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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • 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”

    No, they didn’t. I can install the software I bought back in the day on the computers I bought it for, using the license key provided. GoG also famously uses a model where GoG does not care what OS you’re using.

    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.

    Lol, I’m a software developer that started by writing legacy windows software, I know exactly how much (little) has changed.

    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

    I don’t care. They have the resources to support it.

    Either strip the DRM out and pay whatever you have to to the publishers to do that, or keep supporting the systems you sold your software for.

    The idea that Valve is blameless for shitty behaviour because other tech companies also do that shitty behaviour is nonsense. They have been the dominant platform forever, and have had an insane amount of resources available to them.




  • The author of this article reflexively and illogically defends Steam (like usual):

    But at least some of what Kaldaien complains about isn’t necessarily on Steam’s shoulders. It’s well within devs’ powers to provide players with access to older game versions on Steam (KOTOR 2, which I recently replayed, lets you access its pre-Aspyr version via a beta branch, for instance), but many of them elect not to. That strikes me as an issue with individual devs rather than Steam as a whole, and as for Steam Input? Well, again, if there’s a problem there it’s with developers electing to use that API over OS-native ones that’s the issue.

    He literally completely misses the modder’s point. Steam itself will not run on the original machine you purchased KOTOR 2 on. You can buy a gaming machine, purchase a game through steam and 6 years later, one random day you’re suddenly no longer able to play your game, simply because Valve has decided that the version of Steam that you bought the game through is no longer ok and now you need to upgrade your hardware and OS to play the same game you’ve been playing for years.





  • Lol did it solve anything though?

    If you actually watch the full episode, the timeline of events is:

    • Someone rents a new house and finds a skeleton in the marsh behind it. It’s a ~30 year old woman who died in the winter and was bludgeoned and stabbed repeatedly.
    • They send away for DNA sequencing but the lab doesn’t get back to them for like a year and half.
    • In the meantime they look at missing persons cases (over 100 in North Carolina they state, though presumably ~half that once you filter for skeletal women)
    • They determine that this woman’s case seems most likely based on all the other details about her case. The forensic tech who’s oddly interested in how much pain people feel as they die is interested in using “impose an image of a skull on a face technique” to see if it matches.
    • She reaches out to a skateboarding computer science professor who uses gimp to paste a semi transparent layer of the skull on top of a picture of that victim’s face and thinks it probably maybe matches.
    • They get fed up with the DNA lab and send it to a second one that responds in three weeks confirming it was who they thought.
    • They talk to the victim’s friends who point out what party she was at the night she disappeared.
    • The people at the party say that she was hanging out with this one big truck driver after everyone else. His story has been that she walked home after everyone else left, in January, for 7 miles.
    • They interview him a few times and he eventually says that they had sex that night and she belittled him for not getting it up and he pushed her and she he hit her head on the nightstand and he left and she was fine when he left.
    • He’s convicted of murder and dumping her body because that’s an obvious crock of shit.

    Kinda feels like the whole GIMP escapade was just a waste of everyone’s time and all it took to solve the case was basic police work in terms of interviewing people who saw her last. By the time they tried GIMP they already had a prime missing person that they thought it was, and they wouldn’t have had to try gimp if they just went to a second / competent DNA lab immediately. The way they present it is a little unclear, but it sounds like they didn’t even pull the suspect in for further interviewing until they finally got the DNA confirmation for who it was.