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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Firewire was good for high bandwidth devices like external hard drives and video cameras because it didn’t require the CPU to do any heavy lifting. These days USB is mature enough and CPUs are so fast that we (mostly) don’t notice any performance impact but in the Core 2 Duo days you could easily max out one of your two cores with a large file transfer over USB.





  • Can’t you simply not connect your display to the Internet

    Probably, but maybe not. I can think of three ways a Smart TV could potentially get internet access without the owners knowledge.

    1. Amazon Sidewalk
    2. The TV Manufacturer cuts a deal to access the closed WiFi network that many cable operators have on their cable modems or routers.
    3. Via the manufacturers app installed on a smart phone. They often use the app to make setup easier and / or to cast content. There’s no reason the TV can’t log data until the app connects and then use the app to transmit that data to the manufacturer.

    So while the owner could choose not to give their Smart TV a wifi connection that doesn’t mean the TV can’t get one another way.












  • Well, yes. That is how it works!

    As someone who started with slack in '97 these modern distros function so “automagically” that I sometimes distrust them. They’ve hidden so much of the complexity of Linux and whatever Desktop Environment is running on it that most users have very little idea what’s actually happening or how it works.

    That’s been GREAT for getting more people to use Linux but it’s creating the same problem that Microsoft did with Windows. The old DOS users often knew quite a lot about their PC and how it worked because they had to but as the technical barriers went down so too did the knowledge of the users. You no longer had to juggle IRQs, Memory Maps, or DLLs because Windows just did it for you.

    That’s not a bash (lol) on Linux or users of modern distros either, I myself am on Linux Mint as I type this, because it was always going to work out like this. A lot of very smart people put a lot of their time into MAKING it work out like this.




  • The way I understand it is that every anticheat needs to be overhauled as they can no longer tap into the kernel/get kernel access.

    Yes, if we assume that various institutions (cough cough looking at you EU) allow MS to remove kernel access.

    So the anticheat has to eun in userspace.

    VSB-E isn’t really “user space” but your point about the kernel is valid.

    hich is why anticheat should

    The word “should” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. Even if it COULD that doesn’t mean devs will allow it nor does it mean that existing games will get updated on EITHER platform. Removing a kernel level anti-cheat could easily be the death of some older games on Windows as the owner simply doesn’t want to put the money into making it work.

    I’m honestly not too sure how possible it is to make VSB-E work on *nix either, since it appears to use Microsoft Hyper-V technologies at its core and those wouldn’t be available in *nix. That means that we’d be back to Game Devs having to specifically write anti-cheat for *nix…which is something they can already do if they want.

    VSB-E is interesting but I’m not convinced its going to do anything for Linux Gaming at all. Hopefully I am wrong. :)


  • Perhaps I’m being dense but how do you see this helping Linux Gaming?

    Even assuming that VBS-E allows Game Devs to shift their current kernel based anti-cheat over to it there’s no guarantee that Linux will get a compatible VBS-E module nor that Game Devs would allow its use.

    I guess I see it as: If a Game Dev does this (use VBS-E) AND Linux gets a compatible module AND Game Devs allow its use THEN newer games may not have the same problem with anti-cheat as older ones.