71–80 of 103 posts
20+ Gigabyte mailboxes, which were actually a threaded, searchable, rich content database. (Exchange's superpower (when it works) is a almost perfect online/offline sync able database -- You can send an email in your offline client, when you go online it'll get sent, your calendar updates will sync, etc)
Windows and Linux are vulnerable to the confused deputy problem, so you separate your concerns into separate VMs and give each "machine" a set of resources (capabilities)
IBM and Digital machines have done this since the 1960s.
I didn't have the budget, so I used one camera and a cluster of photos from slightly varying locations. I got there eventually.[5]
[1] https://hugin.sourceforge.io/
[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/721577185851...
[3] http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/
[4] http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/videos/crowd0-sa...
[5] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/51018992733/in/albu...
Some random folk practices I've come across: * Blocking, stacking and pulling creep camps in DOTA. Unintended behaviours that became core game mechanics. * Comments in the tag section of Tumblr posts, to avoid the comments appearing in a reblog ("Why do people use tags on tumblr instead of comments?" [1]) * The appropriation of switching MOSFETs such as the IRF510, designed for low frequencies, in homebrew amateur ra…
Twitter's "retweet" and "hashtag" were both folk innovations that became product features. People used to write 'RT @user "comment"' to retweet.
I approve of this, but its hardly novel. Web browsers were originally intended to view flat html documents with hyperlinks between them. The concept of a web app is itself a 'folk' repurposing of technology. Another might be the way blocks in minecraft are repurposed to make all sorts of elaborate redstone machines such as automatic farms.
Orthogonal to the main point of the article, I was interested in the mention of Victor Papanek's tin can radio receiver, which apparently cost 9c to make (presumably the cost of the transistor, since everything else was recycled), and could be fueled by burning wax or dung. I haven't been able to find a simple guide for how to make one myself.
> No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities. Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce. I've been searching for other examples of end-user…
It's very explicitly intended to be reprogrammed, but Tiddlywiki is a pretty good one. It is a great platform since it gives you data storage, advanced queries, and rendering.
SO THAT'S WHY I was pushed to try to use it (but didn't see the point after a few minutes) It's self contained AND REPROGRAMMABLE????? Holy cow!
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I wish to see learning to code, per se, easily accessible for all. I'm not talking about cheap or even free boot camps that promise entry into a lucrative job market. I'm talking about a kid, or a parent, or an auntie or uncle or cousin or sister or brother, about whoever, who just sees something they want to make happen and they literally do because they can. I read through the comments and I re-read the wonderful article by Robin Sloan linked below ("An app can be a home-cooked meal" -- look through this comment thread, and you'll see it, alongside my first observation of the term "OA", one that took me some time to decipher -- another thing that will stick with me).
I believe that programming is and always will be for the masses. I believe in development best practices when they are called for. But for learning, for discovering the beauty of computing and the joy of software, of writing one's first programs, I wish the barriers were less!