a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
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.





cgod  ·  2374 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'll acknowledge the death of GPC when RMS quits shouting at clouds.

And....on a vaguely related tangent. I never say no to my daughter when she asks to use my computer. We control her screen time and most the time she want's to watch TV, play tablet or use my phone. I have never once said no to her request to use my computer. She hasn't figured this out yet and when she does I'm sure that I'll have to start saying no. I want her to be a comfortable computer user. Of all the kids I know the only ones who use computers are the smart ones. The dim bulbs all use touch screens or consoles.

I wan't her to have a smidgen more control over the options of what she can install and what she can use compared her dumbed down peers.

kleinbl00  ·  2374 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My daughter and I are going to build that there ADSB rig. She doesn't know it yet, and I need to finish a couple movies first, but bloody hell we're gonna rig one up.

OftenBen  ·  2374 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I wan't her to have a smidgen more control over the options of what she can install and what she can use compared her dumbed down peers.

I fear a time (And I think you might feel similarly) where she CAN'T install what she wants, where she CAN'T choose what she uses because of DRM/Proprietary devices.

When I think about the death of 'general purpose computing' I see the ossification of our current technological caste system, with it's different levels of brahmin techno-magi.

kleinbl00  ·  2374 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's here, dude.

What's that? you want to install an app you didn't get from the app store? Try running it, then get shut down, then open system preferences, then security, then click the button, then enter your password, then close out, then open the app. This is Apple's 5-year-old "fuck you for stepping outside our ecosystem" nuisanceware, and that's on OS X, which is Unix.

I ran a jailbroken Android phone. It was awesome. Except for updating. It wasn't. Download a gig worth of developer kit on the laptop. plug in via USB. Scour the Internet for scripts. bash into the kernel and sudo a frickin' bluetooth update. Have half your apps not work right.

I lost $500 worth of .tifs because Apple decided that Preview was written poorly enough that you could backdoor into the kernel through a malformed image header. So what did Apple do? It rewrote my .tifs so they contained no information. Not "we think this is a problem" not "this sure looks like a 5mb monochrome TIF, is it?" not "we've quarantined these files because they make us nervous" but "yeah, we're gonna replace these with black because fuck you."

If you are seriously thinking that you're having any sort of adventuresome experience on the desktop if you aren't running an alternative operating system you're high. That shit been dead.

OftenBen  ·  2374 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    It's here, dude.

I don't disagree. I also don't want to see it ossified.