I would rephrase this as they got there because they treat their customers with respect, they take feedback to improve their platform, they don't pack their launcher / store front with ads and trickery, and you can trust that your games will be there and not go away.
Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else.
Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for.
In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.
This is what I always say about Valve. They are not morally unimpeachable, but at the end of the day I've been a regular customer for over 20 years and they've never fucked me over. I don't think I can say the same about any other software company.
And most importantly, the moment they show any indication of doing otherwise, I will happily drop them.
I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG.
I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing"
There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.
Going back further, the thing that enabled them to release their first game "when it's done" and set the ball rolling was being founded by two ex-Microsoft with piles of money, most studios don't have that luxury.
Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident. If that DB is the source of truth for SS payouts elsewhere, clean up the data. There's no reason for it to be there.
Social Security receives payments as well as makes them. SSNs are keys for both.
The “super old person” SSN numbers are in the DB mostly because non-citizens are using them to pay into the system. If you delete those numbers, the next payroll run will inject them right back in.
And you would remove important accounting metadata for each payment. Metadata that is consumed by the systems that prevent fraudulent payments from going out.
The only way to stop the fake/bad SSNs is to go into the field and address each instance with employers. This is time-consuming and expensive, which is why no one has done it much.
The reason given that the SSA does not clean up the data is it would cost too much for little to no administrative benefit. They also don't want to add new inaccurate data to the system.
The no administrative benefit bit checks out with napkin math. Of the 18.9 million entries for people age 100 or older they are paying out benefits to 44,000. The total number of people in the US age 100 or older is around 90k to 100k, depending on time period for comparison.
There's an Inspector General audit report in a nearby comment for source.
> Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident.
That's like saying null columns in a particular database table must be filled in (or have the row entirely erased) because someone, somewhere, somehow, might infer the wrong thing about them, if they completely ignore all the other tables and business rules.
___
"Hello, I am Oldy McOldperson. Give me money."
"...Sorry sir, but that person would be almost 150 years old now, and that's well past our Impossibly Old threshold of 115 years. Furthermore, one our other databases says that person was reported as missing 90 years ago."
"But Oldy's--I mean, my precise confirmed date of death is still blank, therefore I'm alive, so give me money!"
"Sir, only a complete moron would believe that's how it works."
I've done hundreds of nodes, all managed to a very low level (I've been to the datacenter and optimized placement of servers within the cabinet to enable shorter cables to the patch panel) which is way beyond what most companies need.
In general it's better to have fewer and more powerful and reliable nodes that you own than to have many disposable small ones, as shared instances just don't work
well and aren't cost-effective.
Cloud in general just makes everything more expensive while removing control. The costs on AWS if paying for three years upfront is the same as buying the hardware outright, except you have little say in what the hardware is and how the infrastructure is set up.
choosing serverplacement to optimize for cable length does not sound very efficient. usually you get the cables in the length you need and place servers to solve other requirements (heat, direct connections between devices, etc)
> as shared instances just don't work well and aren't cost-effective
of course ymmv from mine, but this statement being true or false depends on too many things to be of any value
IME many companies claim 99.99+ uptime but then the penalties are trivial. If a 99.99 SLA is busted with an hour of downtime in a month but the penalty is 5% bill credit, the company just lost $500 on $10k revenue, assuming that:
A) Customers actually chase the credit, which (again IME) many companies make very difficult
B) The downtime is very clearly complete downtime. I've seen instances where a mobile app is completely down (but the web product works) or a key API is down (but the core product works) or there are delays in processing data (but eventually things are coming through). All of these can cause downstream downtime to customers but may not be covered by a "downtime" SLA.
Once a company claimed nine 9s (99.9999999%, 0.03 seconds down per year) uptime on their new cloud service to me. When pressed how they came up with the number their measurement they said they were measuring the percentage of time the login webpage loaded (not that you could log in or things worked inside the page and app) and the https://uptime.is/ tool only went up to nine 9's.
But you could find a group you enjoyed playing with and learn from them. I spent hundreds of hours in a UT2k4 server in Team Arena Mode warmup just practicing air rockets, shock combos, and flick lightning gun headshots. RIP UT2k4
