Date : Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:18:13 +0100
From : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: About ARM PC
[warning: i'm in one of those moods, epic rant against technology follows]
On 01/01/2012 12:29, F. Haroon wrote:
> it's about time that programming was re-introduced into society
But will it be as effective as it once was? Way back when, a teenager in
his bedroom could write an effective word processor, or a cool game, or
accounts package. (S)he would know the program inside out, and given
that in-the-field updates were difficult, they would bend over backwards
to iron out all the bugs and quirks. A teenager from the '80s would be
horrified at how often Firefox gets "fixed".
But the game has changed. Beyond recognition. The source codes to a
modern OS are unwieldly and massive and complicated. A word processor
comes on a DVD-ROM and has more features than most people know how to
use. I'm just about to fire up GTA3:Liberty City on my PS2 and it's an
oldish game but do you think it is feasible for one person to do that in
their bedroom? Hell, so much of the cool stuff is wrapped in layer after
layer of legal bull. Take, for instance, the RaspberryPi's main chip.
It's a black box. No doubt a Wiki will appear as people rip apart Linux
and/or RISC OS to try to determine how the chip works internally, but
there's no official datasheet so your bedroom hacker is just going to
have to use an established programming environment to write yet another
<x> to run on Linux. Anything that needs something a little bit special
(it is *fun* to attempt to write your own *basic* OS - it really shows
you how much you don't yet know) will probably need to find another
platform.
BTW, it might sound nonsense to roll your own OS. Not necessarily, for
the ARM (in its Thumb2 incarnation) is in *loads* of embedded devices.
You don't need a lot to run a smart breadmaker, but you do need to think
beyond "can I do this in C?". You can, but that doesn't mean you should!
> so that we can gain control over our machines once again.
Yeah. Right. You remember the claims of "the paperless office", right?
Would that be the same office that has printouts of emails adorning the
walls, a wastepaper bin full of skewed printouts where the paper loader
crunged up the paper, splattered toner all over it, or the dress of the
cute girl with the glasses that hates the machine, not to mention the
server only talks to odd then even IP addresses on alternate days and...
and... you get the idea. ;-)
We make wonderful technology so we can watch in REAL TIME with mouths
open as parts of north-east Honshu island are wiped from the map in the
most literal sense. We can get photos from the inside of Kerry Katona's
bathroom, though I'm not sure why anybody is really interested.
We can put a stupid piece of plastic into a machine, and it will feed us
local currency. Pretty much anywhere in the world. At any time of the day.
We can shout into a device, and somebody will shout back. It is easy to
forget that somebody could be next door, or on the opposite side of the
planet.
I'm about to take some stress relief by entering a world, getting myself
a minigun, and blowing the crap out of everything I see. And I can drive
really badly, smash up cars, run people over, go back and do it twice
for cops. Aim for head on high-speed collisions with moped riders. But
none of it is real. I'm in control, it's my car and I choose who lives
and dies, but it is completely fake.
Though we pay a HEAVY price. Mobile phones, contactable everywhere. Even
if you turn the ringer off and leave it to redirect calls to the
answering service, it'll ping when an email arrives, and you know no
matter how hard you try to resist, you just *have* to check that email.
And probably fire off a quick reply. Standing in the middle of the
goddamned supermarket. Say WHAT? Seriously? For real?!
<sigh> Yes.
Then, there's DRM and DMCA and local laws. Sure, I get it. Some dude
rips the latest film and drops it on a torrent, a thousand people can
have IDENTICAL copies. But, then, what's with HDCP? Once upon a time we
could video HD content, watch it when it suited us. It's a lot harder
these days. Not impossible. But look how many HD recorders there are.
Those of us of my age will remember an entire aisle in the
electronic-stuff shop dedicated to video recorders. Whoo, HiFi audio.
Whoo, flying erase head. Whoo, six heads. Whoo, long play. Whoo,
awesome-sounding acronym (that few people actually understand).
Now? You are told, by the broadcaster, what to watch and when to watch
it. Sure, there is video on demand, but it's on demand on their terms.
Like "watch within seven days". What if you want to collect all the
episodes, then watch them end-to-end with friends? I did this with the
first series of Twin Peaks, and again with My So-Called Life and it was
great fun. Now you'll be expected to lay out for the boxed set because
how DARE you record stuff off the telly like people have done for over
two decades.
Then there's flamin' DVDs. You start with an anti-piracy notice (you
wouldn't steal a car...) despite the obvious logic FAIL that if you
downloaded a ripped vid, you wouldn't see that rubbish. The only people
that see such patronising <expletive> are the ones who paid good money
for the DVD. Then there's adverts. Other films you might like. You're
right, I might like them. But this is only really relevant if the DVD is
BRAND NEW else it's out of date. Oh, and why can't I skip past all of
that rubbish? Then there's fancy animated menus that are cool the first
time, and from then on are just tedious. Then there's rubbish like you
can set up language and subtitles before playing the movie (with
caveats, like "english with forced french subtitles") but you can
neither alter the options (how about english with NO subs?), nor can you
switch language/subs on the fly like any decent DVD. It's part of the
MPEG spec, that you can't do it is just the DVD distributor being a
bunch of ass***es.
Then there's the epic scary. You. Every Single One Of You. You would
pale with panic, fear, terror, etc if you knew what data was being
collected on your on-line behaviour. You are tracked around the web
(less so on RISC OS or without script permissions), your search queries
are hashed to categorise you. You are a commodity. A profile on sale to
the best punters. Nobody gives a damn about the accuracy of any of this
information. You have no right to examine or correct this data,
regardless of what the DPA might say. In fact, good luck finding out who
is saying what about you. It's some faceless entity is a faraway country
treating you as just another statistic. I like cute japanese girls and
anim? and I live at home with my mother - I probably fit into a whole
lot of generic categories that would be the next best thing to libel.
But how will I know? It isn't my job to know. It is my job to sit and
stare at specially targetted advertising for dildos and enhancement
surgery and eastern european brides, along with roulette and poker at
every opportunity, like there simply isn't life beyond Texas Hold 'Em...
Hanafuda/Koi-koi, anybody? Or Karuta if you're brave? Poker is such an
overrated game! Whatever, the scale of personal invasion going on minute
by minute is a wet dream for most paranoid governments, but thankfully
there are (supposed to be) laws preventing such behaviour. But we
tolerate it because Google gives us instant factoids, hundreds of cute
kitten videos, a global map when we want it, the ability to share stuff
without suffering a nervous breakdown, and instant chat with friends.
Governments, on the other time, give us lies and bull and taxes. We
don't want the goverment poking around in our lifes, damn nanny state
interferes too much as it is. But some mega-corp in a foreign country?
Well that's okay. We get something in return so we don't mind. Even
better with Google+ which is starting a policy of requiring you to
provide accurate information, no more pseudonyms. That, pretty much, is
why I'm not on Google+. My "identity" is "heyrick". My close friends
will know more than the things I choose to write in my blog (which you
might notice does actually contain that much about *me*), the rest of
the world, frankly, can STFUAD. And no, you aren't a "friend" if you
clicked a button that said "+Friend". Go look up that word in a dusty
dictionary, see what it used to mean.
Modern machines give us convenience. At a price. Perhaps a price we
haven't yet been capable of comprehending.
[speaking of my blog, I might cut'n'paste this as today's entry]
> Otherwise, the software industry I think will die.
Question is, how can we reclaim it? I hope I live long enough to see
somebody put together a proper, innovative, lightweight, capable OS for
portable devices (smartphones, etc) that isn't Yet Another POSIX Clone.
> We need our machines to be our servants, not be slaves to them.
We utterly lost that war, and any future claim for independence, the
moment Big Brother hit the airwaves.
Best wishes,
Rick.
--
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...