imo, it's a semantic attack, and it's been very effective. art, drawings, paintings, animations, movies, shows, music, poetry, books, code, games, any free human creative venture: it is all suddenly (and falsely) insinuated to only be possible when placed inside a "platform". you and I may know this isn't true, but most people could not defend against this hostile idea or simply could not identify it as such, and now falsely believe human expression is only "real" when it's inside a company's ad-filled self-reinforcing skinner box.
wow. does the factory that made it have absolutely no quality control processes in place? I would be embarrassed to own a vehicle that did that, and more than a little worried about its safety.
I always thought it should be "unlock", because that's more what is happening. you're not buying it, renting has a connotation of a fixed term ownership time, but unlock describes the action.. they've had the movie the whole time sitting there, probably in a CDN near your home already, but you're not allowed to see it until you pony up. it's locked away.
same. I buy a lot of software/games and media/music/movies, and before I buy I always make sure I can pirate it down the road if I need to. if I can't, I reconsider how much I need it. I'll switch to my pirated copy at the drop of a hat without a drop of guilt. if it has annoying or unperformant drm? it makes me sign up for an account to use my paid software on my own computer? its servers go down and it won't boot? switched.
this was my experience too. kept putting it off because I assumed I'd need to tinker a bit. didn't at all, worked immediately with only the simplest configuration. genuinely amazing, I wish my software worked that well.
If you have a smart TV, it probably runs an ARM-architecture Linux or Android (which amounts to a bunch of extra stuff piled onto Linux) to drive the logic and ui to support connecting to the internet and downloading and updating streaming apps and other smart TV crap.
most of the time they'll run some minimal stripped-down version of these operating systems to support only features needed for the TV and it's functions. buildroot is an open source project that specializes in producing hyper slim Linux OS installation images for devices like these.
if I had to guess, they had a USB full of shows plugged in and the smart tv's solution was to just boot up the linux version of VLC in a bare x session when the user hits play on "totally_not_pirated_smallville_s01e03.mkv" on their thumbdrive. not a terrible solution, honestly: VLC just plays anything.
The old kernel is because a lot of low level hardware has available drivers written for it that are intended to be loaded into old versions of the Linux kernel (at time of release perhaps) and are then just never updated lol, at least not for ARM. sometimes there are breaking changes with kernel apis and stuff as the kernel version increases over time, so the easier solution for someone trying to make a TV, over begging and/or paying the hardware developers to update their drivers, is to just run an old kernel version.
everything is a hack. nearly all these smart devices are just general-purpose computers with ancient (predictable, cheap) software and inescapable interfaces taped over the front, and a whole lot of digital duct tape on the back.
I'm not even talking about those people or those scenarios.
you call them the extreme scenario, but they are the norm. this kind of scenario is the average reality for a massive number of Americans. it might not be "single parent with a flat tire", but there are thousands of ways people get stuck in a rut with only credit as a lifeline, and it's getting more and more common, and it's rarely something that could be foreseen or mitigated against. that's how our society is constructed now. desperation is the norm. it's profitable.
that is what this trend reveals. the ones who buy more than they need on credit they barely qualify for are the minority. the desperate are the majority.
you'd think you'd take some personal responsibility over your ignorance on the matter before loudly asserting that desperate people need to just pull up on their bootstraps harder and stop whining near you.
I don't believe I'm immune to advertising but I don't think advertisers are willing to admit that it's just as easy to create negative brand associations as positive brand associations. when the only exposure you have to a product is frustrating and irritating and offensive, these feelings can bleed over when you see them on a shelf later.
after many years of trying to ignore advertising and pretending I'm not influenced by it, I've admitted I am, just like everyone else. so instead of resisting the effects, I try to turn the feeling of brand familiarity into a warning sign: if I'm drawn by familiarity to a particular product, I question why before I buy. if the answer isn't "a friend or i have used it and found it valuable/good", then i remind myself that it's not good enough on its own. they have to try and trick me into liking it, so it can't be that good. if it were good, they wouldn't have to drop dump trucks of cash into an ad agency to try and trick people into buying it. an ad for a thing means the thing is shit.
the owner class says it has, so it has. they know better than us! get back to work, peasant, and I don't want to hear any whining about expenses. you won't make liars out of us!
People who are modifying Windows this deeply are not going to switch to Linux
I did. I was a heavy Windows customizer and deeply understand it as an operating system and target for application development. I left because, at some point, I realized the OS I (one way or another) paid for was treating me like a product instead of a user, and I resent that. I don't like the feeling of slowly losing grip on the OS as it slides into becoming adtech tooling for marketing interests instead of the thing that runs programs for me. Despite my entrenched Windows knowledge, none of my primary personal computers run it anymore, including my gaming PC. Adaptation is a lot easier than most people expect, in my opinion.
easy.
best breakfast. fite me.might make breakfast for dinner tonight.