Common misconception. It’s not a PC. Many of the components are close to standard, but their implementation isn’t. Lots of proprietary shenanigans going on. It also lacks a typical BIOS, which alone makes it not an x86 PC.

Worse than OG Xbox emulation? Last time I checked, it was rough to say the least, with absurd hardware requirements.

Development costs are much bigger of an issue than production costs. Physical media disappearing changes nothing about this.

I mean, those games from the time you decided not to play games are extremely easy to access these days, with the exception of dead multiplayer titles. There is something to be said about being young and having much more of an ability to experience wonder and enjoyment than later though.

It’s not like the Chinese are any better. I want both sides to lose.

Most of it comes down to the user. You need to be precise about naming and sorting media with all of these media libraries. With non-standard media - like fan edits, combined episodes and the likes - my usual shortcut is to place it in bonus feature of regular media.

It’s not better at this.

You will also not find as good of a support of Jellyfin by many devices like Smart TVs, game consoles, etc. Also, it just doesn’t work as reliably in many ways, like identifying media, transcoding it and sorting it correctly. It is an alternative to Plex in the same way that Gimp is an alternative to Photoshop: Superior in terms of licensing, but not as an actual piece of software.

Photoshop is perhaps the most complex piece of software you can teach yourself without relying on any external resources. It’s the opposite of poor usability and this was even the case decades ago.

Gimp and the Linux desktop experience are not more sane UIs compared to Photoshop and Windows. Both have issues, but usability is not among them.

No, it has special source, because it 1) was literally the first practical photo editing software for home computers 2) has been in continuous development since 1987 and 3) is clearly designed for artists, not programmers. It’s not just how long the development has been, but also how much resources have been poured into it compared to open source and other competitors - and to what end. Gimp may only be just nine years younger, but it’s clearly (just look at its insane user interface) typical of an issue that is very widespread among open source projects: It’s developed by programmers for programmers, with little regard for non-technical users and actual workflows.

Not all open source software suffers from this, but a ton does. It’s frustrating any time I’m trying to get people to e.g. switch to Linux and other open source software; they often run into a wall of poor usability. This is the main thing that prevents mass adoption of the Linux desktop. The fact of the matter is, most developers of open source software are highly technical people who are developing this software for themselves and other highly technical people. This might be fine for you and I, but it won’t win over the better washed masses.

Some people do actually use this software to make a living. That’s not corpo-speak, it’s a reality.

Anywho, I’ve never paid for Photoshop. Just updated my pirated copy every half-decade or so.

The latest flavor of trying to fix Gimp’s UI by modifying it to look like Photoshop. These go back decades and usually end up being abandoned after a few years.

https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

The whole premise is flawed. Gimp should be a viable program on its own, by having a UI that actually makes sense and not by copying the market leader, because this will always mean playing catch-up, it will always mean being seen as a lesser copy.

Let’s be realistic. None of the FOSS alternatives come even close to Photoshop. Gimp has never been a good piece of software. Not to mention, if you’re doing commercial work, you need the original software to reliably work with clients and others.

They could be used to fold molecules or sift through SETI signals though. The problem is that nobody can really afford to run them.

Google claims they do. During their last presentation, they boasted about billions of users of their AI. The sheer gall of these people!

This was a thing until well into the 2000s. VHS stayed around for a long time. We only got our first DVD player in 2003 (it was dirt-cheap - a tiny silver thing the size of a PSOne that cost maybe €35, a small fraction of the price we paid for our VCR in the '90s) and you could still get many of the latest movies on VHS at that point, both legally and illegally. There were regional differences though. From what I’ve heard, my country of Germany held onto this medium for longer than others.

Most piracy (in my experience at least) involved recording TV broadcasts and then duplicating it for friends and family or duplicating content that was otherwise available within your circle. Some people recorded DVDs onto VHS (there were even devices that had both disc and tape drive that did this very conveniently), but this wasn’t that common.

Slightly off-topic, but I had a neighbor who was very proud of being able to circumvent the copy protection and compress movies on DVD to fit onto a single CD (which would still play on a DVD player) at an acceptable level of quality that was somewhere between VHS and DVD (but closer to the latter with the right codec settings). I taught myself how to do this later on as well, although only in order to share movies and shows with others, since I quickly preferred having media on hard drives and USB drives instead of juggling discs around. My personal go-to method was to rent DVDs from the local library for free and then create backups of those I wanted to enjoy more than once. I did the same with PC games and software from that place…

The vast majority of people are unaware of the existence of such tools. It’s not unlikely that there were only a handful of people among the 1250 who replied who both knew about this and thought about using it here.

About 16, 17 years ago, I was briefly obsessed with browsing freely accessible webcams on the Internet. Most were surveillance cameras outside of businesses (some even with motorized controls!) and it was fun to explore the world that way: I saw sunrises in the Arctic Circle, busy Asian city streets, lots of interesting everyday moments from around the globe. Just harmless fun, right?

However, two cameras I stumbled upon made me stop this entirely: One was from an office in Russia, a hidden camera placed under a desk shared by several young women wearing short skirts. The other (thus the connection to the title) was a camera inside someone’s home, right above a baby sleeping in their crib. In fact, the entire house, every single room, was covered in cameras, all of them accessible to the world. I felt like the worst creep, even though I found both completely by accident.

I experimented with this as well, but since I was keeping full copies of the discs on my hard drives anyway, it was unnecessary in my case. I still have most of these disc images; now on my NAS.

I think the first time I tried N64 emulation must have been in late 2002. There were indeed still games released for this system at the time, although not many. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (ported to the console in 2002) was one of the last big games for it. Fun fact: The PC version at lowest settings looks almost identical to the N64 port.

Early N64 emulation was spotty, but the fact that it worked at all absolutely blew my mind, especially since I was just in the process of switching from N64 to PC as my main gaming platform. Super Mario 64 was one of the first titles to be properly playable with next to no issues, but outside of that game, it was a bit of a gamble and remained so for years. Performance could vary wildly, glitches were very common (some titles remained unplayable until surprisingly recently, like the excellent voxel-based Command and Conquer port for the system) and the plugin system proved to be a nightmare, as it fractured development resources.

GameCopyWorld is still around today and still being updated. Looks the same as it did decades ago.

My go-to method was to create a disc image of games from the local library and then use either DaemonTools’ copy protection emulation feature or a crack from that site. They had and still have a really good selection of the latest titles (nothing 18+ though, the equivalent of the American M-rating), although it’s almost entirely console games now due to mandatory online activation with most PC games.