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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • X11 was nifty, but limited by low ambitions. Its client/server model was simple: the application ran entirely on the UNIX host, and the terminal was just a dumb graphical display device: drawing commands went one way, and key/mouse events the other way. If only Sun had seen fit to open up NeWS, we could have ended up with apps’ UI layer running on the terminal, handling events and showing the interface, and the communication down the bottleneck between your terminal and the big UNIX machine running the business logic of the app being more structured (like, say, view-model objects and business-logic events). Of course, you’d have to write your UI code in PostScript, at least until someone invented Lua or something.


  • The problem is that GPS signals are weak, and generally need a line of sight to the sky. Phones don’t rely on GPS alone, but also get location data by triangulating base stations and/or querying databases of WiFi SSIDs over the internet. And AirTags don’t contain either a GPS receiver or an internet connection: they’re just simple, low-power Bluetooth beacons which send an encrypted ID to any nearby iPhones, which add their locations and forward it to Apple.

    Basically, all the smarts are in Apple’s infrastructure (including the numerous privately-owned devices running Apple’s location services). Replicating this without a network of roving receivers is a nonstarter.




  • On one hand, it sucks that in the Trump era, maintaining shareholder value involves not offending Nazis. OTOH, though, given how tedious the American Revolution one was, essentially running on rails with your character inserted into key episodes, the Civil War episode would have sucked. Presumably you’d have been riding shotgun with Harriett Tubman and/or General Sherman in a succession of semi-interactive cut scenes, repeating until you shot/stabbed enough confederate NPCs to be rewarded with possibly a short break of open-world exploring as a treat.


  • One example: the early-80s arcade game Elevator Action, in which you play a secret agent who abseils to the top floor of an enemy building and has to grab secret files and make his way down to a getaway car on the ground floor. Well, that’s how it’s described. In reality, you’re a spree shooter rampaging through an office.











  • One problem with these is that using them breaks things like file open/save dialogs for modern apps which use some (DBus-based?) way of invoking those and expect a modern desktop environment to provide one.

    Also, did the source code for the proprietary parts of Open Look ever make it out? That was probably the most handsome GUI of its era, certainly more so than Motif (the “yo dawg I heard you like bas-relief shading” GUI) and arguably NeXTStep.