John Carmack pushes out unlocked OS for defunct Oculus Go headset
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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 same because of locked down hardware.
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 or some other Flash player.
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?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/05/google_chrome_iframe/
https://mobile.twitter.com/estark37/status/14226948565440593...
-SameSite:none cookies (with bonus breakage that makes it impossible to use accross older and newer browsers simultaneously without user agent sniffing)
-the planned chrome alert/prompt changes already mentioned below
browsers have been getting a lot more comfortable with the idea of breaking backwards compatibility as of late.
Think you proved my point.
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.
Best we can hope for is virtual machines, and archive files targeting a specific browser version on specific virtual machines.
For those interested I have 43TB, 210TB, 61-2TB, 212TB. The machine boots and sees all the spindles. ZFS would be ideal but cannot handle differing drive sizes I guess. JBOD misses the replication requirement. Just doing mdraid on all the similar drives and having different folders or JBOD "wastes" too many spindles (at least one per group, so 4-6 wasted spindles by size alone!).
So I'll probably handroll something with whatever that triggered rsync program is, or cronjobs. lsyncd, that's the one.
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.
I’m not assuming either way. I’m just pointing out that either type of web site could choose to have an index page or choose not to have an index page.
> presumably JSON or CSV
That's presuming a lot. Even if it's accurate for most/all NYTimes infographics today, it doesn't mean it's accurate tomorrow, and it isn't accurate today for a lot of other sites.
Well, yeah, that's true of all normal websites too. That's precisely what web crawlers are for. If there's no index page that links to all pages, or some way of iterating through all the pages, you wouldn't be able to exhaustively archive any web site.
Not exactly. While you may miss data that isn't requested specifically, you can crawl the site and get most/all that is accessible through links at least. Stuff only available through search results won't show, but if it's discoverable through browsing, you can get it.
The same can't necessarily be said for custom interfaces that are JS heavy, possibly with non-link click actions, custom sliders, a graphical representation of a map that expects a click on a region, etc. An old style page that lists all the regions (like states, or counties in a state), or even that has a dropdown in a form? Those are much easier to crawl and archive.
Rebuilding the bundle from scratch might be more complicated. But you don't need to do that to preserve it.
Unless you mean something different by compatibility? Sure, you won't be able to mix wildly different versions of libraries because their APIs change. But I wouldn't call that a "runtime environment".
I say this because I know that Wayback Machine didn't archive multi-load Flash files. That would require parsing SWFs and executing their embedded Action/ABC tags, which requires writing something equivalent to Flash Player. SPAs aren't much different in terms of archivability as all-Flash websites were.
Don’t get me wrong, the web is still miserable in this regard. But IMO it’s the mobile apps that are going to be a giant hole in history: we’ll just have some screenshots to look back on.
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 is hard to know what APKs (or anything really) will be interesting to people 30 years out. Archiving all of them gives our future selves a chance at finding what they want to see.
Here is an example pulled from a discussion I once had. Someone was looking for a really obscure feature phone game from the late 90's. I had played the original game on original hardware and commented about how bad that game was and that they weren't missing anything by not finding it. Their reply was essentially "I don't care if the game is any good, I really just want to experience what was like," which made sense to me after I heard it.
Anyway, the game was so bad at the time it was released that I doubt anyone felt like it would be worth revisiting in the future. And yet, 25-ish years later, they would be wrong.
Why did they do it? No idea, and there is no official response in the forums, despite users complaining about its removal for over a year.
Sometimes, I wonder what the Archive stores in their non-public repositories. Just waiting for the day when it's safe to show the world.
This means you need to load the whole page, then hit js triggered by page load, etc, then save output to html.
Because, some of those js libs won't work in future browsers, others won't work if they can't phone home, or 100 other things.
Archive.org is about 100 years from now too, and js content is a PITA in that respect.
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 things are future proof and can be archived easily.
As a simple example, building my personal website atop Markdown ensures that, even if the formatting can't be preserved, the core content will be since it's simple ASCII (yes, that's ignoring issues of long-term digital storage and access and so forth, but at least it's not also a bunch of binary blobs or database formats or whatnot).
Equally alarming is that fact that so much of our digital lives aren't even in our control. A historian used to be able to rely on family archives, public libraries, etc, to understand our past. A hundred years from now they'll be looking back and hoping someone somewhere preserved the contents of an S3 bucket before Amazon decided to delete it on a whim...
One reason I take these is that I have RAM and I have grep and apparently either the people who had the data don't have RAM or they don't have grep, and so while I can ask my local Facebook archive "Er, didn't I write something about anti-freeze?" and get an answer in seconds, Facebook itself will try to suggest I might want pages about anti-freeze, a group that cares about anti-freeze, a sponsored advert for anti-freeze ... and not the thing I wrote.
Say, I am commenting in a thread trying to respond to John Smith. That's the only person whose name starts with a J.
If I start typing @J..., the suggestions would be for literally anyone else but John Smith in the thread.
On their mobile website (which lags behind the app), typing @John Smith will sometimes suggest a number of John Smiths, none of them being the one in the thread I am writing in.
Same with friends. If I want to tag a friend of mine and start typing their name, I usually get suggestions for random people first (neither from my friend list or the comment thread).
Why on Earth is the list not prioritized by (friends in thread) / (everyone else in thread) / (friends) / (everyone else) is absolutely beyond me.
The link on the notification will take him to the top of the thread.
Depending on the thread's popularity, John could have a very difficult time finding the posts he's tagged in.
Facebook literally wants you to be caught up in wading through their posts, spending your life on their website.
If I want to really search for the title of a random video I saw 5 years ago the only option is to download a raw CSV of my history and use grep :(
The problem with these (at least the Facebook ones) is that the data is lacking all context. It's kinda OK if you just want copies of your photos, but I can't make heads or tails of most my comments from the archive, and posts are missing a lot without the comments.
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.
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.
I don't think I agree with that. For a lot of pre-historical research the only thing we have to go on is fossils and rock formations. Our picture about dinosaurs is extremely ephemeral and extrapolated from a very small number of things in the grand scheme of history, I don't think we can even begin to imagine the sheer number of events that happened in the total history of organic life forms that resulted in the current state of things. But knowing those things is really important for a lot of scientific fields.
Edit: Also I guess I just don't see why digital information is really significant here. It seems just as likely for a marginalized person without safety to have a physical notebook or photo album get lost or destroyed, for example.
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 over in many places. (Many places but not all. Fun fact, you can't send Zelle to someone with an emoji in their local contact name with some banks.)
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.
Given the choice between that and having to figure out how 8-bit ASCII works, it's pretty clear which is the easier problem to solve.
Modern Word versions still load Word 97 docs. There's a decent chance Office versions from around that time still work on Windows 10.
That's why I built my personal ADHD blog[1] on TiddlyWiki[2].
It's a self-contained HTML page that has everything.
I could have even embedded the images.
You can archive it with *File -> Save As...* (single-file .mht works).
Not sure why they dropped support for it entirely since, given it was supported for the longest time and it's the most convenient single file format for web page saving. It's a major reason I couldn't continue using Firefox as my main browser.
For web content, in my eyes it's a pretty cut and dry example - if the authors of any piece of content don't want it to be archived and aren't forthcoming in making this archival a viable pursuit, then the content simply should not be archived. Alternatively, just get a static PDF of it for future reference instead of fighting an uphill battle against webpages and even software that's user hostile.
For your own content, however, i think that you're on the right track. Use simple file formats, have tested backups and ideally rely on stable, boring software that's also slow to evolve and change.
In my eyes, unless you have a personal interest in the material that you want to archived that would make you overlook most complications, the burden of preserving or even making their information easy to preserve should lie on its authors.
For example, if you as a person want to make your voice be heard through centuries, then it should be upon you to use open data formats or even something as simple as Markdown, as opposed to binary .docx files or similar formats that will have significant problems related to reading them.
Furthermore, there is no actual guarantee of anyone actually caring about what you (or, let's say, i) might say, for example, in an offhanded remark on Twitter about seeing some cute kittens today, apart from any such data being included in a larger analysis of bulk data.
I'm certainly not against the idea of archiving or preserving data, but it seems that most larger events out there will have a huge amount of coverage either way.
I'd be willing to hear counter-examples, for sure.
Are you a professional developer? Has framework churn been an issue?
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.
> it's actually fucking awesome for those of us with "neurodiversity".
Can you expand upon that a bit?
How engaged were you with social media before your sentence, and has that (or will that) change now that you've had some space from it?
> we would see the occasional video on the news
How does the picture that the media paints of the internet & social media compare to your observations now that you're able to use it hands-on?
The thing with TikTok is that there are tons of videos helping, supporting and bringing awareness to issues such as ADHD, OCD, Tourettes, differing sexualities, gender identity etc, that are really refreshing and have really helped me to understand myself and my neuro-problems that caused me to get locked up. No other social network has that type of content.
Facebook was huge in 2013 and still relevant. Now I barely use it at all. I think Facebook has some big problems. I don't want to say it will go the way of MySpace as Facebook has been much better at adapting than MySpace was, and Facebook has some way smarter people and more money. It might even come back into trend again in the future if their "Meta" projects take flight.
The media only really shows the goofiest or cutest videos from social media. Nothing of any real worth. So my view of TikTok was very fucked up. TikTok is different for every person that uses it since your For You page is based around how you interact with the videos it gives you. I get zero people dancing on my page, and a lot of really smart content.
Also, for the first five years I didn't have any access to the news, for security reasons, so I was very cut off.
What did they get you for?
I have an inkling of what you may mean, but I'd like to know more.
By moving the goalposts further and further away, we've made redemption effectively impossible & wiped out the strongest motivations for people to learn and improve from mistakes (penalized by justice systems).
This is perhaps not what you were expecting to be asked about, but I’m curious nonetheless. So when you reported to prison you had to hand in your passport, driver’s license etc? And now when you were released they claimed that they have misplaced them? How do you get new documents, family members vouching for you or something like that?
It's interesting thinking of the changes. I guess many of the current trends were well underway by 2013 so the current state would be different but not too different to you. At any rate, I'm glad you're out and hope you can sort the ID mess.
Design is much more responsive now, I'll give it that. Lots and lots of huge photographic headers. Hamburger menus? I'm guessing that is the name for the 3-line icon? They were pretty new in 2013 on mobile sites on my iPhone 5. And the 3-dot thing for "extra" options ... I don't remember that existing back then.
There is a reduction in information density.. some of it is warranted by an increase in white space which is good. A lot of sites now have super-intrusive advertising posted all the way through the copy, which wasn't common in 2013.
The sheer amount of data I burn through just browsing the Web.. that's a huge change. Even my mobile plan with 100GB of data gets burned in no time just browsing around. Sites are so, so heavy now. I saw that post yesterday about Discord having an enormous favicon file and so I can see that people just gave up trying to trim their code. I look at some HTML source now and I lose my shit because it is literally megabytes of bullshit. People were more careful with their code in my time.
One weird thing is that my brain doesn't know it is 2021 yet. I saw a show the other day where a woman said her son was born in 2011 and I did the maths and my brain said her son was two years old. This happens to me constantly. It's like my brain stopped counting time as soon as I entered the jail.
Other options include the Brave or Duck Duck Go browsers - similar features built in, but possibly less bookmark portability, etc
I just found out about Brave this week. It looks promising. I didn't know DuckDuckGo had a browser. I've been using the search occasionally. People say they can't switch from Google, but honestly their search quality is over-rated. They are really sanitizing their results more than the others recently. Even Bing is bringing back more results from really useful obscure sites than Google is.
It's very strange for you to be that pedantic about the supporting clause without being at all critical of the independent clause. You defended the supporting clause but completely ignored the primary/independent.
Independent clause: "This goes against the idea that software is "art"
Supporting clause: "...in the sense that most works of art are created to physically endure over time."
I was arguing against the primary clause, as it was immediately obvious to me at first read that superficially combining the two clauses yields a "Fallacy of existentialism" (more accurately, it violates the rule that anything distributed in the conclusion must be distributed in at least one premise...but the less correct short quote is easier for readers of this comment to DDG). Laid plainly:
A: "Software is not created to endure over time."
B: "Some works of art are created to physically endure over time."
C: "Therefore, Software is not art."
That's not very logical at all.
In fact, upon reflection you'll find that I was not arguing against a "straw man" version of their original 'weasel-word' assertion. Instead, before replying(!), I purposefully removed the logical fallacy in an attempt to "steel-man" their argument. I figured that if I could show that a charitably non-fallacious argument of the same character was horribly flawed, that most readers could intuit that any weaker versions of the "steel-man'd" argument would also be some kind of wrong.
On a personal note, some unorganized thoughts I'd like to share which I might be convinced to change my beliefs about:
I feel that people don't "get" that one can't just add weasel words to magically make a bulletproof argument with instant "gotcha"-trap potential against anyone who tries to rebut their bad/unthoughtful assertions. It's hard (for me) to find examples where weasel words don't do at least one of the following:
- Weaken the argument to the point of saying something which is still 100% true and specific, but so trivial/impactless that it doesn't matter in any meaningful application. "Some children receive higher test scores after switching from drinking Pepsi to drinking Coca-Cola".
- Create a tautology (a non-falsifiable statement that literally adds nothing to any discussion). "No, really! It very well might be possible that Tupac is still alive!"
- Creates a logical fallacy which means that the statement is meaningless. "This goes against the idea that software is "art" in the sense that most works of art are created to physically endure over time."
Hopefully this write-up helps other people think, read, and comment more clearly because it took me 40 minutes to craft a complete response to a couple of 20-second Markov Chain comments. The asymmetry is real.
> The statement is qualified ("most works of art"). Non-recorded performance art is not most art. Hence, the statement is true.
We already see this in old stuff. DOS games run great in dosbox, because the IBM PC was pretty simple. Same with the gameboy, snes, etc.
When you get to more modern things like Windows 98 games, PS3 games, xbox360 games... Most of those are much harder to emulate/crack/archive. They have more complex copy protection schemes, interact more deeply with their OS and hardware, and emulating them is generally more effort.
The next gen of stuff will interact with closed source now-defunct servers. Re-implementing those servers is very much possible... but a massive amount of effort. Effort that won't happen for most products ever.
The PS3 and 360 aren't actually harder to emulate because they have more complex copy protection; they're hard to emulate because they're very novel systems (hardware-wise) and developers had to use all sorts of tricks, which is something their successors are not.
Meanwhile, the PS4 is literally just a PC and already has a pretty good emulator (if early), because the PS4 has desirable exclusives. The author of it only started writing it a couple years ago and it's already booting commercial games and has a handful playable; way faster than old emulator development was! The Xbox One is literally just an NT PC and lack of emulation is largely because there's not really a point to, yet; it's just a PC and has very few exclusives.
The Switch is literally just a phone with a controller and had its first emulator booting commercial video games within the first two years, because it had desirable exclusives.
The Quest is literally just a phone (even moreso, because it's literally Android and even their window manager is just a layer over Unity). It isn't emulated or cracked because it has no really great exclusives and Facebook allows as much piracy as you want.
Windows 98 games are actually pretty easy to emulate; very little at all doesn't work with QEMU out of the box, and that heavy-handed approach probably isn't necessary for the consoles of the future; the PS4 has a great emulator that's basically just a compatibility layer like WINE is, because again, it's literally just a PC.
I thought it was because no had actually cracked the DRM yet.
It's also worth noting that plenty of emulators only work with homebrew titles early-on; a lack of a crack for the copy protection wouldn't in itself prevent emulation.
There's no point in doing it with the Xbox, because the Xbox has no exclusives anyone cares about and is more expensive than a device that sold tremendously better and is cheaper.
This is the same reason people develop private servers for MMOs, and the exact same reason they don't bother doing so for consoles if there's a better edition on another platform.
The niche of "cheap piracy box" has been filled, and the only way for people to have an incentive to hack on the Xbox while firmware updates are still going on is if it suddenly starts getting big exclusives now that it's EOLing.
There is an intrinsic economic incentive in breaking the console's security, because there's an untapped market of 50M devices out there already. If I have an Xbox One already, am into the idea of piracy (perhaps I bought my Xbox One near launch expecting the same kind of piracy scene the previous Xboxes had), why wouldn't I spend the cost of modchip?
There's a market for the kind of cracking and it's only because of the stupidily good job Microsoft did on the security that you're not seeing a homebrew or piracy scene (and thus not the seeds for an emulation scene).
Part of the intent on getting developers to use these APIs as much as possible is to make forward-porting / "legitimate" emulation of games easier.
DRM licenses are kind of expensive and it's hard to publishers to justify the added cost of DRM after the initial release, when they've made 80% of the revenue for the game. So they often (though, not always) get patched out eventually.
It could easily be a perpetual license for a given title. Then there is no incentive to remove it.
But there's a business case to be made for patching out DRM very early in the product lifetime. The longer a product is protected by DRM, the more likely the DRM is to be cracked, and that this crack could be applied to a new releases. It doesn't make sense to put a new game release at risk just to keep protecting some five year old game from piracy.
If you're selling DRM, you want to disincentive publishers for using your protection for too long. And if the DRM is built in-house, you want it to keep functioning for a number of titles to amortize the cost of development.
Most of the time an anti-DRM patch gets rolled out it's either a company/individual that has strong personal feelings about DRM (i.e. somebody like Stardock) or else it's a patch that the devs wrote way back when to make testing in some environment easier that they kept around and valid out of the goodness of their hearts. I think in almost all cases it boils down to someone who personally disagrees with the prevailing business opinion that DRM is good and actually has enough political power in the company to force their opinion onto the business at large.
You wish. NFSII for DOS was a HUGE task to run under DOSBox. Linux had it much easier with Wine on w9x games and DOSEmu for DOS games.
OFC games for the 486 and below ran pretty well on DOSBox.
I wanna be able to play the freaking game in ten years without worrying about whether the game/console's online service is still available to do some mandatory authentication or version check.
Aren't these also subject to disk rot?
Meanwhile, I have games I played 3-4 years ago on the PS3 that are severely hampered because the online components no longer work--the servers were either shut down, or in one case the company completely went under.
So if you really want to preserve a game on disk, you pretty much have to pick up another copy stamped at a later date to include all of the patches.
Computers are becoming (already are) 'black-boxes' -- non serviceable by the mainstream.... Thank Tim Apple
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
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.
Is it too much to ask for vendors to do the right thing?
This seems pointless. My old phone is obsolete. There is literally no reason I would want to use it over my current phone. I could care less if it was bricked.
I worry about this too. It's been a great experience collecting and _using_ devices that were made a while before I was born. It's sad future generations might not be able to use the tech I'm enjoying now.
Anything else is essentially like renting hardware and letting the manufacturer forcefully make it into e-waste whenever they like.
Part of the reason I buy Apple devices is because Apple is unlikely to get acquired or go out of business for the foreseeable future. I wish there were viable alternatives. Android devices are not an option for me, as they are more likely to be abandoned and/or contain Google/manufacturer/carrier malware, and I need to use banking and work apps.
In that same vein, I have a preorder for a Framework Laptop because, at least for actual computers, I have the option of not splurging on a non-upgradeable, non-customizable Apple device.
We really shouldn’t have to wait for Librarian of Congress-granted exemptions, which can be rescinded at any time and are meaningless with locked-down devices anyway.
The only old iOS device I haven't sold/tossed is an iPad 2 which is unbearably slow for most things, and I can neither downgrade the OS or install some lighter alternative. Plus it needs a new 30-pin power cable but I haven't gotten around to buying one because all the other old devices just use one of a pile of USB cables I have stashed around.
As far as I'm concerned, at least in terms of repurposing older devices, iOS is like the old consoles where it's essentially stuck once there are no more "official" updates. If it boots Android, there's a decent chance I can install something custom on it years later.
Also, installing a phone OS is more intimidating to me than, say, putting Debian on a laptop/desktop. I’m happy to go into a BIOS, play with voltages, overclock, etc. but please don’t ask me to hold some combination of buttons to start a process that can easily brick my phone.
These days there are some decently high guardrails for not bricking a device, as long as you follow installation instructions.
I know my old iPad has issues with Home Assistant's web interface for example.
Or do you mean the underlying rendering engine?
Also, different from iOS at least Google still pushes updates for important parts of the system (Chrome, WebView, etc.), so at least for casual navigation it wasn't horrible insecure.
I am planning to do some DIY fix and going to donate it. There are many kids here in India who needs a digital device to do their online classes but have to use a small screen phone
Still, Apple is known to lock people's accounts for a variety of bogus reasons and then all your purchased content is lost.
I had to repair an old Macbook, and while Apple is still in business they won't take repairs for out of support products. Official repair shops seem to have some access to old pieces, but I don't know how long it will last, my laptop got its part from another junk laptop.
Then the current crop of Apple product have unreplaceable parts for third party shops, especially anything touching the secure enclaves.
I kinda doubt Apple being in business will help on the supoort side for 5 or 10 years older products.
Take for example digital backs for medium format cameras - these things are built in low numbers, with high end FPGAs and camera sensors, with JTAG interfaces ready to go and everything - but then forgotten about a few years later. Why not enforce the creation of some document on how one would build their own OS for it? Or how the bus from the sensor ADCs works? This all existed at one point internally, but now is lost, and most of this backs will slowly die and go to waste, even though they could easily be repurposed or repaired.
Not at all. This is precisely on point, and directly intersects with the Right to Repair as well. It's about damn time we, as a society, put a stop to black box devices over which we have no ability to inspect, repair, or repurpose after the vendor decides to end support.
At the bare minimum a vendor should not be allowed to sell a device that has digital locks if the user is not also given a copy of the keys.
You can lock the device, but if I don't get a key at time of purchase, then I don't own the damn thing.
One possibility is around DNS. A public/private keypair is basically a lock and a key. If you can't put ANY public keys on my device without giving me the private key, HTTPS is going to be problematic. Software updates become a little scarier as well, since a man-in-the-middle attack becomes MUCH easier to pull off. But perhaps the answer there is, like DNS on a desktop computer, to simply allow the user to edit those local keys. As long as there's a "Yes, I am also cool with installing unsigned software updates," then I don't see a problem.
Thinking here about a smartphone. Note that I'm explaining the current state of things, I am *not* excusing the state of things.
Directly for end-users, generally no real scenario where it's bad as long as they can enroll their own keys in a safe fashion preventing evil-maid type attacks.
Tangentially for end-users, locked devices are easier to make worthless for thieves. FRP on Android, or whatever Apple does, when it's locked to a user account even when reset. This is one thing that would become harder to implement when the root of trust can be manipulated on the device.
Then there's supply chain integrity for OEMs. This is the reason some android vendors only allow unlocking when attached to an online account after a delay (e.g. xiaomi). Some unscrupulous vendors would open the box, replace the system image with a malware-ridden system image, and sell those to end-users.
Finally, there's somewhat a case for DRM and similar uses. The current implementations are built on the current "security" model, where it's security for the businesses first, then security for end-users last.
Still, I agree wholeheartedly that users should be in control of the root of trust, in a way that does not reduce their abilities to use their owned devices. Add to that that standards-based boot should be used. All the time. All devices.
Why would you give the key to everybody? Just give it to the owner... That's what I want. I shouldn't need to hack my own smartphone or have to solder a board to my Xbox to run my own code on it.
I feel like you could get good traction on right-to-repair if it was framed around waste reduction and a cleaner future.
Which means we might not get there for a generation still, but these things feel related to me.
> Consumer electronics is broken. We’ve all had the experience of a busted screen, button, or connector that can’t be fixed, battery life degrading without a path for replacement, or being unable to add more storage when full. Individually, this is irritating and requires us to make unnecessary and expensive purchases of new products to get around what should be easy problems to solve. Globally though, it’s much worse. We create over fifty million tons of e-waste each year. That’s 6 kg or 13 lb per person on earth per year, made up of our former devices. We need to improve recyclability, but the biggest impact we can make is generating less waste to begin with by making our products last longer.
Certainly, for myself, the right to repair is very much about ending the cycle of disposable products so we can create a more sustainable future.
As an inventor I can't financially hope to support a device for a human lifetime and break even, much less profit.
Right to repair and allowing these things to be legally opened and hacked by the end user is the right way, not burdening every manufacturer with unrealistic support laws.
For an example, look at military equipment costs. 20 year support is often built into those to give you an idea of the cost of this. Spoiler: things will cost 10-20x what you think they will for a business to hope to profit.
For example, the amount of bending of the case of a device has to be DRASTICALLY less to allow effectively sealing contaminants out for 20 years vice 2, as well as the seals themselves being an order of magnitude better if there is no servicing involved. For most military equipment we have all of those AND regular servicing, something that consumers would absolutely revolt against nowadays.
One other thing people fail to realize on the electronics front: many of the chips in these older systems are getting very difficult to come by. About 10 years ago I was involved in repairing F/A-18 avionics, and one specific chip in that system was extraordinarily important. It was a radiation hardened 80286 CPU, and had a single production run for the entire budgeted lifecycle of the systems it was in. Unfortunately a design flaw in the power delivery systems meant that the CPUs were being destroyed at a rate roughly 4x as fast as expected and they had to figure out what to do. This specific chip was one of the many reasons (but a key one) that we retired that airframe.
When you start designing things to last a long time AND be very reliable, the cost increases very quickly in ways that are not always predictable.
Germany put the onus on the sellers here. Since 2016 sellers of electronic appliances with a store space of >400m^2 and online sellers with a warehouse space of >400m^2 are required by law to take small electronic appliances (up to 25cm max side length) and dispose of them properly, which usually means recycling, no matter if you actually bought the thing from them or not, and no matter if you buy a new thing or not.
These sellers are furthermore required to take larger appliances if you buy a new replacement appliance from them.
This service has to provided free of charge (except for reasonable shipping costs).
In practice, almost every commercial seller of new appliances, even those who do not fall under the law, will take your old appliances at least when you buy a new similar one voluntarily. Because if not, a lot of customers would just go to a competitor who does.
This spread to other areas too, where e.g. a lot of sellers will voluntary take and dispose of your old mattress when you buy a new one from them.
The sellers do have to dispose of the appliances properly, which is usually also the least expensive option for them. Recycling companies will come and take that stuff for free from the sellers, because they make their money by stripping anything precious out of the stuff.
The area where this is problematic is non-commercial sellers and/or sellers of used stuff. But by law, municipalities have to take all electronic appliances free of charge, the drawback being that they do not have to provide collection/shipping. Getting your old washing machine to the recycling center can be a burden. In my city at least you can call them up and make an appointment for I believe 10 bucks. And they encourage you to tell your neighbors about the pick up time so they can put out their electro trash as well. My city also has about 40 collection containers all around the city for small appliances (up to desktop computer size). The one closest to me is about 7 mins by foot.
Of course, trashing perfectly fine electronic appliances may be a waste sometimes (but sometimes not, because these old things may be extremely power hungry compared to newer models), and a right to repair would be better, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
Thing is, most of the stuff I buy is online. Local retailers taking things for recycling does nothing to encourage the maker of a product I buy online to keep supporting it or open it up for end users (or their local repair services) to support it from there on.
Of course it's good that local retailers offer recycling, it's definitely a step in the right direction, but it's far from having the impact I wish we could have on longevity / support / (semi-un)planned obsolescence.
Something like right to use would be nice. If you need specs or docs or source code for the software/hardware to be usable, then it should be provided. And IMO that should include not gating essential functionality behind online services unless it is inherent to the function.
Definitely goes beyond it. This should be able to get traction as an anti-electronics waste policy.
Designs and relevant documentation should be packaged up and handed over to the Library of Congress (or alternate entity) as soon as any design goes into mass production. LoC may release them when the product is no longer supported by the manufacturer or the company has gone out of business -- which could be fairly automated on the LoC side.
One side-effect of this may be that companies will be incentivized to support hardware longer, if they believe that these designs have notable design elements that they do not wish to disclose.
I'd settle for something non-retroactive. Since I don't think that'd be tenable technically at this point anyway.
One of the cruxes in this are things like GPUs and wireless chips which are pretty unfriendly in terms of getting documentation but even providing a subset of functionality would be great.
It's why you can still get parts (aftermarket, usually) for vehicles many decades old. I wish companies like Tesla weren't trying to change that, however.
I'm not sure how easy it is to get a demo, but look around you maybe malls or some arcade places will have a headset you can try. Or you can spend the $300 to get the Quest 2 :) It's honestly not that much to get a taste of the future.
[1]: https://p1x3l.com/story/239/social-virtual-reality-and-the-o...
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/qdcrxl/vr_but_taken...
I’ll never get over the sale of Oculus to Facebook.
Haven't touched their hardware since and won't; would pass on jobs if that becomes an aspect.
And what does that have to do with eye tracking? I could see it recommend more content based off what you are looking at instead of having to manually like posts. Having a hands free experience sounds like a pro to me.
>virtamate is um, probably risky for someone who feels like they could become obsessed with porn.
Almost all VR porn sucks compared to the flatscreen counterpart. There's also a much bigger collection of 2D stuff that exists.
Nothing. But the Quest2 specially also has four cameras that point out at you and your rooms. So it’s the same theme that I don’t really want Facebook seeing anything remotely related to this.
> Almost all VR porn sucks compared to the flatscreen counterpart.
Compelling argument.
What's the issue of them anonymously collecting things like how big your room is, or what the average brightness of your room is?
>Compelling argument.
It's mostly subjective. The vast majority of it is blurry 3 DoF videos and proper 6 DoF content is limited.
Everybody keeps getting surprised at how seemingly irrelevant data points can be used to segment/profile people with a shockingly high accuracy. It seems the only requirement is scale.
Not at all saying they don't exist, but the job market favors engineers hopping around instead of staying at one place a while to become experts in things.
Does it? That's a fair description of the consulting space, but I don't think it's an accurate representation of the job market as a whole. When product companies hire software engineers, they tend to aim for the long haul.
Not enough to build up deep knowledge, at least compared to older engineers imo
1. You're not negotiating effectively -- a skill you can improve upon
2. You're not worth as much as you think you are (e.g. low margin industry, company doing poorly, part of a low impact team etc, or maybe you're just not very good at $whatever skill the company needs).
Only #2 is a good reason to jump ship and try your luck elsewhere. Over the years I've learnt how to negotiate a fair remuneration. It's not easy, and it can definitely be uncomfortable at first. But in the end, it's totally worth it.
The only blame for being underpaid that falls on an employee is staying somewhere they aren't valued longer than they should. We owe it to our families to get paid what we can [sustainably] earn.
In the current environment, you're almost always able to get a better offer compared to any raise offered. In most organizations, a manager expends less political capital justifying a salary band for an open position vs. advocating for a raise.
I quit my last job after 5 years and over my 30 year career, that's the shortest stint I've had.
Just because they aren't celebrities it doesn't mean they don't exist.
I thought Carmack stepped down from being CTO a few years ago? [0]
[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/oculus-cto-john-carmack-to-...
> Carmack says he's transitioning to the role of "consulting CTO" at Oculus.
So he can still be called CTO.
And if the point is that you're clarifying with your employer that you're looking for an exit (even if it's not immediate) it probably means the employer (and maybe you are helping) is interviewing for your replacement with the goal of eventually finding it. Hence my curiosity that it's been 2 years and they haven't got a new CTO.
Haven't tried it myself, and it has some caveats, but it does make it possible to use the Quest 2 without Facebook.
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.
“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.”
The whole process for putting an Oculus device in developer mode is incredibly fiddly and annoying. You need a verified developer account. You an app running on a phone, which in turn requires an online login. You can't just do it from a desktop PC and you certainly can't flip a toggle on the device itself.
Ideally, as a follow-up to this, they will release something that allows putting the device into developer mode without requiring any of that. As of now, that does not exist.
I assume you're supposed to unlock the bootloader and... I guess, wait for someone else to release a fully defanged system image?
https://developer.oculus.com/licenses/go-unlock-tos
Free as in beer
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.
"In their head" would be a different matter but that is not what the current technology is focusing on (apart from Neuralink).
Edit: not propagating for any such vision the future! just noticing that wearing stuff on head would be clunky and impractical for true immersion.
If they can automagically tell me what size wrench/socket i need to grab, even better.
I've gotten to where I can identify most bolt head sizes on sight... I very rarely have to pick up more than two wrenches and usually the first one is right. Also I find that bolt sizes are typically fairly standardized on a particular machine. I occasionally work on a mini-excavator that has 10mm, 13mm, and 19mm bolts (and 8mm allen-heads), but nothing else I've found so far.
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.
* https://wefunder.com/tapwithus looks promising, and facebook bought up companies doing similar things. A ring with a touch slider, gyroscope, and a button would be interesting.
He choose facebook, the cancer of our society, to persuite his VR dreams.
What did he expect?
One thing is certain though; Carmack is an inspiring role model for many developers. Facebook is not a great direction to lead smart people towards.
In recent times, he's done coronavirus simulations (I don't know anything else about that), and is doing AGI research.
He's also a true hacker through and through. Simply having an example like his, as a model to follow, is helping humanity. I happen to be human, and I distinctly remember his .plan files influencing my decisions in a positive way since I was 13 or so.
(The line about getting a hotel and accomplishing as much as possible in 2 days of focused effort was particularly impactful.)
Source?
Well, at least my ideas are consistent.
As for the root source, I suppose I could just ask him now. But the idea came from a slashdot post. Carmack personally responded to some criticisms of Q3 code quality, and said that he was proud of it, and that it had generated a lot of revenue for the company.
Billions may have been off by a couple orders of magnitude though. I'm no longer sure.
Maybe not too far off, though. The revenue of Q3 Arena alone was $11M. Far more valuable is Id Tech 3, the engine that was licensed by many studios over many years. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find revenue numbers on that. I wonder if it's public.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100312100358/http://www.idsoft...
5% royalties on games sold.
He does AGI research. He's sent me screenshots of his experiments.