Viewing profile — colinstrickland

Thanks for detailed reply. Yes, the marketing budget for Java was unmatched, but to my eye they were in retreat towards the Enterprise datacentre by 2001. I don't think the Python …

Do you not think O'Reilly Associates fits some of that role? It seemed like Perl had more commercial backing compared to the other scripting languages if anything at that point. Py…

Although Perl auto flattens lists by default, which isn't particularly lisp like.

> Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next Facebook or Amazon these days, do you? Do you not? The…

My naive assumption is that WebKit would give a route towards blink and more mainstream compatibility. Gecko was a perfectly defensible choice in the Maemo era, the landscape just …

(Author) Sorry you had a poor experience, yes my blog "engine" is a hacked together POS that barely works, with hand written CSS, that was mostly built before the mobile first era,…

The platform always suffered from two big architectural missteps. 1 - the native browser being an old firefox/gecko fork embedded into their own UI framework, giving a poor perform…

they did indeed have a crowdfunded tablet that went wrong in supply chain, and basically bankrupted the company. Many funders lost out. That's unfortunate, and perhaps might have b…

I don't remember dselect _downloading_ dependencies, but it may have been capable of resolving the full graph - AFAIK .deb always included dependencies

I think you're right about rpm and yum, actually, my memory failed me. (I was always a Debian user, so didn't have as much direct RedHat experience). I remember yum being really sl…

(author here) Thanks! Almost all of those lessons are much easier with 30+ years of hindsight and counter-examples, of course.

Yes, I am agreeing with you, whilst adding some detail.

Debian had binary packages with dependencies via dpkg from maybe 1994. Automatic recursive downloads, with apt (apt-get) were much later, around 1998. Rpm was launched in 1997. It'…

Sun also tried, and failed, to bring to market, a microprocessor architecture for running Java on metal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAJC

chunks of Amazon were still in Perl while we were building out IMDb.

video editing, multiple projects

not really. They suggested it as a viable option for third party access, because they initially wanted to keep native apps as a first-party advantage, and not open the device unbun…

Apple aquired NeXT and completely reinvented their organisation based on that.

if i recall correctly, if the computer is off the return value is undefined.

It also has an `IsComputerOn` system call.

wow, this list is bringing back all the memories. You're right, there was a short wave of enthusiasm, and some apps which were actually very innovative for the time. I remembered t…

That's a coincidence this surfacing right now. There must be something in the air. I was an enthusiastic BeOS user back when it was a thing (ironically, I switched to it because I …

yeah, i'm British, and I kind of mean 'cool kids' to be a slightly self-deprecating ironic phrase. I meant that all the people I knew that were doing more interesting things seemed…

I wouldn't claim to be a good programmer, but I would point out that back then my exposure to PHP was PHP version 3, and version 4 was only just getting established.

hard to say. Salary was market rate. Stock was 2001-era amzn, which wasn't a bad deal