beefcat @ beefcat @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

i don't think adc was encumbered by patents, at least not in any way that prevented other manufacturers from making use of it. it wasn't locked down behind special handshakes and a certification program like lightning is. it used the same signaling protocol that dvi ended up using, which is why passive adapters like the belkin one above were possible. the additional pins on the connector were used for power and usb. the specifications were freely available, and monitors, gpus, and kvms were released that used the connector in the late '90s and early '00s.

the problem people are haivng is that this connector did not see wide use, so cables and adapters are hard to come by 25 years after the fact.

putting vesa in charge wouldn't change anything here unless vesa decided to ditch dvi and push this connector instead. however, that probably wouldn't have happened, because their constituents (most wintel pc makers) would have preferred the cheaper solution of not bundling video, power, and usb in a single cable.

the adc connector was mostly proprietary in the sense that nobody else used it. third party manufacturers had no problem making adapters and cables without apple's permission, as evidenced by the the belkin dongle this article is talking about.

what you're really asking for is an industry standard, which is different from an open standard. however, an industry standard requires the industry as a whole to buy in to it. if they say no, but you still want to solve a problem that their existing standards do not, what do you do?

industry standards also do not typically appear overnight. usually, companies put out multiple solutions trying to solve new problems, and eventually the industry coalesces around a preferred solution. USB was introduced in 1996 with full support for mice and keyboards, but it took nearly a decade to become the de facto connector for mice and keyboards.

in this case, apple display connector (adc) predates dvi, so they didn't really have any other option for supporting an all-digital signal path to an lcd monitor, especially not one that could also power the monitor and provide usb.

this happens a lot with apple proprietary connectors. lightning predated usb-c by almost 5 years, and it was a much better connector than the existing industry standard at the time (usb micro-b). it didn't really start to feel like a problem until many years later when usb-c started offering most of the same advantages and more.

you've never worked in game dev if you think swapping out your game engine is an even remotely trivial task. you're talking about actual years worth of work to get done. This isn't like throwing out some shitty npm package or changing javascript frameworks. that is the reason so many developers view these changes as an existential threat, because switching engines years into development of a new game simply isn't an option.

Read the full context of the comments you were replying to. What part exactly is confusing?

They can finish up those projects and then move on to another engine.

So you're saying for them to finish their current unity projects, then for nobody to buy those games so they go out of business before they can start using a different engine for their next game?

You're hurting indie devs more than Unity.

Lots of indie devs have been working on their games for years and have no choice but to release on their current version of Unity. If everybody did what you're doing, they would all fail and go out of business.

"Space suits" aren't exactly a big market, so they often end up getting built by companies in a market that has relevant experience. The original moon suits were built by Playtex

This is good.

I agree, in principal. I think the internet as a whole would be healthier if more sites weren't so averse to offering paid ad-free/premium upgrades early on. Now people are used to getting everything for free, heavily subsidized by invasive advertising and until recently a bottomless pit of venture capital. It's resulting in very nasty changes to these platforms as many try to find some pathway to sustainability that can be executed in 3-6 months.

When you get something free with advertising, you are the product. That is why enshittification takes hold so aggressively, because making you happy is not the primary means by which they bring in money to pay the bills.

However, at this point I have 0 faith in Facebook to actually do anything good, and I'm sure they will find some way to fuck this up entirely.

Is it just me, or did they start with the worst one and get progressively better? Both last week and this week have been actually good

pirates are the pushy vegans of the internet

Visual Studio got a lot better after Microsoft finally pulled their heads out of their butts and made it 64-bit. But, at least for .NET development, it is no longer required. VS Code is a viable alternative with some extensions, and JetBrains Rider is downright awesome.

Even if you don't like Visual Studio specifically, you probably still use some kind of IDE rather than a plain text editor plus command line tools. Even basic things like syntax highlighting are tremendously useful features that significantly reduce cognitive load.

One use case I can think of for soemthing like Studio Binder is their scriptwriting tools. You can do that all in a word processor, and there are probably even good templates for it. But presumably Studio Binder's script editor is built to ensure all your formatting adhere's to existing industry standards. It probably has a custom spell checker to enforce some of this. I also wouldn't be surprised if it has built in functionality for tying scenes to a shot list, tracking locations and props as they are introduced, etc. I don't know if they actually do these things, but they are features I would likely build into such software based on my own experience that regular word processors and project planners don't really do.

Tools with features and UX designed around a specific workflow can significantly reduce the cognitive load of that workflow. It's why these products gain so much traction to begin with.

Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better

They aren't, that is why.

Kagi has better search results than any other engine I've used. That is why people pay for it.

The conservatives where I live absolutely hate gay and trans people. I see it almost daily. Until conservatives can get their head on straight over basic things like this, they are fighting an uphill battle to get me to take them seriously about anything else.

Go hate gay people somewhere else

Microsoft already tried to buy Nintendo in the late '90s and got laughed out of the conference room.