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https://hackaday.com/2025/10/22/what-happened-to-running-what-you-wanted-on-your-own-machine/
https://archive.ph/6i4vr
When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions.
Today, that freedom is dying. What's worse, is it's happening so gradually that most people haven't noticed we're already halfway into the coffin.
The latest broadside fired in the war against platform freedom has been fired. Google recently announced new upcoming restrictions on APK installations. Starting in 2026, Google will tightening the screws on sideloading, making it increasingly difficult to install applications that haven't been blessed by the Play Store's approval process. It's being sold as a security measure, but it will make it far more difficult for users to run apps outside the official ecosystem. There is a security argument to be made, of course, because suspect code can cause all kinds of havoc on a device loaded with a user's personal data. At the same time, security concerns have a funny way of aligning perfectly with ulterior corporate motives.
[...] The walled garden concept didn't start with smartphones. Indeed, video game consoles were a bit of a trailblazer in this space, with manufacturers taking this approach decades ago. The moment gaming became genuinely profitable, console manufacturers realized they could control their entire ecosystem. Proprietary formats, region systems, and lockout chips were all valid ways to ensure companies could levy hefty licensing fees from developers. They locked down their hardware tighter than a bank vault, and they did it for one simple reason—money. As long as the manufacturer could ensure the console wouldn't run unapproved games, developers would have to give them a kickback for every unit sold.
[...] Then came the iPhone, and with it, the App Store. Apple took the locked-down model and applied it to a computer you carry in your pocket. The promise was that you'd only get apps that were approved by Apple, with the implicit guarantee of a certain level of quality and functionality.
[...] Apple sold the walled garden as a feature. It wasn't ashamed or hiding the fact—it was proud of it. It promised apps with no viruses and no risks; a place where everything was curated and safe. The iPhone's locked-down nature wasn't a restriction; it was a selling point.
But it also meant Apple controlled everything. Every app paid Apple's tax, and every update needed Apple's permission. You couldn't run software Apple didn't approve, full stop. You might have paid for the device in your pocket, but you had no right to run what you wanted on it. Someone in Cupertino had the final say over that, not you.
When Android arrived on the scene, it offered the complete opposite concept to Apple's control. It was open source, and based on Linux. You could load your own apps, install your own ROMs and even get root access to your device if you wanted. For a certain kind of user, that was appealing. Android would still offer an application catalogue of its own, curated by Google, but there was nothing stopping you just downloading other apps off the web, or running your own code.
Sadly, over the years, Android has been steadily walking back that openness. The justifications are always reasonable on their face. Security updates need to be mandatory because users are terrible at remembering to update. Sideloading apps need to come with warnings because users will absolutely install malware if you let them just click a button. Root access is too dangerous because it puts the security of the whole system and other apps at risk. But inch by inch, it gets harder to run what you want on the device you paid for.
[...] Microsoft hasn't pulled the trigger on fully locking down Windows. It's flirted with the idea, but has seen little success. Windows RT and Windows 10 S were both locked to only run software signed by Microsoft—each found few takers. Desktop Windows remains stubbornly open, capable of running whatever executable you throw at it, even if it throws up a few more dialog boxes and question marks with every installer you run these days.
[...] Here's what bothers me most: we're losing the idea that you can just try things with computers. That you can experiment. That you can learn by doing. That you can take a risk on some weird little program someone made in their spare time. All that goes away with the walled garden. Your neighbour can't just whip up some fun gadget and share it with you without signing up for an SDK and paying developer fees. Your obscure game community can't just write mods and share content because everything's locked down. So much creativity gets squashed before it even hits the drawing board because it's just not feasible to do it.
It's hard to know how to fight this battle. So much ground has been lost already, and big companies are reluctant to listen to the esoteric wishers of the hackers and makers that actually care about the freedom to squirt whatever through their own CPUs. Ultimately, though, you can still vote with your wallet. Don't let Personal Computing become Consumer Computing, where you're only allowed to run code that paid the corporate toll. Make sure the computers you're paying for are doing what you want, not just what the executives approved of for their own gain. It's your computer, it should run what you want it to!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06, @10:53AM (1 child)
The expectation by bad and not quite so bad guys that you were always on-line and vulnerable.
There is strong governmental and corporate desires to never fix the problem.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday November 06, @02:02PM
They don't see it as a problem. Quite the opposite: What they see as a problem is you being able to run things that they didn't approve of or authorize you to run.
Which is why open-source code and platforms are so important from a technical freedom standpoint.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ingar on Thursday November 06, @10:57AM (10 children)
Exactly what has been planned: you'll own nothing and love it.
Back in the day, Microsoft called it Palladium, today they released it as Windows 11.
Apple's walled garden has always been a good excuse to rip off the customer.
Future smartphones will be cylindrically shaped, and the high end models might even come with some lube.
To monitor your well-being , that is.
Love is a three-edged sword: heart, soul, and reality.
(Score: 5, Touché) by sjames on Thursday November 06, @03:03PM (8 children)
The new corporatism. All of the disadvantages of Capitalism AND all of the disadvantages of Communism.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AlwaysNever on Thursday November 06, @08:53PM
That's called Capitalmarxism. All the worst qualities from both systems. In Capitalmarxims there are not rights or lefts, there are only those up and those down.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday November 06, @08:54PM (6 children)
And the actual mechanical difference between "new corporatism" and "capitalism" is what?
Not posing this question as a "gotcha". I hear this exact idea all the time and don't understand the thinking. What laws are the former but not the latter? Or vice versa?
Capture of government power always seemed like a natural consequence of wealth accumulation to me. And disproportionate wealth accumulation seemed like a natural consequence of capitalism.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Friday November 07, @12:08AM (5 children)
Ownership. In Capitalism, you buy the product and then you own it. You are free to repair it if needed or improve on it if you know how. You can give it to someone else or use it long past the point most consider it obsolete. You are free to tell others how they can repair their widget.
Under corporatism, even though it is yours, the OEM will enshitify it as you sleep. Or maybe just permanently disable it, perhaps because they'd like you to buy a new one now. Or perhaps they won't sell you one at all. Your only choice is to 'buy' it and pay for a subscription to keep it running until they get bored with it. Or maybe you bought it with a permanent licence but they decided 3 years is 'forever' and now you'll need to pony up.
You might wonder where the courts are with all these shenanigans going on? Me too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Friday November 07, @12:31AM (4 children)
Those aren't legal or structural differences. They're outcome differences.
And those matter, and I share your belief in the importance of owning what you buy, but I don't understand your prescription for how to make capitalism and not arrive at "new corporatism" at a societal level.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07, @01:07AM (2 children)
I agree with both of your points, but I blame software "copyright" and insanely strong copyright laws.
I don't think software should be protected under copyright. Some version of patent, maybe. But copyright is far too strong and just not appropriate for machines, only for human-made creative works (books, songs, etc.)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Friday November 07, @07:47AM
It's obvious software has become enshittified.
I think you are spot on that the enabler of all this enshittification is an interpretation of copyright law regarding inability to verify what the code is instructing our machines to do.
Remember what happened when pet food manufacturers all got together to game the advertised protein assay of their product by mixing in melamine?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=melamine+pet+food+recall+of+2007 [duckduckgo.com]
Think of the money they could have saved by just lobbying Congress to make it illegal to find out what's in the cat food, same as how lobbying Congress resulted in having laws passed to make it illegal to reverse engineer code that's messing up a machine.
No wonder we are having so many issues with bad code.
This problem could easily be fixed by a stroke of congressional pens.
What we have now is much like making it illegal to read and understand a contract, yet assume responsibility of honoring it. Our computers read and execute their code, yet the copyright holder expects "hold harmless" clauses for what his code does to be honored.
I believe one should not be able to enforce anti-reversing, electronic-lock removal, anti-verification activity unless they also agree to accept full liability and remedy for their code behaviour in exchange for that right of denying others the right of inspecting what they got in exchange of considerations paid.
If I buy a book, I should be able to read it, even if it was meant for my machine. What I cannot do is copy it and sell it to others. I strongly consider the COPY of said book to be mine, for my use, and mine to do whatever I want ..including modification, even drilling holes in it, or feeding it to a goat. I would say the same for a couch that I wanted to modify. Maybe it was too low, high, or wobbly and needed more glue.
I don't have the couch guy coming into my house to mess with my couch.
This crap has gone on too long already and frankly, I am surprised at the complacency of people to tolerate this.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday November 07, @06:04PM
Notably, in the early '80s that was a genuine legal question. A key point in the early days of the decline of capitalism was when the courts bent over backwards to grab their ankles to allow software copyright through sophistry.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Friday November 07, @05:59PM
But it IS a legal difference. Under Capitalism, government in pursuit of it's duty to regulate the market and to enforce ownership would rule that the sneaky enshitification after purchase creates a legal liability to the owner. Disabling a feature after the fact would be treated no different from sneaking in to the owner's home with a hammer to damage the product.
Meanwhile, the courts would be a LOT more skeptical of DMCA claims surrounding functional cases where people copy a crypto key (or crack it) to enable 3rd party repair or enhancement parts in a device. It might even question the legality of locking out 3ed party parts in a device the manufacturer no longer owns (having sold it to a consumer). We might even see cases where manufacturers run against truth in advertising laws for not prominently disclosing that the device becomes a paperweight should they (at their sole discretion) choose to shut down a server.
It is very much a legal difference.
You may even recall the history of DeCSS for DVDs. Under capitalism there wouldn't have even been a question about 3rd parties making a drive that could play a DVD video. Further, there would be no lawsuits flying about ISPs "allowing" copyright violations by their customers.
I have no idea how involved you might have been in technology in the early '80s, but I'll remind you (or tell you for the first time) that copyright protection of the machine code resulting from compilation (that is, software) was legally questionable in itself. Publishing a binary patch to commercial software that would disable license management was not even a grey area, it was free speech. I had a right to publish the patch. You as a licensee of the software had a right to apply it. The onus was on you (not me) to make sure you actually held a license to the product.
Compare to now, where even in cases where there is no question of legal ownership, selling mod chips for game consoles can land you in hot water. That is, I can get in trouble for selling you a chip that changes the behavior of a game console that you bought fair and square.
(Score: -1, Troll) by fen on Friday November 07, @01:17AM
You might be gay.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SemperOSS on Thursday November 06, @12:52PM
… that my computers have been Windows and macOS free for more than 20 years — although with every new generation of laptops, there are more hoops to jump through due to the locks and proprietary hardware that they introduce. So far I have managed but woe the day that last freedom will be lost.
Open Source Solutions and Digital Sovereignty is the new black
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday November 06, @12:58PM (2 children)
My computer still runs what I want. Otherwise it wouldn't be my computer.
Perhaps I just don't consider my phone, or tablet if I had one, to be a computer. But still yes it's shit that I can't do what I want with something I bought. But at the same time isn't that what they want? They don't want you to own anything anymore. You are just renting or borrowing thing since everything requires a subscription of some kind to work. The rights for you to enjoy something can be voided at a whim. When was the last time a computer bought came with a big phat manual? They don't want people to tinker around with the hardware. They want you to enjoy it the way they want you to enjoy it. Apparently consumers are fine with that now. So they won't miss it until it's gone. If they even notice it.
Written by someone that wasn't around at the time. The walled garden concept with video games is a bit dishonest. You knew in advance. You paid to get that Nintendo home entertainment system, or whatever. You knew it would run all approved cartridges. You where not surprised when it didn't run Atari cartridges or Spectravideo or whatever. Just as I wasn't surprised that my friends Sinclair Spectrum software would not run on my Commodore 64. But neither machine refused to run things made for it.
Also they didn't lock down their hardware tighter then a bank vault. The lockdown back then was so basic you could break it easily with a soldering iron and some wires. It was just that most people at the time didn't know how and that knowledge was kept tight or in a circle and slowly trickled around to other enthusiasts.
For the NES you cut a leg (4) on a chip, lets not mention which one since Nintendo after all are bitchy about all things. Done. Protection defeated. If you wanted to be fancy, and safe, you bent the leg up a bit and soldered a wire between said leg and ground so it wasn't left floating. But it was extra. Software protection in general wasn't better. Was this bank vault levels of security? No. Or I hope not, I have never broken into any banks. But they didn't have hardware resources to spend on such things. Also there wasn't as mentioned any free sharing of information. Nerds that knew about these things wasn't a treat to their business model.
We are not losing anything. People chose this. The normal customers are ok with this, or just don't know any better or care more. They just want to run their little app and that is all they want. They don't care beyond that. They get what they want. The walled garden in that regard is a feature for them. They don't want to compile any code, they don't want to have options. To tinker around or make changes. They just want shit to work at the fewest clicks possible. So they are not losing anything, you and I are not losing anything either cause we won't put up with that shit and it will and can be defeated. You do know you don't have to run the latest and greatest crap they spew out right? You have options. You can say no I don't want the latest Apple iGauge Pro21 or whatever they'll call it. You'll be fine without.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Thursday November 06, @03:31PM (1 child)
I'm not even sure it's fair to call the early gaming systems closed. The Atari 2600 would happily attempt to run any cartridge you put in it. It's just that most people didn't know how to develop a new game and stick it on a cartridge. But if you did, it didn't do anything in particular to stop you. Though, IIRC, Atari had bit of a freak-out when Activision came on the scene.
The game genie didn't have to do anything special to defeat security.
The C64 had cartridges too. There was an auto-run mechanism there, but if you taped over a single pin, it came up in BASIC and you could bank switch the cart into memory and dump it. I don't think the intent of the auto-run was to prevent dumping, that was just a side effect of auto-running.
There were plenty of copy prevention schemes out there in software for the early home computers, but the computer itself didn't do anything to facilitate them and was perfectly happy to obey it's owners commands to help in patching out the offending code.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday November 06, @04:54PM
If you knew how to make a cartridge back then, or how to burn an eprom it wasn't an issue. For most home computers and such, as the C64. It was mostly annoying cause you only had one cartridge port and if you wanted to use multiple cartridges it was a bit of a pain or you had to get one of them that allowed you to chain cartridges.
Nintendo didn't like that tho. So they region encoded their cartridges, which is what was defeated by clipping or de-soldering that pin. For them the protection was in the cartridge, hence the legal battle they had with Atari/Tengen. Which figured out how to make unlicensed cartridges. The legal battles going on long after the NES was the cream of the console crop.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday November 06, @01:11PM (5 children)
First, just to mention, Steve Jobs would have loved to have had the original Macintosh as locked down as the iPhone. They kept tight control over the hardware, yet those "evil" third parties were de-soldering RAM, piggybacking devices on the CPU, stuffing motherboards in larger cases, and so on.
The entire idea of personal computing was to run whatever software you wanted on whatever data you wanted, under your own personal control. No expensive mainframe time, your data was not being pawed over, and it wouldn't float away eventually as if in some magical "cloud".
At the dawn of personal computing, hobbyists were hunting down inexpensive scrap parts to build their own machines. It was the stuff of science fiction coming true.
But everyone has pissed all over personal computing. Only running what Microsoft approves is only a step away. And don't talk about running Linux, MICROSOFT CONTROLS THE SECUREBOOT KEYS. There are already machines that won't boot anything other than Windows. Don't even get me started on toy cell phones.
But now with magical "AI", it watches everything you do. They don't need to lock things down. Forget about looking at naughty pictures or using a computer for secure banking. Even mutter a politically incorrect comment in earshot of the machines microphone and it might tattle on you (which will, for now, will result in corrective advertising at you). There used to be a day when spying on users would have been outright illegal.
Modern devices (they are not "computers' any more) are there to do what the big corps want, not what you want. Mine you for personal data, make you spend more money, and so on,
And somehow every idiot is ok with all of this. I hate this planet.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday November 06, @01:29PM (3 children)
Turn off secure boot? It's only really there to stop corporate drones frobbing with their PeeCees and to stop Windows malware intercepting the boot loader.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday November 06, @03:00PM (2 children)
https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/bootkitty-analyzing-first-uefi-bootkit-linux/ [welivesecurity.com]
compiling...
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday November 06, @08:41PM (1 child)
So it has to be installed on your machine (presumably as root) and then the machine rebooted. It hijacks GRUB, so it will need to be run as root to be installed. Interesting.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Friday November 07, @11:35AM
It's just a proof-of-concept but yeah. In real life it will be combined with some root escalation or along a vm / browser sandbox escape hatch. With physical access, you'd probably be better off clamping the eeprom to read the uefi password, appending a self-signed mok through the now accessible UEFI menu and shimming the bootloader by directly writing to the EFI partition so that by the time we chain into linux, we have a hypervisor around the kernel that can let us deploy compromised modules. Though, if you want to just liberate locked down hardware, simply adding your mok and preparing signed boot media to install your custom linux build makes more sense.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Username on Thursday November 06, @02:46PM
PC was freedom from the terminal/mainframe setups. Now we're going back to terminal/mainframe, where you need to share time/resources on some server just to create a word document or spreadsheet. It's dumb. Eventually someone will reinvent the pc and we will relive the initial mainframe to pc movement, or cloud to home, or some new lingo that will come out in 15 years.
(Score: 4, Touché) by pkrasimirov on Thursday November 06, @01:45PM
My Chinese robot vacuum cleaner is 24x7 online and spying on me, I'm sure. I paid for it and I legally own it but I cannot truly say it is mine. On Windows and my phone at least I can see something.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06, @02:16PM (1 child)
The enshitification is truly real. Things we didn't imagine even 5-10 years ago are now being done unopposed. Update your windows, use a microsoft account. Chat control, device based age verification. Flock cameras. Upload your ID and scan your face to continue signing up.
In this kind of world, do you still expect to manage your own device? Maybe through sheer grit will you be able to take back some privacy but most normies have long checked out.
Mention privacy or autonomy and their eyes glaze over. But my keeeds.. muh misinformation, the "bad guys". List just goes on and on. Soon you won't even have an internet anymore, let alone private devices.
This development is the turning of the screws further and a few people are noticing but still missing the big picture. All of these countries didn't suddenly start implementing digital ID all at once for no reason. The internet and these devices have become ingrained so within our lives that withholding them is now a good stick for the surveillance carrot.
Maybe you will argue that you can escape it but your kids won't. It will be the norm for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 07, @12:08AM
I see this as the "Beast" referred to in the Biblical Book of Revelation.
2000 Years ago.
We have not seen the Apocalypse yet, but it's sure shaping up to be a doozy.
There are still a few things that will have to pass first...the most visible one being "The Mark of the Beast".
We will build it. But not everyone will die. For a while, it looks like Mad Max scenario, but that will last only until the stores of pre-made resources last. The remnant of survivors will have a Renaissance as former political constraints disintegrate during the melees between the control people and the hoi-polloi. As this time around, the hoi-,polloi have access to kinetic devices that make all men equal before the laws of inertial physics.
I see it as almost inevitable , given our exponential population growth, yet finite land area, that a reset will have to happen.
It won't be pretty, but everything I know tells me it has to happen. I do not believe I will make it, but I am quite willing to do what I can to help younger people get through. We will be judged by how we value wisdom and compassion above all else.
A good tradesman is of far more value to society than property owners and dealers of debt instruments. Especially if constrained by resource availability. Practical Engineers and Tradesmen will be the new "gold".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday November 06, @02:18PM (3 children)
Desolder the ROM, copy it, archive, even today's flashes are not immortal. Disassemble. Read it with eye on long, winter nights. Analyze.
Put a socket on its place. Buy a handful of empty ROMs. Begin with funny trivial binary patches, end with a complete rewrite.
If you really are a beginner, keep another identical system in its original state, for reference and measures.
Nothing has changed since 40 years ago, actually. Personal computers are not magical. Only users got dumber. Much more dumber.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06, @03:32PM
Back then you could get data sheets for the ICs and sometimes schematics for the board.
Today, good luck finding a microcontroller that isn't buried in a poorly documented SOC
that doesn't even bring out all the address and data lines.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday November 06, @03:59PM (1 child)
You don't need to de-solder the EEPROM to r/w it unless it's damaged: https://www.amazon.com/SOIC8-EEPROM-Circuit-Programming-Adapters/dp/B0D9RYZHBT [amazon.com]
compiling...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 07, @01:06PM
Some time ago I bought a new jtag dongle device, wanted to try it, you'd be surprised how much consumer electronics has unpopulated jtag ports. Just solder one on and it works.
I have some old roku devices that took about five minutes to solder a standard header on and huh how about that, it worked. I don't recall anything other than, "clearly my jtag dongle works and is not broken LOL". Obviously there's like 50 models of roku devices all different PCBs but my greater point is TONS of discarded electronics have standard debug ports. Some don't but its not hard to find one that'll work.
I still have that unshelled roku in a box somewhere in my basement lab because anytime in the future that I distrust a jtag dongle I can plug it into the known-working roku and it should work. At least its small. Reduce Reuse Recycle people often forget about the "reuse" long after hardware is obsolete or unusable you can use it for testing or messing around. ewaste is essentially free to acquire, it cost me like 15 minutes to try, so minor labor cost although I was having "hobby fun" so its also free. So I have a free "jtag dongle tester" Thats cool.
Anyway in summary sometimes you can get away with soldering on a connector rather than desoldering an eeprom.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday November 06, @05:47PM (2 children)
Is it? The title ending in a question mark means its false or propaganda as is long standing journalistic tradition without even reading the article.
However, I would think there's 10, maybe 100 times as many people with home labs and dev boards as there were when I started out (which was in the Z-80 msbasic-in-rom era just after peak CP/M)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snospar on Thursday November 06, @07:15PM (1 child)
I came here to say much the same thing. Wasn't the Raspberry Pi a rip roaring success because it encouraged people - especially younger people potentially in education or (gasp) computer clubs - to get hold of a device that they were fully encouraged to tinker with. I know a lot were bought for other purposes and indeed the number of things you can do with a SBC have grown exponentially over recent years. I always thought this painted a better picture for the future, one where people understood there were many other choices than "I'm a Mac/I'm a (Windows) PC".
I also started with BASIC and Z80 assembler when I was very young - hasn't done me any harm; it was the foundation on which my career has been built.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 07, @12:52PM
I have three actual data points I thought of over the past few hours:
When new Arduino IDE versions are released, supposedly they get around 30M downloads so there's probably around 30M people screwing around with C on microcontrollers. Alone. Not counting ALL other programming related hobbies. In comparison my first computer that I learned BASIC on was a TRS-80 Model III (later a coco with microware OS-9, that was much better) and it sold maybe less than a million units (the model I sold about a quarter million, its strangely hard to find sales figures) So figure the "dying hobby" is WELL over 30 times larger than when I was a kid. Would not be surprised a more accurate figure would be over 100 times larger.
The other data point is there's always sizzle selling "our hobby is dying" for clickbait. Going back to at least the 1970s there's been constant magazine articles about "ham radio is dying". However, for almost a century, about 0.2% of the population have ham radio licenses going back as far as I can find data. Sure somewhat lower in the old days like boomer youth era maybe bottomed out at 0.15% of the population, somewhat higher now more like 0.25% since the gen-Xers grew up, but essentially constant. Still it sells magazines to claim "ham radio is dying" LOL.
"Back in the day" about 1/8th of a million people bought the Rodney Zaks Z80 assembly language programming book I learned Z80 from. After that, learning 6809 assembly from Barden's book was a joy in comparison. Anyway "Python Crash Course", which I've never heard of despite having been paid to write Python some time ago, proudly sold 1.5 million copies. I would estimate the "software language learner marketplace" is at LEAST 100 times larger than when I was a kid. Maybe 1000 times larger.
Going back to the hobby in 1981 would be fine with me, I was having a blast at the time. Even if "the industry" dies by a factor of 100 to 1000 I will still have fun like its 1981 again. It's not shrinking, obviously LOL. It would suck from an employment standpoint etc but there's OBVIOUSLY not a lack of demand if sales are up 1000x
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MostCynical on Thursday November 06, @07:17PM
I am now the only person I know running lineages on my phones (5g meant I had to upgrade, and one was physically damaged)
Even my geekiest friends who compile their own Linux distros and run raspi servers don't bother with their phones..
I have managed to keep my wife's laptop running MS office without a Microsoft account.. for now.
I am hoping libreoffice keeps improving the way in handles Microsoft's woerd nonstandard formatting "quirks".
We get the government and the tech we deserve, and generally, humans are not nice.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06, @10:14PM
Prompt:
Name laptop computers based on the raspberry pi.
.
GPT-4o mini
Laptop Computers Based on Raspberry Pi
Several laptop models incorporate Raspberry Pi technology, primarily for education, hobbyist projects, and small personal computers. Here are some notable examples:
1. Raspberry Pi Laptop Kits
Raspberry Pi 400: This is not a laptop per se but a keyboard with a Raspberry Pi integrated into it. Users can connect it to a display and create a compact computing setup.
Piper Computer Kit: Aimed at kids and learners, it combines a Raspberry Pi with a DIY laptop assembly experience, teaching both computing and engineering concepts.
2. Commercial Products
Pi-Top: This is a modular laptop specifically designed for Raspberry Pi. It comes with educational resources and supports programming and electronics projects.
Raspberry Pi 4 Laptop Kit: Various vendors offer kits to build a laptop using the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. These kits typically include a display, battery, and keyboard, providing a complete portable solution.
3. DIY Projects
Many enthusiasts create their laptops using Raspberry Pi boards by combining components such as displays, batteries, and keyboards. Resources and guides are widely available online for those interested in building a custom Raspberry Pi laptop.
These options showcase the versatility of Raspberry Pi in creating portable computing devices, especially in educational and experimental contexts.
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For what it's worth, I cut and paste my GPT query.
I, too, am quite concerned over erosion of my ability to use technology without being compelled to agree to terms and conditions. However recent political apple-cart upsets have given me a lot of hope that an election can result in a legislative solution to overbearing copyright and patent legislation as soon as the "common people" discover how much they are paying to support artificial monopoly business models based on lobbying law makers to pass laws that legalize only certain parties to supply a good.
Another legislator can have that law dismissed. We just need some more financial hurt in the form of job cuts, inflation, increased taxation, and enforced obsolescence to swing public sentiment about giving legislators free reign to make law enriching a very few at the expense of an entire planet.
(Score: 2) by kolie on Thursday November 06, @11:56PM
Corporations happened.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hopp on Friday November 07, @04:27AM
Nothing, I run whatever I like. Choose not to use systems which make you the product.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday November 07, @01:42PM
The reason walled garden point-and-drool interfaces and smartphones are so popular is because that's all most people can handle. Sad, but true. Just like there are no technical solutions to moral problems, there are no technical solutions to willful ignorance. So the vast majority of people don't care about this sort of freedom because they can't comprehend it or imagine what they could do with it, and as a result...well, this happens.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jman on Friday November 07, @03:12PM
With regards to Big G and sideloading, do not use their Crap Store. APKPure is just fine, and M$Hub has many projects I can load into AndroidStudio, again compiling myself.
Have also been looking to switch onto a true *nix phone for awhile.
So far as the walled garden goes, that's why I run OpenCore. As soon as the Fruity Company goes back to making hardware I can actualy work on and upgrade myself, they'll get me back as a customer. Gonna miss it when x64 finally stops working; by then I guess Debian will be the daily driver, instead of the spare OS loaded onto my FrameWork.
Yikes, this tone is bleak. Get off my lawn! ;)