It's amusing to me that in the 90s you could easily play Quake or Doom with your friends by calling their phone number over the modem whereas now setting up any sort of multiplayer essentially requires a server unless you use some very user-unfriendly NAT busting.
Glad you mentioned DOOM! Sometimes people forget that DOOM supported multiplayer as early as December 1993, via a serial line and February 1994 for IPX networking. 4 player games on a LAN in 1994! On release, TCP/IP wasn't supported at all, but as the Internet took off, that was solved as well. I remember testing an early-ish version of the 3rd party iDOOM TCP setup driver from my dorm room (10 base T connection) when I was supposed to be in class, and it was a true game changer.
What was even more amazing is you could daisy chain serial ports on computers to get multiplayer Doom running. One or more of those links could even be a phone modem.
Downside is that your framerate was capped to the person with the slowest computer, and there was always that guy with the 486sx25 who got invited to play.
Someone tried running that in one of the campus computer labs when I was a student, and the (probably misconfigured) IPX routers amplified it into... a campus-wide outage. Seems weird to me, but that's what the big sign on the door said the next day.
You usually just need to forward a port or two on your router. That gets through the NAT because you specify which destination IP to forward it to. You also need to open that port in your Windows firewall in most cases.
Some configuration, but you don't have to update the port forwarding as often as you would expect.
The reason you can't just play games with your friends anymore is that game companies make way too much money from skins and do not want you to be able to run a version of the server that does not check whether you paid your real money for those skins. Weirdly, despite literally inventing loot boxes, Valve does not suffer from this sometimes. TF2 had a robust custom server community that had dummied out checks so you could wear and use whatever you want. Similar to how Minecraft still allows you to turn off authentication so you can play with friends who have a pirate copy.
Starcraft could only do internet play through battle.net, which required a legit copy. Pirated copies could still do LAN IPX play though, and with IPX over IP software you could theoretically do remote play with your internet buddies.
By the way, this is why bnetd is illegal to distribute and was ruled such in a court of law: authenticating with battle.net counts as an "effective" copy protection measure under the DMCA, and providing an alternate implementation that skips that therefore counts as "circumvention technology".
Multi-player started with Doom 2. Original doom was single player only. Doom 2 was for 4 players which I used in my mod ArsDoom. Quake then extended it to scale via a dedicated quake server.
Hamachi and STUN were what I was thinking of when I referred to user-unfriendly NAT busting. It's true that these are not much harder to get working than a modem, but they don't match up with modern consumer expectations of ease-of-use and reliability on firewalled networks. It would be nice if Internet standards could keep up with industry so that these expectations could be met. It's totally understandable where we've landed due to modern security requirements, but I still feel something has been lost.
Hamachi does not require you to open any ports on your firewall by nature. Except maybe the local firewall (Windows firewall, likely) which apps should automatically get asked for when they try to use a port.
I mean, internet standards kept up. IPv6 is a thing, and some form of dynamic IPv6 stateful firewall hole punching a la UPnP would be useful here. Particularly if the application used the temporary address for the hole punch--because once the address lifetime ends, it's basically not going to get used again (64-bit address space). So that effectively nullifies any longer term concerns about security vulnerabilities.
This is just not true. You can still write GTK2 or SDL apps, you just need to package your app for the target distro or open source it because it's an open-source-first ecosystem.
If you're looking for binary stability and to ship your app as a file, ELF is extremely stable. If your app accesses files, accesses the network through sockets, and use stable libraries like SDL or GTK it will work fine as a regular binary and be easy to ship. People just don't want to write their apps in C, when the operating system is designed for that.
Many native apps like Blender, Firefox, etc ship portable Linux x64 and arm64 binaries as tar gz files. This works fine. You can also use flatpak if you want automatic cross platform updates but yes, the format is unfortunately bloated.
It's not that easy to ship a JavaScript app on other OSes either and electron apps abound there too.
What does ELF being stable or people not writing apps in C have to do with Linux binary compatibility? No matter what language you use, it’s either dynamically linking to the distro’s libc or using Linux system calls directly.
Also, I recommend taking a gander at what the Linux build process/linking looks like for large apps that “just work” out of the box like Firefox or Chromium. There’s games they have to play just to get consistent glibc symbol versions, and basically anything graphics/GUI related has to do a bunch of `dlopen`s at runtime.
Flatpak and similar take a cop-out by bundling their own copies of glibc and other libraries, and then doing a bunch of hacks to get the system’s userspace graphics libraries to work inside the container.
Your post reads like a parody of itself. If you're being genuine, I encourage you to step out of your attachment to your own views and meditate on what you said here, and what it looks like to an outside observer who does not share your views.
Perhaps you should try doing the same, instead of treating it as a parody why not step out of your attachment to your own voews and try to engage with it as a genuine statement?
There's never really a time I'm not attempting that, but sure.
I don't think children should have access to porn, because they should have access to decent sex education, and (most?) porn is extremely misrepresentative of reality. According to https://xkcd.com/598/, exposure to porn can affect people's sexual fetishes. I think it is bad for people to develop an interest in violent, dangerous, or asymmetrically-pleasurable sexual activities before they have have had a chance to… uh, however it is people would otherwise figure out what they're into.
It is better for people to learn about BDSM from actual practitioners (including the background context, such as… uh, safe words? and whatever a "scene" is) than from fictional characters. If the average person (or, heck, the average 16-year-old) attempts to act out a rape fantasy, without proper access to information about SSC / RACK / etc, how's that going to go?
This isn't really the sort of thing you can teach in schools. For one, children mature at different rates: some 15-year-olds are too young to even be thinking about that sort of thing, while others are having sex in secret while their parents pretend to be oblivious. (And some of us never start being interested in that sort of thing.) Teaching anything more than the basics (how reproductive biology works, contraceptives, STIs, respecting consent, enforcing consent, the risk profiles of various popular sex acts, "if you skip foreplay, you might need additional lubricant to avoid injury", "don't use condom solvent as a lubricant", "seriously, don't rape people") in compulsory education fails to respect children's autonomy and is wrong. (Schools don't teach those basics properly, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)
I also do not trust schools to provide decent sex education, because there are even "good schools" that cover up peer-on-peer rape, and place the onus of "getting along" afterwards on the victim. How's an institution that does that supposed to teach a holistic notion of consent? (No environment with such a high child-to-adult ratio where the children aren't allowed to leave is ever going to be safe, but the reputational incentives lead to particularly bad outcomes when these things happen; we don't have strong enough cultural norms requiring that adults act responsibly when what "shouldn't happen" happens.)
For similar reasons, I think any policy based on the assumption that children are innocent little angels we must avoid corrupting, is dead on arrival and bound to fail. Children are young people, with all the autonomy that entails.
There's no particular difference, apart from power dynamics, between exposing a 17-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see, and exposing a 30-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see. Of course, we cannot generally ignore power dynamics, which is why age-based rules are useful; but age is a proxy for things like autonomy, capacity for choice, informedness of choice, and tendency for choice to be respected by others. A 17-year-old at risk of exploitation does not magically become less vulnerable on their 18th birthday. If the rules to protect teenagers from harm don't protect all teenagers, there's probably something fundamentally wrong with them. (Yes, yes, you can move the threshold to 20. Very clever. Way to miss the point.) Furthermore, if the rules don't protect all teenagers, they probably don't even protect all teenagers below the age of 18, because they're not addressing the problem close enough to its source / to the harm.
As should be apparent from my earlier post, I have very little personal experience with pornography. But I have spent a while thinking about this topic, and I'm not sure how this position is parodic. Perhaps you could enlighten me?
Maybe the social ills caused by porn will disappear with proper sex education; in that case, I might be inclined to support the prospect of children who choose to seek it out having the authority to access pornography. But my current understanding of the world suggests that a restriction is more beneficial than access. (It's only, what, four years to wait? During which time children can learn to deal with randiness in ways other than "fire up ye olde web browser" or "shag a friend".)
Computer-mediated ID verification, and the Online Safety Act in general, is obviously bad, and should be opposed. But, being obvious, that goes without saying. (Was that your objection: that I didn't clearly pick a side?)
Obesity rates have been increasing globally for decades.
There is no example of a country that has reduced obesity through public policy, food policy (even in the EU with strong GMO regulations), or messaging.
From a government level a different approach is necessary. So far GLP-1 inhibitors are the only things that have worked at scale. Let's see if that holds up.
That' doesn't address the main point of the ge96's comment though, which is that we seem to be replacing a problem with a dependence in medication, which could cause further problems. It seems akin to solving the loneliness epidemic [1] or the prevalence of depression, which some call an "epidemic" [2], with anti-depressants.
Re: losing focus: Maybe this a problem with tap to click on a touchpad? This happens to me and drives me crazy and it's invariably me inadvertently clicking with my palms. Disabling tap to click helps a lot.
I use an external keyboard, but I'm referring to the cases where popups and various things taking their time and showing up and disappearing. e.g. if I open teams and switch to something else, when teams finishes loading it comes to the front of the screen instead of staying in its lane. so it steals focus from say a text editor. it's like the user is supposed to be really dumb and slow, so you're meant to click on teams and wait a few minutes for it to load properly and then start interacting with the computer again.
Before the attacks Israel was in the process of normalizing relations with Gaza. For example, they were increasing work permits monthly. Here is an article from summer 2022
Gaza was not under occupation. It was blockaded because after the occupation ended they decided to ramp up attacks on Israel via. rockets and suicide bombings.
At question was whether Oct 7th was provoked. It was not. It was a full scale ground invasion with military attack plans. Sympathy with the invader doesn't change that. Think objectively.
If you're buying a ridiculously expensive card for gaming you likely consider yourself a pro gamer. I don't think ai interpolation will be popular in the market
The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible: https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html