__d

For sure. But Sun had great engineers, and it was a feature that I'd argue was visibly existential at the time.

An IDE, form designer, language, runtime, and database engine.

People used it to write business applications. Like Microsoft Access, or Visual Basic.

It started as a competitor to dBase II/III called FoxBase, and then Microsoft bought it.

Yes, Kerberos is a direct import, although extended quite a bit. AD is a lot more than Hesiod, but AFS is a lot more than SMB. Zephyr didn't make it over.

There was an opportunity to build out graphical management tools, but NIS+ kinda got in the way, and the politics of commercial Unix in general didn't help.

> Failure to respond to Active Directory

Sun did really well in the academic workstation market, converting the old "VAX and a sea of terminals" into a "sea of Sun workstations".

X11, YP/NIS and NFS worked pretty well for a while, but then Microsoft came out with NT and AD, and Sun failed to respond. Like, ever. I think this was perhaps the worst software mistake Sun made.

ytalk!

UML was phase two of OMG. It originally developed CORBA.

For a long time, std::endl demonstrated that you were a proper C++ programmer, not some neckbeard C apologist. It wasn’t until C++ had „won“ that it became acceptable to use \n again.

I painted my house blue and orange in protest at the boring colour choices most people make.

No one else on my street has followed my lead though.

I think some of it is because people are obsessed with treating housing as an investment, and so anything outside the norm is a financial risk.

AN AU-EU free trade agreement has been negotiated, with the deal agreed in March 2026. It’s now making its way through both sides‘ political processes.

https://commission.europa.eu/topics/trade/eu-australia-trade...

https://www.austrade.gov.au/en/how-we-can-help-you/australia...

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So, let’s quantify things: what’s the chance they’re right? And what’s the cost of that chance happens?

So it’s not implausible that the “justice” system is automated, using AI, to enable it to cope with the deluge of claims.

This mirrors the current increases in open source pull requests and CVEs driven by low-effort AI-aided submissions.

For some use cases, reliance on a phone is sub-optimal. Multi-day wilderness bikepacking, ultra distance racing, etc -- phones just use too much power when you can't get a few hours of charging every day or two.

I find colour useful for a navigation map, mostly. I think the 4-colour eInk displays would be plenty for that, although they have refresh constraints iirc.

A good UI design would mostly avoid the need for colour.

For me, it matters only when I'm futzing with the map: dragging around or zooming. For the rest of the info on the display, anything more than 500ms interval seems like a waste of power.

ANT+ is basically dead because of an EU legal requirement to ensure that personal information is encrypted. So no new devices will be supporting it, and everything has to move to BLE.

It was quite a rich ecosystem of sensor devices, especially for cycling, including speed and cadence sensors, heart rate monitors, power meters, lights, radar, etc.

It has been extremely popular over the last 20 years.

It looks like eg. their USB drivers use the IOKit API.

(1) Agreed.

(2) There’s very few sustainable global competitive advantages. Sometimes you might have a better natural resource by virtue of geography and getting in first to “own“ it. But for most businesses, reducing trade barriers really just introduces more competition.

The Tn chip.

Prior to that, modern Macs were just PCs. Then Apple started to introduce, and then depend upon, their unique hardware.

Then the ARM migration using proprietary CPUs and GPUs really kicked it up a level. The OS relies on the hardware, which is unique to Apple now.

XNU has some interesting features.

It’s Mach based, so it has Mach ports, which are an IPC system that is fairly heavily used by macOS.

It has DriverKit, which is a C++ framework for drivers that’s got morecsuppirt than the usual Unix driver model.

Mach-O does more than ELF, and enables the two-layer namespacing that makes macOS able to manage dynamic linking dependencies better than ELF.

Nothing really earth-shattering but interesting enough. And far easier to build a macOS environment on than FreeBSD.

If it’s only decades, we’ve been very, very lucky.

> If it was easy to stop emitting greenhouse gases we would've managed to do it 25+ years ago.

Also, if it weren’t so profitable.

And cars.

The real costs are externalized.

Is it possible to determine which sectors are physically sequential given remapping for wear-leveling?

Otherwise the claimed defragmentation here is not actually resulting in sequential data.

Until very recently, that was a pretty common view. Countries generally want unconstrained exports, while limiting competitive imports.

Do you see that changing as parts are designed for additive manufacturing? Things that basically cannot be made another way, but have strength, weight, and even functional benefits over a traditionally made part?

I’m thinking of say cooling channels built into walls of rocket combustion chambers, or car brake/axle assemblies, and some of the „organic“ designs that are lighter and stronger than a cast/machined part.

Sure. But … so was Linux, or Firefox, or GNOME or KDE, etc.

Even RISC-V itself was adopted by volunteers and supported by toolchains, and then kernels, and applications.

The amount of work is less a problem than the motivation. And motivation really just depends on recognizing that the status quo sucks, but is fixable.

And yet, new ISAs arise fairly regularly, for various reasons. RISC-V itself succeeded largely because it is gratis, I think.

Err … RISC-V is an ISA without a fab?

So … use RISC-V as the strawman, and create a community-based RISC-6 that doesn’t have these weaknesses? Better to get in now before it becomes too solidly entrenched.