191–200 of 316 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying these people don't know what 'client', 'server' and 'networking' mean and they should have stopped trying to be funny at 'Annals of Unix Hating, Vol. 56'. Tough crowd.
Yes. Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can install stuff in your home directory. No access rights needed. Look up the --prefix argument. This isn't windows, after all.
You are assuming that: 1 - You can put them there; 2 - You have enough quota; 3- $HOME isn't mounted as noexec; 4 - IT don't have scripts that purge $HOME from executables, which the corresponding penalties for the respective user when found. I am not a UNIX newbie, although I favor Windows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>there remained a very large number of people with fond memories of other platforms, many of which did at least some things better than any contemporary or even modern Unix. Yeah, that's what I'm curious about. Could you name names? :)
See Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT by Zachary. Gives you an idea what the Unix landscape was like, and how primitive Windows was when Dave Culter's team from Digital began building NT (after the VMS at Digital), which became Windows XP (when Windows stopped crashing every hour). Much of what we assume every OS does today was cutting edge development in 1990.
If your only other choice is assembly language, then C starts to look really good. You don't complain about weird function interfaces, because at least you have functions!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bluh, don't get me started on Finder. Icons in directories would randomly be overlapping just because I hadn't been in them in a while and new files were added, they added this weird tagging system with colors that just doesn't make sense to me at all, it randomly thinks I want to view some sort of "recently used files and some random shit" list instead of my homedir. I don't know what the devs of it were thinking. E…
> Objective-C looks like a clusterfuck and I never want to touch it. This is pretty much moot now, the Apple world is abandoning Obj-C, but AFAIK it's just old, not bad. Like, came out at the same time as C++ old, and has seen fewer changes to the language than C++ has. It's a compiled, C-like language, so yeah, hard to use and very easy to crash, just like C & C++. Interested to hear your point of view on what makes…
I like to cover myself with some crazy question and think about them. For example, what would look like the thing that would make people go "oh this looks good enough to replace UNIX". Don't get me wrong, I am big fan of UNIX, but I hope I will be alive around the time(but I doubt that) when we will see some new thing which will make UNIX feel dated. Now, some of you might jump and say "Oh, but UNIX already feels dat…
What I'd really like to know, what is Unix, at the core. I know POSIX defines certain standards, but what can we rip out and still call what remains Unix? If we're being really reductive can't we take it beyond the features that were present in the very first Unix for the PDP7? Is it simply the syscall interface which provides a filesystem abstraction? Do we call an OS a Unix if it only has a POSIX layer like Windows NT?
So if we could strip everything out and leave just a few pieces, and still recognize it as Unix, the use of the word approaches meaninglessness. Unixes exist without memory management or process isolation. Think of how fundamentally dissimilar an Apple Watch running iOS is compared to a PDP11. I think that versatility in the terminology itself lets us keep calling something Unix long after it's morphed into something else.
It's not hard to imagine replacing system calls with other ways of achieving the same outcome. I think fundamentally, at the lowest level, where the operating system is an interface to the core features of the processor, it is relatively invariant. For truly unique systems, we do have to look at the hardware. Unique operating systems have been tied to unique hardware, like the Xerox Alto, or the MIT CADR, whereas Unix as a generic set of functionality has made many computer architectures useful, but also reduced their variety.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lisp machines turn up pretty frequently in this context, and I understand why - some of their capabilities still haven't been replicated anywhere else, nor are they likely to be, and that's a real loss; in particular, there is a great deal to be said for a model in which changing the behavior of the running system, right down to the microcode, can be as simple as writing up the changes you want and evaluating them. N…
Very interesting, thanks. Why do you suppose Lisp-M isn't more widely used?
Their UI was powerful and efficient, but not easy to learn. They were designed by programmers for programmers. Their UI assumed that you were willing to invest nontrivial time and effort learning a broad palette of specialized tools.
Their system design made some pretty different assumptions about how they were going to be used, and the environment they would be used in. For example, LispMs didn't have any kind of security or memory protection. They were wide open systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bluh, don't get me started on Finder. Icons in directories would randomly be overlapping just because I hadn't been in them in a while and new files were added, they added this weird tagging system with colors that just doesn't make sense to me at all, it randomly thinks I want to view some sort of "recently used files and some random shit" list instead of my homedir. I don't know what the devs of it were thinking. E…
From day one, they should have called it the "Loser" instead of the "Finder".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other than using PostScript for 2D rendering I don't think NeWS and Display Postscript had much in common. In NeWS you could write your client applications completely in PostScript (or something compiled down to PostScript) and it had its own object-oriented, multi-threaded environment with event handling etc. NeWS was more of a predecessor for Java than NeXT.
Here's the source code for the classic PizzaTool demo (BTW, I've just looked on Google Maps, and I think that Tony & Alba's pizza place in Mountain View no longer exists): http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt ...and here's a link to a HN thread a few months ago where Don Hopkins talks about Postscript and windowing systems; lots of good links there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196983
https://www.yelp.com/biz/tony-and-albas-pizza-and-pasta-san-...
Also La Costeña, home of the World's Largest Burrito, is now at 235 E. Middlefield Rd. in Mountain View.
And Cho's Mandarin Dim Sum has moved to 209 1st St. in Los Altos. (The rent for his hole-in-the-wall on California Ave. in Palo Alto was too high!)
https://www.yelp.com/biz/chos-mandarin-dim-sum-los-altos
Please update your programs!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Autotools is the worst form of build system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -Churchill, probably In all seriousness, what's your preferred alternative? Seems like Autotools is a pain, but it gets the job done and is widely available. I haven't found a build system for C projects that is: - Less complicated - Available from default package repos so others who clone don't hav…
You should be able to build well-written code on a variety of modern systems using nothing more than a Makefile, or even just a shell script. See plan9port for an example of the latter.
I like to cover myself with some crazy question and think about them. For example, what would look like the thing that would make people go "oh this looks good enough to replace UNIX". Don't get me wrong, I am big fan of UNIX, but I hope I will be alive around the time(but I doubt that) when we will see some new thing which will make UNIX feel dated. Now, some of you might jump and say "Oh, but UNIX already feels dat…