I remember reading a story a while back about someone who owned a legit CS version with a proper serial and activation.

They had to change computer, and in doing so had to reactivate Photoshop, but it wasn’t working. They contacted Adobe support and explained the situation but support basically told him nope, not a chance, we aren’t helping you. You need to subscribe to new Photoshop.

So Adobe accepted that yes, he bought a perpetual licence for Photoshop and that yes, the reason it isn’t working is the online activation, but they still refused to help.

Scumbags.

It’s common, and especially so on devices that don’t have batteries which are intended to be user-removable - which is pretty much all new phones.

Unlike laptops, many phones simply won’t turn on without a battery connected.

Yep, that’s specifically the meaning :)

Golden = Made of gold

Gilded = Covered in a thin layer of gold

The gold and the thin layer was the 1%-ers, with rampant corruption and harsh conditions for everyone else.

This is mostly the fault of what people search for.

90% of your average buyers don’t go on shopping sites and search “20W USB-C PD Charger” they go on and search “Samsung S22 charger” or whatever they’ve got.

Sellers are incentivised to design the listings around that, or they simply won’t get the clicks.

Given the free and open source nature of Lemmy, I’d suggest that creating an account to raise a feature suggestion - and in that way contribute - would not be an unreasonable expectation at all, rather than the expectation of having other people who are themselves only volunteers jump through all the hoops for you.

Oh no!

Anyway…

10 years isn’t the worst run, but it still proves the point that anything which needs an app or connected web service to function will inevitably become e-waste, and maybe sooner than you’d like.

Earlier today, I was looking at reviews of portable Bluetooth speakers. One had a bullet point “No equalizer app, with only basic EQ functions available on the speaker itself.”

The review intended that to be a negative, but I was like “Hell yeah that’s what I want!”

Functionality in pure hardware means it will keep on working as long as the hardware works. It means that I myself get to be the one who decides when I need an upgrade, not when the company forces my hand.

Every single tech purchasing decision I make these days, having freedom from apps, cloud, or any other ticking time bomb is top of my feature list.

Ohh yeah. I remember the tech news coverage of the cars being so easy to steal, just didn’t realise there was a “challenge” about it. Unbelievable Hyundai and Kia got away without immobilisers for so long. Really cheeky of them to cut that corner, and it backfired.

What the heck is that?

For sure right!

What really changed though wasn’t the size of the computer, but how the computer produced value.

Initially, a lot of what people wanted computers for was to get their “document stuff” done, and that was what took up all the room, because of the printer, and scanner, and paper, and filing drawers, and so-on. And soooo many CDs for software you needed to get that all done.

Back when I was a kid, my babysitter used our Windows 95 machine to write up and print off a cover letter for job applications, and it was 9 year old me who taught her how to do it, lol. And that was the value.

I bet even when your friend set up their shiny new all-in-one, they still had the old computer and all its attached devices hiding away shamefully in the ‘office’ there somewhere…

So it wasn’t really miniaturisation that killed the computer room as much as it was every aspect of life going online. No physical disks anymore because software comes over the Internet. No need to print because 99% of our life and business can be done online. So all the things that filled up the computer room just ceased to be needed, and so did the room that held them.

There was a brief and remarkable period in history from the mid 90s to the late 2000s where homes all across the land had a room that was referred to as “The Computer Room”

Not “The Office” no; for this room was not so pedestrian. It was a room whose entire function was to house the great monolith of The Computer.

A corner desk in veneered pine-effect plywood, atop which sat the great beige tower and CRT. A printer and a scanner straddling the desk like sentinels. Racks of CD holders built right into the fake pine, and a lidded box for floppy disks in a smoky translucent plastic, that for some reason came with lock and key as if the disks were precious jewels.

These days we have no need for such things, and the home office is once again simply an office. But for a while we had The Computer Room, and some part of me misses you.

The one I self-host shares nothing with nobody :)

Fair :)

Well you said those words, but then followed on by saying what seems to be an excuse for exactly that - effectively they are rich so they can afford it

So what are we saying? Destruction of people’s property is cool if it passes some arbitrary threshold that seems like they must be “well off” to own that property?

Does that also mean it’s cool to rob anyone who owns a macbook, on the assumption they’d have a cheaper laptop if they weren’t loaded?

Where I live, the taxi drivers primarily are driving Teslas and other electric cars because they do crazy mileage for their job and so over time the Tesla is actually the most economical choice for them. And that’s just a regular working class job.

That, or hanging subtle dong on second hand listings is their kink

Very kind and polite of you

To play the role of the annoying five year old, “And why is that bad?”

Fair :)