My biggest issue with libraries is the limited selection, how much time it takes and the how inconvenient it is to find new books.

The most prolific readers I know use the library almost exclusively. Real book a week people don’t buy the books they read! They’d be broke!

A book a week? What am I going to do with the rest of my time?

185 books so far this year, no library card. e-books are a lot cheaper than physical books.

For me the biggest problem with libraries is the limited selection of books. As a kid, before e-readers were a thing, I was a member of 3 different libraries just to get access to enough new reading material. E-books are a blessing for those who like to read a lot.

I remember that at least I do not fuck up on a colossal scale like this.

There is always Thomas Midgley, who invented leaded gasoline and Freon (CFC).

Steamboat Willie goes out of copyright in 2024.

Why would this cause a lawsuit?

Deze: https://www.whoshatontheflooratmywedding.com/

At my high school the admin password for the Novell server was 12345. Kind of obvious if you see someone type it in.

I’m playing Lies of P and it’s amazing. It’s been a long time since a game was able to draw me in like this.

I like Apple Music and would use them if it wasn’t so god damned difficult to upload my own music.

It’s easy enough, just add your music to the Music app on macOS.

Being on Linux there is no iTunes option and getting it to run under Wine hasn’t worked for me.

The Windows version of iTunes is terrible anyway. The Music app on macOS is much better. Can’t you hackintosh it?

Apple Music is also very good. Lossless at no extra cost.

There was no rule, but it was basically the only convenient way. Receiving e-mail on a phone was not at all common, typing a long URL on phone was a PITA and paying for stuff online was not something a lot of people were familiar with.

WIndows CE phones and the like were so niche there was no point in even developing apps specifically for them.

Also note that the above would usually only work in one country, if you wanted to sell internationally you’d have to make arrangements for a shortcode and RB-SMS for each country you wanted to sell in. Never mind the advertising campaigns. Apple taking care of that, with basically global reach and different kinds of payment methods without you having to worry about any of it was quite revolutionary.

30% seems quite a lot, no matter the platform,

I’ve been developing mobile apps since before the iPhone was a thing. I remember when the App Store was announced, including the 30% cut for Apple. There was a lot of excitement around the fact that developers could keep 70%.

Before app stores, this is how you distributed and charged for a mobile app: customers would send a text message with a keyword to a so called shortcode, depending on country this was a 4 or 5 digit phone number. For example, you would send ‘NAMEOFGAME’ to 12345. The user would then get a text message back with a link to download the game. The message they got back was a so called reverse-billing SMS (also known as premium SMS). This message would be billed to the customer, at a certain rate that you as the sender of the SMS could configure. This basically meant customers paid for games through their phone bill.

How this worked from the developer’s side:

• You generally didn’t own the short code, it was shared with many users, you had to pay a monthly fee for the use of that keyword. Companies who owned a ‘nice’ shortcode (like e.g. 12345) would charge more for it than those who owned a more difficult to remember one. This would cost you at least €100 a month per keyword (the same as you pay for an app store account per year, for an unlimited number of apps)
• For this amount all the operator did was forward the message to you, you had to have your own server to process the messages. Your server then had to call an API at the telco to send an premium SMS back with the link. (a so called WAP push message). The telco would usually keep 50% of the total cost to the customer. Send a €3.00 SMS , you get €1.50, the telco gets €1.50. For sending 140 bytes to a phone.
• The link you sent pointed to your own server, where you had to host the files for the game for the user to download.

Note that there was no store, no way for users to discover your game, so you had to advertise it as well. The telco’s took 50% for billing the customer, while you had to everything else. Of course the development tools for mobile apps were absolute shit as well.

So when Apple announced that they would let you keep 70%, would take care of hosting, payments, would provide a nice user friendly app store where people could actually find your app and provide decent development tools for you to build apps in, that was a fucking huge win.

That is incredibly shitty behavior. I’m putting the disk that I purchased into my own hardware. The studio already got my money from the sale, why the hell do they care?

They care because:

for ripping

There would be no problem if you used a licensed software player to simply play back the disc. The problem is you’re trying to rip it with an illicit host key. They don’t want you ripping the disc and spreading it over the internet. You’re only allowed to play it from the original disc using a certified player.

For DVD’s it only applies to new movies, old movies will still play but if your player is blacklisted it won’t play any new movies.

The way it works is as follows: The movie data is encrypted using a key, this key is unique to the movie. The key itself is then again encrypted with another key. Since the keys themselves are tiny (especially compared to an entire movie) it’s possible to put hundreds of encrypted copies of the movie key on the disc. Each DVD player manufacturer has their own key(s). When you put in a movie, the player will look at the list of hundreds of encrypted keys, and decrypt the one that can be decrypted with it’s own key.

If a DVD player is considered to be compromised, new DVD’s will no longer include a key that can be decrypted by that player in the list of hundreds of encrypted copies of the movie key on new disc. Alls your old discs still have a key that can be decrypted by your player, so those still work, but new movies will refuse to play.

This would require an update be sent out to every blu ray player, which is not feasible unless they were all standardized to a single database or service for their license keys.

There are several ways to disable your player.

First, the movies themselves are encrypted with a unique key, that key is then encrypted with another set of keys and stored on the disc. Your player will read those encrypted keys off the disc and use it’s own keys to decrypt the key needed to decrypt the movie. If the blu-ray association determines that your player is compromised, they change the way the movie key is encrypted so your players key can no longer decrypt it. This means your player simply won’t play any movies newer than a certain date.

For blu-ray drives in your PC it’s a bit different. Your software player needs a so called ‘host key’ to be able to access the blu-ray drive. Once the key you are using is found to be compromised it’s put on a revocation list. When a new blu-ray movie is mastered they include the latests revocation list on that disc. If that list is newer than the one in the drive, the drive updates it’s internal list using the list from the disc. If your player software uses a key on that list, the drive will refuse to read any movie. You need a new, unblacklisted, host key to be able to play movies again.

There is no need to connect to the internet for any of these schemes, the updates are simply distributed through the blu-ray discs themselves.

I don’t think games like Ori, Hades, Hi-Fi rush, Call of the sea, Persona 5, etc are trash

I’m not saying they are trash, they are either really old or just decent games. I would say it’s mostly games I would rate a 7 or 8 out of 10. But with limited time available for gaming, there are enough games that I would rate a 9 or 10 to fill the available time. So why would I not just exclusively play only very top tier games?

GamePass is nice if you’re 16, can’t afford to buy full price games and have lots of free time. You get a lot of play time out of a limited budget with decent enough games.

But when you’re 40+ with a full time job, you make a different trade-off. You have much less free time but a higher income. You then tend to go for quality over quantity. Make every hour you can spend gaming count.

It can go a bit too far though. A while back I read about a person with black skin who used to play Black Pete each year and was no longer allowed because Black Pete being black was considered racist. So now apparently he can now only be played by white people. In one occasion a darker skinned person was asked to use make-up to lighten his skin color before he was allowed to play Black Pete.

I’m all for changing this tradition into one where Pete’s face just has some soot on it instead of full blackface and getting rid of the caricature, but we should make sure we end up with a new tradition where everyone is included.

I will simply never have the time to play again to 90% of my games. It’s just impossible (even if I stopped playing new games today, I am not sure I will be able to do so before I die). Since it’s way cheaper to play this way, I don’t see the point of buying new games anymore

My reason is kind of the opposite: I have very little time to play games, so I choose quality over quantity. What I see on GamePass is an endless supply of mediocrity. I’d rather buy a few really good games at full price than spend the little time I have playing whatever Microsoft padded their catalog with.

Causing fires seems very unlikely. An HDMI port outputa 5V at 500mA at most.

Madeuptech branded cheap 8K cables immediately replaced the 4K cables on Amazon, and were the same price. There was no way they’d retooled all their shit or tested each cable

They don’t really need to as there is no such thing a a ‘4K or 8K cable’. HDMI cables come in three speeds: standard, high speed and ultra-high speed. You can send 8K video through a high-speed cable just fine, depending on the frame rate. Or you might need an ultra high-speed cable even for 4k if you’re running ar 120Hz.