The N-Gage had a bunch of bizarre design decisions.
The game cartridge slot was behind the battery - swapping games required disassembling the phone.
The revised QD version fixed a lot of the mistakes but it was too little too late by then.
Throwing money at AI seems a big gamble for productivity.
I’d rather see the UK invest in its human workers instead, with better education and training. IT skills for example as still lacking in the country. PCs have now existed for 30+ years yet so many still struggle with task like making simple spreadsheets.
If there is going be insistence on platforms being open there shouldn’t be these distinctions.
All of these devices are capable of general purpose computing at a hardware level, phones, tablets, PCs, headsets are now very similar and generalised in that regard. I don’t see why a phone platform should be forced to be open while a games console gets to remain closed, when there is now only a hair’s breadth separating an Xbox from a Windows PC.
Considering the latest changes at Meta, it seems their latest innovation is to transform social media into antisocial media.
USB-C has been a blessing and curse. One port that does everything, except when it doesn’t. Even charging is now complicated by the “guess the cable that supports the right PD type” game.
Not that the old days were much better. I don’t miss faffing around with the myriad of serial and parallel port modes and settings.
Take the AI crap out and give it an open display API and it would be a fun desk toy.
A rotating phone screen in a cylinder creating a hologram-like effect to display notifications/metrics/whatever else.
So the plaintiff’s are claiming Siri was recording them without consent, and that Apple were sharing those recordings with third parties including advertisers.
Apple claims they were sometimes wrongly keeping recordings for internal quality control/analytics but hasn’t admitted to sharing them, and have agreed to the $95m settlement.
The sharing with third parties is the most egregious part here, but it doesn’t seem to be addressed any further.
For TVs now, by buying used. Help yourself and the environment by buying an unwanted “dumb” TV that’s free of this sort of crap.
Or if budget allows, look at industrial displays.
Supply answers demand, is we stop buying junk smart stuff and take our money elsewhere the market will eventually follow.
A while ago a company patented a method using eye tracking to monitor whether TV watchers were paying attention to ads.
It can always get worse.
Zuck bending his own knee in the vain hope he won’t get bent over Trump’s.
Maybe he should have spent a little less attention on Caesar and tried to learn a few other lessons from history.
Power costs vary a lot around the world, depending on where OP lives every little saving can help.
That’s a gross assumption that people care about any of this.
For any form of federated community to be sustainable, its users have to care about that. Otherwise those communities will eventually be consumed by whichever instance gains the critical mass to close itself off and become another Twitter or Reddit.
To achieve the benefits of federation, users must be educated on principles of federation, not be obfuscated from them. The question is how the Fediverse can do that.
Years ago a Microsoft breakup was also once on the table, but it never happened.
I wouldn’t get too excited that regulators will follow through with this for Google either.
We are going to need much stronger image rights for individuals in the AI age.
There’s no way to stop the technology itself (although current development may plateau at some point), so there must be strong legal restrictions on abusing it.
I don’t think Mozilla running a Mastodon server is losing focus. The ethos of Mozilla and the Fediverse have a lot of overlap, and Mozilla should desire to have a foot in it.
An official Mastodon server is also a useful platform for marketing and outreach. In contrast an organisation claiming to be all about privacy and open source retreating from a social media platform that embodies those is not a good look.
High energy bills and misinformation about energy saving seems to be causing some odd behaviour here in the UK.
I have relatives who go round turning off every device and appliance at night, despite the negligible power draw they have in standby. Another will only charge their phone at night during cheaper the electricity rate - but runs the tumble dryer during the day.
I also often hear stories about people fearing electronic devices will catch fire if left on standby over night. Which may well be a risk for charging a dodgy Chinese e-bike but probably not for a home router.
The P and D symbol is the DisplayPort logo. I’m not sure when it was first used, but the DisplayPort standard itself is quite a bit older than USB Power Delivery.
It’s still confusing though regardless of which can lay the best claim to the letters P and D. I would have suggested Power Delivery could use some sort of lightning bolt symbol, but then I realised that would probably conflict with Thunderbolt, which also uses USB-C.
It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.
Creating a cost barrier to participation is possibly one of the better ways to deter bot activity.
Charging money to register or even post on a platform is one method. There are administrative and ethical challenges to overcome though, especially for non-commercial platforms like Lemmy.
CAPTCHA systems are another, which costs human labour to solve a puzzle before gaining access.
There had been some attempts to use proof of work based systems to combat email spam in the past, which puts a computing resource cost in place. Crypto might have poisoned the well on that one though.
All of these are still vulnerable to state level actors though, who have large pools of financial, human, and machine resources to spend on manipulation.
Maybe instead the best way to protect communities from such attacks is just to remain small and insignificant enough to not attract attention in the first place.
I have an X220 with an i5-2520M, I don’t use it for gaming but I have briefly played Half-Life 2 with it and it was comfortably playable.
So I would say mid-2000s titles and before will be fine. It really depends on the age the Thinkpad you want is, and the age of the games you want to play.
They were still making MiniDiscs and MiniDV tapes? That seems more of a surprise than the Blu-ray discontinuation.