So don't overload the mini van and learn how to drive it properly, problem solved.

Start by not having a family of 7.

Or state very clearly (not in the fine print) that said device or software will likely cease to work past some date, but is guaranteed to work until that date.

They have done exactly that for many many years.

Look at the back of the Battlefield 1942 box - the game was released in September 2002 and it states that they only guarantee it can be played online until September 2003. This isn't in the fine print, it's on the back of the package like you said it should be, so that you can read it before you buy the game.

This caused quite a stink back in 2002 because people thought it meant that they absolutely would cause the games to stop working at that time but really EA was just covering their ass because they had been sued already by people who didn't get that Ultima Online required a subscription fee because it wasn't spelled out on the box well enough

Instead, EA has supported online for BF1942 through GameSpy for close to 12 years now. And you think they're assholes for going way beyond what they promised and don't release source code. And your other suggested fix is exactly what they did over a decade ago when they fucking released the game but you're too goddamn stupid to know what you're talking about.

Oh, so Reddit?

My first gig out of college was for the same University I graduated from, and I worked on a mainframe doing COBOL programming, and some scripting in a proprietary language called NATURAL which I've never seen used anywhere else, ever.

One project I was handed was to update the 1098-T form. It's basically the IRS tax form for tuition writeoffs. Every year we had to produce a 1098-T form for every student which basically detailed what they paid in tuition. Every year the form was a little different (of course) so every year our generation program had to be updated.

What I got handed was basically a program which drew the form and then printed the data on the correct parts of the form. And when I saw drew the form, I don't mean we had a PDF or JPEG or whatever of the form, we actually recreated the form with whatever bog standard graphics package we used. Like, you would literally say go to (X1,Y1) and draw a line to (X2,Y2), then a line from (X2,Y2) to (X3,Y3), etc. It was like programming in LOGO, but for a legal purpose and without the cool turtles.

This doesn't sound like such a big deal, and it wasn't too bad, but what was tedious was the fact that you would program all this in, then run the program against a single fake student's data, and then you headed to the printer. The printer, in this case was the print room and it was three floors down and a few hallways away. Then you waited for the printout. Which would print as soon as anyone else's job who was in (virtual) line in front of you was done. The time it took to accomplish this was basically random.

And when you found out whatever small change you made didn't work, had the wrong effect, got the numbers backwards, etc. you got to do this all over again. Make small change, compile, run, wait hour(s) for result, lather, rinse, repeat. All with no GUI, no preview, no nothing. Oh, and the program I had, comparing the form printed last year to the actual 1098-T form from the IRS' site was not a 1:1 recreation - it had basically the same info as the source form but it wasn't a dead-on match. I'm guessing this was good enough for the IRS, and either no one had ever bothered to make this thing picture perfect, or the motivation to do so got lost along the way. Lord knows I wasn't going to do it either.

Over time of course you started to average out how long it took to get the printout and you'd wait at least that long before going to get it. And of course this wasn't anywhere near as bad as "come back tomorrow to see if it worked", but that whole process sucked and I don't miss that job at all.

Oh, and this was in ~2002 or so. I didn't really want to be a mainframe programmer but I had little experience in a shitty economy and I was told/promised that they'd be moving to an "all new web-based system within the next six months". When I quit two and a half years later to move to a better gig, it was still "within the next six months". I learned a lot from that job, I guess.

Apple's a fruit, so they're taken care of.

Anonymous are a bunch of cunts.

Peter Max (60's psychedelic artist) used an Amiga on Missing Persons' "Surrender Your Heart" video, which at the time I thought was pretty darn cool. Plus, you know, Dale Bozzio...

Back in the film days, people didn't take thousands of pictures. Best thing to do with digital is sort through them and only keep a few meaningful ones, and print them out on archival paper.

They sure as hell can't code OpenSSL extensions.

Oh that's just part of whatever the French call "la dolce vita."

Right, because no one goofed off at work before the internet came along.

This was the best troll, congrats!

Yes, pity the middle class, white, christian, male and his lack of opportunity in the USA.

Why is liking video games, specifically FPS and MMOs, a necessity to being a programmer?