linguae

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by linguae 2y ago
I remember how promising AbiWord ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbiWord ) and GNUmeric ( http://www.gnumeric.org/ ) were 20 years ago when I first started using Linux and FreeBSD. Back in 2004, OpenOffic
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by linguae 2y ago
Three years ago I had a hybrid job based on Silicon Valley; it was fully remote during COVID but switched to in office once per week when restrictions were lifted (this switch did not come as a surprise; we knew throughout the pandemic that
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by linguae 2y ago
I’m not the parent poster, but I’ve seen two major spurts of Python’s popularity: (1) the mid-2000s when Python became a popular scripting language, displacing Perl, and (2) beginning in the first half of the 2010s when an entire ecosystem
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by linguae 2y ago
In the Linux desktop world, there is no single entity in control over the entire software stack ranging from the kernel all the way up to the desktop environment. In a typical Linux distribution, you have the Linux kernel (run by Linus Tor
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by linguae 2y ago
You might be interested in a 1987 article titled "A Critique of Abelson and Sussman or Why Calculating is Better than Scheming" ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/24697.24706 ), where the author advocates th
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by linguae 2y ago
I have a half-joking, half-serious thought: has anyone written a desktop environment for Linux that uses the Win32 API? Since Win32 is much more stable than Qt and GTK, it would be easier to target that API. The side bonus is API compatib
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by linguae 2y ago
Maybe it was all marketing fluff all along and maybe I’m a fool, but I remember a time when companies like Apple and Google were young and when the companies were idealistic. “Think different,” “The computer for the rest of us,” “Don’t be
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by linguae 2y ago
What makes you sure the GOP will revert to the pre-2016 era? I believe that unless MAGA-style politics somehow gets repudiated before the general election in 2028, the future of the GOP is MAGA. The next presidential nominee will be in th
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by linguae 2y ago
I feel the same way about not needing a physical calculator. I have an HP-48SX and an HP-15C Collector’s Edition. I enjoy these devices; they are high-quality and are exemplary products. However, as a professor I have regular access to m
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by linguae 2y ago
Yeah, the other challenge with GNUstep’s adoption is building a desktop and an app ecosystem for it. There are some GNUstep apps, but the ecosystem is not at the level of KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK. In addition, even if GNUstep become
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by linguae 2y ago
I’m not the parent, but I’ve been following GNUstep’s development on-and-off for 20 years (I was in high school then and thus am too young to experience NeXTstep in its heyday). I truly wish the Linux community had embraced GNUstep instead
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by linguae 2y ago
As a jazz aficionado, I am very familiar with Quincy Jones’ immense contributions to music. I am a very big fan of the albums he produced, such as “The Dude” and “Back on the Block.” What is less well known is Quincy Jones’ involvement wit
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by linguae 2y ago
I hate to be that guy, but politics has always been part of the story of software development. The history of Apple is filled with all sorts of drama, with projects getting cancelled and people getting fired due to politics. Xerox PARC’s
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Ask HN: Are There Any Fully-Documented Computers
10 points by linguae 2y ago|5 comments
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by linguae 2y ago
I’ll go back a little further: at one point before Apple purchased NeXT, Apple had its own version of the Linux kernel called Mklinux ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux ).
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by linguae 2y ago
1. Even if one loves macOS, Apple doesn't support its hardware forever. Being able to run an alternative operating system on unsupported hardware helps extends that device's useful life. My 2013 Mac Pro is now unsupported, but
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by linguae 2y ago
Why not both? Why can’t we have a good usability experience AND control? In fact, we used to have that via the Mac hardware and software of the 1990s and 2000s, as well as NeXT’s software and hardware. There was a time when Apple’s hardwa
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by linguae 2y ago
Calculus isn’t solely about learning how to derive and integrate equations using algebraic rules. There are underlying principles behind differentiation and integration that are missed if one only focuses on learning symbolic manipulations
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by linguae 2y ago
Will our tech industry in Silicon Valley remain awesome, however? I've been working in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, and it seems to me that power in our industry within the past decade has consolidated to a small handful of com
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by linguae 2y ago
Great article. I remember first learning how to program as a kid in the late 1990s, though my platform was DOS-based Windows since my parents had a desktop running Windows 95. I also remember various book series such as the "...for D
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by linguae 2y ago
I believe Ubuntu has been a positive for the Linux community. While there definitely were distributions before Ubuntu that focused on the user experience (Mandrake Linux and Lindows/Linspire come to mind), there are many people whose
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by linguae 2y ago
I was using a 2018 MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 processor and 32 GB RAM as my daily-driving laptop at work from early 2019 until this summer when I resigned and thus turned in the laptop. I had no performance issues with the laptop at
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by linguae 2y ago
I listened to this 2021 talk from Timothy Roscoe and I believe it was interesting. In many ways it reminds me of Rob Pike's 2000 talk "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant," which also deplored the lack of OS research at
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by linguae 2y ago
This time around we have all sorts of parallel processing capabilities in the form of GPUs. If I recall correctly, the Fifth Generation project envisioned highly parallel machines performing symbolic AI. From a hardware standpoint, those
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by linguae 2y ago
Same here; I've been fascinated by Lisp machines for the past decade, but they are very difficult to get a hold of, and when they do show up for sale, they are prohibitively expensive. When I went to the now-defunct Living Computer Mu
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by linguae 2y ago
This is one of the things I miss about Tokyo: there are plenty of small apartments there at relatively affordable prices. I personally would rather have a 400 sq ft unit to myself than to live in a shared house or apartment.
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by linguae 2y ago
It’s not always easy living with roommates (I don’t like it myself), but we all have to make choices. Unless we’re wealthy, we can’t have it all. For many people it’s either roommates or a long commute, and I know people who have roommate
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by linguae 2y ago
As someone who recently left an industry job to teach full-time at a community college, I have mixed feelings about the situation of this physics lecturer. I don’t want to dismiss the difficulties that many people, including academics, fac
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by linguae 2y ago
I agree, though I feel compelled to post that the BSDs learned their lesson about the use of the UNIX trademark the hard way. Part of what caused the classic lawsuit between the Regents of the University of California (the "Berkeley&q
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by linguae 2y ago
Official Unix certification may matter at workplaces and institutions where such certifications are required for meeting some type of compliance criteria. For example, if I remember correctly, early versions of Windows NT had a POSIX compa

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