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[–] 66 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (9 children)

Meanwhile, vinyl is minding its own business...

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  • [–] 39 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Turns out pressing PVC into the shape of a sound wave is so cheap and so easy that people won't stop doing it

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I was thinking of having a vinyl backup of my current favourite playlist but it's ten hours long so it could take some time

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  • [–] 75 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    don't worry, it will vanish soon and everything will be "in the clouds"

    aren't you excited?

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  • [–] [S] 32 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Brother, I have those 40tb raid arrays at home. None of this crap will affect me. Oh and for games I don't play those. But if I did I would stop buying Sony crap.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    There are open-source PC games, completely free, and they are awesome.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Do you mind sharing some of your favourites?

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  • [–] 35 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    My personal conspiracy theory is that Sony is trying to kill Blu-ray before it enters public domain. (2028-2030 or so). Single-layer Blu-rays are invaluable for my cold storage backups. So I'm going to keep buying them. And thanks to them, entering public domain, innovation will be possible once again. So, in all honesty, I don't have that much to fear, as mega corporations also use blu-rays heavily for backups, together with tape.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    How's the long-term stability of Blu-Ray? I know we're running into problems with magnetic tape and CDs degrading.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    Magnetic tape depolarizes over time. CDs were organic and they would literally rot away. But as long as your Blu-ray discs are high to low (HTL)/inorganic Then you're really set for at least 30 years as well, just like professional tape, but at a fraction of the price.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    There's M-Discs which are supposed to last 100 years I've heard.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I have 30+ year old CDs still readable.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    I also have CDs that are this old. There's a big difference between CDs that you can burn yourself, because those are using organic materials and the weak laser in your disk drive to burn them and professionally made disks, which are usually using inorganic materials and molds. The molds then are embossed into the datalayer of the CD, making it significantly more durable than organic discs.

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  • [–] 29 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    Go to your local used game shops! There’s a treasure trove of good shit there.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I have never been to a game shop with prices based in reality. They upcharge the hell out of their stuff and it’s insane.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    You know, I haven't tried requesting a video game through interlibrary loan and now I kind of want to just to try it. I love inter library loan

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Hell, I want to try it now! Especially if you can find games that are generally rare at shops.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    i only have one librarian at the local library i dare ask for battletoads. we've been friends since about when we were born.

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  • [–] 50 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Bluray is still alive and well because its the only format that has full quality basically 1:1 media encodes which ironically make up the backbone of full quality media piracy.

    No streaming service will ever support 70Gb+ file sizes because they never bothered to implement multicast so it would shred their bandwidth or rely on predownloading which would shred the tiny local storage included on most smart TVs.

    You could of course use jellyfin or any other file share protocol to DIY, but you'd better have a stable 100Mbps minimum upload/download speed lol.

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  • [–] 41 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    They still make CDs and Blu-Rays you know. The others are obsolete technologies.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago

    Bluray is higher quality than all the streaming bullshit that's usually lower than default settings x265. Also for anime the bluray is a great way to support the creator and used as a metric for deciding if a series gets picked up for more releases.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago* (8 children)

    I don't doubt that digital is more accessible and readily available than other formats. The biggest problem is that few services allow me to download locally what I've purchased.

    So, for me, you're not buying anything, you're just renting for the long term.

    Honestly, I'm tired of buying digital only to suddenly find out I can no longer use what I purchased. For these services, I prefer self-hosting or any method that allows me to have a working copy locally. At least I can decide what to do with the digital content.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    At least HDTracks and BandCamp let you download what you buy.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Then become gog costumer number one, you could say we pay with our wallets and for the change, Gog is right there.

    but honestly, I like valve enough, me, personally, not to worry that much.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Steam seems to be one of the very few services (perhaps even the only one I know of) that hasn't transformed its product by following the trend of enshittification. I have many games on Steam, purchased years and years ago, many of which are no longer available, but I can still download and play, having purchased them back then.

    I really appreciate Steam, but from what I read every day, I don't think "forever" exists, especially online. If we think of it in terms of "everything's in the cloud," well, the cloud costs money, so unless they somehow dispose of data, I don't know if a company can actually keep every single piece of data "forever" while maintaining a good price and not losing out or burdening consumers.

    The same goes for physical copies: I could lose them, break them, my house burn down, and I'd lose everything, whereas if they were in the cloud, I wouldn't have any problems. The point is that consumers should be allowed, where possible, to export what they've purchased. Honestly, I think that anyone who bought movies or other content on some platform and then years later discovered that the company had removed them and they could no longer use them (or worse, the same content was on another paid platform) would honestly bother me.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I know that's not what you meant... But those are all digital...

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  • [–] 28 points 4 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    cassete tape, zx spectrum style:

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    modulated digital by same definition

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    They're actually all analog, because they all get processed by your senses, which are analog.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Cartridge is alive and well in the Nintendo ecosystem.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    A lot of Switch cartridges now only have license keys.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Well at least Nintendo themselves still releases full game cartridges and it's not like you buy a Switch for third party games anyway. Nintendo only introduced the Gamekey card because third party publishers, especially Acti and Ubi, were releasing their own version on Switch 1 and not using consistent packaging labels to tell a gamekey from a full game cartridge apart so probably confused many consumers. Hence why Nintendo created an official version.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    UMD you mean, i don't think MiniDisk were ever used to distribute games or even general software.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago*

    Cartridges aren't dead yet.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    After digital: Direct brain implantation. IE all your games are stored in memory. And I don't mean RAM. It also isn't YOUR brain.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    Definitive way to curb RAM prices, just use people's brains.

    You could also sell part of your brain to openAI to offload part of their models for the cloud.

    It's the matrix book but instead of cpu power is RAM storage.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    True, but there's bad digital like Amazon Video, and good digital like GOG.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago*

    I'm torn. Like, there are two online medical equipment shops covered by my insurance. The one I use and Amazon. I'm the unusual event my supplier is having delays I can usually get equipment from Amazon in their standard delivery window.

    Like, we've gotten bipap parts on there when a family member traveled across the country and left half of their ventilator at home. It was not cheap, but it was quick and that's what they needed.

    Like, there's a good, necessary service under all the bullshit that other companies seem to be unable to match for reasons I don't understand, probably having to do with paying and treating labor more fairly. If it weren't life and death sometimes

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    All of these media are digital! Only digital is no medium but an encoding scheme.

    Currently used media are HDD and SSD.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    Sure pal, yea, cd is dead.......

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Honestly 90% of the movies we want to watch aren't on Prime (which we happen to have for non-movie-reasons) and we would need extra subscriptions for each of them. It is cheaper and more convenient for us to buy used blu rays or dvds of the movies. It's 3,99€ to rent a movie for 48 hours (best case, usually it is some arthouse subscription) or 2,17€ for the DVD on medimops. We watch during lunch break so we usually can't make it through a movie in 48 hours without stressing. (My spouse does not want to pirate anymore and I support that.)

    Our daughter has her own small collection of cartoons and anime that she can choose for a TV treat instead of scrolling through the endless void of the internet.

    I love booklets too much to ever let go of CDs.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I still buy any new music on CD and regularly buy DVDS. I buy more new DVDs than Blu-ray actually.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    At some point does it make sense to use Blu Rays?

    I have a No Man’s Sky disk. Like 5% of the code on that disk is in the production game today. It’s online only, so I couldn’t even play it with the disk.

    Cartridges do kinda make sense, you could patch the game on them (in theory), they can come in much larger sizes than disks too.

    Side note: modern gaming is shit.

    I bought Spyro and couldn’t even play it without agreeing to a privacy policy. It’s a single player offline game from the PS1 era. I installed The Sims 4, I can’t even play without an EA account. I tried Assassin’s Creed and you need an Ubisoft account to open the game.

    Shit is fucking stupid.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    Pretty sure it has the 2016 version of NMS on it. Booted up a ps4 install with it to try and couch co-op only to look around and ask why the UI was so different from what I was used to. It had internet access we thought but it can't have or it would have installed whatever the latest patch is. It was surreal seeing pillars of Emeril again.

    But you point yes, gaming single player offline is a joke now with DRM requiring single player online. We ripped EA Simcity for this. Simcity died to City:Skylines because it became such a movement.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    DVDs still exist. DVD players still exist.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Backups can always use all of these. Doesn't matter how scrappy it is a couple of hard drives with a parity in running true as/freenas or just Debian with Mergerfs will last you a lot of years.

    Cassettes made a bit of a resurgence recently for audio cassettes though I would never want to return to those days for games.

    You don't have to play their game just wait it out Sony and Xbox aren't doing so hot financially ATM.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    Yup, been running my plex jellyfin server for like 15 years on Ubuntu server off of an 80gb mechanical boot disk.

    10TB RAID I storage tho

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