Noticing a disturbing trend...

[Andromeda Stardust]

I'm not asking anyone to 'rent' this for $1.99 but it's a youtube link to Adam Ruins Everything for the episode on online buying, internet rights, the data mining and the rest how much people get bought, sold, and basically digitally raped by these entities to make a buck.

Youtube is supposed to be free. Not paying money to watch a digitally distributed video of some jackass talk about digital distribution.

 

 

But I'd gladly pay some crackhead $2 for a physical dvdr bootleg of this episode...

 

[Flojomojo]

YouTube is so very NOT free.

 

Unless you pay for Red, it's subsidized through advertising and tracking, "you're the product." If you do pay for Red, (as I do), it's just tracking. :-/

 

It's tightly integrated with Google Play and all the pay-to-watch things that implies. Like any good drug pusher, Alphabet/Google once gave away a lot, but they're increasingly aggressive about monetization.

 

Changes in moderation and monetization motivated the recent gun violence event at their headquarters.

[pacman000]

While I prefer physical over digital as I have a bit of the collector bug, I do see a couple of benefits to digital:

 

• No physical storage space - I live in a small townhouse. Places to put things are limited. This is one of the reasons my music collection is almost all digital. I just don't have a place to store all of those CDs.
• Playing convenience - With physical copies of games you need to switch out the cart or disc to change games. This takes some time to do. Also, if you are travelling you need to bring all the physical games with you, where as digital is stored on your Switch, meaning less things to pack and keep track of.

There are legitimate reasons to go all digital and I can see why some people prefer digital. I prefer physical when it comes to console games. PC games are another matter, those damn Steam sales keep tempting me to buy games that look interesting that I never get around to playing. (Looks at his Steam library of 90+ games, in which he has only played about 15 of them).

Remember, digital storage is also limited.

 

One of my 1st computers was a Compaq Presario someone saved from the trash. They rebuilt it & gave it to us. Nice, but Windows 95 alone took most of the hard drive space. Spent my days uninstalling & re-installing software.

 

The cloud isn't a solution either; I lost 300+ emails a few months ago when MyWay shut down their email service.

 

Call me stupid, but I might be happier if everything came on a cart, even productivity software like MS Word. As a compromise I might suggest a PC with an easily swap-able hard disk.

[Flojomojo]

How do you back up a cartridge?

[Tanooki]

Youtube is supposed to be free. Not paying money to watch a digitally distributed video of some jackass talk about digital distribution.

 

 

But I'd gladly pay some crackhead $2 for a physical dvdr bootleg of this episode...

 

 

I agree entirely but I didn't want to go poking around for a bootleg link of the video since TruTV decided to hide behind a pay wall. I hoped someone would try and find it or a transcript/summary of the episode.

What flojo is saying there is what the video says too and they directly attack Google and Facebook in there for making people the product. They show this long beared hipster dude as Conover's target to harass over these issues, and in good old Matrix movie style show people wire tapped from the body into the system sucking their life and knowledge away to sell as a product to companies, and then in turn have them ad spam people based on interests or patterns then showing the negative effects of that. In one case it got someone in deep because it make people assume the person was gay so there was stigma. Another issue was targeting a dude with lack of self control over pounding down cheeseburgers to harm their health. Cases being shown how they sell your ass through discrete ads but also data mining where you go and what you do/read so they can turn around and push garbage and suggested links on you to control your life and thought patterns to buy more crap you don't even need.

[pacman000]

How do you back up a cartridge?

With a SpectraVision Game Brain, naturally.

[Keatah]

Remember, digital storage is also limited.

 

One of my 1st computers was a Compaq Presario someone saved from the trash. They rebuilt it & gave it to us. Nice, but Windows 95 alone took most of the hard drive space. Spent my days uninstalling & re-installing software.

 

I disagree that digital storage is limited. In exact technical terms, yes, any given storage device/medium will have a capacity rating and that's it. But you can always add more drives, more memory chips, more flash-based devices. And they don't consume much physical space at all. I bet you could fit 100TB in a milk-crate with HDD alone. Much more if you haphazardly filled it with 256GB SD cards.

 

 

The cloud isn't a solution either; I lost 300+ emails a few months ago when MyWay shut down their email service.

 

The cloud is never a solution unless what you put there is also backed-up by a storage device that you own and control 100%. The cloud is a fine TEMPORARY and "access-anywhere" solution which seems to work well for many purposes. Especially for exerting control and monetization. Heh!

 

 

Call me stupid, but I might be happier if everything came on a cart, even productivity software like MS Word. As a compromise I might suggest a PC with an easily swap-able hard disk.

 

Didn't IBM PC jr. have serious applications on cartridges? And certainly other systems did, like the C64, Atari 8-bit.

 

A traditional problem that I see with making some applications work on removable media is they tend to tie-in with the OS. They use a lot of OS resources. Not necessarily compute-intensive stuff like processor time and bus speeds, but, rather, graphic libraries and icons and fonts and DLL libraries that draw with workspace the application uses. And versions of the OS resources have to match what the application is requesting.

 

A counterpoint to that is many applications can be made portable. The application brings everything it needs with it. And it can be made to reside on a USB stick. I bring my Stellarium and X-Plane set-ups over to my friend's houses from time to time. As long as there's a Windows 7 or greater environment, they will work.

 

For PC's to have practical swappable disks isn't the problem. It's the countless millions of possible configurations of hardware. One mis-matched IRQ or a different chipset revision (no matter how minor) could be enough to prevent swappage.

 

But build 500 identical machines and you can swap OS drives all damned day long. SyQuest and removable HDD bay+tray makers were big for a while in the early dotcom era.

 

---

 

So, just keep your user-data separated nicely and use portable apps, there's even a portable Libre Office. You can get a compute-stick for light work too.

[Swami]

On the one hand, in ten years these download games won't be $5 new on amazon or eBay. On the other hand, in ten years, the "collectibles" won't be $150 used on eBay. On my right foot, many of these games won't be available to buy then, which will suck for new enthusiasts and make the console practically worthless unless there is a big homebrew scene. The thing I hate is when I find out about a game from several years back on XB360, Wii or whatever and find out it was digital only and because of some dispute between the game producer and the developer, or l some license negotiation, the producer pulled it from the online store and it's ghosted for any new purchaser (unless you can do jailbreaking/modding and find a usable digital copy).

[Andromeda Stardust]

On the one hand, in ten years these download games won't be $5 new on amazon or eBay. On the other hand, in ten years, the "collectibles" won't be $150 used on eBay. On my right foot, many of these games won't be available to buy then, which will suck for new enthusiasts and make the console practically worthless unless there is a big homebrew scene. The thing I hate is when I find out about a game from several years back on XB360, Wii or whatever and find out it was digital only and because of some dispute between the game producer and the developer, or l some license negotiation, the producer pulled it from the online store and it's ghosted for any new purchaser (unless you can do jailbreaking/modding and find a usable digital copy).

Pretty much this.

 

I was looking at the firecracker in your avatar's mouth thinking yep, that's where all our digital games are going, out with a bang. Your digital goods have an expiry date. Media, once manufactured and sold, works for as long as there is working hardware to read it. And the sram batteries in old carts are easily replaced.

 

Digital collections stored offline on consoles may be retained as long as the hardware lasts, but is limited to the purchases made by the last owner. Mandatory day one installs will also make existing physical media broken or worthless. The software that ships on the actual disc or card is basically the equivalent of beta versions sent to reviewers and testers, and not the solid finished product.

[Flojomojo]

All that is true, but the style of the product has changed. IF video games were ever timeless (HIGHLY debatable), many of them (not all) aren't anymore, by design.

 

One doesn't buy a container of yogurt and expect infinite shelf life. When a multiplayer or service focused game's audience dries up, it's not worth much anyway, regardless of the state of the online servers.

 

I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where I'd be truly upset if stuff I bought were to shut down. TV shows end, but you can catch them on streaming etc. A dead MMO or shooter like Halo 2 is a "loss" I suppose, but if there's a replacement in the wings (as there almost always is), who cares?

 

"But they just want more of our money! How much is enough? I just want my media forever! Waaaaah!"

[Swami]

All that is true, but the style of the product has changed. IF video games were ever timeless (HIGHLY debatable), many of them (not all) aren't anymore, by design.

 

One doesn't buy a container of yogurt and expect infinite shelf life. When a multiplayer or service focused game's audience dries up, it's not worth much anyway, regardless of the state of the online servers.

 

I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where I'd be truly upset if stuff I bought were to shut down. TV shows end, but you can catch them on streaming etc. A dead MMO or shooter like Halo 2 is a "loss" I suppose, but if there's a replacement in the wings (as there almost always is), who cares?

 

"But they just want more of our money! How much is enough? I just want my media forever! Waaaaah!"

That's an over-simplification.

[Recycled]

One way or the another, we will never be able to keep our media "forever."

Edited April 6, 2018 by Recycled

[Swami]

One way or the another, we will never be able to keep our media "forever."

reductio ad absurdum? Try taking the current trend to its logical conclusion.