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Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

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Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#281
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, increasingly, users don’t need desktop software. In fact, the move towards sandboxes apps makes native apps closer to browser apps. I’m not even saying it’s a good thing. Just that gimping native apps isn’t the footgun it would have been 10 years ago.

What do you mean by "need"? Increasingly, users are force-fed cross-platform web apps. I wouldn't say that's what they need, and you're not even saying it's a good thing. If users don't need desktop software, then why do they need desktop hardware?

Take Figma for example. Couldn’t have been a web app 10 years ago. Users would have needed a desktop app in that case.

You emphasize “need” but it seems you mean “want.”

You bring up a great point about hardware too. People don’t need as much hardware given the increased connectivity and cloud computing.

Again, I’m not suggesting all this is good. But of course users _need_ local compute and native apps less than 10 years ago.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#283

I moved from 15+ years of Mac to FreeBSD about 2 years ago for similar reasons. It's too locked-down, too opinionated, too iOS for me now. Very happy with FreeBSD + KDE which gives me configuration choices again.

Could you share with us why you chose FreeBSD over Linux?

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#284
post #189

I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years. I was a bit disappointed that most of the questions ignored his talk about a very cool jukebox he built and focused on OS drama. He built a jukebox with all hit songs he could find in it 1900-2000 and for prerecorded music, got a player piano and sheet music and midi and integrated the…

Better headline: “Unix Legend Ken Thompson Announces he is Switching From iTunes to a Raspberry PI, a Player Piano and Cabinets of old CD’s” Hmmm. I meant for that to be snarky, but it is a better headline.

Apple music is only 10 bucks a month and lossless. But that is pretty cool.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#285
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "need"? Increasingly, users are force-fed cross-platform web apps. I wouldn't say that's what they need, and you're not even saying it's a good thing. If users don't need desktop software, then why do they need desktop hardware?

Take Figma for example. Couldn’t have been a web app 10 years ago. Users would have needed a desktop app in that case. You emphasize “need” but it seems you mean “want.” You bring up a great point about hardware too. People don’t need as much hardware given the increased connectivity and cloud computing. Again, I’m not suggesting all this is good. But of course users _need_ local compute and native apps less than 10…

> Again, I’m not suggesting all this is good. But of course users _need_ local compute and native apps less than 10 years ago.

Isn't this a problem for the future of Mac, though? It seems to me that dumbing down the Mac is the opposite of what Apple should do. Why not place emphasis on what makes desktop special, rather than morphing the Mac into an overpriced iOS device that only runs web apps?

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and the OS is supposed to determine your intent how?

By whatever mechanism the OS has to verify that you have the privilege. E.g. sudo. Not by raising a plethora of hurdles.

An admin password prompt is hardly a deterrence to people doing stupid things. A young physics PhD friend of mine fell victim to a tech support scam, happily installing whatever spyware “Apple Support” told her to install over phone. That was a few years ago. The average person is too easily social engineered into allowing anything.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#287
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the exact issues but might be related to the issues why I left Apple : I was developing a very successful little tool for MacOS ( https://github.com/milgra/macmediakeyforwarder ) which listened for keypresses. From 2016 to 2019 it became harder and harder to install it because apple added more and more restrictions to apps like this. By 2019, you had to enable the application explicitly to listen for eve…

I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually. They’re already on Linux for those using Flatpak. Trusting random third party binaries with access to everything is increasingly too much of a gamble, even for more technical users. That said, I agree that the macOS implementation has issues. It’s tricky though, because if they make it as simple as confirm/deny dialogs, you’…

>> I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually

What I'm about to say may seem wrong, stupid, or crazy at first. I think permissions often belong in the GUI. Applications would get no access to the file system directly, but they could use an API in the gui to open files - only files that are granted access by the user, often by selection in a File->Open dialog or other direct user interaction. By putting the granting of access in the GUI toolkit, we can run untrusted apps natively with no OS permissions.

Maybe not directly in the GUI, but something like that. Trust the user but not the app.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeez, if nvidia hardware is "open and extensible" by your standards, they must have been really lowered by Apple's shenanigans.

If I'm not mistaken, Apple was the one that blacklisted Nvidia hardware, not the other way around. You can still download bog-standard UNIX drivers for Nvidia hardware, Apple just won't let you install them.

It’s understandable when you consider why, but that doesn’t fit you narrative.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#289
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them.

I’m suddenly reminded of the existence of n-gate!

It doesn’t exist anymore. Or rather I mean, it hasn’t been updated in months. Probably the author found something better to do with his time.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better headline: Unix Legend Ken Thompson discovers that you can't use Apple products for building cool DIY stuff.

Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them.

> Community sourced headlines (toggleable visibility natch) would be a great addition. Tie the voting to karma on them.

I remember when I first discovered the StackOverflow website. Every question had tags on it and some number next to each tag. Me at the time thought that this number meant how many times people had added each of those tags to the specific question I was looking at. It took like a year or something before I realised that this is not what those numbers meant.

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