That’s ok. So do I.

Performing sufficiently for cheap production cost, they’d be a low RISC high reward investment.

I have a supposedly smart washing machine that came with the apartment. Setting it up in my locked down appliances network, it didn’t work with home-assistant, required cloud access and wanted me to open up ports in the firewall. Nope. No network connection for you. You are a regular dumb old washing machine.

Yay! More single use disposable garbage!

Yep. The self regulating market is either utopian vision by blind idealists or double speak for maximizing profits and fucking over anybody and anything while doing it.

Among the four disputed patents is one concerning improvements that reduces the number of steps – and thereby overall delay – when transmitting an uplink package; a Wireless Wake-On-LAN Power Management technique; an invention that allows a user to initiate a diagonal scroll at any location by using two fingers; and a hinge block that enables a laptop to convert to a tablet.

Welp, I guess Lenovo goes on my black list too then.

Because some people are desperate to feel superior, clinging to what distro they use when they have nothing else.

You know when you have an issue with your Linux so you air it on a public forum and are overrun with useless comments that you should switch to Arch because it’s so much better and you’re stupid if you don’t?

Yeah.

My guess is that at some point some poor web dev or web admin screwed up big time and with a heart rate nearing the colibri fluttered in panic above their laptop in attempts to restore the site, finding great relief that there was a snapshot in the archives and did not have enough presence to fix all the links to get it back online asap.

Considering it’s a laptop with a working Windows, it probably already has a licence for the hardware. Just download from Microsoft, wipe disk and install it and see if it works.

Because no need to fix when it works good enough.

Sublime Text 2, for which I have a licence. I’d upgraded to 3 but not for a subscription model.

I’ve been paying the €5 ad free subscription without other premium features for years until they announced that it will be discontinued from next month.

So then I am going to take a new look into ad blockers.

Good job, YouTube.

The big question is, how un/reliable are these drives.

Firmware is software that makes the hardware do what it is supposed to do that runs on the hardware itself.

The term is used somewhat ambiguously though.

• Sometimes it is just the pure functionality, “if button is pressed, flip the lights on/off”.
• Sometimes it glues communication with the functionality, “if signal is received over some interface, flip the lights on/off”.
• Sometimes it has an operating system, “when power is on, initiate communications with hardware and interfaces and load software if it is present to interact with any of these”.
• Sometimes it is a package with both operating system and software, “when power is on, initiate communications with hardware and interfaces and load software that I know is present”.
• Sometimes the OS and/or software in the firmware package has a helpful front facing user interface.