No no, you don’t understand!

He’s one of the good billionaires!

(/s for some of you, and for others perhaps you should reconsider why you feel the need to defend a billionaire, regardless of your opinion on video game platforms)

Now now, they’re not just inconsiderate assholes and leeches.

They’re inconsiderate nazi oligarch assholes and leeches.

I’d say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me

The EFF has had a couple of websites that would profile you on exactly this data, so you’re completely correct in that even the basic normal required metadata is more than enough to identify you pretty well.

coveryourtracks.eff.org is where it’s living now, and a quick glance shows that just using browser capabilities and such is absolutely enough to identify me.

In general, signal has proved they store no data besides the phone number itself, and in court they have only been able to give phone numbers.

My problem with signal is actually this, because it’s only part of the story.

Let’s say the FBI suspects you of doing something horrible, like say you played baby shark in public. They have good cause to believe you’re a Signal user, so they get a judge to authorize a subpoena based on your phone number, and Signal complies - and, yes, all they’re doing is confirming to the FBI that you have an account with them.

Now they’re going to go after you with ‘We know you have a secret messaging app you use, Signal, and we know you used it to plan playing baby shark at the mall last Tuesday.’

And so, if you’re not really clear on how all of this works, it’s a fantastic wedge to try to pry actual incriminating information from you. Or, hell, you let them look at the app on your phone negating the whole damn encrypted part in the first place, because you’re sure they already know.

Properly secure messengers shouldn’t be tied to that level of PII, because, well, cops can still try to use it to bludgeon you.

Maybe a little paranoid, but I’ve decided to embrace some of the paranoia since not doing so means you have to trust in the rules and policies that the law puts in place and well, uh…

There’s no such thing as too much seeding.

Well, maybe the 85tb of Ubuntu 24.04 I’ve done is too much, but I mean, whatever.

(I’ve got basically everything I’ve downloaded in the last 7 years seeding, some 6000 torrents. qBittorrent isn’t the most happy with this, but it’s still working, if using a shit-ton of RAM at this point.)

I mean, eBay exists. You can get a Commodore 64, a Mac II-era mac, or a 486 for not that much money.

I have a giant pile of retro stuff including those, and an absurdly expensive Pentium 1ghz box with a proper Vortex 2 and 3dfx voodoo 5 card, sitting around for retro gaming.

Which uh, mostly is all I do anymore. There’s also a TON of modern improvements to emulate floppy drives, replace hard drives with SD cards, and even new video and sound cards that are waaaaay better than what you had to deal with when the hardware was new.

It’s not as cheap as it was 5 years ago, but it’s still reasonable if you have an era you’re after and kinda stay focused on one or two retro computers and don’t, say, decide you want to own one of every G3 and G4 tower that was made or anything insane like that.

…stop looking at me like that.

There’s also a ton of Youtubers that are touching all sorts of rare and expensive hardware that’s a good watch, too. (8 Bit Guy, LGR, Adrian’s Digital Basement, Necroware)

I’m not quite THAT old, but I certainly remember the early 90s.

Tech was all new and cool, and I remember very much reading computer shopper or going to various computer stores looking at all the new cool shit I desperately wanted but could in no way afford.

And, of course, the BBS lists that were in the back of computer shopper and various other things like that: I spent uh, more time than I should admit arguing about stupid shit online via local BBSes and Fidonet and a couple of other networks. But, even then, you’re right: the absolute hostility was very high, but it was about who had the “right” computer, or my dumb 13 year old opinion of which games were fun, and the level of absolute grumpiness was way lower.

(As an aside, those FTN-style networks do still exist, and still have people having conversations on them, and it’s still pretty great.)

Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don’t know if that’s just physics being a pain or if it’s straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.

Anyway I’ll stop internet Boomering and go take my metamucil and watch the wheel.

I really, really wanted one as a kid, but they were quite expensive. Like, actual-real-computer expensive, if I recall correctly.

The good news is the tech pretty much ended up in the S60 Nokia phones, of which I had uh, a lot. And some of them even had normal keypads, and not one from whatever meth-induced fever dream some guy in Finland had.

I still have one!

It’s broken because it was designed by crazy people.

(The battery is required, the battery failed in such a way that it leaked and ate everything on the battery charger/temperature board, so uh, I have to find a replacement controller board and then put a new battery on it and I have to admit I just haven’t been motivated enough to try to find a non-destroyed board from a tiny production run that’s like 30 years old now.)

I don’t think you’d need to use an A-series SOC, considering the power usage of even a M4 is basically a rounding error - and they’ve already got M-series stuff running passively jammed into a tiny case anyways.

I’d be on something like that immediately, but I somehow doubt Apple will ever make a 12" Macbook ever again, given that the majority of people seem to like the 13" airs just fine.

Love to be wrong, though.

Man, I had one of those. And I hated every minute with it.

It was, by far, the slowest “modern” computer I ever used, and I legit do not miss the whole netbook thing with slow-ass atom CPUs and the world’s slowest hard drives.

(They probably would have been far less awful with a more modern SSD option, but well, that wasn’t a thing soooo…)

I have to ask: what j2me games would you actually want to play?

Like, given you have enough compute to run the actual version of most of these games, (why play the GTA java mobile thing when you can just run all the actual GTA games?) what is there out there that’s a game that’s worth playing on its own merits?

no one was bringing Brian Thompson to justice

You’re not wrong, but the issue is that as fewer and fewer people believe that the law will actually hold anyone accountable, they’ll decide the correct thing to do is to take it into their own hands.

And, if there’s anything that’s been very, very, very, very, clearly shown over the last 2 or 3 years in the US it’s that the rule of law does not apply to anyone who is rich, famous, or is capable of wielding sufficient soft power.

If you’re one of those 3, then absolutely nothing you do is illegal, and once you’ve reached the point where the justice system will not do anything to those that wrong you, the only thing you have left is to go out and take action yourself, which historically has almost always been violence.

I would expect there to be more, rather than less, of these types of murders from here on - especially given that everyone in this country either has a gun, or is a 15 minute background check away from having one.

Fedora was always a bleeding-edge distro and never all that stable or reliable.

The problem is RedHat/IBM have been fucking with everything, and Fedora has suffered along with everything else and it’s just kinda decayed a bit over the past few years.

…Ubuntu went to shit at least a decade ago, if not longer.

identify as dead inside

Wow, rude. Why you gotta call me out like that.

Okay I have to ask: if you don’t know someone’s gender, but you can’t call them uh, they/them, then what in the fuck are you supposed to do exactly?

Like, I fully get doing it in person can be being a dick, but on the internet where you absolutely do not know unless someone tells you?

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard today, and I was on reddit earlier.

See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially.

Right-ish, but I’d say there was actually a simpler problem than the one you laid out.

The immediate and obvious thing that killed OS/2 wasn’t the compatibility layer, it was driven by IBM not having any drivers for any hardware that was not sold by IBM, and Windows having (relatively) broad support for everything anyone was likely to actually have.

Worse, IBM pushed for support for features that IBM hardware support didn’t support to be killed, so you ended up with a Windows that supported your hardware, the features you wanted, and ran on cheaper hardware fighting it out with an OS/2 that did none of that.

IBM essentially decided to, well, be IBM and committed suicide in the market, and didn’t really address a lot of the stupid crap until Warp 3, at which point it didn’t matter and was years too late, and Windows 95 came swooping in shortly thereafter and that was the end of any real competition on the desktop OS scene for quite a while.

10% of windows laptops being sold are ARM?

That’s gotta be some weird corporate buyer thing, because otherwise I strongly don’t buy that line at all.

Yeah I figured that’s what you were trying to figure out, since I 100% went through the same thought process, lol.

I just bought a Mac Mini instead of moving to Linux on the desktop, and am pretty happy with the outcome (everything works) but that’s not a solution for everyone.

I can answer your question: Resolve are very clear that Intel iGPUs are not supported in Linux, at all, because the Intel Linux drivers do not support some features they require.

Free version, paid version: doesn’t matter, it’s not supported hardware right now. Not even the new ARC cards are, because it’s a software issue Intel has to fix.

Ran into this when looking at moving to Linux and there’s not a solution for it.