In 2025, things staying the same as they are rather than getting worse counts as a ‘big win’ :|

I remember reading a story a while back about someone who owned a legit CS version with a proper serial and activation.

They had to change computer, and in doing so had to reactivate Photoshop, but it wasn’t working. They contacted Adobe support and explained the situation but support basically told him nope, not a chance, we aren’t helping you. You need to subscribe to new Photoshop.

So Adobe accepted that yes, he bought a perpetual licence for Photoshop and that yes, the reason it isn’t working is the online activation, but they still refused to help.

Scumbags.

It’s common, and especially so on devices that don’t have batteries which are intended to be user-removable - which is pretty much all new phones.

Unlike laptops, many phones simply won’t turn on without a battery connected.

Exactly! What sort of logic are they even trying to apply there? Basically saying “We put a lot of time into our tech demo, and it came out better than expected, so we’re going to charge for it!”

That’s just crazy.

The whole principle is that the intro experience is supposed to be free. It exists to get people pumped about the cool new thing they just bought and excited to play with it.

I guess Nintendo decided that - since you already bought the console - they don’t especially care if you are pumped or not. They already got your money.

As the video suggests, it’s an impending problem in many places in the world, US and UK included.

And the bitter truth is that all of us could have avoided this, if not for the insatiable greed of the 1%

If the wealth earned from economic growth was spread fairly, we could all be working half the hours we do now, with all the time for socialising and family we could want.

And the real irony is that when people have more free time, they will spend their time and money on the culturally enriching things that the government is otherwise being forced to try and subsidise and give grants to keep afloat. Visit historical sites. See a play, pick up a creative hobby, eat out at independent small restaurants.

But instead we are working longer and longer hours for less, leaving us with no time for anything, and that sends all our surplus money into the exact industries that are exploiting us. 11PM depression impulse buys from online megacorps, and food delivery through gig economy apps where the delivery person gets next to nothing and the app reaps the rewards.

People are stretched to breaking point. It’s inevitable that at some point, this is all going to collapse.

They can hardly avoid screwing up, really.

The whole draw of Steam Deck is that it’s a carefully curated experience where everything from the OS upwards is crafted to play nicely together and “Just Work” to bring that console-like experience to PC gaming.

Whatever Microsoft are putting together isn’t going to have that end-to-end consideration. It will be nothing more than a skinned launcher on top of Windows 11, and no matter how shiny that launcher looks you won’t be able to hide from Windows for long. All the normal Windows bloat will be there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you spend as much time messing around in actual Windows as you do playing games.

Yep, that’s specifically the meaning :)

Golden = Made of gold

Gilded = Covered in a thin layer of gold

The gold and the thin layer was the 1%-ers, with rampant corruption and harsh conditions for everyone else.

Yes, which is a big part of why, despite allowing transfers, it still sucks.

Me neither. It’s basically a download game but with physical DRM in the form of a cartridge. The age of genuine physical game ownership is toast.

Nintendo’s site says the cartridge must always be inserted in order to play the game, and so it is the cartridge that controls the game license.

On that basis it seems likely you could sell/give the cartridge to someone else, after which they can play it and you no longer can - they’d just also have to download it first.

Given the free and open source nature of Lemmy, I’d suggest that creating an account to raise a feature suggestion - and in that way contribute - would not be an unreasonable expectation at all, rather than the expectation of having other people who are themselves only volunteers jump through all the hoops for you.

“Temporarily closes” may have been a better headline.

I thought it meant they were shutting for good, which would be pretty ridiculous.

Oh no!

Anyway…

10 years isn’t the worst run, but it still proves the point that anything which needs an app or connected web service to function will inevitably become e-waste, and maybe sooner than you’d like.

Earlier today, I was looking at reviews of portable Bluetooth speakers. One had a bullet point “No equalizer app, with only basic EQ functions available on the speaker itself.”

The review intended that to be a negative, but I was like “Hell yeah that’s what I want!”

Functionality in pure hardware means it will keep on working as long as the hardware works. It means that I myself get to be the one who decides when I need an upgrade, not when the company forces my hand.

Every single tech purchasing decision I make these days, having freedom from apps, cloud, or any other ticking time bomb is top of my feature list.

“72% of that group say real-world rewards are ‘important’ when selecting a new mobile game to download” - says report commissioned by company whose business model is putting real world rewards in mobile games and apps.

Piss off.

I play games to escape the real world a bit and forget it exists, not to slave away doing meaningless tasks for pennies.

Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.

When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.

Ohh yeah. I remember the tech news coverage of the cars being so easy to steal, just didn’t realise there was a “challenge” about it. Unbelievable Hyundai and Kia got away without immobilisers for so long. Really cheeky of them to cut that corner, and it backfired.

What the heck is that?

For sure right!

What really changed though wasn’t the size of the computer, but how the computer produced value.

Initially, a lot of what people wanted computers for was to get their “document stuff” done, and that was what took up all the room, because of the printer, and scanner, and paper, and filing drawers, and so-on. And soooo many CDs for software you needed to get that all done.

Back when I was a kid, my babysitter used our Windows 95 machine to write up and print off a cover letter for job applications, and it was 9 year old me who taught her how to do it, lol. And that was the value.

I bet even when your friend set up their shiny new all-in-one, they still had the old computer and all its attached devices hiding away shamefully in the ‘office’ there somewhere…

So it wasn’t really miniaturisation that killed the computer room as much as it was every aspect of life going online. No physical disks anymore because software comes over the Internet. No need to print because 99% of our life and business can be done online. So all the things that filled up the computer room just ceased to be needed, and so did the room that held them.