That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.

It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.

So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).

Awesome.

IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.

That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.

I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.

I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.

My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.

There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.

I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

Like a community about arch?

I guess it’s not really niche at this point.

Btw, I don’t run arch.

Very yes. Thanks.

This is probably a big reason I don’t buy/play newer multiplayer games, especially ones that are mp only, and a big reason why I buy everything on steam and avoid other platforms.

I’ve heard of games being dropped by steam, but those that already own it, still own it and can access it on steam as normal. In the situations I’m aware of, those games eventually returned to steam later, but still.

I prefer games that are either peer to peer mp, or you can self host a server for mp. I’m not saying that I’ll always self host, but if the option is there, then I’ll never lose the ability to play the game with friends, since I only need to set up a server to play on. Since I have a homelab, setting something like that up is trivial for me, and I can shut down and delete the server afterwards when it’s no longer wanted or needed.

Everyone going crazy for the latest version of whatever battle Royale type game, laying down premium money to play on day one, and spending a lot to get buffs and cosmetics… It just seems stupid to me. No thanks.

Free to play multiplayer with the option to buy cosmetics is less bad, but still not great. You can play, enjoy some time with friends while playing the game and if it goes offline tomorrow, who cares? You didn’t pay anything for it and I’m certain there’s other options in the same vein. As long as you’re having fun, enjoy.

If I’m paying for a game, it’s probably because of the single player experience. Anything multiplayer is icing on the cake, but not motivation to buy it.

For grids, there is a “world grid” which players were given access to some time ago, if you build properly on the world grid, then when you meet up one section from a factory to another section from another factory, they’ll meet properly.

I always use the world grid to get a starting point before laying anything down. I don’t want to struggle later on trying to make things fit, and doing it this way it’s a no brainer.

For rail lines, they’re completely dynamic, if you want to build it into a pretzel, you can do that. I’m not sure the trains would love it, but you can easily do that. There’s actually a problem most new players have that after going around a corner, their rail line goes all wavy because the rail curves a little bit depending on where you place it, and what it’s attached to. The solution is, at the end of the curve, when you have your ending point, remove the last section of rail at the curve, then build a perfectly straight section of rail where it will continue, then rebuild the last bit of the curve. This ensures the next section will start perfectly straight and any curve in the rail will be isolated to where the rail is meant to be curved. Then continue building as normal and the rest of the line will be straight.

Of course the rail lines can go up/down as much as you want (within the bounds of the world), so it’s not uncommon to see sky bridges with long rail lines that span most of the map. In that configuration, either very tall conveyor lifts being materials up/down from stations on the line, or there’s long, looped spirals of track to bring trains down to stations. I’ve seen both, and both methods are valid.

There will be train and truck stations frequently above or below factories for transit. I’ve also seen long bridges of conveyor belts bringing materials from one place to another. The main benefits to conveyors over trains/trucks/drones is that they’re very consistent and don’t require any additional power or fuel to run (trucks need fuel, trains use power), but a lot of people think they’re ugly, so trains or trucks are common. I’m more of a fan of consistency so I tend to do conveyors, but I don’t fault anyone for making different choices. Trains always need infrastructure, at least a rail line, trucks usually need some kind of infrastructure, though, not always. Drones don’t need any, so if you want to preserve nature in the game, you can go that way, but drones are very late-game and require batteries which are difficult to build in sufficient quantities. Not impossible, but not easy either.

I tend to build a road with conveyors hanging underneath. The road is for me to get there and to provide the necessary structure to place the conveyors.

One thing I’ve heard of that factorio has that satisfactory lacks is the idea of pollution. In satisfactory, you can spew all the toxic gases you want and the environment doesn’t change at all. Plants still grow and the world keeps looking the same. IDK, it’s a difference I know about.

The first-person style of satisfactory is more like building in Minecraft (I would assume) so getting things lined up is sometimes a challenge until you get to the hoverpack. But the hoverpack requires power, and to get it, you have to be within a certain proximity to a power post.

In any case. I was thinking the tour would be a “before you buy” kind of thing, maybe over discord or something, where I can stream my game and you can ask whatever questions you want, and I can show you the mechanics. If you’re not interested, that’s fine. There’s plenty of that kind of tour content on YouTube too if you want to look around.

For transporting materials, you don’t have to. If you build modular factories right next to where your nodes are you can produce your items and store them at that location. The only down side is that when you need that stuff you’ll have to go to that location and pick up what you need. A lot of players like to build a resource hub and dump all their finished products into bins there, so they have a single location to go to when building anything. Just pick up whatever mats you need, and head out.

I have a lot more I could say about the nuances of design and structure in such a place, but it’s all up to the person playing for what they want to do to put it all together. I tend to keep cramming too much into too small of a space and I have to engineer my way around the limitations. I need to plan better.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy factorio, as I enjoy satisfactory. My offer stands if you change your mind. If you ever buy the game and want to play some mp, let me know, I usually have a server running.

So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.

I think that answers the question, let me know if I misunderstood. I’m not 100% familiar with all the factorio mechanics so I’m not totally sure if I fully understood the question.

Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.

When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there’s a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there’s blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets… Complicated.

With satisfactory, you can build small and just wait, or build big and use a lot of power, and things get finished much faster.

With progression, there’s two main sections, milestones and phases. Each phase unlocks more tiers of milestones, and each milestone unlocks more buildables which will allow you to complete future milestones and phases. You can complete them in whatever order you want, but some of the progression requires that certain milestones get completed before progress can be made. In that way, there’s some linearity with the progression.

The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I’d happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I’d offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.

It just seems like you would enjoy the game. If you ultimately decide to play, that’s fine, if not, no worries.

Satisfactory has added blueprints. They’ve been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They’re not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won’t connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.

There’s plenty of quirks with it, as I’m sure there are in factorio, and there’s no “perfect way” to do anything. A core mechanic in satisfactory is alternate recipes. I’ll give you an example. Screws are an early item that’s usually a pain point for new players early game. To get them, you have to mine iron, smelt it into iron ingots, then construct rods from those ingots, and finally, convert the rods into screws. It’s a pretty involved recipe for the early game. Most other recipes are more simple, concrete is raw limestone, constructed to concrete directly, it’s a two machine setup to get it rolling. Rods are another, and plates are similar to rods (both three machine setups, miner, smelter, constructor). Screws require at least four.

There’s a popular alternative recipe called cast screws, which creates screws from iron ingots directly. Not only that, but you get more screws per ingot than the vanilla recipe.

To take that example further, there’s an alternate for ingots, which is a “pure” ingot, which uses a mid-game machine, the refinery, to combine raw iron and water, and produce iron ingots, which has a higher yield than simply smelting the raw material.

So you can do the og recipes, and build a field of miners, smelters, and constructors (to make rods, then screws), so that you get enough screws in sufficient quantities, or, with a little legwork and some alternative recipes, you can use the pure iron ingot alternate, and cast screw alternate, and get a lot more with a lot fewer machines, and fewer iron nodes (less raw iron).

There’s Infinity variant building methodologies, from building right on the ground, to large towers filled with many floors of machines to do the work. The layout can be chaotic and spaghetti, inefficient and a mess, to varying levels of perfect input to perfect output, building a variety of things continually.

You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together. The options are endless.

You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.

Personally, I focus on alternative recipes early on, as well as logistics (faster conveyor belts, etc), and power (mainly coal/fuel)… Collecting biomass generally sucks IMO, plus the nature in the game is quite lovely and I don’t like to destroy more than I have to.

With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need. If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.

Trying to solve logistical issues in three dimensions can be a challenge.

There’s caves to explore, a variety of wild animals of varying strengths and abilities in the game, even some that are radioactive, or spew toxic gas. There’s even flower looking plants that kind of stand up when you come nearby, and if you hang out near them, they emit toxic gases too… Or you can play on passive mode where the fauna generally ignore that you exist unless you attack them.

I could keep going, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the game, including a lot of things we don’t have the story about (they’ve had placeholders in the game that won’t be explained until 1.0 gets released, hopefully later this year). I have over 970 hours in the game and I will be starting a brand new save once 1.0 is available. I’m certain I will be playing that for many more hours to come.

If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.

For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I’m in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it’s not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.

That’s a fair assessment IMO. They’re all related games.

I personally haven’t played factorio, but I know enough about it to prefer satisfactory.

A few friends of mine are getting into Palworld and getting away from satisfactory. IDK, it seems a bit too different to me.

Foundry is on my radar. I might wait for satisfactory to hit 1.0, play that for a few months, then switch over to foundry.

It looks good though. IIRC it’s early access and what I’ve seen of it, I kinda want to give it a bit to get closer to complete before I jump in.

I’m a big fps/3d spaces person. I gravitated to satisfactory. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing but 3D.

Legally, it’s fully owned by the company.

My current workplace uses mostly cloud desktops. Basically, even if you’re using a personal system, you install a remote desktop client software (it provides access to another system, it does not allow access to your system), which is used to connect to a server farm of virtual desktop servers. So the work desktop you use kind of overlays itself on your system. Your system is still there, humming away in the background, with it’s only task being to shuffle your input up to the cloud, and bring down the images of your cloud desktop and display them.

There’s some other features, but that’s the core of it. We use a third party “remote monitoring and management” (RMM) tool to administrate company owned systems. You are perfectly capable of using the remote desktop client on a system that’s not company owned. I like this model, since you can minimize or close the remote desktop at any time, and since we (the IT team) have full access to the remote desktop server farm, we can connect to your remote desktop session and see what you see, but only what’s within the remote window. We can’t escape it to see your computer. So if you have a problem with your work stuff, we have access to that. If you have a problem with your personal computer, we need to use a one-time-use (or ad-hoc) remote connection software like LogMeIn or something similar (specifically the LMI rescue type feature set). Once we disconnect from your personal system after doing whatever troubleshooting you asked for, we lose access to that system.

The programs change, but they do the same thing in concept. There are a number of company owned laptops and desktops we have our RMM tools on which allow us to dive into a system whenever we want.

I run a homelab, personally, and when my workplace does not give me the necessary stuff to be productive from home, what I do is build a small virtual system on my home lab, which I remote into when I work (from my desktop), so I can maintain a work/personal division. It’s similar to the cloud system I’m doing at my current job, but the “remote” desktop is a VM on a server in my basement. Other times I’ve been given a laptop, and I’ll set it up in a corner and turn on its built in remote desktop service (to allow remote desktop connections into it), then use the same protocols to connect to my work laptop.

When I’m done work, I just shut down the remote desktop connection and poof, back to my stuff on my PC.

With my current job I went another way, I got a KVM switch, which allows me to switch between two physical computers at the push of a button. (KVM is keyboard/video/mouse) When I’m done work now, I push a button and my screens (I have several) and KB/mouse all switch back to my personal desktop. Same idea but different.

I couldn’t imagine using my personal computer to do work stuff directly. That’s just not kosher in my mind. I have work’s RMM and tools all installed on the system I use for work, and my personal system is entirely free of such things.

I also want to include a short story. Recently a client started a ticket about our company logo being on their personal computer. I grabbed that ticket up and immediately identified the system, and removed it from our system. I followed up with the user to verify that by removing it from our system, the icon disappeared (indicating our monitor agent was fully uninstalled), they confirmed, and I closed the ticket. I kept thinking it’s grossly inappropriate for our software to be on their personal system, and I wanted to get it fixed ASAP. Not everyone is the same, I’ve known users that want or e remote management tools on their personal systems. I don’t understand it, but I can’t tell them that it can’t be there either (the customer is always right, applies in this context).

As I hope I’ve demonstrated, neither myself, nor anyone I work with, nor anyone I’ve worked with in the past, would ever take such an opportunity to snoop or spy on them, but I’d rather not have that liability hanging over my company. All it takes is for one person to have the software on there and accuse us of stealing their private data (say, leud pictures) and publically posting that information on the internet, and I’m sure the policy would change. Of course, we wouldn’t do that, but all it would take is the accusation.

It’s a bad day for us when we see something we shouldn’t, especially if upon seeing it, we’re morally obligated to contact the authorities (in the case of illegal content such as child porn). If course, if something like that is observed by a tech, we must do something about it, but we don’t want to have to get involved in that sort of thing, so we’re pretty careful about it. To put it simply, we’re not looking for anything, and we don’t want to snoop through your stuff, because if we do and we find something we shouldn’t, there’s going to be hell to pay. Not only in the fact that now we need to report it to the police, but also that we need to be able to justify why we were able to see it in the first place. If we can’t justify why we were looking at the content, that’s probably grounds for termination and getting blacklisted from IT, even if it had a positive result (like a pedo being sent to jail).

Bluntly, it’s not worth the risk, paperwork, or inevitable trouble that we’ll face if we do.

Keeping a good separation between personal and work minimizes the risk of IT seeing something that shouldn’t, even if it’s not illegal/illicit. Even your personal financial information. I don’t want to know. I had a call recently with a user who couldn’t log into their bank, and through testing, I was on the lookout for errors while they logged in. As soon as login was successful and their accounts were up, I minimized my remote control so I didn’t see more than I absolutely had to, of their bank info. I got them into the accounts. I don’t care what the accounts are, or what is in them. It seems minor, but that is that users personal information which I do not need to know. I solved their login problem with the site, so I’m done.

I probably have a hundred of other examples, even some where my co-workers had to contact authorities, I’m pretty sure… Every decent IT tech knows that this is a risk and we do what we can to avoid getting caught up in it. We don’t want to have to answer those questions.

If you ever have IT connect to your computer and your background goes black, there’s a reason. At first it was bandwidth related, and we’ll still say that as the reason, but a large reason why we still do it, even into an age of high speed internet, is because a lot of people put pictures of their family, friends, sometimes even inappropriate content, as their desktop wallpaper. It’s hard to miss when it’s your wallpaper. So if it’s blacked out when we connect, that’s one less possible problem we have to deal with.

I’ll stop, but if you have questions for a random internet IT guy, please feel free to ask.

Take care.

There’s a lot of trust required in IT. You must be a trustworthy person. Being fired for a trust related reason is basically a death sentence for an IT career. That being said, none of the tools I typically work with will provide previews of a user’s screen, or such previews will be low enough resolution that reading what is on screen is basically impossible.

When we connect to a system and get a full resolution image of what’s going on, pretty much always there’s some on screen indication of us being connected.

IMO, this is how it should be.

The only time I’ve actively tried to “spy” on a user’s activity, has been when requested to do so by a manager/owner, usually when pursuing an allegation of inappropriate use of a work computer. Even then it’s been very rare, and I can only recall one such instance of it happening at all.

As an IT person, I will say, I could care less what you do with the equipment. I’m busy enough, I don’t need to fill my day with watching you do your job. Yes, we have tools which can allow us to eavesdrop on everything you do, I don’t touch them unless I absolutely must, usually only if I’ve been ordered to.

Another poster pointed out that work resources do not belong to you and legally, they’re right. The system, including all data and work contained therein is legally the property of your employer. This includes your email and any correspondence, and anything else that work provides as a function of your employment. If you create an excel work sheet that does some data processing for you, or reformats information in a better way, during work hours, that sheet isn’t yours. The ownership of the sheet is your employer. Though you did the work in creating it, your employer owns it because they paid you for the time/effort to do so.

Personally, I do whatever I can to avoid interacting with users unique files. I recently refused to work on someone’s personal iPhone because it contained personal data. Though their work email was probably present on the device, I didn’t want to touch it. I did however, provide instructions for them to do what they were asking themselves.

When interacting with work-owned systems, I’ll modify the registry, and run command line commands without the users knowledge, in an effort to reduce the disruption to their workflow, while solving an issue. Generally this is when I have a request from that user, or the company, to get something done, such as install a piece of software. You’ll be working away and poof, new software appears.

Anyone in IT unnecessarily snooping in on your files, can be fired with cause, ruining their career, if they’re caught.

We have access to everything, and I mean everything, in an organization. Your email, files, databases, software… Partly for troubleshooting, and partly for performing backups. If we don’t directly have access, typically we have permission to grant access, so we can grant ourselves permission to access whatever we need to. This means that IT is one of the highest trust areas of the business. We can read the CEO’s emails, send mail as anyone, access everyone’s files, and delete all data on everything in such a way that it is impossible to recover. We need the access to do our jobs and violating the trust we have with that access, is unforgivable and a career-ending event.

I will say that I have not met any IT professionals who will snoop, spy, eavesdrop, or otherwise examine what you do or what data you have or interact with, without a good reason. If it happens, it’s likely that someone else, such as a manager, has requested that we do. We are merely the middleman in that scenario. Bluntly, we’re too busy than to just do it for kicks.

If any IT professional has violated trust, I would report it to management. It is grossly inappropriate to access a user’s system without just cause.

As for notifications, that varies depending on the request. I typically only inform people when I need to remotely control their desktop (interrupting their work) and I’m generally very receptive to being asked to wait before connecting so any sensitive information can be dealt with and closed before the session is established. I have no issue with that. I don’t need, nor want to know any more than I do. I’m never looking for illicit or illegal things unless they are creating a problem (excessive bandwidth use, excessive disk use, etc). For the most part, I try to stay in my lane. I’m here to help, not spy on you to get you fired.

“kill parent or sacrifice children”

For me, working in IT, two things are keeping me on Windows:

• games
• IT tools only made for Windows.

Most remote access stuff is entirely Windows based. Sure, there’s clients so you can connect to Linux, Mac, whatever, from the admin console, but the plugins and whatnot that actually show you the remote users desktop are almost entirely Windows exclusive. There’s sometimes a Mac option, but almost never a Linux option.

Using something that’s more common/public, like TeamViewer isn’t really an option. There’s a plethora of business focused RMM tools that are just web apps with Windows plugins for all the heavy lifting.

The part that gets me, is that any of these tools which allow for self hosting, can have the server and client side on Linux, but the IT team doing the work only gets Windows as an option for the remote control tools.

Infuriating.

This is an excellent point. The availability of games.

On PC, you can play pretty much every game ever, with varying degrees of legality, whether directly, or indirectly using an emulator, with the only exception to this being very modern titles on consoles which do not have an emulator for PC yet, or that are still locked in a bullshit exclusivity deal.

Meanwhile, PS/XBox is limited to whatever Sony/Microsoft deems appropriate to have on their console.

On console you live and die by someone else’s rules, on PC, the sky is the limit.

You see, I don’t play games on consoles because I don’t like controllers.

I mean, I’ll use them in some scenarios, but the position I need to sit in to hold a controller is usually uncomfortable.

I’ve been playing PC games since the 90’s. I picked up an Xbox one S, and even set it up, and it’s been very good at collecting dust since I bought it. I got it used, so no big loss, but still.

I’m not going to pay $500+ for another dust collector, just to have the privilege to pay extra for games, and be uncomfortable playing them, then have no option to switch to a PC later because I only own that game on the stupid console.

It’s a waste of my time and money.

And if I really want to play a game with a controller, I can do that on my PC too.

Simply, if I buy a game on console, I’m forced to use that console and it’s controller, to play. If I buy it on PC, I can play it however the fuck I want to, on any system I want to. Fuck your exclusivity deals, and fuck you.

I agree, the whole thing is interesting to say the least.