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But you could do it, which would give it a use in remote areas with poor electrical service given the ubiquity of both USB power and the BL-4C battery.

Great value for him, maybe.

Well, the ones based on Chromium aren’t, anyway. I’ve heard some major criticisms of Safari in the last few years, for what that’s worth.

The NHS’ virtual appointment service in the UK doesn’t support Firefox either, only Chrome, Safari and Edge. The dark days of “please view this website in Internet Explorer 6” are creeping closer to the present again. I hate the modern internet.

Unless they plan on programming all of Mosaic law into all of their algorithms going forward, that’s a whole lot of hot air. And in any case it’s a serious violation of the Establishment Clause, if not veering into “and domestic”.

Yeah, federated network things.

Did you read the article? Excerpts include:

Generally, in business, it is sensible to provide your customers with what they want. With Twitter, the meme-makers’ favourite billionaire is doing the opposite. The cyber-trucker is trying his best to cull his customer base.

Threads is what would happen if Twitter and Instagram made out in a bowling alley. It’s all their worst parts combined - but it may well succeed. Rocket-man Musk’s changes to Twitter have not exactly made it ‘brand friendly’. Threads, meanwhile, is shaping up to be a paradise for in-your-face brands - and the AdTech industry would love for you to join them

and

Threads’ naffness won’t stop its success. It’s data-scraping fluffily dressed up as substandard corporate twaddle. It’s a cringe-inducing privacy invasion. It’s not meant for users, but that doesn’t really matter: you’re not a user, you’re a product.

It’s describing Threads as a product not for users, but advertisers. The perfect brand-friendly non-place for companies to stick their marketing crap. That doesn’t really come across as a ringing endorsement to me.

This is a total affront to the ethos of the web and everyone involved in drafting this awful proposal should be publicly shamed. Stick sandwich boards on each of them saying “I tried to build the Torment Nexus”, chain them together and march them through the streets while ringing a bell and chanting “shame”.

OsmAnd actually works pretty well in my experience, at least in the UK. It’s not always up to date or fully-detailed but it’s far from useless and I appreciate that. It’s my primary map program on my phone.

Damn, that does look a lot better.

PlayStation was less of a bitch to develop for, too. Once Sega fucked the US launch, it was over for the Saturn. Nobody was going to try learning to wrangle two CPUs, a 2D background-drawer and a 2D sprite-drawer that had its arm twisted into becoming a 3D quadrangle renderer when the market wasn’t there for it.

Really, the only reason anyone collects for the Saturn is that it actually did pretty respectably in Japan on account of being the best 2D machine of the generation and actually having a competent launch strategy over there. Arcade ports, JRPGs and platformers are most of the Saturn’s stand-out titles. Ironically, the Nintendo 64 with its “3D-or-bust” attitude didn’t do well at all in Japan despite a respectable second place in worldwide performance.

The Sega Saturn did a lot worse than the PlayStation outside of Japan, even compared to the Nintendo 64 - only about 2 million Saturns are thought to have been sold in the United States. And over time the disc drives have been failing on them from age. Doesn’t help that Sega stopped making Saturns back in early 1998, long before the Nintendo 64 (2002) and original PlayStation (2006) were discontinued.

Combine that with the ever-growing retro gaming hobby/bubble, and now a lot of the working ones are, by this point, in the hands of enthusiasts of the system who don’t really intend to sell, or collectors who would want a lot of money for them.

If you want one for your phone, Feedly is pretty good. On desktop, I use Liferea.

Seconding Liferea.

For real, the world of Linux gaming owes a lot to Valve and to Proton’s contributors. The last five years have taken gaming on Linux from a fiddly nightmare to, in many cases, performance as good as native. There has never been a better time to run Linux as your primary operating system.

Can they at least handle texting? A lot of services require SMS-based 2FA (insecure as it is) these days, so a phone that can’t receive texts is a complete non-starter.

I’d be fine paying Google for YouTube Premium if I could use it without being logged in. I’d take an access key for anonymous ad-free viewing for $20 a month. But Google is never going to offer that because the data-harvesting is the whole point of YouTube to them. Google is a data-slurping company with an advertising division that dabbles in video, search and phones as side hustles.

In any case, if they really do crack down on adblockers, there are always other methods of watching their videos ad-free, and if I really like a creator, I’ll subscribe to their Patreon or watch them on Nebula.

Possibly, now that we have much tighter integration between different chips using die-to-die interconnects like Apple’s “UltraFusion” and AMD’s “Infinity Fabric” to avoid the latency and microstutter issues that came with old-fashioned multi-GPU cards like the GTX 690 and Radeon HD 7990 XT.

As long as software can make proper use of the multiple processing units, I think multi-GPU cards have a chance to make a comeback… at least if anyone can actually afford the bloody things. Frankly, GPU pricing is a bit fucked at the moment even before we consider the idea of cards with multiple dies.

To be fair, a lot of these are accurate, or at least were at the time.

• Multi-GPU just never caught on. There’s a reason you don’t see even the most hardcore gaming machines running SLI today.

• The Wii’s novelty wore off fairly quickly (about the time Kinect happened), and it didn’t have much of a lasting impact on the gaming industry once mobile gaming slurped up the casual market.

• Spore is largely forgotten, despite the enormous hype it had before release. It’s kind of the Avatar of video games.

• It took years for 64-bit to become relevant to the average user (and hell, there are still devices being sold with only 4GB of memory even today!). Plenty of Core 2 Duo machines still shipped with 32-bit versions of Windows and people didn’t notice or care because basically no apps average people cared about were 64-bit native back then and you were lucky to have more than 4GB in your entire machine, let alone need more than that for one program.

• Battlestar Galactica (2003) fell off sharply after season 2 and its ending was some of the most insulting back-to-nature religious tripe that has ever had the gall to label itself as science-fiction.

• Downloading movies over the internet ultimately fell between the cracks outside of piracy. Most people stream films and TV now, and people who want the extra quality tend to buy a Blu-Ray disc rather than download from iTunes (can you even still do that with modern shows?)

• I definitely know people who didn’t get an HDTV until 4K screens hit the market, and people still buy standard-def DVDs. Hell, they’re still outselling Blu-Rays close to 20 years later. Calling HD a dud is questionable, but it was definitely not seen as a must-have by the general public, partly because that shit was expensive back in 2008.

• The Eee PC and the other netbooks were only good when they were running a lightweight operating system like Linux or Windows XP. Once Windows 7 Starter became the operating system of choice for netbooks, the user experience fell of a cliff and people tired of them. Which is a shame, because I love little devices like UMPCs.

• The original iPhone was really limited for 2007. No third-party applications, no 3G support, no voice memos, you could only get it on a single carrier… the iPhone family did make a huge impact in the long run, but it wasn’t until the 3GS that it was a true competitor to something like a Symbian device.

The only entry on this list that’s really off the mark is Facebook, which even at the time was quickly reshaping the world. And I say that as someone who hates Zuck’s guts and has proudly never had a Facebook account.

Yeah, I’ve been watching the mobile Linux space with interest but it’s definitely not in a place yet where I would consider using it as anything more than a novelty. The PinePhone is a neat little piece of hardware but no way it can replace my LineageOS phone right now.