Sigh… there are many sad truths about me, too.
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The only audiobook I’ve ever listened to was this one: LibriVox By no means do I expect it to last as long as the real copy.
Probably because these aren’t really books. They’re sound files. E/iBooks aren’t books. They’re texty files. A book has a tangible spine and is printed matter. I trust that tangibility more than some software fiddliness. It’s the only legacy that makes sense to me.
The BBS is next…
Personally, I LIKE plain vanilla. OSes, phones, computers, etc. I have never been a fan of the tricked-out. I use a few things at a very high level of functioning. I prefer the command line and a good editor to do my work. This is because I’ve seen tricked-out and it tends to break, go obsolete quickly, be hard to transfer in case of disaster and generally be a pain to maintain. So plain is fine, to me. Yes I like some whiz bang, too. But not like a lot of techheads I know. Early adopters always seem so frustrated. I like a more Zen approach to my computing and electronics.
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I learned the hard way, and only in the last 5 years or so have I come to peace with not having the latest awesome doohickey. I had several PocketPC devices, FFS!
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I’m scribbling this from my Newton.
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I think Palm was the height of the technology until IOS and Android hit the scene. For all the Sharp devices that ran Linux and WinCe flavors, and (damn!, what was that female named Microsoft tablet OS?), nothing matured like the PalmOS App selection for depth until the current big boys came along.
ETA - My Handspring Visor Prism was a thing of glory. And then the Clies were nice, too…
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I had a couple of Palms, then a couple of Treos. I kept my Treo as long as I could until the switch to iPhone. In 2010 I said fuck this iPhone (really, it was fuck AT&T and their shitty high priced monthly), dumped my contract and used a lame-ass TracFone for two years before going back to iPhone, on Verizon this time. Which I’m on now. It’s a 5S and I am feeling like it might be time to say goodbye again to Apple for a while. I have no need to be at the latest rev. There are features I’d like, but really, I’m good and don’t care that much.
The question is, which is to be master – that’s all.
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Computers are evolutionary creatures, just like us humans.
Layers upon layers. Machine Code creating Assembler, creating C libraries, creating .NET libraries. Subsystems created because they made sense at the time that atrophy but never quite disappear.
It would be nice to just create a new Hardware and Software platform utterly from scratch. Clean and Modern, and somehow get it widely adopted. Similarly, it would be great to just rebuild humans from scratch. Deal with all the physical trial and error hacks and spaghetti code mind. Make clean, neat, bug free people.
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That’s what you get from “intelligent design” (for certain values of “intelligent” and “design”). If they actually were evolutionary systems, the shitty ones that didn’t work so well would die off, and the better ones would bone and make more of themselves.
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It is a lover that you have to Beg.
Please. Do this one thing for me. What do you want me to say? What do you want me to edit?
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I too and scabies this frond my neutron!
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Thought. What about leveraging the plethora of RAM and disk space, and run the mission-critical stuff as separate VMs? Then the configuration of all the needed files could be fixed. If there is no need (and way) to communicate with The Hostile Outside, not even security updates are needed that could screw the thing up. And you can back up multiple versions of the VM image, so if an update goes cock up you can restore the known-good one.
The only major problem I see here is with OS licensing, but that can be solved by using a free OS, or worked around with a crack.
In the end every mission-critical VM will look like the comic : )
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My word. Let’s start the sequencers.
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And, for the same hardware configuration, you just download the image that somebody else had to deal with instead of having to duplicate all the work.
And you won’t have chance to break something outside the VM by putzing within it. Which is also a major timesaver.
If we could make a clean, neat bug-free bug, we could definitely do a human next.
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& I’m all for scaling up the Tardigrade. See if we can make it macroscopic, still retain its toughness and resilience qualities, but also customized to our needs, especially weapons delivery systems, terraforming capability, memory and storage, background processing and fault-tolerant distributed interlinkage.
Imagine not needing a spaceship. Imagine being able to just shoot a wad of trillions of them at a planet.
We can start here.
And also, please read this and consult this for further resources.
Let the games begin.
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Because the ability to run legacy programs is still rather solid.
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