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290 points rbanffy | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.629s | source
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chuckadams ◴[] No.44006767[source]
I just can't get me enough of Raymond Chen and his wonderful walks down the dustier paths of memory lane. Feels like a more innocent time where I didn't feel like I was imminently going to be turned into paperclips.
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avidiax ◴[] No.44007294[source]
Yeah, the sense at that time was that you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you if you aren't careful. Of course, the machines haven't really done anything to us. They've just been locked down and remotely controlled to deliver ads and misinformation.
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EvanAnderson ◴[] No.44008269[source]
> ...you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you...

Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping.

The machine isn't trying to master me. The people who made the machine are. I wish people in the tech industry wouldn't be party to taking away computing freedom. It pays well, though, and they can console themselves with "It's not a computer, it's a phone"-type delusions (at least until the day "the man" comes for their PCs).

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bigfatkitten ◴[] No.44010501[source]
> In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc).

Not if you’re a mainframe customer. Capacity based licensing has been a standard practice in the mainframe world for around 50 years.

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EvanAnderson ◴[] No.44011284[source]
Part of the magic of the personal computing revolution was breaking away from these shackles.
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1. bigfatkitten ◴[] No.44011359[source]
As a society, we’ve since decided that we actually prefer to rent everything and to have no agency.
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2. EvanAnderson ◴[] No.44011461[source]
I don't think the marketplace does a good job of explaining the difference to people. That might change things. Maybe. Probably not. >sigh<
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3. fragmede ◴[] No.44011717[source]
On the other hand, the confusingly named DIVX (not the codec) expiring DVD-esque format (so you could play the DVD for 48 hours after purchase, and then after that you had to pay to watch it again. The format totally failed in the market and brought down Circuit City.

So that suggests it's a user education issue.