> So yes, currently playing PS2 games on PC via emulator is still absolutely fantastic, but native ports would be the holy grail of game preservation.
I would think that emulation of the original game as closely as possible would be the gold standard of preservation, and native ports would be a cool alternative. As described in the article, native ports are typically not faithful reproductions but enhanced to use the latest hardware.
Indeed, the focus for preservation would be to increase the accuracy of emulators.
pcsx2 is pretty good today in terms of running games (there is a single digit list of games it does not run), but it's far from accurate to the hardware.
Porting to current systems via recompilation is cool, but it has very little to do with preservation.
Fractional scaling on Wayland is only blurry for X apps, and even then, most apps have Wayland support at this point, so for the remaining apps, just turn off Xwayland scaling, and using native scaling through env vars and flags, and no more blurriness.
What should they do instead? spend money continuously holding your music on disk forever even though you aren't paying them for the service? Sounds like they are being cool about it by keeping it around for a while and warning you before deleting it.
The marketing move of offering an unlimited plan reveals that storage and traffic are not that expensive and someone made a choice that light users will subsidize heavy users. With that, hiding your data from you and subsequently deleting it, at least without first encouraging you to download it within some post-downgrade grace period, would be a choice, not necessity, and is user-hostile.
If it is an actual necessity—a service chose to market an unlimited plan to attract more users, and then realized they are losing money on storage and traffic so much that they would unapologetically burn bridges with existing users who showed themselves as willing to pay (who maybe needed to downgrade temporarily for whatever reason) with the above move—and yet their strategy is apparently to keep offering that plan (in hopes to turn things around with more light users joining?), I would question whether that service has serious issues with even medium term planning.
No matter their actual costs to provide the service, I'm struggling to see why they should not immediately delete all of your stored files upon cancellation of the storage service.
They are a European company, so you are the customer, not the product and recipient of subsidies. They use less manipulation and dark patterns than an equivalent American company.
You pay, you get service. You don't pay, you don't get service. If they can't bill you, they should try to communicate with you for a few months before treating it as a cancellation. If you cancel, then your choice is clear and you should expect your service to be immediately terminated at the end of the current billing period. If their service is storing files for you, termination of the service means deletion of the files.
There is no need for a grace period when you knowingly and voluntarily make the decision to terminate a file storage service.
> you are the customer, not the product and recipient of subsidies
They also do advertisement (promoted tracks and audio ads) but this is irrelevant to my point, what I described applies regardless, including the fact that heavy users of the unlimited plan and free users definitely receive subsidies, both from light users and from ad revenue of the platform.
> You pay, you get service. You don't pay, you don't get service
The definition of the service you receive and how good it is includes what happens when you decide to off-ramp from receiving it. Changing your service plan is your indication that you want to change service, what happens after that is how they handle it. There is no stipulation whatsoever that things stop being available to you immediately.
In fact, in case of SoundCloud, they themselves prove this, because they did not delete data but instead continued to keep data for free, which means providing you a service that you presumably stopped paying for. The silly move of them was to do that and not allow you to download it, and then emailing the victim urging them to pay to access this data, which makes it 100% a dark pattern and means they are effectively blackmailing customers with proven ability and willingness to pay.
If I remember right, Apple (an American company) handles it better and gives you a month to download excess data if you downgrade, but sure, “dark patterns”.
> There is no need for a grace period when you knowingly and voluntarily make the decision to terminate a file storage service.
If you terminate your use of a file storage service, you would expect your personal data to be deleted. However, no one terminated their use of a service, somebody apparently downgraded their payment plan (temporarily or not).
Sounds like they will warn you about your storage limit for a while, so you can choose which data to delete to be under the limit, before deleting your data at random to force you under the limit. Quite reasonable.
You mean Apple? I don’t think they actually delete any minor excess data that may occur incidentally due to race condition or eventual consistency. Just if you actually downgrade, they do… After a month or so, during which you can still download.
As a listener I'd pay (a reasonable amount like <$5 per month) to only listen to mixes, especially if it can be filtered by bitrate.
Their best feature is social feed - I only see reposts from people I follow. But for branching out / discovery might be cool to see what their feed looks like, so something like "show followees feed".
Overall what Im saying is they treat their non-paying customers better then their paying ones. Once I was a paying customer after having and using my free account for over 7 years then converting to a paying customer and having to cancel Soundcloud became hostile.
I'm certainly not going to say nobody should use it.
But I assume the dev then is the dev now. That he was OK introducing something like that, even 9 years ago, tells me that his values and my values are very far apart.
I did actually evaluate it (before I knew this history) and it didn't meet my needs, so I chose something else purely on technical grounds anyway.
Wash your hands after touching the bathroom door, then lean on the door with your shoulder. If you have to use a door handle to exit the bathroom (the door swings into the bathroom), it means the bathroom is poorly designed, so use the paper towel that you dried your hands off with.
I use my elbow. It is the same recommendation as to cough to your elbow. You do not touch with your elbow on yourself or others so it is generally safe.
Unfortunately not always practical due to poorly designed handles and lock mechanisms. I usually "sacrifice" my little finger for this when I have to use my hands, with the theory that I'm much less likely to put that finger in my mouth or eye etc.
in iffy situations I use my fathers method, which is the systematic prevention of transfer, even if you must touch things or people (doctor,pathologist,forensics) in less than ideal circumstances, hard to describe, easy to demonstrate.
"It’s real Linux. Like, actual Linux. Not Android with Google quietly running 47 background processes to figure out whether you’re sad enough to buy ice cream. Not iOS with Apple playing gatekeeper over which apps you’re allowed to have. Just clean, honest open source Linux that treats you like a grown up who actually owns their stuff."
For many of us it's mostly a gimmick, and as a former colleague pointed out: If an attacker is so deep into my phone or laptop that they can turn on the camera and microphone, pictures of my fat ass naked online is the least of my concerns.
Still, for teenagers and young women, having the a switch that ensure that no one is spying on them in their bedroom or bathroom might help relieve some anxiety.
My iPhone is dying and I'm not sure if I'd want a new one. I certainly don't want an Android phone, because I have little trust left in Google, but Apple is also starting to annoy me and I certainly no longer feel like a valued customer. Plus their integration of Gemini into Siri doesn't inspire a lot of trust. There are a other few alternatives, like /e/OS and CalyxOS which seems interesting as well.
It would be interesting to see Sailfish ported to the Fairphone as well.
Yeah, marketing, but there are many other reasons, including competition within this space. I was looking at their new C2 community phone and the price (circa 300 EUR) too seems fair to say the least (with 5 years of support). Fairphone seems nice too. But as foobarkey commented above, these things should really be in brick and mortar stores (or in Temu, god forbid...).
1. Those who see their codebase as a sculpture, a work of art, a source of pride
2. Those who focus on outcomes.
They are not contradictory goals, but I'm finding that if your emphasis is 1, you general dislike LLMs, and if your emphasis is 2, you love them, or at least tolerate them.
I don't disagree with you - LLMs are not at odds with quality code if you use them correctly. But many people who take excessive pride in their code don't even bother to look and see what can be done with them. Though, in the last couple months, I have seen several of the (1) types around me finally try them.
I would think that emulation of the original game as closely as possible would be the gold standard of preservation, and native ports would be a cool alternative. As described in the article, native ports are typically not faithful reproductions but enhanced to use the latest hardware.
reply