121–130 of 181 posts
I just wonder how much of the truly exceptional engineering in today's software was done by people on drugs (yes, 'ADHD' medication counts). I fully expect it to be a significant chunk, but I hope it's not the majority.
> 'ADHD' I'm confused by the use of quotes. Do you think ADHD is a made-up thing?
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>You think a throw back Win 95 clones with UNIX-like internals is what modern users want? They aren't building it for "modern users", they're building it for fun. To build a usable operating system you need manpower. To get manpower you need money or you need to build a community around an interesting project that people will work on for free. Andreas has managed to do both of these things. Serenity is not just anoth…
Prove “fun” isn’t just an emotional equivocation to burn resources living in one’s nostalgia only to quickly abandon it like numerous attempts at amiga and commodore style OS clones being built for fun in the 00s If it’s not for modern computer users and lacks a meaningful ecosystem of software and purpose its first worlders avoiding contributing to real work they externalize on others There’s enough academic wank in…
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I'd like to go the other way, and have a filesystem that leverages a proper database for its metadata. I can search millions of records in a split second in SQL. But searching records on my hard disk takes enormously more time. The solutions out there for speeding it up (like Windows Indexing service) rely on asynchronous indexing that's patched on top of the filesystem instead of integrated realtime within it, and a…
>I'd like to go the other way, and have a filesystem that leverages a proper database for its metadata. Microsoft made an attempt back in 2003 at creating a "smarter" file system with rich metadata based on a real database engine (MS SQL Server) ... but eventually abandoned the project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS WinFS wasn't necessarily going to completely replace NTFS but Microsoft did have ambitious plans…
The 'file table' contains a 64 byte record for each object and has some very unique characteristics that make searches incredibly fast (e.g. it can find all the photos in under a second, even if there are 20 million of them among 200 million files). You can also attach various metadata 'tags' to each object and find matching objects based on them.
The project is in open beta and anyone can download it and try it out on their own computer.
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Prove “fun” isn’t just an emotional equivocation to burn resources living in one’s nostalgia only to quickly abandon it like numerous attempts at amiga and commodore style OS clones being built for fun in the 00s If it’s not for modern computer users and lacks a meaningful ecosystem of software and purpose its first worlders avoiding contributing to real work they externalize on others There’s enough academic wank in…
Oddly enough, other people find enjoyment in things you might find pointless. Maybe just let them be? Not every waking second needs to be spent on "pushing computing forward" or whatever. Sometimes we just want to do something cool, even if it's useless.
And I mean from my reference you (and the downvoters) just complained about someone having a different opinion than yours so shrug
Serenity is one of the only recent OS projects that I think has any potential. It's a very high velocity, high quality project and I think that's down to the community culture Andreas has fostered. They aren't a load of fuddy-duddies who insist on using mailing lists and IRC. Nobody wants to collaborate with a load of grumpy greybeards.
You think a throw back Win 95 clones with UNIX-like internals is what modern users want? We’ve moved on from “back in my day, the 80s…” computer UI nostalgia to 90s it seems. 10 more years we’ll have Mac OSX Snow Leopard clone project get abandoned (have had a lot of young Millennials and older GenZ hackers talk it up at me as peak computing) Just because they’re not grumpy doesn’t mean they aren’t nostalgia driven i…
I'm increasingly tempted to try my hand at making a toy OS - or at least a kernel. There's a few things I desperately want an operating system to do: 1. Have either database-like transactions or (at a minimum) write barriers for file operations. The current filesystem semantics are terrible for databases and other applications which need to not corrupt their data after a crash. fsync() is too heavy, because you can't…
Go one step further and have the kernel expose a much more structured view of storage to user space by default. 99.9% of user space programs I've written don't want to deal with file IO, they want a database, or some other way for arbitrary in memory objects to be persisted and shared between processes. There's so much room to improve on the 1970s era IO primitives we use by default.
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You think a throw back Win 95 clones with UNIX-like internals is what modern users want? We’ve moved on from “back in my day, the 80s…” computer UI nostalgia to 90s it seems. 10 more years we’ll have Mac OSX Snow Leopard clone project get abandoned (have had a lot of young Millennials and older GenZ hackers talk it up at me as peak computing) Just because they’re not grumpy doesn’t mean they aren’t nostalgia driven i…
We haven't improved much since Win 95 in terms of desktop OS UI/UX. Could you remember any substantial UI improvements between Win 95 and Win 11? Local search, improved UAC and a shitload of ads.
Yes I can. Most OSes these days have a OS level fuzzy searching functionality. This has been my preferred way of launching applications on Windows (Win key), Linux (Win key) and MacOS (CMD+Spc).
I press a hotkey, type the first few characters of the program I'm trying to go to, and press enter. This is also common in text editors and even some web apps. Improves the UX of discovering commands, as compared to endlessly nested menus like the 90s.
There's loads of other things that have improved but this one is just so basic that I couldn't live without it.
Let's not live with rose tinted glasses. Yes, there's backsliding in terms of UX but don't ignore the improvements.
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We haven't improved much since Win 95 in terms of desktop OS UI/UX. Could you remember any substantial UI improvements between Win 95 and Win 11? Local search, improved UAC and a shitload of ads.
It's gone downhill. Scrollbars that only appear half the times you need them, buttons that aren't buttons, not-buttons that are in fact buttons, instead of curated menus Evince has three places you can click and hope to find the function you want in one of them, it's just a mess. Win 95 had the basic UX down, and Tiger made it look very pretty, but it didn't need any more fixing.
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I feel like it should be possible to say "I want to reserve access to this resource when something important happens on it". Or just "I want to reserve access to this resource". Hopefully eliminates TOCTOU races. I guess then there have to be different modes to balance scalability/flexibility.
When people complain about antivirus and endpoint security applications slowing their computer down, this is what they're talking about. This leads to user-visible delays (which, to them, seem to be random) as the reserver does what it wants right after the user has done something to the file. Many (most? ALL?) apparent Explorer stalls are really Windows Defender locking and scanning the file right after you did some…
Meaning a process could start loading and reading while queuing writes and only writes would block while another process is locking access to the executable to scan it. If the scan succeeds the writes are committed and if it fails it could revoke execution privileges and all the work is undone.
Lot of hand waving there, but when you're not committed to existing file system semantics there is a lot of room for innovation.