asciilifeform: unfortunately merely talking about 'monopolist scum must die' -- does not kill any; intel still would answer, if octopus could speak, 'aaah lol, have fun porting eulora to abacus'
asciilifeform: ( twist: 'fyootoor tech', mircea_popescu will reveal, is gurls with abacus )
asciilifeform: and -- for completeness -- Fyootoor Tech that mircea_popescu knows about, and asciilifeform -- does not.
asciilifeform: this, afaik, leaves 'get considerably reduced expectations of what comp can do, and start making out of 1980s parts, and TTL' -- which is great, except no bitcoin
asciilifeform: the gabriel_laddel approach -- 'oh hey i'll just pave over the swamp, nothing will ever fall through the pavement' -- also does not work, and is quite destructive to the sanity of folks who attempt it
asciilifeform: ye olde chip racket, as exemplified by xilinx (see thread), where 'by the time the docs leak, not only we stopped making it 15 years ago but go and buy even secondhand one!' -- remains operational.
asciilifeform: 'is mircea_popescu referring to some concrete approach, or just a generic prof.brin-style 'THINK!YOUMAGGOTS''
asciilifeform: not missed , that's what prompted the line of thought
asciilifeform: i thought about getting one with amd g-series -- and was at the point of seriously attempting it when the latter began to show signs of death
asciilifeform: btw mircea_popescu baking a pc-style mobo is not expensive, our existing pcb people could quite readily do it. the problem is 'out of what'. the necessary docs are not available, never leaked, nor the firmware signing keys (still not phuctored!1111 damn)
asciilifeform: trinque: aha. and antennae spirals on ~every die.
asciilifeform: ^ '...and one going nowhere, just for show!'
asciilifeform: they went to tlb cache, and other nonsense to make winblowz slightly less 'molasses'.
asciilifeform: the cheap transistors -- did not go to make bounds-checking memory, no
asciilifeform: and this is precisely what happened to the pc !
asciilifeform: symbolic of the traditional idiocy of the 'rich poor' man
asciilifeform: not long ago i saw a photo of some american mega-rich d00d, forget who, and nobody cares, his refrigerator, was full of synthetic 'budveiser' beer☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: ( pretty sure we had 'the' dma thread not long ago )
asciilifeform: on all comps, american, soviet, martian.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: laugh, but it's the ONE interface that's ~actually~ standard
asciilifeform: the original idea seemed appealing -- to make devices self-describing and conformant to standardized profiles -- 'keyboard', 'block disk', etc
asciilifeform: trinque: fabrice bellard had an interesting experiment, where he stuffed tinycc into kernel, and had it self-build on boot☟︎
asciilifeform: and good chunk of the craptree , in linuxland and winblowzstan both, consists of this crapolade
asciilifeform: the point, sadly, is that the world of 1993, where the machine consists of gadgets you can converse with independently, is gone
asciilifeform: (and this is a 'clean' example, that mostly ~works!)
asciilifeform: so you gotta walk the buses, in turn, before it becomes even meaningful to attempt to speak to the thermometers.
asciilifeform: on many (most?) extant boxes, the thermometers sit on a 'sm' bus (2-3 wire thing, there are several variants) which in turn sits on pci bus
asciilifeform: massive shit show, and it is only ONE example.
asciilifeform: to initialize the phy, you gotta first find and init the mac...
asciilifeform: they have their own, internal bus, that connects'em
asciilifeform: GB nics have 2 parts, that are electrically independent and often made by separate firms, the 'mac' and 'phy' (the latter is what actually drives the transformer, the former -- what you/os think of as 'the nic')☟︎
asciilifeform: often there are subsystems, i'll give concrete example:
