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VonGuardon Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

Great idea except it won't make anyone money. Therefore it will never happen. Copyright law in America is not based on good ideas, reasonability, or even preservation. They are based on profit. Your idea is great, but we do not live in a world where good ideas matter at all. Only money matters here, and this idea will not make anyone money.

VonGuardon Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

Courts do not do that. The people suing would offer up a big old list of damages into the millions and then negotiate down from there to something like 6 figures AND the loser covering the court costs. The American legal system is completely broken, and amounts to two people piling up money, then the one with the bigger stack wins both stacks of money. This is completely untenable for a non-profit to even think about, let alone to incur the risk.

VonGuardon Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

Completely incorrect. This work is being done under a non-profit, and whether or not the original owners care is irrelevant. Doing this would immediately open the non-profit to litigation and endanger the entire project. Just because we don't think anyone cares doesn't mean we won't get sued.

This project is preserving the source code around a distributed chat system from the year 2000, the E programming language, and the first real usage of JSON. Outside of those aspects, it's not about preserving fonts and proprietary code.

You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes.

When we want to open source proprietary code, we work with the rights holders. This code was all given to us under such an agreement, and the agreement ONLY covers the code owned by the people who built this thing. The deal was contingent on us not opening any of the code the original owners didn't own, as that would ALSO incur risk for them.

VonGuardon Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

This is a cautionary tale for preservationists. My current preservation project is still not open because we are very slowly reviewing the code to make sure we don't accidentally include any IP when we open the source code. The real things that get you are similar to what happened here: codecs, graphics libraries, and a really big one to look out for is fonts. It'd be great if there was a scanner that could detect this stuff, but unfortunately, the scanning tools out there tend to go the other way like Black Duck: they detect open source code, not closed source.

VonGuardon One possible housing crisis solution? Public housing for all income levels

Uhm, at the cost of some tax dollars. It's still like this in Cuba. people still beg, BUT they have a home to go to at the end of the day. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing. Would you rather our tax dollars are spent on missiles and tanks for other places.

VonGuardon GnuCash 5.9

It's great for personal or very small businesses but god help you if you are building a real startup with GNUCash. I am speaking from experience here, GNUCash zealotry is a plague. I honestly wish this project basically did not exist, because the business world despises GNUCash, ONLY cares about QuickBooks, and using anything else is a giant waste of everyone's time. Believe me, I have been fighting this fight in non-profits and startups since the early 2000's. It's not a fight ANYONE should ever have. I USED TO BE THE "WE MUST USE GNUCASH" GUY!

Now, in a perfect world, yes, GNUCash and literally ANYTHING other than Quickbooks would be an option for small business accounting. But we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where Intuit has fought VERY hard to make damn sure no one can use anything but Quickbooks, and their iron fist is clad in very specific APIs and file formats.

If you do not use Quickbooks:

* Your bank will hate you.

* Your investors will hate you.

* Your payroll system won't work.

* Your tax systems won't work.

* Your accountant won't work.

* Grants are even off the table in some cases.

* Some places won't audit without Quickbooks.

I constantly run into well intentioned open source zealots who demand the use of GNUCash. This is terrible. Don't be that person.

The world has chosen QuickBooks. This choice was made under duress and with corrupt power brokering. But the decision has been made. Maybe there are some OK SaaS options, but they only exist as long as Intuit allows them to exist. Anything competing with Quickbooks is going to be bought and killed by Intuit, so you're going into a dead-end alley. I know that leaves GNUCash on the table, but...

Please, do not make the mistake my many non-profits and businesses have repeatedly made when I was not paying enough attention to scream bloody murder about it. I turn my back for one minute, and engineers are installing GNUCash on the accountant's Mac Laptop.

It's 100% always come back to bite us in the ass, as we've had to change platforms on-demand in order to meet a funding deadline, a bank requirement, a loan ask, or a grant application. And it's ALWAYS the accountant in the org that gets saddled with the 60+ hour work weeks it takes to redo everything. If I was an acocuntant, I'd quit if told to use GNUCash, but most of them kinda don't know any better because, hey, why not try some thing the techies are all excited about!

GNUCash is a wonderful project. I wish we could all use it. But we cannot. Not for real business. And honestly, this is only for contrived, arbitrary reasons. But these reasons exist. The world is 100% built to prevent people from not using Quickbooks at every turn, and you only harm yourself by demanding open source software for accounting. As I said to the director of my most recent non-profit: "You would not tolerate the accountant coming in here and demanding you use NetBeans. Please, give them the same courtesy you'd expect them to give you on tool choice."

VonGuardon Dethrace: Reverse engineering the 1997 game "Carmageddon" (2023)

I was the USA champion in this game back when being an esports pro meant winning a Voodoo 2 for your efforts. Best driving game ever, and so much fun.

VonGuardon Tell HN: Burnout is bad to your brain, take care

The number one trait I have seen in people who are burned out is that they utterly and completely deny they are burned out. They often furiously push back on the idea. "I cannot possibly be burned out, because I have way too much to do," or something less articulate.

Admitting you're burned out is the fist step on the path back. It can take years to get back to normal and have passion again. But it will return if you take care of yourself and avoid the kind of things that send you spiraling into stress.

VonGuardon Can kids master the video games their parents loved?

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment specializes in generational knowledge exchange through the medium of video games. There is nothing that warms my heart more than watching that information transfer in real time.

Watching a parent explain to their child how to properly hold an N64 controller.

Watching the child's mind explode as mom/grandma/dad/gramps shows them the warp zone in level 1-2 of Super Mario Bros. Frequent "Mom doesn't know about video games, how'd she do that!?" kind of quotes from the kids.

Watching dad and daughter charge through a Sierra adventure game, looking up the manual in Archive.org and figuring out 40 year old puzzles together.

The family that plays together, stays together.

VonGuardon Medieval

Gizmondo was designed by Sir Clive Sinclair. First rule of a Producers-like scheme is to have the thing designed by a famous designer.

VonGuardon The Later Years of Douglas Adams

I met Douglas near the end, at MacWorld SF 2000. He was charming, enormous (though, not in a "fat guy" way, much more in a "way over 6 foot tall" way.) He truly was a monument of a human being. He was vastly more interested in experimenting with a USB microscope camera he'd become associated with than being all "Hey I'm famous," a trait I took to insinuate great humility and confidence. I was almost paralyzed by my inability to say "You, sir, built me from a puddle of bullied goo into a tower of a man, confident in the face of chaos and uncertainty, purely through force of word and logic." Instead, I think I just talked about the microscope. He was amazing.

VonGuardon AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach

New lines of business. Another way for them to sell your data. The NSA is quaint. The Valley knows everything about everyone already, and even has their current GPS coordinates.

VonGuardon Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland has all-playable exhibitions of home computer and console games on original hardware. You can play something on the C64, Atari 800 or Sega Genesis, for example.

VonGuardon Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

You missed the museums you're talking about. There are a ton of small museums in the Bay Area, from themade.org to the American Bookbinders Museum in SF. Non-profits are also expected to donate all their assets to other non-profits if they fold, here in CA. It's mandated in your articles of incorporation. Themade.org, which I can speak to, has always promised its stuff to Stanford or the CHM if it went under, though thankfully, we've survived COVID and are thriving.

VonGuardon MacRelix – Unix-like features for classic Mac OS

The fellow who does this is an absolute class individual. Definitely support this project!

VonGuardon How GitHub replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting platform

People used Codeplex? I thought it was just this crazy halfstep Sam Ramji convinced MS to take, leading them to open source. When it launched, Codeplex was supposed to be a source code museum, where you could see the code but not reuse it. Crazy I know, but it was what MS was comfortable with at the time, and a few years later they opened .NET. Codeplex was like an experiment to get MS to touch open source code and feel comfortable with it at a legal level, not a replacement for Sourceforge...

VonGuardon It's 29—Delphi, I mean

I heard a rumor years ago that Russian train systems still run on Delphi.

VonGuardon Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit (2018)

Dynamicland was amazing. So far ahead of its time, yet also so utterly without a practical real world application. So dedicated are they to the idea of dynamic code running the space that they wrote the kernel on a whiteboard, and if anyone wanted between the camera and the whiteboard with the code on it, the whole space would crash. Now THAT is dynamic.

VonGuardon Scratch in the Browser

The exciting thing here is that this runs on Squeak in JavaScript. Squeak is a modern Smalltalk, and now it can obviously be run on top of JavaScript. That's dynamic languages all the way down!

VonGuardon The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)

Yes indeed. It's sources are already in a private GitHub repo, we just need to prune copyrighted things like fonts and libraries so we can open source it. That'll start in January.

VonGuardon The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)

This was brought back to working order with the help of Randy, Chip, Mist64, StuBlad, McMartin, and some other folks who hacked away until it was brought back to working order. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (themade.org) undertook this work as the first ever institutional preservation of an MMO, and everything was accomplished for $0. The MADE is about to collaborate again with Randy and Chip on preserving Electric Communities, EC Habitat, and the Palace. The Museum has acquired legal waivers to begin this preservation project, and will undertake a hack-day on site January 13, 2024. Join us and help bring back history!

VonGuardon Show HN: I built a virtual tabletop for playing Dungeons and Dragons

The big reason we do this is that being a DM, it's REALLY hard to predict what your players are going to do. I used to spend days preparing for a game, only to have the party turn around and wander out of the dungeon 10 minutes into the session, negating all my prep. This way, I can just throw up a map and have them dungeon crawl.

I suppose it make a difference that we are playing Rappan Attuk and not a mainline D&D campaign. There's a lot less dungeon crawling in today's D&D, but Rappan Attuk makes up for all of it with about 600 pages of one dungeon.

VonGuardon Google kills two-year “Pixel Pass” subscription after just 22 months

This is all across the US, one coast to another, so these personally run apps probably wouldnt work, right?

VonGuardon Google kills two-year “Pixel Pass” subscription after just 22 months

I just cannot rationalize getting him any gaming equipment. He could manage Stadia, juuuust barely. He frequently cannot figure out his cell phone. He is basically a ludite. My mom had to stand there and turn Stadia on on the tablet for him... I was considering Shadow but it's just too complex too.

VonGuardon Google kills two-year “Pixel Pass” subscription after just 22 months

When I got Stadia, I set my dad up with it to play Red Dead 2, because he knows nothing of games, and I wasn't buying him a PS4 just to play 1 game. It was great. When he got stuck, I logged in across the country and advanced the story for him, and he took back over. Spectacular product.

I told my dad, day 1, "You'd better enjoy this now, because in 2 years, Google will kill this and you'll never be able to play again." I was off by about a year, but I was 100% right. At least they gave me back 100% of my money and game purchase $. Still, standard Google.

Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever.

VonGuardon Nuclear fission fuel is inexhaustible (2022)

One thing this doesn't really address is that the way you separate plutonium from uranium is via acid. At the end of the process, you have a barrel of radioactive acid to deal with. Not nice stuff to handle. Toxic AND corrosive waste.

VonGuardon Chiptune.app

Man, I would kill to have this as a standalone app on my phone with all of these midis loaded.

VonGuardon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://vonguard.net/

- https://vonguard.net/2022/10/30/utterly-insane-movies-weve-w... Terrible movies.

- https://vonguard.net/2022/04/27/why-david-and-peter-paul-are... David and Peter Paul made some good movies.

- https://vonguard.net/2021/09/03/5g-enables-the-real-peer-to-... 5G is the final key to the peer-to-peer revolution.

VonGuardon Ask HN: Is anyone using Quarkus for monoithic, full-stack web apps?

https://thenewstack.io/how-vodafone-greece-built-80-java-mic...

VonGuardon Atomic Tourism

Go visit B Reactor. It is amazing.