I really want to go back to electronics and appliances being both more robust and more repairable. It's just that the vast majority of the population disagrees with that once they learn that it will make things cost more initially.
I think the "black box" nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn't turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to "fix" including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
This is a symptom of industry switching to cheap "disposable" electronics, rather than more expensive, robust, and repairable ones.
From the treadmill company's point of view, it's cheaper to just lose one unit and pay shipping one way rather than pay to have the unit returned, spend valuable technician time diagnosing and fixing an issue and then pay to ship the repaired unit back.
About 50 years ago, you could find appliance repair shops that would fix your broken toaster or TV, and parts for stuff like that were easily available. Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.
You're not wrong. I love onions, but I will freely admit that they are a powerful flavor and they are basically in everything.
I will note that if you're in this camp, that if you soak your onions in water for a couple minutes after slicing they are significantly less pungent, and will allow you to taste the other stuff better without sacrificing the texture they add
It is very reasonable. No one forced Valve to build their business model this way, and they are one of the most profitable companies per employee, ever.
Literally every software company built their business model this way. Go open a support case with any software vendor complaining that their product won't run on Windows 98 and see how many help you out beyond "Buy a computer from this millennium"
It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows, they would just have to hire a few more people to do it.
You are failing to understand just how much has changed since Windows 98. It's a completely different environment that requires specialized knowledge to develop for. They can't just dust off some old source code and re-release the client. The entire back-end has changed. It would be a massive undertaking that would appease about 12 people total.
Gabe would still be a billionaire.
Sure, but I would argue that there are a lot of better things that Valve could be doing with those resources than supporting Windows 98
This issue has multiple facets and the answer changes depending on the end result you want.
The author of the article sees the problem as "Old games you bought on steam are unplayable on modern hardware". Kaldaien sees the problem as "Steam cannot run on older hardware anymore, even if the games I bought still work there". Both people want the same thing (To be able to play the games they bought) but are looking at it from different angles.
Ultimately, Steam is a DRM tool that has a very good storefront attached to it. If you want true ownership of the software, buy the game in a way that will let you run the software by itself. Valve expects that the overwhelming majority of its users will keep up with semi-modern hardware (In this case, a machine capable of running windows 10/SteamOS) which I don't feel is is an unreasonable ask. However, expecting Valve to retain support for an OS that hit end of life 20 years ago is unreasonable.
I agree with the opinions of the article's author. It would be far better to ensure that support for the old titles you bought are available on modern hardware rather than making sure Steam is still accessible on a PC running windows 98. This is one of those corner-cases where piracy is acceptable. You already paid for the game, you just need to jump through some hoops to play it on your 30 year old PC.
This is the same tired anti-vax/eugenics rhetoric. Let the flu infect the whole flock and then just let the ones that survive continue to breed making the species stronger.
This is information coming from someone who has absolutely zero medical experience, but thinks that doctors have been looking at this whole thing wrong for the last century.
This will rely on having an executive team that can predict trends beyond the next quarter.
Doubling down on advertising, telemetry, and AI in an overly bloated OS looks really good if you only care about the profits that brings for the next 3 months, rather than how much your userbase resents it. MS is fully capable of turning this around immediately by just making LTSC available to the public without needing to buy a MAK through an enterprise channel, but that means throwing away some recurring revenue in favor of claiming a lost userbase
When a piece of software is checking for chain of trust, it's done primarily for security or DRM reasons. The benefits of verifying this chain of trust would make it a little harder for cheaters to inject code and it would be an extra hurdle for pirates to overcome, but the cost is that everyone that bought your game with the intent of playing it on Linux now has absolutely no way to make that happen. I'm not sure the loss in ~4% of your sales would be worth the benefit.
I believe that's just fear-mongering. This has been a thing that Microsoft has wanted to do for a while, largely because having 3rd party code with direct kernel access is a huge problem in terms of stability and security unless you can be sure you know what all that code is doing.
They tried to do this in the past, arguing that anything that wanted kernel-level access had to Windows API calls instead, however Windows Defender which was bundled with the OS was exempt from this restriction. The EU argued that it gave Microsoft a competitive advantage in the AV space and mandated that if they wanted to do this, they had to follow their own rules which MS was not willing to do.
Instead, Microsoft dictated that any code that was going to run in the kernel had to be submitted to Microsoft for review, who would then approve or deny the code for use. The problem with this method is that it's slow, so any AV that wanted to update their engine had to go through a code review process every time. Crowdstrike (and likely every other AV provider) got around this by having a component of their software with kernel-access that could read in data dynamically. This is what caused that worldwide BSOD problem a couple years back. The Crowdstrike component with kernel access loaded in a bad update that was not properly reviewed and it broke every system with the AV installed.
Overall, this change is a good thing and will force software vendors to actually operate securely rather than just asking for ring 0 access when they don't need it. As always, if you're worried about the changes MS is making, Linux is available and getting better day by day.
Honestly, Hackers gets a lot of shit for being ridiculous, but it only deserves it sometimes.
A lot of the actual hacking that is done in that movie is stuff like social engineering and phreaking payphones. It's exaggerated in the movie to make it watchable, but it's largely based in reality.
When Gearbox got the rights, I was sure Duke was going to show up in Borderlands, because thats basically the perfect place to put a relic of a character like that.
Have him do the 80s macho-man thing as a side character, and then contrast how much things have changed in the last 30 years for comedy.
There is no story that you could tell with Duke as the main character that wouldn't feel like it was a script written in 1998 just rotting in a warehouse somewhere.
Fake maple syrup has no place in my house. I dont eat pancakes or waffles often enough to require skimping on the syrup, so I will pay for the real thing.
That being said, if Im ever out at a restaurant and get pancakes or waffles, I will opt for jam rather than the corn syrup slop, and that's fine too.
Oh, I fully agree.
I really want to go back to electronics and appliances being both more robust and more repairable. It's just that the vast majority of the population disagrees with that once they learn that it will make things cost more initially.