Gabe Newell knows that any potential buyer will run Valve into the ground. Thus he already promised too long ago that he would never sell or let Valve go public.
Considering how many game studios that Microsoft just killed off in the last 3 years alone; they're never going to be worthy of buying Valve.
These are the kinds of cops that should be summarily fired on the spot and not ever given a badge again. Such sickening behavior.
This is pretty clearly a company practiced at "riding the waves" of what's popular to sell absolute bullshit.
They appear to raise millions, develop what looks like a minimally viable product for it's development phase, then pull the rug out and exit with the bag of cash, quickly pivoting away from discovered scams and name changing to avoid too much consumer ire or regulator scrutiny.
It wouldn't surprise me if the CEO or anyone else at the top levels of this company has an entire resume full of these sorts of 'scam and run' operations, the kinds that melt into the background and vanish the moment any real strong consumer or regulatory/legal scrutiny hits it.
Basically this is investment fraud 101; you find something you can trick people into investing into, then spend as little as possible to get a 'minimally viable product' that appears plausible enough to give you time to exit stage left with all the fat cash you can take. Because this sort of operation does produce something; oftentimes they get away cleanly; because they did do something and oftentimes they obscure or obfuscate and hide the evidence of any planned malfeasance; usually the only places with any record of it is in the mind of the CEO or other executive(s), if they're in on the scam too.
Sometimes the CEO gets 'caught' intentionally and then fired...or they just run the company into the ground. That latter case can let them off the hook with a tidy golden parachute as well; depending on the circumstances and what they 'negotiated' when they were 'hired'.
The shoe fits on the other foot as well. Both extreme communism and extreme capitalism have tendencies to turn into dystopian nightmares.
If '1984' alarms you; so too should current works like 'Ready, Player One' or 'Ender's Game' and it's associated sequels.
Extremism in general tends to not work. I don't pretend to know what the exact right balance is; but it does exist.
Censorship like this is one fast track to things like the French Revolution.
NOPE!
You cannot pay me to use Windows 11.
This kind of website sounds kind of problematic and useless. The ability to follow a specific person's post is highly useful, and highly necessary oftentimes. If you want to reduce the friction that "Following" induces; you simply need to not disclose to the users how many people are following them, nor do you need to disclose how many followers a user has. Problems solved.
The same goes for Likes. Nobody but the sender of the like should know about that like. Instead of keeping counts for the recipients to obsess over; calculate a reasonable percentage of people who we can guess "like" the post algorithmically based on views of the post and clicked likes. I get that the feedback mechanism is necessary; but it should be a gentle one that simply encourages people to post what people like and will view. This percentage should not be used to rank a post above or below other posts, unless the user viewing the list asks for the list to be sorted or ranked as such.
Even a progression from "Closed Source" to "Source Available" is nice progress I think.
If we assume that the License is not restrictive we may be able to fork Winamp into a codebase that might actually be Fully Open Source Software and track changes of the upstream as we need.
Minimum SDK also does get bumped in Android in general at a snails pace. Given that we're basically coming up on Android 15; it's not unfair to assume that, eventually, we will simply see Android intentionally and permanently REFUSE to run the app because it's Minimum SDK value is considered to be too low and thus Android must assume that the application is completely insecure.
The largest barrier for me in FLOSS and FOSS applications is simply a lack of GUI tools for what is considered to be "Advanced" functions.
Just because I can do it on linux doesn't mean it's easy or intuitive. Unfortunately a lot of FOSS and FLOSS applications are, of necessity, extremely limited in what tasks they are targeting. Frequently you cannot rely on the "alternative" to have a relied upon function or feature until deep in it's lifecycle; when finally enough people have complained and the feature is implemented.
Sometimes a feature is never implemented due to an entirely shifted paradigm in the way the program is implemented and the feature is "impossible" or "inconsistent with xyz".
One example of this is the number of GUIs and frontends written for ffmpeg; many of which simply are lazy GUI implementations of what the ffmpeg CLI binary itself will helpfully print out in the console when you ask it for help with the correct switch(es). Many are even less thought out than this and will often unhelpfully provide an obtuse box at the bottom for custom commands you wish to feed to the program....which is great if you know the command(s); but make using the GUI unhelpful when compared to just firing up a CLI and reading the output and figuring out the correct command for exactly what you want it to do.
Keep in mind; I am not at all uncomfortable with using CLI interfaces; I just expect that a GUI doesn't force me to fallback, or become so unusable that I am forced to fall back on an original CLI tool because I cannot possibly discern why it failed to work
Frequently things that would be simply be an option buried deeply in the GUI menus only and are otherwise fairly simple are relegated as being only possible within a CLI interface; and I find that reality quite infuriating most often...as the limitations of a CLI oftentimes make the task I am trying to complete far less simple than it really should have been.
SearXNG has fediverse search functionality too.
13 billion Euro British Franc Moneys?
That's pocket change to Google.
Note: the above message is satirical. Do not reply.