If they aren't going to charge for access otherwise then I don't think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.
People need to stop holding Jobs up as some deity of tech. He was a marketing and hype man that was in the right place at the right time and knew how to take advantage of that luck. Nothing more, nothing less. It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.
By any metric other than "line must always go up" Apple is doing just fine.
"Oh no, they haven't found another multi hundred billion dollar product to release since the iPhone, even though there are no signs that the iPhone won't continue to be a very profitable business for years and years to come...better go dig up Steve jobs, shove a stick up his back, magic his corpse back to life, and beg him to save the shareholders profit margins", the horror.
This sort of thing is why I dislike legislation that mandates the use of something very specific. Things change and it is better to create laws that don’t become outdated as fast as tech tends to.
When do the alcoholics get to sue the bars/pubs for "forcing" them to walk through the door and order a drink?
Another good thing falls to the whims of lack of personal responsibility, parenting, and Helen (won't someone think of the children?!) Lovejoy syndrome. Now the predators will just continue to do there thing in a darker hole that is even harder to find.
Jokes on my employer, I have been effectively working less than 3 days a week in active hours actually doing something productive beyond meetings and forced chit chat for years.
Most employers in my experience care far more about the appearance of working than they do actually working. Once you realize this it is amazing how little actual work you need to do to make them happy.
As much as I like Linux, and use it almost exclusively on desktop/laptop, every time I see something like this I am reminded how much I hate the fact that Apple of all companies is about the last bastion of commercial and consumer operating systems who isn’t trying to derive the bulk of their revenue from advertising.
And Mexico was going to pay for that southern boarder wall...
"Your honor, we actually operate 5 different app stores.....that all just so happen to be called the same thing, share the same backend infrastructure, etc. With what you end up being able to see device side depending on device metadata. But they are 5 different stores, we swear"...... /s
Or something like that.
With Apple tipping over the ~50% market share in the US and with the current rulings in the EU, maybe the US DOJ smell blood in the water. Hopefully something unusually good for the consumer will come of this, but I won't be shocked if it doesn't.
If it ends up being OK for a company like OpenAI to commit copyright infringement to train their AI models it should be OK for John/Jane Doe to pirate software for private use.
But that would never happen. Almost like the whole of copyright has been perverted into a scam.
That is the thing with for profit companies, especially publicly traded ones. No matter how much they make, it is never enough. Next quarter must always be higher than this quarter or the world is on fire and heads will roll.
It seems like so long that Roku was not a horrible company. Simple little box for a good price with a small static ad on the home screen to make money.
Seems like a lifetime ago.
That is a lot of words to say "they found out that the big tech executives had been lying to them about being family, changing the world. etc" just as much as their last employer was.
News flash, working in big tech is every bit as soul sucking for the rank and file as it is working in big healthcare, or big law firm, or . Nothing special about it, they are large publicly traded companies that have shareholders and investors to answer to as the number 1 priority.
If most companies didn't get so horny for "open floor" plans and/or cubicles maybe nearly everyone wouldn't hate their fancy expensive real estate holdings so much.
In my opinion anything that is just a frontend for Youtube is just a bandaid, and if they get to much attention Google will make using them increasingly untenable.
The real answer is moving to competing platforms outside of Googles control.
Because piracy is the boogieman that allows them to wrestle more power and profit from everyone around them like the parasites they are. They want a cut every time anyone ever watches something, ever. And they want to control if you even have the option of what to watch.
Amazing how when the argument is coming from the bottom up you have to have evidence, facts, numbers, etc. But when it comes from the top down “just knowing” and “a feeling” is more than enough.
This kind of thing is what has always kept me from using Blind as well.
A site used to talk shit about your current employor that has a registration process that requires you to hand out your work email, and they pinky promise not to ever provide that to anyone?
No thanks, even if they would never do it on purpose, they are one good breach away from it getting out anyway.
This is trolling or the actual issue is an PEBKAC issue.
Windows has fallen far from grace in my opinion, but it is not the incompetent smoldering trash fire you are describing. You guys are doing something wrong.
Maybe it would be a better idea to look for people that didn't endorse Trump the moment they lost to him to be his competition this time around.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/chris-christie-endorses-donald-trump-219861
Chris Christie is one of the current human embodiments of the meaning of the phrase "talk is cheap".
Not like it was hard to see how big a pile a shit Trump was back in 2016 so Christie clearly supported such a person then when he thought it would be good for him politically, what has changed now?
As much as some of us may dislike it when a company does these kinds of things. You can't really blame them for following the laws of the country that they are headquartered in.
You can blame them for operating there to begin with in cases like Apple in China, but you could hardly blame them for following the laws of the US where they are headquartered for example.
If the law of the land where the headquarters is requires them to give up the data they do have to partner nations then they don't really have much choice in the long run if they want to continue to exist.
The real error was that they built the mechanism to do it to begin with.
Jesus, I hate that word, “shoppable”. It just sounds dystopian.
Google is going to keep finding ways to break these front-ends as they search for ways other than ads to monetize their services. I fully expect they will eventually lockout the public API so only the official app can use it in that quest as well. In my opinion the front-ends are just a bandaid and the real solution is something other than YouTube completely, if that is even possible at this point.
All of the front-end solutions are telling Google is that people want that content and they will come to YouTube for it one way or the other, Google just needs to figure out how to force people down the workflow that gets them the most money.
I wouldn't be able to find a use for Alexa if they were paying me $10/month to use it.
If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.
What it proves is being a greedy self serving prick that will do anything for a buck if given the chance is not the exclusive domain of white people. Anyone can be an incompetent executive.
When it comes to tablets, if it is not an iPad, Galaxy Tab S, or Pixel tablet don’t waste the money period. Everything else is pushed out the door and forgotten about by the OEM before the delivery truck leaves the warehouse.
And huge swaths of those "colonies" regularly vote against their own interests and actively work to enable well connected politicians and businesses to kneecap them in the name of having the last word or just out of good old fashioned racism.
They did the same thing with “blockchain”, “NFTs”, and other largely vaporware crypto junk last year.
They are just riding the hype wave hoping to cash out before the bottom falls out of it like always.
Not that I am a fan of the current implementation of copyright in the US, but I know if I was planning on building my business around something that couldn’t exist without violating copyright I would surely thought of that fairly early on.
Podcasts are yet one more thing that ads have more or less ruined for me. I rarely listen to them due to the sponsorships. It is like trying to watch YouTube on my TV through the YouTube app instead of the Smarttube app.
Because Reddit has a legal team on retainer, and a budget for litigation.
And they recently had to use them: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/reddit-beats-film-industry-wont-have-to-identify-users-who-admitted-torrenting/
Imagine how that same thing would have gone but with lemmy.world instead of Reddit. Being permissive about discussions on how to commit blatantly illegal activity can be expensive.
If its legal for someone to hypothetically not create a wedding announcement website for gay people because she doesn't want to serve those kinds of people, then there should be nothing wrong with not wanting to serve armed cops.
Baking food and making coffee could be argued to be every bit as "creative" as a website can be if the lawyer is good enough.
I understand why Louis likes privacy.com so much. But he really needs to stop telling people to use them as a means of stopping payment with scummy vendors and companies so frivolously without having a disclaimer that it can open that person up to getting their credit dinged for non-payment.
Maybe he doesn't care about such things, but his viewers might.
To get around the Blizzard dark pattern the "right way", agree to the EULA, login, cancel subscriptions, remove payment details, close account (if possible), stop using Battle.net, done. Now the EULA is irrelevant. This also has the knock on effect of being the path that Blizzard/Activision/MS will actually notice since it will cost them money at scale in a way they can't explain away as childish internet trolling.
Edit: a word (irreverent > irrelevant)
Last time I had a Roku you could block the static home screen ads with PiHole. So as long as they don't start serving these from the same domain as something you need for the box to work right or start hard coding a different DNS server into the OS that won't respect your local network settings it will probably keep working.
But if they are not doing one of the above to get around DNS adblockers yet, they will eventually in the name of those sweet sweet ad dollars. Best to just start planning an exit from Roku products if you care about such things.
The real game now is how long will it last before the hype and with the the floor falls out of "AI" and a good chunk of their stock gains with it.
I think Rossmann tends to be a drama king about things sometimes, but the general overarching message he is trying to get across, sometimes poorly, is something I usually agree with. This included.
The whole thing reads like just some lawyer on retainer was sent a memo telling them to send a threatening sounding letter and no further thought or research went into it on Googles or the lawyers part.
All that talk about the punishment fitting the crime in the justice system, unless you ruffle the feathers of some rich corporation.
Nothing wrong with that setup if everyone is on board with it.