. In a pinch, q-tips work. Both sides should be a near mirror finish when you’re done, though, depending on the cooler, it may not have been machined to a near-mirror, so just clean it until your cleaning cloth/qtip comes away mostly or completely clean.
Once cleaned, apply new compound, fix any thermal pads and reassemble (reverse of disassembly). Be very careful when reattaching the tension bracket to move in a criss-cross or “x” pattern, always go opposite of whatever one you just tightened, and tighten everything just a little as you criss-cross the plate to ensure equal pressure across the cooler. Everything else should be trivial in terms of order.
Once everything is tightened and secure, reinstall the card and test.
I think it was a bug or some kind of resource saving technique. The original did all online servers, AFAIK they were hosted by Rockstar. So I would be in a new game I started as “friends only” and after a while (I imagine, alternatively, if their servers got busy, IDK), it would just transparently merge your current session into another session. Suddenly I would live join a populated public server.
IMO, it was an effort to limit their resource use. When someone was solo in a game, it would just merge your online session into another one that’s populated to consolidate resources. Ignoring any game settings for friends/invite only or whatever.
I gave up on it quickly afterwards, because people insisted on being trolls and griefing anyone they could. Not everyone, I’m sure, but they’re was plenty of it going around.
They may have changed away from a server/client model, to a more peer-to-peer model, I don’t know. I lost interest in everything GTA after I finished the GTA5 campaign and tried to play online.
I don’t know if I’ll return to GTA when 6 comes out. At this point, I’m leaning towards not doing that. I might just wait for a sale and pick it up to play the campaign, but I’m done with their online gameplay.
My favorite feature of the game was when you went into a friend’s only game, just so that you can get a handle on mp before subjecting yourself to actual mp, and halfway through driving through the city, you would merge into a public game and get shot to hell with no warning, and when you let out an exasperated “awww come on” the game triggers voice chat, which you never set up and didn’t know the game had it, and only realized when the 10 year old kid that just fragged you comes on the mic with a “cry more noob” or some similar retort.
Oh yeah, super fun game.
Legally, it’s fully owned by the company.
My current workplace uses mostly cloud desktops. Basically, even if you’re using a personal system, you install a remote desktop client software (it provides access to another system, it does not allow access to your system), which is used to connect to a server farm of virtual desktop servers. So the work desktop you use kind of overlays itself on your system. Your system is still there, humming away in the background, with it’s only task being to shuffle your input up to the cloud, and bring down the images of your cloud desktop and display them.
There’s some other features, but that’s the core of it. We use a third party “remote monitoring and management” (RMM) tool to administrate company owned systems. You are perfectly capable of using the remote desktop client on a system that’s not company owned. I like this model, since you can minimize or close the remote desktop at any time, and since we (the IT team) have full access to the remote desktop server farm, we can connect to your remote desktop session and see what you see, but only what’s within the remote window. We can’t escape it to see your computer. So if you have a problem with your work stuff, we have access to that. If you have a problem with your personal computer, we need to use a one-time-use (or ad-hoc) remote connection software like LogMeIn or something similar (specifically the LMI rescue type feature set). Once we disconnect from your personal system after doing whatever troubleshooting you asked for, we lose access to that system.
The programs change, but they do the same thing in concept. There are a number of company owned laptops and desktops we have our RMM tools on which allow us to dive into a system whenever we want.
I run a homelab, personally, and when my workplace does not give me the necessary stuff to be productive from home, what I do is build a small virtual system on my home lab, which I remote into when I work (from my desktop), so I can maintain a work/personal division. It’s similar to the cloud system I’m doing at my current job, but the “remote” desktop is a VM on a server in my basement. Other times I’ve been given a laptop, and I’ll set it up in a corner and turn on its built in remote desktop service (to allow remote desktop connections into it), then use the same protocols to connect to my work laptop.
When I’m done work, I just shut down the remote desktop connection and poof, back to my stuff on my PC.
With my current job I went another way, I got a KVM switch, which allows me to switch between two physical computers at the push of a button. (KVM is keyboard/video/mouse) When I’m done work now, I push a button and my screens (I have several) and KB/mouse all switch back to my personal desktop. Same idea but different.
I couldn’t imagine using my personal computer to do work stuff directly. That’s just not kosher in my mind. I have work’s RMM and tools all installed on the system I use for work, and my personal system is entirely free of such things.
I also want to include a short story. Recently a client started a ticket about our company logo being on their personal computer. I grabbed that ticket up and immediately identified the system, and removed it from our system. I followed up with the user to verify that by removing it from our system, the icon disappeared (indicating our monitor agent was fully uninstalled), they confirmed, and I closed the ticket. I kept thinking it’s grossly inappropriate for our software to be on their personal system, and I wanted to get it fixed ASAP. Not everyone is the same, I’ve known users that want or e remote management tools on their personal systems. I don’t understand it, but I can’t tell them that it can’t be there either (the customer is always right, applies in this context).
As I hope I’ve demonstrated, neither myself, nor anyone I work with, nor anyone I’ve worked with in the past, would ever take such an opportunity to snoop or spy on them, but I’d rather not have that liability hanging over my company. All it takes is for one person to have the software on there and accuse us of stealing their private data (say, leud pictures) and publically posting that information on the internet, and I’m sure the policy would change. Of course, we wouldn’t do that, but all it would take is the accusation.
It’s a bad day for us when we see something we shouldn’t, especially if upon seeing it, we’re morally obligated to contact the authorities (in the case of illegal content such as child porn). If course, if something like that is observed by a tech, we must do something about it, but we don’t want to have to get involved in that sort of thing, so we’re pretty careful about it. To put it simply, we’re not looking for anything, and we don’t want to snoop through your stuff, because if we do and we find something we shouldn’t, there’s going to be hell to pay. Not only in the fact that now we need to report it to the police, but also that we need to be able to justify why we were able to see it in the first place. If we can’t justify why we were looking at the content, that’s probably grounds for termination and getting blacklisted from IT, even if it had a positive result (like a pedo being sent to jail).
Bluntly, it’s not worth the risk, paperwork, or inevitable trouble that we’ll face if we do.
Keeping a good separation between personal and work minimizes the risk of IT seeing something that shouldn’t, even if it’s not illegal/illicit. Even your personal financial information. I don’t want to know. I had a call recently with a user who couldn’t log into their bank, and through testing, I was on the lookout for errors while they logged in. As soon as login was successful and their accounts were up, I minimized my remote control so I didn’t see more than I absolutely had to, of their bank info. I got them into the accounts. I don’t care what the accounts are, or what is in them. It seems minor, but that is that users personal information which I do not need to know. I solved their login problem with the site, so I’m done.
I probably have a hundred of other examples, even some where my co-workers had to contact authorities, I’m pretty sure… Every decent IT tech knows that this is a risk and we do what we can to avoid getting caught up in it. We don’t want to have to answer those questions.
If you ever have IT connect to your computer and your background goes black, there’s a reason. At first it was bandwidth related, and we’ll still say that as the reason, but a large reason why we still do it, even into an age of high speed internet, is because a lot of people put pictures of their family, friends, sometimes even inappropriate content, as their desktop wallpaper. It’s hard to miss when it’s your wallpaper. So if it’s blacked out when we connect, that’s one less possible problem we have to deal with.
I’ll stop, but if you have questions for a random internet IT guy, please feel free to ask.
Take care.
There’s a lot of trust required in IT. You must be a trustworthy person. Being fired for a trust related reason is basically a death sentence for an IT career. That being said, none of the tools I typically work with will provide previews of a user’s screen, or such previews will be low enough resolution that reading what is on screen is basically impossible.
When we connect to a system and get a full resolution image of what’s going on, pretty much always there’s some on screen indication of us being connected.
IMO, this is how it should be.
The only time I’ve actively tried to “spy” on a user’s activity, has been when requested to do so by a manager/owner, usually when pursuing an allegation of inappropriate use of a work computer. Even then it’s been very rare, and I can only recall one such instance of it happening at all.
As an IT person, I will say, I could care less what you do with the equipment. I’m busy enough, I don’t need to fill my day with watching you do your job. Yes, we have tools which can allow us to eavesdrop on everything you do, I don’t touch them unless I absolutely must, usually only if I’ve been ordered to.
Another poster pointed out that work resources do not belong to you and legally, they’re right. The system, including all data and work contained therein is legally the property of your employer. This includes your email and any correspondence, and anything else that work provides as a function of your employment. If you create an excel work sheet that does some data processing for you, or reformats information in a better way, during work hours, that sheet isn’t yours. The ownership of the sheet is your employer. Though you did the work in creating it, your employer owns it because they paid you for the time/effort to do so.
Personally, I do whatever I can to avoid interacting with users unique files. I recently refused to work on someone’s personal iPhone because it contained personal data. Though their work email was probably present on the device, I didn’t want to touch it. I did however, provide instructions for them to do what they were asking themselves.
When interacting with work-owned systems, I’ll modify the registry, and run command line commands without the users knowledge, in an effort to reduce the disruption to their workflow, while solving an issue. Generally this is when I have a request from that user, or the company, to get something done, such as install a piece of software. You’ll be working away and poof, new software appears.
Anyone in IT unnecessarily snooping in on your files, can be fired with cause, ruining their career, if they’re caught.
We have access to everything, and I mean everything, in an organization. Your email, files, databases, software… Partly for troubleshooting, and partly for performing backups. If we don’t directly have access, typically we have permission to grant access, so we can grant ourselves permission to access whatever we need to. This means that IT is one of the highest trust areas of the business. We can read the CEO’s emails, send mail as anyone, access everyone’s files, and delete all data on everything in such a way that it is impossible to recover. We need the access to do our jobs and violating the trust we have with that access, is unforgivable and a career-ending event.
I will say that I have not met any IT professionals who will snoop, spy, eavesdrop, or otherwise examine what you do or what data you have or interact with, without a good reason. If it happens, it’s likely that someone else, such as a manager, has requested that we do. We are merely the middleman in that scenario. Bluntly, we’re too busy than to just do it for kicks.
If any IT professional has violated trust, I would report it to management. It is grossly inappropriate to access a user’s system without just cause.
As for notifications, that varies depending on the request. I typically only inform people when I need to remotely control their desktop (interrupting their work) and I’m generally very receptive to being asked to wait before connecting so any sensitive information can be dealt with and closed before the session is established. I have no issue with that. I don’t need, nor want to know any more than I do. I’m never looking for illicit or illegal things unless they are creating a problem (excessive bandwidth use, excessive disk use, etc). For the most part, I try to stay in my lane. I’m here to help, not spy on you to get you fired.
For me, working in IT, two things are keeping me on Windows:
- games
- IT tools only made for Windows.
Most remote access stuff is entirely Windows based. Sure, there’s clients so you can connect to Linux, Mac, whatever, from the admin console, but the plugins and whatnot that actually show you the remote users desktop are almost entirely Windows exclusive. There’s sometimes a Mac option, but almost never a Linux option.
Using something that’s more common/public, like TeamViewer isn’t really an option. There’s a plethora of business focused RMM tools that are just web apps with Windows plugins for all the heavy lifting.
The part that gets me, is that any of these tools which allow for self hosting, can have the server and client side on Linux, but the IT team doing the work only gets Windows as an option for the remote control tools.
Infuriating.
Well, I definitely agree that corpos are getting away with too much.
The walled gardens of cellphones and whatnot creeping into vehicles, from farm equipment to consumer cars, this is just kind of ridiculous. Everyone wants to be the one-and-only that can do anything to the things you’ve purchased. We desperately need the right to repair for all things… Not just cars, phones, etc (even operating systems are trying to get into a walled garden situation).
They’ve tribalised the very concept of owning something.
I think the part that bothers me the most is that, the customer is likely completely oblivious to the fact that a repair person used a third party part in their device.
I don’t think most cellphone users are discerning enough to start checking if the repair place is actually licensed by Samsung to perform repairs or not. They just see the Samsung logo under the banner of “we fix these brands” and go in. As long as it’s fully working when they walk out, they couldn’t possibly give fewer shits whether genuine Samsung parts were used to fix the device.
This is essentially victim blaming. Anyone who can fix the phone themselves with non-Samsung parts is going to do it themselves and never get “caught” doing it. So instead of “catching” the “bad actors” putting non Samsung parts into phones, they’re putting that responsibility on customers? That’s a PR nightmare. What the fuck are they thinking?
That’s fair, different games for different people.
I thoroughly enjoy satisfactory (obviously), but that doesn’t mean that everyone will.