If you’re getting back pain from an office chair then your arse is likely too far forward when you’re sitting and you’re putting pressure on your spine due it being at an angle other than 90 degrees from the seat, or your table is too low, lowering your arms, so you’re bending forward.

You’re suppose to feel your arse pushing against the back of the chair not leaving enough of a hole between the chair and your lower back that you can fit an arm in it, and when your arms are resting on the table (which they should be pretty much all the time if your keyboard and mouse are sufficiently forward) you should feel no pressure either downwards or upwards on your shoulders

I’ve been coding for over 3 decades, often for massive long hours (to the point that by the age of 17 I had RSI due to how my wrists were resting at the edge of the table and some years later when already doing it professionally went to the doctor with chest pain - which I feared were due to a hearth condition - which turned out to be work posture related) and at some point in my mid 20s I moved to The Netherlands and to a company which had its own Ergonomics Consultant (this was back in the peak of the 90s Tech boom so there was lots of money sloshing around) who would come around when you joined and adjust everything for you (they even had tables with adjustable height) and explain you all about the correct work posture.

Been following that advice and haven’t had posture related problems since then whilst always using pretty standard office chairs (always with adjustable height, tough).

I have however seen plenty of people doing the lazy (and stupid) posture of being all the way forward on their chair and quite a lot with arms too low or too high (which is more understandable since most cheap office tables don’t have adjustable height).

It’s not what makes them money so they don’t really have the business incentive for maximizing hardware sales that leads to a relentless pushing out of new versions of their hardware that are barely better than the last one and all manner of tricks for early obsolescence of older devices (things like purposeful OS and App under-performance and even incompatibility with older versions of the hardware).

Also in the big picture of gaming the Steam Deck is tiny and in its early stages, so business-wise is not the time to go down a strategy of relentless new hardware versions and enshittification, quite the opposite.

Absolutely, they’re doing the right thing and as the right thing aligns with their business objectives it’s a bit wishful thinking to claim its because they care so much about their customers as people.

At some point in my career I’ve actually designed mission critical high performance distributed server systems for a living, so I’m well aware of that.

You can still pack thousands of users per server and have very low latency as long as you use the right architecture for it (it’s mainly done with in-memory caching and load balancing) when you’re accessing gigantic datasets which far exceed the data space of a game where the actual shared data space is miniscule since all clients share a local copy of most of the dataspace - i.e. the game level they’re playing in - and even with the most insane anti-cheat logic that checks every piece of data coming in from the user side against a server-side copy of the “game level data space” it’s still but a fraction of the shared data space in equivalent situations in the corporate world, plus it tends to be easilly partitionable data (i.e. even in MMORG with a single fully open massive playing space, players only affect limited areas of the entire game space so you don’t really need to check the actions of a player against the data of all other players).

Also keep in mind that all the static (never changing or slow changing stuff) like achievements or immutable level configuration can still be served with “normal” latencies.

Further the kind LVL1 ISP that provides network access for companies like Sony servicing millions of users already has more than good enough latency in their normal service and hence Sony needs not pay extra for “low latency”.

Anyways, you do make a good and valid point, it’s just that IMHO that’s the kind of thing that pushes the running costs per-player-month from one dollar cents or less to, at most (and this is likely quite a large overestimation), a dollar per-player-month unless they only have tens of players per-server (which would be insane and they should fire their systems designers if that’s the case).

After over 3 decades as a gamer and tech user this is maybe the single most consistent important benefit for any open platform were you can just install Linux.

The rest is nice but this one means that 10 or 20 years from now your hardware might have been repurposed for something else and still be useful and in use whilst a closed platform will just be more junk in a junkyard or sitting in a box of those things you’ve kept just because you don’t like to throw expensive stuff away but will in practice never use again.

They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.

Remember that Sony gets a cut from games being distributed to their platform, so online fees are just them double dipping for extra profits.

They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.

I have an Orange PI Pro 5 16GB on a box that smoothly runs a full blown Ubuntu Desktop version and would fit in a pocket though it’s maybe a little too thick (from memory the box it’s about 3x5x2 cm).

Total cost was about $170.

The board itself would fit a thinner box, but you might have to 3D print one.

Mind you, a N100 Mini-PC that costs the same is even more capable as a Linux Desktop, but it’s significantly larger and will definitely not fit a pocket.

You can find cheaper SBCs capable of running a Desktop Ubuntu but in my experience (with a $35 Banana Pi P2-Zero) if you go too far down the price scale Desktop Linux performance stops being smooth, even if the board is a tiny thing.

It was actually quite surprising for me recently when I found out some of these things are perfectly capable Linux Desktops.

Playing Accounting Tycoon on the Steam Deck.

What’s there not to like?!

By that definition making coffee at home and taking it with you to work instead of buying is theft.

Even further anytime you make a product or do a service yourself or get a free alternative (for example, open source software instead of a close-source alternative) instead of buying would be theft by that definition.

That’s not the legal definition of “theft”, it’s not even the historical or common sense definition of “theft”, it’s some kind of neo-Capitalist Dystopia definition of “theft” that only makes sense if you’re starting from a foundation of there being a “right to make money”.

It’s legally called “Copyright Infrigement” and it’s not even part of Criminal Law in most Legal Jurisdictions, unlike Theft.

You’re talking off your arse so hard that by now you must hovering on your own farts.

I’m old school and just download torrents with something like BiglyBT and put them in my local NAS (which is really just a bunch of portable HDs connected to my router), from where I can access them anywhere in my home, most importantly from a cheap media player connected to my TV.

Been doing this for over a decade and it works for me. Also I know how to do it in a way that keeps me safe from such legal firms extorting money from people pirating digital works, whilst if you thrown “convenience” software into the mix, it’s harder to make sure it’s not leaking your IP address or other personal data even when using a VPN.

The rule with running under a VPN is to:

• Use a VPN provider which does not keep logs, hence my recommendation of Mulvad but there are others that the community considers reliabled in that respect (look around)
• Do not register for any pirate anything using your e-mail.
• Configure your torrent application to only connect via the VPN (settings depend on the program) so that it doesn’t “leak” by using your ISP connection directly if, for example, you forgot to start the VPN.
• Personally I also tend to chose a VPN exit point outside my own country to make things harder from a legal point of view: complex legal cases involving multiple legal jurisdictions aren’t worth the trouble for the legal system to catch a person torrenting for personal use.

If your torrenting goes via a VPN (hence it’s important to make sure it’s not leaking) all that those law firms have is an IP address to an exit point of the VPN provider. Unless the VPN provider is willfully cooperative (i.e. a letter in legal language merelly asking is enough for them to give the data, and the whole point of the likes of Mulvad is that they are not cooperative) those legal firms need to get a Court Order to force the VPN provider to give them the IP address of the machine using that VPN exit point at that time (i.e. your machine) and if the VPN provider doesn’t keep logs they can’t give that data since they don’t have it anymore, plus is both the VPN provider and the exit point are in a different country - i.e. a different legal jurisdiction - it gets even harder because, for example, German Courts can’t directly issue valid court orders for other countries (it’s pretty simple when the target is your local ISP, not so much if it’s, say, a company in Sweden)

It’s simply not worth it for those law firms or the courts to go after common torrenting in such a situation, especially as there is a vast number of easy to extort people torrenting from their home connection directly, what the Americans would call “low hanging fruit”.

Certainly this is how it worked in the UK which had the same kind of situation.

A VPN is not a protection for people committing actual real crimes (say, murder for hire) because it’s definitelly worth it for the Justice System to jump through the hops needed to get such a person (in this case they would need a court order to wiretap the VPN provider to catch that person on the act and other legal jurisdictions would definitelly cooperate in a timelly manner to catch a murderer), but for people just doing normal torrenting for personal consumption it’s absolutelly not worth it to overcome that many hurdles to give somebody a fine. For those law firms too, it’s just easier to send legal letters to the ISPs of people torrenting via their home connection directly to get their name and address (without even involving a Court) and then send those people threathening legal letters than to try and legally force an uncooperative VPN provider in a different country to give them the IP address of the home user whilst they still have it (if I remember it correctly, Mulvad’s logs are in-memory only and last only 24h).

You should be using a no-logging VPN, even if only as a question of principle (I’m afraid that in Germany, it’s highly likely common people’s Internet activity is already under dragnet state surveillance: things like the mandatory providing and recording of ID when buying a phone SIM in Germany - which is unusual elsewhere in Europe - only serve for there to be a centralized record linking communication streams to people).

Something like Mulvad will cost you €5 a month, way cheaper than any streaming service.

I got used to using a VPN back when I live in the UK (which is probably the worst Surveillance State in Europe after Russia, as show by the Snowden Revelations which in Britain only led to politicians making laws to rectroactivelly make their massive civil society surveillance practices legal) and as it so happenned it was perfect at hiding my sailing of the high seas from those law firms (which were very active there) for more than a decade there.

The way things are fast decaying in so-called Democracies when it come to the actually practice of democracy in governance, it’s probably a good idea to start doing your online life behind a VPN (not that it suffices, but it’s a start).

It’s called the Discounted Value Of Money in Finance.

As in, the future money returned by an investment is converted to today’s money by using a risk free investment - say US Treasuries - as baseline to convert that future money to today’s money.

Maybe an example helps: if I have a $1000 investment I can make today that returns $1050 in 2 years time, the way to check if it’s worth it and by how much is by comparing it with how much would $1000 put today in, for example, US Treasuries return in 2 years time and if it’s more than $1050 then that investment isn’t worth it because I could make more from those $1000 in 2 years with no risk.

You could say that the baseline, no-risk, future value of today’s money is how much it will turn into by that future time if I kept it in a risk free investment from today until then, and you can also do the operation in reverse, Discounting the Value Of Money in the Future to a Present Day value.

PS: There is also another concept which applies here which is to do with having your money lock-into something called Opportunity Cost. Simply it’s trying to have a value for the investment opportunities you might miss if you money is already lock-in for a certain time frame in something. Back in the example above, if those $1000 are put in our example investment for 2 years, they can’t be used if a better opportunity appear in the meanwhile.

This actually applies to regular people all the time: for example, if you don’t have time to play a game, why buy it now if you can instead buy it later when you do have time to play it, it might be cheaper and you even have the option to change your mind in the meanwhile and get something else you enjoy more with that game. Mind you, this is maybe an example more suitable for the Patient Gamers forum than for the Piracy one ;)

It’s interesting that he’s using an insult from England and in a context which would make him Royalty trying to control the Barons.

Whilst a 100W delta seems unlikelly, a 50W delta seems realistic as the kind of stuff you have in a NAS will use maybe 5W (about the same as a Raspberry PI, possibly less) whilst the typical desktop PC uses significantly more even outside graphics mode (part of the reason to use Linux in text mode only is exactly to try and save power there). It mainly depends on what the desktop was used for before: a “gaming PC” with a dedicated graphics card from an old enough generation (i.e. with HW from back before the manufactures of GPUs started competing on power usage) will use signiificantly more power than integrated graphics even in idle mode.

That said, making it a “home server” as you suggest makes a lot of sense - if that thing is an “All In One” server (media server, NAS, print server, torrent download server and so on) loaded with software of your choice (and hence stuff that respects your privacy and doesn’t shove Ads in your face) it’s probably a superior solution to getting those things as separate standalone devices, especially in the current era of enshittification.

A NAS is basically some software running on a computer, so you can use a desktop as that computer, ideally with a light operating system (for example, Linux in text only mode).

HOWEVER: desktops are designed for far higher computational loads than needed by a NAS, plus things like graphical user interfaces and direct connection of user peripherals such as mice, so even when idle they consume a lot more power than the kind of hardware used in a typical NAS.

Also the hardware in a good NAS will have things like extra higher speed connectors for HDDs/SDDs (such as SATA) rather than you having to use slower stuff like USB.

So keep in mind that a desktop as NAS will consume significantly more power than a dedicated NAS (as the latter will probably be running on something like an ARM and have a power source dimensioned for a couple of HDDs, not to run a dedicate graphics card like a desktop has) and probably won’t fit as many disks.

If you’re ok with having most disks be accessed a bit slower and USB3 work for you (and, for example, if your NAS is on 100 Mbit Ethernet, it’s the network that’s the slowest thing, not USB3) then it’s usually better to use an old notebook rather than desktop because notebooks were designed for running of batteries hence consume significantly less power.

Frankly I would advise against using an old desktop as NAS mainly because in a year or two of continued use you’ll have paid enough in extra electricity costs vs using a NAS to pay for a simple but decent dedicated NAS.

If you’re running a remote controlled car you want something way down the power scale like as ESP32 or even an ATTiny + radio HW.

Mind you, I don’t disagree with your actual point, I just think the example you used wasn’t correct.

Andor was about people living in a world ruled by an oppressive authoritarian regime which put little value on life hence was calously violent.

And as people they were vastly more complex than merelly good or evil, at time acted in stupid ways, others in intelligent ways, sometimes made the greatest sacrifices for others and other times were selfish and self-centred.

All that meant we could empathise with them because they were like us, only in that imaginary universe and those imaginary circumstances.

This is what great Acting is all about and this is, IMHO, how you make viewers deep down “get it” how it is to be in that kind of situation (which for some leads them to understand the “other” side).

Living by proxy that “truthful living under imaginary circumstances” of a good actor with a good script is how you get people to understand, not political speech decorated with a few bits and bobs from an imaginary universe to try and disguise its nature as “present day politics opinion making”.

PS: I suspect that it’s actually not by chance that both Andor and Rogue One, which was maybe the most full-bodied Star Wars film (in the sense that it was as good “chewing gum for the brain” as Ep4-6 but also had more depth), have the same actor cast as a main character.

Considering they’re the one who pushed for decades to extend the Copyright period from the original 20 years to “Death of Author + 75 years” (so, around 125+ years), making the entering in our lifetime into the Public Domain of any of the cultural elements we grew up in pretty much de facto impossible, thus breaking the quid-pro-quo of Copyright Legislation, I’m surprised that anybody here sees the Disney Corporation as anything but Evil.

These people did more damage to freedom in modern society (as Copyright also affects things like Software) than anybody else.

It’s all massivelly dissapointing!

Came here for parrot feeding advice and tip and tricks to deal with phantom pain on the wooden leg and nothing.