We have a fee-free bank-to-bank transfer system that is based on pre-digital technology that takes 2-3 business days. We often call it "direct deposit" or automated clearing house (ACH). It's often used for payroll and paying bills.
Now, we could probably make this payment system instantaneous relatively effortlessly (and thus useful for regular in-store purchases), but the banks lobby against this so they can continue to charge us fees and interest to over-use credit cards. (Interestingly enough, credit and debit cards all use direct deposit on the backend to actual transfer funds between parties).
This is all fine and dandy for most people because they simply can't imagine doing things a more consumer-friendly way.
"Is that a barcode scanner? That can be used by the government to track my purchases!"
--Burt Gummer (Tremors 2, 1996)
The government already tracks your car with its GPS transmitter.
Republican energy policy is to let oil barons do whatever they want, destroy whatever they want for new drilling and pay as little taxes as possible.
Democrat energy strategy is to regulate oil, preserve delicate ecosystems by banning oil/gas exploration wells and fracking in those areas and investing in expanded green energy policy.
The political problem for Dems is that ballooning prices at the gas pump are very unpopular with moderate/undecided voters (reality is that almost everyone in this country has to fill up their car tank regularly) and the oil barons can manipulate their output, control the messaging and change these people's votes (especially in an election year).
Dumping some of our strategic reserves when prices get too high is a strategy that counters this machination.
And if the world supply is in a high producing state, dumping some of these reserves can sink prices low enough we can refill those reserves for cheaper than we initially bought the reserves that we dumped.
Republicans then get on the horn and claim this is risky, helps nobody but democrat politics, etc, etc. They're not wrong, but the entire thing is political brinkmanship, so... who cares? π
It's still popular because it was popular.
Also, it was simple and modular.
It was largely succeeded by monolithic and enshittified versions of iTunes, which have zero appeal these days. So it's still remembered fondly for not enshittifying and not trying to build a walled garden.
Well, it is on Android...
But the main app is tightly integrated into the win32 api--moving it to linux would basically require a complete rewrite. DEADBEEF is an example of something like this. Parallel values and ideals, but open source.
There are wine-bottled versions out there. Of course, whether or not output is bit perfect would depend on the wine settings. Bottling it, of course, defeats the point of the program being highly modular/extensible.
Also, you have to remember that a lot of proprietary formats have proprietary encoders/decoders that are incompatible with the GPL.
Shipping Windows binaries are much less of a hassle for the dev than than trying to reverse-engineer everything they need or figuring out how to manage dependencies with different licenses across different package managers and distros with different goals.
tl;dl foobar2000 is an excellent sum of its parts; like Winamp was back-in-the-day. You start changing parts and you get a different sum.
@s_s
@lemmy.one