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The 'Fuck You' Pattern

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Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#601

Post by privacythrow1 »

Thorrez wrote: post #516
privacythrow1 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the costs in the 90s were tied directly to physical distribution and comparatively lesser market demand. Whereas nowadays digital distribution is king and market demand is ubiquitous. I'd consider those factors to be responsible for driving prices down before I'd give a multinational corporation credit for allowing me to use their product (that I paid for) in return for pervasive advertising.

Windows 95 had a suggested retail price of $209.95 https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19950607&slug... This magazine from 1995 had a CD full of stock images for sale for $18.98 https://the-avocado.org/2018/03/16/lets-read-pc-magazine-jul... So I don't think the physical distribution was a large percent of the price.

Maybe I attribute too much value to the costs of physical distribution. Either way, my point is that I don't think in-app advertising is the sole driver of the price point we see for Windows today compared to the price point we saw in the 90s.

I find it hard to accept the explanation that in-app advertising is the tradeoff I get when buying a tech product at a given price. Either it's free and it serves me ads, or I pay for it and I get to opt-in to ads if I choose.

It's the same argument for Smart TVs. These companies know they can have their cake and eat it too.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#602

Post by stjohnswarts »

XorNot wrote: post #428
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #57

"Wow, fuck you. I just wanted to look at cats." "Well, fuck you, too. We're here to sell ads." It's not about dark patterns, that's just a second-order effect. It was never about dark patterns. This is the implied agreement. You understand it, or you don't. And if you don't, I guess you haven't been on the web in the past decade or something. What? You thought it was fair that a company spends millions in technical i…

So how does this explain why Windows 10, which I have paid like $150 for per license, is now infested with ads, tracking and online presence - and close to impossible to buy without that. They aren't even trying to put a $ figure on what they think it's worth - because they can't be stopped from doing it. There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.

Why do I see no ads in windows 10? Have you tried using WPD?

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#603

Post by stjohnswarts »

fny wrote: post #471
6502nerdface wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess someone could argue that it only costs $150 because of the ads. Windows 95 cost well over twice that when it was launched (inflation adjusted). Maybe in the same way that airfares are way cheaper than they were in the 90s, but with much crappier included service.

They're = being leaches. Sure Windows 95 is expensive, but so were PCs. If you look at inflation adjusted OS prices, you'll see significant declines that reflect a lot of competition: - Windows 95 was $210 in 1995: $370.94 in today's dollars. - Windows XP was $199 in 2002: $297.78 in today's dollars. - Windows 7 was $159.99 in 2009: $200.75 in today's dollars.

pretty sure I gave like $50 for a license for win95

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#604

Post by stjohnswarts »

behnamoh wrote: post #488
jokethrowaway wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The single killer feature of windows, unrivaled by Mac or Linux, is playing video-games. Expensive professional software is often available on Mac. Probably the target market for windows evolved to become people who tolerate advertising (or at least that's what PMs at M$ think). Half the price is paid in the license fee. The other half is a lifetime of ads exposure.

To be fair, Windows 10 has been surprisingly satisfying in ways that I never imagined. Sure, Explorer still lacks tabs and a real bash is nonexistant, but macOS has gone downhill in other aspects anyway. I have an early 2015 MBP and I loved it. In fact, I loved it so much that every time it threw a problem at me I tried to find a workaround and fix it, even though I could easily switch to my Windows laptop. But the s…

I read stuff like this but I've had zero problems with MacOS since I bought a mac pro a few back. Am I doing something wrong? How did you hit all these issues? I'm primarily a linux user but it's not like I'm hitting any problem with MacOS on my laptop or my "new" M1 mini.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#605

Post by e12e »

e12e wrote: post #574
nine_k wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts! Well, yes, serving static HTML is easy. Serving images is kind of not hard either, because you have free unlimited traffic, don't you? Some hosting plans offer it. They just limit the egress bandwidth. So maybe you need a few more servers to cope with it, just like $50 a pop. You're not gonna need any CDN, people further away from your DC w…

> Go an and run a site that serves massive amounts of cat pictures for peanuts! Well, I was responding to "millions", so maybe "a handful of peanuts" might be more accurate... I belive there was an open company/OCI post by neocities.org a good while back, detailing their budget - but I can't seem to find it again.

Looks like Kyle dropped out of the open company initiative at some point, or let that one blog post drop off the site?

http://web.archive.org/web/20160310015118/https://blog.neoci...

> Our (rough) budget for 2015

(...)

> We have upgraded a lot of our infrastructure to provide for faster, more reliable service with more features, space, and bandwidth capabilities, which has pushed our operating bill to around $300/month (...) To prevent unexpected costs, we have made agreements with our providers to make this a fixed rate, so a sudden flood of traffic shouldn't change this dramatically.

(...)

> In order to become self sustaining with the current system, we will require approximately $3600 in annual recurring revenue. I think this is an achievable goal with our new site (we're almost 1/3 of the way there), and we have plenty of runway incase this takes longer than expected. We also have the ability to scale back on some of our expenses, as I believe I can shave off at least $100-150 from our monthly recurring expenses should we need to without too many problems.

> (...) We can scale a lot (~500k+ sites) with what we have now, and the scaling options we have are simple, predictable and affordable.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#606

Post by 867-5309 »

tgtweak wrote: post #594
867-5309 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for Reddit, you can "sign up" with a bogus email address and still interact (browse, join, comment, vote, message) freely. the only possible downside is it asks you to verify your email address every launch, but I don't see this as a downside since I am using Reddit anonymously, and it is easily dismissed. been doing this for over a year now

Still allows them to identify you over the course of several sessions, which allows them to de-anonymize you.

not if your email address and browser sessions contain no personally identifiable information

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#607

Post by exikyut »

fl0wenol wrote: post #472
runnerup wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would pay twice as much upfront but that's not an option. So instead I pirate Windows 10 Enterprise which is an absolute dream OS for a prosumer. I'd buy it but I haven't been able to figure out how to.

That's exactly what you do. Find a guide on buying LTSC through a Microsoft partner. It's expensive but you can effectively install it many times. https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...

Wait, you can actually do this legitimately??!?!?!

TIL how I'm going to be buying Windows from now on. I had no idea this was actually this accessible.

Pirating can sometimes be the simplest technical solution to some situations, but at the end of the day being able to point at a (set of) legitimately-acquired license key(s) is a bit like having a PhD, it squares everything off in a way that opens doors (or keeps doors open) that would otherwise be shut.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#608

Post by CRConrad »

vvillena wrote: post #567
Ntrails wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remove the requirement for seatbelts since "if it goes down, they're all dead anyway." I mean, he's got a point here. Surely if we actually wanted plane passengers to survive crashes they'd have something more substantial than lap belts? I'd have thought, as a simple laymen, facing the seats backwards would make any impact far more survivable than crouching in the insane way that the "safety pamphlet" suggests?

Consider that people survive in some crashes where the plane structure fails. There are no crashes where the plane looks fine, but people inside are dead. This means lap belts + bracing is actually a good approach. A more involved restrain means no bracing, which means more forces on the neck. It also means it's harder to get free, and quick evacuation is one of the main factors that save lives during an accident.

> A more involved restrain means no bracing, which means more forces on the neck.

Did you miss the GPs bit about facing the seats backwards? Then the whole backrest becomes your restraint. (I mean, most airplane crashes are forwards, right -- they don't get rear-ended all that often?)

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#609

Post by zomars »

_trampeltier wrote: post #502
XorNot wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how does this explain why Windows 10, which I have paid like $150 for per license, is now infested with ads, tracking and online presence - and close to impossible to buy without that. They aren't even trying to put a $ figure on what they think it's worth - because they can't be stopped from doing it. There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.

What I don't undestand, even Win 10 Pro has XBox and candys all over the place .. serious in a pro version?!? With the terrible EULA it all felt just like a joke to me and I deleted all my Windows installations and I'm Linux only now at home. I'm not using Linux because it is free. I have 4 unused Win10 Pro licenses at home now. But I just can't say yes to the EULA. So I dumped them all. In the late 90s I also bought…

Get Win LTSB. That's the most sane version.

Re: The 'Fuck You' Pattern

#610

Post by einpoklum »

zorrolovsky wrote: post #392
einpoklum wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope; Windows is getting old :-P Time to switch to another OS. Consider some newbie-friendly Linux, like Mint (linuxmint.com).

Agreed. I am a Mint user and I couldn't be happier. I switched around one year and a half ago because I was concerned about the constant data transfer (increasingly harder to deactivate) between my devices and Apple/MS. I was also sick of seeing unwanted ads and notifications both in Windows and Mac.

Personally I'm on Devuan because of my aversion to systemd, otherwise it would be mint for me.
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