201–210 of 239 posts
Writing this from an Android device
Surprised this point not realized or discussed more in this thread. Android is famously claimed by linux fans but for all practical purposes its a Java device which factually made this technology among the most impactful on the planet.
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Oh man, VR and metaverse-style concepts were big in the 90s even if the technology obviously wasn't quite there yet. Active Worlds predated Second Life by several years and surprisingly enough is still online to this day.
I remember VRML going nowhere fast.
Contrast VRML to a game like Quake. One of the key optimizations in Quake was a very computationally expensive pre-processing of the game map to determine surface visibility. The map environment was also a simplified set or surfaces rather than a giant tree of arbitrary primitives.
VRML had almost the opposite Design leaving the client to do a ton of work just to construct the usable representation of the virtual environment and then figure out what to draw. It also didn't help the client software often had terrible UIs and were implemented as browser plugins.
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You have to be logged into github for the SSH clone tab to appear-- if they don't know your pubkey you can't connect using the SSH protocol. Git can push over HTTPS, too.
aha, that wasn't previously the case, thanks for the correction whether i'm logged in in my browser has nothing to do with whether my ssh client has access to an authorized private key
https://web.archive.org/web/20180115003453/https://github.co...
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Well, Gates is absolutely terrible at PR and doesn't tick any of the boxes of being chic, unless it's some kind of so uncool that he's cool kind of thing. Despite this and more importantly despite his reputation in business and the often laughable products MS produced, his tremendous philanthropy really changed my perspective on him. In a world where there are mega-billionaires, he's my least unfavourite. He's doing…
Eh, I would say he puts a lot of effort intro creating image of benevolent nerd philantropist. Point in case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hnZJIRd6Qw There must have been a team of people dedicated to carefully crafting this video, creating props, there's even a dozen or so actors there (each in the background for just a few seconds). It looks like someone put a lot of effort into this and it surely consumed thou…
My 2 mins of googling came up with more like 3.6B$ on malaria, but even 2B$ is a shit-ton of money. I certainly haven't donated 2% of my net value to malaria (and it's only on the order of 1/10000 of his!).
Malaria rates are down around 30% since 2010, thanks in part to Gates. He's likely saved thousands to hundreds of thousands of lives.
Malaria is just one part of his philanthropy. I'd love to see the numbers for Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. It would be great to all billionaires follow suit with this kind of "easy decision".
Nathan Myhrvold's long answer was more interesting. He was talking about the future of the Internet and what would make money. Now 25 years later, watch what's actually made the most money, and did his reply cover those. I can think of hosted services and search. Even Microsoft had one of the very first maps online in the 90s [ terraserver ] but they failed to realize how large this business eventually will turn into…
I don't think that Microsoft failed to realize how large a business mapping would become. I think the problem was mostly these products existed in the Ballmer era where Microsoft expanded into seemingly every niche without clear goals besides using up all the oxygen in the room.
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The reply was on point and serious . Mainframe still exists and generates billions in revenue. Windows/ Microsoft lost their foothold in a new market. However Microsoft is also transforming into a cloud first company.
Well the cloud is the new mainframe, hence why "Azure OS" is the new Windows.
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Eh, I would say he puts a lot of effort intro creating image of benevolent nerd philantropist. Point in case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hnZJIRd6Qw There must have been a team of people dedicated to carefully crafting this video, creating props, there's even a dozen or so actors there (each in the background for just a few seconds). It looks like someone put a lot of effort into this and it surely consumed thou…
Can't fault him on hiring a crew to craft his videos. He has better things to do with his time. Wouldn't you outsource that if you were in his position? My 2 mins of googling came up with more like 3.6B$ on malaria, but even 2B$ is a shit-ton of money. I certainly haven't donated 2% of my net value to malaria (and it's only on the order of 1/10000 of his!). Malaria rates are down around 30% since 2010, thanks in part…
I'm not saying he shouldn't outsource his videos. What I'm saying is that this looks more like a professionally made commercial (advertising his personal brand). I'm pretty sure it cost O(hours) of his time (consider even getting to the set - you can see this is a professional set, so probably in some studio; I also doubt this was done in one take given how there are other actors around including the skating Santa Clauses). All in all, it really feels artificial and dishonest. What kind of person would even come up with idea of creating such a video in the first place?
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Funny how all my "nerdy" friends love Gates now. I guess 100B$+ is enough to afford PR team that can convince public you are no longer "more evil than satan himself".
Well, Gates is absolutely terrible at PR and doesn't tick any of the boxes of being chic, unless it's some kind of so uncool that he's cool kind of thing. Despite this and more importantly despite his reputation in business and the often laughable products MS produced, his tremendous philanthropy really changed my perspective on him. In a world where there are mega-billionaires, he's my least unfavourite. He's doing…
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Well the cloud is the new mainframe, hence why "Azure OS" is the new Windows.
Cloud is not the new mainframe. Maybe in 15 years.
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JScript was their version of JavaScript You could also use VBScript in the browser if you wanted to, it's been an option up to IE 11 IE had pluggable scripting engines, which wasn't a bad idea per se and anyone could write one, it was a simple COM component
ActiveState provided Tcl, Perl and Python versions actually.
They provided the best Perl distribution for Windows.
They also made some cool IDE/Editor based on Mozilla XUL.