...is something I still say out loud to myself occasionally. For example if I hear a good point made on the radio.
Like WTF? What were they thinking?
https://web.archive.org/web/20050326092609/http://slashdot.o...
You mean you don’t enjoy the current -
> With Joe Biden’s campaign in freefall amid concerns about his declining mental health and new sexual assault allegations, remember this: it’s a good time to note that Bernie’s on the ballot.
- front page news Reddit?
I do love HN, but it is still part of YC and allows some commercial activity and I feel at times goes overboard on flagging certain kind of discussions and comments (I'm not referring to obvious trolling and unsavory language).
They've done a really good job of rehabilitating their image. Having grown up at the time, it's hard for me to see Gates and them as different than that. It does make me somewhat sad that we've embraced a future where the bad guys won, that the schoolyard bully that tried to stifle progress is now succeeding by adopting that which they tried to strangle int he cradle.
Yes, the hate for Gates does look a bit naive now. To be fair, at the time there was a huge amount of admiration for him in the mainstream (I still meet people convinced he “invented” this or that software alone in a garage), so the hate was really niche. Hi
I have also seen commentary over the years that his non-profit is arrogant and sometimes harms when it is trying to help. I am less able to assess those stories to know if I agree or disagree. But I do know it is not always universally praised.
I do know that MS company culture was pretty aggressive in the time I was there. Some of that has got to be rooted in his famous personal aggressiveness, setting a poor example for others. Some form of that aggressiveness stayed with the company long after he left it.
But I do think Gates himself has had a personal transformation or re-consideration of his old self. And it is a credit to him that he's done that. His commentary on the coronavirus shows it, for example. Probably his retirement from software, having more money than any one person could know what to do with, his famous friendship with philanthropy-minded Warren Buffet, has given him some perspective about what he can do with the next phase of his life, without the need for profit motive or egotistical drive for competition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
It engrages and disgusts me it isn't a bigger deal.
On the other hand, Bill Gates is not law enforcement, is not the criminal justice system. Speaking abstractly, if someone is convicted of a crime, goes to prison, and is let out... At what point does a prominent individual need to say they'll never talk to that person under any circumstances? In some cases that would be too extreme and in the abstract, repentant ex-convicts may deserve forgiveness.
In hindsight it's easy to say Epstein wasn't that. But we don't know how he may have misrepresented himself to Gates and others. We know from the press that there was some sketchy business involved in his relatively short prison stay, which I presume Gates did not know. My guess is it's not always an easy call to make, whether or not to show forgiveness to an ex-con, whether or not you can trust them as reformed, etc. The article you cite says he regrets making the wrong call.
Ubuntu 20.04 also looks to be an extremely usable desktop that just works.
Then i went to games which was empty and nothing would appear. I closed it and started it again and now games would show up, so i decided to install "WolfeDoom" which sounded interesting. While it was downloading, i went back and decided to also install ZZT (i think) so i pressed Install for that too. That installed fast so i tried to run it and... nothing happened. I tried again, but nothing - the game's name appeared for a bit at the top but then disappeared without any indication about what was wrong. So i uninstalled it and closed the Software app.
At this point i thought to try WolfenDoom but... i couldn't find it anywhere. I opened the Software app to see where it was, went to the installed tab, scrolled down and found it, but instead of "Launch" (or whatever) it had an "Install" button next to it (which is weird since i was in the installed category). I clicked it and an error popped up about some state or whatever. So i restarted the Software app, went directly to the game's page and pressed Install from there - error again. So i googled to figure out what is wrong and i found vague messages about it.
Eventually it fixed itself. Somehow. My guess it was installing at the background but this wasn't shown anywhere and trying to install it again was failing because of that.
Very usable.
Very just works.
It reminds me of Early Mac OS X in someways, around the leopard, lion, mountain lion times. Just seems to work.
With a lot of closed components on every device.
> Bsd powering macos and ios.
There is BSD code in XNU just like there was BSD code in NeXTstep in the 80s but the link and resemblance is pretty tenuous. And it would be a huge stretch to call Darwin an open source project. There were efforts to build free distros out of it, long abandoned. And that is ignoring the vast amounts of closed components.
I'm speaking to the lineage of what linux has been able to impact.
It's not likely that closed components could have existed without a foundation of linux/bsd.
> It's not likely that closed components could have existed without a foundation of linux/bsd.
This is false and I think pretty naive.
On the Apple side, I'll cite that NeXT's equivalent of Cocoa used to run on Windows NT in the 1990s. They didn't need Mach/BSD or any form of Unix to run AppKit. I will also note that today many Apple features depend heavily on the Mach kernel interfaces and less upon the BSD layer.
On the Android side, note that many people are saying Fuschia will replace Linux in that environment.
Linux/BSD source code were part of a lineage that many of today's operating systems, whether you want to package that up as Mach, UMX, whatever.
1. Mac OS X includes oss code in it's foundation.
"Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs once tried to hire Linus Torvalds, the irrepressible Finnish coder who created Linux and gave the thing its name.
But Torvalds said "No," and not long after that, Apple hired Jordan Hubbard, the creator of FreeBSD, a lesser known, but still thriving, open source operating system based on UNIX. It was a better fit: Mac OS X shares conceptual roots with Linux, but it shares honest-to-goodness code with FreeBSD." [1]
"The code at the heart of Mac OS X was born in the mid-1980s at NeXt Computer, the company Steve Jobs founded after his first stint at Apple. NeXt built a operating system based on two existing UNIX projects: Mach, from Carnegie Melon University, and BSD, created at the University of California at Berkeley. But on this base, they added their own, private code – such as the Cocoa programming framework and a graphical user interface – hoping to provide the sort of slick software environment pioneered by the Apple Macintosh." [1]
"Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, was open source and included quite a bit of code from FreeBSD." [1]
2. Android
"The Linux kernel is an extremely important part of the software on nearly every Android device. This section describes Linux kernel development and release models (below), stable and long-term supported (LTS) kernels (including why all Android devices should use stable releases instead of cherry picking patches), kernel configuration and hardening, requirements for interfaces and the modular kernels (introduced in Android O), kernel debugging and network testing, and SquashFS." [2]
"Android's history dates to 2003, when a team of California entrepreneurs launched Android, Inc. Their initial goal was to develop software for digital cameras. In 2005 Google acquired the company and put the team of Android, Inc. developers to work building an operating system for phones that was based on the Linux kernel and adaptations of some other open source utilities." [3]
I appreciate you feel the need to feel better about yourself at the expense of others by calling others names, but there's really no need, nor does it add to advancing any kind of understanding about the topic, except perhaps shining a light on jumping to myopic reactions and judgements of others.
I will not be replying to further messages from you on this thread for the above reason.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/
[2] https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel
[3] https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-and-a...
You have misread me. I do not feel better than anybody else nor do I feel I need to. I also do not feel that I am calling you or anybody names. I have not met you, I am confident you are a wonderful human being. It is, independent of the thinker, naive to think Mac, iOS, or Android needs Linux or BSD and couldn't be ported to or based upon something else in the start.
I mean, apart from the fact that NeXT's key pieces were also ported to NT as they struggled to find a market for NeXTstep, in Apple's search for a kernel, they also considered BeOS, and they had a short lived project MkLinux which had Linux in the same co-position with Mach as BSD has with XNU ... This reflects the attitude that any modern kernel will do, that they can swap them in and out with little consequence. A similar attitude that people advocate when saying they ought to port Android to Fuschia.
But many people also exaggerate the role of BSD in XNU. In many places there is little resemblance. They continue to diverge over time.
You have also evidently misread me on some other matters in the thread and this brings me to read your reply as a bit of a non sequitur, but it's not worth debating them and you say you're cutting me off. So I do hope you have a good day, fine sir or madam. Best regards, friend.
Where is the data on that? I just googled around, I don't know if this site is reputable but it would indicate mobile didn't overtake PCs until 2016 and even now the gap is not huge:
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...
I know I've read that PC sales went down pretty severely around the 2011 date you cite, however, it could be that sales of new PCs are down much more than actual usage because PCs need to be replaced less frequently.
I really dislike how political/personal everything gets around here, even the tech discussions, and the tech discussions themselves are full of breathless hype and hot takes that don't really make sense, too many people that learned something last week and then rave about how x and y changed their life. I don't know what early Slashdot was like, though, how it compared.
Instead, Clay Shirkys essay on a group being it's own worst enemy appears to be acting out in yet another online forum.
That is a reason I like HN. I am not a startup guy, so that crowd and the resulting discussions on HN are basically an R&D shop for the rest of us. They can go do the bleeding-edge, so we can sit back, see what works, and take that on as leading-edge.
> Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them?
They stopped having web pages and started having Xangas/Friendsters/Myspaces that had the networking feature built-in.
Dense layout with links to all the new reviews with grades, by section (music, film, etc), no infinite scroll. Quite a few other websites were like that, you could get the gist of all the new things at a glance, now they all feel dumbed down
Digg was cool for its time but it was way overly simplistic. The frontpage was dominated by a really narrow set of power users because of how the system worked and the comments were single threaded. It was kind of a hot mess.
It is both crazy that K Rose missed out on selling it for $250 million and that's all it was worth. Had he played his cards right, it could have been Twitter and valued at tens of billions of dollars.
If you want to get into great sites that I miss, I really miss Reddit from 2005-2010, maybe a little later. Do I get a prize for using Reddit when it had no comments? The programming related discussions were good. HN's too ideological and big for them now, and r/progamming is a clusterfuck of people being assholes to each other and talking about shit we were arguing about 15 years ago.
Those early sites had a feel that I can only imagine the pre-Eternal September net had for older people.
It's funny what you say about Digg because Reddit is that now, the same few powermods control almost everything. It feels more like reading a bunch of press releases than anything authentic nowadays, though there can be good content in smaller subs that have nothing to do with the front page.
Web Rings! That bought back some memories of adding webring code snippets to my website. I agree they are a fantastic idea and I'm sad they seem to have gone away. Wikipedia claims that they were (effectively) killed by Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
Beyond webring sites, most of my early browsing time was spent on web forums (devoted to poetry and conlanging, my key interests). It's sad-interesting to see that of the various software packages used to run those sites, only phpBB seems to be under active development for its original purpose.
We don't talk about Usenet ...
And meta moderation. Some of the smartest discussion was at the +5 Troll level. Very liberal and self governing. When getting meta-mod rights, it felt like a civic duty to do my part.
Plus friend, friend-of-friend, foe, etc traffic lights. It was way ahead of it's time. Then got sold, many moved out including myself - never liked Digg, old or new - and now with potentially an order of magnitude of technology people (hardware, software, other stuff) compared to 2000, a shadow of it's former self.
Also, kuro5hin, which Reddit has captured in theme in niche subs.
The old digg.com
Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them?
My ealiest memories were pre-net, on Prodigy and AOL, long before they were 'net connected and could email each other. I learned what connectivity was at 2400 baud. I didn't discover BBS's until much later, around 1993-4,and was at 14.4k at that point. I never really understood fidonet, but played some of the BBS games and downloaded some warez from a "31337" BBS with a backdoor whose login was "elite". At least the sysop didn't call himself "Crash Override".