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Jako301 ,

Why should it be? A faulty software update from a 3rd party crashes the operating system. The exact same thing could happen to Linux hosts as well with how much access those IPSec programms usually get.

How come Android doesn't have a built in PDF viewer?

Forgive me for this stupid question. I just transitioned from iPhone to Pixel (GrapheneOS) and I’m curious why there isn’t a built in PDF viewer like on iPhone? It feels like you have to open things externally pretty often, but I figure there’s a reason for that. I haven’t used Android in many years and I recently...

Jako301 ,

Apple is a bit like Microsoft in that regard. Their browser (safari) is so tightly integrated into their operating system that removing it is basically impossible. Due to that, they can use/abuse it for basic functionality like a pdf reader instead of creating a separate app for it.

Android, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a real default browser. While Chrome ships as the default since android 4, it’s basically just the app tacked on top. Since PDF readers on android existed before Chrome became the default, Google was never really bothered with including a build in PDF reader in their browser. It simply wasn’t necessary. And since most browser depend on chromium, which lacks this functionality, they don’t have it either.

Firefox on Android has the option to open PDFs, so if you want it, that would be an option. It isn’t a limitation of the operating system, Google simply couldn’t be bothered and most others just use copy + past on Chrome.

Jako301 ,

And both of these companies build and purchased more renewable energy sources than all 100+ countries combined. Microsoft has committed to be carbon free by 2030, and while I don’t belive in their commitment, they at least seem to be trying contrary to most nations. They even invested in nuclear plants for their power needs.

You can fault both companies for a lot of different reasons, but in terms of carbon emissions due to power usage, they are better than 99.9% of the countries on that list.

Jako301 ,

Depends. It can be a good joke gift in your early twenties between men, but on any other occasions it can get pretty depressing.

Google and Microsoft consume more power than some countries (www.tomshardware.com)

In 2023, Google and Microsoft each consumed 24 TWh of electricity, surpassing the consumption of over 100 nations, including places like Iceland, Ghana, and Tunisia, according to an analysis by Michael Thomas. While massive energy usage means a substantial environmental impact for these tech giants, it should be noted that...

Jako301 ,

Google builds entire datacenters with their own transformers and power lines, if not their own powerplants. You plug these datacenters directly into the high voltage networks that don’t have big capacity problems.

The low voltage grids in residential areas on the other hand were build as cheap as possible, so increasing the load by 20% is already too much for most of them.

Jako301 ,

That has nothing to do with age. Most people nowadays are so used to instant gratification that they struggle with stuff that only helps them in the long term, me included. Last time I tried to seriously sit down and learn I caught myself doing dishes and watering plants after not even 30mins.

Jako301 ,

They get that same location data with or without maps. As long as you are using stock android, Google knows exactly where you’ve been even if you enable airplane mode. They get your position with WiFi networks and other phones around you and store that data with timestamps. Maps doesn’t give them any extra data, it simply binds you into their ecosystem.

Jako301 ,

They struggle with finding a good/the right man to keep long term, but simply getting a date takes half an hour on tinder while they can choose between 50+ guys in their immediate neighbourhood.

And this isn’t even purely my imagination, it’s annecdotal from things my sister pulled off.

Jako301 ,

You are definetly in a bubble, even if its a pretty big one. Owning a pc is pretty much a prerequisite for going into comp-science or working in IT.

Out of all the 30 odd people I know of at my workplace, one other apart from me has a gaming pc, and two others have consoles. The rest doesn’t play any games at all.

Jako301 ,

Nuclear is the worst possible option to fill said gaps. Nuclear reactor need to run at a mostly stable output permanently, they are slow to react to changes and can’t be switched on or off at will.

You could use them to generate a stable base power level, but that’s the opposite of what we need. It wouldn’t change anything regarding the need of energy storage.

The best option currently as a gap filler is gas cause it can be turned on or off in minutes when needed.

Not keeping up with demand is a self-made problem. Multiple EU countries already have multiple days a year where they use 100% renewables.

Am I the only one preferring low quality media over high quality one?

I have a very slow Internet connection (5 Mbps down, and even less for upload). Given that, I always download movies at 720p, since they have low file size, which means I can download them more quickly. Also, I don’t notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p. As for 4K, because I don’t have a screen that can display...

Jako301 ,

You don’t really prefer a lower resolution, you just work within the limitations you have.

Also, I don’t notice much of a difference between 1080p and 720p

Either your display is really shitty or you need (better) glasses. This isn’t like the difference between 60 and 144hz where its barely visible for untrained eyes.

Jako301 ,

Tbh, that’s something I can totally understand. Some programs use very obscure savefile locations, usually hidden behind 10 subfolders somewhere under your documents.

Jako301 ,

Tbh, that’s pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can’t really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it’s one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that’s why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.

There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.

Jako301 ,

Java version runs flawlessly on Linux and is superior either way.

Jako301 ,

Steam requires others to keep the game downloadable if its in your library, but they can’t do anything if ubisoft decides to shut the servers down. You keep your license but it’s useless.

Jako301 ,

Latency is a non issue if you make the service even remotely decentralised. One server per EU country is enough to push the latency below 50ms, which is more than playable, even for shooters and MOBAs.

Jako301 ,

If YouTube decides to mangle the original content to fight back… then maybe that’s finally the impetus people will need to switch platforms.

Switch to where? Everything that’s not just a different youtube frontend is either shit or doesn’t pay the creators. Federated FOSS sites aren’t an option either cause once an influx of users outside the tech bubble happens, the server capacity will hit ground bottom.

Is it more energy efficient to charge a phone/tablet using a desktop/laptop while your computer is being used vs using the charger? (kbin.run)

I was just thinking if you are on your computer anyway would it just use some of the excess electricity that your computer would have wasted or would it be worse than charging your phone from a charger while using your laptop separately.

Jako301 , (edited )

Not to discourage such thoughts in the future, but your single post asking here probably used up more electricity than what you would save over the course of the next ten years.

Jako301 ,

It was a bit of a hyperbole, I have no idea about the exact amount.

Let’s say you charge your 2000mAh battery every day and your PSU is 10% more efficient than your charger (the difference is most likely not even this big).

2Ah × 5V x 356d= 3.56kwh

3.56kwh × 0.1 = 356Wh

356Wh would be the difference per year, that’s about 12ct per year.

Now estimating the power usage for fediverse messages is very hard to do since it depends on a lot of different factors (your device, cellular or WiFi data, amount of hops needed to reach you, general state of your nearby network, your instances infrastructure).

The only even remotely similar thing I could find was emails with pictures producing about 20-40g CO2, which only slightly increases with more recipients, and Reddit usage comes at about 2.5g per minute. Comparing these two numbers just shows that all estimates done are pretty much useless for us since we have no idea how they are done.

But if we go with a low estimate of 0.1g (slightly above SMS and somewhere around spammail level) per user seeing it and a few hundred to a thousand users seeing this even if they just scroll past, we reach the CO2 equivalent of 1kWh pretty fast without even talking about long term storage and future indexing. Not to mention that comments produce something too since they need to be federated, albeit not so much as the post itself.

So while 10 years was a bit much, 2-3 years would be very much in the realm of possibilities, but no one knows or can even properly estimate the actual numbers.

Jako301 ,

The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don’t work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.

Jako301 ,

As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I’d hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.

Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.

Jako301 ,

If we are talking about bigger projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads, than this may be true. But smal scale projects have so few people actively looking through them that even to automatic scan done by the playstore has a higher chance of catching malware. It doesn’t even have to be bad intent, two years ago there was a virus propagating trough the Java class files in minecraft mods which reached the PCs of quite a few devs before it was caught.

I don’t dislike FOSS, a lot of the apps I use come straight from github, but all this talk about them beeing constantly monitored by third parties is just wishful thinking.

Jako301 , (edited )

And you didn’t understand what I said. While you can not monitor closed source at the code level, you definitely can monitor the apps behaviour. Even the automatic threat protection from the playstore protect function is worth more than the measly amount of people looking through smaller projects codebases.

I hate Google with a passion, but with all their control over android devices, they are more than capable of scanning apps for malicious behaviour and automatically removing them. These few apps in the article are the 0.01% of malicious apps that their algorithm didn’t detect.

Jako301 ,

How is that even supposed to work? These search engines need per definition massive databanks to search through. Either you need your own crawler and indexer which is more than just inefficient, or you are limited to a relatively short list of curated static results.

Jako301 ,

If the game is DRM free on GOG it usually only has the Steamworks DRM on steam. That one is so easy to remove that you might aswell call it DRM free since its only use is to make publishers think their game is protected.

Jako301 ,

Yeah, but it lies.

No it doesn’t, at least not if the update isn’t already a month overdue

But a future Windows update will reset them without informing the user.

I’ve done 3 years worth of updates in one day cause I needed too. Pretty much everything was reset including registry edits, but the privacy toggles were one of the few things that stayed persistent. Maybe it’s a EU special feature (wouldn’t be the first), but at least here they won’t change back silently.

Jako301 ,

Not really, it still doesn’t answer the question as the main thing is still unclear.

Is the first chicken egg the one the chicken hatched from or the first egg a chicken laid.

Both can be argued as correct.

Jako301 ,

I’ve spent ways less time editing the windows registry than I’ve spent trying to fix all the dual monitor bugs with linux.

Windows issues/changes are a 30 second google search away, linux issues often enough require a 1 hour deep dive into multiple forums.

Jako301 ,

I agree with the first part (not that it should mean they can just extract more money out of us), but the second part is something I simply don’t believe.

Don’t get me wrong, I know budgets have increased, but the dev cost definitely didn’t by remotely the same amount. Devs wages are pretty stagnant since the initial silicon Valley boom and new tools at our disposal have made it a lot easier to create games, be it for indi devs or the corporate giants. Sure, graphics got fancier, but so did the readily aviable stock assets. High end work stations cost maybe a bit more, but they are a drop in the bucket in the 100+ million budgets of today.

What has increased on the other hand is the amount of executives/managers and their wages. In addition to that marketing has gone up a lot, probably over half of most budgets go there. The growing corporate overhead with its archaic structures also eats up a lot.

If we go purely by dev cost, prices should go down since the overall profit would increase with the greater amount of players. Everything else is corporate overlords throwing shitloads of money at a mediocre game to make it seem worth something.

Jako301 ,

It’s the implementation that will probably annoy me the most. If the ingame radio station in GTA tried to sell me coke or Pepsi I probably wouldn’t even notice since it fits in with the world. But knowing EA they will probably put them in as additional loading screen that you can’t skip.

Jako301 ,

I’d be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.

But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that’s it. They don’t care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.

The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google “valorant cheat .exe” and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.

Jako301 ,

This is not a ban and it was never meant to be. They just force tiktok to sell the US market to a US company. Said US company will continue the platform just like it is at the moment, just with a bit more of that sweet American propaganda mixed into it. Tiktok won’t be gone, all that data will just go to the NSA instead of the CCP, that’s all they wanted.

Jako301 ,

Live service and always online are two entirely different things, and the former isn’t inherently malicious, unlike the latter.

I’d, for example, consider all Paradox grand strategy games as live service with major updates dropping once or twice a year (followed by like twenty bugfix patches cause they fuck up every time, but that’s besides the point). Sure, every major update comes with a new dlc that isn’t exactly cheap, but you also get a lot of free content with each release. All their major titles are entirely different games now than they were at the 1.0 release.

What ubisoft does is just a tacked on battle pass that gets a few worthless items/skins so they can call it live service and have a justification for their always online verification model. That’s purely an anti piracy measure that fucks legitimate players more than pirates.

Jako301 ,

Because Bethesda doesn’t provide the legacy versions on steam, unlike other mod focused games, afaik. Once you’ve updated your game, you are stuck with whatever version you have.

Sure, you can always download the right version from somewhere else, but I wouldn’t count piracy + the risks coming with it as a viable excuse for their fuckup.

Jako301 ,

That’s just your bubble. Most VPN users just want to circumvent geo restrictions.

Besides that, the general VPN “propaganda” is that it encrypts your traffic and no-one can see it. The average user gets baited by that and doesn’t care to look further into it.

Jako301 ,

You got Hyper-V approved on a work desktop? Man I wish I had that much luck.

Jako301 ,

You haven’t worked in any customer support position, and it shows. The amount of slurs hurled at them is far greater than anything found in a few github comments.

Jako301 ,

While it does look really cool, I already know that a lot of people will struggle with motion sickness.

It’s a fast paced game and while the trailer suggests that you can stay stationary for a bit, it still shows a lot of fast sprints and dodges every so often. Doing this movement with a controller will absolutely fuck up your entire sense of balance and direction.

I will still check it out, but it looks a bit like the doom VR game that was a great concept but was limited by reality.

Jako301 ,

It also depends on your definition of cyberbullying. Is a mean comment under one or two posts already enough? Does it have to be consistent? Does it have to be from the same Person?

I don’t want to undersell Cyberbullying, it definitely is a problem, but a lot of these surveys have vague questions that can be interpreted in massively different ways, both from the person that answers them and from the researchers that formulated them.

Jako301 ,

Most Windows issues and annoyances can be fixed pretty easily with registry tweaks. This specific issue requires you to go trough the major effort of changing a single 0 to a 2.

As long as its still easier to completely debloat windows instead of debugging Linux, your so called win is still far away.

Jako301 ,

Your phone is 100% CIA spyware either way.

Besides, I’d much rather have the CCP collect my data than the US, simply cause the CCP doesn’t care about you if you don’t go to China, but the US could hand over stuff to your government.

Jako301 ,

They don’t want to ban it, they want to seize controll of it and let it operate as is, just with different propaganda now.

Jako301 ,

Most governments even semi big companies don’t allow whatsapp or other meta products on their hardware, is that precedent enough to ban meta too? Very few apps comply with the GDPR requirements needed on company/government hardware.

Look, I despise Tiktok too, but most arguments on here are just “muh China bad” or “look at these other people doing something”

Jako301 ,

How did you suddenly go from spyware to propaganda and are even accusing me of beeing fooled by them? I don’t even have Tiktok on my phone, I just fiddled with the algorithm in a containerised emulator.

All I said is that I’d rather have China have my data than the US cause China is a much smaller potential threat to anyone outside their country.

Jako301 ,

First, how does one even “fail” on MSO?

Secondly, you switched over the least tech savvy people that relied solely on an existing workflow to get anything done. You destroyed their workflow, denied them the option to use older documents as a reference due to how badly messed up MS documents often get when opened with Libre and you gave them an alternative that’s just different enough that nothing works as expected, but still similar enough to just be seen as a different office version.

These are the last clients id switch over.

Can you tell excel sheets which were created using a pirated version of MS Office?

My friend works for a company which requires her to use Microsoft specific application, she didn’t really want to switch to Win 11 and choose to just use Wine Linux package and install a 2016 version of MS office on her Linux laptop. That’s all well and good, but this company she is working for servers other clients at...

Jako301 ,

Can they find out?

No, not really. The Metadata doesn’t have a “pirated” flag and something like the product key doesn’t get saved. Microsoft themselves probably know due to their telemetry but even they can’t be bothered about it. I would bet that even you send a pirated document to the Microsoft CEO, they wouldn’t notice or even care enough to look for it.

But as always there is the important rule of “don’t fuck with work stuff, ever”.

It’s already questionable why she is editing company documents on here private PC without either a dedicated and remotely managed work particition + VPN or an O365 online work account. These documents fall under far stricter data safety regulations and the way it is right now, she is personally liable for any data leaks.

anders , to memes

True 😄

@memes

Jako301 ,

If you are comfortable editing the registry then you can get the old context menu back without the extra clicks. Searching online for the right key was pretty easy.

Jako301 ,

Emulators are legal

In general yes, but Yuzu itself probably never was legal in the first place.

At least in the EU and US there are anti-circumvention laws that make circumventing anti-piracy/copy-protection measures illegal in itself even if its done on games you own. Since Yuzu used the prod.keys to decrypt the games, it most likely already broke these laws.

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