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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Dual boot and encrypt your Linux drives so windows can’t access them, or run windows in an isolated VM. Only use Windows when you absolutely need to and use Linux for everything else.

    That’s the best way to get yourself used to it. I did that with PC gaming. All my servers, my personal laptop, and my personal desktop all run Linux and just the personal desktop has windows dual boot. Now many games run on Linux, so I don’t even boot Windows. It’s been like a year or more since I last touched Windows outside of my work laptop.

    And with KDE Plasma desktop, even my non-tech-savy partner had no problem switching. Fedora has a Plasma district that works really well for me.


  • And look how much thinner. A large part of that is the need for physical ports which although they may loom small on the outside, also take up space inside for the boards that convert signals. Now those conversions happen in the dongles if needed.

    The real problem is that USB didn’t implement a hub standard so most hubs have had to use old hub standards and just have a single USB-C connector and the rest USB-A, hdmi, etc. There haven’t been many purely USB-C to USB-C hubs to allow for connecting lots of USB-C devices to a single port and usually they end up losing features or splitting bandwidth instead of sharing the full bandwidth.



  • But even the car thing is not the responsibility of the manufacturer to fix. It’s the owner’s responsibility and only of they actually are using it.

    If companies have to update all products to keep up with modern safety standards, it would mean no new products would ever be made and the products would be exceptionally expensive since you’d only buy them once. That’s not the type of economic system we live in.

    And no, a router that is defective is not going to tank the digital economy just because the manufacturer doesn’t fix it. Definitely not a d-link product. That’s why enterprise grade commercial products are so much more expensive. They are designed for longer life. If that’s what you want, then buy a commercial product and pay the company a subscription fee for support or warrantee in cases like this.



  • Those are things that get inspected regularly because of public safety issues, not ownership issues, and in the US at least, that only happens in a subset of states anyway. That is about using something you know will likely hurt someone vs using something you know will hurt you and possibly your customers. There’s a big difference in liability there.

    Vacuums for example do not get regular inspections, and owners are allowed to use any product they want, even defective ones, in their own home or business, even if they pose, say, an electrical shock risk or something else that wasn’t something that would have made it fail its initial certification. We don’t force vacuum manufacturers to fix old product design issues.

    And even if we did, how long back would we make them fix? Would 100 year old vacuums need to be brought up to modern safety standards like grounded plugs and all of the wiring to be redone to ground all the parts or more modern motors that use less power so they don’t need to be grounded? What if only one person in the whole world still uses that product?

    It’s just not a reasonable thing to expect re-engineering old devices when a new potential owner safety issue is found.




  • I’m not saying they shouldn’t fix the issue necessarily, assuming it’s even possible. I’m saying they shouldn’t be held to higher standards than any other product just because the engineering effort involved in software is undervalued compared to physical objects. If a product made 15 years ago didn’t follow modern safety standards and is no longer being sold by the manufacturer, we don’t make them update their old products.

    As for tooling, yes, and with software it often requires “tooling” that no longer exists in order to develop the patch including hardware that may no longer be manufactured. It’s not like the product manufacturer manufactures all of the parts like circuits and microchips. Just like vacuum manufacturers don’t usually make the bearings and gears and such, they just assemble them. So same concept.

    We may require them to keep parts with the existing design, but we don’t require them to fix safety issues that were not found to be out of compliance when it was originally approved for production. We might make them fix it if they’re still selling them, but we don’t make them fix these issues if they are not.