machinecoffee

Wow, that was an expensive mouse!

I remember working on a Sun Sparc 4 (I think, about 1996) with an optical mouse that would only work on a special mat, and wondering what was the point? Glad to see they solved that particular problem.

maybe data froms action!

http://www.data-forms-action.com/

It's not where the data came from that's interesting, it's the the fact the list exists, who's on it and that it's being used to identify people that you may not want to start a business relationship with.

Would it be possible to think of a way to keep your satellite office open? Think of some plan so that you can support new customers, or somehow widen your scope to get fresh work. Is there some geographical advantage to where you are so that possibly they would like to keep the office open?

It seems now like if you do nothing, the office will close for sure. But maybe there's a way to convince the parent company to keep you open and thus avert what seems like the inevitable.

Or maybe you could all group together and open a new consultancy for yourselves (then you have to let your colleagues know).

- just thinking a bit outside the box, as it's pretty clear the writing is on the wall - and if you've been looking for something new for 4 years already, it will be even harder once you're out of work.

Probably a lot of DB Servers do that - which is why the plan for a query can change as the amount of data per table increases.

I would argue that BeOS was not a failure as an OS, but it was a failure in the market where it couldn't find a clear place for itself, and was attempting to break into a market pretty much totally dominated by MS at the time.

Remember in the time of home computers, there were many good Systems that were pretty much from scratch implementations (Amiga, GEM and Archimedes) so the idea of creating a totally new OS against the incumbents (Windows and OSX) is not totally pointless.

Folklore.org is an excellent site, I loved reading about the early days of the mac and gained a great respect for the first Macintosh team.

In my opinion they really moved the needle on ubiquitous computing for the masses, and did a great job on their first attempt.

Oh my goodness, sensible, persistent, easy to use scrollbars! Oh how I've missed them...

Interesting reading through the code, which looks very much like Win32.

Actually Mac OS was always pretty restrictive in what you could customize - in some ways they've actually doubled the number of choices you now have :)

And I guess there's no way to create a transaction between the file system and the sqlite db. I've often thought that would be a useful feature sometimes - maybe something in the sqlite API could write your file, and then commit when verified on the filesystem.

Snow Leopard and Windows 2000 I believe will long be fondly remembered by some, for being stable releases that barely introduced new features, but focused instead on stability.

Wow, good acronym. Now if only I had a good way to remember names, it's something I'm really bad at. Somehow when somebody tells me their name my brain goes on holiday, even after I purposefully repeat it, like 'Hi Luke, nice to meet you..'. Five minutes later I'll be struggling to remember it.

That's even worse at a party full of people I've never met before.

Never realized how much Smalltalk influenced Objective C until I looked a bit more into it.

See e.g. object initialization here: https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Inst...

And the notion of passing messages to an object.

Thanks for reminding me how useful a site finance.yahoo is, if you take that graph back to 2005, IBM doesn't look that bad. You also see the precipitous fall Groupon had from its earliest days.

It didn't seem to be a problem for GEM for some reason though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gem_11_Desktop.png

I was too, of course a distributed system could also be built with DCOM and MTC (later COM+), and the DTC (Distributed Transaction Coordinator) could be used when you needed a transaction across services (or DBs, or MQs). Obviously the DTC was developed in recognition of the fact that distributed transactional service calls were a real requirement - something that current microservice architectures over HTTP REST don't seem to support.

Previous discussion on HN for 'Naughty Strings', was certainly an entertaining and eye opening read...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10035008

Does there even exist a working quantum network at the moment, as in has anybody ever connected two devices and sent 1MB of data over the link (even if the 2 nodes are only a few meters apart)?

This article is talking about building an internet, but I'm not even aware of a reliably functioning peer-to-peer network, which is surely a needed first step?