linguae

56 ms·

721.
by linguae 4y ago
For desktop software and client-side Web applications, I wonder how much effort is made to test these products on a wide variety of configurations? Judging by how resource-intensive many applications are, it seems that many companies and t
722.
by linguae 4y ago
I concur about Windows Vista. For all the criticism that OS received, it did bring Windows a compositing desktop similar to Mac OS X, which was a crucial milestone to the GUI experience, which brought compositing desktops to more than 90%
723.
by linguae 4y ago
This is a nice collection of graphical user interfaces. This reminds me of the well known Toasty Tech collection ( http://toastytech.com/guis/ ), but with a narrative tying together the evolution of these GUIs. Some fee
724.
by linguae 4y ago
I don't think the problem is the Unix philosophy, which has to do with building focused components ("do one thing only and do it well") that are interoperable with each other (e.g., Unix pipes). While it's hard to apply
725.
by linguae 4y ago
A world where Apple had acquired PowerPoint in 1987 could have hurt Apple's own HyperCard, which was also released in 1987. HyperCard did have its moment of success from its release in 1987 to roughly the mid-1990s. Back on our timeli
726.
by linguae 4y ago
One part of the article that resonates with me is the need for composable software that uses a more sophisticated mechanism than Unix pipes to connect components to provide an integrated experience. Over the past few years I've been i
727.
by linguae 4y ago
The thoughts of this article resonates with me. For the past few years I've been wanting to create a desktop operating system that fully embraces component-based software, kind of like an updated version of OpenDoc for the modern era,
728.
by linguae 4y ago
To be honest, my switch to FreeBSD and Windows had more to do with hardware (notably the lack of upgradeability in many Macs since Tim Cook took over) and less to do with software. macOS is still a good OS; I use Monterey on my work-issued
729.
by linguae 4y ago
I greatly appreciate the Jobs-era Mac OS X, with its Unix and NeXT heritage; in fact I personally think the high water mark of the Mac from both a software and hardware perspective was the Mac OS X Snow Leopard era. Nowadays I use FreeBSD
730.
by linguae 4y ago
Unfortunately when you’ve been priced out of housing (the pandemic and the recent rise in interest rates priced me out of anything within 2 hours from Silicon Valley), there’s not much you can do other than relocate or find a way to increas
731.
by linguae 4y ago
What ate Lisp's lunch wasn't necessarily the Lispers dreaming of a perfect system. Rather, Unix was far more accessible in terms of availability than the contemporary Lisp systems coming out of Symbolics and Xerox at the time Uni
732.
by linguae 4y ago
Richard Gabriel's "The Rise of Worse is Better," written around the same time period the Unix-HATERS Handbook was written, gives some clues. Unix was contrasted with environments such as Scheme (which is rather small, but be
733.
by linguae 4y ago
At one point it was possible to purchase the OED on a CD-ROM ( https://www.oed.com/page/buy/loginpage ), though in recent years the CD-ROM version has been discontinued in favor of subscriptions to the Web version.
734.
by linguae 4y ago
I grew up in Sacramento and lived there throughout my childhood. In my opinion Sacramento is the most pleasant large city in the Central Valley. It has a nice walkable core (though the areas outside the core are generally examples of clas
735.
Ask HN: How to Plan Research Projects and Careers
2 points by linguae 4y ago|0 comments
736.
by linguae 4y ago
One of the most important Lisp primitives is lambda, which provides higher-order functions. It is a fundamental primitive, and the name lambda is derived from the lambda calculus which influenced the design of Lisp.
737.
by linguae 4y ago
I disagree; I find it harder to migrate away from the iOS/Android duopoly than it is to migrate from the macOS/Windows duopoly. Because so much of modern desktop computing has migrated to the Web, I can use any operating system t
738.
by linguae 4y ago
They tend to either live with multiple roommates, commute from faraway places (like Stockton, Los Banos, and Salinas), or live in their vehicles. I remember reading an article ( https://www.kqed.org/news/10467044/l
739.
by linguae 4y ago
This tool has been very helpful for me in situations where I need to create professional-looking diagrams for papers yet I have no access to OmniGraffle or Visio, especially during my student days when I couldn't afford licenses for th
740.
by linguae 4y ago
A related issue to restrictions regarding camping is the politics of zoning laws in America. As someone who works in Silicon Valley and can afford to rent an apartment but cannot afford to purchase even a condo in the area, for the past fe
741.
by linguae 5y ago
My feelings about Mac OS X are similar to the author's. I switched from a Windows XP/FreeBSD dual boot configuration to Mac OS X Tiger back in 2006 when I bought my first modern Mac, a Core Duo MacBook. I've remained a Mac
742.
by linguae 5y ago
Thankfully there are some retrocomputing and hobbyist groups online that maintain this spirit of computing. I was born in 1989 and was fortunate enough to be exposed to computers at an early age, and so I was able to live through a time wh
743.
by linguae 5y ago
There are third-party X servers for OPENSTEP; this ( https://ftp.nice.ch/Attic/openStep/X11/ ) is one that I found after a minute of using Google.
744.
by linguae 5y ago
In 1996 Sun bought Lighthouse Design ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design ), a NeXT software house, and then largely abandoned it when Sun went all in on Java. I don't think a Sun acquisition of NeXT (
745.
by linguae 5y ago
A sad example of a Sun acquisition that went nowhere was Lighthouse Design ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design ), a software company that specialized in productivity software for NeXTSTEP. One of the compa
746.
by linguae 5y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. It seems that there is no middle ground these days between Web- and mobile-inspired GUIs that have taken over the desktop (even in the macOS world) and doing everything via the command line. I feel the same way abo
747.
by linguae 5y ago
Good point. "As unopinionated as possible" should be the emphasis. Perhaps the toolkit could support both types of decorations, with flags that enforce which decoration policy is used.
748.
by linguae 5y ago
Given non-GNOME developers' frustration with increasingly GNOME-centric releases of GTK, and given some of the licensing issues surrounding Qt (such as the one-year delay for FOSS releases of the toolkit: see https://news.yc
749.
by linguae 5y ago
A part of me wonders how the history of personal computing would have played out had macOS or Windows been built on top of a Smalltalk VM. In some ways, NeXT was a "pragmatic Smalltalk" machine in the sense that it had a Smalltal
750.
by linguae 5y ago
As a lifetime Californian (granted one who grew up in Sacramento where it regularly exceeds 100F in the summer), I concur. One of the most depressing things about considering moving from California is the weather in much of the rest of the

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