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Comment Simpsons game... (Score 1) 17

EA had a Simpsons game that they killed last year. A friend had been playing it since the beginning, and she was actively upset about it.

The problem with these "freemium" games is that they cost the company money for people to play... bandwidth, storage of whatever data they're collecting, etc. ... so once you get to the point where the "whales" aren't spending stupid amounts of money to buy your "premium currency", you now have the casual players costing you money.

One solution would be to reduce to tracking and bandwidth, and maybe start deleting accounts for people who haven't logged in for a year or more. ... but that takes developer time, so costs money, too. So they just kill it outright.

It's pretty damned sad... I miss being about to spend a few bucks for a game (eg, Plants vs Zombies) and able to play an actually fun game, instead of some game that's going to try everything it can to get me addicted and decide I need to spend money to level up faster or get some special character (eg, Plants vs Zombies 2)... or even worse, the "how many ads can we get you to watch in the 15 minute break you took to play a game"

Some of these games might be salvageable if the addicted players coughed up $10 a year or something to keep playing... but they'd probably still need to trim back how much bandwidth and whatever it takes... and set up a billing system, etc.

It's a shame, because there have been a lot of games through the years that had absolutely no reason need an online component (other than to get you to try to hook your friends into playing, too), which meant you couldn't play them when flying or whatever... and now they're just completely dead.

Comment Re: The world is full of stupid press articles. (Score 1) 83

https://xkcd.com/386/

There was advice years ago that if you wanted an answer on QA sites, you should ask the question with one account, then give a wrong answer with a second one... because people usually don't care enough to help, but they WILL post to say that the first answer is wrong.

Comment Dangerous (Score 1) 82

My former boss used to say that he knew enough programming to be dangerous (and sysadmin, etc)

But he knew it, so he left it to us professionals to do the work most of the time. AI just gives people the tools to be dangerous, without them actually understanding much of anything. And any jobs to clean up their work will slowly be learned by AI to do a good enough job most of the time until that one critical disaster happens.

Luckily, I was working for NASA, and they have rules for critical systems.... but most companies don't. And it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to poison the AI to leave back doors or whatever other vulnerabilities

Comment Re: Wow (Score 2) 201

The cycle is more like:

"The economy sucks because of too much regulation, I can make it better!"
(things seems to improve for a while, but they relax too much regulation and destroy the economy)
(other side gets elected to clean it up, and spend years trying to fix it)
"Remember how bad the economy was under that other side? I can fix it!"
(and then we re-elect the party that keeps crashing the economy) ... this last time the candidate actually said "are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?". Yes, yes I am. I may not be employed now, but it wasn't the middle of a pandemic that you made worse by telling people yo rise up against measures trying to help hospitals get a handle on things and forced states to compete against each other for supplies... then stole them.

Comment Re:Congratulations (Score 1) 6

and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life

I hope you got a good relationship with them! My son can't even talk yet. So, right now, he's just this cute thing that runs around and causes trou^H^H^H^Hgood things to happen.

 

Comment Re: And we should care because? (Score 1) 201

It has nothing to do with Citizen's United. It's a push by some groups (likely people who control corporations) to try to claim that corporations should have rights that we give to people.

If you give freedom of speech to corporations, then truth in advertising laws fall apart.

Comment Re: And we should care because? (Score 2) 201

Corporations can have free speech once someone can figure out how to apply the death penalty to a corporation. Until then, it shouldn't have the rights of people.

Let's consider for a moment:

Imagine if a corporation can outright lie to you about what they're selling, and then claim free speech when they're found to be lying.

"Made in America!"
"Gluten Free!"
"Does not contain rodent droppings or insect parts above the legal limits set by the FDA"
"Will not cause hair loss"
"Does not cause birth defects"
"Will not record your sex life and then put it on unsecured servers" ...etc.

Comment Re:TFS ignores the negatives (Score 1) 73

One obnoxious way to get the older version is to install an older LTS of Mint into a virtual machine and then go manually get all the bits that are Thunderbird and copy them to your new system. The hard part is making sure you have all the bits, but I don't remember how I did that.

Unfortunately, the Mint installation essentially copies a complete installation to your system, so there are no .debs of the installed packages. But I've wondered if some other distribution might install all the applications from .deb or .rpm files.

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