I posed a similar question on hardware forums a while ago and got slammed for it.

Basically, I queried why do motherboards have everything built-in and permanently consuming lanes, and then having their tech becoming obsolete, instead of just having more slots with said functionality on add-in cards. That way manufacturers wouldn't need so many different SKUs for different configurations, it'd just be a handful of motherboards with different bundled add-in cards (essentially modern Super-IO cards) for the WIFI, USB, LAN ports, SSD connections, etc. Especially with the modern proliferation of m.2 connections for SSDs. I get in the old days when the bus was parallel and having built-in devices didn't consume fixed links, but now those devices aren't free lunches,and standards go obsolete really quickly. I'd much rather having a bundled dual 2.5G Ethernet card I could swap out for a dual 10G card if I wanted than having a pair of 2.5G ports I don't need consuming resources and contributing towards costing me the PCI-e slot I need for that 10G card.

Now, I can see an advantage in being able to put m.2 sockets flat between the standard 7 PCI-e slots, or somewhere else (like towards the front of the motherboard), but what gets my goat is when they have them *instead* of real PCI-e slots. Just put a real slot in and supply a riser! That way people who don't want loads of SSDs can use the lanes for something else more easily than jury-rigging funky m.2. to PCI-e adaptors just to plug in what used to be a normal amount of add-in cards. It's all the same signals (though might require bifurcation to be properly and more widely supported).

I think a nice design convention maybe might be a couple of standardised m.2. connections near the front of motherboards, with all the standard SATA ports on them. You could then swap the ports for U.2 connections, or Oculink, or some such, without having redundant SATA ports cluttering up the board.

But I digress. Give us back our 7 slots!

Might want to check they're still deleted. I seem to recall reading that they were restoring deleted posts?

I'd much rather be all digital for many of the reason you mention, but until the corporates release their vice like grip on letting me consume the content in a manner of my choosing, then physical is the way it has to be. By way of example, back in the day, a DS with a flash card was a revelation (you could carry your whole cart collection at all times, switch between them without risking losing them, backup your save games, etc), but modern legit options are crippled compared to even the physical versions, and still are, due to the overvaluation of said content, making even small losses too great for them. Hence things like onerous mandatory internet license checks. Don't even get me started on how physical releases are often cheaper than the digital ones, despite all the logistics involved, and the fact that you get a better product by far in all ways bar convenience.

Veering off back to those physical remnants though, there's a lot to be said for physicality and the sensory impact of that in relation to memory. Experiencing those physical objects is quite often the mental index back into your memories of your experiences of that content. You lose that with an all-digital approach. A thumbnail in an endless list doesn't have quite the same mental impact as the battered old box with the small tear where you wrestled with your brother on Xmas morning when you were 10 years old and landed on it. Pure digital commoditises the stuff so much, IMHO.

...for killing off my beloved N900 device family for the dumpster fire the business ended up as. The N950 would have been wonderful.

Absolutely loved that phone. Still, at least I still have Jolla.

Funny thing is, Whatsapp apparently originally started as XMPP, then moved to an extended flavour of the protocol, then closed itself up. Perhaps it's still some sort of XMPP internally, just without any of the good bits, like federation.

Not exactly out of the box, but buy an Xperia and flash Sailfish onto it? Works great, been running it for years.

Same with many games and banking apps. The irony is they're more than happy to let me access their services on my PC (or if they have one, their website using a browser on the same phone!), but heaven forbid I do so on a rooted phone. It's nuts.

I think you have that arse about face. Games are tailored to the capabilities of what the hardware can do. The NES' gimmick was fast hardware scrolling and sprites. Platform games benefit from that, but you can hardly claim Zelda 1 was a platform game, nor things like Punchout. The SNES's gimmick was better graphics and sound and the famous mode 7 scaling and rotation. They looked for games they could develop to show that off, and that's why F-Zero was a launch title, and Mario Kart began life as a multiplayer version of F-Zero.

New consoles are released when there's something worthwhile about them that the company feels will make you buy a new one. Be it better graphics, better controls, bigger games, or simply an anticipated game they've held back to only release on a newer system. If they can eeek those improvements out over more systems, they will so they can sell you more things.

...but I thought Robinhood was already on in the Play Store?

How does enabling that setting prevent it from rebooting? It still forces the reboot, that option just delays it. The OPs solution presumably prevents it altogether, so may well be worthwhile.

You seem to have accidentally omitted all the work between 4.01 and 5 which went into XHTML, which was far better than HTML5, IMHO. Crappy FEDs whining that they'll have to close their tags and generally do things properly led to HTML5, not lethargy by the W3C. HTML had support for all that multimedia by using a generic object tag.

Unless something's changed recently, they are all just skins over Safari, as Apple doesn't allow other rendering engines.

...if copyrights only lasted a sane amount of time, say, 10 years or so, with a couple of optional 10 year extensions. Then the long tail of potential rights holders in a given work would dramatically reduce, making systems such as this much more feasible to manage.

...for bloat like this? Seriously?

What the hell is wrong with the Mozilla Foundation? Just focus on making a minimal, high-quality, open source browser. That's it. that's literally all you need to do. That's why we have rich extension mechanisms, right? So people/companies can build and add-on whatever gubbins they like without wasting core resources building and maintaining it.

I despair sometimes, I really do.

I have feeds on my FF toolbar that show me the latest articles and I click them if one interests me. I can do it with just a single click and a wave of the mouse rather than firing up some external program. Unless they've fixed up the webextensions RSS feeds so you can have a separate button per feed (and no, having separate extensions per feed is NOT sufficient) that also generate a menu showing each item, it's not a good enough replacement, IMHO.