Itty53

Microsoft doesn’t want to rely on licensed software every time they install their programs either. Again, Valve taking a queue from MS. And that’s fine BTW, the whole industry follows MS.

Moreover the real issue, the difference in computing cost between running Win10 with all the unnecessary boost vs Linux is massive. Had they used Windows it would’ve costed more to be able to run less.

As to being reliant on Windows, that’s been their standard most of their history. Steam was Windows based. If Windows were to go ahead with making a stripped down Windows OS that was specific to gaming, such as the one demoed in a code jam earlier this year, you can bet steam would be selling that version of Windows direct from their store, and likely have a easy tool ready to use to install it to your deck. They would probably offer it as an installation option too. Why not? There’s no good reason they shouldn’t. The whole verified question goes out the window. That’s huge. But again, MS controls that situation, not Valve. They’re still reliant on MS in major ways.

Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.

He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It’s literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.

I really don’t get why people think he’s all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn’t sell, theft and litigation.

Put simply, they could not retroactively apply new changes to you.

Sounds like they could though?

Jokes aside, this is another in a recent string of “let’s pretend our ToS are legally binding documents as fool-proof as the law” actions by major companies because … well, who’s stopping them?

“you guys screw me out of thirteen or fourteen more Kickstarter funding rounds and I’ll take my business elsewhere!”

- SC funders

Nintendo just waiting for the thing to go on sale to drop their lawsuits.

Declaring “I shall not be purchasing [thing] because [reason]” in public is yes, very cringey. You just, don’t buy the thing. That’s all. No look-at-me-i’m-important declaration necessary.

My complaint isn’t the same as that bullshit. Try again.

There’s a difference between choosing and listening to fans (critics) to improve and being made to feel obligated to do so. This society literally harasses people over being upset at fictional portrayals of cartoons. Sometimes harassed right out of their chosen career. Game devs know this very well.

Content creators have no obligations to the consumers of the content, period. No more than Picasso had an obligation to paint landscapes. He didn’t care to so he didn’t.

Content creators, publishers, etc: they’re free to make schlock we don’t like, and we’re free to express our disdain for it, and I’m free to point out that the folks wasting their energy complaining are indeed, wasting their energy. And cringey to boot. There’s a line crossed when you start insisting and making personal commentary at all. A publisher’s interests and the fan’s interests are not always aligned. That’s fine. You can deal with it, I promise. You bring up the snyder cut: Know who probably drove that whole push? The studio. Yeah, every one of those “fans” got played. This kind of shit is unacceptable. Period.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/justice-league-the-snyder-cut-bots-fans-1384231/

Don’t encourage it.

Huh, the games did phenomenally well in America. Weird. /s

We’re in an age of knee-jerk finger pointing, with the problem getting worse the higher you get in society. It’s just one giant game of blame hot-potato.

Here’s the thing: The producers don’t owe the fans shit. They don’t owe the fans an explanation even. They owe the investors an explanation. The fans are just there, that’s the reality of being a fan of something. We don’t get a say, we just can choose to watch or not, and then decide to trash it or praise it online if we want to.

So while there’s a problem going up the ladder of the blame game, there’s another one coming back down the ladder, and it’s entitlement. For some odd reason there’s an air of “we deserve this content, exactly to our specifications” and it permeates games, movies, music, all of the entertainment content we have been inundated with as a society. And I think the culture generally leans towards encouraging it because it keeps the culture thriving. But it also keeps us in the exact status quo we’re in as a society, beholden to these billionaire publishers we all rail on daily.

Because let’s face it: We as a society spend an enormous amount of energy and as such, destroy a lot of the planet, on all this entertainment. If we can’t accept that as a fact then we’re fucking doomed.

Honestly, leave it on Reddit. That sub was just ASUS and Corsair in a trenchcoat. I can do without the commercials.

Fun fact, Michael Crichton (that one) coined that, Gell-Mann amnesia after Murray Gell-Mann, who had nothing to do with it.

Actually Prigozhin is arguably waaayyyy worse. Putin is a ruthless warlord just like Prigozhin, yes. They have equally virulent ideologies, yep.

But Putin is a politician first and Prigozhin is 100% not. Say what you want of Putin but deep down he still gives a shit about projecting certain images of control, law, etc – he still values the opinion of certain international communities. He is still the leader of a government, not just a battalion or an army.

Prigozhin doesn’t give a shit about any of that, he is a simple and ruthless warlord without any pretense of governance at all, who only understands force and who has no qualms about being open in his toxic ideologies.

I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely Prigozhin actually accomplishes any of his own goals towards Russia because he isn’t a politician and he’s just a thug, but I also think it’s equally unlikely Putin’s Russia recovers from this. Wagner was Putin’s pitbull. They were virtually the entirety of professional real soldiers Russia had under its command. No more pit bull changes things dramatically. We can easily expect a social “downgrade” of Russia’s status as superpower in the eyes of other nations. That leaves some big doors open for China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and of course, the United States.

We may be on the cusp of a second break up of the USSR, further breaking Russia down into disparate nationstates. That possibility offers a lot of problems on its own. It’s no longer a question of “rogue warlord gains control of russian nukes”, now its “russian nukes don’t exist, now those nukes belong to 15 new whatever-istan nations, each without any pre-existing relationships or treaties”. That’s scarier. Doubly so because in that big muck of former Russian states, Wagner could still be around in the middle of it with the biggest dick on the block. He’d predictably go Atilla, march through every one of them and conscript every dude over 16 to fight. And history tells us over and over just how those situations end: global-scale wars. Conqueror types never stop, they just keep conquering until they get stopped.