- This topic has 8 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated Nov 8-7:16 pm by anti-apXos.
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PPC
This is why I love Open Source Apps- this is old news, that only recently came to my attention:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3xk3p/adobe-tells-users-they-can-get-sued-for-using-old-versions-of-photoshopYeah, you pay a lot of cash for the right to use a software. Then, because the persons that sold you that software decide that you can no longer use it, you can get sued by using something you paid for…
Imagine suddenly you lose the right to read you favorite book, that you bought or someone gave you for your birthday, or lose the right to play your favorite cd, or play your favorite dvd, etc… Young folks used to just watching movies on streaming services, or listening to streaming audio (I guess very few of them read and would really miss books) won’t know what it really means to own something.P.
Xunzi_23
Should also add also for capturing photons.
You can be heavily fined or sued for photographing many buildings and landmarks.
EU should have stopped the shitty practices by mostly american companys, but sacks
of money found in offices tell a story of why citizens are treated like cows.
Milked to death.ChPol
In another register, but for me equivalent.
You buy music by your favourite band on analogue cassette (young people can’t understand it, but it did exist).
OK, but the tapes are getting longer, the sound is getting worse… A new digital tape system comes out: you buy it again.
But tapes are fragile, a CD is better, smaller and vinyl is old-fashioned, difficult to start up. And all the old equipment disappears, it’s impossible to repair.
So we buy CDs.
But CDs are old-fashioned… But we’ve bought the same album three times now: stop! What’s more, you’ve been cheated by dishonest salespeople because the sound on Itune or Spotify is poor compared to a CD, which is itself appallingly poor compared to a well-maintained vinyl and a decent sound system.
And we throw away tons of plastic and printed circuits. And unlike your old computers, everything is too fragile to be used again.@ChPol – I get what you mean…
But it that particular case that you mentioned, the support medium, it’s a bit different, and caused by the changing technology… In my particular case, I ripped my favorite audio cds to audio files- you can do that, at least here in the EU, as long as only 1 copy of the file is used at a time… So you can rip your old cd’s and upload them to your computer/tablet/phone and listen to your music, without requiring any streaming service at all (and with better quality than those compressed files usually have).
PS: Long ago, I ripped most of the father’s vinil collection to mp3 and saved it to a single cd, that he then could listen to on his dvd player… Unfortunally he left the disk out on the sun and it got burned… đP.
@PPC
You’re right, but the new technologies were sold to us as being better, and with hindsight we can see that this was half true or completely false. I remember a King Krimson vinyl record that made the house shake and the bass rattled the furniture: you could feel yourself throbbing to the music. On CD, the result is a very disappointing flat track.
It’s the same with software. You have to buy something new. Microsoft is our biggest producer of waste. The added functions don’t add much, but are supported by manufacturers who are “rubbing their hands”. This company makes a lot of perfectly operational PCs unusable after a few years. If you throw them away, it sells them: that’s its business model.(I also digitised a lot of vinyl to mp3 and to ogg. It fit on multiple CDs at first but most of it was on HD. Strangely enough, it’s the only PC in my possession that burnt up its motherboard and hard drive in one go. It took too long, I will never digitise again and I lost my money!)
HiChPol, my maybe 400 Vinyl records and Thorenz Record player will probably still be in use in another hundred years.
Vinyl is being pressed in huge quantity’s again. I bought the record player which has an sme arm many years ago,
keep it clean, oil it once a year change the drive belt about every 5 years, Cartridge or replacement needle
as needed. I have an Ortofon middle of range, sound is MUCH better than CD as long as record is ok.Many of my purchased CD are now non playable, many expensive CD players last only a few years, if buyer is lucky.
Some only warranty period plus a couple of months.Computer wise I dread the day mine really goes. I bought a good board from Gigabyte, a good PSU. Up to now, more than
12 years on capacitors are good. I replaced Drives with SSD and NVME, Graphics card with a silent one. Ensure everything
is clean and and replaced processor cooler and paste. The intel cooler was becoming very loud, sound of imminent failure.
I backup to USB Sticks and Rotating disk. SSD or NVME fails come with no warning and data loss.Both are forgetful, if not
powered expect data loss after a few months, in some extreme cases even weeks suffice to make a drive unreadable.Robin
Well, maybe I am (like Xunzi) not representative, but I never did buy identical recordings twice merely for the reason of getting them on a more up to date storage medium. So parts of my music collection are stored on real tape (yes, the old-style 4-channel studio tape machine with the huge tape discs), others on (really high quality metal type IV) cassettes, some on vinyl (and even some few true Schellack-disks, these have actually poor mono sound, but you could play those on a gramophone even with a steel needle). Other recordings I have bought on CD and CD sets. And finally the most recent ones are stored as mp3 format on an mp3 player or on the PC, with backup, for sure. Never made attempts to convert from one technique to a more recent one like PPC did. Why should I waste my time with this time consuming task? Just as Xunzi already states, the old vinyl disks sound really great still, also the tape recordings and the cassette recordings as well. No need to convert everything to mp3 or ogg. Whether old stuff sounds great or not is not necessarily a question of the storage media, but rather a question of quality of your playback equipment and whether you take care of your equipment. Make sure your magnetic head is always demagnetized properly, make sure your diamond or sapphire in disc player is in a perfect condition, the stylus force and angle is always adjusted properly. Then you’ll hardly ever in your life have to rebuy the identical recordings for reasons of poor sound quality (well, may be differently when you are a professional disc jockey or scratcher using a slipmat). And finally: Never touch the surface of vinyl discs or CDs with your fingertips. The acid mantle of your skin will irreversible damage the material over the following years without notice. So always handle the discs (vinyl and cd both) at their utmost rim only. (Professional archives actually do use gloves.)
When player equipment like CD player breaks down after some years in most cases this is due to design decision of the manufacturer, it’s not a law of nature. E.g. I had to resolder many of the soldering points on its board, the original solder they had used was simply brittle (probably this was this unreliable lead free stuff), no wonder it refuses working after short time. Call it obsolescence by design, planned obsolescence. If you find CDs not playing anymore, check them in another CD player. It’s well know they wear out when exposed to light or temperature or finger prints, also fine scratches are critical. It’s about their overall error rate which increases and sums up over time. And whether the CD still plays after years depends heavily on the error correction abilities of the algorithm your CD drive has implemented. Weak algorithms refuse playing CDs with a relatively low error rate already, while others do actually play heavily worn out CDs without noticeable error. So it depends on the player. The back side of a CD always is extremely damageable, way more than the front side. So don’t write something on the back, don’t glue stickers to the back, make sure literally no scratch on the back… And finally we have to talk about copy protection some manufacturers used on their disks to keep you from digitally copying the content to your PC: These disks have been delivered purposefully with the maximum amount of errors, so in new condition you won’t notice they are actually damaged already. But these discs can’t age, as you easily can understand. They were (under the aspect of error correction) at the end of their life already when you purchase them. This (in my eyes fraudulent) practice was also wellknown in the past, I had to return some CD’s already immediately after purchasing exactly for this reason, they exceeded the error correction abilities of some players. A good test was always to try playing them in your car radio/CD player, which in most cases came with very poor error correction abilities compared with your hifi equipment at home. If a disc refused to play in there, it was one of these what we call âUn-CDâ meaning ânot a CDâ, no idea how these are called in English language when purposefully violating the red book standards. As said: even when those Un-CDs played immediately after purchasing, there is no room left for the additional error rate during lifetime, so they will fail very soon. Simply don’t buy such kind of fraudulent rubbish. Please note: I explicitly don’t talk here about the proper CDs meeting the red book standards, which last decades if treated and stored properly.The sole reason for buying the same piece of music again is when I want to listen and compare another interpretation by another artist. So I own e.g. the very same cello concerto on tape played by Paul Tortelier, another interpretation on disque performed by Jacqueline du PrĂ©, again another interpretation on Cassette played by Mstislaw Rostropowitsch, and finally one played by Pablo Casals on CD. All of them I’ve bought or (recorded from a public radio channel) in different decades. And most recently I purchased an interpretation by Heinrich Schiff as mp3 (320kbps) download format. Same for other pieces of music. All my Vinyl originates from 1950s to 1990s, the tapes date from 1970 to 1990, the cassettes from 1980 to 2000, the CD’s from 1990s to recent. Why should I waste time converting them, why should I waste money to buy all the different interpretations again and again, just for the reason there again is a brand new recording method available? This will happen again and again… Who could spend all the money for re-buying hundreds of discs, hundreds of cds’s, tapes, cassettes, just to have them all in the most recent flavour of playback media? That’s insane. Just keep what you have, and buy new things in the most current available format. Then you are fine.
And then again: I’ve seen so called remastered or digitally remastered editions of pieces I know from my old-style vinyl discs. The new editions have pretty poor sound compared with the old editions, even when the new ones come digitally on CD now. The reason for this is: While remastering the channels are re-mixed in recording studio by audio engineers to adapt them to the recent listening experience or listening habits of the majority of the recent audience. The modern way of mixing is simply to adjust the frequency range to what majority of modern listerners is used to from consuming pop music: pulled bass and trebble to the max, while mid range frequencies are pulled down a bit. It sounds really unnatural, esp. when you know how it really sounds in a concert hall… No real physical instrument could produce that fat bass sound you get from the remixed digitised CD or download/streaming editions. This is a huge drawback of many modern editions, even well known labels suffer from this. But what counts here is what majority asks for and buys, it’s simply about marketing. Hence I’ll happily stick to my old stuff.Concerning the software issue: If I recollect correctly, this is only true for the Photoshop versions after Ver. 13.0 (from 2012), when they started their cloud thing, and the potential risk of loosing the means of legally using something you’ve paid for was something people have been warned about when this construction has started. Strange enough somebody is caught by surprise now this has actually happened as predicted. Was in early 2000s one of the reasons for me never again purchasing non-free software. Just read carefully what is written in the contract you are signing before paying for something. It’s actually that easy. If what you read is inacceptable, just don’t buy and don’t use it. There are always (mostly always) free (in the meaning of fsf, not necessarily free of charge) alternatives available. Or, if you actually need to rely on non-free software for some reason, you should always keep in mind you can get disowned arbitrarily at any time by the person/enterprise who has licensed it to you, in case you have accepted this possibility in the contract.
‘nuf said. Lunch break is over. Back to work.
RobinWindows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.
stevix
At one time my music collection was spread across shellac 78’s, vinyl singles and LP’s, open reel tapes, cassettes, minidiscs, and CD’s. I’ve even got one original Edison wax cylinder. Over the years I eventually digitised the whole lot (except the wax cylinder), as some of the equipment to play some of this stuff was becoming difficult and/or expensive to repair.
The main thing that’s changed in my view is that back in the 70’s if I heard something I liked I would buy the record. Just one copy of course. Now it’s all digital it appears that I need 6 backups, in order to be 100% confident I’m not going to lose the lot at the click of a mouse!
anti-apXos
Of course, they’re only making the statement that the suit might be brought, no cases of them actually doing it. I wonder what the result would be if they did? Of course, even if the suit was not in their favor or was even thrown out, it would still have a chilling effect.
For that matter, just mentioning the possibility has it’s effect (at least Adobe must think so or they wouldn’t do it). I wonder if users could sue Adobe for making an empty threat. Some kind of intimidation.
I tell you, if I didn’t hate everything about the courts system, I would have been a lawyer just to bring cases against bussinesses that do these things.
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