They can hardly avoid screwing up, really.

The whole draw of Steam Deck is that it’s a carefully curated experience where everything from the OS upwards is crafted to play nicely together and “Just Work” to bring that console-like experience to PC gaming.

Whatever Microsoft are putting together isn’t going to have that end-to-end consideration. It will be nothing more than a skinned launcher on top of Windows 11, and no matter how shiny that launcher looks you won’t be able to hide from Windows for long. All the normal Windows bloat will be there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you spend as much time messing around in actual Windows as you do playing games.

Yes, which is a big part of why, despite allowing transfers, it still sucks.

Me neither. It’s basically a download game but with physical DRM in the form of a cartridge. The age of genuine physical game ownership is toast.

Nintendo’s site says the cartridge must always be inserted in order to play the game, and so it is the cartridge that controls the game license.

On that basis it seems likely you could sell/give the cartridge to someone else, after which they can play it and you no longer can - they’d just also have to download it first.

Sometimes it is desperate people who fall for scams, sometimes it’s not.

Or, if there is desparation then it’s not always financial desperation. It may be loneliness and the desire for some connection, as exploited by all those “pig butchering” romance scams.

There’s no simple solution to stop people getting scammed, because scammers and swindlers are a ‘profession’ as old as society itself, and they’ll never find any shortage of takers.

The only way this will ever stop is if people stop falling for scams, and there’s no money in it.

Which doesn’t seem likely.

I mean, the title of the post beat you both…

Rena would definitely play the hell out of that

Same logic, the bra itself as a whole is a chest covering, so like a shirt it’s not a “pair”

Not that there always has to be logic in these things, etymology sometimes defies that.

A bra does have a “pair of cups”, though!

For some items like glasses it’s very clear why they are pairs; if you can have a reading glass (which is an antiquated way to refer to a handheld magnifying lens, for example) then you can certainly have a pair of reading glasses because it’s the two pieces of glass which are plural.

For trousers there are no certain answers, but I’d suggest it’s very much with with how we conceptualise their function. For 90% of their height trousers are split and cover the legs, of which we have two, only joining right at the top.

For shirts you might think it’s the same (two arms right?) but it’s a completely different story because the primary function of a shirt isn’t to cover the arms but to cover the torso. So it’s singular. And gloves of course are distinct, so it’s back to pairs.

It’s just not fun anymore.

It used to be kinda humorous in an irreverent way back in the 2000s when Google used April Fools to announce things like the Google Romance search engine, or a facility to archive all your Gmails on printed paper. It was tech making fun of itself.

But these days when the mask is fully off, and we recognise that big tech and social media has been one of the greatest problems the world has ever faced, we’re not laughing any longer.

Those few days between jobs are moments of pure joy.

You’re finished with all the bullshit of the previous job, and are blissfully unaware of whatever fresh bullshit is waiting for you at the new one.

Totally. I feel like winning Best Director is your one-time free pass to get a risky project greenlit that normally you could never.

And if those movies don’t smash the box office then maybe, in part, it’s because the director quietly never intended them to be the kind of movies that would.

Fair :)

Oh no!

Anyway…

10 years isn’t the worst run, but it still proves the point that anything which needs an app or connected web service to function will inevitably become e-waste, and maybe sooner than you’d like.

Earlier today, I was looking at reviews of portable Bluetooth speakers. One had a bullet point “No equalizer app, with only basic EQ functions available on the speaker itself.”

The review intended that to be a negative, but I was like “Hell yeah that’s what I want!”

Functionality in pure hardware means it will keep on working as long as the hardware works. It means that I myself get to be the one who decides when I need an upgrade, not when the company forces my hand.

Every single tech purchasing decision I make these days, having freedom from apps, cloud, or any other ticking time bomb is top of my feature list.

Yes it matters. Loads of manufacturers are doing soldered wifi on some of their models. Delll, HP, they are all at it.

And even if your wifi wasn’t soldered, wouldn’t it be better to know you were buying a machine where it would just work out the box rather than needing replacement?

There plenty of other things to consider too, though, especially for laptops.

WiFi chipset, trackpad hardware, webcam, all can lead to a sad time with the wrong manufacturers and driver support

There’s a time for everything, is my personal take. Sometimes I want a film that will be original and challenge me, but I don’t want that every day.

Sometimes it’s relaxing to know there won’t be any big surprises.

You see Statham on the poster, you know exactly what you are getting.