• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • 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.



  • I will be controversial and say that I think Fahrenheit makes more sense when talking about the weather. Its scale simply makes more sense on human terms: 0 is fucking cold, 100 is fucking hot. This is about the tempurature range you can expect to experience between winter and summer throughout much of the world.

    Celsius makes more sense for cooking (and everything else) since its scale is calibrated around the phase changes of water.



  • you need a Microsoft signed stub to boot anything other than Windows on a PC

    Not necessarily, most motherboards and laptops (at least every single one I’ve ever owned) allow users to enroll their own Secure Boot keys and maintain an entirely non-Microsoft chain of trust. You can also disable secure boot entirely.

    Major distros like Ubuntu and Fedora started shipping with Microsoft-signed boot shims as a matter of convenience, not necessity.

    Secure Boot itself is not some nefarious mechanism, it is a component of the open UEFI standard. Where Microsoft comes in to play is the fact that most PC vendors are going to pre-enroll Microsoft keys because they are all shipping computers with Windows, and Microsoft wants Secure Boot enabled by default on machines shipping with with their operating system.