+1 for SensibleSideButtons and ScrollReverser. I find using a mouse painful without them, and I greatly appreciate that they're both free.

To check it's not broken before they roll it out Europe-wide.

That's not an A/B test per se, thats a blue/green release.

Wipeout is clearly not "abandonware".

Dogs and cats, living together

Your two years of experience is showing.

My years of backend before that certainly influences how I see things. Maybe it would have been better if I'd drank the "modern front end" kool aid from day one. I came in a sceptic and remained one.

The front end world is a miserable place of dreadful software built on fantastic foundations.

I have dabbled periodically in modern front end development, but it depresses me hugely. All the mistakes that gave us PHP dominating back ends (another sad story) being repeated in a modern context.

Learn CSS? I did. Feel like I wore out MDN but I agree it is awesome. An adequate solution to a very difficult problem.

I recently bought a C64 and was recommended this modern replacement, it works with the vast majority of games https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/shop/commodore/eflr.html

Software engineering is the most desk bound job in existence.

Perhaps, but your desk can be located anywhere.

...as long as the company allows it.

Yes, good point - I mean 'desk-bound' as in culturally tied to a physical location while working. I say that in contrast to software jobs that don't particularly care where or how you work as long as you deliver results.

It's been 19 years since this problem has been fixed and yet the bad code is still there.

I'd suggest you assess first the amount of code that depends on java.net.URL both in Java SE itself and then in the ecosystem, before you can say it would be "easy" to remove java.net.URL.

Hint: same reasons java.util.Date, and java.util.Vector are still there.

This is looking at the past with today's eyes. There was no concept of "maintaining" games as you might expect today. Games were finished, put out on disk or CD, and that was usually that. Patches were sometimes introduced to fix bugs or improve compatibility with certain hardware, but that was usually the limit of support. Quake received far more support post-release than any other game at the time. There were many patches, game improvements and fixes. ID released GLQuake to support the new trend of 3D acceleration (the base game was software rendered only). They released QuakeWorld to support the growing player base who wanted to play multiplayer across the internet. And they released several expansion packs to provide a large amount of additional single player content. This is far, far from "abandoning" a player base. I don't know what more they could have done other than make all of their future games in the Quake 1 engine, which would have been commercial suicide given their reputation for being at the front line of PC technology.

Indeed, if anything is slow, it's GIMP.