I recall Quake orignally being super dark, Like you were supposed to be playing this in some basement tomb. But we were 'testing' Pentium Pro workstations in a brightly lit windowed office, so we had to adjust the game's brightness. So I wonder if this was a "make Quake look good for demos" thing.
It's a very interesting project (even if I always avoided Perl and 'officially don't care'). And so it sucks you got a mediocre response because dum slideshow UI issues. Maybe write up a blog post and try again later (just make sure its not too chatgpt-ish).
Internet says nothing about that; and using VB for DeCSS it's as 'serious' as quickly hacking Perl or TCL (for its day) in order to complete a simple prototype.
If any I can just see C++ code which is pretty much portable because you can decouple I/O with ease, altough
under Unix you would need to use ioctl's to command the DVD drive in a low level way.
VB could bang on any Win32 C API, so there's no reason to disbelieve this. In the modern sense it's like saying you couldn't write this in Go. Direct question: do you know what you are talking about, or are you just spewing keywords and reddit mime dancing?
So did Perl with bindings and TCL interoperating in two ways. Reddit? I used to compile mplayer and libdvdcss long ago, and even if the prior version was VB/C++ bound, it was the open code (FLOSS) the one who survived every takedown attempt.
The same with Nagra encoding and XawTV for some propietary channels in TV. You can decode any stream (and even extract subtitles) thanks to free software.
Even BTTV cards will still work. Go try that with Windows 7 and up. If you can find drivers, that's it. And working decoding software not messing up with DDraw based codecs and rendering.
I was there, and it was the free software the one who broke most of the chains. Propietary software today it's useless.
Worth noting the industry knew that CSS was a lousy scheme. Originally, Disney and others were boycotting DVD because of it. That lead to DIVX (the disk not the codec).
Some people were opposed to DIVX's 'phone home' PPV option, but the bigger issue was it seemed like a nasty format war was brewing. Then DIVX flopped quickly. Instead, the MPAA got the US Congress to "patch" CSS by passing a law.
Apple had an advertising campaign that you could "Rip. Mix. Burn." your CDs with a Mac. Obviously nerds could rip DVDs, but nobody ever could productize it like that.
It was good that CSS was a lousy scheme, for everybody, including for the DVD producers.
As long as CSS was not broken, I bought neither discs nor drives, because I believe that only naive customers (to not say losers) are willing to buy any kind of information that cannot be protected from the certain eventual destruction due to the decay of its storage medium, by making copies of it on any other kind of storage medium.
After CSS was broken and the tools to read DVDs became available publicly, I have bought several DVD drives during the following years and many hundreds of DVDs.
So the breaking of the CSS was how the DVD industry got my money, and presumably the money of many others. They should have been grateful to the one who did this.
When you "buy" copy-protected information you are not really buying it. You are just renting it until the time when its storage medium will become corrupt, which is certain to happen, sooner or later. (Or until your reader becomes defective and you can no longer buy a replacement, due to obsolescence.)
The copyright laws are stupidly named and frequently stupidly formulated. Making copies not only is not a crime, but it is a fundamental right of the owner of any kind of information, being the only way in which information can be preserved.
Only the distribution of copies to third parties may be criminalized. While most stupid copyright laws claim that even making copies by the owner is a crime, that is not only unjust but it also not enforceable against any careful owner, so the laws are doubly stupid.
The average consumer won’t pirate it unless it’s easier to obtain the pirated copy than a legit version. They’ll suffer through ads, poor quality, high prices. A good example is music - I’d bet audio piracy is bordering on a rounding error of 0 because of Spotify, Apple Music and YT music. Meanwhile, for video content you need to subscribe to Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple TV, and even then you won’t get access to all of the “big” shows. Sky sports and co show that the vast majority of people are willing to pay for the content but when the service and availability suffers they’ll go elsewhere
You massively underestimate how price sensitive the average person is. Stuff like Spotify ended music piracy by driving the cost of music to nearly zero.
Good for you. Good for the guy who sold disks at the flea market too.
DVDs/BRs/etc were always a scam imo, unless it your favorite movie that you will watch repeatedly forever. For most people buying DVDs was just expensive PPV.
Keep in mind that Android has like a billion users who have never touched a Windows computer. (And unmanaged Windows was/is also a disaster zone.) Coming at this from a internet forum perspective is missing the scope of the problem.
> I'm fine with an opt-in lock-down feature
Me too, but it's really just some UI semantics whether this is 'opt-in' or 'opt-out'. Essentially it would be an option to set up the phone in "developer mode".
There is a big difference between opt-in and opt-out that isn't semantics. You can't slowly discourage, deprecate and delete the default the way you can an opt-in, because too many people keep using it.
Yeah, I predict that "developer mode" will eventually be a setup option in the trust store, so you'd have reset the phone to get to it.
With billions of Android users, there's only millions of people who need or really want this. So like 1%. My point is stop thinking about your mom's windows box and consider the scale.
This is based on a view of society that is incompatible with belief in democracy. If people overall can't be trusted to act responsibly and not follow complex sequences of steps dictated by scammers, what hope do they have to figure out who they should vote for? Liberty is responsibility. If you are permitted to cook your meal on your stove, you might burn yourself. It's an entirely different philosophy where the Big Brother or Dear Leader protects you from yourself and knows better what's good for you.
Keep in mind that Android is super popular everywhere democracy isn't.
I'm just spitballing something which would be completely trivial for any 'techie' (and wouldn't require jumping through 24 hr hoops), while improving the situation for the other 99%. Or Android becomes iOS and some minority of techies use some weirdo linux phone, whatever.
The goal is to produce a stable workstation OS, because that's who pays the bills. That means Linux 'enthusiasts' who want the latest and greatest stuff have signed themselves up to be eternal betatesters. That part will never change because its largely intentional.
Irrelevant nerd myopia. They mostly just paid someone to do it (until they decided "wordpress guy" was not worth the marketing budget). If anything DYI is easier than ever.
Before OpenTDD was ready, the improved signals and etc were originally part of "TTDPatch", which made the original 'model railroad' much more fun. So I stuck with that for a long time. They should at least ship the patch with the original game.
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