But Network has completely taken over and we loss that. Even Nintendo Switch 2 Game Card is now only going to be a Game Key.
I am not entirely sure we could solve that with technology. Network has gotten so cheap, and will continue to get faster and cheaper that I think may be in a way there is no point competing.
And if we cant do that. Let say we cant make a write once / a few times 128GB NAND product that last 50 years and cost less than a dollar to make.
May be then the only solution is a law to protect consumer that the digital things we buy would still be available for us to download for at least x number of years. Especially when considering hosting it and the bandwidth is so cheap it isn't really a big risk for companies.
It is getting ridiculous that both Google, Apple thinks they own everything I paid for. They think they are merely renting out their tech to me, both hardware and software.
Why rely on the original publisher? Let me download it and then share it.
I think it's a much simpler requirement that the product be functional without "phoning home" and when the original prosper stops selling it then libraries abd torrents and archive websites step in.
”real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”
- Linus Torvalds
We're already there in many places of course, and many stores have already replaced the "buy" action with more ambiguous wording.
Next turn to that being people turning to the seventh' seas, and then we have again an iTunes Store/Steam moment, and the cycle goes on.
It is yet another one of those oversights that people have just ignored, that when you buy a product like a phone, there is absolutely zero reason why it should not perform at the very least just as well as it did on day one if all the other conditions are the same, i.e., you have a choice about including any additional features. If you do not have a choice, e.g., because an update imposes some feature, then what you have on your hands is really just a company damaging your property.
Imagine if you took your car into mandatory services or if Tesla pushed mandatory updates that made your acceleration, breaking, turning response times slower and increased your gasoline or electric consumption; and then tried telling your how fast and smooth and efficient the new model is that behaves the same way that the old one did when you bought it.
It’s just fraud! If your update diminishes the performance and function of core capabilities, then you are liable for those damages, because you caused damages.
(@hoseyor if you could repost more toned-down soberly-worded versions of those comments, without directly accusing multiple prominent tech companies of fraud, I think you'd get more traction.)
If you find one. Last year I was searching for good old fashion players. There are only old used in the market. The only new ones are crap.
In 10 years will be difficult to find good players.
Also the bulk of cheap drives out there do at least DVDs at 8x and CDs at 24x (which are roughly the same RPM), so with a smidge of motivation you'd also get one of those and be ripping CDs in closer to 5 minutes.
I'd probably make a little project where I buy 4 drives for $70 total, and once in a while I spend an hour ripping 30-40 CDs while listening to whichever one appeals to me the most out of the batch.
We have that, it's called spinning Rust with ZFS + Backup (M-DISK?), what's more important where do you buy your stuff for example Nintendo vs GOG.
Don't buy Software that you cant "own".
We need regulations around this kind of stuff and governments that are willing to break up companies that monopolize industries.
Companies like Autodesk and Adobe for instance have far too much control over very critical markets and the revenue that they extract from them allows them to lock down software in very onerous ways.
No amount of spinning rust and ZFS is going to make running offline versions of Fusion360 or Photoshop easy for the common person.
It's going to take legislation.
Exactly what i said. Don't give money to corporations who want to control your software.
>>Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us
>Fusion360 or Photoshop
Not my Software not my Problem. Ask your country to support alternatives [1] for this kind of software. You're right that critical software is concentrated among a small group of providers. But an even bigger problem is that they're not open source and are sold under US laws (patents, licenses, restrictions etc..).
We don't live in that society however. We live in a society where the people who build your house and the public facilities and the stores that you shop on are becoming increasingly locked into cloud based CAD and BIM software that is owned by monopolists who use the money they make to further entrench themselves.
This is your problem and no amount of spinning rust and ZFS is going to fix it.
No it's not, i have not used and CAD-Stuff for 20 years, again don't support stuff you don't like.
The amount of money for Fusion360 to "build" my house is not 1 second of thinking worth...i just don't care, but hey you do! Make a change.
I also don't get it why you try to mix storage and proprietary-software, those are two different things.
The same argument (impossible to replace etc) was made for Microsoft-Office in ~2000, and now the whole French Police uses LibreOffice. If you want a change YOU have to change.
A server that uses parity drives and regular data checks is a reliable system built on top of unreliable storage. It achieves the same data integrity but it's a lot more annoying and difficult to deal with.
A huge stack of m-discs is not a good option either.
That was never the case with Cartridges, Floppy's or even CD's.
However M-DISK is around 30-100 years.
>A huge stack of m-discs is not a good option either.
What is your alternative? Maybe LTO tapes is then something for you?
Mo Data mo Problems you know ;)
If the complaint is that large game distributors work to make it hard for you to store the bits on that SSD, yeah I totally hear you.
For those people the only way to obtain a digital local copy is via torrent.
Anyway after this I decided, fuck it, screw reliable storage or buying things on media. I'll buy it in a digital form and keep moving it around in less reliable media (mostly SSDs) until I'm dead.
I don't care about ownership. I care about not having to buy things twice and care about things I've bought being taken away. That's slightly different.
building things up right now as homeserver/tarsnap/friend's homeserver
at some point i want to setup offline tape backups... they last longer than hard drives.
The company should be obliged to keep hosting all digital assets they've ever sold to an end consumer.
And the law should be that when they want to get rid of this responsibility they have to remove the DRM first.
Of course they could just jump to subscription model entirely where you never own anything, but even that would be at least more honest than the present state.
There is no solution here unless you force it to be available on day one.
The sleight of hand companies pulled at some point in the past twenty years is that they made us believe we're buying stuff that we're just renting, but we need to go back to ownership. That puts the burden onto the company to make sure you can always get the thing they decided to withhold from you.
And my point was not that the current situation is fine and dandy. It was that a law that says "sell licenses for restricted purposes today, but if you want to stop selling these 10 years from now, you'll have to do X and Y at that time" can't work - the company will find some way to discharge that obligation through sales and bankruptcy.
What would work would be an obligation at the time of sale - say, you could sell software licenses with conditional functionality, but only if you provide proof that you have an archived version stored with a third party that would be released to all customers in case of your bankruptcy. Since the cost would have already been paid, there would be no way to discharge this obligation during bankruptcy or dissolution or other similar mechanisms.
Lots of games are still stored on the cards. The key-only cards are mostly an alternative to printing the key on a piece of cardboard.
The real problems are that A) not every game lets you choose and B) the cards use flash and will wear out.
I can sell/lend out a game-on-cartridge and I can do the same with the key-on-cartridge ones.
A key on paper / email / virtual entitlement is tied to your account. It cannot be lent out, it cannot be sold.
In fact, except for certain conditions it cannot be inherited. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/after-you-die-your-st...
At least key-on-cartridge represent an entitlement tied to a physical good, and not an online identity.
Hot, cold, time - no problem. Just keep them out of sunlight.
I still buy indie games from GOG but I archive my GOG games folder myself and just copy it between computers. No need for any Steam insanity.
I don't think the issue is the storage media. It's the hostile attitude game publishers have. It reminds me of how N-Gate used to talk about companies "being at war with their users."
evbogue•8mo ago