The media's playing the "let's distract the populace" game...
When I read the title on the article here, which was based on the media reports, I'd thought that someone must have missed Lucifer skating to work. Hillary takes NH? Brr... What's the world coming to?
It's succinct and to the point. And while it doesn't get to the dirt like the news items have been doing, it does spell out that Intel couldn't be bothered with working on the project in an appropriate manner from start to finish and some of the other reasons this whole thing went down the way it did.
The big problem though is, that all their sales people did the same thing in a year's timeframe.
According to the upper management, they'd supposedly been told not to. Either they're all insubordinate or the upper management failed in their job to make it dead clear that this was NOT a situation that they're supposed to be playing those games. Whether that was deliberate or not remains to be seen as an exercise for each person pondering the situation. (Past track record indicates the upper management may have been talking out both sides of their mouth on this one...but I'm not going to say that one as fact without some more concrete proof.)
In either case, Intel DID screw up. BADLY. What happened is explainable, but not excusable.
Heh... Not understanding the licensing is going to be the end of that client in the long term.
Most people would be aghast at what licensing they're operating under with their stuff. There's a REASON why I took to largely using nothing but FOSS stuff. The terms, once you understand the consequences of each license, is actually something most people and businesses (even the software ones...) can live with.
Considering that the GPL only comes into play when you DISTRIBUTE the code in question, the NVidia driver's been pretty much something of a non-issue.
You can't legally distribute to someone an install done this way, or provide an installation that ships directly with the NVidia drivers, but you can ship a Linux install that can make it easy for someone and you can always turn it off/remove the offending binary blob when you hand someone a machine you've been using the driver on. Since usage is not controlled by the GPL grant, and there's no directly infringing pieces involved everyone just grouses about the blob NVidia provides, asks if they'll ever do like AMD and Intel are in the process of doing, and goes on.
Unfortunately for all, the trend has been towards companies going to the very short term thinking instead of sustainable things. Offshoring, etc. are more good solid examples of what I'm talking about. All short-term, short-sighted thinking. Sure, you might see a couple of quarters of profit by doing that, but after that, you're going to lose all of it because of the problems you brought on by doing it. In the end, most publicly traded companies are worrying about "shareholder value" and looking at the current stock price. In this day and age, you can't even look at that- that stock price isn't the shareholder value, it's the shareseller value because you dipwads don't do dividends and only base the return on an investment on the sale of the stock.
All you're worrying about at that point is the capricious mood of a bunch of people that daytrade.
"Seems" is the key word there... I've gotten bad treatment from Wal-Marts in the past.
My wife and our friend have been accosted over their service animals in Wal-Marts (Even though the effing doors have "Service Animals Welcome"...)- if you're not seeing a lot of the bad treatment, you're just...lucky...
Not always true. And unless they openly state that they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, they have to allow them in the store if they're "shopping"- all he needs do is pick up some cheap-assed item off the shelf to legitimize it. If they throw him out then, they've got a lawsuit on their hands.
I've never been "blacklisted"- and if I ever find proof thereof, they'll get sued bigtime as it's not at all legit.
For starters... Please quit conflating the act of infringement with "theft" or "murder". It's NEITHER and as such you should really, really quit doing it. Everyone that does that should do so. Honest.
Infringement is violating the right established by the government to further the production of the arts in which a party has the right to control the reproduction and distribution of a so protected work. If I infringe upon that right, all I've done is usurped your right to control that production and distribution. It's not theft, where if I take something, you're deprived of the use thereof (Sorry, "lost profits" do NOT constitute theft- you are not assured that anyone will buy the copies of your protected work, so therefore, you can't claim you were deprived of anything other than your right to control the production of the work...). It's not murder, which is the taking of the life of someone. The law is explicit in which of those three acts are which- and they're right in doing so because they ARE different.
Now, then...
Making available doesn't work well as an argument. If you use that, every library on the face of the Earth is a criminal in that case. Which, is flatly garbage, when you think long and hard about it. It's not stealing, even IF you viewed it as such.
Infringement only occurs when someone makes a copy of the protected work for themselves or others- photocopying a book, making a copy of an album or MP3 of something. And, it's not you, if you're making it available, that is actually doing the act of infringement, past the covered one of making the file in the first place, which IS fair use- and very probably is even not an infringement itself because of the AHRA (That remains to be seen as there's not been any Court ruling that indicates that this is the case- the wording of the law in question would seem that it does cover that...). Anyone making copies of the protected work are the actual infringers per the law the way it's currently written.
I am not condoning people doing it, mind. It's morally wrong, yes. I know with some reasonable certainty that I wouldn't be doing it.
Is it illegal? Not based on a reading of how the laws are currently written, no.
Morally wrong doesn't make it illegal unless there's a law that backs that position up- sorry, things just don't work that way.
Using that argument, then very, very few can be allowed to be out of prison or have these sorts of restrictions of their rights applied to them.
A stunning majority of the prison population happen to be afflicted with Antisocial Personality Disorder. This means they have little to no sense of right and wrong and are actually compelled to do the things that put them in prison in the first place.
But yet, you release these people, who're actually MORE dangerous than most sex offenders back out on the streets.
Moreover, it doesn't even get into the fact that it's damned easy (frighteningly easier than you think) to get a sex offender label slapped on you these days- and you really never committed a crime to begin with.
It's a damned crock and the legislators making these laws KNOW it. They're pandering for votes, making legislation that sounds really good and appeals to assuage the guilt of the parents out there that know they're not quite doing their jobs and expecting the government to do it for them- but has all kinds of bad unintended or intended, but hidden, consequences.
In the end, you will need a hybrid that is capable of being the plug-in EV that's usable by everyone in the mix- but then use something like solid-oxide fuel cells to power it and fuel it with an appropriate fuel from something like Methanol, Propane, or Biodiesel (All depends on what you can manage to fuel the solid-oxide cells from without conversion...) and go from there or find cleaner ways of producing the electricity. They may be at that threshold now. It certainly looks like it with the current crop of EV's and alternative generation tech.
If you factor in tech just now hitting the market (such as Nanosolar's stuff...), the nanotech coming from the discoveries about chlorophyll and how plants convert almost every erg of impinging sunlight into usable energy (and how to make electricity that way...), dramatic improvements in Savonius Rotors, etc. you end up with something a bit different in picture.
Electric Vehicles may now be the right way to go with everything except for some classes of aviation.
Heh... Did Bill Gates change jobs? Did Allchin? No?
You might want to think about telling someone to not act snotty to one's elders- I'm very, very probably older than most of the people posting on/. I've been at this stuff since the "home computer" was considered to be something like an 8008 or a 1802 programmed in hex.
But then, what did I expect? This is/., the electronic zoo, complete with poo flingers. (As I address one of the same...)
The reason people think electric=low power is that they're used to these things that have low HP ratings to conserve on battery demand and cost. An electric motor is more efficient and more powerful than pretty much every prime mover we've developed over the centuries. The problem is providing that specific prime mover with energy. Batteries are intrinsically heavy (or dangerous- just look at the flaming Dell's to realize this...). All of it is pricey because we've focused on internal combustion engines. Now that we're being forced because of circumstance to re-think everything on the prime mover equation, electrics are beginning to be utilized as they win over most everything else. If someone could axe the battery problem out of the equation, then combustion based prime mover tech would get relegated to the largest applications where it'll be an issue for a while yet to apply electric motor technology to the problems in question.
That's not how that term is used in that parlance. You can choose to call it what you want to, but to quote Inigo Montoya...
"You keep using that word...I don't think it means what you think it means..."
Discrimination is being particular and inconsistent in your licensing terms, just like the parent poster told you.
It's not being for free for those that don't want to make money off of it and for a fee for those that do- in terms of the use in the context of licensing, if you had it your way, it would be called discriminatory licensing. (You're discriminating against the people that can afford to pay the royalty...). Just because YOU don't want to be paying for it, doesn't make it discriminatory if you have to pay some pittance to use it in your stuff. You're not discriminated against, you're just being cheap.
Did you see me SAY that it was the follow-on or that the teams were involved? NO.
What you saw me say was that Microsoft probably learned from the mistakes and successes with their interaction with Sega on the Dreamcast. That also includes the management that was still around when they disbanded the WinCE games group. You need to quit reading more into what people type than what is typed...
The jury's still out on that one. If they've still enough 40Gb units to sell for Christmas, they might buy enough traction to get the studios to take them more seriously. Sony kind of pulled a Dreamcast with the PS3, if the truth was admitted here. The biggest drags have been that cost and the overall sign-off from the studios. There's beginning to be a decent enough line-up coming out of the studios that I'm considering one of the 40Gb machines if budget permits and there's still any left here- but in the end, there's no good reason to be spending the money they're asking for the 80's and the lesser models in the current official line up are sorta crippled in a few ways to make them a bit less compelling.
Not quite. Sega had a relationship with Microsoft and they had a WinCE target image for people to use. Not many of the titles actually USED it as it was constraining in several ways that the studios tended to not like. Now, spiritually, the XBox is the sequal/love-child of the Sega/Microsoft liason. Microsoft learned what NOT to do with the Sega relationship, I suspect. Unfortunately for Sega, they shot themselves in the foot repeatedly with the Dreamcast in the manner of prior console FLOPS coupled with a few...iffy...decisions that ran up the price-point and made it less compelling (Like gigadisks...).
If they'd not shot themselves so badly in the foot and had found a way to lower the price point a bit when it was rolled out, they'd probably have experienced a comeback like Nintendo is right now. Combine the bad oopses on the prior systems, the gigadisks, the price-points... It all combined to doom the system even though it was really more akin to a coup on their part- the first of the true next-gen consoles (think more akin to an X-Box or a GameCube and you'd be thinking right...) that was well before it's time.
The initial price of the Dreamcast, coupled with the very bad taste everyone had in their mouths from Saturn's debacle in the console market is precisely why it went belly up. I played the titles I bought when they were in the process of axing the thing in the tail end of Sega's production of them. Some of the titles were as good as anything on PS/2- some of them were arguably better in gameplay or quality of graphics. If they'd not shot themselves in the foot with the 32x, SegaCD, and Saturn so badly, they would be in the position Nintendo is now with the Wii. But it was too late and too costly in light of the other past offerings- people just didn't give it the credibility that it honestly deserved.
Non-discriminatory means that anyone paying the royalty price gets to use it. Discriminatory means I can deny you rights to a given Patent, even if you're willing to pay the price I set to others.
Discriminatory licensing would be for me to license the rights to a given patent to the FOSS community but NOT license it to MS because they've been naughty.
Non-discriminatory licensing is where anyone that pays the up-front and ongoing royalty price gets to license it.
If I license it for FREE, then that's the price. If I license it for a fifty cents per instance using the hypothetical patent then that's the price.
Anyone stepping up to the plate gets to license.
RAND (Reasonable And...) means that it has to be some realistic thing per unit- say zero to something proportionate to it's liability to be used, for example the MP3 patents are licensed out in a reasonable fashion (Reasonable being if you're implementing DVD players or portable music players...). Unreasonable would be something like $500 per instance for something like that.
Because the workaround is doing something non-compliant and non-standard, per the USB spec to work around a problem. Now, had Seagate helped with the problem, it would be better and there wouldn't be a story. They didn't. Moreover, the drive has some troublesome characteristics. It's formatted NTFS. It advertises itself as a USB storage device, but technically, it's NOT (the spin down feature isn't part of the USB storage spec...)- and it only works with Windows OSes without modification. It also doesn't work right with MacOS machines.
Something of this nature should adhere to standards. It should be usable by any OS that complies with the driver specs on it. That's what USB is all about. That's why things like those thumb drives, flash card readers, keyboards, mice, joysticks, and other USB HID/Storage/Etc. spec devices all just simply work on all OSes.
Not that I can tell... They've got some nice ideas (like SeaShield, which protects the bulk of the drive's electronics from ESD...) but for the large part, they do non-compliant crap like this and then resort to the "We don't support..." crap. They've been doing it and stuff like it for over 10 years now. Seagate's the last in line brand as far as I'm concerned. You buy it when there's no other choice. Even if there's much more expensive parts.
Indeed. The behavior of the USB drive is non-compliant with the USB storage device spec. It's a useful behavior, to be sure, if you can make it work on all the mainline OSes (Sorry, Seagate- Linux happens to be one of them...), but they didn't do their due dilligence and when caught out on it, they resorted to the "Linux isn't supported" BS (But then neither is MacOS for that matter- heh...lame.).
That doesn't engender a desire for me to buy any more of their stuff- ever again.
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The media's playing the "let's distract the populace" game...
When I read the title on the article here, which was based on the media reports, I'd thought that someone
must have missed Lucifer skating to work. Hillary takes NH? Brr... What's the world coming to?
It's succinct and to the point. And while it doesn't get to the dirt like the news items
have been doing, it does spell out that Intel couldn't be bothered with working on the
project in an appropriate manner from start to finish and some of the other reasons this
whole thing went down the way it did.
Yep. You pegged it there.
The big problem though is, that all their sales people did the same thing in a year's timeframe.
According to the upper management, they'd supposedly been told not to. Either they're all insubordinate or the upper
management failed in their job to make it dead clear that this was NOT a situation that they're supposed to be playing
those games. Whether that was deliberate or not remains to be seen as an exercise for each person pondering the
situation. (Past track record indicates the upper management may have been talking out both sides of their mouth
on this one...but I'm not going to say that one as fact without some more concrete proof.)
In either case, Intel DID screw up. BADLY. What happened is explainable, but not excusable.
Heh... Not understanding the licensing is going to be the end of that client in the long term.
Most people would be aghast at what licensing they're operating under with their stuff. There's
a REASON why I took to largely using nothing but FOSS stuff. The terms, once you understand the
consequences of each license, is actually something most people and businesses (even the software
ones...) can live with.
Considering that the GPL only comes into play when you DISTRIBUTE the code in question, the NVidia driver's been
pretty much something of a non-issue.
You can't legally distribute to someone an install done this way, or provide an installation that ships directly with the NVidia
drivers, but you can ship a Linux install that can make it easy for someone and you can always turn it off/remove the offending
binary blob when you hand someone a machine you've been using the driver on. Since usage is not controlled by the GPL grant,
and there's no directly infringing pieces involved everyone just grouses about the blob NVidia provides, asks if they'll ever
do like AMD and Intel are in the process of doing, and goes on.
Unfortunately for all, the trend has been towards companies going to the very short term thinking
instead of sustainable things. Offshoring, etc. are more good solid examples of what I'm talking
about. All short-term, short-sighted thinking. Sure, you might see a couple of quarters of profit
by doing that, but after that, you're going to lose all of it because of the problems you brought
on by doing it. In the end, most publicly traded companies are worrying about "shareholder value"
and looking at the current stock price. In this day and age, you can't even look at that- that
stock price isn't the shareholder value, it's the shareseller value because you
dipwads don't do dividends and only base the return on an investment on the sale of the stock.
All you're worrying about at that point is the capricious mood of a bunch of people that daytrade.
"Seems" is the key word there... I've gotten bad treatment from Wal-Marts in the past.
My wife and our friend have been accosted over their service animals in Wal-Marts (Even
though the effing doors have "Service Animals Welcome"...)- if you're not seeing a lot
of the bad treatment, you're just...lucky...
Not always true. And unless they openly state that they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, they have to allow them in the store if they're "shopping"- all he needs do is pick up some cheap-assed item off the shelf to legitimize it. If they throw him out then, they've got a lawsuit on their hands.
I've never been "blacklisted"- and if I ever find proof thereof, they'll get sued bigtime as it's
not at all legit.
For starters... Please quit conflating the act of infringement with "theft" or "murder". It's NEITHER and as such you should really, really quit doing it. Everyone that does that should do so. Honest.
Infringement is violating the right established by the government to further the production of the arts in which a party has the right to control the reproduction and distribution of a so protected work. If I infringe upon that right, all I've done is usurped your right to control that production and distribution. It's not theft, where if I take something, you're deprived of the use thereof (Sorry, "lost profits" do NOT constitute theft- you are not assured that anyone will buy the copies of your protected work, so therefore, you can't claim you were deprived of anything other than your right to control the production of the work...). It's not murder, which is the taking of the life of someone. The law is explicit in which of those three acts are which- and they're right in doing so because they ARE different.
Now, then...
Making available doesn't work well as an argument. If you use that, every library on the face of the Earth is a criminal in that case. Which, is flatly garbage, when you think long and hard about it. It's not stealing, even IF you viewed it as such.
Infringement only occurs when someone makes a copy of the protected work for themselves or others- photocopying a book, making a copy of an album or MP3 of something. And, it's not you, if you're making it available, that is actually doing the act of infringement, past the covered one of making the file in the first place, which IS fair use- and very probably is even not an infringement itself because of the AHRA (That remains to be seen as there's not been any Court ruling that indicates that this is the case- the wording of the law in question would seem that it does cover that...). Anyone making copies of the protected work are the actual infringers per the law the way it's currently written.
I am not condoning people doing it, mind. It's morally wrong, yes. I know with some
reasonable certainty that I wouldn't be doing it.
Is it illegal? Not based on a reading of how the laws are currently written, no.
Morally wrong doesn't make it illegal unless there's a law that backs that position up- sorry, things
just don't work that way.
Using that argument, then very, very few can be allowed to be out of prison or have these sorts of
restrictions of their rights applied to them.
A stunning majority of the prison population happen to be afflicted with Antisocial Personality Disorder.
This means they have little to no sense of right and wrong and are actually compelled to do the things
that put them in prison in the first place.
But yet, you release these people, who're actually MORE dangerous than most sex offenders back out
on the streets.
Moreover, it doesn't even get into the fact that it's damned easy (frighteningly easier than you think)
to get a sex offender label slapped on you these days- and you really never committed a crime to begin
with.
It's a damned crock and the legislators making these laws KNOW it. They're pandering for votes, making
legislation that sounds really good and appeals to assuage the guilt of the parents out there that
know they're not quite doing their jobs and expecting the government to do it for them- but has all kinds
of bad unintended or intended, but hidden, consequences.
It's got to stop.
In the end, you will need a hybrid that is capable of being the plug-in EV that's usable
by everyone in the mix- but then use something like solid-oxide fuel cells to power it
and fuel it with an appropriate fuel from something like Methanol, Propane, or Biodiesel
(All depends on what you can manage to fuel the solid-oxide cells from without conversion...)
and go from there or find cleaner ways of producing the electricity. They may be at that
threshold now. It certainly looks like it with the current crop of EV's and alternative
generation tech.
If you factor in tech just now hitting the market (such as Nanosolar's stuff...), the nanotech
coming from the discoveries about chlorophyll and how plants convert almost every erg of
impinging sunlight into usable energy (and how to make electricity that way...), dramatic
improvements in Savonius Rotors, etc. you end up with something a bit different in picture.
Electric Vehicles may now be the right way to go with everything except for some classes
of aviation.
Heh... Did Bill Gates change jobs? Did Allchin? No?
/. I've been at this stuff since the "home computer" was considered to be something like an 8008 or a 1802 programmed in hex.
/., the electronic zoo, complete with poo flingers. (As I address one of the same...)
You might want to think about telling someone to not act snotty to one's elders- I'm very, very probably older than most of the people posting on
But then, what did I expect? This is
The reason people think electric=low power is that they're used to these things that have
low HP ratings to conserve on battery demand and cost. An electric motor is more efficient
and more powerful than pretty much every prime mover we've developed over the centuries.
The problem is providing that specific prime mover with energy. Batteries are intrinsically
heavy (or dangerous- just look at the flaming Dell's to realize this...). All of it is
pricey because we've focused on internal combustion engines. Now that we're being forced
because of circumstance to re-think everything on the prime mover equation, electrics are
beginning to be utilized as they win over most everything else. If someone could axe the
battery problem out of the equation, then combustion based prime mover tech would get relegated
to the largest applications where it'll be an issue for a while yet to apply electric motor
technology to the problems in question.
That's not how that term is used in that parlance. You can choose to call it what you want to, but to quote Inigo Montoya...
"You keep using that word...I don't think it means what you think it means..."
Discrimination is being particular and inconsistent in your licensing terms, just like the parent poster told you.
It's not being for free for those that don't want to make money off of it and for a fee for those that do- in terms
of the use in the context of licensing, if you had it your way, it would be called discriminatory licensing. (You're
discriminating against the people that can afford to pay the royalty...). Just because YOU don't want to be paying
for it, doesn't make it discriminatory if you have to pay some pittance to use it in your stuff. You're not discriminated
against, you're just being cheap.
Did you see me SAY that it was the follow-on or that the teams were involved? NO.
What you saw me say was that Microsoft probably learned from the mistakes and successes with their interaction with Sega on the Dreamcast. That also includes the management that was still around when they disbanded the WinCE games group. You need to quit reading more into what people type than what is typed...
The jury's still out on that one. If they've still enough 40Gb units to sell for Christmas, they might
buy enough traction to get the studios to take them more seriously. Sony kind of pulled a Dreamcast
with the PS3, if the truth was admitted here. The biggest drags have been that cost and the overall
sign-off from the studios. There's beginning to be a decent enough line-up coming out of the studios
that I'm considering one of the 40Gb machines if budget permits and there's still any left here- but
in the end, there's no good reason to be spending the money they're asking for the 80's and the
lesser models in the current official line up are sorta crippled in a few ways to make them a bit
less compelling.
Not quite. Sega had a relationship with Microsoft and they had a WinCE target image for people to use. Not many of the titles actually USED it as it was constraining in several ways that the studios tended to not like. Now, spiritually, the XBox is the sequal/love-child of the Sega/Microsoft liason. Microsoft learned what NOT to do with the Sega relationship, I suspect. Unfortunately for Sega, they shot themselves in the foot repeatedly with the Dreamcast in the manner of prior console FLOPS coupled with a few...iffy...decisions that ran up the price-point and made it less compelling (Like gigadisks...).
If they'd not shot themselves so badly in the foot and had found a way to lower the price point a bit when it was rolled out, they'd probably have experienced a comeback like Nintendo is right now. Combine the bad oopses on the prior systems, the gigadisks, the price-points... It all combined to doom the system even though it was really more akin to a coup on their part- the first of the true next-gen consoles (think more akin to an X-Box or a GameCube and you'd be thinking right...) that was well before it's time.
The initial price of the Dreamcast, coupled with the very bad taste everyone had in their mouths from Saturn's
debacle in the console market is precisely why it went belly up. I played the titles I bought when they were in the process of axing the thing in the tail end of Sega's production of them. Some of the titles were as good as anything on PS/2- some of them were arguably better in gameplay or quality of graphics. If they'd not shot themselves in the foot with the 32x, SegaCD, and Saturn so badly, they would be in the position Nintendo is now with the Wii. But it was too late and too costly in light of the other past offerings- people just didn't give it the credibility that it honestly deserved.
The Second Amendment is the passage that allows you the resources FOR that violent insurrection that was mentioned in the GP post...
Actually, he's got the terms WRONG.
Non-discriminatory means that anyone paying the royalty price gets to use it.
Discriminatory means I can deny you rights to a given Patent, even if you're willing to pay the price I set to others.
THAT, my friends, is what RAND really means.
Discriminatory licensing would be for me to license the rights to a given patent to the FOSS community but NOT license it to MS because they've been naughty.
Non-discriminatory licensing is where anyone that pays the up-front and ongoing royalty price gets to license it.
If I license it for FREE, then that's the price.
If I license it for a fifty cents per instance using the hypothetical patent then that's the price.
Anyone stepping up to the plate gets to license.
RAND (Reasonable And...) means that it has to be some realistic thing per unit- say zero to something proportionate to it's liability to be used, for example the MP3 patents are licensed out in a reasonable fashion (Reasonable being if you're implementing DVD players or portable music players...). Unreasonable would be something like $500 per instance for something like that.
Because not everyone has eSATA, perhaps? :-)
Many laptops don't. Many modern desktop machines don't.
Because the workaround is doing something non-compliant and non-standard, per the USB spec
to work around a problem. Now, had Seagate helped with the problem, it would be better
and there wouldn't be a story. They didn't. Moreover, the drive has some troublesome
characteristics. It's formatted NTFS. It advertises itself as a USB storage device, but
technically, it's NOT (the spin down feature isn't part of the USB storage spec...)- and it
only works with Windows OSes without modification. It also doesn't work right with MacOS
machines.
Something of this nature should adhere to standards. It should be usable by any OS that
complies with the driver specs on it. That's what USB is all about. That's why things
like those thumb drives, flash card readers, keyboards, mice, joysticks, and other USB
HID/Storage/Etc. spec devices all just simply work on all OSes.
Not that I can tell... They've got some nice ideas (like SeaShield, which protects the bulk of
the drive's electronics from ESD...) but for the large part, they do non-compliant crap like
this and then resort to the "We don't support..." crap. They've been doing it and stuff like
it for over 10 years now. Seagate's the last in line brand as far as I'm concerned. You buy
it when there's no other choice. Even if there's much more expensive parts.
Indeed. The behavior of the USB drive is non-compliant with the USB storage device spec. It's a useful behavior, to be sure, if you
can make it work on all the mainline OSes (Sorry, Seagate- Linux happens to be one of them...), but they didn't do their due dilligence
and when caught out on it, they resorted to the "Linux isn't supported" BS (But then neither is MacOS for that matter- heh...lame.).
That doesn't engender a desire for me to buy any more of their stuff- ever again.