wizardbeard

Oh fuck off. "Then she shouldn't have dressed like that" ass take.

At this point we're just anecdote vs anecdote, but I've been pleasantly surprised during most of my attempts.

I'm not going to try and sift through collections on abandonware sites and try to cross reference them against known copies sold. The only person who can speak to your personal white whale is you.

archive.org has many gigs worth of 90s era "900 in 1" shareware/freeware CDs on it. Games that never sold copies and were just stolen personal projects shoved onto one disc.

Recently I found multiple users on SoulSeek that collectively have nearly the whole discography of a relatively unknown japanese house music label, Far East Recordings. The main artist Soichi Terada's work on the Ape Escape game soundtracks (only thing he's known for in the US) is easily available as are his CD releases, but there's a ton of vinyl only releases (he was prolific in the late 80s through mid 90s) that I could find evidence existed but couldn't actaully find the music anywhere. On top of that he did a lot of collabs with japanese artists that just don't exist online, and I found a ton of their stuff on SoulSeek as well.

Also, be the change. I've backed up all the CDs from my childhood, and put them up on the archive if I couldn't easily find them on it already. When I find time I'll do the same with all the old freeware games I downloaded back in the early 2000's. Keep backups. I've got easily accessible backups going back to my family's Windows XP, and I have our Win 98 drives whenever I decide to buy the right adapters.

Anyway, hope you find what you're looking for.

Saved you a click: Exploit requires attacker to already have an account in the local administrators group, and appears to only allow local admin privileges anyway.

You can remap the C:\ drive (including the OS files in system and windows folders) to a location you already control, with exploited system files and dlls, rather than having to go through UAC and confirm you want to use admin privileges to replace them in-situ.

Microsoft doesn't consider this an actual vuln because local admins are already defacto trusted and able to use their admin status to do all this anyway. They could just disable UAC locally anyway.

He definitely had/has a good grasp on the corporate hellscape. Too bad that he fell prey to the modern conceit that you need to use whatever platform you have to spout your opinions.

Just make your funny/depressing corpo comics and live the rest of your life privately man.

You might be surprised. Plenty of sites backing up whatever they can. Try archive.org and various abandonware sites.

Yep, Valve also normalized microtransactions significantly through TF2.

Once again, Valve started it as something reasonable: Cosmetic options, then expanded to allow shortcutting unlocking alt weapons through $1-3 charges instead of through game progression (achievements unlocked alt weapons at first). Other companies followed suite in ever increasingly predatory ways, and Valve got worse with it too over time.

I'll tell you something you missed:

Steam's DRM is notoriously easy to bypass, allowing that. They also don't force DRM on their platform, it's entirely developer/publisher opt-in (and they are also free to add additional DRM on top if they wish), and many many releases on Steam run fine directly from the executable without the launcher running.

Edit: For the record, I pirate before I buy, buy on DRM free platforms (GOG mainly) where possible, and use a third party launcher to unify my collection across multiple storefronts and many many loose executables into one spot.

Let's also not forget how absolutely groundbreaking Steam was for digital distribution.

I really have a hard time accepting that they "pushed" the industry rather than that they offered a platform with features that were worlds beyond what was available at the time for game developers and publishers. No one was bribed. There were no shady backroom deals. No assassinations of competitors (in fact the opposite, doing experiments with cross platform purchases with the PS3 and with GOG). There was no embrace extend extinguish, as there was nothing already existing like it to embrace or extinguish.

Also saying that they are now supporting linux and open source is ignoring a long history of their work with linux. This isn't something new for them. What's new is yet another large step forward in their investment, not their involvement.

Look, like you, I am concerned about their level of control over digital distribution game sales for the PC market. But from a practical standpoint I find them incredibly hard to have any large amount of negative feelings about them due to their track record, and the fact that they are not a publicly traded company so they are not beholden to the normal shareholder drive for profit at any cost. I'd love to hear more reasons to be concerned if any exist rather than "proprietary" and "too big".

On top of that, Steam DRM is pretty notably easy to bypass, with what appears to be relatively little effort from Valve to eliminate the methods. They aren't doing the normal rat race back and forth between crackers and the DRM devs that you would expect.

Anyway, again I'll say: I'd love to hear more reasons to be concerned beyond "proprietary" and "too big".

This is probably the simplest option. I've seen a good number of simple yet functional and pretty sites built in markdown and converted to html via some simple tool like pamdoc.

Supernaturalists is the title I think. Should be on my shelf at home, so I might be able to edit this and confirm later.

They are, even in name. There's some weird business structuring loophole where the "uber" OpenAI group is a non-profit, that runs/oversees the for-profit subsidiary OpenAI. It's like OpenAI inc vs OpenAI co or some rediculously meaningless distinction.

What a clickbait title. Not OPs fault, they just copied the original article title.

Saved you a click: This is about a short interview with one of the leads behind Fallout Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel. When 3 was coming out, Todd Howard said that for their purposes, Tactics and BoS didn't happen.

Game lead says it sucked to hear, but he's happy that elements have become canon in kind of a back door way, and thatcs good enough for him.

It was a different time with far less people needing clearly defined canon lore for things, and the canon of the other series Todd oversaw/sees Elder Scrolls was/is a massive clusterfuck with multiple conflicting events being simultaneously canon due to "dragon breaks" allowing multiple conflicting game endings to somehow all have officially occurred all at once. Seriously look up how the lore handles the endings of Daggerfall, or the fact that the entirety of the gameplay area of Oblivion (the Empire) had been consistently described as a (tropical) jungle in every game pre-Oblivion.

Anyway, here's the relevant quote in its entirety, with bolding added by me that changes the sentiment from the headline significantly:

"It sucked," says Orman. "You don't want to be told that what you've done is non-canon. By the time he said that I had a lot of distance from this, so it wasn't heartbreaking or gut-wrenching—it was just like, 'Oh man. You didn't have to officially say it, we could have existed in this weird quantum state where it was kind of part of things.' But the way things go now, with the reinterpretation of IPs and the retelling of stories—and especially with the creation of the TV show, where it's existing in the universe, but they're taking liberties and they may have to make adjustments to make that world work for TV—lots of ideas are going to get shuffled around. There have been little bits and pieces of Tactics which you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time. And that's good enough for me. I don't need anything more than that."