I do see that page referencing their app, so it could go either way, depending on whether their app is a mandatory part of the pathway.
It looks like you can control it with vanilla Orcaslicer. See the last post in this Snapmaker forum thread, for instance. It may or may not be willing to take gcode through the USB port—the specs indicate it has one.
It looks to me like they're continuing in their usual direction of fairly open software on mostly proprietary hardware.
You'd have to indicate "I also support these optional bits" for this to really work, which would lead to truly massive headers.
I prefer the idea of slapping people who put up pages that cater to Chrome rather than reading and following the standards upside the head with a large dead fish. People who write faulty WYSIWYG web design software get smacked once for every bad site deployed with their help.
The first one that comes to mind is Qt (the widget toolkit). While I'm not sure the current owners still do this, Trolltech offered the earlier versions under both the GPL and a commercial license that I think included paid support. I assume any sales under the commercial license were to companies who wanted to include it in their closed-source software.
As the owner of a Snapmaker2 A150 (that is, one of their second-gen multifunction devices, fairly old now), I can say that my experience with it has been decent enough. It speaks a lightly modified Marlin dialect and can be run completely offline. New firmware requires user permission. They did release the source for the firmware and for their custom slicer (not worth it), and some of the more adventurous owners did manage to flash it with modified firmware. There were a few complaints at the time about the hardware not being as open as people had hoped, mostly because of custom connectors and the like.
Hardware-quality-wise, it was kneecapped by needing to be solid enough for CNC, so it's slower and heavier than a purpose-built printer would need to be, but the prints are of decent enough quality for a device of its age and type.
In the general case, the person or persons who distributed the binary would then have done so illegally. In order to distribute, you have to follow the terms of the license. So them attempting to go after anyone downstream of them at that point is sort of like calling the police because someone stole your drug stash. And if there's an upstream beyond the illegal distributors, they're practically waving a "Sue me now!" placard in their direction.
The originator of the code, above whom there is no upstream, is allowed to offer it under more than one license (including a mixture of free and closed licenses), but the specific license in force has to be specified with each distributed copy.
No surprises here. Well, at least the items it ordered this time were kinda-sorta-maybe-almost plausible to stock at a café, unlike the tungsten cubes in the vending machine.
Reason #### not to allow random untrusted sites to run Javascript on your system. (I'm not actually sure how many reasons there are, but I am sure we must be into four digits by now.)
Sure it can (most of the bits, anyway). You can go the opposite way around the world or around the edge of Africa, for instance. Latency will go up, and it'll add to the congestion of other trunk cables, but rerouting is certainly possible for any location where the cables in the strait aren't your only route out. The real damage will be to the middle-eastern countries served directly by these cables, and it may be a bit of a headache for people who maintain Internet infrastructure.
Although Iran might cut the cables regardless, since one of the countries they appear to serve is Iran itself. Easiest way to control the news is to limit the flow of information across the border.
Your Internet obviously does not look like my Internet. I can't remember ever seeing a site that didn't belong to Google or Microsoft that required their login garbage (I see commercial sites that offer it as an option for lazy people who are unable to understand that using it is not in their best interests, yes, but every single one I've encountered thus far has also had a local username/password system).
As for the hyperscalers, that's starting to break up a bit because of the number of countries the US has pissed off recently. People want to move their stuff back inside their own borders. It's a drop in the bucket so far, admittedly, but every little bit helps.
Using hg-git everywhere reinforces the idea that Mecurial is a second-class citizen. (Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful that an option for interoperability exists, but I wish it weren't needed.)
Definitely. The last time I checked, your only hosting options if you wanted to use Mercurial directly were Heptapod and ($DEITY help us) Sourceforge.
Unless they've changed in the past few years, most parts are proprietary and will have to come from Snapmaker or their resellers. Swaps are usually at the module level. So the flexibility in parts sourcing is much lower than your Ender 3. On the plus side, they're usually good about honouring warranties.
Nozzles with other aperture sizes are available from Snapmaker for the U1. It's possible that the nozzles are a standard size (my older Snapmaker 2 uses the same nozzles as your Ender 3), but I can't find a specification anywhere.
TL;DR: If your priority is varied parts sourcing for longevity, maybe look at a different manufacturer.