The person you replied to isn't entirely wrong, though.
"ricing" was a term in use in the car modding scene around the 80s and 90s especially, where among certain groups it was popular to modify Japanese import cars with kits and decals etc to mimic the look of the Japanese racing scene.
Some people considered these mods to be tacky and worthless because they usually tended to focus more on aesthetics than performance, purely tricking the car up visually with no other changes. Due to the Asian origin of these mods and the stereotype that Asians eat a lot of rice, the cars were insultingly dubbed "rice burners" or " ricers" and the process of doing it "ricing"
It was intended 100% as an insult, basically meaning "Your car looks like shit because of all that Japanese crap you put on it"
Like many insults of course, the insult is often "reclaimed" by the group it targets, who begin to use it between themselves in a favourable way, without any insult or negative connotation.
Ricing in the context of computers where people are styling, theming and "tricking out" their desktop almost certainly was borrowed from the car scene.
By this point there is basically no negative intent around the term at all, and especially not racist, but the place the term came from was.
One could argue that Tado should have had more certainty about their business model before they started selling promises they couldn't keep, but that's business I suppose.
Presumably Tado anticipated they could capture customers on a free tier and upsell later, but it turns out that when customers have a fully functional basic tier, they generally don't want to pay money for extras they don't care about.
And so now, Tado are left with an online service that costs them money to run, but no ongoing revenue. So of course they will try to monetise the subscription.
Of course, part of the problem is that customers have almost been conditioned to expect cloud stuff to be free. And so that's the price Tado tried to aim for, and now that is causing problems.
Either way though, what they are doing now represents "changing the deal" Darth Vader style - the product previously was a one time purchase and then free after, and they are now trying to make it paid after selling it as free. And that is bad.
Did you genuinely interpret that as a child to mean "If you put something on the Internet will be safe forever"?
As I'm sure you are now aware as an adult, the intended meaning is very much "If you put something on the Internet which is embarrassing to you or damaging to your reputation, then it will be around forever"
It's a warning that the things you don't want to stick around could end up being precisely the things which do.
We have all got very accustomed to the notion that we can put content on a website and it will stay there forever, permanently available, as if that site somehow has an obligation to look after it. But they don't.
It sucks, and there will be a lot of stuff lost, but it's also good to have a reminder that if there's data you really care about, you need to look after that data yourself.
The problem, as far as HP will be concerned, is the strategy was leaked to the public. If there was no leak there would have been no news, and no 'feedback'.
HP won't take this as a signal to not do the shitty thing. They'll take this as a signal to back off for now, and then try the shitty thing again later, but slowly and bit-by-bit, so there's no big news.
This is exactly what Microsoft are counting on, that people will simply go "oh well" and just carry on with Windows 11, because any effort needed to move away is too much effort.
Yeah, the Neo Geo really is that console that was an outrageous luxury back in the day.
There is an arcade near me which is flat fee for entry and every machine is on free-play. It's very satisfying to be able to keep pressing continue as much as you like.
Of course. And that's because "still" has two meanings. One being "the same now as always" and the other being "in a continuing state, uninterrupted"
Which one the reader will interpret is dependent on context.
"75% of children still fascinated by sticks" is very likely to mean different groups of children surveyed years apart - the 'unchanged' meaning.
"14% of adults over 50 still keep a pair of 80s flared jeans in their wardrobe" is very likely to mean it is the same adults who were wearing them back in the 80s - the 'uninterrupted' meaning.
The problem is that for this article, neither of those valid meanings make sense - at least not to me.
It is not 'uninterrupted' because we know that lots of people stopped playing old systems, while other people joined the hobby.
It is also not 'unchanged', because the levels of people playing 90s consoles will have dipped to a low somewhere in the middle and then bounced back thanks to renewed interest and modern hobbyist technologies that make these things more accessible now than they were just 10 years ago.
It's altogether a different situation now than it was then, and that's why I find "still" to be a poor choice of phrase regardless of the meaning intended.
A good chunk of the people playing on retro systems never even owned half the systems back in the day which they have collected now. Or they might be new people getting into the hobby who perhaps weren't even born when those systems were current.
People can't "still" be doing something that they were NOT doing before!
It's such a strange way of looking at a hobby which is more popular now than it ever was.
I would agree with you that the simple discontinuance of a loyalty scheme isn't in itself anti-consumer, sometimes these things just come to a close.
But choosing to can this right in the lead-up to Switch 2 certainly makes it feel like that timing is no coincidence, and has everything to do with the release of the new console.
This is obviously a move to drive adoption of Switch 2, and discourage any further purchases on the original.
Nintendo don't want you still earning points on Switch 1 when you should have gone out and bought Switch 2 already!
And they ESPECIALLY don't want you using all the points you already earned to get "free" content on the BRAND NEW Switch 2 that you should be PAYING for!
The slop is an unfortunate consequence of the streaming model.
Because there is so much content on streaming and it's so readily accessible, watching a movie isn't an "event" anymore in the way it was when DVD or VHS was the only option. And when you pair this with second-screen devices (phones) then it all adds up to people treating movies as background entertainment while they scroll their phone or do something else.
And because of that, the way shows and movies are produced has changed, too. The reason everything seems like homogenous cookie-cutter crap is because it is. In fact Netflix have specifically been asking producers to dumb content down so viewers can still understand it even when they are only paying half attention.
Of course, there are still talented people out there making great movies and shows, but they are increasingly drowned in a sea of copy-paste mediocrity.
And I do feel sorry for all those perhaps equally talented but less senior writers, directors, editors and artists who might never get to produce a movie they are truly proud of, because they've been captured by the streaming content factory that demands of them only a constant treadmill of dumbed-down slop, cheap and quick and instantly forgettable - and that people will only ever half-watch.
The person you replied to isn't entirely wrong, though.
"ricing" was a term in use in the car modding scene around the 80s and 90s especially, where among certain groups it was popular to modify Japanese import cars with kits and decals etc to mimic the look of the Japanese racing scene.
Some people considered these mods to be tacky and worthless because they usually tended to focus more on aesthetics than performance, purely tricking the car up visually with no other changes. Due to the Asian origin of these mods and the stereotype that Asians eat a lot of rice, the cars were insultingly dubbed "rice burners" or " ricers" and the process of doing it "ricing"
It was intended 100% as an insult, basically meaning "Your car looks like shit because of all that Japanese crap you put on it"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner
Like many insults of course, the insult is often "reclaimed" by the group it targets, who begin to use it between themselves in a favourable way, without any insult or negative connotation.
Ricing in the context of computers where people are styling, theming and "tricking out" their desktop almost certainly was borrowed from the car scene.
By this point there is basically no negative intent around the term at all, and especially not racist, but the place the term came from was.