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Reminds me of the Swedish Fish Theory in a way.

They have a battleeye proton build that devs can choose to ship with if you use that, but for some reason most (including GTA V online) just… Decide not to use it.

(Apologies for not otherwise contributing to the discussion, you want “paid” instead of the nautical rope-handling term “payed”.)

With apologies to the rest of the industry, boots on the ground equipment reseller-wise: Upgrading scanner scales costs us ~$1,800/lane/store for a 7895 before our markup (and I don’t know the actual figures, I’m not a money guy), and we barely convinced store owners that EMV was needed because of the liability shift. I’m skeptical that UPCA is going away entirely, and would expect GTINs to be more complimentary than anything.

We’re having a hell of a time convincing people to get off of POS applications that were sold ~10 years ago running Windows Server 2008 R2 and an app that is just recently past its support cutoff. They would need to completely replace their POS in order to upgrade.

With $100,000, I invested it and then I turned it into $16,000.

I still haven’t heard of anything in this space, as a part of an NCR dealer with ~170 independently owned grocery stores as customers. A fair amount of them don’t have imaging scanners, and the scanners they do have can’t scan QR. Not saying it’s not happening, but I am strongly skeptical that the industry is switching away from UPC/EAN as a whole *by that date.

I understand that you aren’t interested in responding, the only point I felt I wanted to clarify my own thinking about “is it justified just because they have the same service as any big company has?”

I would happily and readily say that I don’t know of any other single *gaming company that provides the same amount of services to the general population and to, if we follow the tenets of OSS, humanity as a whole. They provide code and money to KDE, Arch, the Linux kernel, they work directly with AMD on Linux drivers, they are working on accelerating what I believe are common-sense additions to Wayland, they’ve pushed VR on PC from being a futuristic wishlist item to having a section dedicated to games for their headsets and the countless others (including Metas, whom they also directly support) on their store and helping maintain and develop the open source frameworks needed to make them.

In my mind, Steam the storefront is how Valve does everything else that they’re doing, and I haven’t heard of anything that they do that I find reasonably objectable. I mean, maybe the TF2 stuff could count against them, and also given that there are 17 year old people who weren’t alive when that game came out any amount of work they keep putting into it is just wild from my perspective.

I’ll give my own experience as a Steam customer and aspiring game dev:

I’ve never had a problem with Steam that wasn’t quickly and satisfactorily resolved. Usually, in ways that go above and beyond Valve’s stated responsibilities. They have been quick to respond to the two hardware tickets I’ve raised over the years of owning a Steam controller, two Steam Links, a Valve Index, and my own Steam Deck.

In the many years that I’ve used all flavors of Linux and installed all manner of native games and non-native games, it has only been in the last 4 or 5 years that the process has become, in my own experience, painless enough for me to not only consider suggesting other less technical people I know to try Linux, but to enthusiastically recommend it. They were the strongest single driving force I am aware of in bringing day-one mass-market release games to Linux.

I have, over the years of my dealing with them, come to believe that money spent towards Valve is materially making my life better in ways that just playing games through Steam doesn’t fully encapsulate.

They provide development assistance and funds for open source projects in a way that truly gives back to the projects they work with, their company is run in a way that I find personally satisfying and aspirational, their leadership feels like they’re maintaining their relevance in the industry instead of being disconnected money-men…

I respect their decisions enough to consider their cut reasonable as compared to the services they provide both directly and indirectly to the PC gaming industry as a whole.

I’m probably misremembering then. I’ll rewatch to get back up to speed.

Most of what I know about the recalls that were done was from a Louis Rossmann video on it, and my impression so many months later was that it was a specific design issue either software or hardware that was only an issue with OneWheels.

I don’t know which specific video I saw, and am assuming this one contains his understanding of events better than I can express it myself: https://youtu.be/Q_Mk-5XkSmY

My understanding from the lawsuit is that OneWheel’s issue was a software bug, and my understanding of how they handled the issues is that it wasn’t very well done.

Do you have actionable advice

I haven’t heard of an actual direct initiative here, that 2027 date sounds more like marketing for IBN than an actual industry-wide push. Walmart is banking on RFID, for example.

If we’re talking about Digital Rights Management, steam is acting in that role to manage your digital rights on the steam platform. They could allow you to download games without requiring an account login or client download, and they instead do not. They could allow you to download free games from the client or the website without requiring a login, and they do not.

GOG’s website is also DRM for the same reason. It won’t allow you to download games that aren’t licensed digitally to your account, including free games. GOG has DRM-free games and installers fairly universally beyond that first check, and that means you can download them from alternative sources, but downloading from GOG 100% requires interacting with DRM.

To be direct: I don’t care that Steam is DRM because it’s minimally invasive and I currently trust Valve enough to use an operating system made by them as a daily driver. There are very few companies I’d say that about.

The Steam client is DRM at its core, even if it’s acceptable DRM. I think it’s important not to allow your thinking to shift from the reality that it is DRM just because it’s personally acceptable.

I don’t mind it, I will simp for Valve all day long, and if a company requires you to log in to an account with their server to check whether your account has the digital entitlement to then allow you to access a file or not, that’s digital rights management.

I want to give the perspective that from a technical standpoint, even free games on steam require the steam client to install and while the license to play the game is free steam is licensing your account to own the game. The game doesn’t require steam after that and usually this means the game is available elsewhere, but for the specific case of “free games on steam”, steam is still acting to manage digital rights.

You’re right about them going bust, but they were bought by Keurig/Dr. Pepper and is in stores, just probably none near you. My local Walmart has it.

I’ve seen some arbitration agreements stating that you can’t collaborate with other customers who are affected by the same issue, requiring each customer to have a different attorney.

Oh no, I did it anyways and collaborated with other customers online. Oh well guess we gotta arbitrate that now.

Another commenter here: the double reply thing was likely an app bugging on sending a reply.

I was an avid reader as a kid, and took the Accelerated Reader tests almost religiously.

I switched school systems one year and jammed out all the tests I could remember.

Got an award at the end of the year. A neat little blue engraved plaque. Not sure where it ended up.

Sorry, this comment was mainly just providing the previous user with a correction because they seemed to think that the other person that they were replying to was talking about forcing people to use phone apps, which I assume we all agree is bad and would likely work if there were a concentrated push for it.

Concerning your points after “using the browser”: I want websites to use replaceState and manage their own intra-page navigation with a cookie. They can still intercept the back button as they do now, but they should only get the single history entry until they switch to a new page, if they ever do.