This is far from the first (or last) time he wrote something like this. This was just a regular thing in the kernel world for a long time (until Linus matured a little).
Whether or not it was a good thing is up for debate I think. Yeah, it’s very rude and unprofessional (and discourages new contributors who don’t want to risk getting chewed out), but considering the importance of the Linux kernel, it’s good to know the lead maintainer is doing too much of the right thing than not enough (i.e. being lax with bad code in order to be respectful). I’m fine knowing that a few tech workers got their egos smashed if it gives me confidence that the code powering civilization is high quality.
I pirated Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) and played it from start to finish on my Steam Deck because it was impossible to buy. I would’ve paid $20 for that old ass game if it was available for sale, but it was literally impossible.
The problem is that these giant publishers are led by MBAs, and as someone who went to business school, I know first hand how stupid those people are.
“PC” historically refers to devices that are “IBM PC” compatible, although nowadays that mostly means machines with x86 chips… except that powerful ARM desktops, laptops, and servers are becoming a thing too so that’s not accurate either. Plus there’s that whole “Mac vs PC” ad which also makes the term more confusing.
But even going by the recent historical usage, I’d say the Steam Deck qualifies since it has an x86 chip, whereas the PS3 has a weird custom PowerPC cpu (which, ironically, was made by IBM).
That’s why you should never put people on a pedestal. There are a lot of people I admire, but I always try to imagine them being stupid assholes most of the time to balance things out in my head.
Most companies aren’t in the business of giving away free services,
First of all, this is wrong. Free to play is an insanely profitable business model.
But also it’s wrong because non-F2P multiplayer games aren’t a free service. You paid $60/$70 for the game, and whatever the cost of the servers is would have been factored into the sale price. The per-unit cost of hosting an online game is nowhere near the cost of the game, especially back in the day when most “servers” were just a matchmaking service for P2P game clients.
Nowadays, the cost of running a multiplayer game is lower than ever. Cloud hosting gives a ton of flexibility to design an online service that is affordable to run, not to mention the money printing machine that are microtransactions (often sold in non-F2P games that also require a subscription to play).
Online subscriptions are not meant to cover server/hosting costs. They’re a monopoly tax from the platform holder, who can charge you money to connect to the internet simply because they can, and they know you have no other option.
I don’t remember all the steps I had to do, but I do remember it being a pain in the ass. I downloaded the black edition from myabandonware.com and installed a widescreen mod (which messed up the UI since some elements were slightly offscreen, but it didn’t bother me).
Besides that, the only other annoyance was the controls. There are actually a lot of community layouts for this game, but the ones I ended up using were a pain when navigating the menus. You’ll definitely want to try a few.
FWIW, here are my current working launch settings for it:
The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
I met a family member’s kid once who would both narrate himself while playing Minecraft, and have full conversations with whatever youtuber he was watching on a second screen (who was also narrating himself playing Minecraft)
I also met an old lady with dementia once who would have full conversations and arguments with people on TV.
I’m not sure if this phenomenon has a name, but it’s something currently afflicting both the silent generation and generation alpha.