ajtjp

32 ms·

1.
by ajtjp 2y ago
"just meant that developers are expected to bundle their own thin custom-built JREs alongside the application" can be significant initial setup work and overhead, and seemed more so back then. With Java 8, I shipped a combo Swing
2.
by ajtjp 2y ago
I keep an install of SeaMonkey 2.49.5 on my desktop. It's my preferred platform for browsing FTP and Gopher (the latter with the OverbiteFF add-on), and is the last version of SeaMonkey that has full NPAPI support, useful if I find an
3.
by ajtjp 5y ago
Not necessarily recommended , but something that was done by a real team at a real company. We all had our own GitHub Enterprise accounts. But only one was logged on to each computer. Rather than switch out the accounts when someone else
4.
by ajtjp 5y ago
Part of the problem is we were all newbies at some point. I remember the first time I tried to use SCM. It was a collaborative project in college, and our professor recommended we set up a CVS repo (at that point in time, he probably shoul
5.
by ajtjp 5y ago
In office and proof of vaccination is exactly what I will be looking for when I look for my next job. I also don't like working remotely, so in-office is a requirement, and proof of vaccination is nice insurance against the company sw
6.
by ajtjp 5y ago
I quit my job over the lack of a return to office. Interacting with people to solve problems is a lot of what I enjoyed about being a software developer, and particularly after starting a new job mid-pandemic where I didn't already kno
7.
by ajtjp 5y ago
Small addendum: I've also noticed that, especially among the more extroverted developers, people who were on a team that went remote tend to be happier than people who join a team that is already remote. I think a lot of this is that
8.
by ajtjp 5y ago
Introvert vs extrovert. I couldn't disagree more strongly with the author of the linked article. I'd almost call it pro-remote-work propaganda. But, I say that as a software developer who is extroverted (at least relative to the
9.
by ajtjp 5y ago
We put street signs on highways in Ohio. Quite handy for knowing whether you're in the correct lane, as it doesn't have the ambiguity that overhead signs can have. Of course, we do also have overhead signs as a backup and for lon
10.
by ajtjp 6y ago
That isn't quite the same a what this software is or what Groupy does, but that is a fascinating article. I loved this part: --- For instance, one study subject took twenty minutes of staring at a Windows 3.1 desktop before being able
11.
by ajtjp 6y ago
Seconded. Marketing 101: Make it easy for the consumer to see why they might want to try the product. I use Stardock's Groupy, and it does this well (and is inexpensive). I'm not sure why I'd want to switch to this when I a
12.
by ajtjp 6y ago
Background: I used Opera Presto as my main browser from 2007-2014, and Vivaldi since 2016 (2015 being a mix of Opera, Firefox, and Vivaldi). I've used Firefox as my main browser at work for most of the past four years. One big factor
13.
by ajtjp 6y ago
I'm curious what area of Vivaldi is perceived as slow. I use Vivaldi at home (on a 9-year-old desktop), and Firefox at work, and the only things that come to mind are tab opening/closing could be better, and some very CSS-heavy a
14.
by ajtjp 6y ago
I remember seeing that in some browser, but was it Opera? I remember having 100 tabs and miniscule tab titles in Opera, but can't recall that option. I still use 12.18 on occasion, and fired up 11.52 but can't find any such opti
15.
by ajtjp 6y ago
Yes. My productivity started out somewhat lower, but by now is much lower. Moreover, most of the time I just don't care about things that I used to care about. I'll realize, "this is something I would argue that we should
16.
by ajtjp 6y ago
As a relative neophyte in Rust (have gone through about half the chapters in the Rust Book), I recently deployed a small Rust server in DigitalOcean, and was surprised by the compilation speed. The server's code was about 27 KB in siz
17.
by ajtjp 6y ago
Killer is often criticized for not adding much to a laptop beyond some extra cost. The benefit Killer touts is prioritizing latency-sensitive traffic, e.g. for games. I haven't used one and can't say how effective they are, but
18.
by ajtjp 6y ago
Dell, HP, and IBM produce(d) some really good models, too. Precisions, EliteBooks, ThinkPads. Even some of the mid-tier ones will last quite awhile, and if not quite 7 years, a lot of them are more repairable than an Apple. I still semi-f
19.
by ajtjp 6y ago
Some people have mentioned that once you use 4K, you can't go back. I guess I'm in the group that has used 4K (or 5K, in my case), and found it easy to go back. At work, we have these 5K, 27" LG monitors: https://
20.
by ajtjp 6y ago
It's partially modern web frameworks, too. I happened to load up the web version of Slack on a Core 2 Duo running at 2.2 GHz today, and it was unusable. By comparison, I remember using AIM via Meebo (remember that site?) on dial-up b
21.
by ajtjp 6y ago
The Windows logo in the Start menu was a bit colorful in Windows 95 and NT 4.0 as well. I'll grant you that the logo itself is slightly different in XP, but it had been colorful for years by that point.
22.
by ajtjp 6y ago
It depends on if you're talking boot times, or program loading times. I agree, every computer I had until 2007 had terrible boot times. But I've compared how long it takes to start Word on my Pentium II 450 MHz running Windows 98
23.
by ajtjp 6y ago
"massive chunks of the OS were updated in Vista that took years to debug and smooth out to what is now Windows 10" This is key, and also shows why, at least at release, the technical failures of Vista were what drove its commercia
24.
by ajtjp 6y ago
I ran it for awhile too, on my laptop. I think that was back in my post-Vista try-all-the-other-options-out-there days, as I cannot remember what advantage it gave me that XP didn't have, but I do remember it being a pain to get set u
25.
by ajtjp 6y ago
I remember those menus. Office 2000 had them as well. You had a menu with the options, but there was also an option to expand the menu, which revealed more options, with a lighter gray background than the main options. It was an interesti
26.
by ajtjp 6y ago
Indeed, and there also is a DPI scaling option at least as early as Windows 98, on top of the text/widget size configuration. I've used it on a 1200p monitor connected to a Windows 98 box, and it works. It doesn't always pro
27.
by ajtjp 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: I liked XP SP1. Perhaps it's because I used it mostly offline, so its security issues were far less visible than if I had used it on a T1 line. But from a stability standpoint, XP SP1 was a huge step up from 98.
28.
by ajtjp 6y ago
That would be Server 2012. Took me months to figure out how to restart it via the GUI. I actually came to like the 8.1 Start screen, though it took awhile. Basically my most-used programs are pinned to the start screen, so I can tap Windo
29.
by ajtjp 6y ago
And you could switch the puppy animation to a cat, or a wizard, or probably several other options! You could easily switch it to look like earlier versions of Windows, however. I miss that ability in 8.1 and 10; up through Window 7, I coul
30.
by ajtjp 6y ago
The proper thing to do in the Windows XP control panel is to switch it to Classic View. No more trying to figure out what category something is in and being wrong half the time, just the same options as you had in Windows 98, plus a few ne

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