Asshole Design

Original Toot: https://strangeobject.space/@silvermoon82/110969122337810598

Sonic's complaint form has the "go back" and "submit" buttons reversed from typical so people accidentally delete their complaint and have to decide whether to fill the form out again or just forget it.

Image caption: A Dell Optiplex "ultra small form factor" PC motherboard. In a red circle are contact pads clearly designed for an M.2 SSD slot, with the words "M.2 SLOT" below it, but no slot is soldered.

Couple things to consider:

1. Intel Core CPUs natively support m.2 as it's just PCI Express with a different physical connector. There's no need to add an "M.2 controller chip" like you need for SATA, you can wire the traces directly into either the CPU socket or the chipset.

2. The traces are already there. That's why the board has pads for an M.2 slot in the first place!

3. The slot itself is like two cents, and these boards are assembled by a pick and place robot so there's next to no labour involved either. This isn't like "oh well you didn't buy granite counters in your mansion and now you need to rip up the whole kitchen to add them".

4. They had to deliberately make two different versions of this board, one with an M.2 slot and one without. Just to fuck over the people who didn't buy an M.2 SSD from them.

5. It's infamously difficult to solder a surface mount component on by hand and you risk damaging other components and completely breaking the board, this isn't like the Commodore 64 days where you could grab a handheld soldering iron and replace a chip or a add mod wire relatively easily, so the barrier is so high that yes, for most people, they can never add an M.2 SSD. Having a professional reflow in the component would be prohibitively expensive, much more than just buying the M.2 option from Dell in the first place.

BTW: The slot further up the board is for the network card. The chassis doesn't have enough space to mount a standard SSD, and it's also the wrong "key" for an SSD which will prevent you from plugging an SSD into it. https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/6c2fd1d1-04eb-4765-8c5d-35a1fc9279c9.jpeg

Source: I own one of these machines, I've tried putting an SSD into it.

This might not seem like much, but it also discriminates against people in poverty. Why? Because a lot of severely impoverished people (the homeless, refugees, many people in developing countries) have a smartphone but not a laptop, because it's easier to carry and is also a more versatile single device. There are many charities giving smartphones to impoverished people for this reason, because in this day and age you will not be able to get out of poverty without some sort of computing device.

More info:

Before anyone says "oh well maybe there's a genuine technical reason", it didn't have this restriction for years, and then suddenly started doing this. Also, the app communicates to Fido servers via an online API, and you're logged in to your account, whether you're on one kind of network or the other should be irrelevant because everything should be happening server side anyway.

Also, it's not just "you can't be connected to Wi-Fi", it's you can't have Wi-Fi enabled period. Even when you're not connected to a network and it's already directly connected to data, it doesn't work.

Also also, if you run of regular data but still have unlimited sessions left, you can't actually use them without first buying a data add-on, since you can't start your session on Wi-Fi and then switch to data.

Like I actually can't think of a reason for this. In fact, why even have those buttons in the first place?

This was in the Onedrive web client.

Assuming the worst of Microsoft (which I think is reasonable), here's my theory: They want you to install the app rather than use the web client, that way they have more access to your phone or computer. This was also seen in Firefox and I haven't bothered trying it on Chromium, so it could potentially also be similar to the "anti-Firefox" tactics that Google likes to use (maybe Microsoft too since their new Edge browser uses Chromium).

I suspect it's also as privacy invading as Google's captcha.

Netflix pulled the plug on the Roku XDS 2100x in Dec. 2019. Then Roku themselves worked to make this device useless:

• simple apps like the fish bowl app and the flames simulating a fireplace are gone (they're not particularly useful, but it indicates deliberate intent)
• the Roku Store is inaccessible
• media plugged into the USB port is not mounted -- that's right, you can't even use it to play stored media.

This is not natural obsolescence -- this is sabotage. When this happened to the Wii, some people hacked it so we could continue to run apps on it. Roku doesn't have the same. If you buy a new Roku, then you become part of the designed obsolescence problem.

If you call Roku at 408-364-1260, you get a recorded greeting saying they aren't even accepting voicemail for those asking for support. When someone asks about recycling, the answers are various ways to trash the device.

Old Rokus connect to old TVs. When they disable the old Roku, the new media players can't drive the old analog TVs so they kill the TV too.

Don't let them get away with it. Boycott Roku. Stop buying their new products if they're going to push consumers to fill landfills with perfectly functional hardware.

Crankset is sold by randombikeparts.com.