How is it not unethical to grab a domain you don't need and had no intention of buying until you learned someone else was interested in it? Especially since it usually involves extorting money from the would-be buyer.
I fully agree you need to buy the domain as soon as you name your project, and that's where this person went wrong, but that doesn't make domain sniping any more ethical.
There is no evidence that the person who bought the domain name in bad faith. The blog post is suggesting that someone is literally scraping GitHub and buying the domain name of every single public repo.
The MUCH more likely scenario is that someone simply thought of the same name and bought it.
CDs just feel so utterly pointless to me these days, since I can have the 100% identical content on a hard drive. Not trying to diss what you do, it's just a weird state of mind I entered once MP3 players and bluetooth speakers replaced CD players everywhere and I can't seem to shake it.
Agree about the principle though, I try to buy merch at every gig I go to. Makes me feel slightly less bad about using Spotify.
Having something physical is nice, though. You can have the exact bits off the disc and maybe even the artwork on your hard drive, but you can't hold the album and look at it all together - especially for more elaborate packaging than your standard jewel case with inserts. In my mind, having something physical and not implicitly copyable makes it feel more real.
I'm in my own weird state of mind where I prioritize collecting physical over digital to the point of neglecting digital-only releases - digital is always going to have a copy somewhere I can listen to or purchase, but physical is limited and there's no guarantee I'll be able to get a copy later. This is probably an overly materialistic view, though.
I've been thinking that what I would like as far as "physical copy" of my media would be more like a card than anything that is actually used to play the media.
Something like an NFC-equipped greeting card (maybe more than just a cover; pages can be inside for fun stuff that used to be in the CD inserts/jackets/etc), that I could set on a stand which would then interface with the card and start playing music. Pull the card, playback stops. You get the idea. I just think something like that would serve both purposes - look and display nicely, while giving a conversation piece and more content from the creators; but not prone to damage causing issues with playback and as durable as you want them to be (could be more like HID Prox cards; plastic instead of cardboard. Or even more "exotic" materials. Lots of room for creativity).
There's a couple of things that made me think the article was way older than it actually is (and made me mildly irritated that it doesn't include the publication date).
First off, the author starts off by talking about GMT and goes on to educate the reader how UTC is actually the current standard. Maybe it's just me but I thought this would be common knowledge by now, while the author frames this as some sort of a revelation.
Then there's the jab about The IERS breaking Wikipedia's css which just doesn't seem to happen on the two devices I opened it on, so I assumed that was the case prior to Wikipedia's redesign.
Minor things for sure, and the content itself is pretty timeless (heh).
Leap seconds are also set to be removed eventually. UTC will become UT1 with a fixed offset, at least until enough seconds add up for the BIPM to care about the offset and insert a leap minute or hour or something TBD.
I'm not sure what you mean, but this sounds wrong. The whole thing about leap second abolishment is to effectively disconnect UTC from UT1, i.e. allow DUT1 to grow unbounded and make UTC a fixed offset of TAI.
With arrow buttons, placed together instead of at opposing ends.
Huh, I've never really thought about that but it does make sense to have them next to each other instead of at the opposite ends. Wonder why it's so rare to see that, apart from "it's always been this way".
I have to assume the natural question is then "which end?" If you put them at the top and the left of vertical and horizontal bars, they're inconveniently far apart when you want to pan different dimensions. If you put them bottom and right, it's very easy to move the window so they're off the screen entirely. But then that's a problem you have with split controls anyway. It feels like there is no good choice here, and split is on average least bad.
I put on the song as soon as I heard the news and it took Spotify something like 15 seconds to load it. There's a very stressed server out there right now.
The article doesn't claim otherwise, it just states that you have to enable it manually for every chat, which most people don't seem to realize (or care about).
Whoever is Winamp today, what they want to revive is not their old cool audio player, but just ride on the name and sell some modern piece of crap that has nothing to do with classic Winamp.
I do both: stream and play offline stuff. For the former, I use YouTube Music, which is incredibly awful, but at least it does work.
The website version of YouTube Music that I use on the PC is all right, but the app version I use on my phone is a usability mess. Google Music was so much better, but Google has become Microsoft. They're too big to care about making their products good any more.
For offline playing on my computer, I use Winamp. Full stop.
Let's be serious, you're not the target market. Anyone who is using minimalist software is not the target market for any corporate software. The fact it would drive you away is a feature and not bug.
Winamp was never a minimalistic player, it was one of the feature rich players. It allowed for all the UX/UI hacking you could get wayback then. It's just compared to today it was really simple.
You don't have to be minimalist to perform well. Like most other software from the era of 32MB-of-memory Windows desktops with two-digit-Mhz single-core processors, it had to be lean or everyone would hate it. That doesn't mean lacking features.
It wasn't lean in comparison to other MP3 players at the time. This is the thing I think people are forgetting. It was in comparison pretty much what that website is promising.
As someone who at the time had a Pentium processor at 100Mhz and 32Mb of RAM, I feel confident enough to say that Winamp was lean as hell.
Random anecdote: I had a SNES emulator at the time that was fast enough to play "Zelda: Link to the Past" but only as long as I did it without sound. Winamp was fast enough that I could keep it playing in the background without slowing down the game.
If you had a 486-100 with 4 MB and playing MP3s and not noticing, that would be lean.
There were other players out there. I remember using K-Jofol, but I don't remember if it had a reputation for being leaner or just having wild skins. I know mpg321 exists which is integer only decoding for speed (it made a difference on my super low end box), but I don't know if it was available at the right time.
The OS got in my way, rather than the player, trying to use 486 machines as mp3 "jukeboxes" back in the day—"the day" being when high-hundreds Mhz single-core machines were the norm, and 486s could be had at garage sales and such practically for free.
MP3 playback would pop and skip if anything else tried to touch the CPU, under Linux or Windows, even on Pentium machines (there weren't 30 background processes of dubious value constantly begging for time like on a "modern" OS, so this rarely happened unless you tried to do other stuff while the music was playing). Choice of player didn't make much difference. Contrary to common wisdom, Linux was, if anything, even worse about this than Windows, but neither was good. QNX or BeOS, however, could handle MP3 playback while multitasking and web browsing without any glitches, even on a 486—though I don't know if I ever tried with RAM as low as 4MB, most likely 16MB was about as low as I went, since I had several of these systems and was able to assemble a couple really good ones by borrowing parts from others.
What MP3 players? Windows Media Player with the MP3 codec installed on your system? I don't recall there being a lot of options for Windows, at the time.
There were a few options. Napster for one. It's just the reason we don't remember is because we all installed Winamp and forgot about the rest. I spent more time looking for skins for Winamp that I did a replacement for it.
https://skins.webamp.org/ shows what the UI/UX was for it. Which is basically an old version of the current website. Flashy and modern.
It was featureful but it was also high-performance. It was originally popular because it could play MP3s on systems where other players couldn't keep up.
...and the target audience has probably never even used or heard of Winamp, so if they're trying to ride on the name with that audience, it's going to be another fail.
Lots of people who originally used Winamp way back when are using Spotify, Deezer, etc. The target audience isn't an age group but people who want that style of music app.
I fully agree you need to buy the domain as soon as you name your project, and that's where this person went wrong, but that doesn't make domain sniping any more ethical.