Which operating system with a GUI and installable apps marketed to residential end users isn't proprietary? Windows is proprietary, macOS is proprietary, iOS is proprietary, Android has been gradually moving functionality out of AOSP which is free and into Google Play Services which is proprietary, and video game consoles are definitely proprietary.
Because it uses Electron, and the employer has declined the RAM upgrade required to run multiple applications that use Electron without thrashing swap.
User mods are a BAD thing if you're doing competitive play!
If all players in a friend match are playing with the same set of mods, I don't see how they're a bad thing. Even in stranger matches, I don't see how an accessibility mod, such as one that remaps buttons, increases text size, or makes colors more color-blind friendly, gives an unfair advantage.
For me my password manager has always been a keepass database synced over my own personal nextcloud.
Does your "own personal nextcloud" run on a server in your home or a VPS that you lease?
It also lets you set the rules when you generate a password, so if I know it's a password I'll have to enter in a touch screen, or over a playstation controller etc... then I turn off special characters etc...
And sometimes these rules change. For example, you might set your Microsoft account's password to something decently strong if you're just using it for Outlook.com. But then you feel a need to weaken it when you find yourself repeatedly keying it into a PC keyboard to log in to a Windows 8.1 or 10 PC with your Microsoft account, and then weaken it further when you find yourself keying it into an Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller.
disk encryption is possible, but unless it's use is listed as a precondition to the program's proof of security, the proof is potentially meaningless in the real world
Then I hereby propose extending the proof thus to make it more meaningful. A proof can be amended; it need not be discarded outright.
your compiler may pay lip service to memset_s
Then replace use of memset_s in the proof with use of each operating system's counterpart to memset_s.
Say someone does decide to save up enough money from his or her day jobs to incorporate and start building games. One thing I realized when considering going this route is that not everybody who has worked in a video game studio is skilled in all parts of the process. Could you recommend any good resources for a game developer to build skills in marketing, both to promote a game to the public and to promote a game to the console makers who operate the storefronts?
There are literally people making games for free and they're better than a lot of the people getting paid
If this is the case, the scarce resource is not developers as much as marketing. It costs money to bring even a finished PC game to consoles so that users uninterested in PC maintenance rigmarole or behind a restrictive download cap can play.
Why do you think it's now impossible to make games with a small group or solo dev?
You might need a "small group" just for the organizational and accounting aspects of dealing with the console makers that act as gatekeepers to your market. For example, the PlayStation developer signup form currently requires each developer to be a corporation or LLC with its own tax ID, an office with a static IPv4 address, and a domain name with website and email under that domain. SIE declines to do business with sole proprietorships, and many ISPs offer a static IP only to offices in commercially zoned areas, not to home offices.
You don't need to be always-online. You just need to be online when you want to download a game. Same as buying a game from Steam.
It might work in urban areas within the footprint of fiber, cable, and DSL. But users behind a satellite or cellular home Internet with a 10 GB per month quota and a $10 per GB overage fee would find both Xbox purchases just as cost-prohibitive as Steam purchases.
When my XBox 360 dies, that will probably be the end of my gaming, because I'm not sure you can buy a console which is purely offline these days.
You can buy a RetroUSB AVS or a Retro-Bit Retro Entertainment System. These play nearly all games made for the Family Computer (Famicom) and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), including titles from Broke Studio, Retrotainment, Sly Dog, KHan Games, Spoony Bard, and other indie studios that specialize in new NES games.
The install base may continue to shrink as more targeted solutions claim niches. But desktops are not going to die.
Even if the desktop PC doesn't die, the laptop PC might. In fourth quarter 2012, the install base of 10.1" laptops shrank enough that manufacturers stopped making 10.1" laptops. This disappointed those few people for whom a 10.1" laptop was optimal, such as myself at the time. People whose 10.1" laptop broke (or whose original battery and replacement battery could no longer hold a charge) had to settle for buying an 11.6" laptop and the slightly bigger, more conspicuous bag that it requires. The closer you get to a traditional laptop case, the more attractive it appears to would-be thieves.
And even if the desktop PC doesn't die, it may become expensive enough that only established companies, not home users, can afford one. This would make it more expensive to start a home-based business.
You still have to have hardware on the other side to run the stuff... why not get a real computer?
Because applications' system requirements often exceed the slow CPU and low-speed Internet available to a smartphone. It may be more cumbersome and expensive to carry the required hardware, the required battery, and the required high-speed Internet connection with you. Or because you have "a real computer" at home, but your ISP doesn't want you using it as a server.
Because the applications you use are compiled for x86 or for x86-64.
Wine on an x86-64 PC works well to run Windows applications. It works particularly well for applications whose developers accept issue reports reported by Wine users, such as j0CC-FamiTracker (chiptune music sequencer), OpenMPT (sample music sequencer), BGB (Game Boy debugger), and FCEUX (NES debugger). They're fully supported on Wine, but they are distributed as Windows/x86 executables because of an underlying dependency on MFC, MFC, Delphi, and Win32 respectively. A counterpart to Wine on Arm would have to actually be an emulator to run these.
If consoles didn't kill PCs, why would Google's streaming efforts do that?
Handhelds did kill handheld PCs like the Nokia N800/N900. What's the PC counterpart to, say, a Nintendo 3DS? The closest thing you can buy in stores is a touch-operated smartphone, and it lacks any sort of keyboard or gamepad out of the box.
However, it should be illegal to present ads on a device you paid the full price for.
Such a law would have to define "full price" in such a way that a company can't claim that full price is half the company's market cap. What would be, say, the "full price" for a year of Google Search service? I'm interested to read how you might approach writing that law.
buy whatever TV looks best, but do NOT put it on the network.
That wouldn't work for a TV that locks out even "dumb TV" features unless you connect it to the network in order to agree to the End User License Agreement for the system software.
the web has grown to require some quite impressive specs, and at this point it would be very hard to sell something you can't browse the web on comfortably, which means there's a lower bound to what can be sold reasonably.
And that lower bound is pretty close to something that can't do more than web and streaming. Let's call it "Chromebook".
The proof is in the pudding! Who hosts their own servers today? Nobody, that's who.
That's more an issue of ISP policy: how the subscriber's downstream to upstream is configured, who gets a routable IP address as opposed to a line in the NAT table, who gets to regularly take incoming connections without risking disconnection for acceptable use policy violation, etc.
As soon as gaming consoles become upgradable and offer performance on par with desktops, the gaming market for desktops disappears entirely (it's already doomed because it's easier to cheat on a PC than a console).
Let me know when more major console games support user-made UI mods and level mods. When console games do support a stripped-down editing interface, it's usually the main gimmick of the game, such as LittleBigPlanet, WarioWare DIY, and Super Mario Maker.
Hell, even Steve Jobs never announced the death of the PC. It may be the "Post PC" era, but he never said they were going to die.
After Windows 8 came out in fourth quarter 2012, entry-level 10.1" x86-64 laptops disappeared in favor of (higher profit margin) convertibles and detachables as well as locked-down Windows RT devices. When netbooks came back, largely as a response to Chromebook late in Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign, the smallest one could buy was 11.6".
He likened the PC to trucks - versatile machines that can do everything, but have limitations of their own, while smartphones and tablets represent other vehicles on the road - able to do their tasks generally with far more efficiency. But as you can see, we have trucks on the road still, because of their utility.
But can someone who doesn't own a truck but occasionally needs to use one rent a truck? Can someone who occasionally needs a PC rent a PC?
Is there a substantial wheel tax penalty for owning a truck compared to a car? Is something analogous contemplated for owning a PC?
There's no operational necessity to save locally-edited documents on Someone Else's Computer(tm)
Say you want to start working on a document on one of your computers and finish on another of your computers. These computers aren't always on the same LAN and turned on at the same time, and at least one of them doesn't even have a USB A port with which to connect a flash drive. (A 5" pocket computer usually won't.) Nor is it always practical to forward a port to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ in your home now that ISPs are putting entire neighborhoods behind a single NAT IPv4 address. So you end up bouncing the files off someone else's computer, be it a storage account that you lease, an email account that you lease, or a VPS that you lease.
No, not every ass-hat is buying a new PC. The speed/power curve on those devices flattened out so there isn't much need.
Even if the speed/power curve has flattened out, rechargeable lithium ion batteries wear out, and replacement rechargeable batteries for a given model stop being manufactured. Screens break, keyboards break, occasionally GPUs overheat, etc. So there'd still be a market for PCs to replace broken PCs. The troublesome part comes when the market for replacing broken PCs is by itself not big enough to sustain economies of scale to continue making a wide range of PCs at home office prices. This already happened to entry-level compact laptops in fourth quarter 2012, for example.
On top of that mom and dad aren't buying junior a PC any longer. They buy a tablet because, gee whiz, it's cheaper (because the damned things are toasters).
Until the high school "introduction to computer science" class that junior is taking gets to a point where a tablet running a smartphone OS is no longer enough to support coursework.
where a tablet does replace a PC or a laptop, its just until that person runs into a situation where they need to use a real application and not Twitter to the their friends or play stupid games.
The fear is that when someone runs into such a situation, they may find it hard to resolve it. Affordable laptops smaller than 11.6" have become hard to find. Parents might not be able to afford a laptop on a week's notice, and they might end up unwilling to buy one at all were it not school-related.
Perceived size of an application's display is proportional to the ratio between the screen size and the viewing distance. If I'm sitting 3.3 times as far from a 30" TV as I'd put my eyes from a 9" tablet, the display on the two will project to the same size on my retinas. This is why CSS's px unit is defined as 1/2688 of the viewing distance (based on a 96 dpi display 28 inches away), not as literal pixels.
But you're correct that the desktop use case doesn't put the 30" quite that far away. Phone apps on a tablet have the same problem.
At least sometime in the past three years, either I or a family member has worked in a job where at least one of the following assumptions has not held.
Application availability for platform
Though I have seen several password managers for smartphones, I haven't seen a lot of them for flip phones.
Device policy
Running a password manager on a phone and using it at work requires an office policy that allows carrying a personal phone on your person while working.
Network connection
Running a password manager on a phone and using it at work requires either a password manager that works offline, an office that has a guest network so that the password manager can reach the Internet, or a $10/week raise to cover a cellular data plan.
Password length and complexity
A long-time password manager user in the habit of generating long, entropy-dense passwords, such as the base64 encoding of a 128-bit random string, is likely to have trouble hand-keying them off the phone's display all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Which operating system with a GUI and installable apps marketed to residential end users isn't proprietary? Windows is proprietary, macOS is proprietary, iOS is proprietary, Android has been gradually moving functionality out of AOSP which is free and into Google Play Services which is proprietary, and video game consoles are definitely proprietary.
VS Code is great, free, so why not use it?
Because it uses Electron, and the employer has declined the RAM upgrade required to run multiple applications that use Electron without thrashing swap.
User mods are a BAD thing if you're doing competitive play!
If all players in a friend match are playing with the same set of mods, I don't see how they're a bad thing. Even in stranger matches, I don't see how an accessibility mod, such as one that remaps buttons, increases text size, or makes colors more color-blind friendly, gives an unfair advantage.
For me my password manager has always been a keepass database synced over my own personal nextcloud.
Does your "own personal nextcloud" run on a server in your home or a VPS that you lease?
It also lets you set the rules when you generate a password, so if I know it's a password I'll have to enter in a touch screen, or over a playstation controller etc... then I turn off special characters etc...
And sometimes these rules change. For example, you might set your Microsoft account's password to something decently strong if you're just using it for Outlook.com. But then you feel a need to weaken it when you find yourself repeatedly keying it into a PC keyboard to log in to a Windows 8.1 or 10 PC with your Microsoft account, and then weaken it further when you find yourself keying it into an Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller.
disk encryption is possible, but unless it's use is listed as a precondition to the program's proof of security, the proof is potentially meaningless in the real world
Then I hereby propose extending the proof thus to make it more meaningful. A proof can be amended; it need not be discarded outright.
your compiler may pay lip service to memset_s
Then replace use of memset_s in the proof with use of each operating system's counterpart to memset_s.
Say someone does decide to save up enough money from his or her day jobs to incorporate and start building games. One thing I realized when considering going this route is that not everybody who has worked in a video game studio is skilled in all parts of the process. Could you recommend any good resources for a game developer to build skills in marketing, both to promote a game to the public and to promote a game to the console makers who operate the storefronts?
There are literally people making games for free and they're better than a lot of the people getting paid
If this is the case, the scarce resource is not developers as much as marketing. It costs money to bring even a finished PC game to consoles so that users uninterested in PC maintenance rigmarole or behind a restrictive download cap can play.
Why do you think it's now impossible to make games with a small group or solo dev?
You might need a "small group" just for the organizational and accounting aspects of dealing with the console makers that act as gatekeepers to your market. For example, the PlayStation developer signup form currently requires each developer to be a corporation or LLC with its own tax ID, an office with a static IPv4 address, and a domain name with website and email under that domain. SIE declines to do business with sole proprietorships, and many ISPs offer a static IP only to offices in commercially zoned areas, not to home offices.
You don't need to be always-online. You just need to be online when you want to download a game. Same as buying a game from Steam.
It might work in urban areas within the footprint of fiber, cable, and DSL. But users behind a satellite or cellular home Internet with a 10 GB per month quota and a $10 per GB overage fee would find both Xbox purchases just as cost-prohibitive as Steam purchases.
When my XBox 360 dies, that will probably be the end of my gaming, because I'm not sure you can buy a console which is purely offline these days.
You can buy a RetroUSB AVS or a Retro-Bit Retro Entertainment System. These play nearly all games made for the Family Computer (Famicom) and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), including titles from Broke Studio, Retrotainment, Sly Dog, KHan Games, Spoony Bard, and other indie studios that specialize in new NES games.
The desktop PC is going nowhere.
The install base may continue to shrink as more targeted solutions claim niches. But desktops are not going to die.
Even if the desktop PC doesn't die, the laptop PC might. In fourth quarter 2012, the install base of 10.1" laptops shrank enough that manufacturers stopped making 10.1" laptops. This disappointed those few people for whom a 10.1" laptop was optimal, such as myself at the time. People whose 10.1" laptop broke (or whose original battery and replacement battery could no longer hold a charge) had to settle for buying an 11.6" laptop and the slightly bigger, more conspicuous bag that it requires. The closer you get to a traditional laptop case, the more attractive it appears to would-be thieves.
And even if the desktop PC doesn't die, it may become expensive enough that only established companies, not home users, can afford one. This would make it more expensive to start a home-based business.
You still have to have hardware on the other side to run the stuff... why not get a real computer?
Because applications' system requirements often exceed the slow CPU and low-speed Internet available to a smartphone. It may be more cumbersome and expensive to carry the required hardware, the required battery, and the required high-speed Internet connection with you. Or because you have "a real computer" at home, but your ISP doesn't want you using it as a server.
Completely usable systems for less than $50
Just why do I care about Microsoft ?
Because the applications you use are compiled for x86 or for x86-64.
Wine on an x86-64 PC works well to run Windows applications. It works particularly well for applications whose developers accept issue reports reported by Wine users, such as j0CC-FamiTracker (chiptune music sequencer), OpenMPT (sample music sequencer), BGB (Game Boy debugger), and FCEUX (NES debugger). They're fully supported on Wine, but they are distributed as Windows/x86 executables because of an underlying dependency on MFC, MFC, Delphi, and Win32 respectively. A counterpart to Wine on Arm would have to actually be an emulator to run these.
If consoles didn't kill PCs, why would Google's streaming efforts do that?
Handhelds did kill handheld PCs like the Nokia N800/N900. What's the PC counterpart to, say, a Nintendo 3DS? The closest thing you can buy in stores is a touch-operated smartphone, and it lacks any sort of keyboard or gamepad out of the box.
However, it should be illegal to present ads on a device you paid the full price for.
Such a law would have to define "full price" in such a way that a company can't claim that full price is half the company's market cap. What would be, say, the "full price" for a year of Google Search service? I'm interested to read how you might approach writing that law.
buy whatever TV looks best, but do NOT put it on the network.
That wouldn't work for a TV that locks out even "dumb TV" features unless you connect it to the network in order to agree to the End User License Agreement for the system software.
the web has grown to require some quite impressive specs, and at this point it would be very hard to sell something you can't browse the web on comfortably, which means there's a lower bound to what can be sold reasonably.
And that lower bound is pretty close to something that can't do more than web and streaming. Let's call it "Chromebook".
(Especially prior to Crostini.)
The proof is in the pudding! Who hosts their own servers today? Nobody, that's who.
That's more an issue of ISP policy: how the subscriber's downstream to upstream is configured, who gets a routable IP address as opposed to a line in the NAT table, who gets to regularly take incoming connections without risking disconnection for acceptable use policy violation, etc.
As soon as gaming consoles become upgradable and offer performance on par with desktops, the gaming market for desktops disappears entirely (it's already doomed because it's easier to cheat on a PC than a console).
Let me know when more major console games support user-made UI mods and level mods. When console games do support a stripped-down editing interface, it's usually the main gimmick of the game, such as LittleBigPlanet, WarioWare DIY, and Super Mario Maker.
Hell, even Steve Jobs never announced the death of the PC. It may be the "Post PC" era, but he never said they were going to die.
After Windows 8 came out in fourth quarter 2012, entry-level 10.1" x86-64 laptops disappeared in favor of (higher profit margin) convertibles and detachables as well as locked-down Windows RT devices. When netbooks came back, largely as a response to Chromebook late in Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign, the smallest one could buy was 11.6".
He likened the PC to trucks - versatile machines that can do everything, but have limitations of their own, while smartphones and tablets represent other vehicles on the road - able to do their tasks generally with far more efficiency. But as you can see, we have trucks on the road still, because of their utility.
But can someone who doesn't own a truck but occasionally needs to use one rent a truck? Can someone who occasionally needs a PC rent a PC?
Is there a substantial wheel tax penalty for owning a truck compared to a car? Is something analogous contemplated for owning a PC?
There's no operational necessity to save locally-edited documents on Someone Else's Computer(tm)
Say you want to start working on a document on one of your computers and finish on another of your computers. These computers aren't always on the same LAN and turned on at the same time, and at least one of them doesn't even have a USB A port with which to connect a flash drive. (A 5" pocket computer usually won't.) Nor is it always practical to forward a port to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ in your home now that ISPs are putting entire neighborhoods behind a single NAT IPv4 address. So you end up bouncing the files off someone else's computer, be it a storage account that you lease, an email account that you lease, or a VPS that you lease.
No, not every ass-hat is buying a new PC. The speed/power curve on those devices flattened out so there isn't much need.
Even if the speed/power curve has flattened out, rechargeable lithium ion batteries wear out, and replacement rechargeable batteries for a given model stop being manufactured. Screens break, keyboards break, occasionally GPUs overheat, etc. So there'd still be a market for PCs to replace broken PCs. The troublesome part comes when the market for replacing broken PCs is by itself not big enough to sustain economies of scale to continue making a wide range of PCs at home office prices. This already happened to entry-level compact laptops in fourth quarter 2012, for example.
On top of that mom and dad aren't buying junior a PC any longer. They buy a tablet because, gee whiz, it's cheaper (because the damned things are toasters).
Until the high school "introduction to computer science" class that junior is taking gets to a point where a tablet running a smartphone OS is no longer enough to support coursework.
where a tablet does replace a PC or a laptop, its just until that person runs into a situation where they need to use a real application and not Twitter to the their friends or play stupid games.
The fear is that when someone runs into such a situation, they may find it hard to resolve it. Affordable laptops smaller than 11.6" have become hard to find. Parents might not be able to afford a laptop on a week's notice, and they might end up unwilling to buy one at all were it not school-related.
Perceived size of an application's display is proportional to the ratio between the screen size and the viewing distance. If I'm sitting 3.3 times as far from a 30" TV as I'd put my eyes from a 9" tablet, the display on the two will project to the same size on my retinas. This is why CSS's px unit is defined as 1/2688 of the viewing distance (based on a 96 dpi display 28 inches away), not as literal pixels.
But you're correct that the desktop use case doesn't put the 30" quite that far away. Phone apps on a tablet have the same problem.
Does installing GNURoot Debian (or Termux) and XServer XSDL apps from Google Play Store give a user experience anywhere near what you suggest?
At least sometime in the past three years, either I or a family member has worked in a job where at least one of the following assumptions has not held.
Application availability for platform Though I have seen several password managers for smartphones, I haven't seen a lot of them for flip phones. Device policy Running a password manager on a phone and using it at work requires an office policy that allows carrying a personal phone on your person while working. Network connection Running a password manager on a phone and using it at work requires either a password manager that works offline, an office that has a guest network so that the password manager can reach the Internet, or a $10/week raise to cover a cellular data plan. Password length and complexity A long-time password manager user in the habit of generating long, entropy-dense passwords, such as the base64 encoding of a 128-bit random string, is likely to have trouble hand-keying them off the phone's display all the time.