embedded engineer

  • 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’ll admit I may not understand economies well, but the inverse is that these publishers are enabled to charge higher prices in higher-income countries. The cost of creating their goods is constant, so if Valve isn’t selling at a loss to poorer regions then they are simply extracting additional profit from higher-income regions on the assumption that those customers can afford it.

    I wonder how this kind of scenario plays out in other industries. Regardless, it seems like the EU has a goal of reducing gaps in buying power between their members, and their unified digital market is a step in that direction.


  • Did you read the article? This isn’t comparable to your India vs America example, it’s specific to prices only within the EU where the EU has digital market rules that specifically prohibit this.

    What Valve did does sound like price-fixing too according to your linked definition of “an agreement among competitors to [fix] price levels”:

    “Valve and five publishers (Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax) agreed to use geo-blocking so that activation keys sold in some countries … would not work in other member states. That would prevent someone … buying a cheaper key … where prices are lower.”



  • Gen Z here. Oldest computer I remember my family having was an XP tower, a Dell Dimension.

    I studied computer engineering, and that interest pulled me into retro tech. I love seeing what older hardware is capable of — I’ve got a Pentium laptop that can load old Reddit and stream music over wifi.

    There’s a trove of old hardware and software to dig through too with so many unique odds and ends. History and tech worth preserving. One of my favorite projects so far was doing some programming challenges in BASIC on an Apple II. Anything old-tech is fun to me :)



  • I can never stick with gnome/gtk because it’s been impossible for me to get a consistent theme/look across my apps.

    Newer gnome/gtk has its DPI jacked so that the title bar, buttons, etc. are far too huge for my desktop or laptop, with the only fix being to tinker with the theme config files. Older gnome apps don’t have this issue, but their themes are incompatible so good luck finding a matching theme pair. Non-GTK apps would get stuck with the newer title bar — I swear it would be >100px tall. And doesn’t gnome/gtk 4 have an even newer theme interface that’s incompatible with 2/3?

    I’ve since moved to openbox and tiling managers; they actually bother to get this right.