Nope.

Back in the box and straight back to the store.

I’m interested to hear what the deal is now with all those damn “EcoATM” cell phone buying kiosks now, because to my knowledge those were operated by the same outfit (Outerwall) as Redbox is/was. Are they bankrupt, too? My local Dollar General has had one squatting in their foyer for over a year with an out of order sign taped to it and apparently nobody from the mothership has noticed or cares.

Those damn things are theoretically full of cash.

But it’s abandoned on their property. If you abandoned something on a commercial property and never came to reclaim it, eventually (probably quite quickly) the store management would dispose of it. They’re not going to keep it around stinking up the place forever “just in case.”

I’d doubt somebody could officially just unilaterally throw the thing away, but the business on whose property it’s parked absolutely has some kind of contingency to deal with crap left there by one of their vendors. Or they will if they’re a retail operation worth a damn.

Or a very badly made wall…

Tofu dreg construction, perhaps.

This is in fact precisely what happens. LLM output becomes increasingly incoherent with each subsequent generation trained off of previously AI generated data.

One can surmise it’s actually a life-sized model kit tank made out of cheap plastic, akin to how it works in Ground Defense Force! Mao-Chan.

The general consensus of the internet seems to be no, although this surely varies to some degree based on the laws in whichever country you’re in.

Before anyone tries the other avenue of attack, titles to things generally cannot be copyrighted, either. Content of a work can be, but the name of it cannot.

The current revived version appears to be tied to a content streaming platform for “creators,” and also sells NFT’s. The mothership certainly gets a cut of all of those sales. Just like seemingly every other techbro venture nowadays, their business model entirely revolves around being a “service,” and the media player itself is apparently just a side hobby. (Note that this is basically exactly the same mutation that happened to Napster. That worked well.)

Otherwise, the answer is sponsorship by a corporate sugar daddy. Even the OG Winamp was sponsored by and then ultimately bought outright by AOL.

Pachinko in Japan is basically what slot machines are here, and they are arranged in a similar manner with similar degrees of design audacity. Most of them also have a slot machine built into them, which spins its reels (digitally, they’re all screens now) whenever you land a ball in a pocket or whatever. You get a fixed payout for landing a ball in a pocket, but you can also theoretically win a jackpot by winning at the slot machine aspect. So think of it like a slot machine that has a luck check before you can even pull the lever, and then another luck check to see if you actually win. Gamblers are already famously bad at understanding statistics, but I guarantee you practically nobody can accurately assess the risk vs. reward of that. It’s diabolical, but apparently also very effective.

For what it’s worth, I have an “old” Metal Army pachinko machine from circa 1998 and even mine has a color LCD screen slot machine reel in the middle of the playfield.

While we’re at it, even my dinky Metal Army machine is quite possibly the single loudest mechanical object ever manufactured in the history of mankind, and that’s when there’s only one of them. A ball bearing factory in full production during a tornado is probably quieter than a pachinko parlor at prime time.

My LG smart TV from 2017 or so has never been connected to any network.

About two years after I set it up, it went through this phase where every time I powered it on I got a new nag popup about this app, that app, this streaming service, and that streaming service having their “support ended” after which they would no longer work. One after the other. I can only conclude that the thing had fucking suicide timers built into all of its onboard apps to deliberately pull this crap on you regardless of any other factors to try to trick or entice you into buying a new TV.

Needless to say, I did not buy a new TV. Mine has had a PC plugged into it and has since day 1, which serves it all of its content except that which is generated by retro video game consoles.

What a crock of shit.

WineDB has it marked as silver.

Honestly, for a modern PC I can’t imagine Winamp is all that taxing of a program to run. I think the biggest bugbear will be its fairly tight integration with the Windows shell for file management and enqueuing things from an Explorer window, and maybe the external device integrations which would rely heavily on the Windows API and possibly WDM.

If you’re running Windows you can still use old versions of Winamp.

On Linux, I dunno. I’ll bet you it’ll run in Wine.

The whole look n’ feel. Not UI, then, maybe just call it overall design.

But it was the first thing I thought of as soon as I saw it. Even the cursive font, in pink…

I like my idea for kaiju sized Rock-em, Sock-em Robots better. We could host robot battles between skilled karate practitioners and put them live on television.

What, it’s been done already?

Ah, crap.

…That site’s UI looks like someone saw the marketing literature for the Frigidaire produce preserver and said, “Yeah, that’ll do.”

In its day Winamp was the most comprehensive media player and users were super into its skinability which was a big deal at the time. Nowadays the “plays everything” throne is very firmly occupied by VLC, with a little cushioned stool next to it for Media Player Classic to sit on. However, neither of them offer the user interface experience that Winamp does/did.

Winamp was iTunes before iTunes. It was Spotify before Spotify. It did an excellent job of managing the hordes of totally legitimate MP3’s we all had back in the day, and did so with an aplomb that nothing else seemed to manage. Really, its playlist and library management was top notch. Newer apps still piss me off because none of them do it the way Winamp did.

Side note, if you have an old iPod kicking around and don’t feel like dealing with Apple’s ecosystem, Winamp can still, to this very day, stick music on your device natively without having to install or use iTunes. Just saying.

But this source code release thing really baffles me. I have no idea what the point of that was supposed to be.

I think this one can be summed up as the old, “The nail that sticks up gets pounded down.” I don’t think it’s really any deeper than that.

Behave or exhibit yourself in a way that people don’t get, and the response from some is to just get irrationally angry and/or stupid about it. Logic does not apply.

Your line of reasoning is exactly the same as if a company – for the sake of argument, let’s say Ubisoft for absolutely no particular reason whatsoever – made a shitty product that no one actually wanted to buy, and therefore only sold six copies.

Who “recoups” the cost then? Nobody. That’s called the inherent risk of operating a business.

It’s also why indie developers in this day and age typically wind up considerably more successful for both themselves and their employees, because they don’t need to outlay the enormous bloated expenditures of the AAA studios and publishers, nor go to such extreme lengths to desperately rake in enough revenue to break even.

That, and there is no penalty for giving a false positive warning although there is for noncompliance. So manufacturers will just stick a Prop 65 label on everything rather than put forth the brainpower required to verify if any of their products or materials sourced from any of their innumerable suppliers and subcontractors might actually contain a chemical from the naughty list or not. Therefore the label becomes less than meaningless.

Mustang couldn’t make it. All of them are upside down in a ditch someplace.