The only sub I use is Spotify. I share it across my friends and family and like their vast catalog. They also don’t charge for their API so I can integrate it with Home Assistant.
My friends and family agree downloading songs manually sucks.
Piracy is a service issue. I have no problems with subscriptions as long as the price and service outpace piracy.
If the price gets to a point it doesn’t make sense, I go back to piracy.
I honestly just don’t use these services, and never recommend them, entirely because they are subscription-based.
As a model, it is largely focused on trapping the user who forgets to cancel. Many also use sneaky ways to avoid a user cancelling in time, and give no warnings.
As everyone else here, I think piracy is illegal and immoral. We should accept that we don’t own our services and software and we should never doubt that corporations have our best interest in mind.
Therefore you should never have a Plex server, never use protonmail, never use AdGuard Home, never use AdGuard DNS for private DNS.
Also you should never use Firefox with UBlock origin sponsorblock and consent o magic.
Lastly you should never ever use re-vanced and x-manager, and God forbid don’t use a VPN
Wow. This hits hard. My Malti-poo is down for whatever, even if it means using weed whacker in the yard. He will stand right next to me getting hit in the face. I need to make him move.
Tfw I paid for a subscription to access my textbook this semester.
Granted, it’s not just a textbook. My Spanish classes use VHL Central, which includes a textbook with videos, audio files, virtually endless practice assignments, and pretty much all of our assignments and course material.
It’s a really great tool, I guess I just wish I could keep access to it after I graduated. (I think you can purchase a textbook, but definitely not the full program.) Ah, well. ¯\(ツ)/¯
That kind of model is unfortunately common for university courses. I had it for my language courses, and a couple of the core maths courses.
The online platform justifies a subscription by providing additional resources, homework grading, etc. Fair enough, honestly, if they want to charge you $15 or something reasonable. But when textbook access gets rolled into the bundle, it tends to inflate the subscription cost and also have the convenient-for-the-publisher side effect of temporary access to the text. Lose-lose, from a student perspective.
I had a course that required we buy a license to Pearson’s service in order to submit homework. $100+ to view a pdf for a semester and submit homework through a buggy form interface. I still hold a grudge against everyone in the department for that decision.
With that model the company can afford to offer far more content than with a pay-once model. With a pay-once model they only generate enough income to be able to offer a book, and maybe a smattering of supplementary material. Go subscription-based however, revenue increases, so output increases and now they can afford to create and maintain a whole lot more while keeping the price affordable to those who need it during the period that they need it.
It’s a similar principle to renting vs buying. If they were to offer all of those materials as a one-off purchase at a price that would allow their business to be sustainable, it would cost more than most are able to afford.
If we go back to one-off purchases, we go back to getting less for life as opposed to a lot for a limited period of time. It’s a trade off, and clearly one that most people are willing to make.
People get so angry (OP) about the way things are just because they’re unhappy in general and looking for something to blame. Not all companies are fair with their subscription models, but most are. Not every company cares about their customers, but most do. Some companies are run by sociopaths, but most are run by normal, nice people.
Having worked in the industry at that time, there were 2 main reasons they did it like that
batteries were quite unreliable and failed often
mfgrs couldn’t afford to have one year warranties and send out field replacement units for a battery
And the reasons they stopped doing it…
batteries got better
battery contact failure was higher than battery failure.
replaceable batteries compromise waterproofing
I think they should still be replacible, but they should have better connectors that are sealed off from the rest of the device. It costs a tiny bit more to do that engineering though.
battery contact failure was higher than battery failure.
quite a feat, only doable if you try to make it fail
replaceable batteries compromise waterproofing
this is in no way true, and is a bold face industry lie. There is no shortage of water PROOF and not just resistant electronic equipment that feature replaceable batteries.
the reason replaceable batteries were removed is entirely due to planned obsolescence.
not really, the phones we have are basically all water-resistant, so they definitely aren’t waterproof (makes you wonder just why this argument is repeated so much)
and it doesn’t require something to be bulkier to make it waterproof, unless you are deep sea diving, but I think at the point where you require over $100,000 in gear to reach said point, I don’t think a deep sea diving case is out of the budget.
the most common failure on a Bosh SPS drill is the actuator arm for the pounding motion, and this is commonly shared among several power tool brands with SPS drills.
you could make the argument that these parts just fail more often, and if you go by what broke, that would make you think it’s a reasonable conclusion.
Until I tell you that said actuator arm is made of injection mold plastic and all other parts of this assembly are made of steel. So in reality, this part that just happens to break more often is doing so because it was meant to, we are more than capable of creating contact terminals that don’t break as easily
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