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My boss has a morning meeting where we tell him what we’re working on for the day. And every Monday, this meeting is at 8:00 when my shift starts. I’m thankful my name makes me further down the list because I would be stumbling to get that.
He’s a cool guy and not overly micromanager or anything, so it’s not a huge thing, but just reminded me seeing this meme.
It’s absolutely bonkers for Microsoft to even consider that paying $99 or $199 for their ad ridden software is fair and reasonable. If you’re going to bombard me with ads, the shit better be free. You can’t have it both ways. Ads are riddled in the OS whether it be in the Start Menu, notifications area, File Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and even other paid products like Microsoft Office.
It’s so fucking frustrating seeing shit like Candy Crush being forcefully installed onto a system you paid for, especially when it’s supposed to be the “Pro/Enterprise” tier. Windows is a fucking joke and they deserved to have people using this exploit to get “free” activated copies of their OS.
Hopefully this is just another thing that pushes people to other OSes, whether that be Linux or macOS. Just get the hell away from Microsoft and take some of that monopoly power from under them little by little.
Borderlands is another good example of this. Cartoony but fun gunplay and fun dialogue made the games (mostly) good.
I think games in that sort of style that don’t aim for realism typically have the best long term play. Jet Set Radio is another series with that sort of non-realism style and has aged fantastically.
I only restarted when they started pulling all the shit off Netflix and making up their own. Everyone needs a + service now, even fucking Walmart. And the thought of paying for ads on Hulu was not going to happen. Fuck them all.
But they’ve kind of made me enjoy piracy more as I rediscover it. I don’t have to worry about shit like a Community episode getting pulled because they’re scared of getting canceled or because a contract expired and the only downtimes I have now are my own, not because someone else decided to do surprise maintenance on a server I don’t own. I also don’t have to switch between 10 different apps to watch different shows/movies.
Same as it was in my neighborhood. Smoke shops would have them on display under a glass counter. I assumed it was somehow legal for a long time.
Just not something local cops care enough about. Hell, local cops are probably buying those copies too.
It’s the FBI that does the enforcement of those laws, and more so only comes down when the MPAA lawyers are aware of it. And neither FBI or MPAA are aware until it’s a bigger operation, like a series of 76 gas stations across the west coast are all selling bootlegs and the regional manager is in on it or something. But the local gas station or neighborhood barber shop? Too small to care about and would bring more negative publicity since the neighborhood would be highly upset attacking a small business owner like that.
We definitely are. We started to get a little spoiled back then when those DVD quality bootlegs came around too. Like screeners from another country but in English and a watermark on them somewhere lol. And then the cam quality were something most people turned their nose up at, even if that’s all was available.
Kind of funny now that I say that…that deters a lot of people from cam quality and does today as well. If all I can find is cam, forget it. I’ll wait until the DVD/stream is released. But I wait so I can get that in pirate form. I bet others, like my friend who asks me to upload a copy to my Plex server, goes to the movies instead of pirating since cam is all that is available.
But I’ve been burned by some bad cams. Like not just bad video and audio quality but also people standing up in front of the camera or being too loud and I can’t even hear or see the movie.
Back in the day, and probably even now, as I used to encounter them when I lived in the big city, cam copies were famous on the streets. It was the only way to get a bootleg copy while the movie was still in theatres but you didn’t want to go for whatever reason.
When I lived in the big city, in a not so great area, the guys used to be in the grocery store parking lot or barbers or smoke shops selling the DVDs and before that were selling VHS copies.
And then when LimeWire grew in popularity, people would upload those like they would any retail DVD. And then went on to torrents as those grew in popularity.
And it still continues today for similar reasons. People want the fame that comes with uploading the first copy online or the first decent quality.
You’re looking for something like Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby.
You’ll hear these thrown around a lot. Plex is the most popular with Jellyfin coming up over the years.
This is if you want to host your own media on a “server” at home.
If you want someone else’s media, you can still use these, like someone else sharing their media library with you or you can go the route of something like Kodi that hosts content from elsewhere. The options are almost limitless with this last one.
It grants the IT department authority over the devices. Restricting unauthorized changes like adding new accounts, adding new software, removing existing software, allows for tracking of the devices and sometimes remote wiping in case the device is stolen or lost and valuable data is on the device, among other things.
Less to do with cheating and more to do with control over the device since it’s the school’s property. Preventing cheating is an afterthought of MDM (mobile device management).
Even places where you can download music aren’t safe anymore.
I bought an album back in September 2022 on iTunes and downloaded it. Apple Music synced some of my music and fucked up my library, causing me to have to go to a backup from August 2019. I thought, “no problem, I’ll just go download that album from iTunes again.”
Album is no longer available for download. I have a receipt showing I legitimately paid for it.
I’ve found others online saying the same. One person even defending this behavior “well it’s not Apple’s fault the music isn’t on the store anymore”. Maybe not, but I’m going to need a refund from them if that’s the case. We shouldn’t be tolerating this BS.
This is partly why I also play on Creative, usually. But yeah, would like to have the Survival - Peaceful playthrough and still get everything craftable too.
Granted, you can find some of this stuff in chests and randomly throughout the world while playing Survival - Peaceful, which is kind of part of the fun for me when exploring dungeons and villages and the spawning mansions.
Plex has a music streaming option. You can download your music and upload to a “server” at home and stream from there. I haven’t tried it but see it’s an option.
You may need to pay for something to stream away from home. I had to pay a one time fee for the app on my phone to watch movies and tv shows, like $9.99 on iPhone, IIRC?
It’s not just the lack of availability but that was a part of it. Microsoft and Sony’s lack of proper response is part of the reason.
I remained “patient” to some extent as I only just got to build my PC this year. The GPU “shortage” was a part of it too.
But I felt that Sony and Microsoft could have done more for customers. Sony had a program to get actual PS users a PS5 but that too was still sold out. Scalpers had no issue buying pallets of consoles but actual fans couldn’t. It was insane.
But besides that, I’ve since realized that, at least for myself, a PC is the better way to go. Consoles are a waste of money for me in the long run as a PC will be used for more than just gaming and the longevity of the parts and upgradeability is incomparable. I likely wouldn’t have felt this way had I just been able to get a PS5/Xbox Series X like I wanted.
But Microsoft and Sony don’t seem to care about their actual fans and them getting consoles in their homes, which is what soured it for me. Though, yeah, same could be said about Nvidia and AMD as well to an extent too, but there are more manufacturers under them that make the actual cards and you had some like EVGA that had programs that tried to get a GPU in actual customers’ hands and not the greedy scalpers.