> While I'm bitching, what is the deal with keyboards on new laptops needing special drivers?
The only laptops I've encountered with this are... Microsoft's. Somehow the Surface folks can't get enough of their critical drivers in-box with Windows to be able to re-install from stock media.
(IIRC it goes even deeper with USB drivers missing, but I gave up on Surface Laptops a few year ago)
I'm not buying another Kindle until there's a successor to the Voyage's "Limited Edition Premium Leather Origami Cover." If a competitor wants to lure me over, that is the way.
Nonono, despite my outward white appearance, I follow the sage wisdom of Chris Rock[0]. It's so I have enough advance notice to blast "Fuck the Fire Department" so we can share a nice laugh at the historic rivalry between LE / FD.
"Needed tens of dollars of rental compute" isn't much of a moat to get acquired instead of copied.
I loath Waze. Its idea of shortcuts are terrible, its search routinely suggests things hundreds of mile away ahead of the match that's nearby, and sometimes I go through an area of intermittent service where it just decides to stop routing without giving a heads-up.
But Waze is so much better at accurately alerting me to police than my Valentine 1 was that I never even bothered mounting it in my latest car. Google supposedly integrates that data for years now but every time I try it comes up short. Google and Apple Maps are better in every other way, but for me at least, that one feature of Waze is a massive moat.
They have a spicy ketchup product that I liked, tho it has disappeared from my local stores. At the time I first noticed it at the store it was the hottest one that also matched the thick consistency I expect from ketchup.
"IHOP Transgression" cracked me up. There's a restaurant in my town that does the same thing and I hate them for that reason. And like IHOP, what they call an omelette is actually a frittata.
The 5mph bumper impact standard was, as you've pointed out, not a safety regulation.
Automatic shoulder belts being annoying is irrelevant. The dozen-ish explosive, expanding gas sacks in my car are kinda frightening. Both originated with a regulation requiring passive restraint systems to reduce collision injury/death.
That particular blood was probably people stopped at night with the trunk open to access a spare tire or tools. And then there was more blood because sometimes those people forget to leave their lights on, or their lights don't function because the battery has died, so we got more regulation requiring ugly reflectors.
> there is very little one can do with this thing.
It has a VMM and Docker. Entware / opkg exist for it. There's very little that can't be done, but expecting to use an appliance that happens to be Linux-based as a generic Linux server is going to lead to challenges. Be it Synology, TrueNAS, or anything else.
The only laptops I've encountered with this are... Microsoft's. Somehow the Surface folks can't get enough of their critical drivers in-box with Windows to be able to re-install from stock media.
(IIRC it goes even deeper with USB drivers missing, but I gave up on Surface Laptops a few year ago)