This post has been reported for possibly questionable source. Given that many people outside Australia won’t be familiar with Green Left Weekly, I’ll explain a couple of things:

1. Green Left Weekly is absolutely biased. It is not a broad news source, rather it selects articles that covers topics it and its readers are interested in. It will interview people that will talk about issues it cares about.
2. It often uses language that will trigger a more emotional response that a straight-talking site would avoid, they also skip providing sources sometimes.
3. That said, it is not factually incorrect. The very website used to report it as a questionable source also concedes that Green Left Weekly has never failed a fact check.
4. Australians generally know all this. Take the story with a grain of salt, but if the publication says a mining company is challenging for its right to dig up rare earths in Greenland in courts, you can accept it as given that a mining company is indeed doing that thing.

Your point is sound because I usually use a credit card for this, but most of my Steam purchases come from buying gift cards. However, I could easily buy those gift cards with cash.

Your comment implies this is not possible/common.

I’m not about to defend Google, but I think Apple are worse. Google are upfront about what they collect and let you download (takeout) or delete everything they have on you at any time you want.

Apple don’t tell you what they are collecting, don’t let you opt-out of data collection and it’s a manual process to access/delete what they have on you.

Neither company is good on their privacy fronts and to champion one over the other is silly.

My client is spending waaaaaaay more money on Microsoft Online than it ever used to on software licenses. Every single user in the business is costing 🇦🇺$30 per month alone just for their Office suite. That’s before you get to the Azure stuff. Some hosted apps cost over 🇦🇺$1k/month to host in Azure.

Before you go too strongly after Microsoft for charging so much, this is cheaper than what we used to pay for running our own SharePoint, Exchange etc farms as well as the infrastructure required to host websites/database etc. All that has been outsourced to Microsoft Online and saves significant money.

Microsoft is doing very well out of its own cloud fees and can cope with AWS, Google and all the smaller private cloud operations getting some of that action.

I agree with your first statement, but disagree with the rest. I am not their target market. I enjoy playing their games, but primarily because I am spending time with the kids as I do. Not many of their games are targeted to my demographic.

I disagree that they focus only on digital. Every single Nintendo game comes out on a physical chip. And sales on digital copies are rare and minor (30% off maybe). It is often cheaper to get a physical copy on sale cheaper than digital. And you can then sell it / buy it second-hand. I’ve read that with Switch 2, even the digital codes can be transferred to a new owner. Nintendo for all their faults have never forced you to lock in a digital library you can never resell.

I bought it second hand. Nintendo got $0 from the sale. In fact, two thirds of our physical games have been purchased second hand.

You might be surprised. I came to the Switch party super late when I bought my kid a switch Christmas 2023. He’s all over Zelda now, has BotW, TotK and even Skyward Sword on his Switch. For him, these games are all from the last year. He turned 2 the year BotW was released.

It’ll be the same story with Switch 2. Some kid who might not even be born yet will get a Switch 2 in 8-9 years and come across these games with all his school friends.

I doubt I’ll go the Switch 2 path with the kids. I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade, yet. I’m thinking of the Steam Deck - while the Nintendo had a fairly cheap entry point to get on the platform, I’ve spent enough on games to negate the difference between a Switch and a Steam Deck - where I already have a 500+ game library to play on it.

I am typing this comment on a Pixel 7. I have had it for nearly two years and I have never experienced these symptoms.

The only app I can think of that doesn’t load in under a second is Asphalt Legends - and that’s because the app takes a week to load on anything.

I am very satisfied with this device, and doubt I’ll be upgrading to Pixel 9. I have no reason to upgrade.

What would be the point? Reddit doesn’t make any content. They’re just a platform. If they go ahead and paywall subs, those subs are going to have a tiny potential subscriber base. Therefore, they will be less attractive to post to (smaller audience, fewer upvotes etc).

About the only place I can maybe see it working is AskHistorians. And you pay the Historians to answer the questions. Which would of course reduce the amount Reddit takes from the paywall. Doesn’t seem worth it, to me.

Even then, I think the Historians would rather reply in a new free sub with wider readership than take $20 for putting in three hours of work responding to something. They do it because they’re passionate. Not for money.

This works for us:
Step one: Keep your instance civil. No tolerance for horrible people (racists/bigots etc).
Step two: Maintain a vibrant local set of communities free from nastiness.
Step three: Let your users engage with the noise of the fediverse as much or as little as they desire.

We don’t bother with telling our users who or what they can access, and don’t immediately ban visitors based on their home instance. Will that scale to millions of users? Probably not. But that’s a problem for future Nath - maybe.

So I’ve just bought a PC. I haven’t had a new computer for 12 years. The newest game I’ve played is Subnautica (and Below Zero). I’ve basically missed everything from the last 15 years.

I own a few games that I haven’t been able to play until now (Fallout 4, Star Wars Squadrons, Witcher 3, few others). Thinking I probably have enough games in my backlog to play those and maybe look at new stuff next sale.

The biggest problem I see with this is the scenario where calls are recorded. They’re recorded in case we hit a “he said, she said” scenario. If some issue were to be escalated as far as a courtroom, the value of the recording to the business is greatly diminished.

Even if the words the call agent gets are 100% verbatim, a lawyer can easily argue that a significant percentage of the message is in tone of voice. If that’s lost and the agent misses a nuance of the customer’s intent, they’ll have a solid case against the business.

I did phones in a different century, so I don’t know whether this would fly today. But, my go-to for someone like this was “ok, I think I see the problem here. Shall we go ahead and fix it or do you need to do more yelling first?”

I can’t remember that line ever not shutting them down instantly. I never took it personally, whatever they had going on they were never angry at me personally.

Then again, I do remember firing a couple of customers (“we don’t want your business any more etc”) after I later became a manager and people were abusive to staff. So you could be right, also.

Surely opinions on this are going to vary wildly? Lemmy is full of people installing graphene and de-googling, while I’m happy with stock Android on Pixels with a custom launcher. Samsung, Sony and Asus all have serious devotees as well.

There’s also different responses depending on what you want in a phone. Some people want smaller than 6", others must have a 3.5mm jack. Some want SD storage. The camera is vital for me, but most of my colleagues don’t really care about the camera.

How would you sift through all that for a “best” one size fits all phone?

You might like Civ IV, it’s square tiled instead of hexagon tiles. I’ve always preferred the squares.

If it was that big a deal for you, why would you use a phone OS by that same company?

SMS is hot garbage:

1. The first “S” stands for short. If your message is over 160 characters, you are sending multiple messages. The implementation of SMS is a hack on the carrier network in the first place, and joining multiple messages, particularly across carriers is a complication to this hack. Sure, 99.99% of messages are delivered just fine. But if the message doesn’t arrive for some reason, there’s no acknowledgement of this. The recipient just doesn’t get it.
2. SMS is easy to spoof. If I have even basic carrier access, I can send a message to your dad from your number.
3. SMS is not secure - at all.
4. I can initiate a number port on your number, and while that port request will likely fail, it’s possible that I can receive messages that were destined for you in the short term.

But sure. It works for anyone on any phone.

The neat thing about Android is that you have the choice to do that. None of us understand why you want to use sms over rcs, but we love that you can.

£1,212 is more like $1,500 US dollars. Which is nuts.

The author has a MacBook and has discovered that the new Apple Silicon is terrible for games. Particularly 32-bit games. It turns out Valve hasn’t re-made these 10-20 year old games to compensate for Apple’s hardware compatibility changes.

Somehow, that’s Valve’s fault and a sign that they’re going down the drain.

It isn’t a monopoly though. Even ignoring the Blizzards, Epics and GOGs of the web, any developer can host their game on their own Web site and market it completely independently of Steam and keep 100% of their takings.

The monopoly on storefront argument holds water in mobile land where side-loading a game is not possible/easy. In the world of computers though, I don’t think the same standard applies.