It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs.
Have you stopped to think how cavalier & mean it is to tell people how they should create things that others enjoy?
I went and played some turns of Civilization that I haven't touched in half a decade a couple weeks ago. Every couple years I like to play a couple matches of Mechwarrior 2. These things don't self destruct. They harken from an age before online services, when personal computers let us manage & operate our own systems, let us backup our saves & our games.
> Have you stopped to think how cavalier & mean it is to tell people how they should create things that others enjoy?
In a way that doesn't explode unexpectedly? Yeah, right, I'm the mean one here. Please, this is just more facetiously cruel antagonizing. What is with the anti-social cruelty?
It takes time.
> In a way that doesn't explode unexpectedly? Yeah, right, I'm the mean one here. Please, this is just more facetiously cruel antagonizing. What is with the anti-social cruelty?
It doesn't explode unexpectedly. It explodes in a way that the creator made it explode. So, yeah, it seems that you are the mean one here.
There's been a pretty fair & reasonable deal in computing for decades. Preservation is getting harder, worse, impossible. This is- pretty clearly to most of us- a loss.
As far as I can see the only think I'm saying here is that creators should be able to create things as they see fit. I did not say a word about consumers or what they should be doing. I would love to know what gives you the impression that I'm being cruel to consumers here.
You did insult me first, why are you surprised that I would defend myself? You are even doing it in this post to.
So you support the abolition of copyright law? That would certainly go a long way toward solving the problem of media self-destructing within human timescales. But if creators get to benefit from government granted monopolies, it's only fair that we introduce some consumer-protection law too. Copyright was intended to benefit both consumers and producers. Deliberate destruction of media is a sign that it's drifted too far in the producers' favor.
As for my opinion on copyright laws, I guess I'd be for their abolition. But that is just my opinion that isn't really based on any real knowledge of these laws or what consequences they have/removing them would have.
> But if creators get to benefit from government granted monopolies, it's only fair that we introduce some consumer-protection law too.
With this I wholeheartedly agree.
True. The Parthenon, the work of classical authors and philosophers. Michelangelo’s David. The work of musicians, artists, architects and authors from bygone eras. They all fade and disappear without the tireless effort of conservationists and historians everywhere.
And thank goodness for their work. Its an indictment of our modern technology landscape how much tomorrow’s historians will be missing. Perfect digital copies are trivially easy to make, but that doesn’t seem to help. Is it possible to run old iOS apps? Play old Xbox or PlayStation games after Microsoft and Sony shut down their old online services? Install and run old copies of adobe products? See what GMail looked like when it launched? Or play earlier versions of multiplayer games like WoW or EverQuest? No. In a few years it will all be gone, rendered inoperable, “upgraded” or purged.
The work of pirates, software crackers and emulators has kept some of what we had in the 90s alive. But so much software we have today has been intentionally artificially made to be ephemeral. Chess has survived for thousands of years. How long will DoTA, Diablo3 or Hearthstone be playable? These games will be lucky to survive a generation.
What an inhumane way to treat a creator’s life’s work. What callous disregard we hold for the curiosity of tomorrow.
How many of Michelangelo's contemporaries still exist?
Some games will last forever, some will not.
Or any web services, like Notion or Google Docs?
The way we’re going, I’d be surprised if modern games last 25 years; let alone 2500.
Not, statistically, on a meaningful time scale. All my data will probably one day be gone... But I have enough backups and replicas and remote repos that it's unlikely to happen before my own death.
Yeah, but on what timescale?
Saying it's justified for software to break as soon as the company dies because it would be destroyed on it's own anyway is like saying "we all die anyway so we might as well be slaughtered".
Nothing lasts forever, my attitude is more about being ok with that.
There's nothing about any of this that looks like a ticking time bomb. Everything was fine until one day some part of the world around us unceremoniously disappeared, for no real ascertainable reason, in a way totally beyond most peoples control.
This is shit. Unqualifiedly just shit.
Good for you that you feel free & clear for casting off the past, but it's cavalier & mean to tell people they're better off that their hard work & things they've enjoyed have, for no real reason, self-destructed.