wonder what esr is up to

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > wonder what esr is up to

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

esr insists he is working on vital infrastructure but voluntary contributions aren't covering the costs

either the infrastructure must not be vital or his entire economic philosophy, that only voluntary contribution is necessary and moral, is wrong

# ¿ Feb 15, 2017 20:04

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 12:22

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

libertarianism is only one of an increasingly large number of bad political frameworks of ideas constructed by taking some primitive principles and trying to logically derive a worldview from them

much of it down to a lack of actual depth to education of today

American Libertarianism just the Koch brothers' ideological proving ground: it was never intended to be a coherent philosophy that actually resulted in change, it's just a way for the right wing to float ideas and gauge reactions before trying to push them via the "mainstream" Republican Party

for example, "Reason" magazine toyed with things like Holocaust denial and support for Apartheid in South Africa, if those hadn't generated outcry then they'd have been pushed to the mainstream via other channels

I can't find it now, but that "Libertarianism Is Not a Ruling-Class Philosophy" article is a pro click

# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 04:05

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

he's more or less right about this

the "heroic" part is that back than any idiot could slap together parts in a garage to make some kind of halfassed microcomputer. they weren't really compatible with anything. there were no meaningful standards beyond the S-100 bus design

the commodore 64 and the apple II and the ibm pc swept the market and killed off all those dumb garage tinkerers

it was really the one-two punch of the Apple II and IBM PC that killed the thousand random S-100 micro manufacturers, by the time the C64 came out the companies run by garage tinkerers were already dead and CP/M compatibility was about legacy, not about new software

the S-100 bus and CP/M were the IBM PC compatible of their day, but they were extremely fiddly to get working right and had serious interoperability problems that led to serious market fragmentation; you often had to buy the OS and other software from your hardware vendor, even though it was "standard," because everyone used slightly different disk formats and so on, and even then getting all the pieces-parts to work together was often a nightmare that made DOS-era compatibility dances look sane

the Apple II and II+ showed that these personal computer things could actually be useful appliances if they were more or less turnkey; the "put in a disk and boot straight to the program you want to use" model was actually pretty revolutionary at the time, as was the affordability of an Apple II with a floppy disk drive

Atari and Commodore and Texas Instruments (and Mattel and a whole host of other mass-market manufacturers) decided to get into this stuff from the ultra-low-cost home end, assuming business use would follow since that was working for Apple, but a lot of what they did was way too compromised to expand to business use; Apple really hit the sweet spot in price, capability, and configurability in the 8-bit world

IBM then put together a personal computer that businesses were willing to buy en masse and pretty much everyone else was an also-ran in business from then on

# ¿ Feb 19, 2017 06:14

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

his time on UNIX-HATERS when he was first rewriting the jargon file to refer to UNIX instead of ITS certainly is legendary

# ¿ Feb 19, 2017 19:48

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

so he brought up his "dates every hacker should know" thing on a list we're on, and I pointed out that he was missing a few things and quite wrong about others

he took it about as well as you'd expect

# ¿ Feb 20, 2017 03:56

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

the 256 byte memory was SRAM, not DRAM. it was intended to be the register file for the cpu, because early 1980s chips didn't have room for on-die registers

what

the 68000 was 1979, though I'll grant that it was probably way more expensive than the 9900

quote:

the ti-99 series looks a lot less goofy when you keep this in mind

the TI-99 makes more sense when you realize the 9900 was a single-chip implementation of TI's 16-bit minicomputer architecture, which like many mini architectures didn't even really have a register file as such beyond a PC, flags, and maybe SP, just a fast cache of a certain range of low memory and a direct addressing mode for those locations

DEC did the same thing in the PDP-10 and probably other architectures, wouldn't surprise me if Data General was similar too

# ¿ Feb 20, 2017 19:53

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Hammerite posted:

who has he led. serious q

the community, duh

# ¿ Mar 12, 2017 08:14

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

double ohm seven posted:

my thread lured out rotor

felling blessed 🙏

a good thread

# ¿ Mar 12, 2017 08:14

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 12:22

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

rotor posted:

and there's very few things in the world that make me happier than this. A smile of an innocent child, a babies laughter, the thought of esr having to buy generic cheerios at the supermarket.

it almost sounds like you've tried to work with him or had an overlapping social circle

# ¿ Mar 12, 2017 11:56

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