Alright, not that I wrote or implied that anywhere… In fact Java was probably the whole reason Oracle bought Sun to gain leverage over Android. Which fits very much into what I wrote - one company innovates, another one buys them to squeeze users (Google wasn’t a customer of Sun, they used their own implementation which wasn’t exactly Java but also not exactly anything else). Just that Sun by all means wasn’t a small company, I mean they controlled almost a full stack with their own processors (SPARC), workstations and servers (Blade was somewhat famous), an operating system with Solaris (and if you want to count it even JavaOS) and Java on top of those, and they contributed a lot of technology like NFS, ZFS (license discussions aside). On the other hand, when they bought someone, the product wasn’t just milked to death, but actually integrated into their stack and continued to be developed in the open.

Shame it turned out that way, I guess Sun was a bit overleveraged with how much they did vs. how much they made from it. And to think that Oracle paid less than a fifth than what Twitter sold for later for all of that technology to go to waste, just for a chance to sue Google… But we long as suits continue to license their stuff because they have cool advertisements at airports, this will keep going.

Oracle was never really innovative on a technical level , it’s first and foremost a company focused on selling licenses, and they’re really innovative in that regard but if you fall for that as a company, I have no pity, this is their whole schtick.

Big companies in general are often rather conservative in nature while innovation happens on smaller scale and later expands.

The big problem is rather that a lot of innovation has been absorbed by the big companies via buyouts, especially when money was cheap to borrow. Innovation bears risk, buying an established solution and milking existing users much less so.

I don’t think the users are without blame. A lot of people ignore the red flags when a solution is just convenient enough (we need the commercial support / this exactly covers our use case so we don’t have to hire someone to adapt it / …) and the vendor then cashes out when moving away from his solution would be really expensive.

I think there’s still a lot of innovation lately, but a lot people are just looking for the next big thing that does everything it feels like.

That’s reflected in the linked article:

First, we know the reason a bike will continue on its path isn’t just because of the force of momentum pushing it there. We know that because if you lock a bicycle’s handlebars so that they can’t turn, then the bike falls over, regardless of how fast it’s moving. So part of this riderless bike phenomenon has to do with its self-steering properties.

Judging from the videos on their site, it has strong TGM vibes with the play field outline, colors etc. Guess I’ll be trying it later

I’m assuming its API was originally very friendly and unintrusive

Which would make sense - stuff like this automates content creation on your platform, which justifies pricing for advertisement (its main income). Basically bots but not really because they’re initiated by a human action.

You can’t tell me you’re not using an extension cord for the controller

Not the homie’s fault that the Dreamcast is the king of arcade accuracy, together with the Neo Geo AES.

The Dreamcast was just stronger than the PlayStation 2 when it came to putting sprites on the screen.

It was also the primary home platform for other, now legendary games, like Street Fighter 3 (not arcade perfect because it’s a port from CPS III) and Capcom vs SNK 1 and 2.

He’ll keep talking about it until you understand it

BitTorrent is a pretty big part of the Internet though.

In addition to what was already said - use Firefox instead of anything chromium-based - I think it’s equally important to stop using the services offered by big tech companies and not just try to keep using them on our terms. Google wants me to watch a ton of ads on YouTube? Fine, I’ll stop watching it. In fairness, on my smart TV, YouTube ads have been what I consider adequate, while Twitch can be a disaster. The alternatives already exist with Peertube and Owncast. Are they perfect yet? Far from it probably but there won’t be big improvements if nobody uses it.

And honestly the example you gave is rather a good example of a remake. The PS2 is 20 years old at this point. If the game was well made and the remake/ remaster is well-executed? Why would anyone object to this?

New and exciting games exist. This isn’t an issue. In most cases I’d even say that while money surely is important, in most cases it’s not a lack of money preventing a good game, but rather another issue that might lead to funds running out. If that makes sense.

The current situation is way better than say 25-30 years ago, and those games weren’t exactly trash.

Nothing, the licenses are for content providers and equipment manufacturers, obviously in the end you pay the license when purchasing the goods but the amount is small.

I think your workflow is not optimal. Are you using software like Radarr and Sonarr? They do the renaming for you and come with Kodi integration. Or is this not feasible?

Fastmail is a great provider, very happy customers, but with them being in a five eyes country, I don’t trust them. But it’s only email which is a nightmare protocol regarding privacy anyways so I don’t really care.

yEnc isn't a cipher, but rather an encoding for mapping binary to text, similar to base64 (but much more effective). So this denotes yEncc encoding.

The files you're seeing are PAR2 files, which are used for repairing. They're useless without the base file. The file in your example contains 32 recovery blocks. That means if your base file has 32 or less damaged blocks, this parity file can repair it.

Usually, you'd download all files belonging together in a single download and let your downloader do the rest. This is normally done by loading an NZB file that you either get from a Usenet search engine or an indexer.

The indie game market will crash and countless of investors will sit on their virtual mountain of now worthless indie games