Moonrise2473

While in the past doing a reprint of a book, movie or game was expensive and wasn't worth if something wasn't popular, now selling something on a digital store has only a small initial cost (writing descriptions and graphics) and after that there's nothing more. So why publishers are giving up on free money?

I thought to those delisting reasons:

1. Artificial scarcity. The publisher wants to artificially drive more sales by saying that's a limited time sale. For example that collection that included sm64. super Mario Galaxy and super Mario sunshine on switch. The greedy publisher essentially said "you only have 6 months to get this game, act now" and people immediately acted like "wow, better pay $60 for this collection of 3 old games, otherwise they'll be gone forever!” otherwise they would have been like "uhm, i liked super Mario sunshine but $60 for a 20 years old game? I'll think about that"

2. Rights issues. For books the translation rights are often granted for a limited time; same for music in games; or if it's using a certain third party intellectual property. Publisher might decide that the cost for renewing the license is too high compared to projected sales, while the copyright owner instead still wants an unrealistic amount of money in a lump sum instead of just royalties. Example is Capcom DuckTales remastered, delisted because Disney is Disney.

3. Not worth their time. Those sales need to be reported to governments to pay taxes and for a few sales, small publishers might prefer to close business rather to pay all the accounting overhead. Who's going to buy Microsoft Encarta 99?

4. Controversial content: there are many instances of something that was funny decades ago but now is unacceptable. Publisher doesn't want to be associated with that anymore

5. Compatibility issues. That game relied on a specific Windows XP quirk, assumed to always run as admin, writing their saves on system32, and doesn't work on anything newer. The code has been lost and they fired all the devs two weeks after the launch, so they're unable to patch it.

In all those cases (maybe except 5), the publisher and the copyright owners decided together to give up their product, so it should be legally allowed to pirate those products.

If I want to read a book that has been pulled from digital stores and is out of print, the only way to do is:

1. Piracy (publisher gets $0 from me)
2. Library (publisher gets $0 from me)
3. Buying it from an ebay scalper that has a "near mint" edition for $100 (publisher gets $0 from me)

And say that I really want to play super Mario sunshine. Now the only way is to buy it used, even if they ported it to their latest game console and it would literally cost them nothing to continue selling it. But if I buy it used, Nintendo gets the exact same amount of money that they would if I downloaded it with an "illegal" torrent.

In short: they don't want the money for their IP? Then people that want to enjoy that IP should be legally allowed to get it for free

I have one code for this https://www.gog.com/en/game/duck_paradox

someone has better reflex than mine and wants to play this?

In my (European) country now we can have a digital copy of the driving license on the phone. It specifically says that it's valid to be presented to law enforcement officers during a check.

I saw amazed in the beginning. They went from limited beta testing to full scale nationwide launch in just two months. Unbelievable. And I even thought "wow this is so convenient I won't need to take the wallet with me anymore". I installed the government app and signed up with my government id and I got my digital driving license.

Then yesterday I got stopped by a random roadblock check and police asked me my id card. I was eager to immediately try the new app and show them the digital version, but then because music was playing via Bluetooth and I didn't want to pause it, i just gave the real one.

They took it and went back to their patrol for a full five minutes while they were doing background checks on me.

That means if I used the digital version, they would had unlimited access to all my digital life. Photos, emails, chats, from decades ago.

What are you are going to do, you expect that they just scan the qr code on the window, but they take the phone from your hand. Are you going to complain raising doubts? Or even say "wait I pin the app with a lock so you can't see the content?"

"I have nothing to hide" but surely when searching for some keywords something is going to pop-up. Maybe you did some ironic statement and now they want to know more about that.

And this is a godsend for the secret services. They no longer need to buy zero day exploits for infecting their targets, they can just cosplay as a patrol and have the victim hand the unlocked phone, for easy malware installation

Immediately uninstalled the government app, went back to traditional documents.

and because i'm a lazy ass i didn't read the specs but just read the search engine result.

I also assumed that because 6 years ago i bought a $50 hp envy and it had wifi, this much expensive one is also going to have it

Result: that $250 printer doesn't actually have wifi

There's a certain "people's republic" where they introduced a new government signature on all android apps. For "safety", as they "check" the apps for you 😉

For now it can be bypassed after three pages of scary warnings but in the future?

Maybe it could be a big reason of why they're liking harmony os that much, you don't need to manually approve android apps if android apps are completely unsupported

I hate this scale, it says low battery and shuts off after just 3 months of sitting in the drawer. It infuriates me that there's still a lot of energy in the battery, I can use that in remote controls with no issues

If there's enough battery to say "low battery", then there's enough battery to show the measurements!

I went to install gsam battery monitor on a new phone and it looks like it has been delisted recently.

Does anyone has more info on that? It was a staple on my phones since almost a decade...

Any alternative that shows a graph with rate of charge/discharge?

I bought a refurbished pixel 7 in europe. I assumed it was the european version (GVU6C).

I tested it and it appeared functional in all functions, so i released the escrow to the seller.

Now because I don't trust the software hasn't been tampered, I wanted to clean it with flash.android.com but... can't because it can't unlock the bootloader (even if i connect to internet and call the code ##2432546## to get the "checkin requested" from google play services)

It looks like i have the model GQML3 for Verizon which can't be bootloader unlocked. FUCK! I especially bought this because it can unlock the bootloader...

Anyway.... about restoring the original software....

Phone says "phone is with latest update installed" with android 14 and security update from 5 june 2024.

Can I flash the full image for android 15 with october security update or i risk a brick? Do I need to wait for the lazy fucks at verizon to "certify" the android 15 update? Those fuckers take ages to "certify" the updates...

They can't sell the $699 AI party trick that requires a $24 subscription so they slashed the price to $499. Unfortunately it's still $500 too expensive for what's worth.

Maybe at $10 someone could buy it as a Halloween costume prop and even pay a whole month of subscription just to show off the novelty

A decade ago I used BitTorrent Sync. Then it became Resilio Sync. Then with Resilio Sync 2 they nerfed the free app to a point that I just removed that from all my computers and switched to syncthing.

Yesterday I was watching my server struggling when syncthing was doing the periodic scan of a directory with hundreds of thousands of files and then i thought, "maybe Resilio Sync uses less resources or doesn't waste time reindexing a static directory for the nth time"

I went to see their website and now with the new version 3, all the features are back. The business plan now is to sell the app to enterprises at unaffordable prices rather to persuade consumers to pay a subscription to self host their syncing server

I wanted to try it but now they say docker version is discontinued, need to install the package to bare metal. Ugh... So I desisted and decided to stay with syncthing

Now with the news of the impending discontinuation of syncthing android app, everything changes. Without Android support, syncthing is no more irreplaceable for me.

So, has anyone tried Resilio Sync 3? Is it good?