Apple made 4 billion in 2023 from selling advertisements on their devices. Sure, it’s only ~1% of Google’s ad business buts still technically billions

Gentoo has systemd instructions right alongside openrc through the whole installation handbook. Pretty sure opensuse is systemd also.

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019 has a 10 year support window, and subsequent LTSC versions, 5 years. If you can get your hands on one of these licences you would presumably continue to receive security patches. If the US government is somehow not running on this kind of licence, it would be pretty funny, but I’m sure Microsoft would be lenient and let them jump onto whatever compatible LTSC version given its an American company.

Do a retro! Lol

I don’t know if @Hackerman_uwu is enough? I’m writing this comment to test it

Maybe !Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world

Edit: nope neither of those work

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

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???

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

I think however you’re accessing Lemmy is rendering it wrong. I see the usual function.

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.

OSKO is even better than payment apps. Basically every bank offers is as a payment method option (if not the default) for any transfer, at 0 cost. They’re also implementing a new system to replace direct debits, to add more consumer protection and control to the recurring billing market.

They might mean instant bank transfers, like OSKO in Australia. Google tells me a service called FedNow is available through 35 banks as of July this year which supports instant bank transfers.

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.

Steam can refuse a refund after that time, but they are usually incredibly flexible because a) they want to keep customers on Steam and b) many jurisdictions have much firmer and consumer favoured laws around product refunds, Australia for example is a large reason for Steams current refund policy in the first place.

But what about why 10k, the horrors