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John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset

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

#151

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?

How is that any different than wanting to archive a CGI website from the 90s with a URL structure like http://example.com/?query=foo ? Unless there's an index page with links to all possible query values, or you can work out how to manually iterate all possible query values, there's not much you can do. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with JavaScript data visualizations specifically.

That URL structure is trivial for a crawler to walk and index. I'm not sure why you'd assume that there wouldn't be an index page, such a site would have all desired links in the DOM, the crawler just sniffs those out and visits in sequence. There's no need to think that the links would somehow be 'hidden' from the user and have to be randomly enumerated...

Not only that, but a site of that era probably also has a sitemap.xml file which would enumerate all available public endpoints, specifically to make it easier for crawlers to index everything.

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

#152
I'm going to give this a try later. One small fly in the ointment is that if like me you do not have and do not want to ever have a Facebook account, it will not be possible to load this onto the device after 2022.

This is because loading the ADB requires putting the device in developer mode, which in turn requires an internet connection and an active login to your Oculus developer account. Oculus developer accounts have been deprecated and will stop working in 2023, after which time a Facebook account is required.

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

#153
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait for the first big JS Framework which uses the canvas for everything.

That kind of thing makes indexing a nightmare but it's not any more difficult to archive than .exe or .swf files. Sure you need a "player" but that's true of PDF and OOXML and people don't really complain about those.

In a PDF or normal program there are clear semantics what is text and what is something else. On a canvas, everything is just made up of pixels. You'd need OCR Software to detect what is what and they won't ever be 100% correct unless you use only text and fonts which are made to be recognized by OCR Software.

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

#154

> allowing for a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now to be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down. This resonates so much with me. Each time I setup a new device that requires an Internet connection, I think about how we can enjoy booting 30 years old retro computers and how the next generation will not be able to do the sa…

Do you mean locked-down software? Do you have examples of hardware that the next generation might not be able to boot 30 years later? I'm curious and ignorant :D

I was thinking about the Xbox One. Someone opening a shrink wrapped version in 30 years will have a useless brick because it needs to connect to Microsoft servers for the initial setup. I am not exactly sure what it does during this first exchange and how much of it is hardware/software but I'm pretty sure none of it is done in the final user's best interest.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely someone is archiving apks, just for the fun of it? I can imagine that someday we'd have a webarchive that embeds a simulation of the device where you can run that apk in your browser. Of course, if it's just an application shell dependent on a running backend, then yes it's not really an application so much as an "application shell" at this point, and you ALSO need to be able to move around the data corpus to…

Haha well that just blew my mind xD I personally don't really care about achieving anything. Why is this such a big thing? Why would we want to achieve all the APKs? There are too many of them lol History? Memories? Who cares, we're all going to die lol And with the qty of APKs, only 0.00000001% of them will ever be dug out of the archives.

It's definitely feasible to store all APKs. After all, Google does just that. It probably wouldn't even be a significant chunk of what the Internet Archive is currently capable of storing.

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

#156
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is true of some of the best work being done on the web, such as the NYTimes interactive infographics. Because they are so JS-heavy, and reliant on CI/CD pipelines for deployment, on custom CMSes, there is no way to archive them in the way that static pages containing just text and images can be archived on the Wayback Machine. Heck, even Flash projects from 15 years ago still run fine when compiled on Ruffle…

> Because they are so JS-heavy, and reliant on CI/CD pipelines for deployment, on custom CMSes, there is no way to archive them in the way that static pages containing just text and images can be archived on the Wayback Machine. Welcome to the world of digital archiving. It's an enormously complicated space, and even for just my own personal projects and content, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to ensure…

One aspect of this is to look at the ways that history is being rewritten now from original materials. All of the -isms of the 1900's painted a picture of straight, white (male) Captains of Industry paving a way to the future, and in revisiting the source materials we are discovering that this image paved over a lot of people that were doing a lot of heavy lifting.

History is full of assistants, spinsters and confirmed bachelors whose stories are being re-told now from diaries and correspondence letters that have been family heirlooms for generations. You can't trust the contemporary reports as accurate, because they have a different agenda than we do 20, 40, 100 years in the future. We only knew of Marie Curie within her own lifetime, less because her work was so profound, but because she had a husband in her own field who conspired with her to subvert a system that didn't want to give her standing. A partner outside your field can't do much for you, and a more selfish collaborator wouldn't.

Who knows what polite fictions are being told about people now that will be reframed by our grandchildren, assuming that scholars can find any of it. If I had to guess it will be neurodiversity. Probably/hopefully doing away with the Tortured Genius trope.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? JS can be cached and preserved just like anything else. Even the (presumably JSON or CSV) data could be cached, though I don't know if the Wayback Machine follows API endpoints by default

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?

If it's view-only, request-response replaying could be a viable option. Browser software can be emulated.

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

#158

> allowing for a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now to be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down. This resonates so much with me. Each time I setup a new device that requires an Internet connection, I think about how we can enjoy booting 30 years old retro computers and how the next generation will not be able to do the sa…

I'm not sure if there's already a term for this, but the "lack of permanency" is going to be an absolutely massive problem for future genealogists.

Here's an example of how genealogy research looks in the modern day:

* Newspapers (Headlines, Obits, Engagement/Marriage announcements)

* Handwritten letters

* Census records

* Physical photographs

* [Depending on century, location, and religious denomination] Baptism records

* Family Bibles

* Military enlistment paperwork [assuming that it wasn't destroyed in a fire.]

* White & Yellow pages

Much of this physical information has been digitized, but for information that was birthed digitally is precariously susceptible to complete loss once a website goes offline, or a hard drive fails, or any other number of issues that happens to things over the centuries. War, the elements, material shortages, etc.

There's other sources, of course. A big one is first-hand accounts of the past, but even such verbal interviews should be conducted with objects or photos to help jog the interviewees memories of the event.

The majority of how personal memories are being stored are on phones, in hard drives, and other various media that are susceptible to bit rot, proprietary encryption methods, technology or social media platforms that have already gone defunct. This is a trend which is quickly increasing too. If some serious solutions aren't proposed and adopted very soon, it seems highly likely that there's basically just going to be a giant void from the late 90's to at least the 2030's.

Heck, just think about how 10 to 20 years ago, the most common way to get a PC game was on CD. Now it would be an inconvenience because very few people even have a headphone jack, let alone a CD/DVD drive.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got out of jail after 8 years. Went through my del.ici.ous bookmarks. 99% of the sites either dead or can no longer be viewed properly.

I would definitely read a blog (or just follow up comments) about a technology orientated person jumping forward almost a decade in time and what they find really different. Are you a professional developer? Has framework churn been an issue?

Yes, been a web developer since 1994. Framework churn is THE WORST. Ugh. Really, nothing in terms of outside appearance has changed. The web looks pretty much identical to when I was locked up in 2013. There are a lot more ads, and way more video ads. The Web uses up waaaay more RAM and CPU.

Development, though, has been a bitch since I got out a couple of months ago. I want to use the latest frameworks, but I'm starting from zero again. None of the old frameworks even exist. I feel like I'm 5 years old again.

The code I've written in the last few weeks has all been very old fashioned! I just needed to get the job done.

I had zero access to the Internet in all that time. The biggest thing I found was TikTok. I fucking love TikTok. From the inside we would see the occasional video on the news, but it just looked like it was to make videos of people dancing, but it's actually fucking awesome for those of us with "neurodiversity".

One last thing - out of the, like, 1000 online account I had... only 2 were accessible once I got out. Wikipedia and eSnipe. Can't get into anything else. Don't have ready access to the email address used on a lot of them. The others have an email address on a domain I own, but I can't change the nameservers because I can't get into the account, but my friend paid the domain fees while I was locked up, so I still "own" the domain. I can't get anything back as the court owns all the identity documents that I have and won't let me have them. In fact, when I asked a couple of weeks ago they said they have no idea where they put them all.

Oh, and everything is SSL now. That wasn't a thing in 2013.

Any other questions, fire away. It's a fascinating topic. I do feel like I teleported 8 years into the future.

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

#160

> allowing for a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now to be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down. This resonates so much with me. Each time I setup a new device that requires an Internet connection, I think about how we can enjoy booting 30 years old retro computers and how the next generation will not be able to do the sa…

Do you mean locked-down software? Do you have examples of hardware that the next generation might not be able to boot 30 years later? I'm curious and ignorant :D

Lots and lots of IoT requires internet access and servers to stay up and running for even initialising a device after a reset. Some require these servers to control the device once it's as up. I already own a smartwatch that cannot be enabled because the application that used to initialise it has patched out support for that model.
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