The Lone Coder

https://midrange.tedium.co/issues/the-lone-coder-505212

by weare138 • 5 years ago

105 23 5 years ago

midrange.tedium.co

karmakaze• 5 years ago

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.

bombcar2• 5 years ago

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.

tux2• 5 years ago

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

justinsaccount• 5 years ago

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.

tux2• 5 years ago

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.

JKCalhoun• 5 years ago

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.

thitcanh• 5 years ago

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

johnchristopher• 5 years ago

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.

hellbannedguy• 5 years ago

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.

illys• 5 years ago

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.

leonroy• 5 years ago

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?

hlandau2• 5 years ago

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).

dehrmann• 5 years ago

Are there any laptops this open?

angrais• 5 years ago

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.

bombcar2• 5 years ago

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.

wott• 5 years ago

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.)

avhception2• 5 years ago

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

avhception2• 5 years ago

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 :)

latte• 5 years ago

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

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

hyperpallium2• 5 years ago

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

The Lone Coder

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