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The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

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Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#211

Post by Zak »

ece wrote: post #203
Zak wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your mention of Hypercard is nostalgic for me. That was my first real introduction to programming. I had seen a BASIC prompt on an Apple II, but that lacked sufficient discoverability given my age and available resources at the time. Hypercard, on the other hand came with some example stacks (its name for a self-contained application), and it was just a couple clicks to see how anything worked. It was, of course too…

Is Filemaker close to Hypercard in some ways? I'm not too familiar with Hypercard.

Filemaker is a desktop database with some scripting tools; Hypercard is more fundamentally a GUI builder where graphical objects have scripts attached.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#212

Post by benlivengood »

fsflover wrote: post #192
benlivengood wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These threats are exaggerated and are not in my opinion why the industry likes locked down things so much. With respect, the threats are real. I spend plenty of time removing unwanted software from my relatives' PCs. Antivirus/antimalware software is not much better; it slows the systems down significantly and doesn't protect against adware.

Just try free software operating system and free software repositories. Never had any problem with malware on GNU/Linux, which I installed for my relatives.

That works well for several of them but kids like games and some don't work on Linux. Neither does AutoCAD, which was required for school courses.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#213

Post by Shared404 »

fsflover wrote: post #204
Shared404 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. Thanks for both the other companies, and the important distinction.

One more: https://tehnoetic.com/ And for completeness: Purism’s CEO Todd Weaver Testifies at California Congressional Privacy Commission https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-ceo-todd-weaver-testifies-at-c...

I've now favorited this thread, thank you for the many recommendations.

Do you happen to know if any of these companies monitor their supply chains to avoid China? I recognize that that's not the fight that many of these companies are fighting, but it seems like a worthwhile one that would probably tip at least me over from one option to another.

I've done a little poking around myself, but haven't seen anything.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#214

Post by fsflover »

Shared404 wrote: post #213
fsflover wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more: https://tehnoetic.com/ And for completeness: Purism’s CEO Todd Weaver Testifies at California Congressional Privacy Commission https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-ceo-todd-weaver-testifies-at-c...

I've now favorited this thread, thank you for the many recommendations. Do you happen to know if any of these companies monitor their supply chains to avoid China? I recognize that that's not the fight that many of these companies are fighting, but it seems like a worthwhile one that would probably tip at least me over from one option to another. I've done a little poking around myself, but haven't seen anything.

Purism is actually trying to do something. On the software side, see here: https://puri.sm/posts/protecting-the-digital-supply-chain/.

On the hardware side, they are trying to produce their phones outside China, but it’s expensive: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/ ($750 for phones produced in China vs $2000 for those produced in the USA).

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#215

Post by the_af »

benlivengood wrote: post #189
the_af wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most straightforward reasons for most of the walled gardens are malware, adware, spyware, and ransomware. These threats are exaggerated and are not in my opinion why the industry likes locked down things so much. I think the real reason is DRM and control over the platform; malware gets used as the stick in this argument, and is mostly a red herring. There used to be a time tech-minded people widely considered…

> These threats are exaggerated and are not in my opinion why the industry likes locked down things so much. With respect, the threats are real. I spend plenty of time removing unwanted software from my relatives' PCs. Antivirus/antimalware software is not much better; it slows the systems down significantly and doesn't protect against adware.

To be clear, I didn't mean they aren't real, just that they are exaggerated and not the real reason many industry actors push for walled gardens and locked down devices.

Let me ask you this: of the many times your relatives had spyware, viruses or malware... do you remember a time when they caused real damage? I don't mean slowing down the computer or making it malfunction, but actually stealing something irreplaceable, identity theft or causing a real money loss? In other words, when were these instances more than annoyances?

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#216

Post by 542354234235 »

samatman wrote: post #48
mjevans wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the course of my life the tinfoil to warranted concern has been the general trend. Mostly in areas where unchecked ambition for control, power, and influence have allowed greed to convince people to do evil unto others. The natural cost of information is the marginal cost of copying. It's the creation of new, useful information that needs to be incentivized; that's where UBI or some other hire more public works…

We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough. Might not be able to pay out a quarter million a year like the FAAAM crew does, but we need a bunch of jobs paying half that to write and maintain open source. If it isn't competitive with the other optio…

> We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough.

I think you underestimate what UBI would do, or you are only looking at very narrow direct effects. There probably wouldn’t be that many coders that would directly move to 100% coding while living off $1,500 a month UBI. But there would be lots of people already making decent money that would be able to rely on that extra $18k a year cushion to start their own business, or reduce their hours to work on a passion project. All the people that could go to school full time to learn skills useful to society because they didn’t have to also work full time. All the people that could afford to take a pay cut to take a more fulfilling job. All the people that could step back and take meaningful steps to get a higher skill job because they were not 2 paychecks away from homelessness. All the business that could push automation because they were no longer the only thing standing between thousands of minimum wage employees and poverty. Things like Wikipedia are just examples at the extreme end of the spectrum. UBI would free up an almost unimaginable amount of human potential to try new things and start the process of decoupling us from having to find some sort of drudgery for every single person in exchange for not starving.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#217

Post by fsflover »

fsflover wrote: post #214
Shared404 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've now favorited this thread, thank you for the many recommendations. Do you happen to know if any of these companies monitor their supply chains to avoid China? I recognize that that's not the fight that many of these companies are fighting, but it seems like a worthwhile one that would probably tip at least me over from one option to another. I've done a little poking around myself, but haven't seen anything.

Purism is actually trying to do something. On the software side, see here: https://puri.sm/posts/protecting-the-digital-supply-chain/ . On the hardware side, they are trying to produce their phones outside China, but it’s expensive: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/ ($750 for phones produced in China vs $2000 for those produced in the USA).

By the way, many of the listed vendors got “Respects Your Freedoom” certification from FSF: https://ryf.fsf.org/.

Re: The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (2012)

#218

Post by IggleSniggle »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #63
grawprog wrote: post #53

Phones, consoles, Chromebooks and other unrootable hardware, restrictive hardware licensing, arm's business model, abstraction over abstraction, SAAS, corporate cloud infrastructure, web apps over local, streaming over storing, walled gardens, signed binaries, nearly everything about 'modern safe computing' is all about taking control and responsibility away from users and handing it over to somebody else to be paid…

> Chromebooks Actually the RK3399-based Chromebooks are the "most-rootable" device you can buy today, by a long shot. Far more rootable than any desktop machine still in production. No Intel ME, no PSP, and with the Samsung Kevin laptop you can build coreboot to boot the device with absolutely zero blobs -- even the Cortex-M0 power management unit firmware source is in there. It's really one of a kind.

Can you expand on this? I’m not familiar with this space. What capability do you have with these that you lose when you build your own desktop?
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