ascagnel_

The terms under which libraries lend out e-content are awful: e-content expires after either a given number of lends, a period of time, or whichever comes sooner, while a well-maintained library book can last for decades, and it tends to be more expensive than its analog counterpart (eg: an e-book for may cost more than its heavy-duty library-style-binding hardcover).

That said, the key difference is that book publishers decided to offer e-content under an explicit license, while game publishers have not.

> Looking more closely at the not-shiny new FLP01, the front has a couple of faux 5.25-inch floppy drives to the right. Sadly, they look fake, even from a distance, with the filled-in slots and single-color plastics. However, these two artifices flip open to reveal an optical drive (upper slot) and front I/O array including headphones, USB-A, and USB-C ports (lower slot).

I think that's on the game's director, Chris Roberts, because it's not the only time it happened.

Roberts was the lead on Digital Anvil's "Freelancer", until the publisher (Microsoft), frustrated at the scope creep and protracted dev cycle, bought out the studio, demoted Roberts, and cut features so they could ship the thing.

The worst movies on Criterion Channel are interesting, even if they're not good.

The worst movies on Netflix are just boring.

The "Shortcuts" app was an acquisition and is fairly powerful as a graphical system automation app. I created a shortcut that looks up the overnight weather at my home, and determines if it needs to turn on the AC to run for ~30 minutes before I go to bed so the room is comfortably cool.

The MLS did this with their Apple deal (pay a maximum of $120 for a season and you're guaranteed to get every league match of the season through the "TV" app), and it's been reasonably successful. That said, the league used that money in part to bring in Lionel Messi, and his significant international following came along with him, so it's hard to parse out how much of that is because they made the games easy to access (with the significant asterisk that Linux and Android users are stuck with a web app) versus his singular impact.

The other part of this is that MLS is significantly smaller (~$275m in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023) than other North American leagues (the NHL, the next-largest league, had ~$6.75b in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023), so I don't know how reasonable it is for other leagues to follow the MLS's path.

I'm a Things user, but I bounce between that and Apple Reminders for household/shared tasks. I'd love a good do/die app that supported multiple accounts and assigning tasks.

I don’t daily drive Android, so I’m not sure if there’s an equivalent, but iOS has a system review nag/prompt that can be disabled globally. If the app lets the system manage it (where it waits a while to see how long you’ve used it before surfacing the prompt, and doesn’t redirect sub-five-star reviews to their own internal tracking), then I’m happy to leave a genuine review. If the app violates any of these rules, I go out of my way to leave a one-star review.

Don’t overrule my preferences in the name of growth hacking.

You can also trigger the camera by swiping right-to-left on the lock screen or from the notification pull-down.

Aside from the EU explicitly mandating it, the developer agreement you sign with Apple in order to ship software on their platform prohibits you from doing so. And while you theoretically can write your own storefront, running self-signed apps isn’t going to be a viable user story with the way Apple’s set it up (intentionally, in my opinion).

They got caught doing the same thing Microsoft got caught doing in the 90s with IE/Netscape -- using their monopoly position on one piece of software (Windows, the Google app suite) to prevent their OEMs from shipping another piece of software by default (Netscape, Epic Games Store) that directly competed with their own offering (Internet Explorer, Google Play Store). Since Google and Microsoft both use OEMs, unlike Apple in their parallel case, there's a clearer line to how Google is being unfair compared to how Apple is being unfair.

In short, Epic sued and won because Google got between them and Samsung.

In general, in the courts, it's a lot easier to ask a judge or jury for someone to stop doing a thing (blocking their software from being pre-installed) vs. forcing someone to do something they're not currently doing (allowing any third-party app stores).

If it requires a smartphone app, no thank you. But if it’s “smarts” are really just Matter/Thread the app is an optional front-end, I’m more willing to take the leap.

I think there's a somewhat obvious middle ground here: use the platform's default behavior, and surface an option that lets a user decide if they prefer the other version; eg: a PC user should also have the option to treat the page keys as scroll inputs rather than cursor navigation.

My other thought would be automated trading algorithms — would they be able to distinguish between a real OpenAI post and a scammer hijacking the account?

> I believe the argument here is that the way to do that isn't by establishing a private business that flaunts and undermines those government regulations, but by changing the policies through government process.

And to make those who interfaced with the prior system in good faith whole again; eg: drivers who bought taxi medallions for six figures USD, only to have the value of the medallion plummet with the arrive of "rideshare" services.

What this forum needs is for its members to volunteer their time at their local library doing tech support. It’d be a rude awakening for a lot of folks.

The better question is if developers want ray tracing; for them, it can represent a massive time and cost savings in terms of lighting games.

It’s trivially easy to take that same PSX disc, make an image of it, and load that into an emulator today.

Probably up through the PSX, at least in the US:

- hardware to dump your own cartridges is available and doesn’t require breaking copy protection (which at that point was more around locking out publishers that didn’t sign license agreements rather than unauthorized duplication), and popular older systems are fairly well understood at the interconnect level at this point

- PSX games themselves don’t use encryption to protect games, just some chicanery around CD standards so burners of the era wouldn’t make unauthorized duplication as much of an issue; additionally, the Bleem! case officially recognizes PSX emulation as legal

Once you get to the PS2/GameCube/Xbox generation, you start to run into systems that include encrypted executables that make DMCA-compliant emulators basically impossible.

Not quite -- roughly $25, depending on when you cross and whether or not you have EZ Pass.

+ ~$15 toll

+ $15 congestion charge

- $5 congestion charge toll abatement

https://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/en/tolls.html

It’s less IQ and more that they’re neither the ones writing the rules nor are they empowered to fix the situation.

IKEA is highly variable. I’m writing this while sitting on a leather loveseat that’s more than a decade old and holding up great. I also have a chest of drawers that, despite my best efforts during construction, immediately began to sag.

Their expensive furniture is good mid-range stuff, the cheap stuff is cheap.

> Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.

This seems like a massive stretch to ask a judge to sign off on, since it pretty radically expands what the DMCA covers. If were to come into force, you could slap some encryption on any piece of software and block anyone from interoperating with it.

I still think it's a bit of a reach to say that Firefox "reversed a browser monopoly" -- while 30% was significant, MSIE remained utterly dominant until Chrome hit the market, especially once Google started pushing the browser via their various properties.

> Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime

Microsoft would charge you up-front for things like dev tools (Visual Studio), documentation (MSDN), server software (MS SQL, Windows Server), etc. Yeah, you could get alternatives, but it wasn't until the very end of the 90s that you started to see FOSS really take off in a way that would be appropriate for an enterprise-style environment.

App stores take a cut of revenue, while Microsoft would get its revenue before your project shipped.

My dad, when was a kid, would bust out a soldering iron and he'd show me how to swap out the quartz timing crystals on digital wristwatches to repair them (or, for fun, make them intentionally run fast or slow). On occasion, he'd even do it on PCs to under- or over-clock them and make them last a little longer.

By the time I was in college, he was on his way towards retiring, and knowing that I was into software, decided that I would be his IT support person. He went through various laptops and desktops (PCs, Macs, he even gave Linux a real try but gave up when he couldn't get his financial planning software to run on it), Android phones, etc. The one platform he liked using in his later years was iOS/iPadOS specifically because, in his words, "there's not a bunch of other s--- here, and I don't need to manage it".

It's ease-of-use dovetailing with computer safety, and that's a _hard_ problem.

The graph you linked shows Firefox topping out at around 30% of market share, a distant second behind IE.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#/media/File:Bro...

This later graph (from the same Wiki article) covers 2009-2022, and is much more telling: once Chrome launches, it overtakes Firefox in two years, and then IE in another year. By the time Firefox manages to overtake IE, it’s fighting for third and has only ~15% market share.

Today, Chrome has ~66% market share, and it’s somewhat clear that the remaining 34% of non-Chrome traffic is mostly iOS/Safari. Apple is absolutely being anti-competitive, but that anti-competitive position is the only thing blocking Google from taking control of client and forcing a browser monoculture.

Foundation was near-unadaptable as-is, given that it spans eras and wants the user to emotionally attach to the structure, rather than the individuals. For TV shows, audiences generally attach to characters (and the actors and actresses that play them), and the kind of story that allows a single cast to span eras would need to engage with some degree of time travel, cycles of life and/or abuse, or immortality, none of which fit in with Foundation.

That said, Neuromancer is a book that's more "cool" than good; Gibson is very good at painting pictures with words, but story itself is something of a convoluted mess. Hopefully an adaptation can give the writers a chance to smooth out the elements that don't work.

I’ve lived at my current address for about five years. The first year, zero issues. Starting at around the 2020 election, service dropped off precipitously, to the point where I’ve had a piece of outgoing mail in my box since Friday. I can’t trust the mail with anything time sensitive any longer.

I blame this on Louis DeJoy, who was appointed Postmaster General in May 2020, and has numerous conflicts of interest.