MudMan

I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?

It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so… meh.

Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.

That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.

I hate this argument so, so passionately.

It’s the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.

So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can’t do it any other way (or hey, maybe it’s already funded by corporate money, that’s also a thing). But no, you’re not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it’s publicly available. That’s some late stage capitalism crap.

Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it’s coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don’t contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don’t know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it’s owed not so much.

Yep, that was my point. There’s nothing fundamentally alien to using desktop Linux for most tasks when it’s standardized and preinstalled, you see that with the Raspberry Pi and Steam OS and so on. The problem is that people like to point at that (and less viable examples like ChromeOS or Android) as examples that desktop Linux is already great and intuitive and novice-friendly, and that’s just not realistic. I’ve run Linux on multiple platforms on and off since the 90s, and to this day the notion of getting it up and running on a desktop PC with mainstream hardware feels like a hassle and the idea of getting it going in a bunch of more arcane hardware, like tablet hybrids or laptops with first party drivers just doesn’t feel reasonable unless it’s as a hobbyist project.

Those things aren’t comparable.

No, I’m not talking past it. I just have less an issue with it. The Android thing is disingenuous, though.

But I did explicitly address it above, when I said once you have to pick a distro at all the OP has a point because that’s already past the level of insight casual users have or care about. It’s literally right there in my first response to you.

I’m not splitting hairs, I’m calling out a fallacious argument. If your take is that Desktop Linux is super accessible and mainstream because Android is a thing that’s a bad take.

Here’s how I know it’s a bad take: if I come over to any of the “what Distro should I use first” threads here and I tell you to try Samsung Dex you’re probably not going to be as willing to conflate those two things anymore.

But hey, yeah, no, Android is super accessible. So is ChromeOS. If that’s your bar for what Linux has become for home users, then yeah, for sure. Linux is on par with Windows in terms of accessibility. May as well call it quits on the desktop distros muddying the waters, then. I mean, if all that is Linux what are those? 1% of the Linux userbase? 0.1%? Why bother at that point?

I gotta say, the frequency with which you hear that Android/ChromeOS is actually Linux and it totally counts, or how successful Linux is on other applications is REALLY much less flattering to desktop Linux than people claiming that seem to think.

I’d argue the moment you have to pick a distro in the first place you’ve made the guy’s point. That’s already way past the level of interest, engagement or decision-making capacity most baseline users have. Preinstalled, tightly bound versions like Android or SteamOS are a different question, maybe. Maaaaybe.

Oh, but we haven’t talked about the opposite thing, which is when tech-savvy user X thinks they know better than whichever IT person or team set up a process and decide to ignore it or bypass it and then they break something and nobody’s happy.

I see your point, though. I mean, even if you know what you’re doing there are many times where you just need to get a thing done and you just want somebody to make it so the computer does the thing, rather than understand how the thing-doing is done. We forget, but computers are actually super hard and software is overcomplicated and it’s honestly a miracle most of it works at all most of the time.

It’s not, though. Some of the people I’m talking about are experts at intricate, complicated things. But for digital natives and tech-heads this language is second nature, that’s not true of everybody. And for some of those people they know enough to realize that sometimes computers lie to them. Is this message telling me to press a button real or is it malicious? Yeah, I can tell pretty easily, but they can’t.

There are tons of people out there, of all ages, for whom computers are scary bombs that can steal their money or their data or stop working at the slightest provocation. Thing is, they’re not wrong.

You know what? Windows doesn’t get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don’t like (I’ll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I’ll admit they do that well.

Oh, absolutely. My favorite conversation to have with non-techies is
“It doesn’t work.”
“OK, what does it say on the screen.”
“I don’t know.”

Like, they can read. I’ve seen them read. But the moment they get something on the screen with text they haven’t seen before they freeze. And even if they can read the plainly written text saying stuff like “hey, we need to install something, is that fine?” they can’t parse what is being said. Half the requests from help I get from people are about them getting a prompt to update something that needs manual permission and them being too insecure and scared to know what they should do.

So yeah, the bar is much lower than people think. As in, the question “Do you want to do this thing you have to do and is fine to do? Yes/No” is an unsurmountable obstacle.

The Windows market share has wavered between 90 and 70% over the years.

I don’t know that you can ignore that assumption.

It depends on the application anwyay. My last set up for a non-techie was a Samsung Android tablet with a keyboard cover. It’s now harder to get that person on either a Windows or Linux computer.

Touchscreens were absolutely not commonplace in mass market devices. There were absolutely a thing that existed, but they were associated to productivity devices and corporate things trying to look modern and fancy. I’d argue with no Nintendo DS you get no iPhone.

Nintendo’s pitch for the DS was that it wasn’t a Gameboy. The Advance was the Gameboy. This was the adult system for adults that used a touchscreen and you could hold it sideways and read it like a book. And they had Brain Age/Brain Training, based on some quack’s later disproved theories but that sounded and felt healthy and meant for older people who liked to do sudoku. Also, you want to do sudoku? You can do it here! There’s a pen and everything.

That “blue ocean” strategy on the DS and the absolutely insane success of it was the template for the Wii two years later. And it worked both times. They weren’t even shy about it, they are on the record a bunch explaining how they wanted to sell boring, grey DSs to people and then get them to buy games and become gamers instead. That ended up being what made Apple the biggest company in the universe, and it’s blow by blow the strategy Nintendo came up with. They are just too budget minded, so they attached that to a cheap console instead of an expensive mobile phone.

They didn’t “luck out”, they were reproducing the strategy that had already worked in the DS. Remember “Brain Training”? To this day I know people who claim to loathe videogames who owned a DS and were cool with it. Same core design: accessible, unorthodox input system as a trojan horse for adults, here are all the games it turns out you also enjoy playing.

It’s the same with the Switch and the detachable controller, dockable console gimmick. If anything, the Wii U is the outlier in them not designing it well enough to pay off that ongoing strategy. One could argue that the 3DS did as well, but that glassless 3D screen is amazing, particularly once they figured out eye tracking, you’re all wrong about that one.

It didn’t have a chance. Those are a lot of “ifs”. You’re basically saying if the other console manufacturers hadn’t manufactured consoles then the Dreamcast would have done great.

Look, from a design perspective, the DC was ahead of its time: cram a PC in a console shell, focus on sharp resolutions and online support. The template ended up becoming the Xbox and eventually after the 360 era it’s what all modern consoles are.

But in the context of them trying to bounce back from the Saturn’s very mishandled Western run, it was the absolute wrong console to make. All the arguments from Sega fans about how the games looked nicer than the PS2 and whatnot just didn’t hold up to scrutiny on the displays of the time. Was the resolution much higher? Yep. Did it matter when plugged in using component cables to a crummy consumer CRT? Absolutely not. It looked a whole generation behind.

And again, be careful about rating worldwide success from what happened in the US. The DC did surprisingly well there, like the N64 did, but much less elsewhere. The Gamecube outsold it 2:1, as did the original Xbox, and the PS2 ended up outselling both of those 10:1. The Dreamcast was in stores over here, for sure, but I have never met anybody who owned one.

And a handle. From that perspective it was a nice tiny lunchbox with a cool console attached to it.

Interestingly, the GameCube ended up having all of those, so… more related than one would think, I guess?

That is demonstrably false. The vast majority of GC games did absolutely NOT look like ass. At most, multiplatform ports didn’t look as good as they could have because both OG Xbox and GC were less of a priority and people led development on PS2, so multiplatform ports tended to be slightly elevated PS2 fare, rather than fully exploit the smaller two platforms. But also, both GC and Xbox had very nice looking first party releases, and like always with Nintendo, their aboslute army of first party developers was putting out visual bangers from day one. If anything the asset quality of many GC games has become more obvious over time, as the platform lives on through upscaled emulation.

At the time I played a bunch of multiplatform stuff on GC first when a port was available despite having a PS2 right there. My experience of being a multiplatform owner at the time was less that Cube ports were compromised, although some were, but that it was disappointing how many ports it just didn’t get at all, particularly as games started getting really asset-rich on the other platforms and fully max out a single layer DVD-5 or even ship on dual layer DVD-9s. Some people would do double disc GC releases, but nobody wanted to jam four whole discs in a box.