Grumbledour

Since we are talking notepad++, it takes up 11mb of disk space, the instance I have open here with 45 documents takes up 6.6mb of memory.

Winamp was already mentioned in another comment. While 160mb is "fine" on 16gb systems, it's still much more than similar apps used to take up and will not be much fun on a 4gb system, which is what many not so technical people still use daily.

Do System colors even exist in windows 10? The option to set global color schemes seems to be long gone and Microsoft needed to spend extra effort to adapt a dark color scheme in explorer (It didn't support dark mode for a long time and then took some updates to work well across the board).

I always find it kind of funny and sad at the same time, that something windows could do 20 years age now needs to be implemented by each application separately.

That's the thing though with well developed apps: I think I also dislike the new icons. But it doesn't really matter, since the old ones are still there and I can continue using them..

The dark mode seems a bit buggy still and the contrast really is to stark, but I am hopeful these problems will be addressed with time.

Not everything is always right at the beginning, but I am never afraid to update notepad++, which is a huge compliment these days.

I have to say I was much more taken with the description of computers in the books. Maybe it was more me projecting than what was actually there, but what I took away from it were computer systems that worked without networking most of the time, were fault tolerant and had most of their power through programmability, which ordinary people were able to access. This reminded me so much of the ideas and visions of early computing environments and even though the books don't dwell much on computers, I found it really fascinating to see these echos there.

In comparison, the visual design of the show is just ... nice? But seems honestly pretty impracticable most of the time and I felt doesn't really set itself apart from other contemporary Sci-fi Shows.

But THEY decided to use Chrome! So the WANTED this to happen.

Now, you can rightly point out that they don't know, but we are on Hacker News here. I am not talking about someones grandparents, I am talking about users of this site, working in the IT industry. I am talking about my collegues at work. About IT professionals. We all should know, most of us do. Yet, many here always proclaim how they can't use privacy friendly alternatives because "minor reason". The whole industry regularly creates content that only properly works in chrome, reminding one of the old Internet Explorer days.

It's not that "normal" people don't listen to "us" experts and use chrome regardless, it's that many so called professionals seem to care about privacy even less. And I am not getting complicit with this attitude in helping google make everyone feel save using their crap piece of spyware.

Switch your browser now and tell the people who don't know why they should too, or stop complaining about "evil google" while enabling them with building shit that includes their tracking and only works in their browser.

Why should I bother though?

Privacy is really important to me, so I am not affected because I don't use chrome in the first place. All the people who use chrome, especially on this site, know damn well what they agreed to. You all already opted into this and everything google comes up with tomorrow. Why should I put in work to give you the warm fuzzy feeling of having staved of the google spying for another day? If you want protection from this, use another browser.

At this point, blocking this from the website level just seems to support google even more, because it takes the pressure from chrome users to actually start thinking and stop being victims.

It probably refers to the controversy surrounding hacktoberfest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894

The github page sounds like there might be experimental support. There are instructions to build a windows VR version. I could not find much more information about it though.

The Internet Archive provides an Emulator of the Canon Cat at https://archive.org/details/canoncat

The interesting thing to me is, that I don't feel vi and modern programs do things that much differently. In vi, Esc puts me in command mode, in any modern GUI Editor (at least on windows) Alt puts me in command mode (Jumps to the menu).

Yet, I seldom use the wrong mode accidentally on modern applications, yet constantly on vi. One part, as you said, is probably down to visibility, but a highlighted menu item could just as easily be overlooked. Maybe vi's main problem is the command mode as default? I always pondered if I would make as many mistakes (or would have found it quite so confusing as a new user) if edit mode was the default.

When the Pandora was made, it was mostly a group of enthusiasts who wanted an open device to play retro games on that wasn't quite satisfied with the offerings back then. (I think it was also GPD who offered some retro consoles?) So this was the main reason for that, but it took really long to come out, and while it was great, not least to the great community and their support, it was very niche, already a bit long in the tooth technically and maybe not as open as some had hoped.

I think they started plan for the pyra pretty soon after that, if memory serves, to improve on the pandoras shortcomings.

These days, I really don't know why anyone would still want this. The form factor is great (Though the pandora did have production issues surrounding the case, not sure if they are ironed out), but retro games consoles are everywhere and you can buy SBCs for pocket change. And as others have pointed out, at the price this thing costs there are pretty good subnotebooks available again at the moment.

So while I really don't know who wants this in 2021, If the could get you say a shell for a raspberry pi or similar in this form factor for a much more reasonable price, I would absolutely be on board myself.

It is inspired by it as the wikipedia[0] article notes. Both are inspired by Cedar/Mesa[1] from PARC. There is a great video of Eric Bier showing some of cedars capabilities on youtube[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

Thanks, this is really helpful! Since there seems to be no central point of information on the myriad versions of oberon and no official website at eth anymore, it's really hard to get the lay of the land and find out which version does what and why.

My Linux-fu might just be to weak but I haven't yet managed to get the Symbolics VM to run. I was wondering, if there exists a Linux VM were someone already got it to work or if you could do it inside a container?

It just seems really cumbersome and that is a shame, because it seems so worth to take a look at it.

It hasn't really affected the language outside of some fringe groups and doing what you suggest is the kind of behavior that gets regularly made fun of when someone tries it.

For most germans, this seems silly, since we don't know or care why specific objects have a specific gender. Why are spoons male, forks female and knives neuter? Who knows? But then again, using the wrong pronoun still often sounds really weird to us, so no just using "das" for everything.

But of course, there are words where it can matter, especially since der/die/das are also used to refer to peoples positions for example. So I always thought having a neutral word accepted by others like 'the' in english could help german to get easier for everyone to learn while also making many things more gender neutral.

Incidentally, the language is changing here, but not because of gender issues, but rather because we incorporated many foreign words, often english, in the last decades and also many new immigrants have come to germany with not as good a grasp on the language. So, if you ask People for example which pronoun to use for "Blog", you will get three different answers. And while people poke fun at it, it is also not unusual to hear someone say something like "der Frau". People then just assume you are not very fluent in german but that's about it.

I think a big part of the problem is that there is so much gendered language in german. So there are no progammers, there are male programmers (Programmierer) and female programmers (Programmiererin), which leads to both forms or short forms being used (Programmierer/in) in these postings to be inclusive. But I don't even know if there is an accepted neutral form of the word if you wanted to address someone non-binary.

So, while the whole (m/w/d) thing is kind of silly, it on the other hand makes it clear, that whatever gendered form you use, you don't actually care about gender.

I really hope we can someday find acceptable neutral forms for these words. It would make many things much easier in german.

So, how do you do it? How is your presidential campaign going? Or are you more into burning down factories and Power Plants? Show up at Elon Musks house with a gun so he stops shooting his trash into space?

Of course we need to tackle the big Problems, but they need consensus and time. You can decide right now to not buy a new phone or reduce your average pageload by one megabyte.

It won't change the world overnight, but tackling climate change does not mean that we need to stop the largest polluter and everything else can go on as before. These changes need to be on every level and it is foolish to not start at the one you are at because "someone is worse than me".

Personally, I always find these kind of stories a bit nitpicky and silly.

They are right at their core though and it would be good to question, if we need high definition screens and streams all the time everywhere. It's not only the environment, it is also often detrimental to the device and user themselves. Look at e-readers to see what kind of devices we good have for special purposes if not every consumer computer needed to be a media powerhouse.

And then we need to go further and ask ourselves, how would it benefit the environment if we had stricter rules for unnecessary data transfers in general. Because I would think, cutting down on adware and excessive file sizes on the top 10% websites would give us significant savings on bandwidth, emissions and lets be honest, improve UX quite a bit for most people, especially on slower devices/connections.

And of course, the article points out, that while these things are important and can help, the are dwarfed by other factors that really need to be tackled. No reason to ignore the smaller stuff, though.

I think this is actually more a matter of taste. Been there, done that. These days I prefer to just mix in my language of choice with HTML instead of mixing it in with some extra templating language that basically does the same but is harder to read and reason about. But that is the whole debate about jsx in a nutshell I guess.

Considering Reacts popularity, it is an interesting question though if templating languages replaced php and asp or are on the way out again in favor of that style of coding.

That really depends heavily on the platform and specific app. It is not there by default for most. Using canvas based rendering is pretty much as accessible as flash apps where, which is not much by default.

I feel this complaint misses the point. This code is highly readable and reminds me a lot of the early times when we build HTML in PHP. You can also use it just like that. Render it server side and be done. Maybe load some additional js to act after all that on the rendered page.

Problem is, while this is the better user experience than having to download and run a react behemoth to gain basically nothing, no one seems to have come up with a good version to write this kind of heavily AJAX dependent webpage without it being a real hassle. So while react apps kind of suck from a user perspective, as a developer, my code has never looked cleaner and was never this easy to maintain because everything that happens and can happen is right there instead of been loading delayed from other files and then changing everything client side and needing additional endpoints for full html and fragments/JSON on the server.

Now, sprinkling in CSS there an top of that or even one of these awful "write css in js" solutions would be were I also draw the line, though.

But isn't scuttlebutt User centric vs. content centric? So I will only easily find content from people I already know? And I guess I can find new people if they are somehow connected to me, but can I search just for content on the "whole" network? Does this really provide a network effect like medium or facebook, or google search, who offer a large existing network for discovery?

But Discourse is just old crap in new clothes. It reminds me of badly coded php forums of yore. It looks nicer, but without allowing dozens of external js files it just gets you a blank page. And their demo forum clocks in at nearly 5mb for viewing the index! Add to that bullshit like infinite scrolling and I really don't know why I would ever want to use this. We don't need new bloat that replaces old bloat just so someone maybe cleans up the presentation a bit.

What I mostly get from this is, that there really is no good modern alternative to those great UMPCs.

Emails are also a special kind of hell, because we often need to fall back on table layouts, which are painful with screen readers.

If you really want to make life easier for blind people (and many other users as well), makes sure you are also sending the plain text version along with the html.

I have trouble wrapping my head around this. When I think of decorational images, it's mostly back to times when we used spacers or built table layouts with sliced images. I drank the semantic cool aid. Decoration should be separate from content.

Of course a stock image in an article is not really important and may not add much value, but someone thought including it did add some at least. It just seems weird then to say that screen reader users should never even be made aware that it is there.

Obviously from all the comments, this seems to be what people do. Still, it seems somehow wrong to me. If the image sets tone, should we not try to convey that? If it really serves no purpose, should we not just leave it out at all?

Yeah, I meant to write attribute of course.

As a fellow German, I can understand the anger, though.

Basically, we don't have a warning system anymore, because the pieces that are left are mostly being dismantled (sirens, tv and radio) and all they seem to want to replace it with is an app that doesn't reliably work when the network is fine.

Lets be honest, if catastrophy should strike here, we would be last to know.

You are right. It seems screen readers these days do skip over images with empty alt tags.

I don't use one myself and have most of my knowledge from friends that do, but this info is obviously outdated.

They used to. But your comment made me search a bit and it seems most don't any more, you have to turn that on.

I guess you can then use alt="" for "decorational" images and practically hide them from screen readers? It still seems odd to me though to even have these kind of images.