I still uninstall it, even though I know it's improved a bit. I just can't get to the point of trusting it, or see the point for yet another layer of latency and bugs between programs generating audio and the sound card. They should have spent all that effort making a nice interface to dmix or something. Rather than bash ALSA for being "Linux only", then turn around and create systemd which is Linux only by design. I mean, we get it. You're the next Miguel de Icaza. The savior of Linux, coming to save us from the terror of text files, open standards, and clean dependencies. People must be forgetting the hell that was CORBA and Linux circa 2001 or so. You still can't install many apps without installing half of GNOME.
Sierra was notorious for making games that had to be solved in just the right way. LSL1-3, for example, you would come to a dead end if you didn't pick up some item early on. How would you know to pick up that item? Or even that you were missing an item? You wouldn't. They were still incredibly fun, though.
I played a bit of the Walking Dead. It was well done, but seemed more of a limited-action RPG than a puzzle/adventure game that LucasArts and Sierra were known for.
I'm not exactly sure Racket existed when this project was created. Furthermore, Racket is non-standard. Which is really the issue with Scheme. Prior to Racket there were SLIB and SRFIs. Which are still non-standard, but at least more universal.
Inspire is not quite the word I would use, I think. The reason so much was done on the 386 is because Intel finally dropped that god-awful segmented addressing in favor of a flat memory model. In addition, protected mode became actually useful and was necessary for a Unix-like OS to be created (where you have multitasking and protected sections of RAM). Doom was also a killer-app for the 386.
There are Unix-like OS's on MMU-less architectures. Though of course there are limitations (like not supporting fork(), only vfork()). But you're right that it made it a lot more attractive to try to do a proper Unix.
There were even commercial Unix workstations based on MMU-less CPU's. An example is the Sun 1 workstation, that used an 68000 (Since the first version - the 68000 - is not fully restartable, various hacks were used on 68000 designs requiring an MMU; I'm not sure what the Sun-1 did, but one example that was used was running two of them in lockstep, and have the MMU halt the second one when the first one triggered a page fault, so that it'd be possible to inspect the CPU state before a bus-error would mess it up. From the 68010 onwards this was unnecessary)
I don't see the relevance. I, too, can easily find dead-end hardware that was expensive years ago that no one wants today. Most are just happy someone is taking that crap out of their hands. It's big, heavy, has strange power requirements, people forgot how to even turn it on and get it running, etc.
Yeah, I don't know how it is in SF. But in LA, you're competing with multiple cash offers, usually quite a bit over asking price. First time home buyers are pretty much left to the sob story route (that is, writing a letter to the owner and praying).
They are. And so is Boeing, Raytheon, EA, and Blizzard if you're near Irvine.
LA is incredibly diverse, despite people harping on about Hollywood. You can work in this town and never even care "the industry" is here. It becomes background noise. This is also why LA will never be defined by "Silicon Beach." People on the east side don't go west. (For good reason, I might add. Your life will be one hellish commute after another)
the "current climate" is one where security defects lead to highly visible public witch hunts and shaming and then the forking of code (see: OpenSSL). OpenSSL only just today got funding and an additional two developers. Despite pretty much the entire world using and depending on it for years now. Despite the fact that it's open source and anyone anywhere could have taken the time to conduct an audit.
