linguae

76 ms·

691.
by linguae 4y ago
Speaking about Xerox PARC, about a month or so ago I was actually at the 50th anniversary of Smalltalk event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View; Adele Goldberg participated in an in-person interview, and Dan Ingalls was also in
692.
by linguae 4y ago
Here’s my take: in many projects there are design and engineering tradeoffs that put the user’s needs and interests against the company’s interests. A simple example would be ads. Many websites and software tools rely on ads for funding.
693.
by linguae 4y ago
It's a similar story with the Self programming language ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language) . There are many software engineers and computer scientists who never heard of Self, but Self&#x27
694.
by linguae 4y ago
The Japan Rail Pass for those on tourist visas/entry stamps is a sweet deal that I take advantage of whenever I travel to Japan and visit different regions. It allows you virtually unlimited access to the Shinkansen and other routes o
695.
by linguae 4y ago
Same here. I've been on the housing market for the past year, though my local market is the Monterey Bay Area, with parts of the Bay Area and the Central Valley as backup options. Interest rates were considerably lower last year, but
696.
by linguae 4y ago
I’ve witnessed the same. In addition, I’ve recently seen Facebook recommend posts that were outright racist and anti-Semitic. I tried reporting them to Facebook, but they weren’t removed since they didn’t call for violence. One would thin
697.
by linguae 4y ago
I'm not an expert on building codes, but here are my assumptions based on what I've read thus far regarding zoning for residential properties: 1. The structure built on top of the permanent foundation must comply with the buildin
698.
by linguae 4y ago
Exactly. In California every county I've researched thus far prohibits living in a home on your own land that's not on a permanent foundation, unless there is a home under construction on that lot and the mobile home is merely te
699.
by linguae 4y ago
In my opinion, I believe the desktop computer experience suffered with three major changes since the days of Windows 95 and Macintosh System 7: 1. The rise of the Web, especially during the 2010s when web browsers became filled with enough
700.
by linguae 4y ago
I've been getting into Plan 9 this year; I love the simplicity of the design, such as the fact that nearly all system services are accessible through the file system. I'm running 9legacy on a spare Intel Core i3 mini-PC; my Think
701.
by linguae 4y ago
In my opinion, the most interesting alternative timeline of Apple's history would have been had Pink/Taligent been released sometime around 1993 or early 1994, coinciding with the release of the original Power Macintosh lineup and
702.
by linguae 4y ago
One of the things that fascinates me about the history of the Newton is that if it weren't for complaints from those advocating C++ that escalated to John Sculley (who ruled in their favor), we may have ended up with mass-market machin
703.
by linguae 4y ago
I agree with you. One “what if” possibility that I think about from time to time is an open source community back in the 1990s rallying behind an OS built from Smalltalk or a language environment offering similar capabilities such as Self
704.
by linguae 4y ago
Thank you for the link. I had an opportunity to try out the online VM for Interlisp-D a few months ago; it works very well. I'm glad that Xerox Interlisp-D has been made open source and that there is a team of people who are contribu
705.
by linguae 4y ago
My dream is for Symbolics Genera to become open source, though I'd be satisfied if hobbyist licenses for the DEC Alpha port were available at a reasonable price. Another dream that I have is to actually use a Symbolics Lisp machine; I
706.
by linguae 4y ago
Rob Pike, one of the creators of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, spoke about this in his 2000 talk "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" ( http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.pdf ). Writing an OS f
707.
by linguae 4y ago
And even now these places are starting to become unaffordable for the middle class. I had an unsuccessful search last autumn for homes in Watsonville and northern Monterey County under $550,000 due to bidding wars that often resulted in ho
708.
by linguae 4y ago
Counterpoint: Customer service at restaurants in Japan (where tipping is not customary and where immigration policy is strict) is excellent, much better than in America. I’ve had wonderful service even at fast food restaurants; the workers
709.
by linguae 4y ago
I moved on to Windows 10 and FreeBSD after many years on the Mac (I refused to upgrade my Macs beyond Mojave), but this is an interim solution for me since neither Windows 10 nor existing FOSS desktops match even Mac OS X Tiger when it come
710.
by linguae 4y ago
To be honest, before the release of Apple's M1 Macs in 2020, I thought that the Mac was on its way out, especially around 2017 when we had to endure many years of waiting for new desktop Macs (the Mac Mini had a long period between upd
711.
by linguae 4y ago
Exactly. I haven’t upgraded my Macs since Mojave, for this and other reasons. I’ve grown increasingly disillusioned with the direction of the Mac under Tim Cook. What happened to the Macintosh emphasis on building software for creators t
712.
by linguae 4y ago
The Smalltalk community also had an influence on design patterns and testing frameworks that would later get picked up by C++ and Java programmers. If I recall correctly, the Gang of Four (the authors of the famous Design Patterns book) us
713.
by linguae 4y ago
There is a GCC Objective-C compiler that has existed for a long time, and a large portion of the Cocoa API is available in GNUstep, an open source implementation of the OpenStep API. It’s long been possible to use Objective-C outside of Ne
714.
by linguae 4y ago
Certain features in FreeBSD are not available in Darwin, such as ZFS and jails. Also, if you’re doing software testing, it’s nice to be able to spin up a VM of the OS that you’re testing your software on.
715.
by linguae 4y ago
This is news to me. I remember that the Linux desktop seemed to be on the ascendancy back in 2006. GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were very nice desktops; while they weren’t Mac OS X Tiger (which still holds up as an amazing desktop), they were solid
716.
by linguae 4y ago
I'm a longtime Mac user who bought a Microsoft Surface Pro last year that replaced my 2013 MacBook Air. Even though Windows is not my favorite OS, I like having a full-blown desktop/workstation OS on a device that I could take no
717.
by linguae 4y ago
Back when I was in elementary school in the 1990s we learned word processing using the ClarisWorks office suite on 68k Performa 575 models running System 7. While nostalgia may be clouding my opinions, I do remember ClarisWorks being easy
718.
by linguae 4y ago
There was a Macintosh word processor named WriteNow that was a major competitor to MacWrite back in the 1980s and was also written in assembly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow
719.
by linguae 4y ago
Yes, Windows 2000 on today's hardware runs like a champ. Even Windows 2000 on contemporary high-end hardware ran very well. However, I do remember using installations of Windows 2000 on contemporary hardware that weren't snappy.
720.
by linguae 4y ago
The interesting thing about this is that early Mac OS X was the opposite, with each release being faster than the previous. The very first consumer release of Mac OS X (10.0, Cheetah, 2001) was said to be rather sluggish. Addressing this,

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