flomo

10 ms·

151.
by flomo 9mo ago
There are some really retrograde government and bigcorps, running ten year old infrastructure. And if that is your customer-base? You do it. Plus I worked on a consumer launch site for something you might remember, and we got the late requi
152.
by flomo 9mo ago
This is true, but the patents were all RAND-licensed, so the press reported that IBM made about $5 per PC. Which isn't nothing, but IBM had no ability to restrict PCs market segments (like they had with Microchannel). So we soon saw &q
153.
by flomo 9mo ago
As an aside, most histories conclude that IBM "fucked up" and allowed a PC clone ecosystem to grow-up, so they only dominated PCs for 7 years or so, and after that it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle. But if you lo
154.
by flomo 9mo ago
Also to add, before Mailchimp and Sendgrid etc, there weren't many obviously reputable vendors in the email space. The business people were dealing with a salesman who was sure you wouldn't getting spam holed.
155.
by flomo 9mo ago
AFAICT, back in 2010 they had a partner who used a scummy email vendor. And he's still trying to re-litigate that? Email is so untrusted at this point, it seems not worth dredging up. The original site is gone and is now an AI startup.
156.
by flomo 9mo ago
Thinking about it, there's just no business model in rescoring "It's a Wonderful Life". You want to get into a pricewar with a studio? Anyway, hollywood hated this situation and was glad to see it under control. The issu
157.
by flomo 10mo ago
It's an interesting discussion. Also, a lot of stuff from the 19th century only became famous after copyright expired (and only sometimes was the author able to profit from this, other times they died in poverty.) 28+28+... might be a
158.
by flomo 10mo ago
This is a tech forum, you don't need to act smart because you know piracy exists. It is an interesting question.
159.
by flomo 10mo ago
Since it is the holiday season, reminds me of "It’s a Wonderful Life", which everyone thought was in the public domain, and it became a christmas tradition because it was all over the place. Well, eventually they dug up a copyrigh
160.
by flomo 10mo ago
As an old time burner, sometimes this kind of stuff seems like a flex, like 'you had to be there, sorry pleb' from the tech exec class. Anyway I'm glad they have something there than not.
161.
by flomo 10mo ago
Completely agree. But fyi there is a bunch of dev training stuff around this, implying like "don't do an owasp or you're in trouble".
162.
by flomo 10mo ago
Nice troll. But TFA is about corporate IT so hopefully you get whatever.
163.
by flomo 10mo ago
For companies not heavily into tech, lots of this stuff is not that expensive. Again, how many DBAs are even looking for a 3 hr/month sidegig?
164.
by flomo 10mo ago
Yeah, and nobody is looking at the other side of this. There just are not a lot of good DBA/sysop type who even want to work for some non-tech SMB. So this either gets outsourced to the cloud, or some junior dev or desktop support guy
165.
by flomo 10mo ago
IIRC, the Abobe Postscript font was simply called "Times", so that is usually what Macs had installed. Microsoft Windows shipped with the Truetype font called "Times New Roman", which was similar but not identical to the
166.
by flomo 10mo ago
IBM had/has a monopoly on mainframe systems. But they never were really dominant in midrange systems (e.g. VAX, UNIX), and Microsoft and Apple etc became huge companies in the PC market. So you can't really disagree with the ratio
167.
by flomo 10mo ago
Nobody gave you the actual answer. IBM was under an antitrust decree and had to openly license their technology for a nominal fee. (Supposedly about $5/PC.) So yes, they were in a hurry and used generic parts, but they still had tons o
168.
by flomo 11mo ago
My take is a lot of that Web 1.0 stuff was total spaghetti code, hardcoded to a table layout, full of injection holes, etc etc. (It was like everyone did my first CGI script x 100.) So in that sense Perl wasn't any different than class
169.
by flomo 11mo ago
On the other hand, the low-point was MacOS 7.6.1 Update 2 or whatever.
170.
by flomo 11mo ago
I know when AMD had the K8/Opteron, they were obviously doing really well, but their marketshare didn't really change because they were capacity-limited.
171.
by flomo 11mo ago
The low-level terminal stuff is still grody as hell. Years ago, HN had some blogposts from someone who was rethinking the whole stack, but I dunno what happened to that project. If people really like TUIs, eventually they're going to s
172.
by flomo 11mo ago
Eh, I bet a lot of this stuff is running on some old SCO box held together with ducttape and prayers, because the vendor is long gone/dead.
173.
by flomo 11mo ago
What I heard from one large chain is they couldn't train warehouse employees on the green screen (3270) inventory app, its too different for them. They just wouldn't do it or would quit.
174.
by flomo 11mo ago
IMO XSLT was just too difficult for most webdevs. And IMO this created a political problem where the 'frontend' folks needed to be smarter than the 'backend' generating the XML in the first place. XSLT might make sense a
175.
by flomo 11mo ago
Sounded like the maintainers of libxml2 have stepped-back, so there needs to be a supported replacement, because it is widely used. (Or if you are worried the reputation of "OSS", you can volunteer!)
176.
by flomo 11mo ago
Perhaps the greatest thing about TIFF, but also the most horrible things, and probably why TIFF is mostly historical. It was so extendable that no two programs ever accepted the exact same TIFF extensions. (omitting the war story) edit: for
177.
by flomo 1y ago
Recalling an old scandal about an office copier/scanner which was doing some OCR cleanup and changing numbers.
178.
by flomo 1y ago
Point being the only real difference between Windows and Mac was marketshare. (Linux doesn't have an ABI, software predominantly comes from the 'store'.)
179.
by flomo 1y ago
There was some point around 15 years ago when it was nearly impossible to download and install Windows software without getting some extra adware and etc. This was true even for 'legit' vendors like Sun and Adobe. (Plus Google wou
180.
by flomo 1y ago
Wow, that's a great video. (Now I recall some old HN 'insider' ranting about how jobs moved this factory to china.)

More ›