Weathering Software Winter
100r.co
Weathering Software Winter
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Weathering Software Winter
#2Interesting and naive journey to find a suitable and minimal "permacomputing" environment for doing software development on a sailboat.
Re: Weathering Software Winter
#3> We grew up in Montreal, and many of our friends worked in AAA studios like Ubisoft, making free-to-play games, building projects that had a lifespan of three years. The projects that we made in the past on the Apple stack, Electron, or on Unity3D, also had a lifespan of three to four years, but games like Super Mario, as well as others produced in that era, are still playable today.
The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after creation are in minority due to effort of community. I dunno what author is smoking.
> chains of emulators eventually break down
, arguably some emulation experience is better than original
> The download is at 7 gigs with three more hours left to download the update, it won't finish, and we will have spent all that data for nothing.
Resume download existed for better part of internet. Also torrents are great for that use case...
> There was a time when computers were super playful, but now they feel cold, and have been weaponized against people.
They still are, just gonna join the crowd of weird penguin people instead of buying another windows/macbook box, all the power and weird stuff you can do with computers is still there, using current software.
Maybe not in "I built everything from scratch way" but still
> The Commodore 64 emulator was extremely complex, more complex than I could grasp. It was the limit of what I think a single person could understand. It seemed like a simple system, it was just a box, but writing an emulator for it was more than a weekend project. I was looking for something that I could nail in a single weekend.
Huh, I kinda hit the same thing. Started writing Z80 emu (in Go, then Rust for funzies), got a good framework and some way in into implementing instruction set then realised "damn, now getting it cycle accurate and synchronized with peripherals is a lot of work. And peripherals are more work than CPU itself".
Re: Weathering Software Winter
#4> We grew up in Montreal, and many of our friends worked in AAA studios like Ubisoft, making free-to-play games, building projects that had a lifespan of three years. The projects that we made in the past on the Apple stack, Electron, or on Unity3D, also had a lifespan of three to four years, but games like Super Mario, as well as others produced in that era, are still playable today. The games that don't work in som…
The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after creation
are in minority due to effort of community. I dunno what author is smoking.
An iPhone games from 2009 or a Facebook Flash game from 2010? Now there's a real chance you have no way of making it work unless the game is so popular that the developer/publisher have kept it alive and on the market all this time.
Re: Weathering Software Winter
#5Interesting and naive journey to find a suitable and minimal "permacomputing" environment for doing software development on a sailboat.
Some pretty good stuff leading to work on computing that can survive societal collapse.
Re: Weathering Software Winter
#6Interesting and naive journey to find a suitable and minimal "permacomputing" environment for doing software development on a sailboat.
If only more of us were so “naive”. A brilliant journey.
Re: Weathering Software Winter
#7> We grew up in Montreal, and many of our friends worked in AAA studios like Ubisoft, making free-to-play games, building projects that had a lifespan of three years. The projects that we made in the past on the Apple stack, Electron, or on Unity3D, also had a lifespan of three to four years, but games like Super Mario, as well as others produced in that era, are still playable today. The games that don't work in som…
The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after creation are in minority due to effort of community. I dunno what author is smoking. I would say what you're seeing is biased towards popular games - there is an immense amount of games out there and most have no community to try to preserve or emulate. It also really changes after a certain point in time & with specific platforms - old, popular (but still…
Biased toward older games too. Even on PC things are shifting toward more online based experiences, often without any sort of local server included.
Re: Weathering Software Winter
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The games that don't work in some way or form 20 years after creation are in minority due to effort of community. I dunno what author is smoking. I would say what you're seeing is biased towards popular games - there is an immense amount of games out there and most have no community to try to preserve or emulate. It also really changes after a certain point in time & with specific platforms - old, popular (but still…
Biased toward older games too. Even on PC things are shifting toward more online based experiences, often without any sort of local server included.
Same here. Recently I saw a dvd for sale of a game I was once interested in for really cheap (it was Need for Speed released in 2015). I was interested until I saw the text on the dvd "the game requires a permanent Internet connection to play". Well, what if I want to play it in 20 years after it has been long forgotten by everyone else? Nope. It's not going to work. That's why I'd rather stick to games I can actually own rather than rent briefly.
Re: Weathering Software Winter
#9It always saddens to me when people only think of the extremes, while perfectly good options exist!
If your develop for highly locked device (iPhone) which requires the very latest version of huge dev environment -- maybe choose some other development target which does not evolve quite as much. Qt, Java, etc.. are not updated for years. And don't forget to make sure that your OS does not break without updates either.
Gimp is more clunky than Photoshop, but it will never fail because of lack of license server.
This part is especially annoying:
> At sea, without internet, if I wanted to look up how to fill a polygon, I couldn't do it, but if I had printed it?
.. or maybe you could have gotten some e-books? They take much less space that paper books (important on yacht!) and lasts forever. Postscript format, from 1985, is still readable by all modern systems. Plain text ASCII, from 1968, is still being written every day. Even HTML 1.0 is rendered by all modern browsers.
Re: Weathering Software Winter
#10The author mentions power use being a factor. Last I did some research into this, smartphones are by far the most power-efficient general-purpose computers broadly available, using several times less power than something like a raspberry pi. I wonder if running an open-source OS on smartphones was considered for their sailboat permacomputing?