361–370 of 912 posts
Anyone remember Openmoko, the first commercialised open source smart phone. Was heaps buggy though, not really polished, etc. It’s only redeeming feature was the open source software and hardware (specs?).
The information superhighway The internet before advertising, artificial intelligence, social media and bots. When folks created startups in their bedrooms or garages. The days when google slogan was “don’t be evil”.
That part of the Internet still exists, it's just nobody visits those sites anymore. Communities are moving back to early Internet-like chatrooms like IRC, but now it is Slack, Discord, and the like. Everything private.
I don't like the siloing our information to Discord being a comparison to old internet. We had indexable information in forums that is "lost", not in the literal sense, but because you wouldn't be able to find it without obsessive digging to find it again. Conversations in Discord communities are very surface level and cyclical because it's far less straight forward to keep track of and link to answers from last week let alone two years ago. It is profoundly sad, to be honest.
Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.
Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have. VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for somet…
- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…
Nice list. Some thoughts: - I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line,…
Honestly I'm disappointed the promised XHTML5 never materialized along side HTML5. I guess it just lost steam.
Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.
- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…
XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared.
The "real world" has 2 types of file formats:
(1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common theme is that the data itself is more important that the file format. That's why Adobe Reader will read malformed pdf files written by buggy PDF libraries. And both 7-Zip and Winrar can read malformed zip files with broken headers (because some old buggy Java libraries wrote bad zip files). MS Excel can import malformed csv files. E.g. the Citi bank export to csv wrote a malformed file and it was desirable that MS Excel imported it anyway because the raw data of dollar amounts was more important than the incorrect commas in the csv file -- and -- I have no way of contacting the programmer at Citi to tell them to fix their buggy code that created the bad csv file.
(2) file types where the consumer can control the author (closed-loop): programming language source code like .c, .java, etc or business interchange documents like EDI. There's no need to have a "lenient forgiving" gcc/clang compiler to parse ".c" source code because the "consumer-and-author" will be the same person. I.e. the developer sees the compiler stop at a syntax error so they edit and fix it and try to re-compile. For business interchange formats like EDI, a company like Walmart can tell the vendor to fix their broken EDI files.
XHTML wants to be in group (2) but web surfers can't control all the authors of .html so that's why lenient parsing of HTML "wins". XHTML would work better in a "closed-loop" environment such as a company writing internal documentation for its employees. E.g. an employee handbook can be written in strict XHTML because both the consumers and authors work at the same company. E.g. can't see the vacation policy because the XHTML syntax is wrong?!? Get on the Slack channel and tell the programmer or content author to fix it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner? Why do you think JavaScript is a problem? And a big enough problem to risk destroying open web standards.
The same reason Typescript exists
TypeScript exists for the same reason things like mypy exists, and no one in their right mind claims that python's openness should be threatened just because static typing is convenient.
Anyone remember Openmoko, the first commercialised open source smart phone. Was heaps buggy though, not really polished, etc. It’s only redeeming feature was the open source software and hardware (specs?).
There was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone and it's successor PinePhonePro. Bugginess and general impracticalities brought up to more recent standards. Inflation-adjusted, of course!
Anyone remember Openmoko, the first commercialised open source smart phone. Was heaps buggy though, not really polished, etc. It’s only redeeming feature was the open source software and hardware (specs?).
There was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone and it's successor PinePhonePro. Bugginess and general impracticalities brought up to more recent standards. Inflation-adjusted, of course!