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Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

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Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#141

Post by pmarreck »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #57
tobr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.

This breaks immersion for a lot of people, me included. It's one of the biggest issues I have with lots of sci-fi (moreso than most other types of speculative fiction) novels. Just asserting a fact this fundamental and building your world around it only works if societies, culture, technologies, and history are build around it. Humanity's history with tools and automation are millenia old. To alter this would require…

Hmmm. Good observations. I hope this doesn't break my interest in the Warhammer universe, lol, which I believe probably suffer from a lacking "origin story"

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#142

Post by jdiff »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #128
jdiff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrolytic capacitors can dry out, boil out, oxidize, generally break down. There's many failure modes for them that can be caused by wear, age, or unuse.

Only if they're used grossly outside their rated limits. Whether or not the rated limits printed on the can match what they're actually capable of is another matter, as people found out for a couple of years in the early 2000s.

Unuse also can damage capacitors through oxidation. I've never seen a datasheet that said "make sure to stretch out your capacitor's legs at least once a year."

Manufacturing errors can make capacitors die young, but even the most upstanding member of a capacitor tribe will one day kick the bucket through no fault of anyone's.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#143

Post by throw10920 »

Vecr wrote: post #96
forgetfreeman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please enumerate the demonstrable advancements of society attributable to open source software. Edit: lots of downvotes, no credible responses. Guess y'all are stewing in your own cognitive dissonance?

The Human Genome Project heavily used open source software, as did the detection of the Higgs boson on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I'm not sure what your standard for advancing society is though, but the Internet probably helps investment banks and short sellers all over the world try to price in various current and future events and prevent massive and sudden price corrections that can have major impacts on r…

> The Human Genome Project heavily used open source software, as did the detection of the Higgs boson on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Do you think that those projects wouldn't have existed with proprietary software?

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#144

Post by throw10920 »

guhidalg wrote: post #69
forgetfreeman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please enumerate the demonstrable advancements of society attributable to open source software. Edit: lots of downvotes, no credible responses. Guess y'all are stewing in your own cognitive dissonance?

Ok so gcc and Linux don’t exist in your world.

I'm not sure what you're on about. ICC/MSVC and Windows both exist. They're real compilers and OSes that millions of people use every day, and I've never seen anyone make the case that they're somehow not capable of doing things that their open-source competitors can.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#145

Post by throw10920 »

Loocid wrote: post #95
forgetfreeman wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both great for IT guys, society writ large though? Really?

Most of the world servers run Linux. Most of the worlds people would use at least one service running on those servers.

If Linux didn't exist, those servers would be running another open-source OS. Or a proprietary one. Linux isn't special, and in fact, its design and popularity together have set OS research a few decades back.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#146

Post by throw10920 »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #64
twelvechairs wrote: post #23

Replace 'computers' with 'open source software' and you are something closer to an uncomfortable truth. Open source has been critical to the advancement of our world but people who go out of their way to use and encourage open source past the basics (even fdroid or Firefox not even getting to hardware and full software stacks) are treated as oddballs even by the tech community.

Please enumerate the demonstrable advancements of society attributable to open source software. Edit: lots of downvotes, no credible responses. Guess y'all are stewing in your own cognitive dissonance?

The open-source community significantly intersects with what is most accurately described as a "cult" dedicated to the irrational defense of open-source by any means necessary.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#147

Post by forgetfreeman »

throw10920 wrote: post #146
forgetfreeman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please enumerate the demonstrable advancements of society attributable to open source software. Edit: lots of downvotes, no credible responses. Guess y'all are stewing in your own cognitive dissonance?

The open-source community significantly intersects with what is most accurately described as a "cult" dedicated to the irrational defense of open-source by any means necessary.

I am well aware. I was an open source developer for 12 years.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#148

Post by forgetfreeman »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #94
forgetfreeman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming the internet is a net advance for society is a pretty hard sell in the face of the dissolution of critical institutions, proliferation of mental heath issues, and hyper-concentration of wealth it has made possible.

These critical institutions you speak of, they were not here since the beginning of time nor will they be here till the end of time. Blaming “the internet” for their dissolution is implicit assuming that they should have continued in their current form (just to begin listing the claims that are hard to sell). Further, hyper-concentration of wealth is not something “made possible” by the internet. These problems exist…

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over Google's near-monopoly over online search and ads and Amazon's deathgrip on merchandising. Could you speak up a little?

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#149

Post by sleepybrett »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #110
sleepybrett wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 happens every fucking day, hell wasn't there an article today about people who have older equipment that depend on floppy disks and how hard it is to find reliable disks these days? The article discussed an older embroidery machine, the only way to supply it with patterns to embroider was 3.5 inch floppy. His are starting to fail. But this is also true of older samplers, drum machines, synthesizers, etc. Sometimes…

We stop making specific models, and lose how to make spare parts for those models. We don't lose how to make the machines in general. This story would be completely different if the old silicon computers were replaced with neo-computers. Also for anything that uses a standard floppy drive there are cheap and plentiful adapters to use flash storage instead of disks.

I have yet to see a thing I can insert into a floppy drive that will pretend to be a disk. I have seen plenty of things that can replace the drive itself with something that pretends to be a floppy drive.

The problem with those are that not all equipment that uses floppy drives conforms to standards. If you have a 50 year old embroidery machine from a company that no longer even exists you'd need someone pretty fucking technical to pull that shit apart and figure out if any of those drive replacements will even work in your weirdass machine. If you are lucky your machine used some off the shelf drive from a reputable company (I've seen some old weird drum machines machines that had Apple Disk ][ drives hanging off them) but otherwise...

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#150

Post by _aavaa_ »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #148
_aavaa_ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These critical institutions you speak of, they were not here since the beginning of time nor will they be here till the end of time. Blaming “the internet” for their dissolution is implicit assuming that they should have continued in their current form (just to begin listing the claims that are hard to sell). Further, hyper-concentration of wealth is not something “made possible” by the internet. These problems exist…

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over Google's near-monopoly over online search and ads and Amazon's deathgrip on merchandising. Could you speak up a little?

Sure, let me say that again. Online search, online advertising, and merchandising are not "critical institutions". Nor have you provided any evidence that the companies Google and Amazon displaced deserved their role as incumbents.

In fact. 2 of the 3 were literally non-existant before the internet was created, so the internet is obviously not causing their dissolution.

Let me spell it out further: no matter how much people moan about it, Google does not have a monopoly on search in the way that the word "monopoly" is being used. There are several alternative (hello Kagi) and people are free and able to switch in less 30 seconds, they just don't want to and just don't care.

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