ad-skip to present day. encryption and drm is being introduced into the new atsc 3.0 broadcast standard, and some stations are already using it.

i bought a few smr drives, knowing they were smr. they were cheaper, a lot cheaper than the same amount of space in cmr. used only for static media storage, so that’s not a big deal, really., but holy hell was it slow getting stuff on them initially.

i have a few self-powered externals that are also smr (quite common with those as they use 2.5in notebook hdd). when those things have to start shuffling bits around and rewriting tracks, sustained write speeds fall well under what even usb2 can send.

i bought a big external hdd recently on impulse… a clearance sale. it was really, really cheap. with the thinking that i could ‘shuck’ it because i’m short on space in a couple storage systems. i checked. i can, but i haven’t. hell, i haven’t even used it yet other than to run a full smart diag on it, followed by a full format and a read/write verify. took days. then i put it back in the box and have basically forgotten about it until now.

you have to be careful on what models you buy. some have usb built onto the controller board (no internal sata) or other things (e.g. encryption chip, weird power) that make it more difficult or even impossible to use the internal drive in an environment other than the enclosure it ships in.

patents is what you’re thinking of. and all (afaik) of them relating to mp3 format have expired.

usb nvme adapters are not expensive and it likely won’t be the only time you need it. they are a handy accessory to have on hand if you have nvme storage.

don’t mess around with imaging to a file on the zfs, then restoring it. simply clone nvme -> nvme using a usb nvme adapter then replace the internal with the clone.

or onlyoffice

a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can’t get rid of without literally giving them away. they’re ‘tolerable’ for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the ‘performance per watt’ just isn’t there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.

these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run ‘ok enough’ on 4th gen, just make sure they’re booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they’ll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can ‘rufus’ a win11 installer, but there’s no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.

i personally bought them. no i don’t have money. didn’t then either. they were about $200 each, just prior to when vista started shipping (they were on sale). ram was upgraded from scrap, so was one of the video cards and one of the cpu (they were both originally windsors)–the other was bought new for ~$50 in late 2008 or so.

i have a couple dual core athlons (windsor and brisbane athlon 64 x2) at the office from that era. they are still used, even. have 8gb ddr2, dvdrw, and dx10-capable geforce cards.

just put a big pillow ‘on’ the external hard drive.

erecting a firewall.

someone spycheck already, dammit!

MEDIC!!!

they’re just trying to con people into using the new data harvesting mail app by calling it ‘outlook’

when i wanted bandwidth available ‘elsewhere’ (such as streaming or games on a different pc) but wanted to continue long transfers, used to neuter the lan adapter configuration on the system doing the transfers by setting it to 10baseT, full or half duplex for 10 or 5mbit max. that was back when my isp connection topped out at < 15mbit. i didn’t always use a program or an addon that had rate limiting, and that was my ‘solution’.

we still play that game. at least once every week or two, i’m calling a ‘lost’ phone from another or using the handset locator on a cordless system.

company that profits from porn piracy sues for piracy of porn.

my co-worker wants an ota dvr. what one do you have? and is it easy to use for someone that can barely navigate a tv menu? ease of use and minimal internet bandwidth use (they use a ‘jetpack’ with crappy signal for internet at home) are their main requirements.

anything 4:3 seems ‘old’ these days.

i got suckered once on a different site that got shut down. never again.

it’s been a few months since i’ve had that pc booted-up, but i think this is the one:

https://www.videohelp.com/software/Subtitle-Workshop

note that i don’t create or translate subs, all i really use it for is for adjusting timing of the whole file (using vlc to find the + or -), and the occasional edit or delete of an existing line.

i’ve had ads inside of subs downloaded via browser. whenever i see them, i load 'em up in my sub editor and remove them. i usually have to adjust timing anyway as my sources are rarely the same.

but no refunds past 30 days into a longer-than-one-month term. pay by the year, cancel 6 months in, you’re out half of what you paid. not even converting the ‘used’ time into a shorter appropriate length term (like a six month plan or 2 quarterly ones…) and refunding some if it…

it’s robbery.

cable companies in the u.s. do the same shit, now. no prorated refunds–even on normal monthly billing.

he will likely die before it’s paid off (especially if interest accumulates). the real ‘sentence’ is being reminded each paycheck.

i’ve watched more than a few shows that have been brutally hacked into wide format from the original 4:3. the practice is horrible. they need to stop pulling that shit and let the viewer decide whether to crop the frame or not–or put a proper pan & scan up instead of a blind hack job and leave the original format available, too.

bots will start hitting a brand new subdomain on my web server literally seconds after creating it. looking for exploitable scripts like wordpress, usually.

we do that around the veggie garden, but with aol cds.

this isn’t anything new. fake downloads, malware, and scam support sites and links and phone numbers have been a thing in results since they started putting paid placements and ads in serp… and even before then, back when simple keyword spam could game the algorithms.

you can verify warranty on wd’s site.

warranty exchanged drives should carry a minimal warranty or the balance of the original drive’s warranty–whichever is longer.

but it was ‘doa’–get a refund from seller, or via ebay’s/paypal’s buyer protection. don’t mess around with mfg warranty, you don’t need to here.

is there anyone on the planet that didn’t see this coming the moment the buyout was first announced?

plenty of room on that ad to replace ‘own it now’ with ‘rent it until the studio deletes it or we quit paying for its rights’

low-bandwidth data plans in bulk are pretty cheap. it’s what many atms, vending machines, redbox and similar, etc., along with sensors and gauges, and what-not for a variety of applications, use.

over the expected lifespan of a car, it would cost the manufactures less than they charge for a set of floor mats.

every mention of the odds, or over/under, or the ‘spread’, etc. during the broadcast is also references to gambling.

those other three you mention are mainly for coding or technical help, while pastebins definitely have other ‘use cases’

i have enough… uh… ‘archived’ content that i don’t need to ‘discover’ anything new for years.

when we’ve had netflix (off and on a couple months at a time, last was about a year and a half ago), we often encountered 540p max playback on “hd” titles that should have (legitimately) been streaming at 1080p; and we rarely were able to use all the simultaneous connections of the plan (usually only limit-1)

if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

if it’s still under-budget, break it carefully.

Sure, but Firefox isn’t one of them

but those that do inflate google’s stats.

i had to fudge the useragent to chrome yesterday to get 1080p out of azn.

be sure to actually launch firefox and don’t use the google ‘app’ either.

users can modify their useragent string, and sometimes they have to because some webdevs are morons.

some browsers actually default to using chrome instead of its own.

using a browser-reported useragent string to count marketshare itself is flawed from the start, using a very narrow and limited scope of web sites to measure it–even more so.

if i counted my own clients: home, soho and small business end users… it’s about even between chrome and firefox on windows (chrome users doing so on their own, as we highly recommend firefox, and vivaldi over chrome for a chromium-based solution) with edge trailing far behind; and about 3 to 1 android (chrome) over safari on mobile with (so far, but soon to change) very few mobile firefox users.