• 0 Posts
  • 69 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 26th, 2023

help-circle


  • Blu-Ray discs can carry offline updates that blacklist other discs. All players must support these updates as part of licensing the technology. All your blu-rays may play today, but if an update comes along to revoke the license on a title and you play a disc that carries the update that enables that revocation, it won’t play back on your device. It’s occasionally been used to disable known pirated discs, and so far hasn’t been used on licensed materials, but “so far” is never much assurance.


  • Blu-Ray discs can carry mandatory software updates that change the functionality of playback devices, add “protections” against “piracy”, and could potentially revoke licenses of content on other discs.

    Media companies are prepared to screw you over regardless of wether or not you but content from them. I do believe in paying for content, but I don’t trust any modern distribution to last, so I have a couple backups of all the media I’ve ever purchased. And for formats that make it difficult to back up, I sail the seven seas.





  • I think the general public isn’t stupid in this instance, I think they’re just cheap. I have a friend who filled his house with Echo speakers and bragged that it was less expensive than a couple HomePods or Sonos speakers. When I pointed out that Alexa made shopping suggestions after a request he made, he kinda brushed it off, but a few months later he disconnected them all when he noticed private conversations around the house were influencing his Amazon recommendations. He’s fortunate enough to have learned from his mistake and been able to afford to fix it. A lot of folks see a 4k streaming device for $30, compare it to something like the Nvidia shield or the Apple TV, and think it’s a great deal. When they find themselves frustrated by advertising a couple days, weeks, or months later (or maybe desensitized to it like a frog in boiling water), it’s too late. They’ve already spent their money, and/or assume that this is just what all streaming devices are like, so why spend more for this experience?

    Stupidity? Probably not, just cheapness and an ignorance of how low cost hardware stays low cost.







  • That isn’t how Genesis begins. Genesis begins “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The second verse (in English) does say “the earth was without form and void”, but “without form and void” is better translated as “an unformed void”. We translate “void” adjectively (instead of as a noun) in Genesis 1:2 because the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew text used by Hellenistic jews in and around the turn of the BC/AD epoch’s) implied an unseen quality to earth. “Unseen and unready” would be a rough translation of the Greek translation into modern English, where “unseen” (ἀόρατος) is the word translated as “void”. In actuality the Hebrew word is a noun (bohu, בֹּהוּ), not an adjective. And it’s masculine.

    SOURCE: Am pretentious Biblical language nerd who needs to correct random strangers on the internet and historically bad translations that perpetuate new bad translations.


  • What are you on about? Somewhere else you said that Firefox alone causes “your” 8gb Mac to stutter.

    That’s bull.

    My personal Mac is a 32GB Macbook Pro, but we have an 8GB M1 iMac in our house that I actually use frequently. We picked it up as an open box item at Best Buy about a month after it came out. Just a couple of weeks ago I edited a wedding video on it when I’d accidentally left my Macbook at a friends house about an hour away. Final Cut handled three streams of 4k video just fine on 8GB. We are constantly using it as the primary slicer for files for our 3D printer. My kids run games on it using both Dolphin and Wine without issues.

    And I’m not the only person who has done these things. There are people all over YouTube (especially two years ago) who were benchmarking and using the entry level M1 Macs for things just like this without the issues you are describing.

    Just one very early example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUXZBVLFNfY

    If you genuinely can’t even run Firefox without performance issues there’s something wrong with your machine specifically.





  • I don’t recall seeing any that behave in that way. Not saying you’re wrong, but I have a <6 month old TV that doesn’t behave in this way. Plugged it in to the wall, ran through the “setup” choosing “setup later” options, plugged my receiver into the HDMI 1 port, and everything just worked.

    I’d be interested in seeing which brands are doing this.


  • I had a friend call me crazy for ripping all of my old DVDs and Blu-ray Discs to a hard drive around 2009.

    “Why not just stream from Netflix?”

    Now he’s complaining about being subscribed to a half dozen services just so he can watch what he used to stream from Netflix. I kinda want to shake my Plex library with him for personal vindication, but I’m not sure he’d appreciate the irony in a way that would satisfy me.