This is just my little brain dump section. For anything that doesn't fit into any of the other catagories.

Do you ever notice how redundant a lot of industries are these days? So much of technology is "solved" for what we use it for. Think about it, what do you do with your computer? I for one edit text files, play video, browse the web, play some games which were often low requirement games when they came out, which is often 5 years at the least and often more. If one day my computer got replaced with an Intel Core2 Quad from 2009 I doubt I would notice for a very long time. I'm willing to bet you're much in the same boat. This is why, with the exception of storage, I very rarely ever buy new computer components. There's simply nothing out there where a cheaper and slightly older solution wouldn't work just as well. I'm sitting here trying to think what benefit more modern hardware could bring to my webserver or my Minecraft server and I'm completely blanking. We have technology more than powerful enough for a solid 90% of the population to do anything they could dream of, and no future uses for the excess power. I suspect an argument could be made for AI, but I can't think of a single time AI has been more useful than a simple book. However, if computers are so redundant then why are people still buying them? The simple answer: we live in a society blah blah blah. People look at shiny new thing, see how it will increase their perceived status in the tribe, and buy it. A perfect example is when some trip mates in my German trip were bragging about how they had their phone for over two years before they upgraded! I inquired their reason for upgrading, and she said that it was because the old one wasn't powerful enough for schoolwork. Sure. The more complicated answer that says these people have some merit I've discovered by running some normal people (not vaguely deli-meat smelling geek) software on an old computer. As I've mentioned in my computers page I've had to install Windows 10 on my Dell Latitude E5530 from 2012, and while on Linux Mint despite being mid range hardware from over 10 years ago running a heavy Linux distro I never noticed it was that old or slow or whatever. The experience was virtually identical to that of my powerful and modern desktop. However, with Windows it became slow and annoying to use, which is probably the experience most people have with old hardware. In the world of FOSS and otherwise obscure software there is no practical benefit to creating the software, so the software becomes the end unto itself. People work on it because they enjoy working on it, and it is one of my strongest beliefs that the best things are made when the creators truly love what they're doing. As such, more effort is spent making the code "good" and optimized, and so it runs on slower hardware better. There is also somewhat of feedback loop where well optimized but obscure software makes otherwise outdated computers usable, and so the users (like me) adopt a mindset of old computers being practical. These user are often also developers so then not only do they strive to make optimized code but they also carry the belief that old computers should be able to run modern software with them into their programming thus creating more software that runs well etc. etc. The exact opposite happens in corporate environments like Microsoft's where code monkey wants to keep his job so he makes a new feature to impress boss who doesn't know the first thing about software. Feature is developed without care so it runs poorly on old computers, consumers not knowing there's an alternative buy a new computer so the feature they won't use works, then the developer thinks that no one uses old computers so what's it matter if it runs poorly on them anyway.

There could theoretically be room for innovation in the market with a low power computer running very well optimized code, but at the end of the day that's not innovation. We have that already, it's called a raspberry pi and whatever -NIX you prefer. This would simply be a shift in marketing from a maker tool to a desktop computer.

Why is there no open source queuing system for sound in plays? When I was tasked with setting up all of the sound queues for a production I quickly found that the defacto standard you're crazy if you use anything else software for the job was QLab, only available on Macintosh. Unfortunate, but not that big of an issue. Or at least that's what I thought, but upon trying to install MacOS onto a 2012 Macbook, a computer that should be perfectly capable of running a modern operating system and sound software, I simply could not do it. I tried every ISO imager I had, every USB, every DVD, stock DVDs and upgrading, and never once was I able to get to a MacOS desktop. This is why I'll never consider Macs to be user-friendly. If you cannot install an OS on your computer, it is not user friendly. Macs work the way idiots expect computers to work. My mom has started using a Macintosh for work, since it's what "creative pros" use, but after failing to be able to install Google Chrome (turns out on the install screen rather than clicking, double clicking, or anything sensible, you need to drag and drop the chrome icon "onto" your system. This is incredibly unintuitive and neither of us could figure it out until looking up a tutorial. I've never had to go to such lengths to install a basic and well maintained and documented program on Windows, Linux, Haiku OS, or BSD.) she has become somewhat jaded to their outward sex appeal. After staying up till 2 AM trying to get MacOS 10 installed on a modern computer and failing miserably despite having for years installed "harder" operating systems quite easily, I installed Microsoft Windows on an old business class tank of a Dell and easily download Sound Cue System and never looked back. This experience has convinced me that there is no use to Macs in this world beyond being fairly decently built computers, at least the ones from 2014 and prior. I have no experience with the new ones as I rarely purchase new computers, and I almost never pay any more than a pittance for them.

This has brought to light something for me though. In areas such as these there is simply no open source software. Maybe this is because there is simply no overlap in interests, but this obviously isn't true. There's me for one, but my old mentor I believe was a developer at Mozilla working on FireFox. In honesty it's probably since very few people are aware of this software segment to begin with. The people in the booth are naturally rarely recognized if things go to plan, and only when things don't go to plan do people realize there's software, technology, and people involved. On the other hand with things like Adobe Photoshop when people see something created with it there's somewhat of a nutural response of "someone made that with something!" as is more common with visual arts. It's also far harder to demonstrate in use, for example you can show someone a pretty picture made with Krita or Gimp and they'll say "wow", but it's a pain in the ass to get anyone to care about sound queuing for children's musicals. Believe me, I've tried.