“People think it’s amazing that we got to the moon using only slide rules and rudimentary computers. No: that’s why we made it.”
I know the feeling.
8 thoughts on “Technology”
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“People think it’s amazing that we got to the moon using only slide rules and rudimentary computers. No: that’s why we made it.”
I know the feeling.
Comments are closed.
It’s not getting better either. Expect it to get worse.
What we need is a clean sheet OS by a person with the right ideology. This is never going to happen. This OS would be small and burned into ROM. There would be no BIOS. Just this OS which would be instant on when you turned on your computer. No virus would ever infect it.
That’s essentially how Win8 boots up now. A number of hackers have gone on record saying that Win8 is going to be very difficult to hack.
Yes, and it takes the position that linux or any other OS is a virus. This is not the solution I was talking about.
The real problem is just that there isn’t enough incentive to make it work 100% of the time with 100% of the hardware options out there. Microsoft publishes the APIs and system calls, and it’s up to the hardware OEMs to comply with them.
Apple is well known to work with its hardware options better – because there aren’t nearly as many hardware options, and they all come from or through the same company.
SpaceX seems to work pretty well with its modern computers. Because they have the incentives, and the control over hardware, necessary to make it happen.
Again it goes back to ideology. If you idealise the computer, hardware configuration is on the hardware makers to confirm to that specification. They either do that or not sell their hardware at all. Instead we have this weird situation where every OS has to independently figure out how to work with any piece of hardware that comes along. It’s stupid.
Oops… Conform, not confirm.
“Also recently broken: the Oregon Scientific remote thermostat. Gave everyone new batteries – base station and remote sensor; hit the reset buttons, paired them, got a temperature. Put the base station outside, a distance of 16 feet. Four hours later: can’t find it. ”
These things always seem to break.
FWIW (not much) my parents have one of the outdoor remote thermometers (not Oregon Scientific, probably La Crosse); it’s been working pretty well for about three years. I got them lithium batteries for the outside unit, since alkalines don’t work too well in the cold. That’s probably not what’s going on with Lilek’s unit, though.