731–740 of 796 posts
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I should at least get equity on each login. After 1000 logins I get the source code. This is too much like rent, it's not fair.
It's jungle law. What are you going to do about it? You could pirate the game instead. If it isn't pirateable yet then you could be the first.
Ah the difficult topic we don't want to talk about!
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Ignoring anticompetitive behavior, Windows is the only thing that works on most computers and is usable by most people. If you buy a computer, and it's not a MacBook, Windows is the only option.
I'm not convinced this is true in any sense at all anymore. Can you name a piece of hardware that isn't supported by Linux? I was gonna suggest maybe the surface tablets, but a quick googling suggest even they run it just fine. 20 years ago hardware support was a major concern for us Linux aficionados. 10 years ago it was a minor concern. Today I think you may have some issues with newer apple hardware, but it's not…
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Reminds me of the fact that I lost my Xbox account because they shutdown hotmail. My account is working on my Xbox but the password reset options are not supported by the OS on the Xbox. And I can’t change the email of the account from an Xbox. The support wasn’t helpful either. I read that somebody with the same issue got them to change the mail by logging in and out while on the phone. I don’t have the energy to ju…
There's more to this story, you've forgotten your password or something. Hotmail accounts moved to outlook.com, just reset it on a PC.
The fight should never have been about physical vs digital, but about ownership. If I buy a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to: 1. Keep it forever without the risk of remote deletion. 2. Use it while offline, unless internet connectivity is strictly required for the experience. 3. Move it between my devices. 4. Backup and archive it. 5. Resell it. 6. Pass it on to my chil…
The problem is that the technology [1] to do this simply doesn't exist. I'd say the core of the problem is that copying a digital artifact is easy, is a solved problem. You simply copy the data that represents the artifact, and now you have another copy. *Deleting* data (and its cousin, *moving* data) is a nearly intractable problem. How can you verify that someone no longer has access to data that you gave them? The…
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The streaming service is a Cathedral: You've paid your tithe to the temple of HBO Max? Marvelous, please come in, my child and gaze upon our wonders! What? James Cameron's True Lies? It is not in our collection, please remain here and we can watch Commando together! It's just as good! The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies…
Just a minor correction: Commando is superior to True Lies ;)
I'd argue even that is done better on underground services. Plus they'll just show you actually useful metrics, like the IMDB rating.
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This is the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up... So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your…
The streaming service is a Cathedral: You've paid your tithe to the temple of HBO Max? Marvelous, please come in, my child and gaze upon our wonders! What? James Cameron's True Lies? It is not in our collection, please remain here and we can watch Commando together! It's just as good! The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies…
To be honest it's never been easier to pirate media. It is, in fact, much easier to pirate media than to find a show or movie you'd like to watch "legally".
I have Netflix because I have a family plan with my parents, but I literally never use it in favor of regular ass usenet pirate sites that usually have better UI/UX than any of the streaming services do.
Whenever I'm interested in some show or another, I google "Where to watch blah?". You then get greeted with 9000 websites all purporting to tell you which service has blah (the fact that this is even needed is an absurdity). 90% of them say different things to one another, most of them are clearly some hallucinated AI-generated crap created for the purpose of siphoning ad revenue from visitors. You login to whatever streaming service you subscribe to, and there's only 3 seasons out of 9 of blah, and it's the middle 3 seasons to boot (one that comes to mind is Law and Order SVU on Netflix, it only has seasons ~11-18 or something like that). The other seasons are spread across 4 different services. You then go to a different country. The catalogue is completely different, and half the shit you actually wanna watch isn't there. The DRM they use fucks up often, streams get interrupted if you open more than 1 tab at a time, the supposed "4K" resolution they offer with your subscription looks more like 360p, they don't have subtitles in one region when they do in a different one, the audio tracks are horrid more often than not.
I throw my hands up in the air, navigate to one of the 9 trillion piracy websites out there, type "blah" in the searchbar, and I'm watching it in 4K after approximately 30 seconds of effort. It has all the nice features like autoplay, all the episodes are in 1 place.
Gaben was 1000% right in saying piracy is a service problem, considering I don't even bother pirating games pretty much ever because of how good Steam is. I didn't even have a problem with Netflix back in the day when it was a genuinely good service, and I still pay for Spotify and Tidal, but the TV and Movie industry needs to get a grip on reality.
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Their products/services are ubiquitous not because they are good but because they got where they are today by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics. On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user…
>extremely aggressive bundle pricing I mean it's a good deal. As you say, when a company goes above a certain size, it does not make sense to pay for GSuite + Slack + Zoom + RMM/MDM + Zscaler Windows is still good for gaming PCs, and it will now handle and update itself reliably. No I don't need to hear anecdotes, I work in the IT desktop space. IT janitor monkey if you will. There is no way an enterprise will conver…
Maybe for a non tech company yes they cannot navigate anything better due to user expectations, but in my experience those companies usually have support for Mac and at this point I'd rather have that if forced to choose between it and Windows.
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Praise Criterion The whole collection, mostly on Blu-Ray, was 50% off at Barnes and Noble when I was there a couple of weeks ago. There was a huge display right at the entrance of this huge chain retailer, so in spite of the online streaming hype, there must be a non-niche audience for optical media.
Blu-Ray is risky from the DRM side of things. Those disks can be disabled at anytime and can just stop working if the players are offline too long or the manufacture's servers go down. Rip them to your hard drive if you want to keep being able to watch them without begging for permission.
Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away. These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s…