141–150 of 175 posts
TL;DW: He's very supportive, and talks about how things used to be fixable and have plans included on paper, "open source". He says Apple II shipped with complete schematics and source code listings.
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I sometimes wonder what the world would look like if Woz got his wish to not bury the Apple II (Which had a huge amount of ports for tinkerers/electronic maker type enthusiasts). I was too young for the Apple II, but as a kid I saw a father working with his in his garage. He was always inventing something, and connecting it to the Apple. In a way, it was one if the first Raspberry pi's? Kinda?
The Commodore 64 was much more akin to the Raspberry Pi's. You didn't have to be rich to have one.
Still tho, gotta love that toys like Raspberry Pi and Arduino (and other similar stuff) have been reviving the old-school "hacker" and "maker" mentalities. Downright amazing some of the nifty stuff people been building lately with them single board computers and other such components.
We know what Wozniak would say, as he's a tinkerer from a time when computers were "human-sized" and able to be tinkered with. I think realistically the only thing we can demand is user-replaceable battery. Everything else is doomed to end up on a single chip integrated. And that chip either works, or doesn't. It's not about profit, it's about integration and miniaturization.
No. Have a look at these three modern smartphones:
"IFixIt: Your Smartphone Doesn’t Have To Be Glued Shut!"
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> No one is telling customers "your phone is now a brick" when their charge port breaks Apple is. They'll "repair" it for you (they go out of their way to make sure that nobody else can - if not with the charge port then certainly with some of the other components) for a price. But they typically do this by replacing the item and destroying the old one. And the difference between that and a true repair matters from a…
This is not true. Apple does not say your phone is a brick and they don't destroy old devices. They disassemble them and re-use the working components to build remanufactured devices for warranty use. They literally have multi-million dollar machines that are built specifically to be able to take apart old iPhones component by component to allow them to be reused or reintegrated into the manufacturing process for war…
Am I the only believing it should be a free market, where each company follows the strategy it prefers? Let the market decide if repairability is desired or not. If customers really want it, certainly there will be companies offering it. Much better to have millions voting with their money and purchases than a few bureaucrats deciding how they believe things should be.
The US had a "free market" in the age of the robber barrons[1] and before the creation of the FDA, where companies did what they wanted and "let the market decide". It was a nightmare. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
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This is absurd. That is absolutely tiny connector which produces negligible amount of waste and could easily save the entire device from being dumped in trash.
Why would you dump the device in the trash? That's a bizarre thing to do with valuable components. Take it to Apple or an authorised repairer, or have it recycled.
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Why would you dump the device in the trash? That's a bizarre thing to do with valuable components. Take it to Apple or an authorised repairer, or have it recycled.
Many components are disabled from reuse with software.
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I'm not sure I understand why a schematic would violate a patent. As far as I'm aware, patents do not exist to make information secret, but to provide a temporary exclusive legal right in exchange for making the information public.
A schematic, in and of itself, may not violate a patent but providing a means for someone to create a part that requires software that's patented may open up people and companies to litigation that would kill them. Qualcomm, for example, holds patents for any number of chips that are in mobile devices from any tech company. A phone manufacturer, more than likely, wouldn't be able to provide schematics for their devic…
First of all, nobody is asking for detailed instructions on how to produce all the parts from some base level. A schematic is only really going to show a level deeper. It would be plenty useful just knowing what connects where, and why. Meanwhile the actual knowledge to produce the part from scratch isn't even that useful in terms of repair unless the scale is rather massive.
Secondly, I'm not aware of any reason it would be so terribly illegal to tell somebody how to violate a patent. The whole point of the patent system is to let people know how to do exactly what the patent is for - but in exchange the creator gets a temporary legal means of preventing others from actually doing it. The actual means of violating a patent are inherently public - otherwise the patent could not exist in the first place.
So I have no idea how Qualcomm would sue anybody out of existence for telling people information that is already public. Of course this is limited to patents. There may be other aspects in play that would result in secret information that could not be distributed. But patents are not it.
We know what Wozniak would say, as he's a tinkerer from a time when computers were "human-sized" and able to be tinkered with. I think realistically the only thing we can demand is user-replaceable battery. Everything else is doomed to end up on a single chip integrated. And that chip either works, or doesn't. It's not about profit, it's about integration and miniaturization.
Remove those two barriers then people can fix or not as their skill or funds allow.
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These quotes are good food for thought. I've never read anything from Chomsky. Any books in particular that you would recommend?
He's pretty awesome. Here's his website: https://chomsky.info/ I heard about him in college via the "mathematical linguistics" stuff which was a pretty creative idea. Like anyone else he also has defects, his more recent commentary on American politics is arguably worthless because he completely dismisses everyone to the right of him as "the most dangerous group on the planet."
He's probably the only major earnest anti-capitalist that still supports the right wing of the democratic party.
But yes, if you pin him as a "Democrat" you might get that impression, in reality he's so far left that the Joe Biden administration has classified his beliefs as subversive and dangerous.