People started doing it professionally when the ad money came in. Before that people did it for the love of the content, and it was lower production quality, but better content.

Don’t worry. Those normies are about to cost us the whole open web, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.

I am so tired of “journalism” that’s just shocked Pikachuing about crap that people already know, and HAVE already known, for YEARS.

It’s either a total waste of time, or people are so thick and oblivious that they don’t know something that’s been staring them DIRECTLY In the face for AGES, and I honestly can’t decide which explanation is more depressing.

*grandpa

That BIOS feature can be disabled… now. But there’s nothing keeping a manufacturer from just not providing that functionality, and requiring only signed firmware updates. Now the machine is more or less locked down.

The fact it can be disabled now is a convenience feature based on historical availability, but that’s absolutely no guarantee it will continue to be there in the future.

You say that based on 30-40 years of companies not really knowing what they were doing, but we live in a world where hardware manufacturers ABSOLUTELY know how to make nearly unhackable, locked down hardware. Smartphones are already like this - if the manufacturer decides you don’t get to install a custom OS, unless you’re lucky enough for there to be an exploit, you don’t get to. Same goes for game consoles. That knowledge can easily be applied to these to make these, if not completely unhackable, so unstable and inconvenient as to be almost the same.

We are absolutely entering this nightmare phase.

Joke’s on them… even if they don’t pay it’s not like I valued the time I spent on it anyway.

And I certainly didn’t do a good job.

Yes, but it’s going to repeat that way FOREVER the same way the average person got slow walked hand in hand with a mobile operating system into corporate social media and app hell, taking the entire internet with them.

This, and not even ironically.

Something broken on the laptop? It’s so locked down nobody can do a damn thing about it, and even if I could I can’t spend 15 minutes of class time troubleshooting while the others are waiting, so I guess you’re just not participating today, Billy.

You can use them fine. In fact, you’ll have to on your new Android phone which has no opt out.

Call your representatives

Hire a lobbyist to donate millions of dollars to election campaigns for your representatives

Real answer. Hoard now. Hope what you have lasts until the baking climate kills you.

Older PCs and consoles are only cheap now because people buy newer stuff.

When the newer stuff becomes prohibitively expensive, old hardware and consoles will SKYROCKET as demand goes up, because nobody is MAKING more.

Hoard tech now. We’re not that far away from 2012 laptops going for $500.

Draw her a little portrait the next day

Doubtful. When they remade FFVII they waved their hands around about there being a menu and said “Look! It’s just like the original!” despite the fact it’s NOTHING like it at all. They’re going to gaslight everyone about their bad, flashy effect game systems rather than give classic fans what they want.

Bingo.

Me: “I want to strategically pick from my attacks and dynamically respond to shifts in the battle with a whole optimized and customized party.”

Square-Enix: “Best I can do is half-assed hybrid character action game or stupid, limited autoplaying AI.”

They’re on that side because they choose to be there. There could be a cure for cancer on this side and they wouldn’t care.