jtotheh

I think the reaction to this and other things about their business practices led him to change his ways, or maybe just work on making it look like he changed his ways. At least he wants to look like a good person now, maybe he even is one.

Thank you.

That's something I think about a lot. I don't know how we could do it but I think it should be priority to try and figure it out. Social and psychological question rather than technical/engineering.

My killer app for X11 is XScreenSaver. Wayland can't run it, so forget Wayland.

I just read the book "The Innovators" (https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Hackers-Geniuses-Created-R...) (although I got it from my public library) -- some great stories in there, although not about bezos/musk/zuckerberg (book is from 2014). His main theory is that innovations mostly happen collaboratively, from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage to the inventors of "nupedia" and wiki software combining to create wikipedia with many in between.

The stories of Xerox PARC, Doug Englebart and others are really amazing. I myself would be (if I were a lot smarter) the Woz, not the Jobs......

If you use the Apple ecosystem (Apple TV, iPhone and so forth) it all works together really nicely. And it's very reliable. I don't think the same is true of Linux with Android or Pine Phone or whatever. Also the devices tend to be supported and usable for a long time.

I could see making a case that Linux can cost less money, or is the same OS you're targeting on the server, or that you are very concerned with software freedom or "open source". If you want to modify the software you use every day, and be able to--maybe you like adding features to your Emacs setup, I get it. I've done that. Claiming that the Linux desktop experience is better than the Mac on the merits is just ridiculous to me though. Especially when you can run pretty much anything you would on Linux on the Mac, but not the other way around.

Apple's business model is all about being the best user experience for the most people (which does not mean Linux aficianados) and being in the world of software, services and devices that you pay for and are mostly closed source. There are more people who want Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop and so on than fans of LibreOffice, GIMP, et al.

They seem to be doing pretty well with this. I don't see them as getting there in an anticompetitive way, certainly compared to the M$ of the 80s and 90s. I guess people say it's a "walled garden" but they actually interoperate pretty well.

One comment I noticed is that the News app has ads. That may be true, but if you give them their 10$ a month (or less if you get the family plan, etc) you get access to all this content that otherwise is locked behind paywalls. It's kind of a good deal.

Apple is doing things I don't think are possible on Linux, like sharing the clipboard (and camera) between the phone and computer, playing videos on your Apple TV....Maybe someone will tell me "all you have to do is download this source repo and compile this....." -- with the Apple stuff it just works. <don flamesuit/>

Mostly, Apple stuff works very reliably and gets out your way. It does things you want to do, like maintain a photo / video library and share it with your family, keep track of your calendar on all your devices, etc.

Looking into this more, I see that Lotus 1-2-3 is considered to have greatly helped the IBM PC become dominant, and it did not run on CP/M-86 (i would be interested in any confirmation or rebuttal of this though). So Microsoft's success was partially due to Lotus as well as IBM, both of whom they would defeat in PC OSes and spreadsheets. There was rumored to be a saying at MS "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run".....And Mitch Kapor ended up promoting free software (was head of Mozilla) and tech inclusion with his foundation.

It is a strange turn of events that DRI did not supply the dominant OS for the IBM PC. Before watching this I didn't know that CP/M-86 went for $240 and PC-DOS for $40. Gates' shrewdness (I'll call it that) enabled him to control the PC (as in IBM PCs and clones) market. Sounds like Kildall was a great guy and a genius, who did not win in the "business is war" competition. I remember working at Egghead Software and GEM being superior to the Windows of the day, but it never took off. Xerox (who should have owned GUI computing) made Ventura Publisher based on GEM. Now Gates wants to be seen as a kindly benefactor to us all.....

I hope you pursue your dreams! If they change then so be it, but if they continue to be about tech, I hope you don't let this stop you. The industry needs motivated women!

I totally agree with this. As streaming migrates to > CD-quality bitrates, and Dolby Atmos and such emerge, the idea of using physical CDs seems silly. I can understand that it might be possible to have a completely analog chain from microphone/instrument to vinyl, and that is sort of tantalizing, but vinyl is really such a hack and has weak S/N ratio etc, I think it's silly to use it in this day and age. (Except to access rare recordings, which should be immediately digitized).

I tried to install Debian 11 on an Early 2014 MacBook pro and it didn't have video at all for me in the installer. I didn't pursue it after that. You have done a lot to get this to work.

I've tried different Linux distros on this computer and Manjaro was the best out of the box that I tried. I recently changed to Arch thinking that it was the true source of Manjaro's working, and it is not so much. I've got it to an OK state though.

Oracle JDK 8 includes something called Web Start, which was a cool way of having a client Java executable that would be updated when you reloaded it from a web link. It used to be a real pain to manage updating clients in client-server apps before everything went web. I worked for a shop that had a complex GUI deployed this way. Web Start is not open source, and some of the free reimplementations didn't work. (OpenJDK does not include it).

I watched this, having had it recommended elsewhere. It's a pretty amazing story. It is a bit long but very entertaining. The achievement it eventually explains is amazing,especially for those of us who have had dual-boot Windows/Linux machines.

modern users (for example, kids) are able to get by with their files in the default folders of the applications and no concept of a directory tree. And with performant search they don't worry about it, they just search for the file. I don't know that that's due to disrespect but it's a thing.

You can write your own apps for your personal iPhone on a mac (with Xcode,which is free) - granted you have to own a mac.

Also, the iPhone can do things the Jornada can't.......

That's pretty scary.

Looking around Knuth's web pages after checking out his questions for ChatGPT, I found this, which really surprised me. I didn't know he was so thoughtful about such things.

I clicked around on the timeline to sample this at different points. Can’t imagine watching it for any length of time. Interesting that they were kind of making the same kind of music with 1970 instruments (including flute, drum set)

That was my reaction as well. It really doesn't say much of value, just regurgitates some facts about both languages.

modern word and excel really started on the mac, earlier than that.

Robert Crumb depicted PKD's religious experience in comic book form, here is a link: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/07/r-crumb-weirdo-phi...

This is pretty funny. The rest of the stuff on the site is good as well.

I find Chomsky convincing. I'd like to hear what people who disagree have to say.

this is a couple months old, but I just found it. I think it's a funny idea, a little alarming, too.

this is an amazing story.

I believe there was some skullduggery where M$ encouraged Wordperfect and Lotus, who dominated their markets, to focus on OS/2 as the future, while preparing to release or further promote Excel and Word for Windows with the release of Windows 3.0. (and possibly sabotaging the OS/2 effort). They also started the practice of bundling them up as "Office" which made Powerpoint a freebie, thus killing the market for presentation programs that had had competition at the time. I worked in an Egghead Software store while all this was going on.

I live there, I still try and refer to it as National Airport.

So, Team Reagan left the hostages there longer, sold arms to an enemy and subverted the POTUS - why is there a statue of that !@# at Washington National Airport?????

the two best things for me about the MacOS are the integration with other apple devices/services and that things "just work". When I first started using it after using Linux for years I installed Thunderbird and the like. Now I use the Apple programs (Safari, Mail, etc). There are a lot of little niceties in things like Preview. I don't generally use Siri though.

The way it integrates with my other Apple devices, that it does point in time backups automatically, how well it suspends/resumes, long battery life - these are the killer features for me. For instance if my iPhone is in my pocket and I visit a site with SMS based 2FA the computer gets the code from the phone and offers to paste it into the prompt. There are a lot of little small things like that. A lot of them would involve using the Apple ecosystem, like Apple Music, iCloud, other apple devices, etc. Just my .02.

my favorite sentence: "the euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge:give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name."