bandario

Righto debatelaird. Enjoy your internet supremacy, I've got work to do.

It's not really the same thing though, is it?

I watch a show once and I'm done. I have some games in my library with over 1000 hours of playtime. I'm about as careful with those purchases as I am with a good pair of boots, and buddy I am the most annoying man at the hiking store.

I have used piracy to determine if a product is worthy of a retail purchase my entire life with everything from Android apps to AAA games. I know that you are making the argument that I am an outlier here but I don't think I am.

Avenza maps is a good example. I tried it out with a cracked copy years ago and found it so useful in my personal and professional life that I have maintained an annual commercial license now for probably 10 years. I don't receive any additional functionality compared to using a cracked copy, and maintaining the license between installs is actually FAR more difficult than just installing a cracked APK. Avenza has become so essential to my life that I directly support the development at a level above what I require, to hopefully ensure the continued development of this reasonably niche software into the future.

Given the forum we are in, I would compare it to the paid versions available for several popular linux distributions these days. You can download Zorin OS completely for free and have a very close to fully featured operating system much like you can have an almost fully-featured version of a pirated game. You could use this daily without paying a cent. That still didn't stop me buying Zorin OS Pro. It's the same deal. I want Zorin OS to stick around and keep doing what they are doing, just like I want ID Software to stick around and keep doing what they are doing. That doesn't make any of them immune from releasing a box of garbage for full price (I'm looking at you, Rage and Rage2).

The only significant change in the landscape here in the last 30 years is the advent of services like EA Play Pro and Xbox games for Windows live. For me these services serve exactly the same purpose as piracy. If there's something I'm interested in I can sign up for a month, try the thing that I'm interested in and then cancel the service without any significant penalty. If the game is good, then I'll grab it when it becomes available on steam. So long as there continues to be no penalty for cancellation, this is an acceptable compromise to me but otherwise I am going to pirate your shit and if it is garbage then I won't buy it.

I tried Battlefield 2042 via EA Play Pro for one month. At release it was an absolute joke. Not even close to finished. A truly terrible game. Those that managed to win a refund were ok, but many people were deemed to have played too many hours in a day to qualify for a refund. My friends and I bought the game on steam for a steep discount a full 18 months after release. That's how long it took for them to fix the many issues and turn it into a worthwhile experience and a worthwhile purchase.

You can't hire games from the video shop these days to try them out and I'm not about to be somebody's sucker. The gaming industry is a complete mess, constantly pushing unfinished garbage and broken games. You've got to look after yourself.

I think you would be surprised.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy-doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/

Games are expensive as hell in my country and the tech press have become completely disingenuous worldwide. A good review means nothing. I'm not about to drop $100AUD to $150AUD unless I know for sure that I am going to get a large number of enjoyable hours out of it.

I'm well aware of the old adage “never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to stupidity.” But...the number of times that a completely unprotected update is pushed in the first week of a release is too damn high for it to be accidental.

2012 Toyota. Toyota T-Connect didn't become available until 2014.

It's also a paid service! It requires a sim card and a plan, and would have relied on the factory entertainment unit which I have removed.

I think you are mistaking 'black box' type data logging with an always-on internet connection phoning home with the ability to turn features on and off which is a more recent and far more sinister phenomenon.

Dude, I literally played the pirated version for a weekend and then bought Doom eternal because it was so damn good. I do it all the time. It's in my steam library and I finished it twice and bought 2 expansion packs for it.

I will now also download version 6.66 + All DLC's from a pirated source for safe keeping to avoid any future fuckery via online services shutting down etc.

This is not uncommon behaviour at all. Many games are absolute trash these days even when the tech press gushes over them. In spite of your assertions, demos are almost a thing of the past. Hardly anyone does demos anymore.

My personal experience with chasing a refund after purchase does not reflect your experience either. Until critical mass builds into a full public backlash, if you've exceeded the return period (mere hours) then you are done.

Doom eternal was cracked on day one of release. I believe in this instance, they "accidentally" pushed an update with an unprotected version.

When your game is as good as this one was, piracy can actually help to move more retail units.ID software and Bethesda know this better than most.

It only hurts sales when your product is trash.

I think most of what you have said is true, and I'm glad for it. I will continue to build enthusiast level computers and sit close enough to the bleeding edge because I enjoy it.

What I believe is likely to happen is that serious performance oriented gaming PCs will once again become fairly niche. I sort of bucked against the idea of micro form factor mini PC's being a valid choice for gamers for a while.

It wasn't until I saw the youtube video I've linked below that I realised something like the HX99G would MORE than fill the desire of most of my friends group in terms of gaming performance, thermals and user experience.

It's not as small as the APU powered boxes that OP was talking about, and it has a dedicated wedge of silicon for the GPU but it is extremely cheap, extremely capable and seems to run fairly cool whilst being smaller than 99.9% of normal PCs.

My wife recently asked that I build her a gaming PC. She's pretty casual and doesn't mind 1080p gaming. All of my spare parts and previous gen hardware has already been put to work in a gaming PC for my daughter so I began the task of speccing up a reasonably decent 1080p gaming build from new parts. I can't beat the price:performance ratio of the HX99G. Watch the video and see for yourself.

Keeping in mind that this is now previous generation components and a next-gen replacement is almost certainly due any month now...it's nuts. Not only is he playing current release games at 1080p, in some titles they were happily over 100fps at 1440p, with fighting games even running at 4K without issue.

You and I will happily keep our server-sized monsters, but I know a LOT of people that will happily sit in this lane. The price is right and so is the performance. It's like a console without so many limitations, as well as being a powerful PC in its own right.

https://youtu.be/BfXn-5-IYMY

My car is nowhere near that smart, and I don't pay any subscription fees so I doubt I'm rolling around Australia with a data connection that I don't know about.

This is a pretty uneducated guess but it looks like the tank for what we would call a "long drop" toilet system in Australia. Deployed in national parks or remote wilderness areas, the tank goes in the ground and a toilet sits directly above. They stink horribly as you might imagine.

I'm betting either this or some other form of septic system designed to be buried with the small cylinder on top accessible on the surface.

I'm not interested in any vehicle that requires an app or has its own connection to the internet.

Using a VPN generally increases your latency. Latency is...bad. They are advertising a negative consequence as a positive feature, banking on the target market not having enough understanding of the terms in play.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You might understand it better but the frog is dead.

Here's the scenario. You are sitting in a 40ft shipping container with a heavy steel divider placed somewhere in the structure which splits it into two unequally sized rooms.

The container is perfectly balanced on a steel beam above a cylindrical well such that if nobody moves from their current position the container remains in place. If it were to tip in either direction, the occupants at that fallen end of the structure would be submerged and drowned.

Inside there are two camera feeds displayed on a monitor. One shows the occupants of the other partition: X number of people of mixed age and demographic. You know nothing about them.

The other feed shows that the door at either end of the container is completely blocked by the concrete walls of the well, but also shows a door which would provide an easy exit from the well if one side of the container were raised at the moment arm of the steel beam.

How many people must occupy the other side of the container before you will calmly walk to the far end of yours and tip yourself into the water, freeing those that remain?

If you answer honestly, you don't wake up in the container tomorrow.