Because 3.5mm jacks suck. 6.3mm jacks are much more sturdy and can be easily mounted on 6mm or even thicker cable, which can also handle much more use.
Flimsy jack and thin cheap cable cable is asking for trouble during performance.
The only plus of 3.5mm and smaller 'phone jacks' is their size and in many applications it is much less important than reliability.
I like our European rules, when we are guaranteed PTO by law and employers would often force you to take it when you accumulated too much unused off days. The system cares even for those who would not care for themselves.
Slightly off-topic rant:
I hate how the 'VPN' term has been took over by companies selling services using VPN technology.
VPN was initially 'Virtual Private Network' – used to securely connect own (as belonging to an organization or person) devices over a public network. Like securely connecting bank branches. Or allowing employee connect to a company network. And VPN are still used that way. They are secure and provide the privacy needed.
Now when people say 'VPN' they often mean a service where they use VPN software (initially designed for the use case mentioned above) to connect to the public interned via some third-party. This is not a 'private network' any more. It just changes who you need to trust with you network activity. And changes how others may see you (breaking other trust).
When you cannot trust your ISP and your local authorities those 'VPNs' can be useful. But I have more trust to my ISP I have a contract with and my country legal system than in some exotic company in some tax haven or other country that our consumer protections or GDPR obligations won't reach.
Back to the topic:
I do not believe that all VPN services are owned/funded by governments, but some may be. I don't have much reason to trust them, they are doing it for money and not necessarily only the money their customers pay them. In fact I trust my government more that some random very foreign company.
I was quite involved in XMPP, not from the very start, but quite early. At first its biggest strength were 'transports' – gateways to other, proprietary, instant messengers. Having a Jabber (that what it was called there) account allowed one to talk to ICQ and AIM users. This is what pulled first users and allowed the network to grow. The protocol being open and network being federated appealed to various nerds, for whom it became the IM network of choice. Especially when they could use it to talk to friends and family on other networks.
I wrote a Jabber transport for the most popular instant messaging platform in my country. It become a 'must have' component of any Jabber/XMPP server here. And some major local commercial internet services would start their own XMPP services – finally they had some means to compete with the monopolist. For me it was my '5 minutes of pride' – my little piece of open source software would be used by thousands of users, though most unaware of that. I have also wrote a Python library and a text client for XMPP.
Then Google joined and Facebook started considering it. It seemed like XMPP will become 'the SMTP of instant messaging' – the real standard which will end closed proprietary communicators. But things didn't go well. Google would often ignore the agreed protocol, change it a bit, while still declaring full support. XMPP development would slow down, as everybody wanted the protocol to be agreed with Google, but Google just made some small improvements on their side without sharing details or participating in building XMPP specifications.
Federation with Google would become more and more unreliable. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not. Google Talk, GMail Chat, Hangouts seemed to be the same thing and not the same thing at the same time it was a mess. Then Google pulled the plug. Then every smaller commercial providers did the same – there was no point in keeping the service when more than half of the contacts disappeared.
I felt betrayed by Google (it really felt like a 'non-evil' corporation back then). But that was not what killed XMPP for me.
I would have less and less people to talk to via XMPP, not just because of Google. Other networks my Jabber server was linked to become more and more irrelevant (anybody using ICQ, AIM or GG now?). Nerds that used XMPP left it because of loosing contacts in other networks, or just moved on to Discord (yeah… nobody seems to notice it is proprietary too). I would still use XMPP for family communication, but there was the spam…
Oh… the spam. I would get over hundred of messages (or contact requests), mostly in Russian, offering me bitcoins or cracked software. They would come from many different accounts and domains. Often from 'legitimate' XMPP servers. And there were no means to reliably block it. The XMPP protocol had no proper means to handle illegitimate traffic. XMPP servers and clients had little spam-fighting measures. The spam made XMPP unusable for me, so I shut down my server too. I guess that could also be a major reasons for some commercial services to de-federate. I think USENET was killed by spam and no effective moderation too back in the day.
Then my wife convinced me to bring it back. XMPP is again and still my primary communication platform for family chat. A private server with four accounts. Practically blocked from outside. We use it because it proven to be the most reliable thing and independent from the big corporations. Even Signal was inferior to that (no proper desktop/web clients, sometimes messages would be delayed even by hours, then it even stopped being convenient when they dropped SMS support).
It probably seems extra complexity for you, if your language does not use it. For native speakers it is just natural and not using it would be at least weird.
We could ask the same question about articles . Those 'the' and 'a', why use them? It only makes English language harder to use! 'Apple is apple' why add another meaningless word?
Of course after learning and using English for years I see the meaning of 'a' and 'the' and thy feel quite natural for me to (though sometimes they still make little sense to me – all the fights whether 'The' can be used with some proper name or not). The point is: a lot of features of a foreign language will fill alien and unnecessary.
Maybe more on topic, that is how/why gendered words work in Polish: noun gender is usually linked to how it ends (but do not confuse that with suffixes of grammatical cases). Virtually all Polish women names end with 'a', so any other noun ending in 'a' sounds feminine and would be used in similar way. And sometimes it just 'rhymes' – like in 'to jabkło' ('this apple' – neuter), 'ta gruszka' ('this pear' – feminine), 'ten banan' ('this banana' – masculine). Of course thing get much more complicated than that (like in every language, just in different parts of the language).
People were just talking in the way that it was convenient for them. And thousands years later scholars called this feature of particular set of languages 'gender' because words used seem to be related to genders.
And a lot of users' frustration, especially on more niche platforms (Linux, ARM, etc.) - things look much better on release when the code have been regularly compiled and, hopefully tested, on all platforms, not just the one the lead developer uses.
I think Java ecosystem is more about 'best practices' (in the most enterprisey meaning) than common sense and good coding. That is why everything in Java gets so over-enigeered. Abstraction over abstraction. XML, SOAP, beans, factories of factories at every corner.
At least that is my feeling, as an sysadmin (fluent in some other programming languages) who occasionally deploys those monstrosities.
Compare that to PHP apps. They also tend to be a mess, but in a completely different way. No 'best practices' are common here. Just a pile of spaghetti code, that does the thing it is meant to (until it doesn't).
Then people who still prefer Reddit to Lemmy could do the same to us and would be totally justified. Do not make internet even worse than it is now. You don't like a service – don't use it. Do not make it worse for everybody else.
Will you change your bank when it refuses to work with Firefox? What if most other banks do the same?
This is how things are in Android now – online banking, online games and even subscription media services are mostly unavailable to those who would like to use non-official OS.
website authors will want to limit their own audience for the benefit of some company?
Many websites already refuse to work with anything not-chrome-based – so website authors often don't care.
Banks see that as 'security', so they are ok with 'losing' a small percentage of customers who want 'insecure' devices. In fact they would hardly lose anything, as their customers usually depend more on the bank, than the bank on any particular customer.
For media providers, that is another 'anti-piracy' measure (DRM) – they will also happily sacrifice Linux users, as insignificant fraction of users, probably less then 'actual pirates' on Windows or Mac. Netflix already won't stream in high quality to Firefox on Linux.
For online game providers this will be easy anti-cheat measure – they will also not care about that insignificant fraction of user.
Each of those service providers would loose maybe 5% of their user base (probably less… as most users would eventually accommodate), but the affected users would use major number of services they care about.
The old business model could not last forever… and even if it could it was not good for anyone.
Think about it
Hosting videos is expensive, someone has to pay for it. It was mostly paid by ads. Ads which many (most people) would block and many people would not ever click even when not blocked. But it still made money… The money come only from ads which 1) where not blocked 2) where at least clicked. The business relied on that.
So YT relied on ads targeting people who did not know how to block ads and people easy to manipulate by the ads (eager to buy whatever they are trying to sell). Probably not the brightest. Or just easy to be taken advantage of. So the incentive would be to promote content for those people. Not good content, not true content, just content that makes ads viewed and clicked.
People using ad-blocks were still affected by those who do not. And whole site was optimized for advertises not viewers or content creators. And that is bad.
I am all in favour of any direct form of payments instead of ads powering the internet. Sites get very little money for each view anyway – so the prices for users should also be quite small.
Unfortunately as long as ads are supposed to be normal part of internet, they may get forced even onto paying customers. We need regulations.
They would say: that was because you used the cheaper service instead of us and they botched the repair. It is only a problem for NEWAG because the world found out.
Have you ever worked with a computer with modern general-purpose OS like Linux and no RTC? It sucks. It is not strictly necessary, you can live without it, but you need workarounds for basic stuff timestamps in log files or in the file system. At least for a minute until NTP connection is established, but may be longer when internet connection is not available. And when routers are rebooted most often? When troubleshooting broken internet connection. This is also the time when properly timestamped logs could be useful.
And battery backed RTC is cheap. It doesn't fit on a Raspberry Pi board, but can easily fit into a router case. No excuse for omitting it.
Sounds like what happened to Kerbal Space Program 2… it didn't end well
You mean they choose not to support Linux. Still sounds like they are to blame, not Linux.
They destroy everything they touch...
I am only happy for the damaged they made to MySQL popularity. ;-)
Sulfur polution actually has cooling effect, so it is kind of opposite of greenhouse gases. It sucks in different ways, though.
Bad zoning laws are bad. And these laws are really bad (forcibly separating 'business' and residential are makes no sense to me) , but completely deregulating that (like allowing residential building directly adjacent to a dangerous chemical plant or in a flood zone) would be as bad.
If working with currency use types and formating functions appropriate for currency. Not float.
In Poland it was „śnieży” (snowing).
Maybe it is some kind of automated rule 'block bots that cause lots of traffic'. kbin is becoming more and more significant, so it probably causes some non-insignificant load on Lemmy servers. Legitimate load, but the IDS rules would not know that.
Not everything has to be computed in every computation cycle. Most things are already pre-computed and the operations to do the corrections would mostly be simple additions and multiplications.
Jail is not the only possible punishment for anything illegal.
Differences between 2.4 and 2.6 were quite big, I don't think there was another such big change in kernel releases any time later. But that was also the time when Linux was transitioning from being a hobby project (already useful for serious stuff) to being a serious professional operating system – the last moment for major refactoring.
Linux kernel is still changing and being constantly refactored, but now the changes tend to be more gradual and version numbers matter much less.
Jira was ok until they dropped self-hosting option. Why should I keep internal development data at third party server?
Other Atlassian software, though... oh, what a mess. And it only was getting worse with any new release. I am glad we have dumped it all.
Someone asking for Linux backup solution may prefer to avoid Apple 'ecosystem'.
They do and make reliability even worse.
The loans are not just a symptom. Is probably the main cause of current college prices. Prices would not be so high if students would not be given money to pay them.
But the problem they try to solve is: user's device is not under full control of the service provider. The only solution to that problem is to take away the control from the device owner. You cannot have both.
Modern corporate management model is just broken.
They probably mean Ukrainian citizens ditching a 'democratically elected' president who they didn't like, because he tried to make Ukraine more Russian than European.
But that is still a democracy in work, when this is what most of citizens want. Especially when later democratic elections prove that (as it happened in Ukraine). Russia should not intervene, but they did and this destabilized the situation.
This would only give more power to the remaining billionaires, who won't disperse money on their own. This is why it must be a systemic change and not a volunteer action.
Browser and website developers see it other way: we can care about optimizations even less now.
That works only when people are ready to question their opinions. Many are not. The 'why' question does not seem to make sense to them – why ask for reasoning, when we know 'the fact'?
The only meaningful 'why' in such situation may be: 'why I am still talking to them?'
Google would probably like to take over the user generated content somehow. If people can find it on Google even when it is not available on Reddit then it is pure profit for Google. They already provide a lot of information on their search pages bypassing the sources. Google is not our friend. Not any more.
On EFI systems all bootloaders are supposed to reside on a single partition. EFI does not support multiple 'EFI system partitions', so operating systems have to share a single one. And this is usually not a problem if it is the one Windows choose. The problem most often is broken EFI firmware which fails to correctly handle adding and removing boot entries. Or Windows, which fails to boot if anything changes (disk order and such), even though everything is still available.
Yeah 'make a better tea by making it taste less like a tea'. I have seen a lot of that from people who just don't like tea.
Though, for me that also include Brits, who spoil a good tea by adding milk ;-)
Valve is the company responsible for unlocking my PC for gaming. Most games can now be played without using Windows and Valve is mostly responsible for that. Because most game developers do not care and would rather force you to use proprietary OS than let you use what you prefer.
My experience with C++ was when C++ was a relatively new thing. Practically the only notable feature provided by the standard library, was that unholy abuse of bit shift operators for I/O. No standard collections or any other data types.
And every compiler would consider something else a valid C++ code or interpret the same code differently.
I am little bit prejudiced since then… and that is probably where the author is coming from too.
Then things were just getting more complicated (templates and other new syntax quirks), to fill the holes in attempts to make C a 'high level language'.
Subscription to a software is not mutually exclusive with self-hosting. Developers deserve to earn money, especially those who do not rely on collecting data, showing ads and enshittification of their cloud platform.
Doesn't sound like the 'cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on' that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.
I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.