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John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

arstechnica.com

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Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#91

Post by foxfluff »

kfprt wrote: post #76
CobaltFire wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would completely close markets to new entrants. As an inventor I can't financially hope to support a device for a human lifetime and break even, much less profit. Right to repair and allowing these things to be legally opened and hacked by the end user is the right way, not burdening every manufacturer with unrealistic support laws. For an example, look at military equipment costs. 20 year support is often built…

Declare abandonment and open source all documentation and code. This should get you out of the human lifetime burden.

Yea I've been thinking about this. Open up specs, schematics, docs, and code, or actually support it "forever" (not literally, but a decently long time). It might be a bit extreme though. To provide some incentive, I'd consider the responsibility for recycling if you're unwilling to support usage. There is far too much throwaway crap.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#92

Post by londons_explore »

mywittyname wrote: post #77
spicybright wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a law to require the removal of DRM after 10 years. That's more than fair for how fast hardware and games currently move.

I don't think we need a law, we just need businesses to stay greedy. DRM licenses are kind of expensive and it's hard to publishers to justify the added cost of DRM after the initial release, when they've made 80% of the revenue for the game. So they often (though, not always) get patched out eventually.

Depends how the DRM license is written.

It could easily be a perpetual license for a given title. Then there is no incentive to remove it.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#93

Post by quakeguy »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #78
amackera wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire and respect John Carmack for his role in the history of computing (and his ongoing contributions), but I don't see how making 3D video games was really helping humanity more than this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Carmack made multiple fundamental breakthroughs in 3D graphics. Not only that, but he consistently positioned himself to commercialize those , which is not easy. His Quake 3 engine was the bread and butter of Id Software, generating billions in revenue. In recent times, he's done coronavirus simulations (I don't know anything else about that), and is doing AGI research. He's also a true hacker through and through. Si…

He also helped to create a generation of people which modded and created forks of the engines he wrote to use in their own projects, providing the basis for tools to modify assets and whatnot. I owe him so much and I thank him for what he enabled everyday.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#94

Post by soylentcola »

ralmidani wrote: post #59

Massive props to John Carmack! We also need laws to protect consumers when they don’t have an enlightened champion on their side. Part of the reason I buy Apple devices is because Apple is unlikely to get acquired or go out of business for the foreseeable future. I wish there were viable alternatives. Android devices are not an option for me, as they are more likely to be abandoned and/or contain Google/manufacturer/…

Oddly enough, this is why I stopped buying iOS devices. With my old Android phones/the one Android tablet I got I was able to install something useful and pared-down once they became older and unsupported. They work fine as readers/browsers on my home network or as "fancy" remotes and local-network media players.

The only old iOS device I haven't sold/tossed is an iPad 2 which is unbearably slow for most things, and I can neither downgrade the OS or install some lighter alternative. Plus it needs a new 30-pin power cable but I haven't gotten around to buying one because all the other old devices just use one of a pile of USB cables I have stashed around.

As far as I'm concerned, at least in terms of repurposing older devices, iOS is like the old consoles where it's essentially stuck once there are no more "official" updates. If it boots Android, there's a decent chance I can install something custom on it years later.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#96

Post by abricot »

mywittyname wrote: post #71
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I still try so hard to buy physical copies of games, and if there is a GOTY Edition, to have the DLC be on-disk , as opposed to being a bunch of download vouchers. I wanna be able to play the freaking game in ten years without worrying about whether the game/console's online service is still available to do some mandatory authentication or version check.

Unfortunately, a lot of new releases need a 0-day patch to be playable. It's basically an anti-piracy/anti-early release measure. So if you really want to preserve a game on disk, you pretty much have to pick up another copy stamped at a later date to include all of the patches.

GOTY editions rarely need 0-day patches.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#97

Post by CobrastanJorji »

horsawlarway wrote: post #67
CarelessExpert wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is tangential, but I really wish that their would be legislation, valid retroactively, to enable old unsupported devices to still be utilized. Not at all. This is precisely on point, and directly intersects with the Right to Repair as well. It's about damn time we, as a society, put a stop to black box devices over which we have no ability to inspect, repair, or repurpose after the vendor decides to end suppor…

Could not agree more. At the bare minimum a vendor should not be allowed to sell a device that has digital locks if the user is not also given a copy of the keys. You can lock the device, but if I don't get a key at time of purchase, then I don't own the damn thing.

I'm trying to think of a situation where this is objectively bad, and I having trouble thinking of areas where this is objectively bad. The best I came up with is purchasing an elevator, which has a key for firemen. I wouldn't really want to just give everybody a copy of that key. But on the other hand, you can buy that key on Amazon for $5. It would maybe help people think about security a bit more if they bought a TSA-approved lock and it came with a TSA key with a little warning that read "Note: this key opens any TSA-approved locks, please only open your own baggage."

One possibility is around DNS. A public/private keypair is basically a lock and a key. If you can't put ANY public keys on my device without giving me the private key, HTTPS is going to be problematic. Software updates become a little scarier as well, since a man-in-the-middle attack becomes MUCH easier to pull off. But perhaps the answer there is, like DNS on a desktop computer, to simply allow the user to edit those local keys. As long as there's a "Yes, I am also cool with installing unsigned software updates," then I don't see a problem.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#98

Post by spicybright »

elric wrote: post #64
spicybright wrote: post #30

I'm actually pretty nervous of how few Carmack's we have. Not at all saying they don't exist, but the job market favors engineers hopping around instead of staying at one place a while to become experts in things.

> the job market favors engineers hopping around instead of staying at one place Does it? That's a fair description of the consulting space, but I don't think it's an accurate representation of the job market as a whole. When product companies hire software engineers, they tend to aim for the long haul.

You'd think. Most career advice I get is you need to jump ship to get an actual pay raise. Maybe stay 3 or 4 years.

Not enough to build up deep knowledge, at least compared to older engineers imo

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#99

Post by samstave »

rob74 wrote: post #61
CobaltFire wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would completely close markets to new entrants. As an inventor I can't financially hope to support a device for a human lifetime and break even, much less profit. Right to repair and allowing these things to be legally opened and hacked by the end user is the right way, not burdening every manufacturer with unrealistic support laws. For an example, look at military equipment costs. 20 year support is often built…

Of course for military equipment there are also other cost drivers - more demanding specs, less units produced to spread the development cost etc. etc.

When I was at Lockheed, they would buy $2,000 panasonic 'toughbook' laptops, which were then sold to the military for $20,000 - not including the software licenses for our RFID product.

Re: John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

#100

Post by spicybright »

programmarchy wrote: post #56
spicybright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers evolve and break older pages. JS that requires requests as you interact with it will need an implementation of the server it uses (the subset and data of it's endpoints) How do you preserve that?

Maybe a good example is the original Nintendo (NES) emulators. New gaming consoles can't play those old cartridges, but we have a virtual layer that can. The same holds true for browsers, OSs, etc. It does create a pretty long chain of dependencies, though.

Ignoring the network point I made above, it'll be a monumental effort to get there.

Best we can hope for is virtual machines, and archive files targeting a specific browser version on specific virtual machines.

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