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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 27th, 2023

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  • I can’t help you with your animal fear, but I’ll give you a higher priority reason to avoid a cat for now.

    I’ll give what will probably be an unpopular opinion; cats (and pets in general for that matter) are a luxury… item. I have 3 of them, and I would never recommend one to a person who is struggling financially and/or has lost their job. Their food and vet bills are not cheap, and even a cat that seems perfectly fine can suddenly have an issue that requires an expensive vet visit. As they age, they will inevitably have health issues, which not only adds more expense, but increases the rate at which expenses accumulate. They can also damage things and ruin things, which adds further expense.

    All of this is fine, if you can afford it. However I don’t think very many people actually sit down and work out the numbers. On top of food, litter, and equipment costs, IMO people should be saving ~$70/a month for the first 5 years, then maybe half that after that if you didn’t have to use any of it, to be prepared for big vet events. It sucks not being able to afford the care your pet needs.

    Further, I have found that having multiple cats does not decrease the amount of expense per cat due to expected efficiencies from overlap. There are subtle things that accumulate like cleaning expenses and drain on your time and greater resources. I wish I only had one cat, honestly.

    People say you can’t put a price on them because of their cuteness and company and what have you. But believe me, you can if your cat(s) turn out to be absolute dicks, but nobody talks about that either, IMO because of some kind of Stockholm syndrome, sunk cost combo. People generally gloss over the shitty parts of pet ownership.

    Don’t do it. Be well-off first. Your GF’s sister is probably finding this out.


  • against your bias and narrative

    If being a regular person who just wants to enjoy the things they pay for in peace is bias, and being fed up with this crap is narrative, what does that make you?

    Stop trying to normalize exploitation by greed, and stop normalizing the acceptance of it.

    Just because Sony can manufacture a bait and switch with some boilerplate doesn’t mean they should. Regular people should not be blamed for being exploited when purchasing in good faith. The developers made a game that works, clearly, and Steam delivered it, so they are culpable, but if Sony can stop their horseshit, and this all goes away, it is clear who really is to blame.


  • Did the CEO of Sony write this? A bait and switch scam is fine apparently, as long as there’s some legalese to protect the company in there.

    It seems Steam should have some limitation in place on their end, and the Dev picks sales on Steam, not the publisher.

    Then what is the job of the publisher? To perpetrate scams it seems, because seemingly the devs published the game just fine all by themselves to Steam. If they didn’t do that right, the publisher suddenly has no responsibility to make sure that was distributed correctly? Whose job is it to ensure the product is published in line with their inevitable goals, we wonder.

    so why would they list it for sale in those countries?

    Because they botched the bait and switch. And now Valve is cleaning up Sony’s mess. Too bad they couldn’t clean up Sony’s mess of leaked customer data. I guess they can’t fix it but prevent the next one by making publishers agree up front that they can’t require data from players, in order to publish a game, but I digress.

    no one seems to want to accept personal responsibility

    No one should have to expect to be subject to a bait and switch scam in the first place. Which is what this clearly is, because if they were truly up front, they would have required the account on day one and had the appropriate region filters in place, so consumers could never be in this position.

    Stop blaming the victims of corporate greed and scams; people should be able to reasonably enjoy things they paid for without being molested and exploited. Personal responsibility my ass when there should be laws to prevent this kind of thing in the first place.


  • Interesting. I wonder how that compares to a similar Li-ion cell. Also it’s a shame there wasn’t a close-up on the markings of the battery in that video to know what it is exactly. I don’t imagine all cells are equal.

    The battery packs from the article, for instance, are not constructed from cylindrical cells, but from large thin and flat square cells. The cathode material appears to be unique as well, as far as I can tell; who knows what’s in those blue cylindrical cells.








  • Thanks for your response. Sorry I didn’t get the joke.

    As promised, here’s a “simple” explanation of SCADA, or as simple as I can make it at least. It will probably be rudimentary enough to be controversial, and long enough to be boring. Oh well.

    It stands for supervisory control and data acquisition, and if you think that’s a weird mouthful, it’s because it’s old and comes from a time when clicking graphics on a screen was a novel idea, and logging swaths of data with a computer and searching within it and rendering graphs from it was cutting edge. The term is basically relegated to plant, industrial and manufacturing type processes where a bunch of engineering has gone into it. Processes like brewing, water treatment, factories, assembly lines, etc.

    Those processes are automated with special computers called PLCs that are basically “robot brains” that control things like (but not limited to) motors, valves, pumps, conveyers, robot arms, all kinds of stuff to manipulate the physical world, and can receive information from sensors like (but not limited to) pressure, speed, flow, weight, on/off, open/closed, temperature, distance, or anything else that someone has built a physical world sensor for. You can put all that stuff together with a program in the PLC and automate practically anything from beer making to zebra counting.

    And that’s all well and good, but if you want to see what the process is doing (supervise it), or stop it if it’s gone off the rails (control), or see what it did last time (data acquisition), you need SCADA. There’s special software to build a SCADA system with, and it’s mostly special because it needs to talk to the myriads of PLC (and related) gear out there, and until relatively recently, it’s been tied to an ancient Windows technology called OLE, meaning if you wanted SCADA in your industrial process, you had to suffer with the rather unindustrial wart of Windows in the middle of it. OP is seeking the industrial Holy Grail of a windowsless process in their plant.

    We take it for granted today that we can build an interface in a web browser, and hook it up to control a USB device, all in one day, but 40+ years ago there was Windows 3, serial devices, and no commonly established way to communicate with gear (which OLE kinda solved), or standard design of how interfaces should look or work. Ignition brings all of that old shit into the modern world.

    A relatable example you could call “baby SCADA” would be a smart thermostat, if it has an onboard temperature trend graph. The process it controls is your automated home heating and cooling. The smart thermostat can tell you if the AC is running, you can change the target setting that you want the room temperature to go to. And if it has a graph of the temperature for the last 24 hours so you can see that the schedule you set worked, then it’s basically a 'lil SCADA.

    Cheers.


  • Please don’t take the following as me being a dick, I am just genuinely curious. Your response is unique and interesting to me.

    I have no idea what you are asking

    Then why did you feel compelled to respond?

    The rest of the thread is filled with people who know the topic and gave relevant responses very specific to OP’s situation. Many hours before your response in fact. I’m a little perplexed.

    Maybe custom built software

    Any person (with enough budget) could get software built, but that’s obvious to anyone, so it’s kind of redundant to suggest, so why write it given the other responses? I am further perplexed.

    Just install Gentoo. It will fix your problems.

    I take this as humor. OP was looking for software to run on Linux, not a Linux distro. Was that the joke?

    Anyway, I’m sorry if I have come across as critical or insulting. I really am just curious. If I have, and it’s any consolation, if you care to genuinely answer my questions, I’ll give you a short explanation of what OP was on about, if that is helpful to you. I think it was very kind of you to respond to OP, I think I’m just confused more than anything.


  • Ignition from Inductive Automation. Works great on Linux, used to run it in docker even. There are drivers for all kinds of PLCs. It’s a dream to develop in, was my SCADA platform of choice (I’ve moved on from the industry). If you need to script anything, it is in Python, not some bullshit proprietary scripting language, nor VBA garbage. The client software is great, even runs nice on PC-based HMI touch panels, which you could install Linux on if you want. The call-out alarming actually works (FUCK WIN911).

    The software is free to try and download. You can develop in it for free, unlike the majority of competitors. Go ahead and try all of it out right now if you want. The training courses on using their software are free, nice handy videos, so you can start learning how to build everything like right now.

    The “catch” is it costs money to run all of the SCADA critical components for more than an hour at a time (to prevent you from just using it to run your whole plant for free). But you can build your whole SCADA app today with your PLC gear on hand, and only pay for it once you are ready to deploy to production.

    Anyway, to me, it’s hands-down the best SCADA platform, and it even runs on Linux. Disclaimer: some of this might be out of date, I’ve been gone about 4 years.

    Edit: sorry, didn’t see the “free” requirement. I would never run a critical plant without support, so I’ve not explored any fully open source options. If your plant is serving more than just your farm/homestead (in other words, is serving the general public) I strongly recommend a supported option for your client. If you get hit by a bus, and the plant is in trouble, they’ll have a hard time finding someone to get them back online who knows your “weird” software.

    That said, depending on your needs, Ignition can be cheap AF (comparatively) if your plant is small.