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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

anders.unix.se

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Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#191

Post by kitsunesoba »

nitrogen wrote: post #180
mangecoeur wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to st…

The classic Windows UI was exceptionally customizable. I often configured inverse color schemes that worked better in dark rooms. At one point I even edited some of the core OS binaries to change the text on the Start button, get custom logos and messaging, etc. Classic Linux and Windows desktops were all about customization, so the defaults don't really matter. Last time I checked, it wasn't even possible to set a c…

Just now I checked the background settings under OS X (you got me curious), and thankfully you can set a custom color without setting a transparent PNG (see screenshot). I think it’s been this way for several major releases now, but it wasn’t always true.

http://f.cl.ly/items/1p0k2k0x403q192F1Q0s/Screen%20Shot%2020...

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#192

Post by kitsunesoba »

trm42 wrote: post #72
vbezhenar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think that Windows NT 4 was the best Windows OS ever. And may be the best GUI ever. I always switch to classic theme, if I have to use Windows. In last versions it's not very classic, though.

For me, it was W2K. It has the stability of NT series better usability, drivers and it was quite fast. Windows XP made simple things a lot harder and slower :)

As someone who traditionally has not been a Windows user, W2K is by far my favorite Windows release (7 is probably second). When I was young my house had a Win98SE box that crashed constantly and loved to run ScanDisk at startup. Updating it to Windows 2000 was nothin short of a revolution — the machine suddenly became usable! And even better, it didn’t have any consumer-oriented junk clogging it up. It was what Windows should’ve been from the start.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#193

Post by HCIdivision17 »

broken wrote: post #163
veb wrote: post #160

Is it just me or was I the only one who saw how awesome this is: http://unix.se/ Here's the screengrab http://share.veb.nz/1UD8UE6 in case you guys don't see it... I think it's awesome. I want it! Definitely gonna update my 404 pages, heh.

I enjoyed it, too! It reminded me of the Sburb loading screen from Homestuck: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=002037

And of course - for those who need Homestuck explained - that's a great throwback to the SimCity games, specifically here where the loading screens would often include nonsensical things like the famouse "reticulating splines". (IIRC, a lot of the Maxis games of Yore would play off that joke.)

(And thanks - now the Sburb loading theme is stuck in my head again!)

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#194

Post by qb45 »

Xophmeister wrote: post #105
pivo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first version of Windows used a tiling window manager (or whatever that sort of thing is called on Windows.)

Wasn't that just a technological workaround, though? The hardware couldn't support overlapping windows.

According to "Barbarians led by Bill Gates" this was an intentional choice justified by studies of number of clicks required to perform some tasks.

Great book, btw.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#195

Post by jandrese »

pjc50 wrote: post #131
raverbashing wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is funny because the effect was important on a 100MHz Pentium, but pretty much negligible beyond that.

I had a Toshiba Libretto 30 with a 486DX processor at 100MHz that was exactly on the boundary. It could play MP3s, but only with the Fraunhofer codec: WinAMP was not quite fast enough. It was a lovely little machine that I set up to dual-boot Linux. If it had had mobile networking it would have been fantastic.

I was able to play MP3s on my Pentium 75 using "amp" on FreeBSD, but they would stutter if I fired up Netscape at the same time and started scrolling the window around.

I remember it took some time before I could play MP3s--for about a year I was stuck playing MP2s instead.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#198

Post by Synaesthesia »

cobalt wrote: post #186
xdinomode wrote: post #145

Richard Stallman is a legend. While most of us blindly agree to terms and conditions for crap proprietary software, he doesn't even need a GUI. He's one of my top inspirations. Edit: grammar

while I applaud him for sticking to his convictions, thats like saying that one should walk everywhere because we didn't used to have cars/don't need them

With time I'm starting to realize he's essentially correct in everything he says. We are really chained to corporations due to non-open hardware and software, and they're almost completely unaccountable to us.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#199

Post by bstamour »

noinsight wrote: post #99
lighthawk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also tends not to view websites like HN, GitHub, etc., at least as of a few years ago. I'm not sure if it is because he is still in text mode all the time, because he disagrees with using sites that might somehow involve something that isn't free source, or because he just delegates to others the task of surfing the web and getting information for him. He definitely spends a lot of time emailing though. I admire h…

For personal reasons he doesn't have a personal internet connection at all. He has some sort of bot that he emails links to and it sends the source (or plaintext?) back to him for reading. (At least it was like that a couple of years ago) I believe he also has issues with non-free JavaScript which I suppose precludes him from using websites that use JavaScript (or I guess he could block it).

I used to think his browsing/emailing habits were silly, but then I started working in the park about 5 years ago on nice days. My phone data plan at the time was pretty crappy, so I rigged up a system using a local imap server and offlineimap/msmtp/msmtp-queue to effectively work offline. I'd get my batch of emails once at the beginning of the day, and I could attend to them (reply, forward, copy, etc) over the course of the work day, and batch-send them all out when I'd be connected again.

I never got to the point of having a bot fetch web pages for me, but I can see it as an extension of what I had set up. For someone who travels as much as Stallman, I think it's a very efficient way to browse and email when internet connections are either spotty or not to be trusted.

Re: Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002

#200

Post by odbol »

72deluxe wrote: post #51
mangecoeur wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean and neat Really? You miss that special "concrete gray and primary blue" feel? I think I used every MS operating system starting with DOS, and I miss exactly none of the "historic" interfaces. To the extent I get annoyed when institutional IT departments force you to use the "classic" theme on modern windows boxes ("It's faster!" - no, it isn't to any human perceptible degree, and I appreciate not having to st…

In Windows it is a bit odd anyway, as anything drawn using GDI or GDI+ goes through the CPU. This includes the "classic" interface. For accelerated interfaces (Aero), the GPU is involved (but don't ask me how - perhaps someone could elaborate?), so on rubbish GPUs it may be slower than going through the CPU, perhaps? Windows should tell you that your computer is rubbish so won't attempt to use the Aero interface. If…

It's definitely noticeable. I disabled the fancy UI on a cheap little HP laptop I bought a year ago, and it runs way faster. Maybe it has a crappy GPU, but turning off all that extra visual stuff definitely makes a huge dent.
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