Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

web.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 271 posts

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#261

Post by lukan »

lukan wrote: post #259
lucianbr wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CorelDraw? Word? Audacity? Or maybe it will turn out that all GUI software has command line somewhere inside. I think my original point stands even better in that case. Yay for hair-splitting, I guess.

"Or maybe it will turn out that all GUI software has command line somewhere inside" Not at all. Most maybe, but since I wrote GUIs without a CLI I can say for sure that not all have them.

I mean, every web GUI, which are now probably the majority of GUIs do not have a CLI anymore..

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#262

Post by fake-name »

SllX wrote: post #237
fake-name wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X started going down hill as soon as they replaces spaces and expose with mission control.

Consolidating Spaces and Exposé is not one of the things they did that hurt Mac OS X.

I could not disagree more strongly.

Having them separate, and more importantly taking spaces from a 2d array of desktops to a 1d array of desktops ruined it substantially.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#263

Post by CRConrad »

seec wrote: post #256
aj7 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just got a Windows 11 machine. Had to, to run Solidworks. Have it next to a new M3 iMac. They’re all configured with the same apps. Despite not having used Windows in 10 years, these machines behave identically. But Windows 11 is snappier. And you can actually find things that you don’t know where they are! I was amazed.

With all the ideological hate against Microsoft/Windows (even among its long-term users it seems) everybody seems to miss the part where Windows 11 is actually pretty good and I would say in some ways actually superior to macOS nowadays, especially with PowerToys. For starter, it is much less annoying from a security/notification standpoint, you can tell it to fuck off and let you do your things if you know what you…

> For starter, it is much less annoying from a security/notification standpoint, you can tell it to fuck off and let you do your things if you know what you are doing.

In many corporate environments you can't.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#264

Post by aj7 »

seec wrote: post #256
aj7 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just got a Windows 11 machine. Had to, to run Solidworks. Have it next to a new M3 iMac. They’re all configured with the same apps. Despite not having used Windows in 10 years, these machines behave identically. But Windows 11 is snappier. And you can actually find things that you don’t know where they are! I was amazed.

With all the ideological hate against Microsoft/Windows (even among its long-term users it seems) everybody seems to miss the part where Windows 11 is actually pretty good and I would say in some ways actually superior to macOS nowadays, especially with PowerToys. For starter, it is much less annoying from a security/notification standpoint, you can tell it to fuck off and let you do your things if you know what you…

macOS is behind. And this is speaking as someone who probably owns one of everything Apple makes, Apple stock, and was exclusively Mac for the last 10 years.

I have less than 50 hours use on my Windows 11 machine, a midgrade Lenovo P358 rig I bought renewed because it had plenty of memory and an Nvidia T1000 card. Yet it taught me that the test of an operating system is how quickly you can navigate around, and how well it can find things, given only clues. Windows 11 is just snapper, quicker, than the latest macOS running on a new M3 Mac.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#265

Post by CRConrad »

dylan604 wrote: post #166
Phiwise_ wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>OS X is closest to a NeXTStep This is already in the piece. Why waste time repeating it?

Because the person they replied to used a term like Apple Linux which is ridiculous. So somebody on the internet was wrong and needed to be corrected

> somebody on the internet was wrong and needed to be corrected

https://xkcd.com/386/

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#266

Post by CRConrad »

johnohara wrote: post #128
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows XP would probably be an old 1970s Volvo that is still, somehow, running in all kinds of places otherwise forgotten by the waking world.

Mostly in Oregon, Northern CA, and parts of Washington. But parts are increasingly hard to find.

Mostly in all of Sweden, all of Finland, probably still quite a lot in Denmark, but perhaps not so many in Norway any more (since they are rapidly electrifying[1] the entire national car fleet).

___

[1]: Ironically, the heavy state subsidies for buying an electric car are, like anything else in Norway, financed by... Oil money.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#267

Post by CRConrad »

ryandv wrote: post #50

The section on "THE INTERFACE CULTURE" is critical to understand in today's digital media landscape. Disney's Animal Kingdom is to the written works of Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie as the GUI is to the command-line interface. The message of one medium is audiovisual spectacle and immersive experience; the other, cold intellectualism demanding participation from the reader to paint a picture in his mind's eye through…

> Elsewhere [0] I have called this concept "post-literacy," and this theme pervades much of Stephenson's work - highly technologically advanced societies outfitted with molecular assemblers and metaverses, populated by illiterate masses who mostly get by through the use of pictographs and hieroglyphic languages (emoji, anyone?).

He returns to it rather explicitly in _Dodge in Hell,_ with the odyssee through the "Facebooked" wastelands of -- where was it, Idaho / Montana / the Dakotas? Something like that -- where the MAGAfied barely-literate natives hound the scientist / tech-type heroes.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#268

Post by Phiwise_ »

dylan604 wrote: post #166
Phiwise_ wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>OS X is closest to a NeXTStep This is already in the piece. Why waste time repeating it?

Because the person they replied to used a term like Apple Linux which is ridiculous. So somebody on the internet was wrong and needed to be corrected

I used it, and on purpose. If you missed why, you should go back and read again before replying.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#269

Post by Phiwise_ »

Animats wrote: post #200
Phiwise_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Obsolete" is too strong a word, I think. OSX isn't an evolution of the Macintosh's operating system; That'd be Pink, which was even mentioned, and it crashed and burned. OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk, therefore the only change really needed is to replace mentions of Unix or specifically Linux with Linux/OSX as far as the points of the piece are concerned. If Jobs had paid Torvalds…

Apple was in some ways on the right track with an OS that had no command line. Not having a command line meant you had to get serious about how to control things. The trouble with the original MacOS was that the underlying OS was a cram job to fit into 128Kb, plus a ROM. It didn't even have a CPU dispatcher, let alone memory protection. So it scaled up badly. That was supposed to be fixed in MacOS 8, "Copeland", whic…

Yes, I, too, have read the OP before.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#270

Post by psd1 »

Animats wrote: post #232
psd1 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It likes to fall over to the secondary server, doesn't it.

There are so many known systemd-resolved bugs [1][2] that I can't tell which one was breaking both of my simple Ubuntu desktop machines. Systemd-resolved sets itself up as the sole DNS resolver and then randomly reports it can't reach any DNS servers. [1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18kh1r5/im_shocked_t...

Yes and... the tools are now highly distro-specific. I don't want to allocate my study time to resolvectl, I want to allocate it to programming, but my home server requires me to be a beginner again in something that was easy a decade ago. And I am not getting anything of value for that trade.
Post reply on HN