> the corpses are kept upright as open source projects
I think you are looking at this not merely wrongly, but in reverse.
Gradually the PC compatible has paved over the entirety of desktop/laptop computing. It's like a farm: ripping out hedgerows, blasting with fertiliser and weedkillers and pesticides, trying to kill those pesky things stealing the land.
Those chemicals have turned the innocent IBM PC, a half-8-bit half-16-bit low-end box, into this vasty computing colossus, a mile across, chewing through kilotons of work and emitting heat and work.
And yet, all over that farm, in the wheel-ruts and in the cracks beside the farm buildings, a few of the weeds just keep on growing.
The men in suits have tried SO very hard to exterminate them and they just will not die.
And yet, if you raise your head and look outside the mega-farm, they are everywhere. Outside the farmland, where it's too steep to farm: vast forests of weird twisty weeds turned into trees.
In people's pockets (phones). By the sofa (tablets). In their cars and cookers and hearing aids and pacemakers. Tiny Archimedes, everywhere: Arm chips, outselling all x86 by hundreds to one.
Weird little CPU architectures, weird RTOSes and router OSes.
They cannot kill those weeds, however hard they try, and despite all their efforts, there will always be more weeds than crops.
«
the IBM PC and its successors paved over all of that
»
I really did not like...
«
he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants)
»
That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.
It's a very American viewpoint. I only discovered in recent years that in the rest of the world, the Amiga and ST did much better than at home.
I was a kid when this happened. The Mac launched when I was... 15 I think?
To a rounding error, nobody owned PCs in the UK. They were extremely expensive business machines. Nobody owned Apple II either, and Macs were for the seriously rich.
We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about. We aspired to Camputers and Elan and Memotech.
Nobody _wanted_ office equipment. Would you offer a child a stapler to play with? That's how fun the PC was.
Amigas were huge and very desirable and seen as a gift from the future -- see this article from 2 days ago:
Bring back Symbian, and bundle it with a Beeper client and subscription.
I want basic phone functionality, including as a key core function, text messaging over IP with all my contacts on all messaging platforms. If it doesn't do video and media and games in those calls, good.
If the phone doesn't have loads of apps, good. Let me save and view local PDFs, ideally with indexing or tagging. Make sure the bundled clients for email, maps, and communications are good enough. Music playback too is good, but that is a fairly easy problem. With modern storage capacities, I don't need clever sync. Just stick it all on there.
I must confess, I previously hadn't read much about it as it was not from or by Wirth himself, but on consideration, perhaps that was unfair and premature.
No, it is categorically not a Gish gallop when I post single-line responses at an interval of days.
You are attempting to deflect the argument based on irrelevant side-claims. I'm sure there's a term for that, but I can't be bothered to look it up before my morning cup of tea is done.
If someone is in the process of intentionally turning their project into slop, replacing human written code with bot-extruded code, then they can pay to host their own...
... And they should still be held fully responsible for the true environmental cost of the power and resources used to run the bots replacing craft with slop.
This activity is criminally wasteful, and should be treated as a crime.
So when someone points out that you are inconsistent with your own points, you ask after their health and wellbeing? In other words, you are questioning my sanity because I point out you contradicted yourself?
Well, we are heading for 2º C global warming by 2040, possibly by 2030. And the IPCC and others already pointed out that 2º means the end of civilisation.
So, it's coming anyway... but it's the nature of human fsck-ups that they come in clusters. That's why someone coined the term "clusterfsck".
So, we have multiple human fsckups coming along all together in the mid-2020s, just as we did in the mid-1930s.
Sketchy off the cuff chronology:
* Cheap COTS x86 hardware gets good enough to run free OSes from academia (good)
* Virtualisation forcibly brought to x86 in defiance of Popek and Goldberg (good)
* Broadband everywhere (good)
Result:
* Mainstream acceptance of FOSS (good)
Result:
* Cheap mass cloud computing (bad)
Side-effect: financial crisis -- the dot-com crash
Time passes. International travel gets cheaper. Internet facilitates global trade, globalisation, and awareness of inequalities. Only now you can afford to get there.
Some recovery, new internet startups.
Result:
* Free mass pesudonymous social media (bad)
Result:
* Weak poor post-communist régimes spread disinformation online in bulk
* Cryptocurrencies: imaginary internet money that destroys the climate, facilitates crime, destabilises financial systems
Result:
* International agreements weakened (NATO, EU, global finance, etc.)
* Another financial crisis
Same time:
* Really large scale cloud computing
* Cheaper travel facilitates a pandemic
* More money for internet and cloud companies
Result
* LLMs -- mechanically-recovered text extruders
* More, better disinformation; further geopolitical instability
Next:
* Mass scale climate collapse renders large countries and continents uninhabitable
# Work
Currently the FOSS & cloud correspondent for the Register.
https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven
Work email: [email protected]
# Personal
Comments here (or anywhere else, unless otherwise stated) are personal opinion and not on behalf of any employer.
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