Dual boot and encrypt your Linux drives so windows can’t access them, or run windows in an isolated VM. Only use Windows when you absolutely need to and use Linux for everything else.

That’s the best way to get yourself used to it. I did that with PC gaming. All my servers, my personal laptop, and my personal desktop all run Linux and just the personal desktop has windows dual boot. Now many games run on Linux, so I don’t even boot Windows. It’s been like a year or more since I last touched Windows outside of my work laptop.

And with KDE Plasma desktop, even my non-tech-savy partner had no problem switching. Fedora has a Plasma district that works really well for me.

And look how much thinner. A large part of that is the need for physical ports which although they may loom small on the outside, also take up space inside for the boards that convert signals. Now those conversions happen in the dongles if needed.

The real problem is that USB didn’t implement a hub standard so most hubs have had to use old hub standards and just have a single USB-C connector and the rest USB-A, hdmi, etc. There haven’t been many purely USB-C to USB-C hubs to allow for connecting lots of USB-C devices to a single port and usually they end up losing features or splitting bandwidth instead of sharing the full bandwidth.

“Look at you, sailing through the air majestically like an eagle…piloting a blimp.”

I mean just quote every line from the portal games and be done with this thread. :-D

That’s already the case with a lot of things. I have a 3D scanner and printer for fixing things. Just the materials are limited to plastics that don’t need to take on load bearing tasks. I could use stronger plastics, though, if I was willing to deal with the fumes.

But even the car thing is not the responsibility of the manufacturer to fix. It’s the owner’s responsibility and only of they actually are using it.

If companies have to update all products to keep up with modern safety standards, it would mean no new products would ever be made and the products would be exceptionally expensive since you’d only buy them once. That’s not the type of economic system we live in.

And no, a router that is defective is not going to tank the digital economy just because the manufacturer doesn’t fix it. Definitely not a d-link product. That’s why enterprise grade commercial products are so much more expensive. They are designed for longer life. If that’s what you want, then buy a commercial product and pay the company a subscription fee for support or warrantee in cases like this.

That’s not necessarily true. That’s a copyright issue. Now if d-link was to say that the product was not abandoned and thus the copyright is still theirs, then you might have a case that they need to fix the issue. That doesn’t mean they need to give you the code, but decompiling should be OK. But copyright laws vary quite a bit. So that’s a totally separate issue.

But you are welcome to write your own firmware and install it on the device in most localities. You just need write it from scratch, just like replacing a custom gear or motor in a vacuum would require engineering it to fit inside the case and connect with all the appropriate parts. Which you are welcome to do.

Those are things that get inspected regularly because of public safety issues, not ownership issues, and in the US at least, that only happens in a subset of states anyway. That is about using something you know will likely hurt someone vs using something you know will hurt you and possibly your customers. There’s a big difference in liability there.

Vacuums for example do not get regular inspections, and owners are allowed to use any product they want, even defective ones, in their own home or business, even if they pose, say, an electrical shock risk or something else that wasn’t something that would have made it fail its initial certification. We don’t force vacuum manufacturers to fix old product design issues.

And even if we did, how long back would we make them fix? Would 100 year old vacuums need to be brought up to modern safety standards like grounded plugs and all of the wiring to be redone to ground all the parts or more modern motors that use less power so they don’t need to be grounded? What if only one person in the whole world still uses that product?

It’s just not a reasonable thing to expect re-engineering old devices when a new potential owner safety issue is found.

This is a misunderstanding of how Amazon works. There’s a difference from them showing up as products on their “store” and them actually selling them.

Anything that was a product of that company will show if you go to their store and search for it. But if you look at the options for actually buying them you’ll see that they are being sold by third parties.

For example, if you go to this link https://a.co/d/eFXaSFJ for the DSR-150 you’ll see that there are only 3 sellers. The new is shipped and sold by HOLLITRONIC and the others are used and shipped and sold by other sellers. None of the products on the list, as far as I could find, were being sold by D-link or Amazon itself. D-link has no control over the Amazon marketplace and honesty Amazon doesn’t do much to control it even.

Sure, but then those new revisions that are currently being sold are what get updated. That’s perfectly reasonable. We don’t require physical products to go back and fix the old stuff they are no longer selling. If we said that a vacuum manufacturer has to go back and fix their old products for safety flaws to comply with modern standards, what about a company that has been around for 100 years? Do they have to go back and design and manufacture modern technology into those products that didn’t exist when they were made? What if only one person in the whole world is actually using that product anymore? How long do they need to continue to revise the product?

I’m not saying they shouldn’t fix the issue necessarily, assuming it’s even possible. I’m saying they shouldn’t be held to higher standards than any other product just because the engineering effort involved in software is undervalued compared to physical objects. If a product made 15 years ago didn’t follow modern safety standards and is no longer being sold by the manufacturer, we don’t make them update their old products.

As for tooling, yes, and with software it often requires “tooling” that no longer exists in order to develop the patch including hardware that may no longer be manufactured. It’s not like the product manufacturer manufactures all of the parts like circuits and microchips. Just like vacuum manufacturers don’t usually make the bearings and gears and such, they just assemble them. So same concept.

We may require them to keep parts with the existing design, but we don’t require them to fix safety issues that were not found to be out of compliance when it was originally approved for production. We might make them fix it if they’re still selling them, but we don’t make them fix these issues if they are not.

That’s assuming you’re looking for a replacement part. This is redesigning the product to work differently to fix a flaw. Like if you made a vacuum company use a different gear because the existing one was too fragile. That’s likely not something you can just swap out. First you need an engineer to decide what kind of gear and redesign everything around it to make the gear fit properly as well as creating a way for it to be easily installed by the end user or their repair service. You’re ultimately changing the functionality of the original product. Yes it’s flawed functionality, but there are tons of flawed products out there.

This isn’t spare parts. This is asking for a new part to be designed and manufactured to replace an existing part. That takes time and money. Granted software doesn’t require mass production, but creating the initial version does take expertise and resources that may no longer exist in addition to the time and money.

As far as I can tell, those aren’t from authorized resellers or even from Amazon itself which they might have some ability to stop selling them. These are just people who are using amazon marketplace to sell off old stock like any other product. D-link hasn’t sold them for a while. But I could be wrong, I just haven’t seen any evidence that they are selling them. If Bissel had a vacuum that had a faulty gear that would break after a few years of use and they stopped making them, that wouldn’t stop someone from buying them up from Walmart or other store warehouses that no longer sold them and listing them for sale on Amazon or Walmart or whatever marketplace. That’s very common.

I mean this is pretty standard in all industries regardless of whether it’s a software flaw or a physical flaw in any other kind of product. What’s the likelihood of a vacuum manufacturer replacing a part in a 15 year old product that had a 1 year warrantee even if it’s a safety issue? Sure the delivery and installation is cheaper with software, but the engineering and development isn’t, especially if the environment for building it has to be recreated.

They left it small so that it wouldn’t be worth it to fight in court and they’d either just settle for a license fee or pay the fine. But sounds like the best way would be to get the patents revoked, but that’s probably more expensive than just paying the fine due to the legal fees.

Not give up. Just move away from corporate owned social media which generally has biases baked in and allows for easy manipulation by the company. The one we’re on right now is not one of those and there are lots of other alternatives. Not that they’re perfect, just that money and especially wealthy individuals aren’t able to easily and singlehandedly manipulate millions of people by purging factual but dissenting information.

Yeah they may not cooperate with authorities, but I’m sure they’d be happy to sell it to contractors working on behalf of the government to the same ends. They already sell the info as it is.

I mean that’s standard practice. If a feature, product, or company develops a bad reputation, just rename it. If your market is large enough there will be enough people not paying attention to not realize it’s the same product.

“A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular”

That electric bill, though. 🤣