See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially.

Right-ish, but I’d say there was actually a simpler problem than the one you laid out.

The immediate and obvious thing that killed OS/2 wasn’t the compatibility layer, it was driven by IBM not having any drivers for any hardware that was not sold by IBM, and Windows having (relatively) broad support for everything anyone was likely to actually have.

Worse, IBM pushed for support for features that IBM hardware support didn’t support to be killed, so you ended up with a Windows that supported your hardware, the features you wanted, and ran on cheaper hardware fighting it out with an OS/2 that did none of that.

IBM essentially decided to, well, be IBM and committed suicide in the market, and didn’t really address a lot of the stupid crap until Warp 3, at which point it didn’t matter and was years too late, and Windows 95 came swooping in shortly thereafter and that was the end of any real competition on the desktop OS scene for quite a while.

What, you mean you don’t play games and go “Well that looked great! Well worth my time!” like an awful lot of the AAA game industry appears to think gamers do?

Huh.

Seriously though, I’m curious how we ended up in the make-shit-prettier race and not a make-the-writing-good, or make-the-game-actually-fun, or even things like make-more-than-two-dungeons (looking at you, Starfield) race.

Especially given the cost to me, personally, to keep upgrading my GPU has reached an untenable level: I’m sure as crap not paying $2000 for a new GPU just so we get a few extra frames of hair jiggle or slightly better lighting or whatever.

Time to rename the blue shell to The Shell of Equity, I guess?

I’ve done it twice!

I’ve always debated between it needing to be on my resume as an ‘Achievement’ or not.

Couple of weeks ago. NSI decided to push some of their domains into CLIENT HOLD status, and that will cause DNS resolution to stop working for the domain.

Took down uh, well, everything: https://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/jm44h02t22ck

Honestly, I’d contact their support and ask what their processes are and what timelines they give customers for a response/remediation before they take action.

Especially ask how they notify you, and how long they allow for a response before escalation to make sure that’s something you can actually get, read, and do something about within.

It might not be a great policy, but if you at least know what might happen, it gives you the ability to make sure you can do whatever you need to do to keep it from becoming a larger issue.

This new uh, tactic? of going after a registrar instead of a hosting provider with reports is a little concerning.

There’s an awful lot of little registrars that don’t have any real abuse department and nobody is going to do shit other than exactly this: take it down and worry about it next week when they have time.

It really feels like your choice of registrar is becoming as much or more important than your choice of hosting provider, and the little indie guys are probably the wrong choice if you’re running a legitimate business as you’re gonna need one that has enough funding and a proper team to vet reports before clobbering your site.

On the OTHER hand, Network Solutions is just took down DigitalOcean for no reason, so maybe they all suck?

Yeah, it doesn’t appear that PSSR (which I cannot help but pronounce with an added i) is the highest quality upscaling out there, combined with console gamers not having experienced FSR/FSR2/FSR3’s uh, specialness is leading to people being confused why their faster console looks worse.

Hopefully Sony does something about the less than stellar quality in a PSSR2 or something relatively quickly, or they’re going to burn a lot of goodwill around the whole concept, much like how FSR is pretty much considered pretty trash by PC gamers.

Yeah I’ve been noticing that. It’s probably a case of it being cheaper for them than games, but I’ve also noticed they’ve not yet done a cycle where it’s ONLY freemium stuff, at least.

Next week, for example, is an Apex skin and a game. If it was JUST the skin I’d probably be less gruntled, but as it is, I find it hard to get too upset that I’m only getting 1 free game instead of 2.

Excessively patient. I’ve noticed there’s basically a 50/50 chance of any game I find interesting showing up for free on Epic eventually, so I mean, fine, I’ll wait a couple of years to save $60. Why pay for something that’ll eventually be given to you, paid for by some vulture capitalist’s dragon horde?

I take some of their money, get a free game: win/win.

…at this point, I’m pretty sure my Epic games library is way bigger than my Steam library, simply from the 3-5 free games a month that Epic tosses at you, of which like 1/3rd are actually pretty good.

If it doesn’t yell at me about unexpected creepers in my house area, I’m going to be VERY disappointed.

doubt it would happen in my lifetime honestly

We’re at least 28 years into ‘Totally year of the Linux desktop!’, so I must say I’m afraid your right.

This has been a shockingly long-tail of inertia, and if people haven’t started moving by now I can’t see what exactly would suddenly cause people to decide to learn a new OS - which is a huge time investment - and all new software.

Maybe if Nadella starts breaking into people’s houses and wrecking up the place?

You talking modern stuff, or are we talking 90s Tiger Electronics games here?

Speed running Wii Sports?

Huh.

(I have probably 50 copies because I kept ending up with more and more due to buying game lots at estate sales and garage sales and such.)

Wii games worth something?

Maybe I’ll be able to retire on my collection of Wii Sports disks.

Have you been to a theater recently? You only wish it was silent.

Idk when it started but its fine to talk through the whole movie or fuck with your phone volume turned on now.

off-brand Super Soakers until they get frustrated

I’m now imagining the leaders of the Andromeda Initiative shopping for guns at the Citadel branch of Temu, which is Commander Shepherd’s least favorite store.

I wonder if some of these long dev cycle flops that have happened are because they’re long development cycles.

Like, this game may or may not be any good at all, but I would assume the logic was reasonable when they started work on it 8+ years ago.

I wonder if the push for everything having to be RTX-enabled AAAA live service games is kneecapping them, simply because it takes far far too long to make and bring to market.

Or it was just a flaming pile of junk, but I kinda think there’s maybe more going on than just that with some of these releases.

How much is the buggy armor DLC?