I’d imagine they got a lot of furious calls that turned into embarassment fast.

I think it was AutoCAD that had the most diabolical dongle of all. Some ancient version of the software would seemingly work without the dongle, leading cheap offices buying less licences than installs and plenty of architects installing them on their home computers. Everything seems to work fine, except every save a tiny fraction of a decimal far far away is off. Way too small for anyone to notice. Until they have been working for weeks and months on a project. And then and only then do they realize that all the lines have been slowly drifting apart.

What are garbage smart menus that can’t be avoided?

I’m not being funny. I’m still on a Panasonic last gen thin plasma FHD but thinking of upgrading to a LG C5 OLED when they are on final sale when this year models are rolling out. I’m only watching movies through the box connected to it.

Can’t you just use any modem TV and not hook it up to the interwebs?

Yeah, thanks. I did it a couple of times with the free web dev vm of Windows 10 but it is only valid for 30 days so it gets annoying quickly. After identifying the chipset in some devices I’ve tried to get the Linux toolkit or just the flashing tool from the manufacturers but for whatever reason they will not give it out unless you are a customer of their chipset.

Wouldn’t this rather be the case of proxy hardware layer for any driver to talk to that gets forwarded to the USB port in Linux? I mean the drivers are not for PC component but for talking with whatever device and chipset is connected to the PC over USB.

Any idea about USB drivers if it will ever be possible? I have synths and gear that needs firmware upgrades with flashers that only run on Win/Mac and I haven’t been able to get them to work with Wine.

Wine 1.1, now with AI integration

It feels counter productive when everyone relies on ffmpeg and there are no proprietary secrets left to protect. Just agree on an open standard that saves time and effort for all companies using it while getting tons of goodwill and positive cosmic vibes and maybe even revenue.