Notices by グレェ「grey」 (byterhymer@mastodon.social)

@apparentlymart Keeping old stuff running does take a lot of effort (I write as someone who was previously employed by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment a 501c3 nonprofit wherein I was often asked to recreate prior art to help attorneys for Fortune 25 invalidate spurious patents).

Unfortunately, it doesn't tend to pay well, if at all. Because: monetization in our society hyper fixates on the latest and greatest unless you happen to own a Stradivarius, or Amiga. ;) @RL_Dane @alcinnz

@apparentlymart Apple Silicon may be "young" but ARM is from the 1980s.

C, is from the 1970s and UNIX was ported from PDP11/20 assembly to C, to facilitate portability.

Which seems to have worked remarkably well now, for decades.

Problematically: in the 1970s: most people using computers also programmed. In the 21st century most people using computers, just use them. I can't fathom why anyone would use a computer who doesn't program, yet here we are, and it's horrible. @RL_Dane @alcinnz

@alcinnz Yeah, I dunno. Personally I vehemently oppose the sort of telemetry by default approach that Homebrew uses as mentioned in TFA.

MacPorts in contrast (which is an older project, so old it began as DarwinPorts co-founded by jkh who also co-founded FreeBSD) does have mpstats for those who want to opt-in to telemetry, but spyware should NEVER be a default, it should ALWAYS be a choice.

There are other *saner* methods too e.g. running AWStats or Webalizer, not Google Analytics.
@RL_Dane

@Erik That may seem like a "high bar" but it really wasn't.

"Aminet was the largest public archive of software for any platform until around 1996."

Now? The entirety of Aminet would fit on a thumb drive that probably cost less than $20 USD.

IMHO, the Amiga was the zenith of consumer computing hardware & software design.

Almost everything in the consumer sector since Commodore's demise has felt like a bad rehash, emphasis on bad.

@drewdevault @spacekookie

@Erik I mean, more or less all software prior to TCP stacks shipping with consumer based OSes was this way by default.

e.g. Almost all Commodore Amiga Workbench software, since Workbench did not ship with a TCP stack:

1. required a user to install a terminal program if they wanted to talk to a modem.

2. terminal software required explicit invocation by a user to even ZMODEM receive for example.

3. A TCP/IP stack was available (e.g. AmiTCP) but not an OS default.

@drewdevault @spacekookie

@alcinnz Are Monty Python that problematic? They definitely did a lot of cross dressing, but in general (and I may be incorrect) were mocking societal norms and I think were generally progressive?

I also don't think I've encountered anything horrific about its members, in decades, though there was a really confusing interview with Terry Gilliam years back where the interviewer seemed to think Gilliam was an apologist for saying that people in power, tend to abuse it or something.

@alcinnz In my youth, I loved Jackie Chan.

In more recent years I learned that he was a total jerk to his daughter, because she had a girlfriend.

Purportedly at one point she was homeless, sleeping under bridges.

He kind of lost every shred of respect for me after that.

I've had similar strife with my parents while they were alive, they never experienced homelessness. I have.

Jackie Chan could afford to not be a bigot especially as he crossplayed Chun Li in City Hunter (1993). But nope.

@alcinnz I am only actually familiar with one of these. ;-/

@flabberghaster Typo: it's "Raytheon" not "Ratheon".

I think one of the real challenges is: businesses seem, intrinsically evil most of the time?

Also see: Edwin Armstrong, FM radio inventor, subverted by RCA bribing (aka "lobbying") the FCC to deign his radios illegal.

Armstrong fought them in court, lost all his money in doing so, his wife left him, he committed suicide.

Once his patents expired? RCA started making FM radios.

No movies on that, though. ;( @lattera @ramsey @alcinnz

@Jdreben there's https://liberapay.com/

Albeit, since creating an account, I haven't received any donations, so I can't confirm it functions as intended, but: it seems as if it has the intention to be similar to Patreon, but well, open source and operated as a non-profit which purportedly does not take any fees. @alcinnz @flabberghaster @ramsey

@SimonProD train tracks are also purportedly approximately 24x more economical to build and maintain than roads. @GreenSky

@alcinnz I'm only about 25 minutes in, but I am really unimpressed with how much of the earlier history they are botching, entirely.

Zero mention of NLS (oNLine System) or Doug Engelbart.

Erroneously attributing the invention of BASIC to Bill Gates (invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz > a decade before Microsoft even existed).

Even stating that Microsoft claimed they invented the mouse? o.O

Sorry, that was Bill English.

Hopefully it improves? So far, it isn't.

@oemb1905 Hi BSD folk here, what makes you think we're anti GNU?

We dig UNIX. We sure as heck didn't make an acronym indicate otherwise.

But I don't just dig BSDs, ISC is wonderful too! MIT also acceptable. I was administering systems based around public domain code before FSF and GNU even existed. Which I realize means in some places the WTFPL is preferable because they don't even acknowledge public domain as real (IANAL but w/e).

This reads as unnecessarily hostile?

@lightweight @msw