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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

#181

Post by nitrogen »

fragmede wrote: post #165
CarelessExpert wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Fwiw, the Internet Archive is very much trying to avoid the random S3 bucket deletion problem, and donations to them are tax deductible. The issues of long-term digital storage are such that - use whatever you want for your own blog - but (imo) ASCII isn't going to save you any more than binary blobs are, 300 years into the future after we're all long gone and buried. We're already in a world where UTF-8 is taking ov…

7-bit ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, so ASCII is fine in a UTF-8 world.

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

#182

Post by CarelessExpert »

hinkley wrote: post #156
CarelessExpert wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 confirm…

TBH, IMO this is all a non sequitur

My point is that the nature of digital technologies is such that information is far more ephemeral and closed off than it's ever been, not just for historians but for we, the people who are creating that information. We produce a lot more information, but control and long-term preservation is infinitely harder.

Your observations regarding the challenge of historians is absolutely true. But the effects of technology are entirely orthogonal to that problem.

After all, even if we had perfect digital preservation, what you say is still true, if only because subjugated groups are less represented in the digital discourse for many reasons, including socioeconomics, direct censorship/interference from power groups, etc.

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

#184

Post by CarelessExpert »

fragmede wrote: post #165
CarelessExpert wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Fwiw, the Internet Archive is very much trying to avoid the random S3 bucket deletion problem, and donations to them are tax deductible. The issues of long-term digital storage are such that - use whatever you want for your own blog - but (imo) ASCII isn't going to save you any more than binary blobs are, 300 years into the future after we're all long gone and buried. We're already in a world where UTF-8 is taking ov…

> If I (today) said I had a word document and needed "an old version of Microsoft Word", I'm sure most people would know what I mean, and that I'd find someone with a Windows XP machine and a copy of Office 97'. Meanwhile, there are tons of people who are just going to stare at you blankly if you tell them about EBCDIC, never mind help you find a decoder.

Funny, I suspect the precise reverse is true.

EBCDIC is a well-documented encoding. Worst case, find you a reference book and you can figure out how to deal with it, because that knowledge is open and available.

The same is true of ASCII. If you can understand binary encodings with 8-bit groupings--a fairly fundamental concept in digital computing--you can probably find your way to an ASCII table in a library somewhere.

But good luck finding a working Windows XP machine with Office '97 fifty or one hundred years from now, let alone a spec for the format.

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

#185

Post by flatiron »

robert_tweed wrote: post #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…

You sure?

“In part, the unlocking is an attempt to guarantee that Go hardware will continue to be fully functional well into the future, 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," Carmack wrote.”

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

#186

Post by flatiron »

maximedupre wrote: post #124

I love the spirit, but is there any *successful* precedence? Sure, everything is now open-sourced, but setting up the kind of infrastructure that is necessitated to keep the thing up and running seems non-trivial.

I don’t believe it was open sourced. This is just a firmware that gives your root access and doesn’t require any Facebook integration.

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

#187

Post by jessaustin »

Arrath wrote: post #170
jessaustin wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As hard as it is to find any service manual at all for old machinery, and then when you spend $100 to order a used manual off ebay find that the really useful pages are ripped out or covered with grease, I think a product like you describe is waiting on AGI more than it's waiting on nice AR glasses. Very few people need this product, so the intellectual labor to produce it will need to be nearly free. I've gotten to…

Oh I know its a complete pipe dream, I can't help but want it regardless. I see you may not have had the joy of working on something with mixed SAE, Metric, and if you're real lucky, JIS all combined.

Well I haven't worked on anything with JIS! A guy I used to work with hadn't had fractions in school, so he would use the metric even on SAE parts. He couldn't figure out that e.g. 7/16" is smaller than 1/2".

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

#188

Post by monocasa »

metagame wrote: post #36
amarshall wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xbox One … lack of emulation is largely because there's not really a point to I thought it was because no had actually cracked the DRM yet.

Both have the same root problem: There's no incentive. There used to be reasons to crack consoles, and there still is for many of them, and eventually there might be an incentive to for the Xbox One, but there's no reason for the Xbox One to be right now and there never really has been. Pretty much all of the good Xbox exclusives are available on PCs as well (albeit some only via UWP, which had its copy protection br…

There's tons of incentive. There's over 50 million Xbox One consoles out there, so there's a giant market for people would love to not buy any games for the one time cost of ~$100.

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

#189

Post by mappu »

tinco wrote: post #42
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?

Browsers don't usually break older pages. The only time this happens when you rely on unstandardized features. At least, I have not noticed any page breaking in the past 15 years except for the ones I built using unstandardized API's.

The changing behaviour of browser autocomplete and the new disregard for autocomplete="off" really harmed multiple large CRM / ERP-style sites i worked on, as passwords would get "helpfully" autofilled into completely wrong fields, causing data loss.

I actually still don't think there's a proper sanctioned solution to this, it seems to be cat-and-moused by web developers and browser developers every year or two.

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

#190

Post by gokhan »

baby wrote: post #173
causi wrote: post #95

I'm really glad for what Carmack did. It's rather sad though, that support was dropped for this headset after only two years. As a reminder, the Oculus Go was released more than a year after the Nintendo Switch.

VR is advancing at an incredible pace really, I don't think it's sad.

Can you give some examples? What was not possible and what's possible now?
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