phillco

It's funny because I've always thought NeXTSTEP looked kind of... homely, compared to the classic Mac OS before, and OS X after, which is odd because all were heavily influenced by Steve Jobs. Maybe it's the detailed-but-not-quite-photorealistic icons?

I'm guessing this wasn't the popular opinion at the time (or now), though, based on how much Microsoft copied it.

Sounds a lot like Microsoft's Scalar. [1]

The commits referenced in the blog post look to be from the Scalar team lead as well. Looks like some of their work is getting upstreamed which is exciting. [2]

Although, I wonder what this means for the Scalar project itself.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/introducing-scalar/

[2] e.g., https://github.com/git/git/compare/26bb5437f6defed72996b6a2b...

If only Apple didn't completely nerf text rendering on non-Retina screens by removing subpixel antialiasing

I imagine they wouldn't remove the ability to charge over USB-C, but simply add a new MagSafe port. This would effectively free up an extra port when traveling, and you could still use USB-C charging from hubs, monitors, or third-party chargers.

It's like looking at the rings of a redwood tree. You can navigate all the way down to a Windows 3.1 form in some places.

> I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.

You don't even need to go as far as Windows. Classic Mac OS would be just fine.

Thanks!

I'm curious if there's an equivalent of this for shell scripts, or people use Xonsh itself for this.

Simple bash scripts can easily grow into tangled behemoths and there's not an easy, incremental rewrite step (like JS → TS) that would add a lot of structure. Jumping straight to Python is usually painful because of all the subprocess calls.

It seems that xonsh could bridge that gap, but I'm not sure how many people use it for that purpose, or if people use something else (e.g. Oil shell).

Don’t worry, it was not a very seriously considered idea.

I always wanted to breeze in, sit down, and say, “so, what are we talking about?” but never had the guts.

You'd probably write these off as "$BIG_CO reinvents the wheel", but a few things these things did really well:

- Big bright LED ring around the outside that glows red or green to tell you if the room was available. This was very useful when performing one of the most common big company rituals, craning your head while speedwalking to try to find a free meeting room.

- 1-tap to book a room when you found such a free meeting room. They listed a bunch of common durations, including ones that rounded up to the next half-hour/hour.

- The "outside" Gizmo is integrated with an identical Gizmo inside the room that controls the VC equipment, providing a consistent UX. This is something I only appreciated after leaving: at my current company, the two are sourced from different companies and don't integrate -- you have to exit the meeting room and use the "outside" tablet to extend your meeting or check in, for example.

- When a meeting was running over and people checked in on the "outside" Gizmo, a loud ping sounded on the "inside" Gizmo to tell everybody to GTFO. This was not always successful.

Some pictures: https://andrea-locatelli.com/facebook-roomtool

"Transition accomplished"

I miss the days when Apple's taglines were always witty (they're still sometimes witty, but not consistently so.)

Q: "Why does my company use the blandest possible codenames for everything?"

A:

Misread as "Google Open Sources Code Search" :'(

cs.opensource.google is amazing

As an added bonus, the whole number system is base 25 (logical, since there are symbols for 1 - 25), but this is sort of an easter egg that you don't have to know to beat the game. This is hinted at in an English journal that mentions an age numbered "<Riven symbol for 233>rd". If you assume incorrectly that it's base 10, it'd read "98rd", which sounds wrong.

I wonder if they ever playtested a base 25 puzzle and judged it too difficult.

Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley is good and covers the years of phone phreaking.

tom7 videos are pure gold. I particularly liked his chess video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpXy041BIlA

This is a very artfully written statement. It avoids the most more devastating headline of “John Carmack Stepping Down”. (Yes, going part-time isn’t the same as leaving entirely, but still).

And they called it... harmony.

And next to each component, "Market Price"

> Worse still – and unmentioned by Batzel – a design flaw in the B28 bomb meant that if exposed to prolonged heat, two wires too close to the casing could short circuit, arm the bomb, trigger an accidental detonation of the HE [high explosives] surrounding the core, and set off a nuclear explosion"

P0 - WontFix

I've had the same experience with GHE support.

Those one was more "here's why this technology sucks and we're not going to use it", less "Company XYZ made us look bad, here's OUR side of the story."

Wikipedia could also be safely considered as "not a clickbait site".

This is very well written. They get in, they tell the story, they get out.

> You will

True

> And the company that will bring it to you? AT&T

Less true

Riven did have a couple of annoying "click until you get it" spots (the pitch-black tunnel in the boiler room, for example), but yeah, the puzzles were much more organic.

Well, we don't know if he got the job :)

I was disappointed to find out the screenshot is not a GIF.

> At the distance that the editors sit from a 27” display, there is simply little or no difference between the look of the 27” LED display and the 27” iMac Retina screens.

Eh?