• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 4th, 2025

help-circle

  • Dave wants to wear a dress to school. Donald doesn’t like it because he thinks only girls should wear dresses. Dave says he’s a girl, too. Dave says she wants to be called Samantha. Other girls are perfectly happy with Samantha wearing a dress and playing with them, until Samantha chooses a doll which Marjorie wanted to play with. Angry that she can’t play with her doll, Marjorie tells Donald Samantha is bad. Donald says; “See? I told you it was bad!” Meanwhile Kevin stole the doll Jocelyn was playing with and started kicking it around the schoolyard, breaking it as he does. Donald says “Dave caused that!” And half the other boys agree with him. Now Samantha gets sent home from school by the teacher for fighting with Donald, while Samantha had done nothing but wear a dress and play with dolls. Neither Dave in boy clothes, nor Samantha in girl clothes show up at school the next day. Donald keeps shouting that kids like Dave are the problem. Marjorie agrees with him. Kevin destroys another doll, but they’re fine with that because he’s not wearing a dress.



  • Right, because UEFI is open sourced and can be checked by anyone. Oh, wait, no, that’s why Libreboot is a thing: https://libreboot.org/ I will agree that TrustedComputingGroup and the way they use TPM have a more open standard, but I still don’t trust some of the companies behind it. Especially Microsoft, who have completely lost the plot with recent Windows versions. There is definitely a reason to be wary of it, as cryptographer Ross Anderson is quoted here on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing#Criticism Software Piracy is a direct answer to greedy publishers who burn out developers and force them to make crapware which they then force DRM on so people can’t play it even if they own the original release. Better people than me have written about how awful DRM is in games. See https://www.gog.com/blog/what-exactly-is-drm-in-video-games-and-why-should-you-care/ or https://expertbeacon.com/why-is-drm-bad-for-gaming/ for exaples. DRM is bad for game preservation purposes or simply to allow someone to install and reinstall the game they own several times. Better people than me have written out about the various issues which DRM caused in the past, most notably safedisc and securom which were well-reported upon. It does not belong in gaming. I can explain a lot, and can attribute a lot to stupidity and greed on either side of the argument. It’s not FUD when it’s a slow crawl to further enshittification and overzealous identification and exclusion of individual users and systems while giving false reasons for why we should put up with it.


  • Maki@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world[Deleted]
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    42
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    12 days ago

    Ask yourself why TrustedComputing became a thing, why UEFI and TPM are required for newer Windows versions and what they actually do. And each new step they add something more restrictive to prevent your system running unidentified code. Ask why kernel-level DRM is employed as an anticheat measure. What other kernel-level DRM is on your system? Do you know? Do you care enough to stop using the products pushing it onto your system in the first place? We’re slowly but surely letting the dystopian futures we were warned about happen by not protesting every single time they lock some part of your life down “for reasons”.



  • Don’t overengineer the prototype. Make it simple and efficient as a jumping off platform to lead to further developments down the road. Any open printer project doesn’t have to start with the technology the proprietary models have. They just have to be proof-of-concept that it’s doable. Once that’s proven, further developments can be made down the line. Dot matrix is easy to create and cheap to produce compared to the overengineered systems proprietary models use nowadays and it would work as a stepping stone toward that further development.


  • The print head is not complex, the printer companies just make it out to be. Essentially it’s just a funnel to transfer ink onto paper. All that’s needed is a needle to deliver the ink to the paper, or puncture the top layer to inject the ink to it. Apply heat to set the ink afterward. Moving the head over the paper and moving the rollers for the paper to move is already software which is known to the 3d printing community. The big trick is finding a system which doesn’t hit some backward patent and getting a prototype made. That largely takes time and money.



  • Maki@lemmy.blahaj.zonetomemes@lemmy.worldGoogle's WebP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    19 days ago

    MNG is a bit of an oddity; it was originally supposed to replace GIF but was itself replaced with PNG, Flash, and SVG. I have no such files available but ImageMagick can supposedly make one out of a number of PNG or JPG files if you’re interested in toying with it.