They are more comfortable than they look. The lack of a second analogue stick is a big limitation though.

There was a prototype VMU MP3 player in the works before the Dreamcast was discontinued, alongside a music store.

Sega also produced a digital camera for the Dreamcast, the DreamEye.

The tech world could have looked very different if the Dreamcast went differently for Sega.

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.

This is the inevitable path for nearly all proprietary smart devices. There’s a handful of manufacturers that will see privacy as a marketable feature, but most won’t be able to resist the sweet taste of data.

It’s a shame there are no “dumb” TVs left, except for expensive industrial options.

Isolate the smart TV in restricted VLAN in your home network that can access your local media server but doesn’t allow internet access.

Segmenting a home network like this is also a good idea for smart home/IoT devices.

I don’t remember much problem with the connectivity with SCART. I do remember wasting many hours dealing with cheaply made cables that didn’t even wire all the pins however.

Which come to think of it is now becoming an issue with USB-C cables. At least with SCART the connector could be easily opened for inspection, which became a habit of many an AV tech.

Keeping the same pin layout while upgrading to USB-C would have made more sense. USB-C is the future, seems odd to still be a Micro USB holdout in 2024.

The switch has got to happen at some point, and the Pico ecosystem is still young enough the change wouldn’t be too disruptive.

Considering how much worse Windows seems to get with each update and new version, Microsoft will soon be developing methods of invisibly install Windows updates to force them through.

I look forward to a future where the battle between Microsoft and malware brings Windows computers to a standstill in an endless loop of invisibly installing and removing updates.

The makeup of web users has changed a lot since 2010. The average web surfer was a lot less passive in attitude in decades past.

Yeah this feels like a move that would have worked a lot better before Reddit had burned a bunch of bridges with their most active users.

The pool of people with enough goodwill to pay now is likely small, and shrinking. The causal new users probably are that keen to pay up either.

Well, indirectly the Magic Mouse does control screen time. Can’t be doomscrolling when you can’t scroll at all while the mouse is charging.

I’ve never found Screen Time all that useful, for the same reason as the article - it can’t distinguish good usage from bad usage. Screen Time only counts time - but it can’t tell which minutes is doomscrolling and which are used more positively.

Maybe that’s an application for Apple Intelligence, although there would be some pretty big privacy issues there.

Screen Time is also not helped by only working on Apple devices. It can’t account for time spent using using non Apple devices like TVs, consoles, PCs with other operating systems etc. it might have been more useful if there was an external API screen time software for other platforms could report to.

We probably need a few more years of network and storage improvements to make open video platforms properly viable. Video data is big and bandwidth is expensive, which makes keeping servers running over a certain size difficult.

Apparently there are some people that like ads, and a larger amount who may not like them but are willing to tolerate them.

Those of us who will make proactive choices to not engage with advertising are the minority.

Might seem easy to someone with a technical background. But the last thing businesses want to be doing is telling average end users to boot into safe mode and start deleting system files.

If that started happening en masse we would quickly end up with far more problems than we started with. Plenty of users would end up deleting system32 entirely or something else equally damaging.

Seems a pointless endeavour. The open and enterprise sides are so deeply linked, it makes sense that they share a brand.

Separating them only weakens the broader SUSE ecosystem.

There’s a chance Liz Truss could lose her seat this time. She previously had a large majority but her failed stint as PM tarnishing her and a strong challenge by a local independent could unseat her.

Global pork markets will never be the same again.

From the results that have come in so far, the right wing populist party Reform UK is quickly rising as a new political force. They’ve placed second in at least three constituencies so far.

If Starmer’s Labour fail to make visible progress to the country’s fortunes we could be facing a Trump moment in the form of Nigel Farage.