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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

anders.unix.se

181–190 of 241 posts

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to st…

In Windows it is a bit odd anyway, as anything drawn using GDI or GDI+ goes through the CPU. This includes the "classic" interface. For accelerated interfaces (Aero), the GPU is involved (but don't ask me how - perhaps someone could elaborate?), so on rubbish GPUs it may be slower than going through the CPU, perhaps? Windows should tell you that your computer is rubbish so won't attempt to use the Aero interface. If…

It's entirely possible that in this time period and for the hardware in question (aging corporate workstations), there may have been very poor to nonexistent GPU support in the onboard video chipset. If the choice is rendering 2D in the CPU, or rendering 2D with 3D assist using a GPU which doesn't exist and is emulated on the CPU, the first is most likely faster and uses less memory.

That said, it's entirely possible that this policy persisted after it no longer made sense.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#182
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about the 'huge strides'. I feel nowadays with 'flat design' (is that the right term?) I don't know where I can click and what actions will be performed. It's like the UI is a bunch of text labels, but they may actually be links, but they may actually perform an action. Although there's no way to know, since the label doesn't say what action is performed, and since we don't have mice anymore, we don't ha…

Fair points. The lack of affordances is bothersome indeed, but presumably the UX design fashion will swing back in the other direction at some point in the near-ish future.

I think that apart from the specific problem of not knowing what's clickable and what's the consequences of clicking, which we have right now, there's the more general problem that we're having all the time and that is the random changing of shit for reasons which have little to do with improving anything.

Such as, you have to keep making new versions of things so that nobody clones your old stuff and takes some of your market share, and you kinda want to do everything in a new way so that cloning all those versions gets harder - and you know that users will be forced to upgrade whether they like it or not, or else they won't be able to interoperate with those who upgraded unwittingly, and/or those for whom you actually made the upgrade worthwhile.

Or you have so many people on your team and you need them to do something to justify the size of that team.

Or because you took over a project and you need to show how much should be done here and how great it is that you took over.

Or because you want to work around someone's UI patents, and maybe file your own while you're at it so that new competitors are forced to invent yet another kind of UI.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#183

Hey, the PHP creator included a selfie! (Full disclosure: I write PHP on a daily basis, and reject the opinion that it should be avoided for various reasons, but I recognise the stereotype (that it's not a very 'good' language) enough to derive humour from it - consider it sort of self-deprecating)

I'm with you there - you can pry PHP out of my cold, dead hands. You just can't beat it IMHO for getting small systems up and running quickly. Lots of available libraries and code, and it's either preinstalled or trivial to install on almost everything these days.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#186

Richard Stallman is a legend. While most of us blindly agree to terms and conditions for crap proprietary software, he doesn't even need a GUI. He's one of my top inspirations. Edit: grammar

while I applaud him for sticking to his convictions, thats like saying that one should walk everywhere because we didn't used to have cars/don't need them

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#187
post #46

That smoking spy icon in Ritchie's screenshot gives me flashbacks to mid-90s childhood. I remember seeing it around quite a bit for a while, but can't remember where. Anyone know where it's from?

the original paper describing "faces" is here:

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/face_the_nation/

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#188
post #10
post #6

So both creators of C used Windows...

Not on those screenshots, but C++ creator Stroustrup is also a Windows user.

For some reason every picture I've seen of his office, he's parked in front of a Sun of some sort.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#189

Amazed that Dennis Ritchie used a non-monospace font, I don't think I have seen any other serious developer use one. Also amused to see the Jerkcity comic open in Jordan Hubbard's screenshot.

If you ask really serious .. I dont think any serious developer gives a shit about font being used . Back in the days people used to be happy even to see a character on screen . These days js script writer using bower and other similar things and calling it automation will never understand that. The rush or high of using sun , bare bone x11 linux , developing without any autocomplete , when your experience was your stack overflow .

So please dont talk about serious developer font , its highly offending to all the work.

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