Both on mobile and desktop there's a "login wall" but it can be dismissed by pressing on the X.

Still, it's a dark pattern that I don't like, tomorrow at work we will discuss alternatives as we subscribed (one single account shared between everyone) just for sending attachments with filelink using thunderbird - and with a "login wall" it no longer fits the purpose

Shared from a paid account or from a free account?

If shared from paid account, then tomorrow I'm going to cancel our company account as this is unacceptable, we use that for sharing files in emails (we tried to use a self hosted nextcloud but customers are too dumb to figure out how to press the download button)

Free usage is still limited to 2gb unless you got a lot of referrals. It was a lot in 2008, but it's difficult to daily use that in 2024

I already tried to swap circuit boards in identical Seagate ide drives and not only it worked to recover the data but technically that windows 98 PC still boots today (I turn it on once a year because I have a very old SCSI film scanner that doesn't work with newer stuff)

You should try the experience, I used ddrescue to create an image

No, I'm not paying for that

The money goes only to the seller, not to the cracker that worked hard just for the glory

Not victim blaming nor defending Adobe because fuck them, but... It's not a cancellation fee and they're actually nice to let you cancel earlier.

I explain: when you sign up, you can choose between monthly commitment or yearly commitment. Yearly commitment has a much lower monthly fee because they want to discourage occasional usage, but many individuals wouldn't like to pay the huge yearly sum in a single payment, and in this case they offer a yearly plan with monthly installments. (For a big company instead is the opposite, they prefer paying the huge sum and get a single invoice instead of 12 invoices - less work for the accounting dept). Yearly plan with monthly installments isn't the same of a monthly plan.

So, technically, the user agreed to a 1-year contract and they're even nice to let you go out earlier by just paying back the discount that you got in the meantime, like if you subscribed monthly. If you think about it, it's almost unheard. With most yearly contracts, there's no possibility of early cancellation. Even Amazon, that label themselves "the most consumer friendly company" doesn't easily give partial refunds to unused Prime subscriptions.

Regarding the chargeback, in my country all the banks except American express would reject it as you got the service as stated in the contract

Now that I almost defended Adobe, fuck them and always try to find an alternative to their products before giving a single penny to them

For a professional, what Acrobat pro can do is not available in any other program and (don't tell Adobe!) only 50 cents a day is an incredible deal

For example you can scan a sheet of paper, it does OCR on it and creates a font that matches exactly the one on page, then you can change words and sentences without changing the look of it.

Trim pages, remove elements, edit embedded images and vectors with other programs (doesn't need to be made by Adobe but it works better if it is). Change margins, fonts, colors, flow text differently, change the line spacing. Have a preview how color will change when printed, see if spot colors are used and change them in different ways. Edit transparencies, use plugins for extended repetitive work. Convert the fonts to outlines if the font has some kind of DRM and doesn't allow embedding, resulting in visual difference between other computers.

The nerfed standard edition at 10 euro per month instead isn't worth anything

I wouldn't use those features even if they were available for everyone.

Why the hell do you need a pip window to watch a 30 seconds video while you do something else?

Why would you let the app automatically download garbage shorts that the algorithm decided that you are going to like

I'd also have accepted the money if I were him but at least I would have wrote a blog post explaining the situation, that now the apps are dead and controlled by a bad actor and need to get uninstalled as soon as possible.

Not almost denying it while continuing to get money on his Patreon from unaware users

I donated to the Tibor guy and I feel betrayed for how he managed the situation

It's always a danger when a malicious company purchases a famous open source project.

Like that israeli adware company that bought simple mobile tools

Mondo TV makes copycat cartoons with bad storytelling, bad drawing and bad dubbing, to be sold in those €2 DVDs in the supermarket bargain bins

I have the feeling that half a million is the profit of a decade

Why the fuck are they using a cloud tts on an Android device??? Can't they use on device tts?? Seems extremely stupid for no reason

1. It's expensive. They are paying a fee to the third party tts provider each single time someone needs a response. They boast "no subscriptions" - that means those fees are paid only by new customer purchases. Ponzi 2.0

2. It's fucking expensive. Elevenlabs tts voices costs thousands of dollars per month plus $0.18 per 1000 characters. Ask the history of a monument and the verbose result that the LLM regurgitated costs them $0.15. Are they banking on the fact that most customers would just shelf the device after a day?

3. It's slower. Each time the device needs to reply, it needs to stream an audio file instead of a few bytes of compressed text

4. For the more realistic voices it's only cheaper in the short term. I get it - they don't like the robotic free voices and licensing a good closed source one costs money. But then you don't need to pay the "cloud" forever. Did they plan to shut down shortly after the launch? Where the money for running each user in a VM is coming out? (I saw from a YouTube video that it looked like they were using a browser automation tool in a VM)

At this point since everything is run on the cloud (=somebody else's computer) this could not only be a smartphone app, but a smartwatch app.

I wonder if they will just fold and do a rug pull now blaming the hackers or fix the problem.

Fixing the problem seems difficult for them - need to fully rewrite the app and having everything proxied through their authenticated server, increasing their expenses (and a rushed fix isn't secure/tested). But their money comes only from new investors and new customers, and at this point I doubt that they can sell more units or scam more investors.

also, when you have 5g failover on the router and the fiber it's down, it automagically continues to work without admin intervention

I was also thinking like that until I discovered that the only dude on XDA that was packaging all kind of roms for my short lived Xiaomi, was doing it on random servers (hacked servers? He was always complaining on his telegram channel that he couldn't find VMs with enough RAM or that "didn't last enough") and he sold the phone one year before so couldn't test it. Just running a script and if it compiles, it ships.

After I finished to read his telegram channel I restored the original android 8 firmware and flipped it on eBay...

Should be the bare minimum

I stopped buying Xiaomi because they switched from "monthly updates for years to come" (until around mi 5-6) to "a single update in the phone lifetime, if you're lucky" (RIP those idiots who purchased an expensive mix 3 5g and never saw any update) passing from "we gonna push ota updates without testing, you might softbrick LOL"

Although is understandable because they churn out 1 new phone every week, I guess it's extremely tiring compiling and testing software for all those variants /s

They copy everything from the iPhone, they don't copy the best part. Just three new models every year, updates for years. Why the opposite? People is going to lose track of what's better between the mi 13s pro x and the Redmi note 16x pro 5g. Especially when you add more chaos by rebadging that Redmi as poco x33 pro 5g but changing some bits here and there to make software incompatible

For me it was annoying enough to switch to android. I really felt like I had to use iCloud, forced through my throat. I have ocd and a red dot means "I need to open this app immediately RIGHT NOW to clear it" - and then your can't clear it until you subscribe

it's a dark pattern deliberately chosen to let people get annoyed and pay for icloud. On windows people instead will accidentally fill their onedrive account and that's it. They won't even know that they're using it. It might send some scary emails like "your cloud backup is full!!!11 you gonna lose everything!!111" but those go directly in spam. Error messages in windows for regular users appear like "����� �������� �����������" - their eyes don't have the right encoding to understand the message, so they just click OK and dismiss it. Instead, the red dot is prominent in the home screen of every iphone and bother also those that don't read the error messages....

I had one of those NAS (NSA320). Even when they were new and suppoted they were using some ancient custom version of linux with ancient packages. It would be insane to expose them on the internet.

They never reinstalled OneDrive after an update... yet

(I hate how I have to uninstall useless shit after updates)