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Usually competition is what make greedy capitalist bastards care for their customers. Competition between producers is usually good for consumers.
Although, it seems this simple equation have some nuance to it.... There is a thought that has been nagging me for a while already, it seems nothing short of a huge company (i.e. near monopoly) could produce something as successful (and loved by me, at least) that the .NET Framework... (although, arguably, it was brought alive thanks to the competitive pressure from Java)
Anyway, today I got another product where competition seems somewhat detrimental to the consumer. Video streaming service! Now everyone wants to make one! Existing one have less new good movies than they used to have, and I have to pay x number of subscription to get all I want! 
This was prompted by seeing the trailer for "Luck", looks fun, only need to register to yet one more stream service (Apple TV)..  
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That annoys me as well - Paramount+ for example. They show one episode of Halo for free on Channel 5 (without mentioning it's just the one) then you have to pay for the streaming service to get more. No thanks!
I suspect that what'll actually happen is it'll boost piracy rather than subscriptions.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Shh... I won't tell! 
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OriginalGriff wrote: it'll boost piracy rather than subscriptions.
Oh so true, the wife and I have such diverse tastes that it is not possible to get streaming services to meet them, cancelled them all, then Oz blocked the torrent sites, now I vpn to the US and download.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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I'm more inclined to think that .NET was born as a copy of Java, if I'm not mistaken they even had to change the name so it did not resemble "Java" too much 
(PS I'm not a Java programmer and not saying Java is better)
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Well....it's exactly what I said?! 
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I meant to say that .NET wasn't that innovative IMHO
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I agree I compared the original java iText code to the c# port(iTextSharp) and it was largely a case of renaming method names e.g. getFile => GetFile
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Certainly competition plays a role, but with the masses all dropping cable and satellite TV services, channels like Paramount+, Peacock, History Channel, etc., were losing viewers because they had no other medium through which to broadcast.
It's still a better deal than cable/satellite. I subscribe to Prime, Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, AppleTV, and Paramount+ and I still pay less than half of what I used to pay for digital TV from my phone/internet provider (who actually encouraged me to drop it and upgrade to faster fiber).
My frustration is trying to remember which show is on which subscription, and some of the crappy UIs (I'm looking at you, Apple and HBO).
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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Super Lloyd wrote: Anyway, today I got another product where competition seems somewhat detrimental to the consumer. Video streaming service! Now everyone wants to make one!
For years people have been clamoring for a la carte TV programming instead of cable/satellite's packages (which mostly consists of bundles you don't want except for the one or two channels you care about).
The way I see it, this isn't all that different. Thing is, if you want them all (even that was even possible), it gets as expensive, if not more-so, than cable/satellite.
Competition is good, fragmentation not so much.
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Last Friday and Saturday Canada experienced one of the downsides of capitalistic monopolies. The Rogers Communications network was upgraded early Friday morning and immediately crashed. It was not resored until Saturday.
Rogers is the sole provider of Interac service in Canada. All POS ATMs instantly became unusable. Customers had to use cash (who carries that anymore) or credit to make purchases. Or walk away leaving the goods on the counter.
Since the ATM network was down, you had to go to the bank in person to get cash. One pundit suggested that many Millennials (and later generations) would not realize that service was still available.
Pearson International airport, the largest in the country, uses Rogers exclusively. Staff and passengers lost their Internet connections. Incoming foreign passengers could not access their on-line documents. They were denied entry until they could find alternative means (remember fax?) of producing them. Some passengers were held on their planes to avoid overcrowding the airport.
No one has an estimate of the damage yet but it is expected to be extremely high.
I'm glad that I still had enough room on my credit card for my weekend groceries, beer and wine.
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Anyone travelling internationally who does not have paper copies of any relevant documents should be refused entry on the grounds of feeblemindedness.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Rogers is my internet provider. Curiously, I could send and receive emails on an outlook.com address, but no others, and couldn't access any websites. Rogers' phone, mobile, and cable TV networks were also down for much of this time. The franchise oligopolies that operate these services in Canada are widely loathed, but this kind of cronyism is also common elsewhere.
The upgrade must have been a miracle of incompetence. I worked on products that had dual processors for failover. Depending on the configuration and what went wrong, this either worked well or failed anyway, because of synchronized software problems. But the way upgrades were done was to take one processor offline, upgrade its software, and then make it the active processor. If there was a problem, you could revert to the standby to recover. And upgrades were never flash cut through a network. A new release soaked in a few sites until it had proven itself, and only then was the rest of the network upgraded.
I'm waiting for a phone call, because I was once an expert witness for a serious network outage that occurred in France. 
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Greg Utas wrote: Curiously, I could send and receive emails on an outlook.com address, but no others, and couldn't access any websites.
Maybe they were more than 500 miles away ...
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I still remember when you paid for cable so you didn't have to put up with commercials. Now you pay for what has become mostly commercials! Bring back ON TV - I think I still have the descrambler I built to decode it!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: Bring back ON TV
 Ha! My mother used to work for them in the early 80's. I haven't heard anyone reference ON TV for over 30 years.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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When I was in college, we considered it very clever to design and build the decoders. IIRC, they mixed a relatively low frequency sine wave with the video signal to scramble it. The fix was simple - sample it, use a low-pass filter to extract the sine wave, invert it, and remix. The hardest part was etching and drilling the circuit board. They had one competitor that used a somewhat more complex scheme, but for the life of me I can no longer remember the name.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: I still remember when you paid for cable so you didn't have to put up with commercials.
I still pay for BDs (and occasionally DVDs) so I don't have to put up with commercials.
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Competition sometimes becomes one of who can best manipulate the customer (indirectly, subconsciously, psychologically, fine print trickery, etc.). Where product satisfaction as feedback is only a plus not a goal. Advertising does falls into this category but it's more honest attempt get us to buy something (an ad is shown as an ad). yada yada yada
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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u could just not watch those new movies or you could pay to watch a particular one like google movies or msft or just google and you will find
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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Can't be a coincidence that it is named after a pharmacy:
BENU Apotheek[^]
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I thought the Bendu was in a galaxy far far away.
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Hey guys is just its name. The amazing thing it seems to be a cluster of small rocks loosely clinging together with gravity and electrostatic forces. It wants to shrink and expand at the same time. It's many solids but not solid. weird stuff.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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The time has come I need to install dotMemory.
Even though I specifically did NOT install Resharper, it was installed anyway and screwed up my visual studio shortcut, refactor, intellisense and startup times... (1,700 projects in this solution, can't have performance hog like resharper running!!  ) now I am going through all the resharper options to disable them all.. but my VS keep behaving suspiciously different...
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