As a Canadian citizen, he couldn’t vote for president, but he supported Donald Trump.

“I was definitely all for ‘Make America Great Again,’ and having a strong, unified country, and a bright future for my five American children, but now I feel a little differently,” he said. “I’ve been torn from my family. My life has been disregarded completely.”

And here I was afraid there was no justice left in the world. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

gastric geology is wild ngl

No. The question at hand is whether you expect any company, or any person, to indefinitely fix and maintain legacy systems. And yes, your argument is indefinite support because you want the purchasing machine to be granted use of the software in perpetuity, you want it to never lose access to the software. You provided no deadline by which anyone is allowed to stop fixing things that broke. And yes, things break naturally as a function of time.

It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows

Denial.

I mean, there is still an industry of Cobol engineers maintaining mainframe code for banks from the 80s.

my gramps, that's not the beacon of good business practice you think it is 🤣

Can I hold you to the decisions you made 20 years ago? I bought that program you built decades ago, that means I'm entitled to your continued support. And don't you even think about getting paid, your support should be free. You shouldn't have built and sold the software if you can't support it...

Lol, I'm a software developer that started by writing legacy windows software, I know exactly how much (little) has changed.

It is this perspective that exposes your bias and colors your perception.

We live in a post-Heartbleed world. We live in a post-UAC world. We constantly find new bugs and vulnerabilities, and they cannot always be patched without massive changes to the architecture. We cannot forever maintain old systems that cultivated bad habits in it's users.

Not all change is good, but all change is inevitable.

they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.

Yeah that was a pisstake, a totally unforced error in judgment. Many commented on his GitHub repo to say as much. I sympathize with getting jaded about Valve and Steam, I understand the frustration with how exploitative gaming has become, but nuking his own 20-year portfolio, a thing he should be proud of, because Valve made him so mad he wanted to stick it to them?

That's a highly self-destructive and ultimately futile decision. What a waste.

The store you bought the game from is squarely responsible for your game not running.

I... Huh? If I wanted to play Dark Forces, a game developed for DOS, it doesn't just run natively on my Windows 10 PC... I need DOS Box. Heck, that's exactly what you get when you buy Dark Forces on Steam. Is Steam supposed to sell a game as-is, when it can't run on modern processors and operating systems? The store is responsible for the move from i386 to x86-64?

Coming from the pre-Steam era of PC gaming, ... [where you] go online to a BBS or FTP site to get patches (irrespective of whether the store you used is even still in business), this is all infuriating!

That era of gaming was the domain of SecuROM and it's ilk, an era where I had to buy a game disc THREE TIMES because my disc drive kept scratching the disc! This waxing nostalgic for a bygone era is not convincing, I know the dark magic, I was there when it was cast.

Conservative media in the United States has the answer: appeal to a person's base selfishness, repeatedly. You have to do this over the course of years, maybe even decades. But when you convince someone that they are exceptional, they see themselves as the exception. The rules don't apply to them anymore! This kind of thinking can cross all kinds of boundaries - class boundaries, race boundaries, religious boundaries, educational boundaries.

You can convince poor people to hate other poor people, minorities to hate other minorities, immigrants to hate other immigrants, workers to hate other workers. You just have to convince your marks that they are special, they deserve their share of the pie, it's just that everyone else is trying to steal that share of the pie. And that's not really hard to do, it's just time-consuming. But it does work.

I'm reminded of that meme where a businessman holding a plate of 500 cookies saying "careful, you only have 2 cookies, better not let that guy with 1 cookie take them from you!"

It's bad enough they get your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.