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kleinbl00  ·  2375 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Equifax and our broken computer industry

Dude general purpose computing is dead. Got a website? Go browse Google Analytics and see what devices it's reporting. I'll betcha it's 70% handsets. Shit, I'll betcha it's 40% iPhone, the most locked-down, no-touchy mass-market computing device ever sold to the public.

I've got a Synology NAS. I'm running Surveillance Station on it. And I can get that on any web browser anywhere and it works great. And I've also got OS-specific apps to talk to that thing but they're busted because fuck you, that's why. If it runs in the browser, it adheres to standards. If it runs natively, Apple can decide to bork this thing because it doesn't match their revenue plan anymore. Kinda how Time Machine only works on AFP, but AFP is being deprecated so they can run a proprietary file system, so now your backup solution is putting your iTunes in the cloud for $9.95 a month and if you have anything else like photoshop or Avid it's your own damn fault for not using iPhoto and iMovie.

Meanwhile anything you want to do you can do on a RaspPi and chances are good someone has already breadboarded it, coded it and has uploaded an STL file to thingverse so you can print a case. Flightaware wants more ADSB receivers in the world so they're selling their hardware at cost and posting their BOM publicly. And all that stuff is open-source and out in the world and promoted by a thriving community - my kid's school has a computer club where they mess around with RaspPi in 4th-flipping-grade.

All my devices will happily do SSL, happily do VPN, happily do all sorts of magic secure stuff but these "open" computers I got? They don't talk to the world por shit. "General purpose" computing is big bloated dinosaur companies that grudgingly keep selling you Macbooks for too goddamn much money, or Dell hitting you with a $300 premium for installing Linux. If a death of "general purpose computing" means I don't have to create a proprietary email address just so I can get bloody DDNS to work I will dance on its goddamn grave.