- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
The title is a bit misleading, as the article lists diverging analysts’ opinions, ranging from Valve willing to sell at a loss or low margins, to high prices due to RAM and SSD price volatility.


MSFT? Microsoft?
Yes.
Sorry, its either/both their stock ticker, a fairly common way they refer to themselves internally.
I too used to work for Microsoft.
Wooo boy, being one of two people trying to make the multi hundred, maybe over a thousand node, call center / support tree node system work correctly, for the 360, during the ‘red ring of death’ (3RR was the code we used for ‘you are absolutely fucked’)… yeah that was fun.
That sounds interesting. Would you mind sharing a bit more of your experience, if you’re not bound by an NDA?
I have before in other comments in other threads… but I am about to pass out, and being on mobile with a shit tier phone makes searching my own comment history somewhat cumbersome.
Uh… reply to this in 10 hrs and I will probably be awake and find those old comments?
(Also, its been a while since I worked for them, but even if I was bound by an NDA, I wouldn’t give a fuck, I didn’t do anything that important, really. Just another V Dash amongst many.)
Thank you for taking the time to reply despite your situation. I’ll try to remember to ping you tomorrow, but don’t feel obligated.
Ok, I found one of my longer comments on ‘being an ex corpo from MSFT’.
I think the original post topic was basically about how the Windows kernel is now such a mess that MSFT can’t actually understand it.
Stunning 10/10 Glassdoor Review from Happiest Former Tech Worker On Earth
I used to do V Dash contracts for MSFT.
I knew that the Xbox 360 3RR, red ring of death problem… was so bad, that it actually would have been more cost effective for MSFT to give each buyer two 360s, instead of one, at the same price, because of how mismanaged the RMA process was… I knew a whole bunch of such details a almost a decade before the documentary on it came out.
Yay NDAs.
…
I was also there during the Windows 8 rollout.
Shut down basically everything for a month, because MSFT ‘dogfoods’ all their software: Every MSFT worker is beta/alpha testing all MSFT software all the time.
We spent weeks just, unable to have more than 3 windows open at a time, half the tools we used on a daily basis just not working.
We asked them to let us go back to 7, asked them if therr was some way to return to a 7 like GUI.
For weeks they said nope, impossible, Win 8 is an entirely new GUI, totally new OS, the Win 7 GUI isn’t there.
Oh then uh, weeks later, yeah, yeah it actually is there, you just have to follow this arcane override proceduren to see and use it.
… And then they just relented, put the non tablet UI fully back in, and called that Windows 8.1.
…
Windows is now layers upon layers upon decades of insane spaghetti code.
Even in Win 10, which was the last version I ever used… there are like 3 or 4 different eras of UI, for various settings menus, which people sometimes need to actually use… but they are considered legacy and thus not important.
Sometimes some newer era UI menus will have some of the options from some of the more buried stuff, but not all of them.
It is a gigantic fucking mess.