Why is custom hardware needed?

It's not. The off-the-shelf hardware they chose, combined with off-the-shelf software they chose, was quite capable of doing what he said it would.

The problem was he lied when he said it was custom hardware developed through a series of different iterations. It wasn't - it was as off-the-shelf as you can get, with only a "would you like fries with that?" ROM upgrade from 8meg to 16meg, and a lack of USB port - to differentiate it from the Alibaba $20 special. Right down to the case, which he also claimed was custom-designed by him...

(Hell, after people showed him pictures of an identical board in an identical case being sold there, he popped up saying the USB port was a 'fantastic idea' and that he'd now decided to include one too...)

The images of the hardware and development process used on the Kickstarter page? Again, deceptive - the picture of his 'custom-made' case was lifted from Alibaba and the original logo (badly) photoshopped out; images labelled as showing how ongoing development had shrunk the size of the hardware showed exactly the same photo (copied from elsewhere too) of exactly the same board simply resized to make it appear as though it was smaller , etc, etc.

Software? Very similar story. His 'custom-made code' consisted simply of a bunch of rules; the

The issue was never that he was taking a $20 box, installing Linux, and asking $50 for it. That's just capitalism. The issue was that he misrepresented what he was doing as original hardware and software development, lied blatently about it, and then when caught out doubling-down on the lies .

His Reddit AMA is a good overview of the whole thing.

Thousands of Android users could be wrong, but they aren't.

Maybe they're not, but thousands of Android users are irrelevant .

Over 260 million Android devices shipped last year alone. Even being charitable and allowing that you really meant to say "tens of thousands", your "thousands of Android users" represent much less than 1% of Android devices shipped in a single year.

No, changing the fan in a 2007 macbook is not a task for ordinary mortals. I actually used up a screw driver on that project. USED UP A SCREWDRIVER.

What, was it made of chocolate or something?

I've done the fan in my 2007 Macbook a couple of times (what can I say? It gets a lot of field - as in "standing in the middle of a ..." - use). It's not much harder than:

• Remove a lot of tiny screws, unplug the keyboard
• Peel back the foam and foil, unplug the fan
• Plug in the new fan, stick the foam and foil back
• Plug in the keyboard, put back a lot of tiny screws

The only other way I could think you'd "use up a screwdriver" is if you needed to down a couple of vodka and oranges to face the horror of all the tiny screws...

That's kinda odd. How old is your pro and which bugfix did you desperate need?

My macbook pro is a 17", core-duo. Wherever that puts it.

That model was discontinued in Oct 2006. Congratulations, your 8-year-old laptop is out of date. If it was a dog it'd be middle-aged; if it was a hamster its replacement's replacement would be probably be dead.

And not to put too fine a point on it, the Core Duo Macbook Pros were known from the start to be a dead-end - everyone was waiting for the Core 2 Duo models (that replaced them 6 months after launch), which would at least get you up to OSX 10.7.x.

Good luck with finding a non-Apple replacement that lasts as long...

As an experiment, I added a spurious and incorrect fact to an obscure wikipedia article, complete with a reference to a document which did not support the claim. It took years before my edit was noticed and reversed.

This only works with obscure articles. The more obscure the article, the less it's checked. If you try inserting something spurious into the page on Obama it will be reversed in about 5 minutes

No, it works with non-controversial subjects. Pick an article on a subject that's not obscure and also not particularly controversial - for example, common household substances, typical garden flowers, etc. - and read a few of the citations.

You'll be surprised how many don't support - or, in some cases, don't even relate to - the associated statement in the Wikipedia article. Most of it is stuff that is "common knowledge" that is false - but some authors/editors are so sure of its truth that they cite anything vaguely related to back up the common belief.

One where technologically capable individuals fight back against brutish peers.

^shrug^

You don't live in Midsomer, do you?

It's a ROUTER.

No, it's a BELKIN. They've been pulling stupid shit like this for the last 10 years at least , so why anyone should still be surprised is beyond me.

Remember that - whatever you buy from them, it'll always be a Belkin first and <device> second.

... five stories about Win10 in 6 days.

Slashdot turned into just another Microsoft-shilling site so gradually that I hardly noticed. Now it's too late...

I commented on one the other day to say that the real purpose of Win10 was to keep everyone talking about it, and predicted we'd be seeing a post every day for a while.

Somehow that got modded "-1, Troll" instead of "+1, Insightful".

4 days. 4 posts about Win10 - the announcement story, the "will it cure cancer?" story, the "will it still love me?" story, and this one.

Just saying...

It doesn't matter whether Win10 finally addresses "OS decay" or not.

All that matters is that there's a succession of stories so they've got you talking about it - from website to website, day after day, one story after another.

Oh, and that you attack Mac users for being "sheep"...

Get around stupid geolocation redirects like that by using Google Translate as a proxy. Simply tell it to 'translate' the original URL from Arabic* to English.

(* or almost any language that doesn't use the Roman alphabet.)

Before clicking the link I was trying to imagine how a trapezoidal shape could help and I could not. Well, that's because it is a hexagon.

Doesn't matter. You clicked on the link. Dice's job is done...

The difference there is that Socialism, its various types, & the path to Communism, were all clearly defined by Marx, Engels, et al. well before it actually happened - while the excuse of 'crony Capitalism' is a post-facto excuse for the failures of Capitalism.

Your examples - the Societ Union, Maoist China, and Cuba - while bastardised implementations of Communism (not Socialism; forget your propaganda-based US-influenced "education"), were not the natural outcome of the Socialist progression. Crony Capitalism is one of the natural outcome of Capitalism without regulation...

This seems to hold true for most broad-interest sites like newspapers and magazines where comments can be downright awful, as opposed to sites like Slashdot with a self-selected and somewhat homogeneous audience ...

... where, as this thread amply demonstrates, comments can also be downright awful.

(p.s. and no, the /. mod system doesn't improve it - unless by 'improve' you mean 'hide away by the lowest common denominator of consensus groupthink, nope, nothing to see here at all, move along, move along ...")