It's true the economic restraints of COMECON bolstered DIY culture all across eastern bloc, a lot of which remains to this day.

It had it's downsides as well - the hardware at hand was often ancient and the planned state production we relied on for a lot of source components was very inefficient because of communist cadres - basically incompetent bureaucrats created a lot of e-waste by manufacturing useless junk (a lot of which was not salvageable even for DIY) - buggy ASIC clones, poorly done circuit boards, non-existent QA and braindamaged designs, you name it. Think incompetent CEOs of monopolistic megacorp wreaking havoc with nepotism/cronyism/office politics and there being no board to dismiss em. Thats what communist cadres were like, good technical designs and processes were rejected for political reasons way too often.

fukovo tetris2 represent ^_^

FWIW the title is a bit incorrect, as both hackaday posts deal mostly with computer scene in czechoslovakia, not soviet bloc as a whole - MM is recycling/abridging existing computer history series from root.cz into english.

Just the usual butthurt and sour grapes.

I'm hoping it will be a pleasant surprise. There is history of decent open software output from IBM, I'm sure sendmail "community" was pretty butthurt about Postfix too, as IBM simply took good protocol with horrible implementation and re-wrote the daemon from scratch and got it right.

virtual versions of their currency online.

It's really, really tricky to do - a decentralized peg to external fiat currency with no central/internal control on-chain.

a rather flawed version based on artificial scarcity

Well, yeah. The get rich quick pyramid distribution is necessary to induce gold fever and guarantee hype (as seen in perpetual carousel or half-assed alts dangerously overselling their wares). People still wanted the stable fiat peg for other stuff, eg on chain fiat/btc exchange. Not going to happen (unless you make it a underwritten fiat XCP/CC asset, at which point it's no longer on-chain decentralised) unless central banks and government bond markets are actually on that chain, ie internal to the system.

The same story for a lot of old and hairy codebases. Try glibc some day if you really want to see things.

A team with leadship in the realm of security

Yes, some people take an issue with that, fe:

https://blog.hboeck.de/archive...

Some naysayers are of the opinion that Theo & his peck are good at writing well designed software from scratch (eg openssh), however their "securing" of existing codebases (eg bsd kernel and libc) ended up in trainwreck. libressl is sadly the case of the latter.

For what it's worth, NCC is not some self-appointed security snake oils but industry behemot who actually does software assurance. They harbor a lot of auditing talent (iSEC partners from top of my head).

Conversely, your nirvana fallacy does not hold up. OpenBSD was "designed" to be secure, just to become a laughing stock for reasons you outlined. All code without formal proof (ie all of systems code written in C) is potentially vulnerable no matter what. All you can do is throw best auditing talent at it and hope for the best.

The mining operation doesn't give an advantage to early adopters

If it walks like a ponzi (early adopter with well timed exit profits massively), quacks like a ponzi (you need to recruit more suckers into the scheme to profit) and has feathers like a ponzi (greed is the main incentive to participate), most laypeople will perceive it as a ponzi.

That being said, calling it a ponzi is indeed not fair, as one attribute is not shared - ponzis or penny stocks, or whatever have no interval value at all, thus the inevitable crash to 0.

But when you tack some value to it, however dubious, (be it herbal medicine; or be magic internet payment system), and use ponzi as a carrier for viral marketing scheme, you get multi level marketing - or so called pyramid scheme. When pyramids crash, they do so to inherent internal value as determined by participant consensus.

People conflate MLM with ponzis often because of the many shared attributes. Just like recruiting for AmWay alienates your friends and family, so does bitcoin, as people realize the distribution is pretty much based on the same principle.

Bitcoin is of course here to stay, for better or worse, however I doubt it ever becomes mainstream. Too much of world population need to have this illusion of just world and will gladly accept keynesian system (with obscured unfairness) over aggresively austrian one for a long time.

Now now careful here with basement dwelling remarks, judging from the butthurt replies you've struck a sensitive chord here.

Currently, smart watch makers are desperately trying to do ton of stuff, and suck at most of it (yes, including showing time). These things can't be more than dumb screen terminal for the time being, yet most vendors are afraid to market it as such. You might be interested in pebble watch, actually a fun piece of programmable hardware on your wrists, compared to lobotomised, underpowered android devices, or outright obscure+irrelevant+proprietary systems.

panel today than it's to get a 100+ Hz CRT

CRTs of the higher end, while specced 75hz can often run at 100-120 with proper modeline (and comparably lower resolution).

But yeah, my info is at least 5 years out of date, you can't exactly buy new CRTs these days, while gaming 100hz TFTs seem to be around.

It can do far more these days, NSE scripts are like nessus (which is hopelessly outdated) on steroids.

Amateur LAN party organiser (>50 players) with anecdotal sample here.

Does resolution matter?

It depends. When the game demands it, ie frantic action shooter, like q3a or cs and even the slower ones like arma/cod/battlefield, most players will sacrifice visual details and/or resolution till they get smooth 45-60 FPS.

Conversely games not that epilepsy-inducing (RTS and anything slower than that up to casual gaming), 30fps is often enough and the rest of GPU power can be spent on finer details.

25 in europe or 30 in US is certain enough for movies, as we're used to it, you get that "cinematic feel". We're so used to it there's usually even an option to enable motion blur (which simulates real world camera) in most games. While rod cells have pretty long cool down time too, it relates only to detail perception. Motion perception is magnitude more demanding - seasoned FPS players can tell difference between 50 and 100FPS (yay CRTs, TFT panels like that are not widely available).

25fps is 40ms reaction on frame alone, which is awfuly slow. Jerky framerate is alright for casual gaming on gamepad, but gets pretty nauseating on fast paced shooters with free mouse look. It also affects gameplay - an U-turn often takes less than 50-100ms - then it's a matter of glimpsing something midway or not.

Perhaps grandparent was talking about consoles approaching PCs hardware wise with each gen - with some small amount of junk to keep it obfusated enough for DRM. At the end of that evolution chain you get basically a PC, with hardware DRM. And hopefuly with modular components, otherwise consoles can't really ever compete on manufacture cost vs performance (let's ignore current practice of hardware subsidy).

Do you know who Jacob Appelbaum is?

Ironically, thats why most people shush it, because it is ioerror. The guy definitely knows how to make good PR, thats why Tor project keeps him aboard as a necessary spokesperson evil, however don't conflate talking heads with project contributors (he does basically nothing but ranting). Don't you think targeting someone who whines about it repeatedly since circa 2011 would be such a smart move?

Chances are it's just the usual wikileaks-tier PR, be it paranoia or calculated (usually it's both).