PhobosAnomaly

Don't

simple really

Obligatory:

I don't know man, I agree with everything you say but I wouldn't say the security element killed the system - the PS1 and DS had rampant piracy but still sold like hot cakes. I know people (anecdotal evidence alert) who bought a first gen Switch because it was so easy to flash and exercise the ability to boot "homebrew software".

I'm pretty sure the CD trick only worked on the first (or first iterations) of DC hardware too - I forget whether they either patched out the ability to read CD's aside from karaoke discs, or whether it was a change in CD drive or laser in manufacturing - but I didn't see much piracy where I was.

In a case of "opposite side of the same coin" though, I remember a small surge of people buying a CD just for Bleem!, and the ability to play patched editions of PS1 games on a DC. I understand Metal Gear Solid played well on it.

Fun times.

Data mining, timing, and just sheer luck I guess.

See also: Sega Dreamcast: had online multiplayer and industry redefining graphics, but hamstrung by an onboard 33.6kbps modem.

Flappy Bird: one of the most rudimentary games ever, but just seemed to take off and start it's own snowballing success.

Google Glass: probably had the data mining and cash to weather a bad luck storm, but ultimately was a lower spec AR set that are being hawked today.

I suppose musical.ly rode the wave of popularity, hit the right time post-credit crunch, and rebranded itself in such a way that the pandemic was good for business...

...oh, and the liberal use and sharing of data, too.

Every now and then, a cuppa that's more cowjuice than tea hits the spot. When I'm travelling from office to office with work, it's nice knowing I'm getting a different cuppa each time - for better or for worse.

Brilliant! Even funnier that it was the QM that done goofed!

I always knew procurement across the UK public sector was wasteful, but I never knew quite how wasteful until I started working alongside various bodies.

This was just one of the more egregious - and more entertaining - examples.

Another story from the workplace probably worthy of a "who, me?" segment on el reg:

An old admin grade at one of my last workplaces was... unique, in her approach to her workload. In the times that we haven't had an admin assistant in post, the workload gets shared out amongst the team so the job still gets done, but it's primarily menial and trivial stuff. It's not difficult, but the way the civil service works, sometimes a ten second job takes ten minutes. It wasn't that she was particularly awful - just a bit useless and had all the critical thinking skills of a common housebrick. Anything that needed a decision made became someone else's job.

Someone went in to to see her wanting another AA battery, to replace one in the clock to stop people from losing their minds having done a few hours in the office, but still only seeing half past nine on the clock. There's none left in the store cupboard, so she logs on to the ordering system, and realises that they come in nondescript "units", rather than the SKU style setup you see on most retailer sites. So, she goes for 10 - thinking ten packs would be enough for a while.

A week later, a lorry pulls up at the office, with a pallet for delivery. Nobody's expecting this, and we can't lift it off the lorry for it being too heavy, and we had to get a neighbouring unit's forklift driver to pop it off the lorry for us and leave it at our side door, probably for a pack of fags and a coffee. We opens it up, and hurrah, our batteries are here!

All ten thousand of them.

Turns out, a "unit" in this branch of the civil service is "per thousand", so we literally had nearly a tonne of batteries on a pallet outside. We tried phoning the distribution centre, and they're clearly not giving a fuck about something as low value as this, and certainly aren't sending a truck to get them - this was now an "us" problem.

One of the lads pulls out a stick of batteries, goes back into the office, comes back ashen faced...

"Boys, the clock needs AAA batteries"

We had a slowly dwindling mountain of AA batteries for about three months, literally people taking strips of batteries home at Christmas to put in toys, people bringing in old Game Boys or Game Gears just to try them out with a supply of new batteries, and a Sky Digital remote control with a now perpetually infinite lifespan.

God bless the civil service.

fuckin

I absolutely love Dee Dee man. Quality.

Preferably on job time.

I quite enjoy knowing that the internal pushing effort to expel the log is the first bit of work I've done for the day.

Euronews has done what The Independent did in the UK - went from being a brilliant source of news, to being a bit of a shambles. I used to watch the Euronews channel pretty much daily until they pivoted to a magazine show style of output. The website is just as bad.

A shame really.

Good point. Might have to noise up the French on the border or something.