PostThisTooFast

They were far better because they conveyed the state (and existence) of controls without much-hated skeuomorphism.

"Flat" design is dereliction of design.

Apple has long since given up on proper design. Instead of working through the necessity of presenting numerous options to the user and coming up with a proper hierarchical design, Apple punts to disgraceful shit like peek-a-boo UI, undisclosed hotkey combinations that reveal mystery menus, or "gestures."

We were supposed to get a "total rewrite" of Finder years ago. What happened? And Spotlight is a clinic on shitty UI: WTF is the use of a search facility that doesn't show you WHERE it found things? How degenerated is design acumen (or even just basic sense) there that allows a design like this to not only make it out the door, but persist for a decade or more? Then again, Apple offered up a windowing GUI in which you couldn't resize windows from their edges... or even 3/4 of their corners... for 30 years.

But Windows is far, far worse today. At least Apple is stepping back from the idiotic "flat" design fad and reintroducing a bit of proper GUI. Microsoft is just lost and flailing in the weeds.

Because it syncs bookmarks and passwords through iCloud.

Wireless charging is a dumb gimmick. You still have to put the device on the charger, so what's the point? They could just as well have put flat contacts on the back of the phone and dispensed with the inefficient induction parts that are wasting space, time, and energy.

Image-manipulation tools should stop trying to build a database of files, and instead operate on directories. Otherwise, the displayed library doesn't reflect new files when you copy them into the directory hierarchy.

This always sucked about iTunes too, whereas EphPod simply used the files on disk and thus was always accurate.

In the '70s, running shoes became fashionable as everyday shoes for some time. It's unfortunate that these relatively pointy shoes became the standard gym shoe worn all day by a generation of grade-school kids who were growing quickly and mashing their toes into the fronts of them. I think this messed up my feet a bit.

Amen. I learned enough to start off in C++ from a thin white book from Microsoft about the language. Really excellent.

Not to mention that the Windows help system was better in the early '90s than the Mac's is today. Help on the Mac is a disgrace, which is why a lot of applications have just started delivering a PDF or doing all Web-based doc (which sucks when you're trying to work offline) instead of bothering with it.

Red Camera ripped off JPEG2000 to create its codec; now they extort every other camera vendor that wants to do compressed raw, thanks to the bullshit patent they were able to acquire on it.

Fun note: Red Camera ripped off JPEG2000 and of course got a patent on it through the USA's derelict patent office. Now they're extorting any company that wants to do compressed raw recording.

Is there one for Kotlin yet? It's pretty pathetic that Google's own protocol lacks native support for its most popular operating system.

I wanted a PDA, and owned one: the Handspring Visor. And I did want it to be melded with a phone, which did happen.

Palm OS solved the handwriting-recognition problem with Graffiti and a dedicated character-entry area, while Apple STILL hasn't implemented this simple solution for universal handwritten text entry on the iPad. Or has it? How do you release a stylus for a computing device in modern times without any OS-level affordance for handwritten text?

Just a year before this article, everyone thought smart cards were the wave of the future. All of your credit cards, IDs, and medical records were going to be stored on one card.

The rest of the world did move on to smart cards in limited form, from phone cards to credit cards. The USA never did implement these cool ideas; and our credit-card companies JUST NOW put chips in their cards... but then blew it by still resorting to signatures instead of PINs.

Maybe we would if you'd said what "LSTC" is.

And how Google degraded their search functionality by removing the + operator (which required that the following word be present in every result) because it allegedly interfered with idiotic "Google Plus." And did they restore it after shitcanning Google Plus? No.

I'm a casual rider of a mountain bike, almost always on streets. So I'm no expert. But this guy's reasoning doesn't make sense. I looked up what a "drop bar" is, and it goes DOWN; this lowers your posture profoundly and is NOT a substitute for an extension that goes UP from your handlebars.

Then the idea of only going downhill. Is this really a thing? That seems lame.

I get approving comments on my early-'90s Trek 920 every time I take it out. I was curious as to why, and a guy at a bike shop said that nobody makes an all-purpose bike like that anymore. To me the over-specialization is antithetical to the go-anywhere promise of a mountain bike.

Some drives (like those for Atari 8-bits) were intelligent, so software didn't have direct control over the recording parameters. So publishers would create custom authoring drives that could write bad sectors on command; the program loader would check for a bad sector and refuse to load if it wasn't present.

A more-clever technique would write two sectors in a row with the same sector number but different data in each. The program loader would rapidly demand that sector twice, getting different data as the disk passed under the read head. A copy program, however, would only copy each sector once and be missing the data from the sector with the duplicate number.

I generally oppose anything Chromium, because it's ushering in a return to the shitty days of "this site is best viewed in Microsoft Explorer."

But... not sure what an independent developer is to do about that.

We can only hope! From what I've read, I vote for John Deere.

Yep. Sadly, I'd say that even now you might want to spend your travel dollars elsewhere.

The bubble is back. Look at the housing market and the valuations of do-nothing bullshit companies.

People don't learn.

So.. it’s not misleading.

Does everyone just talk over everyone else on this thing? How does mass audio work?

What is the origin of this "Bad Apple" video, and why is it everywhere all of a sudden?

"Dark mode" is not an innovation. It's a half-assed reversal of a regression.

Computers used to show light characters on a dark background. 8-bit platforms often defaulted to white text on a dark-blue background, which until just a few years ago was still available in Word as a checkbox option.

Then the "desktop publishing" craze came along, and brought the analogy of a computer screen to a piece of paper. But this inverse (black text on a white background) scheme ignored the fact that paper doesn't EMIT light. Using these systems was akin to reading the label on the surface of a lit light bulb all day.

But for two decades, Windows let you set up a system-wide color scheme whose colors would be inherited by (nearly) all applications. It was great; you could (and I did, in the early '90s) replace the dumb inverse default color scheme with a "charcoal" scheme... essentially exactly what most "dark modes" are today.

I think Unix GUIs allowed you to set up color schemes too, leaving only the vaunted Mac GUI as the hard-coded,glaring eyeball-strainer of the era.

But now that people are finally realizing that inverse color schemes suck, what did Microsoft do? REMOVE the color-scheme editor from Windows. So now we're being dribbled out "dark mode" one OS, Web page, and application at a time. And it's still hard-coded.

That's not innovation. It's pathetic.

The musical intro to M.U.L.E. was GREAT. I worked at a computer store at the time and I just had it running all day.

I had the Atari 400 then 800. After losing days of work to unreliable cassette storage, getting a disk drive (the Trak) was momentous. Being able to NAME files was a bonus on merely being able to read and write them reliably.

I still have the whole system, and my Commodore 1702. That thing needs to be re-capped.

Unfortunately it's also littering the sky with a shitload of eventual junk, and immediate astronomical blight.

I preferred Windows over the Mac by far, and worked as a developer on Windows for over a decade and a half. Then I had to start using Macs.

The state of the Windows UI now is a disgrace. Its design defects and lack of organization confound users of every expertise level, and its defects make every task a day-ruining ordeal.

Microsoft even took away one UI facility that always made it superior to the Mac: user-definable color schemes. WTF? I was using my own "dark mode", a charcoal color scheme, since the early '90s. Now I challenge you to find the color-scheme editor in Windows. Just as everyone finally realized that inverse color schemes are stupid, Microsoft started forcing one on you.

And it doesn't look like Microsoft has any inclination to overhaul its failed mess. But really, what motivation do they have? Who uses Windows now who doesn't have to do so for work, using some specific software?

Even Visual Studio, which I held out as the gold standard for IDEs, suffers from the same dumb defects it did 25 years ago. They were tolerable then, but now everyone else has caught up and surpassed it. Even Xcode.

Years ago I read many complaints about how the U.S. government handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to telcos (in what form I don't know or remember) to build out their fiber networks, but they just never did it... and kept the money.

Now I can't find any reference to that at all. Does that scenario sound familiar to anyone?

ICANN't is a corrupt scam, and everyone who follows Internet issues knows it.

They're continually coming up with new rip-offs to get people or organizations to apply for and then keep the astronomical fee after rejecting the application. Registrars, TLD owners...

Oh yeah, the "unlimited" TLD scam was one of the most offensive. They made it look like they were finally going to do the right thing and get rid of canned TLDs... but nope.

ICANN should be abolished. What should replace it? I don't know.

We should be busily building nuclear plants. This isn't going to get better otherwise.