4 ms·

What I want to see is a platform where native software is accessed in terms of resources, aliased locally and cached. Why should software need to be downloaded

What I want to see is a platform where native software is accessed in terms of resources, aliased locally and cached. Why should software need to be downloaded and installed? Something like apt or ports but on-the-fly and more fine-grained, for things like controls and graphics.

retube 16y ago
why can't my PC/netbook/phone mount a remote drive on which software is all installed? I never have to worry about upgrades, installing anything, plus it runs locally meaning i have full OS hooks for peripheral devices etc.
arethuza 16y ago
The only thing that I've seen that tried to split executing application code between the display server (i.e. the bit you have locally) and the application process was NeWS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS I had great fun programming with this (especially with the Hypercard-like HyperNeWS environment). Once you the hang of interactive programming in PostScript it was a lot of fun. Of course, you could argue that web browsers are doing this with Javascript - but that's at a different level of abstraction.
- retube 16y ago
  isn't this what X does?
  - arethuza 16y ago
    Not really (at least not unless X has changed a lot since the last time I had much low level dealings with it) - NeWS allowed the client application to sent chunks of code to the display server, not just commands to display things. And not just chunks of any old code, but a full PostScript environment with all that it implies. There was also a shell (psh) that allowed you to log in directly to a display server and interact with display objects. I remember logging into a colleagues NeWS server process (we had security turned off for some reason) and rotating one of his windows by 20 degrees just by running a single PostScript command.

4 ms·

What I want to see is a platform where native software is accessed in terms of resources, aliased locally and cached. Why should software need to be downloaded

by jcromartie 16y ago

retube 16y ago
why can't my PC/netbook/phone mount a remote drive on which software is all installed? I never have to worry about upgrades, installing anything, plus it runs locally meaning i have full OS hooks for peripheral devices etc.
arethuza 16y ago
The only thing that I've seen that tried to split executing application code between the display server (i.e. the bit you have locally) and the application process was NeWS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS I had great fun programming with this (especially with the Hypercard-like HyperNeWS environment). Once you the hang of interactive programming in PostScript it was a lot of fun. Of course, you could argue that web browsers are doing this with Javascript - but that's at a different level of abstraction.
- retube 16y ago
  isn't this what X does?
  - arethuza 16y ago
    Not really (at least not unless X has changed a lot since the last time I had much low level dealings with it) - NeWS allowed the client application to sent chunks of code to the display server, not just commands to display things. And not just chunks of any old code, but a full PostScript environment with all that it implies. There was also a shell (psh) that allowed you to log in directly to a display server and interact with display objects. I remember logging into a colleagues NeWS server process (we had security turned off for some reason) and rotating one of his windows by 20 degrees just by running a single PostScript command.