241–250 of 912 posts
(Not the Linux distribution with the same name)
I have used it for years.
A two pane manager, it makes defining file associations, applications invoked by extensions and short cut buttons easy convenient.
Sadly it is abandonware now.
Slowly migrating to Double Commander now...
Fortress language. It suffered from being too Haskell-like in terms of too many, non-orthogonal features. Rust and Go applied lessons from it perhaps indirectly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner?
> Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner? Why do you think JavaScript is a problem? And a big enough problem to risk destroying open web standards.
Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread us…
But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as you say:
> If you change parts of it, sure.
Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will definitely change" knee-jerk.
The information superhighway The internet before advertising, artificial intelligence, social media and bots. When folks created startups in their bedrooms or garages. The days when google slogan was “don’t be evil”.
AKA "back when Marc Andreessen had hair and not enough money to build an apocalypse bunker on a personal island."
Animated gifs of cat, banner bars and pixels cost one dollar, until a one million were sold.
And it all ran on Chuck Norris' personal computer.
- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…
- I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line, and installation is fine, so I'm not sure your line of reasoning holds strongly. One thing I think you might be hinting at though that is a missed trick: macOS today could learn a little from the way iOS and iPadOS is forced to do things and centralise configuration in a single place.
- I think transaction processing operating systems have been reinvented today as "serverless". The load/execute/quit cycle you describe is how you build in AWS Lambdas, GCP Cloud Run Functions or Azure Functions.
- Most of your other ideas (with an exception, see below), died either because of people trying to grab money rather than build cool tech, and arguably the free market decided to vote with its feet - I do wonder when we might next get a major change in hardware architectures again though, it does feel like we've now got "x86" and "ARM" and that's that for the next generation.
- XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff done. The forgiving nature of the HTML specs is a feature, not a bug. We shouldn't expect people to be experts at reading specs to publish on the web, nor should it need special software that gatekeeps the web. It needs to be scrappy, and messy and evolutionary, because it is a technology that serves people - we don't want people to serve the technology.
Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread us…
> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as you say: > If you change parts of it, sure. Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will definitely change" knee-jerk.
Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works differently to Apple’s system, you can complain about that imaginary system all you want, but it won’t be meaningful, it’s just noise.
Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have. VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for somet…
1+ for 3dxpoint. The technology took decades to mature, but the business people didn’t have the patience to let the world catch up to this revolutionary technology.
- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…
It would kill the approachability of the language.
One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see something just with distorted output.
That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were put off "real" programming languages because they were overwhelmed by terrible error messages any time they missed a bracket or misspelled something.
If you've learned to program in the last decade or two, you might not even realise just how bad compiler errors tended to be in most languages.
The kind of thing where you could miss a bracket on line 47 but end up with a compiler error complaining about something 20 lines away.
Rust ( in particular ) got everyone to bring up their game with respect to meaningful compiler errors.
But in the days of XHTML? Error messages were arcane, you had to dive in to see what the problem actually was.