Oh this is very bad indeed. It seems you’ve been targeted - this is a threat from some pretty bad dudes. The first part is code for their organization…then it says they’re first gonna wilt (kill) that puppy you love, and then it says you better enjoy living that circus life because next comes the grave. Also they will move into your house and celebrate. Wow man, please be safe…
They had everything right with the Dreamcast, but they had no confidence. They killed it after just 1 year while sales were actually rising, and even in that time it managed to get one of the best libraries of that era. Imagine if they had actually continued to support it.
It’s not that they had no confidence. It’s that they took Nintendos approach on hardware. Sell low at a loss, and make the money on software.
Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.
Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour. As the year 2000 went on, websites even made it easier by posting the game files for download. If you didn’t have broadband (many didn’t at the time. Most had 56k), you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.
So every console sold cost them money. And the software was performing abysmally. Plus, PS2 was right around the corner. XBox was an unknown, and Gamecube was assumed to do better than it did.
From a console war perspective, the year 2001 may have been the most competitive year EVER for video games.
Was probably more likely just that they couldn’t afford the initial loss anymore because the lenders or shareholders got scared of the PS2 and xbox when they were announced.
There’s a little wiggle track burned into PSX discs that’s impossible to duplicate with burners, and it won’t boot up unless it sees that. There’s workarounds that eventually came out, but console copy protection doesn’t have to last forever. It only has to last most of its primary life until the next gen comes out, and PSX managed that.
They did, eventually. The first PlayStation was relatively easy to pirate for (with a mod chip), but it took a while for that stuff to become available. Someone had to go and manufacture the chips, or reverse engineer the check.
By the time that scene matured, Sega released the Dreamcast right into a more sophisticated piracy scene that could apply lessons learned to the Dreamcast right away.
On paper, Sega had more sophisticated copy protection than the first PlayStation did. But it also released 4 years later.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that Nintendo sells at a loss. They don’t have amazing margins on hardware, but they don’t like selling at a loss. IIRC, commodity prices and a price drop meant the GameCube was briefly sold at a loss, but it wasn’t long, and it wasn’t by much.
Whatever else you can say about Nintendo, they are really good at managing manufacturing costs.
Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.
Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour.
You make it sound trivial. While Sega left a security hole open for games to be loaded from a regular CD, the official games were released on GD-ROMs, a dual-layer CD with a 1.2 GB capacity.
So first off, you couldn’t read them completely in a regular CD-ROM or even DVD-ROM drive. (I’m not counting the “swap” method because it’s failure-prone and involves partially dismantling the drive and fiddling with it during operation.) You had to connect your console to a computer and use some custom software to read the GD-ROM on the console, and send the data over.
Once you had the data, you then had the problem of trying to fit a potentially 1.2 GB GD-ROM image onto a regular CD-ROM. A handful of games were actually small enough to fit already, and 80-minute and 99-minute CD-Rs would work in the DC and could store larger games. But for many games, crackers had to modify the game files to make them fit.
Often they would just strip all the music first, because that was an easy way to save a decent amount of space. Then if that wasn’t enough, they would start stripping video files, and/or re-encoding audio and textures at lower fidelity.
Burning a CD-R from a downloaded file was easy, but ripping the original discs and converting them to a burnable image generally was not.
you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.
I don’t remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.
USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.
Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren’t necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.
I remember similarly. I was going to say that thumb drives weren’t even invented until 2005-2006, but I looked it up and they were invented in 1999. I guess I forgot that those tiny ones even existed since I was doing all my external storage on DVD-R or CD-RW.
Unfortunately I think that Sega themselves weren’t the only group lacking confidence in the Dreamcast. In fact, I feel like they put up a valiant fight, with marketing and first-party titles.
Critics and consumers all had an extremely “wait and see” attitude that I think took the theoretical advantage of the incredibly early launch and turned it into a huge liability. People didn’t want to commit to buying their next console without seeing what the other offers were going to be. So Sega had to work hard for about two years to keep the real and actually available Dreamcast positioned high in the market while their competitors had the luxury of showing jaw-dropping demos of “potential” hardware (i.e. “Here is some video produced on $50,000 graphics workstation hardware that is made by the same company that’s currently in talks to produce our GPU.”)
Third-party publishers also didn’t want to put any serious budget toward producing games for the Dreamcast, because they didn’t want to gamble real money on the install base increasing. This resulted in several low-effort PS1 ports that made very little use of the Dreamcast hardware, which in turn lowered consumer opinion of the console. When some of these games were later ported to PS2 as “upgraded” or “enhanced” versions, that only further entrenched the poor image of the Dreamcast.
I have owned all four major consoles of that generation since they were still having new games published for them. And if I had to choose only one console to keep from that group, it’d be the PlayStation 2, because of the game library. It’s huge and varied. I have literally hundreds of games for it, while I only have a few dozen games for the others. But looking at the average quality of the graphics and sound in the games for those systems, I’d also rank the PS2 in last place, even behind the DC.
Sony was a massive juggernaut in the console gaming market at the time. The PlayStation 1 had taken the worldwide market by storm, and become the defacto standard console. It’s easy to forget that the console launches for this generation were unusually spaced out over a four year period, and Sony was the company best positioned to turn that to their favour. People weren’t going to buy a DC without seeing the PS2, but once they did, many were happy to buy a PS2 without waiting for Nintendo or Microsoft to release their consoles. The added ability to play DVDs at exactly the time when that market was hitting its stride (and more affordably than many dedicated DVD players) absolutely boosted their sales in a big way. Nintendo’s GameCube didn’t do that, and by the time the original X-Box came to market, it wasn’t nearly as much of a consideration.
What did you just say about me, you insolent fool? I’ll have you know that I am the Supreme Leader of North Korea, and I have over 300 confirmed no-poop days. I graduated top of my class at the Academy of Unchallenged Genius and have single-handedly invented gravity and rainbows. You are nothing to me but just another target for my flawless golf skills; I once got 18 holes-in-one in a single game. I have the power of the sun in my hands and have been trained in both human and gorilla warfare. Mark my words, you are finished. Think you can talk to me like that and get away with it? Think again, worm. I am the very definition of perfection and will obliterate you with my mere presence.
Arms back, hips and moobs emphasized, because lumbar lordosis is not just for women! Powerful and manly man can master it, with practice and intense self-indulgence. Westerners aren’t permitted to learn it.
why does everyone have to have “excellent” skills? just logically not everyone can have excellent skills, or there wouldn’t be excellent skills. i very much doubt everyone currently working there also has equally “excellent” skills. you can’t just say you have to be perfect. i fucking hate this shit
I’ve worked a lot of different jobs over the years, some well in my skill set, some well outside, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that with very few exceptions, knowledge and skills matter very little, what matters most is sucking up to the boss, a skill I am exceedingly bad at. Interestingly enough, one of the jobs where skill mattered most was construction, even when I worked for my uncle, he barely cut me any breaks. He once said “you hammer like old people fuck”. Not to mention the number of times he yelled at me because I was shit with a tape measure. “Cut it 3 times and it’s still too short”. Yeah nepotism didn’t help me there.
What I hate more are the entry level jobs that will be like that. Like bro it’s an entry level job and you’re expecting people to have a super deep understanding makes no sense. Like I get it’s just marketing and a way to lower the number of applicants to get just the really good ones but it makes it so much harder to figure out what level of skill a job is looking for if they all say they want experts with certain skills or tools.
Yeah at my job at the end of each week my boss will assign priorities to tasks as not priority to high priority. She’ll change them around and discuss why for about 45 minutes and by the end of the meeting every single task is listed as highest priority every week. If everything is always equally the highest priority is anything a priority anymore? Lol
Clouds will form over the spot as a warm wind blows in from the southeast. Flecks of rain will fall and a slow rumble will build from below as the ground shakes and a hole appears from the fallen ground. A representative of each will be sent: a sheriff, an artist, a socially conscious libertarian, and a racist.
They will each give you one gift and then the sheriff arrests you and takes you to be judged by the racists. The others watch on in quiet disapproval, to the abortion or the arrest it isn’t clear. The racist then says “As foretold, the skies open and you’re on trial in another state.”
In his order, abortion is: Homicide after 15 weeks and before a 24-hour waiting period, Legal at your convenience, Legal at your convenience but only if the mother is in danger, Homicide after 18 weeks and before a 72-hour waiting period.
The only way to perform an abortion on that spot that is 100% legal is if it is done before 15 weeks, after waiting 72 hours, and the mother’s life is in danger.
“There will now be a short questionnaire on the ad you watched to see if you actually listened to it. If you get below 90%, we will show two minutes of ads.”
“Why are you leaving? Fill out this survey and let us know what you didn’t like. Please enter your email. Before you go, 50% of YouTube Plus Ultimate!”
A Russian video hosting Rutube (which was totally dead until the govt decided to detract Russians from using YouTube, which made the platform semi-dead) actually tried to do that, having a quiz after each ad break, asking questions such as “what TV channel has been advertised in this ad?” and repeating the ad video if answered wrong
To be serious, nobody would use that platform even there hadn’t been any ads, because competing with YouTube is not an easy feat.
I should probably be happy that Rutube and VK Video gain popularity as the regional alternatives to the monopolist which gets more aggressive each day… if not that popularity has just been inflated by bought-out bloggers and comics from Putin’s oligarch owned channels like TNT being directed to cease their YouTube presence, just so the government could have their own “YouTube without team Navalny”.
but yeah, being more shitty than YouTube at delivering ads is not an easy feat, too!
lemmy.world
Top