Apologies all. That user is not representative of Aussie.Zone users. We’re generally a chill bunch.

On a biological level, dogs are all the same species. There’s obviously something beyond biology in terms of classification. And humans have whatever it is: you only need to watch an NBA game or a 100m Olympic final to see this in action.

I agree that most categories we put people into are artificial, but it’d be an error to say it’s all social.

I also think our species superpower is not our physical makeup. Our ability to work together and use our brains is what sets us apart from the other species on the planet, and on that front the playing field is level.

I had that machine so I know what I’m talking about.

Ahh - that’s how you knew about the HDMI-out issue. That one isn’t a problem for me as my screens are attached to my desktop these days. I disagree that this thing can’t play games though - it had 4000+ hours of gaming in its past under Windows, and worked flawlessly as a Windows 10 machine until last month. It is showing its age, but its weakness has always been that GPU. I’d never have bought it as a gaming machine: I bought it for work and games was a nice bonus.

I have owned this thing since the day it came out and for a decade it was my primary ‘everything’ machine. I’ve lugged across oceans and to dozens of client sites until I changed jobs to one that didn’t need a laptop any longer. I’m very familiar with it and know what it is capable of. It can get warm, yes, but it isn’t like I actually play with it on my lap. I could reinstall Windows on it and have it playing those games again, but I’d much prefer Fedora. This is a driver support issue, specifically a closed-source vendor choosing both not to support it and to refuse to open up their source so others can support it. It is not a problem with the hardware.

When I’m at home, I have a beefy desktop that I can play modern games on. I’m going away for two weeks at Christmas and want to have some simple games to relax with. I’m debating whether to take my MX 3S mouse, or something more portable. I’m not likely going to be able to justify an eGPU.

Besides, the laptop only has Thunderbolt 1 with theoretical max throughput of 10gbps. I doubt I’d get much better than a RX560 going on it - which while supported isn’t really worth the effort. Now that I think about it, I could pick up a second-hand Thinkpad x280 for around the same price and be in a far better spot. That was actually my starting point, I was going to grab one of them before I decided to stretch the life out of this laptop.

You say that like an i7 with 16GB RAM, and a GeForce GPU can’t game. The hardware is more than good enough (within reason - these are 15+ year old games). It works fine in Windows 10. Normally Linux support for older drivers is better than Windows; Nvidia is the exception.

I fired up a little test with Terraria and it worked, though that one likely would have worked under nouveau. I’ll do a more solid test during the week.

Yes, it is fine with nouveau. But I want to play a few older games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 on it.

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.

In Australia at least, those cards are everywhere in populated areas. Supermarkets and department stores pretty-much all stock them. I’d say that over 90% of Australians live within 3km of a store that sells Steam cards and takes cash. Most of us even closer than that.

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.

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So this entire article is a beat-up in response to a single tweet:

https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1947027209845383279

There is no laptop. There is no potential laptop coming soon.

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.

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’ll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

1. Adjectives. You can’t just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there’s no such thing. There’s x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted “4% milk”) in this damned place?
2. Fresh produce. In fairness you’ve gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
4. Your eggs are weird. I’m not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it’s like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they’d last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it’s sugar or preservatives in it, I don’t know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it’s 5 lines long.
6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I’d much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a “I’m better than this person” way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there’s a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone’s worth.
8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
9. I’ll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it’s weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They’re mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it’s train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
11. You have no idea what’s going on. Most of you couldn’t name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don’t know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
12. I’ll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I’m white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I’ve ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don’t seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as ‘good’ by default. There’s a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I’ve been to.

http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=Lemmy.world

Curiously, most common Lemmy sites and even Reddit are not blocked.

Surely the most famous one is the kid trying to enter the school for the gifted, right?