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The Lone Coder

midrange.tedium.co

105 pointsweare13823 comments

> On top of all of this Kaiser, a medical doctor and infectious diseases expert, has had an immeasurably difficult job over the last year as the public health officer for an entire county during a pandemic, a position he was recently removed from after gaining a reputation of being ahead of the curve on things like requiring mask-wearing.

Some people accomplishes so much, they are a hard example to follow.

I've noticed a lot of doctors have a Lot of hobbies, and other business adventures.

That's all I'll say before I get in trouble.

No reason for trouble: I notice it too. They certainly need some kind of way to get their minds away from injured people, sick children, parents with cancer, dying elderly people, devastated relatives... Keeping sanity requires some other occupations.

> my G5 has not been my daily driver for a good couple years; my daily driver is the Raptor Talos II

So I looked up the Raptor Talos II. It's a $7k (starting price) workstation running IBM Power9 RISC based CPUs which are typically used in super computers.

OOC why would someone want to use such a niche architecture for their primary workstation vs say an AMD Epyc or Intel equivalent?

The primary appeal of Raptor's products is that the firmware is completely open source. Compare this with x86, where all modern Intel and AMD systems rely on vendor-signed firmware blobs as an intrinsic part of the boot process.

POWER9 has some deployment in supercomputer clusters but its primary use is in IBM servers, basically the modern descendant of IBM minicomputers. These are purchased by businesses that want to run IBM i or AIX (or Linux).

Are there any laptops this open?

Why does the fact it being open source impact a product decision? Especially when that likely doesn't matter in practice, e.g., I doubt owners of the device are contributing to the source frequently, if ever.

The more open source hardware we have the more innovation we can expect if the open source softens movement is any indicator.

Financially supporting a nascent open source hardware movement seems like a good thing.

This relates to a preference for owner-controlled computing (as opposed to vendor-controlled hardware). See:

https://libreboot.org/ https://coreboot.org/ https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

The question has so much baked in assumption, ignorance, and disregard that it's unanswerable. The answer rests on fundamentals the question itself already discards.

The asker has already decided what matters, what doesn't matter, and why.

The answer "Because X matters." is as meaningless as the question "Why does X matter when X doesn't matter?".

It's a thoughtless and effortless question that expects a thoughtful answer which is not effortless.

The answer is these three assertions which you will have to just accept as given. Your question exposes that you have either never taken 5 minutes to think about things like this, or have, and arrived at some other conclusion, and so would not make these assertions yourself. That explains why open source doesn't impact your product decisions. You asked why it impacts anyone's.:

1 - One doesn't need to do a thing personally to benefit from, or value the fact that a thing is possible, nor to appreciate the difference between possible (however difficult) and not-possible, nor the difference between natural and artificial difficulty or impossibility.

2 - It matters who ultimately controls ones possessions, and through them ones life.

3 - Ideals matter.

The G5 was a PowerPC chip - if you continue to want PowerPC architecture the Raptor Talos II makes sense.

Clearly this is hobbiest for him in at lease some ways.

> So I looked up the Raptor Talos II. It's a $7k (starting price)

There are cheaper models, "down" to $4k, probably around $3k if you build it yourself; that's still expensive of course, but less :-)

(I wasn't able to read the linked article, so perhaps he indeed describes the version matching the price you quote, I don't know.)

He's got multiple power9 systems, he regularly blogs about it at https://www.talospace.com/

I've got a TalosII sitting under my desk, not the 7k$ BTO version but just the mainboard and 2 of the smallest CPUs. I stuffed it into a PC chassis pretty much how you would build your average x86 desktop system.

Supporting owner-controlled computing was one point, but I also really like toying around with exotic systems, especially if they've got UNIX heritage :)

Dug the 68k.news link in the post: http://68k.news

Now that takes me back to an early web. I kinda like it. I got more content from scanning one screens-worth of that page than the actual Google news.

In a honest non-secure version, just like in the old times.

The user-entitlement reminds me of the recent Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26847780

Not a TL;DR but if you prefer to read comments skipping the article, here are some juicy bits about supporting a web browser supporting a "fork of Mozilla Firefox for the Power Macintosh and Mac OS X Tiger PowerPC".

> If you aren’t paying for the software, then please don’t be a jerk. There is a human at the other end of those complaints and unless you have a support contract, that person owes you exactly nothing. Whining is exhausting to read and “doesn’t work” reports are unavoidably depressing, disparaging or jokey comments are unkind, and making reports nastier or more insistent doesn’t make your request more important. This is true whether or not your request is reasonable or achievable, but it’s certainly more so when it isn’t.

> As kindly as I can put it, not all bug reports are welcome.

> And that puts undue pressure on the one guy who is pushing this specific platform forward on what is arguably its most important tool. (On top of all of this Kaiser, a medical doctor and infectious diseases expert, [...] during a pandemic, [...] who briefly hinted at this in his TenFourFox post, literally was the person who called off Coachella this year.)

So in addition to maintaining a fork of Firefox he averts an explosion of COVID-19 cases from Coachella in his day job.

I think it goes beyond “free” software and should be a rule of thumb for any bug reports - be polite, be descriptive, be appreciative and don’t expect anything. It’s rare software where the “customer” whether paying or not has much influence on getting something fixed - your best bet is almost always going to be following the list above.

The website is down right now, here's the archive link if anyone is interested:

http://web.archive.org/web/20210418161124/https://midrange.t...

Said to see old project folding. Many people still use older hardware.

Nothing is stopping those people from running linux on the older hardware and using modern software.

Personally I don't understand why people spend any amount of energy supporting abandoned proprietary closed source platforms.

Because not all software works on older hardware. Simply installing linux won't help. There is limitations in older hardware, slow cpu, less memory, etc. For example try running modern firefox on slow netbook, it takes 100% of resources.

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