I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.
There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.
They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.
This has bothered me from the start. I was not one of the buyers, so I have a different take on the issue. From all his writings, you get a sense that Cringely was a big-idea man, but he had very little ability to follow through on his next great idea or venture. It seems like he would lose interest once the hard part of building a business started to appear. In this case, it looks like someone revved him up on the idea of selling a low-cost Mineserver, I think it was his son, but he probably mispriced the true cost and did not calculate the amount of work it would take to get the project finished. I don't think he started out with the idea of not delivering the product. He was just not capable of following through on his grand ideas. Some people are dreamers, and others are doers. He was a dreamer, and you could sense it in all of his writings.
That's the thing with Kickstarter you never really know if you will ever get the product. This project just became one of the many Kickstarter projects that failed.
There has apparently been no confirmation of his death - Wikipedia still lists him as alive and editors there say there's insufficient evidence. If the linked article is true, maybe he faked his death.
>There is no scenario where you have enough time to pick up a bunch of clothes but nobody thinks to grab the irreplaceable electronic parts that you spent $90,000 on.
Gonna have to disagree on this one. A handful of clothes can be held in your hands. A bunch of electronics can't. That's for insurance to sort out at that point.
The blindness bit had me wondering why the author didn't just look up info on the subject instead of making things up in the middle of a post about honesty.
His gears start slipping halfway through the article and it ends with a weird parasocial vibe.
>Cringely posted pictures of the boards, the SD cards that would hold the open-source Minecraft server software, and the plastic shells etched by a laser cutter that would serve as the cases.
For others who have played plenty of Minecraft but never heard the term "mineserver" used, sounds like he was trying to rewrite the Minecraft game server software.
That's the ambiguity in the way we use some words like "server". If I say I'm going to "build a web server", you don't know if I'm developing software to compete with nginx, or building an x86 box and installing nginx on it.
Building a mineserver today feels like it would be a lot easier with say a N100/N150 mini PC then with all of the modern open source Minecraft software components like Paper or Crafty. The idea was good, just too lofty and underpriced. Also fairly niche. Making it plug and play for nontechnical parents is what made the requirements difficult.
In Sikhism, God is understood as 'Truth' ("The name of God is Truth" is the first line in their holy book), and to be aligned with God is to be aligned with the Truth.
I don't claim to be a paragon of honesty or virtue, but through my experiences I've generally understood that lack of virtue can and does trap one in cycles of misery, anxiety & suffering.
I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.
There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.
They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.
That's the thing with Kickstarter you never really know if you will ever get the product. This project just became one of the many Kickstarter projects that failed.
Gonna have to disagree on this one. A handful of clothes can be held in your hands. A bunch of electronics can't. That's for insurance to sort out at that point.
His gears start slipping halfway through the article and it ends with a weird parasocial vibe.
For others who have played plenty of Minecraft but never heard the term "mineserver" used, sounds like he was trying to rewrite the Minecraft game server software.
I don't claim to be a paragon of honesty or virtue, but through my experiences I've generally understood that lack of virtue can and does trap one in cycles of misery, anxiety & suffering.