No, not at all, generally not a good sign whatsoever (unless you're wall st apparently). I guess there's the chance it was particularly inefficiently staffed, but then Vox seem like they should have known what they were doing, so that doesn't seem likely.
The new owner seems to have a few gaming brands already, Game Rant being the only one I've heard of though. Perhaps they're planning a consolidation and this is the redundancy from that?
Not necessarily saying there's a silver lining, just trying to rationalise
IRC is still alive and somewhat kicking on places like freenode, obviously a lot of that kind of culture lives in discord today, but you've also got matrix as an alternative to that style, but I can't say I've really clicked with it myself.
A few forums have managed to hang around (not that I recommend it, but I discovered somethingawful is still around recently), and the software to run one is still out there being maintained. Reddit really did a number on these sites though so Lemmy, etc is probably a good tool in the box for this too.
Flash games are dead for a pretty valid reason (security, etc), but sites like newgrounds still have a presence for the kind of stuff you're thinking of. I can't say I've browsed it in a very long time though. You've also got the indie game scene that blew up in the 2010s—I personally feel like that's scratching the same kind of itch for me at least. Places like humble and itch.io are good sources.
My (half serious) conclusion is the contestants like you describe are either the no-I'm-not-wealthy class of idiots that have simply come from money and don't realise that's not the norm, or they're drug dealers that found a skilled accountant.
I'd not heard of this one so I had a look, and these are similar but different things it seems:
kexec lets you switch to another kernel without a full reboot, but you still need to go through the init process of the new kernel apparently. It's quick compared to a reboot but still involves downtime.
kpatch is actual hotpatching (like this windows thing) where the kernel code is changed in-memory without any down time. The kernel never stops running, so those enterprise customers get the benefit of always running the most secure kernel without having to schedule downtime.
Though apparently kpatch can't patch everything in the kernel so I can imagine a place for both tools in a server admin's toolbox when you're forced to do a non hotpatch.
As a software engineer in the UK it's particularly infuriating that half the year the local time is the same as UTC (server time) and the other half it's not. So, I have to second guess the time every time I read it because my brain doesn't like the lack of consistency
Doesn't kpatch (the Linux equivalent) typically need some kind of subscription too? IIRC RedHat does this with RHEL as it's not available in the derivative distros
It seems a bit of a silly line to draw to me, but it seems to be some kind of industry convention
I cannot wrap my head around why the game industry hasn't already unionised massively—I hear horror story after horror story and everyone working in the industry seems to have convinced themselves they're special and it won't happen to them
The current silicon valley meta for a while now seems to be to do any shit to lure in a user base that they ultimately can cash in on a year or two down the line.
Once you piss those users off, they go somewhere else and the cycle continues with another company that pops up to solve the artificially created problems with whatever the old thing was. Rinse and repeat.
Whatever the service or software does is secondary to getting you to stick around until they have enough users to sell or sell to
Which git porcelain does this rely on?