81–90 of 114 posts
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Three way merges were a thing before 2005... The author was merely comparing with today's tools.
I wonder what percentage of people on HN have ever used subversion or cvs, let alone older systems.
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One thing I appreciate about Windows is (in my experience at least) you almost never have to go into the command line to change a weird setting. There's always a toggle in the GUI somewhere . I mean, I'll use the command line if I have to... I just like the fact that the supported options are enumerated visually; I don't have to worry I'll break something. Also, I can peruse through a place like the group policy edit…
I agree as a long time windows user, I wish linux copied this feature more
And that's not getting into the issue of whether or not something is a kernel issue or not. And it could be the responsibility of the distro to provide the tools to change the settings.
Basically, it's a lot of people with no obligation to each other trying to work in concert.
The situation on Windows is different. Windows is both the kernel and the shell and the window manager and the provider for a lot of the core tools.
Apple sidestepped the issue with OSX. They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.
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Well, it's not that the latest Office is that much different in this sense... just open Word, add a tab stop, double-click on it and you get a dialog box that probably was almost identical in Word 6 on Windows 3.1. Not that it looks bad or anything, it's perfectly appropriate IMHO. I still dream of getting back menus in Office, now some functions are so hidden that if you don't use them often enough you always lose a…
Clicking the "100%" next to the zoom slider gets another Word 6.0 refugee, complete with nice pixel art 4:3 CRT. In Windows 10, Wordpad and Paint can both bring up the classic Windows 3.x colour picker Window, complete with the inscrutable Custom Colours bit. Although Wordpad is gone in Windows 11 and I don't think the Windows 11 Paint has the classic picker. It still (IIRC) has a colour arrangement in its new picker…
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Oh god, this again. One word: "History". No one thought we would need more than 16 bits (65k chars) to represent all the world's written languages. Then it happened. There must be no less than one thousand individually authored blog posts and technical articles on this matter. Win32, Java, and Qt all suffer from the same UTF-16 internal representation. There has been endless discussion on the matter over the last 10…
The tragic part is how brief the period of time was between “ascii and a mess of code pages” and the problem actually getting solved with Unicode 2.0 and UTF-8. Unicode 1.0 was in 1991, UTF-8 happened a year later, and Unicode 2.0 (where more than 65,536 characters became “official”, and UTF-8 was the recommended choice) was in 1996. That means if you were green-fielding a new bit of tech in 1991, you likely decided…
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I agree as a long time windows user, I wish linux copied this feature more
I think the issue with that is that linux is the kernel. Everything around it is how you interact with it. So how to change settings would be the responsibility of the shell used. And there are several shells and even window managers on top of those. I forget if there's a graphical shell, but it's irrelevant. And that's not getting into the issue of whether or not something is a kernel issue or not. And it could be t…
They used NeXT’s XNU kernel which was a merger between CMU’s Mach and Berkeley’s 4.3BSD. They later refreshed it with code from OSF’s MK derivative of Mach (which also incorporated some code from the University of Utah) and code from FreeBSD, and have added a huge amount of new code of their own. They continue to pull new code from FreeBSD every now and again, but it isn’t so much a plain fork of FreeBSD as a merger between parts of FreeBSD and a lot of other stuff with a completely different heritage
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CVS was released in 1990. Subversion was released in 2000. Google still uses a clone of Perforce internally (and various wrappers of it). Perforce was released in 1995.
Perforce is standard in gamedev currently. As a programmer first and foremost, I prefer git but I've certainly come to appreciate the advantages of Perforce and it's an overall better fit for (bigger) game projects.
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> Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for…
UTF-8 was invented in 1992 and was first published in 1993. Windows NT 3.1 had its first public demo in 1991, was scheduled for release in 1992 and was released in 1993. Technically UTF-8 was invented before the first Windows NT release, but they would have had to rework a nearly finished and already delayed OS
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One thing I appreciate about Windows is (in my experience at least) you almost never have to go into the command line to change a weird setting. There's always a toggle in the GUI somewhere . I mean, I'll use the command line if I have to... I just like the fact that the supported options are enumerated visually; I don't have to worry I'll break something. Also, I can peruse through a place like the group policy edit…
I appreciate linux for the inverse reason. Because everything is either a nice text based config file or a command line tool, scripting changes to settings and automating things is a breeze.
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I appreciate linux for the inverse reason. Because everything is either a nice text based config file or a command line tool, scripting changes to settings and automating things is a breeze.
That works for technical folks, but it's also a barrier to Linux adoption when too many things require dropping to a Bash terminal and dorking around. Try getting Grandma or Katie from HR to be able to do that . . .
Really wish someone would just take the win95 UI code and tell an LLM to make it work on the win11 74 bit kernel
Yes please! Speaking of which, was it Window Blinds(?) that could back/forward port UI themes across various Windows versions? Are they still around?