I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.

Fair point. If I get the itch to play something old, I’ll usually just check gog to see if it’s been ported. It’s probably been about ten years ago now, but I finally went through my old software box that had been sitting in a closet forever and tossed games like Wasteland on 3.5” floppies. Oddly, one of the toughest ones to toss was Darklands, which I would never play again but which at the time sucked me in like few other games ever had.

And now apparently it’s available on Steam and works on the Deck, so I might actually try it out again…

But, again, that’s my point.

I see this argument a lot.

I’m someone who has been gaming since the C-64 days (load “*”,8,1), and honestly I think I’ve lost more games through data corruption on the physical media, simply losing a disk, having a compatible operating system go away, or having the physical media hardware no longer be supported. I actually like the fact that I can just re-download a game whenever I want to play it.

I’ve had a bit less luck with streaming audio, where a service will have licenses for some but not all of the tracks of an album (that’s really annoying), but the trade off there is that I’m not actually buying it, and as a result I have access to god knows how many artists and albums.

The one that really gets me is the fragmentation of video content among a dozen or more services, but hopefully we will start to see a move back towards consolidation there.

I hadn’t really been coming at it from that perspective, but your post got me thinking. I’ve been in the business one way or another since then in multiple capacities - hobbyist, military, government, academia, and commercial.

Back in the 70s, there was barely a major called “computer science” at most colleges. Most people writing software were largely self-taught, and software companies were a couple of dozen people. Going into the 80s, as the industry expanded, more computers were being sold (mid-sized and mainframes, with a small but growing PC market. Being a programmer would give you a solid middle class career. These were the days when Donald Knuth wrote the cost complete and comprehensive software for laying out text and equations available (TeX, now used via LaTeX) because such a thing wasn’t available and he wanted it to be. He was a professor at Stanford, meaning he had a salary already, so he just released it for free. Those were the days when people argued that software couldn’t be copyrighted because any piece of software is really just a mathematical equation, and you cannot copyright math. Anyway, many of the people writing software had a day job, “programmers” included a large proportion of people who wrote COBOL in tiny chunks for not very much money. There was a large chunk of people whose greatest dream was getting paid to do software for a living, and it was seen kind of people whose dream it was to be a professional librarian. Very few were in it for the money.

It all took off in the mid-late 90s when the industry got financialized. Fast forward to today, and no one on my team has less than a six figure salary, I make more than most MDs, and my bosses make far more than that. Because of our age demographic, few if any of them have even a bachelor’s degree, much less one in computer science. It was really that 90s transition when it started to be about money.

But I wouldn’t use the word greedy. The industry just changed, and so did the social relationships. I still have nostalgia for the days when it was more like Wargames and Real Genius than like Black Mirror, but I would never say it’s a result of the folks writing an app that want to do it for a living on their own terms. I think people like Christian Sellig (the author of Reddit client Apollo) represents the best of that earlier mindset, and I sincerely hope he made fuck-you money off of his app before spez shut him down. If anything, it’s people like Spez who are at fault.

Anyway, that was just a rant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Back in the olden days, there used to be a variety of free software called postcard-ware. It was free to distribute and use, but if you wanted to you could send the author a postcard.

It’s 0-255 when you’re indexing like that. 11111111b = 255.

Perchance programming with pointers has plunged as a percentage of programmers.

But thank you. I was hoping someone would notice that.

When you’ve eaten more than 50% of the hamburger, do you claim to have eaten one, or do you claim zero? Are you useing standard founding or are you using floor()?

This.

One of the reasons indexing starts at zero is because back when we used to use pointers and memory addresses, the first byte(s) of an array were at the address where the array was stored. Let’s say it is at 1234. If it was an array of bytes, the first data element was at 1234, or 1234 + 0. The second element would be at 1235, or 1234 + 1. So the first element is at location 0 and the second at location 1, where the index is actually just an offset from the base address. There may be other/better reasons, but that’s what I was taught back in the 90s.

Counting always starts at 1 (if we’re only using integers). You don’t eat a hamburger and say you ate zero hamburgers.