nakal
You don’t own games generally. It’s always a license for software use. You may own the game, if you buy the company and the license is fully under its control.
Software is not a product. And there is no guarantee you will be able to run it forever, even if you made a copy of your entire setup. It’s especially the case with Windows, because it’s bound to a specific hardware that will break one day. Microsoft also cares less and less about gamers (see what they do with their operating system for consumers) and they have a way out with XBox. My bet is that Windows is not making money for Microsoft anymore and it will degrade more and more. Gabe knows it and has a strategy against it. If you’re a gamer and want have games on PC, use Linux and support the good cause.
I noticed my posts don’t get submitted when I swear. I also don’t post in this case, because sometimes you need to swear to make a point.
My HDDs run 24/7 without spin up btw. I’m just talking about the costs. My drives don’t fail that much as yours. The recent drives that failed were WD Blue that were very old and only used for backups. And yes, all backups were still readable, even the drive was reported as failed. Compare it to SSDs that often fail “spectacularly”.
There is a lot of power to waste for the savings you made, when not buying expensive SSDs (20€ a year is not much). Where we use HDDs, we don’t care about noise. Durability? We use huge RAID systems with lots of redundancy.
I personally like to swap new drives after 5 years to avoid failures. So when you find a 16 TB SSD for 350€, you send me a message.
Programs are mathematical proofs. If maths cannot be patented, software can’t be, either.
If it’s on company time, it’s fine.