Part of the free-market attitude though is that you should be allowed to buy policy, so in that regard it’s consistent, you just have to account for corruption in the cost of doing business.
If people are ok with that then I guess it will stand, but it’s insane and anti-consumer in my book. A product costs what it costs, based on supply and demand, and if you can’t afford it you don’t buy it. This flimsy premise of “It lowers the bar to entry so users can upgrade later without having to replace!” will never come to fruition, and it’s too slippery of a slope to “put in a quarter to turn on your A/C”.
That is insane. If it costs the same to make, then lower range isn’t a reasonable area to pitch a lower cost vehicle. Wanting to lower the cost is fine. Putting in cheaper/smaller components to get there is fine. If you are using the same components and just software locking them to nickle and dime the users later, that’s anti-consumer and should not be tolerated. I can’t believe how people look at micro-transactions in games and think “wouldn’t this be cool with IRL stuff?”
My setup is a bit extreme, but here are my guardrails:
I built my kids potato computers from the time they were 3-5, which was during covid. They need computer skills nowadays, and it put them at an advantage for covid school. We got them on java Minecraft which was huge for reading, typing, and some basic math skills (they figured out multiplication for crafting things like doors). I made a chart which had icons of things they want, with the word next to it, so they could search and type in creative.
We used Ubuntu Mate. It’s simple, stable, and familiar. They do NOT have sudo on these boxes. As we’ve advanced, they now have firefox (behind a pihole which upstreams to opendns’ family protect), gimp (with a wacom tablet!), inkscape, calculators, tenacity, libre office, and they’re starting to get into some cad to make things to 3d print. You have to come to terms with doing a LOT of patient hand holding, but it has paid off dividends.
Huge bummer that they’re all 5+ years old. We’ve been moving to libreelec with Disney+, Jellycon, Netflix, Youtube, and amazon prime plugins. It’s not the same, but it’s workable. If Amazon keeps MatterCast open and open source implementations get made, that’s where I’m focusing my attention. A raspberry pi with libreelec that can be a casting target feels, to me, like the holy grail:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/9/24030324/amazon-matter-casting-echo-show-fire-tv-prime-video
No joke can you share those results? I’m holding out for matter cast
This whole thing sucks because this kind of tech has the potential to be revolutionary. For people with paralysis, or those experiencing vision loss due to eye issues, the tech to interface nerves with sensors and inputs will be absolutely revolutionary. On the other hand, Musk has a terrible track record with safety and regulation, develops tech by abusing researchers and workers with unrealistic timelines and expectations, overpromises and under delivers, and responds with hostility to even the most measured criticism. Having his name tied to the version of this tech leading the news cycle will paint it in a dystopian light, raising the regulatory bar to “panic” levels with no nuance, and will likely result in pushing more realistic approaches to the tech back a significant amount of time, hurting those it would help most.
For sure for sure. What is your preferred mechanisms for feature requests? Small things, like in the browser pane, could we get buttons to launch terminals directly in the connections tree on the left, so I can launch the terminal without having to open the file browser for that connection, or likewise, adding a link in the connections pane to jump straight into the file browser? I envision a workflow where I keep 1 view open and can launch into file browsing or terminal directly from that view.
Have you considered embedding a terminal editor in the actual program? I use mRemoteNG on windows, and the integrated rdp/ssh with a sidebar full of bookmarks is the dragon I’ve been chasing on linux.
If this had remmina and vnc, and could embed terminals, it’d be a huge feature jump in my book (though it’s already great as a better way to manage my ssh sessions)
For real though, I loved those. That wireless Logitech one with the volume dial lasted me a decade.
As a Californian, the state should sue for damages and use the funds for high speed rail. The entire hype around this stupid tech was to torpedo high speed rail in the state so Musk could sell more cars. I get that this is Branson’s spinoff, but the tech isn’t viable and all the investor hype around it was just a smokescreen for public policy control and that HAS to result in some sort of reparations, it’s basically fraud in my opinion. The assets should be sold off and put towards public transit.
I manage a lot of systems, so just click to open a ssh session in a new tab. I usually have shell aliases, but a bookmark that could set the title of the tab to the hostname and account for easier nav would be my goal. Being able to dynamically open tab groups too would be good, like if I have a dev/prod/SQL server for an app I could 1-click to open a group of 3 tabs
I’ve been looking for a terminal with better bookmark support; I use mRemoteNG on windows for my RDP/SSH work, and I haven’t been happy with any alternative on Linux that handles session bookmarks like that. I’m curious to try this.
For sure, though I question the theory. Directional wireless power I think is feasible, but this sounds like blanketing (1-2 transmitters in a house with no regard for obstacles/direction, per the article). That sounds hugely wasteful, especially given how much more energy power takes vs. signal. I do think a zigbee type solution is the ultimate answer, because even if it goes back to batteries for wall stations, data transmission like that is so much less energy than power that the battery problem becomes null-ish.
This article is scant on details. It harvests RF to power/charge low energy devices. What RF bands? Is putting these through a house knocking out bluetooth around it, or existing RF remotes for devices? Or is this some background RF that won’t penetrate deep into a house to begin with? There would be “1-2 RF transmitters” to power the whole house…that doesn’t seem great, that’s a ton of wasted energy emanating in a sphere from the transmitter to hit these devices all over. I’m not sure what problem this is solving, copper wiring cost of extended runs to switches? Isn’t this problem going to go away if some system like zigbee got standardized and the switch hardware was baked into the end device itself to be controlled by any of multiple control points?
They used to be but I’m not sure now; I think when they release the full self-manufactured ones I will want one.
I have had an s76 wild dog which was amazing for an 11 year run, and I just replaced that with a meerkat. I also have a thelio which has been flawless. System76’s desktops are amazing.
In 2013 I bought a darter and it’s the worst laptop I’ve ever owned. I went through 4 keyboards and still it doesn’t work, also the wifi radio is under the keyboard and you get a 50% signal reduction when typing. It had one of those trapdoor Ethernet ports which broke, so I basically became a dead device. That is an old metric, but it scared me off from buying laptops from them until they get their own hardware pipeline for them.
My son (who is 9) was diagnosed with celiac when he didn’t grow from age 2-3 (gluten -> guts make enzyme to digest it -> immune system sees enzyme making cells as invaders -> immune system attacks cells -> intestines swell -> nutrition stops being absorbed). He was effectively starving despite eating. He’s on track now as we have a strict gluten free household, and the fad people have created a market demand which makes companies want to make products that give him options…but a treatment like this would be life changing.
It’s a different device. Already, the existing google tv workflow is different than the chromecast, which was phone control first. Now, it brings up an app which favors navigation with the remote. If I want a set top box, I’ll put a kodi box in…I wanted a dumb dongle which could be controlled from a phone. It’s fundamentally a different product.
My hope is that casting decouples as a concept from being a google protocol. Even though Amazon is backing it now, I hope MatterCast can become an open casting standard. My vision is having MatterCast be an installable add-on to Kodi, and then an ultra-light image can be made for super low-end devices supporting audio and video (or both).