231–240 of 469 posts
It was a page of text where some words were underlined and blue. And if you clicked on a blue word, it would jump you to a new page before you were even finished reading the first page!
I remember thinking how dumb that was and must be for people with short attention spans. Uninstall and move on. This WWW thing is going nowhere…
Not quite in the 90's but a bit later I was sure that when Moore's Law would stop we would see the trend move to cores. I wrote an article[1] about this change and how we should all prepare for it :-D If I could tell my young self that as of 2021 we are not talking about kilo- or mega-cores but that my new M1 which I am very excited about is a mere 8, I would have been severely disappointed. [1] https://www.gamasutra…
We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application. I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top. SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of busin…
When I was choosing my university major, everybody was telling me don't choose computer science. The job market is saturated and everybody is a software engineer, choose electronics. I chose CS. Fast-forward today, most of the people I know who were in electronic have switched to software.
The field to look at was cognitive science or neurology, which in fairness makes some sense given where machine learning is today.
Today, people are trying to get into tech companies, and those who take one boot camp course call themselves “software engineers.”
I used to work in the telecom world back then. I would have thought that by 2021 the meticulously-architected ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) standard would have replaced the ancient TCP/IP protocol. Nope. Then I would be wrong again, because I would have thought IPv6 would be everywhere...
It doesn't seem like TCP/IP is ever going to die. The closest standard to killing it was OSI.
Not a prediction of the future, but rather something I've found quite funny over the years: watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle. My two favorite have been... 1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat. 2. Local processin…
I thought all I ever really did was VS Code, so I got code-server installed and everything else was mostly online anyway (Office 365, Exchange, Wordpress, etc), but the biggest pain point was the lack of a native terminal and ssh.
Even though VSCode has a great terminal built in, it seemed so wasteful to load into it just to open a terminal window.
After a couple of months, I just switched to MacOS, and still use my code-server install instead of VSCode, and 100% prefer it.
I hoped for a future free of Microsoft software, and free of UIs designed by software developers. I hoped for a future with no drive letters. The first two are successful: I use no Microsoft software in my life, and many user experiences are now designed by specialists. Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them.
Genuine question, trying to imagine how/why I would not want drive letters. Maybe each device should just use the uuid set by the manufacturer? But then that's too ugly to display in a file explorer.. and often I don't just have 1 partition per physical device, so multiple mount points.. and other times I have 1 mount point with multiple backing devices (mirrors/raid).
Not quite in the 90's but a bit later I was sure that when Moore's Law would stop we would see the trend move to cores. I wrote an article[1] about this change and how we should all prepare for it :-D If I could tell my young self that as of 2021 we are not talking about kilo- or mega-cores but that my new M1 which I am very excited about is a mere 8, I would have been severely disappointed. [1] https://www.gamasutra…
I also thought we'd see new paradigms in GUI and desktop design take over, probably involving 3D.
Everything related to how the internet has developed has been both awe inspiring and deeply disappointing.
I hoped for a future free of Microsoft software, and free of UIs designed by software developers. I hoped for a future with no drive letters. The first two are successful: I use no Microsoft software in my life, and many user experiences are now designed by specialists. Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them.
> Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them. They don't, really. The Windows NT kernel has a unified namespace — it's just not one with a filesystem at its root, but rather an object namespace, so users (and even developers) are almost never exposed to it. C:\ is just win32.dll-wrapper-ese for the NT object path \\?\Volume{some-guid}\, where \\? is the NT object (local)…
I use storage spaces on Windows 10 on 1 machine with 2 drives to mirror them.. so basically a software raid. It's pretty interesting and it just works, I don't have to babysit it. Same with Zfs mirroring. Wonder by how much these two software mirroring techniques differ from each other.