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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Windows being easy to pirate wasnt the reason for it's popularity. It had market share because they allowed for it to be preinstalled on machines for virtually nothing. They allowed it to be preinstalled on machines for virtually nothing because the OS wasn't the flagship product.

    MS Office has always been the major flagship product for the company. This was true in 1994 and still is today. Office is so important to their revenue streams that it's fairly common knowledge and has been mentioned by former employees that OS development would focus on compatibility with Office programs, not the other way around.

    Specifically if you look at the years around Office XP and 2003, that suite is used very much as a CVS. They deprecate their operating systems using Office.


  • For me I play MTGA. Honestly, I'm not into competitive play and just like the social aspect and having fun. Arena isn't the best for the social aspect as its more just speed matches, but maybe they'll release a chat system with that at some point. There is a large number of players, so finding matches is easy enough, and although the cards are completely worthless in Arena (you can't trade them) they also don't have a real world cost to them. I'm terrible at pricing, but I would figure I have around $500-$600 worth of cards in Arena. Again, they are totally worhtless and non-transferrable (which would be an issue if they decided to discontinue the platform), but I haven't spent any money on them either.


  • I spent many years working building and maintaining fiber networks, and I can unequivocally tell you that the answer to this is maybe. Normally you can treat city fiber just as any other ISP. A lot of them have different rules and different thresholds on what they allow and what they do not allow. Fiber networks are extremely expensive to build. So while you definitely need to protect the multi-million dollar investment you've made, depending on how you've built it it can be a little tricky to police what everyone is doing.

    What's interesting is just because you are not receiving notice of a DMCA infraction, that does not mean that your ISP has not received a notice. There is this idea that if you are not set up for it it is difficult to track out what account held what IP 30 days prior or 60 days prior. That is kind of a BS excuse, but I have been at companies that did not have logging because they did not want to have logging.

    We did collect email notices and pass them around though weekly to see who could find the most absurd DMCA takedown. So I will say, if you were pirating some weird ass mommy fetish furry porn everyone in that call center knows it and is laughing about it.








  • BBC could ID a VPN IP address based on usage and concurrent sessions, but honestly most companies that block VPNs just purchase IP address lists from any number of vendors. Pixalate and DoubleVerify are two that I've worked with in the past that both provide that data to clients. They rarely ever block entire IP blocks though, so you might just try reconnecting from a different location/server within the UK until you land on one that works (if any).



  • I run my own Invidious instance on my local network and its not bad, but you really aren't able to endlessly doom scroll Youtube recommendations with it. That sounds like a non-issue, but its more difficult to find new content you like without that algorithmic aspect. Technically, Invidious will load playlists, but the UI is designed to maximize the video presence without the other add-ons, so scrolling is a pain. Also, history is unnamed so its just a thumbnail with no other info.

    You can change UI of Invidious with Stylus (ex. https://userstyles.world/style/6850/invidious-all-instances-player-and-tabs-v-3), but that won't run in qutebrowser and I love my native vim bindings.




  • I think you need some story. I don't think it always has to be good, though. Look at WoW, it has awful storytelling. Quests are mostly just fetch quests where you kill 8 of X and 5 of Y. Few people read the quest dialogue, but its still there. There is some overarching story line, but its mostly conveluded and designed more for an excuse for you to continue leveling.

    Now look at MMOs that did not have a story like Shadowbane. That was probably the purest sandbox PvP game I've ever played. At level 4 you'd leave the newbie island (which was honestly really fun and social) and get dropped into the world. No guide, no quests, just you vs everyone else. There was no motiviation or goal, just go kill people. Those kind of games have super high burnout rates. There just is no structure to them or real content.

    Early 2000s were filled with MMOs like that. Some games were able to pull it off like Ultima Online, but most failed after 2-3 years. Games like Shadowbane, Asheron's Call 2, Ryzom, etc. There just has to be some pre-defined goal your players are working towards otherwise it's just pointless.