The price being almost €110 here in Europe (at least on GoG) does way more to stop sales of it than Russian disinfo ever will.
PS: I was curious so I checked and there are literally only 6 games in GoG including Stalker 2 with a price of €109 or above. No wonder I was so shocked by the price. :/
Yeah, the case with antennas is a good point - when I decided to concentrate various things in a Mini-PC in my living room (TV-Box, Router and so on) I actually looked into these router Mini-PCs as an option and the biggest problem was the lack of a proper antenna, so I ended up going with a generic Mini-PC and leaving out the router functionality which remains done by my old router (which is quite decent, just a bit outdated).
Mind you, this one also wouldn’t work for me because I’m using 4 Ethernet ports (1 for the external connection and 3 internally) whilst this one only has 2 (a weird choice for a router).
IMHO, this isn’t really better than just getting an SBC with 2 Ethernet ports and WiFi and put it in a box with an antenna), a setup which suffers from exactly the same problem as this one: not enough Ethernet ports.
The very example I provided comes with an mPCI-e slot to install a WiFi card of your choosing.
Also they have SIM card slots so you can install a data SIM card and set-up a fallback configuration that switches to it if your landline internet connection goes down.
Whilst that’s a nice slogan, in Electronics “open source” doesn’t mean anywhere as much as it does in Software because it’s generally just knowing which components go into the circuit, which is but a fraction of the work (laying out the board is a massive chunk of work, in some cases most of it, and at high enough clock speeds circuit design is an art in itself).
Mind you, I like the Orange Pi and Banana Pi guys, and the idea of an SBC designed for being an open source router is pretty appealing, though nowadays maybe pfSense would be a better choice than OpenWrt.
Finally this thing having only 2 ethernet ports + WiFi makes it little more than a regular $70+ SBC board + a box - something easy enough to put together by any technically inclined person - which isn’t exactly exciting.
So, how is this any better than the Router Mini PCs you can find in Aliexpress (random example)?
I think that in the last 30 or 40 years people have relentlessly been fed racist bullshit, only it’s been portrayed as anti-Racism.
So “Jews this”, “Jews that”, only it’s all things that paint all members of that specific etnicity in a good light like “they’re victims”, “were oppressed”, “have Western Values” and so on, hence it’s sold as “the opposite of Racism” because it’s says good things about the character of all individuals of an etnicity rather than bad things.
However all that shit is still the very same “people from etnicity X are all the same” mindset as the Nazis had: the core Prejudice that millions of people can just be reduced to members of a Race and treated as if they’re all the same is no different in Nazism from that in Liberal politics.
Hence the surprise when Israel - the self-proclaimed “Jewish Nation” and representative of all “Jews” - turns out to not at all act as “victims” or “opprossed”, and instead act as the very opposite, victimizing and oppressing others to such extremes that they’re at the same level of depravation as those of the Nazis themselves.
All this to say that people need to try and overcome the brainwashing by spotting when their own thoughts, judgments and conclusions are anchored on racial-prejudice, even when said prejudice might be oriented in a direction which seems “positive” - most such “surprises” as when the “Jewish Nation” turns out to be the latest variant of the Nazis aren’t at all surprising when you stop thinking “Jews are X, Y and Z” and instead just think of people as being people, which means that some when they get power combined with de facto immunity for their actions act in the most horrid of ways and the majority around them will just go along with it and even convince themselves of the most extraordinary justifications (in the case of Israel that being extremely racist takes on Palestinians and Arabs in general) for why the actions they’re going along with are the right thing to do.
Having moved fully to Linux some months ago, I look at this kind of thing both with with a feeling of smug satisfaction and with cold chills of somebody who only now starts to fully realise just how massive, heavy and fast the incoming train they just dodged is.
Yeah, but they’re great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-“moderate” political parties.
This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won’t do anything further about it.
Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would’ve been it if, it wasn’t that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).
Here’s an alternate theory:
Back then both parties tended to use the “slimy posh salesman” kind of deceit (half lies, misleading statements, promises left unfulfilled with twisted excuses given for it) and what happened was that Republicans, almost against their will (Trump was an outsider) stumbled upon the “strongman saying what people want to hear using straight talking language” technique of deceit.
It was a massive success because people had been fed the same kind of posh-saleman deceit (with pretty much all the media having gone along with it and turning into de facto propaganda outlets) for decades, found the new sort of discourse refreshing and comparatively trustworthy (even though it was still bullshit, just delivered differently, because it did not sound at all like the usual bullshit it seemed trustworthier to many and all the media that had chosen sides and gone along unquestionigly with the old style of deceit wasn’t trusted anymore so all their denouncing of the “other side’s lies” was ignored)
Whilst the Republicans did adjust to that unexpected success quickly, the Democrats did not and just kept using with their usual deceit techniques spread via the media-outlets to which lots of the electorate had built a resistance to, and acting to favour the usual people when in government.
So here we are today with a lying populist getting power for a second time in the American Two-Party system.
Even that is incredibly “murica” - he’s white and a rich guy from a rich family hence he’s not getting the same treatment for overstaying his visa a non-rich non-white African.
Racism and profound wealth discrimination are as American as it gets.
Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:
So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.
The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.
Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.
The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).
It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.
Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.
Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.
The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.
Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.
Soon Twitter will complete its transition to Nazi Bar of Social Media.
And for those on the other side of the Atlantic, there are several computer shops that will just put a computed together for you without an OS.
Here’s a random example “configure your own computer” from a computer shop in France. In this one the OS (Système d’exploitation) is not included and you have to pay extra for it.
In my experience with custom assemblies like this the OS is never included.
When I live in the UK at some point I’ve even used of these kind of stores there to get a custom notebook.
It’s basically an “assemble your own computer” for people who don’t know how to do it and aren’t confident enough to try (understandable given that the parts value of a whole desktop PC adds up to at least €1000 so there generally is some fear of fucking it up if you’ve never done it before).
I don’t think the sensors really matter for a server but the rest makes some sense.
Still, 80 bucks will buy you quite literally a Mini-PC (a really crummy one, granted) which can run more server tasks because it has as much or more memory and storage and isn’t hindered by there being an Android OS layer there doing nothing useful, and which is absolutelly and 100% under your control because it boots into your OS of choice.
Half than that will buy you a crummy SBC which probably de facto has as much capability to run server tasks as that Oneplus (it’s weaker but doesn’t have Android there eating up resources) though in my experience those things tend to be a bit finicky.
I don’t think it’s actually worth it to spend $80 on an used phone to use as a server (unless you do need UPS-like features or built-in mobile nertwork access) since you quite literally have better options brand new for that money, but if you have one around it can make sense even if it’s a bit more work getting it going and is not fully under your control (unless we’re talking about something jailbroken where you can install Oxygen or Lineage on, so a Pixel would probably be a better choice).
That said, there is a certain technical elegance in the whole notion of repurposing an Android Phone to be a home server.
I think you’re seriously overestimating the technical prowess of the average law enforcement officer…
Except the price, which is much lower for the SBC, way much lower if one uses one of the lower end Orange Pi or Banana Pi SBCs.
Also you can put Linux on the SBCs (which always come unlocked) hence do way more with them as servers than if one has to use Android as the OS.
I mean, I can get it if people with the technical chops, love for technical challenges and an old and pretty much worthless Android phone, configure it as a server if only because “why not?!”, but it’s not exactly a great option considering that a 40 bucks SBC can do the same, only better, more easily and with far more possibilities (given that it will be running Linux rather than Android).
PS: Actually somebody below mention mobile network connection, which, thinking about it, would be a good reason to use an old Android phone as a server since it has built-in support for 3G (unless it’s quite old) whilst the SBC needs it add to it which might be a problem for the cheaper SBCs (just wondering about how I would get around to do it, I think you need to connect a USB dongle to it and it has to be something compatible with Armbian Linux)
It’s a corrupt system.