When you pay for enterprise equipment, you are typically paying a premium for longer, more robust support. Consumer products are less expensive because they don’t get this support.

Ah, brexit

Wow private servers aren’t uncommon, although I do think they violate the TOS as it stands. I imagine people would continue to use those in the event blizzard shuts the official servers down.

If you don’t have it already, maybe you should look at a steam deck in the future. I find it to be really good for times in my life when my time to play is limited, and a better source of unwinding than just mindlessly scrolling Lemmy or Instagram when I have a spare 15.

The semantics is that downloading is copying something from one computer system to another. Nothing about intent or permanence or whether it’s a temp/cache file or not. If you did not download the file, you cannot have seen it.

Whether you meant to do something or not does not change the action. The colloquial use of the word downloading to mean something different from streaming or browsing does not change the fundamental action.

In the case of WhatsApp, which is specifically in question here, it doesn’t “cache” images in a temporary folder. It saves the images to your devices media folders in their own library. So even by your definition, they’re being downloaded. Now, this is a setting which is on by default so maybe an individual doesn’t realise. It doesn’t mean they’re not downloading the content.

Can I interview with you lol - this sounds great!

Re: your last paragraph -

Think of it this way. Google pulls in 300 billion USD a year and 80% of that is advertising revenue, not leaving a whole lot of the pie for Pixel phones once you take out subscriptions, Chromebooks, GCP, etc etc.

Sure, they’re probably making some money on every pixel sale but the point of them making mobile phones is to support their advertising business.

I’m not a Graphene user, but that’s the way I see it. At the end of the day if you get the phone secondhand you’re not giving them any money at all.

The browser versions aren’t too awful, if that’s an option.

That’s the great thing about open source though. Sure, you might drop off the face of the earth tomorrow. But if you do, the code is there, and maybe someone who was using it clones the repo and carries on that work.

My doctor gave me four months to live.

We’ll see in a year, lol

I’ve got a pretty good mixture of qualifications and am working in a tech adjacent role so I’m not starting from nothing. I have some decent connections and might be able to carve out something at my current org. So it could be worse.

Reddit death > installing mint on my second PC > realising I can run most of the games I play and installing mint on my main PC > start learning Rust as a first foray into programming in a long time > realise I want to go back to uni and study info tech to get out of my shitty marketing job > get a shitty second hand laptop off my parents that struggles to run windows and install endeavourOS to try something different.

It really is a slippery slope. When does it end???

It was a joke, I think

One of my favourite songs, but I am still an advocate for the Oxford Comma.

I think they mean more user friendly than plain Ubuntu.

I think this was a misunderstanding of a bit of shitty functionality in threads. If you had Instagram and made a linked threads account, you would see follow suggestions for people who hadn’t made an account yet. It was basically “if this person makes a threads account I want to be following them”. I don’t believe it meant those suggested people had a shadow account or anything like that though. Still sketchy and probably drove inorganic growth, but I believe the number of users is counting the number of people opting into opening an account.

It’s just naturally going to be incredibly high, because so many people use Instagram and would’ve been exposed.

Completely pointless

Holy moley - OP knows and acknowledges as much in the last sentence. They’re doing something for the fun of it. Lighten up.

The terminology we might use down under is wanker

I agree with your points around not preordering, or waiting for reviews etc. However, I disagree with you that refunding after 10 hours isn’t the right thing to do for a few reasons.

First, the size of the game in question. For a short, 10-20 hour story driven game, a refund beyond 2 hours is ridiculous. For a large, open role playing game, where somebody spent 120 AUD expecting to get 50-100+ hours of gameplay, 10 hours is perfectly reasonable if you’re really not enjoying the product. If I can send back a meal at a restaurant that I’ve had (relatively speaking) two bites of, I should be able to refund a game the same way.

Second, again speaking for Australia as a jurisdiction, is the behaviour of brick and mortar stores. I can purchase a physical copy of a game, play it non-stop for two weeks, and get a refund. They have no way to know I finished it three times, but strong consumer protection laws enable me to game the system like this. I agree that it’s the wrong thing to do, but Steam is aware of the fact that the same consumer protection laws apply to them. While they have enough information to stop people from outright gaming the system, Steam needs to balance that against driving people to other storefronts or back to physical retailers.

Finally, your premise that people can’t reserve the right to get a refund just because they don’t like something. I would agree with this, if game demos were still a wide practise. I can’t get a change of mind refund on a shirt I buy in a physical store most of the time, but I can try the shirt on in the store to see how it looks on me. I can get a change of mind refund on most shirts I buy online, because I have no idea how it’s going to look. Yes, you can wait for reviews and watch gameplay, but it’s always different when you actually play the game. At the end of the day, it still comes down to “I thought this game would be X but it’s actually Y”.

A firm, inflexible refund policy in my mind achieves the opposite of what you are looking for. If people can never get a refund because a game simply isn’t what they thought, what barrier is their to a mildly successful company ridiculously overpromising, securing the bag, and disappearing into obscurity? If everyone buys the game on Steam and can’t get their money back, the company has won in the short term. If 50% of preorders get refunded, the company has just lost all of that money.