That’s not entirely accurate. Yes, it was more than the GDP of the entire planet at the time, but that’s not the value of the entire planet. Unless they meant the amount of physical currency that existed, in which case the amount was considerably less than the 62T that the article cites, since most money is never physical.

It’s still patently ridiculous though.

You’re just like yeah I know windows and Adobe will profit off of every button I click

First - Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is not a consumer version. It’s about as locked down as you can get. It doesn’t even have drivers for the ethernet on your mobo out of the box; you better have already downloaded those. (Yes, I’m serious. It’s about Also, it’s pirated, since it’s not available to consumers at all; Microsoft doesn’t want to let consumers have the Enterprise versions of Windows because that’s no longer software-as-service. And the LTSC? That shit’s going to keep getting security updates–but no ‘feature’ updates, at all, ever–for at least 10 years.

Second - I don’t pay for Adobe, but I have to use it in my job. I’ve limited as much of it as I can, and CC doesn’t start up by default, but yeah, if you work in the commercial arts fields, you simply don’t have any serious options that aren’t Adobe, and yeah, they’re going to bleed you dry. But, as i said, i’m not the one paying. My workplace has a license that allows two seats, and I’m literally the only person there that knows how to use any of it–or even has the password to the Adobe account–so I just use the work license to put it on my home PC.

Once I finally got it installed, Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC has been fine. The only real hitch was that I had a terrible time getting the graphics card drivers instsalled; kept getting a BSOD. But everything is running quite nicely.

As soon as I remember to get my other hard drives installed, it will be time to put the Adobe Creative Suite and Corel Painter X on it, and see how happy it is with those.

No Tails?

I’d have to check and see if I can access Netflix from my desktop at work, but my suspicion is that the lower quality has more to do with smaller screens in general. That is, you can get away with a lower bitrate when you’re viewing on a screen that’s 19", and that’s probably a fairly safe maximum size for most people watching on a desk- or laptop directly.

I use my PS5, TBH. I still get ads on Amazon Prime, but I’m not seeing Netflix ads. (I also don’t have Hulu, etc.) I pay for a VPN for my desktop–I’m using Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC–and with Firefox and uBlockOrigin I see pretty minimal ads online; if you’re able to open your streaming service in a browser rather than needing to download their application, then a VPN an uBlockOrigin might be sufficient.

Good point.

A quick check online says that Samsung–which has about 25% of the global market–sold at least 1M OLED televisions and 8.3M QLED televisions in 2023. So, let’s say that they sell 9.5M televisions annually (I’m not sure if the numbers are global or US-only); that’s $190M in pure profit from advertising alone. For a billion-dollar plus corporation, that might seem small, but it’s certainly enough to get them to take notice.

Don’t give your TV the wifi password, kids. No, you don’t need to ‘finish setting up’ your TV; it works just fine as a dumb display.

These leaks frustrate labels and artists and not just for financial reasons. Many musicians work months if not years on their tracks; seeing these being paraded on pirate sites, before their official release, stings.

I dunno about this. Most of the artists I give a shit about have their music up for free on Bandcamp. The ones I’ve asked point-blank about it have said that they don’t care about piracy; they see it as free advertisement for their live shows, which is where they make most of their money (and on merch sales). This might be true of some of the largest acts, where sales might make up more than a few hundred dollars in total annual revenue, but probably a lot less true for most mid-sized or smaller acts.

OTOH, given that the labels are the ones making money off sales of music, they probably care quite a lot.

I’ve personally found that I can hear a sound difference in 320kpbs .mp3s, depending on whether or not it was encoded with a constant bit rate, or a variable bit rate.

The RICO case against the Stop Cop City protestors in Atlanta is using blank phones of protestors–who are all American citizens–as proof of criminal intent and conspiracy. It’s a catch-22; lack of evidence is evidence of guilt.

You really need a critical mass to break Adobe’s stranglehold. I hope that someone can, because I hate their software-as-a-service model. But for now, I have to suck it up and deal with it.

Their refusal to pay to integrate PANTONE colors has really fucked up my workflow. :(

Nothing is going to effectively hurt their bottom line, because they own the market. There are no other viable alternatives to Adobe if you are working in the graphics profession. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in graphic design/visual communication uses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. If you do any work with designers and receive files from them, you’ll need to use Adobe products in order to access the files and all the information in the files.

This is the sector I work in. There is absolutely no getting away from it, and until someone comes up with a product suite that is better right out of the gate, and is completely compatible with Adobe, no one is going to switch.

Beat me to this.

Advertisers tend to be strongly opposed to measuring advertising effectiveness, because if they’re not effective, then they’re out of a job.

Interesting. I wonder if I’m going to end up getting this or not? My guess is that I won’t, but we’ll see.

I have Windows 11 on my new computer, yes (and I needed Windows because some of the things I want to do require it), but I installed Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC, and it doesn’t really come with much of anything out of the box. It’s supposed to only get security updates, no features updates.

When I go to that right now, from my desktop, I get:

"Your Session Has Been Suspended

Something about your browsing behavior or network made us think you were a bot.

What can I do to resolve this?

Try again from a different device or a different location

Ensure you have enabled JavaScript in your web browser

Remove any third party browser plugins that may be running"

This is because I run all my traffic through a VPN, and Ticketmaster isn’t able to harvest information from me that it wants. It expects me to allow them full access to who I am and where I am, rather than just giving me what I’m paying for.

I absolutely fucking hate Ticketmaster’s way of doing this, because they require access to your phone. And they won’t let me use my normal VPN, or anything that blocks them from having location access. I would rather drive to the goddamn venues–what are about 90 minutes from my home–and buy tickets in person, than to deal with Ticketmaster or AXS “security” measures that attempt to circumvent my security.

Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably get an Apple device.

Sadly, I also don’t like spending money. :P You used to be able to make Hackintoshes, but Apple tends to break them with every software update.

I had been thinking about getting an IoT Enterprise LTSC release of Windows and manually adding the components that I needed. Might still do that with dual boot.

There are a lot of ways to get around that, such as:

I’m doing all of that except the last one already. As has been noted in many other places, Windows itself is now in the business of serving ads directly, and it looks like that’s getting harder and harder to disable. I managed to mostly lock down the Pro release of Win 10 that I’m on right now, but Win 11 will make that much, much harder. If it weren’t for security issues surrounding end of product life, I wouldn’t switch versions at all.

C’est la mort.

But yeah, I’ll def. look for a user-friendly version of Linux when I build my next system in a few months.

I have to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro every day for my day job. I have to keep up-to-date with my versions, because clients send me files that use features in the latest releases, and not being up-to-date means that things don’t render correctly. (I’m super-pissed that I have to update since Adobe dropped all support for Pantone colors abut a year (?) ago.)

I use Corel Painter 2022 and a Wacom pen display for fun. My guess is that a pen display might get a little weird in Linux, but the one I have is not cutting edge at least.

Yeah, don’t use that for regular work, that’s an uber-paranoid distro that’s intentionally locked down, which means things are likely going to be more difficult to get working.

I know, I know, but I liked being functionally untrackable online, and not getting ads shoved down my throat (…despite working in advertising…) all the time. It’s neat, but almost everything online seems to have privacy-invading features so deeply embedded that the browser built into Tails just can’t use them at all.