Spyke

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Unreal Tournament 2004 20 Years Later: An LGR Retrospective

You know you're old when games you still play quite regularly turn up in retro reviews! The community master server is still pretty well populated, as are UT '99 servers. These games are still the pinnacle of their genre. No micro transactions, no DRM, no pay to win. Just you, your shock rifle, and as much amphetamine as your nerve endings will take. As the reviewer says, the level design and game mechanics are legendary at this point, and players of any ability can quickly get into a flow state that modern games can only dream of. These are fine wines in a world of cheap lager. New gamers should drink deep from the pc games of the 2000's.

firefox

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Bypass Paywalls Clean Shut Down For DMCA Anti-Circumvention Violations * TorrentFreak

If only they applied the same rigor to big tech scraping the same content into large language models. I guess the bypass paywall team wasn't big enough to afford the legion of lawyers that Sam Altman and co can summon on demand. We can just wait for chatgpt to serve those articles direct to our search results and nobody will even visit their website, because we live in a world where stealing an article to read is illegal, while stealing all of them for profit is not.

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Epic Allows Internet Archive To Distribute For Free ‘Unreal’ & ‘Unreal Tournament’ Forever

they still pulled them from GoG. Why not release them there for free? Epic slapped its legacy fanbase in the face with its handling of the Unreal series and then dumped it on the internet archive to wash its hands of it. They have no respect for their own heritage. This is not the same company that once released the likes of the titan pack as free DLC. It's just a shadow of it's former self, pushing fortnite micro transaction trash.

firefox

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Mozilla partners with Ecosia for a better web

I love the irony in how ecosia brands itself an environmentally responsible organisation while hosting a chat bot on it's search page, burning 10x the energy of regular search. Their chat bot even gaslights me when I ask about this by telling me how the energy consumption for "AI" technologies is actually highly variable, and I should check my own carbon footprint first xD. At this point, both organisations are so utterly self deluded, they should get on like a house on fire. Literally!

firefox

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The Dying Web | Matthias Endler

yes, the web itself is dying with the centralisation of services on top of the blazing dumpster fire that is the current browser ecosystem. So many aspects of the first generation internet have been lost, even the basic concept of it being a massively distributed, hyperlinked collection of pages is just FAANG serving occasional content to break up the adverts. All wrapped up in their own delivery apps that can punish non-compliance with obscurity.

firefox

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Meet Orbit, Mozilla's AI Assistant Extension for Firefox

I'm starting to warm up to this stuff. There is a future rapidly hurtling towards us where, if you take the time to read and think for yourself, you will become a genius. It was happening already in some stem fields where people used GUI tools without ever reading what the buttons did, and if you took the time to read the manuals and the underlying methods, you could become vastly more competent than anybody else in your team. This "AI" bullshit is just extending the lazy culture out to every piece of information on the web, where average Joe is already unable to concentrate beyond 140 characters. Those that take the time to learn the fundamentals and read deeply will have vastly superior knowledge of any subject, while the majority will be spoon fed superficial summaries filled with errors and no way of realising.

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What were your (now retro, but not at the time) gaming wow moments?

3 of them:

  • watching an Amiga 500 load from disk having only seen 8bit games on tape. Everything that machine did at the time was like magic.

  • watching the castle fly through intro for Unreal on PC when the first 3D accelerators appeared. Everything changed after that.

  • experiencing the shark diving demo on PlayStation VR. And also how nothing changed after that! xD

And to have been able to experience that evolution from space invaders to cyberpunk in a single life time has been a privilege.

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When IBM Built a War Room for Executives

It's Interesting how Dunlop spent his life wrestling with a suffocating corporate command and control structure to implement a system to facilitate a suffocating corporate command and control structure, while Engelbart was presenting ways of facilitating the expression of ideas with the machine. Dunlop's work with IBM is probably best left in the garage, along with IBM.

linux

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Mark my words: Windows will become a Linux distro that includes a good compatibility layer that people will take advantage of in other distros, and this will mark the year of the GNU + Linux desktop

I think it will become an entirely cloud based OS with a thin client booting the machine straight into their Edge browser. Pay as you go operating system that never leaves their Azure walled garden. Google's Chromebooks were just ahead of their time. As Spock said: "it's Linux Jim, but not as we know it".

linux

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Linux marketshare measured by statcounter didn't sustain the >4% mark in January 2025

Seems like the kind of numbers you would expect. Windows is the default OS for every corporate and normie desktop everywhere, followed by the graphic designers and musicians rolling MacOS, and then the rest. The ratio never really changes, and never will unless something devastating happens to MS Office. If they included every headless server and AWS EC2 instance it would be the reverse with Windows barely featuring. With the proliferation of Android devices, Linux has become a quiet revolution with mobile but the majority of users probably don't even know they run it.