In 2005, right after Katrina hit, a lot of people in the Gulf lost power for a long time. All cell towers were overloaded constantly. What kept working was radio.
A bog standard Sony radio would run for a long, long time on a few AA batteries. Back then, you could also pick up the audio portion of UHF and VHF analog TV too. It was the main lifeline for news and local updates.
Radio is a fantastic technology that is being wasted. Cheap to transmit, cheap to receive, and covers a wide area. It would be great to see a radio renaissance. Maybe the Zoomers reconnecting to older technologies will revive it.
I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!
On some level the Neo is just a new chapter in the story of the original iBook. The difference between 1999 and now is the much stronger Apple brand, so people on the fence were quite ready to throw down with a $600 Mac.
Classic MacOS never had an entirely reliable network stack for browsing the web but hey, they had a GUI running in 128k of RAM in 1984. Not to say that macs didn't have their charms during the .com bubble but it wasn't until Mac OS X came out in 2001 that a mac was a purchase that made sense.
Were you actually a Mac user? The initial release of OS X was quite inferior to OS 9--it was an incredible proof of concept and perfect developer target, but for an end user, not so much.
I've been in computer labs full of Mac OS 8/9 machines happily browsing the internet so I'm not sure what your claim about "unreliable network stack" is referencing. Unless you mean "a crash requires a reboot" which was true, but also often true for Windows 95/98 as well!
If you had good enough hardware to run OS X, running OS 9 stuff in Classic meant that at least you didn't have to restart your whole computer when something froze, just all your OS 9 software. OS X was definitely slow and a bit buggy early on, but IIRC it got good enough for daily use around when Jaguar came out (late 2002?).
OS 9 running Microsoft Internet Explorer! I can remember the puck mice and the noise of the hard drive grinding away while pulling up Ebay and the campus webmail (Horde/Roundcube debates going on and on...)
When I was in grad school I worked in a corner which had a mac on one side and an IBM POWER system with a huge screen on the other side.
Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time.
My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad.
People think "you have race conditions or you don't" and that is true on some level but if your utilization factors are low they might cause problems once a month but increase the load and those problems are happening once an hour. I saw all the symptoms that I expected such as a brand new and faster mac crashing less often than the old mac because it had more capacity to process events and less overlap between them.
Yeah '95 was bad, NT not much better despite the fanbois saying otherwise (had terrible fights w/ a prof who was a roommate of Bill Gates who got a grant from Wintel to get new x86 machines.) Once we got those machines there were two of us you'd always find in front of the NT machines: the student who liked NT and myself who would use VNC to log into one of the few Linux machines. One day that prof came around and said "you win Paul!" and announced that most of those NT machines would be switched to Linux.
The rainbow beachball cursor was added in OS X. I think your memory of the Mac OS 9 machines might be mixed up.
Classic Mac OS used a cooperative threading model which meant that one program locking up would lock up the whole computer, but Windows 95 was only slightly better in this regard. It didn't have any classical race conditions with the network as you can't "race" in a world with no preemptive threads--control is only ever handed off when a program explicitly yielded.
Win 95 had real processes and threads, memory protection and all of that but it wasn't terribly effective. The whole machine would go down frequently (as did Win NT despite Microsoft’s insistence otherwise; Microsoft kept repeating "It's the hardware stupid", Win2K was a great improvement but WDDM in Vista meant you could crash your display system and not crash the rest of the machine and I think got us in "rock solid" territory except for the the power management crashes that still dog us today) and it was absolutely endemic that applications would crash, I think because of memory safety problems. The industry went through a transition of "those crashes are annoying" to "those crashes prove your system is vulnerable to hacking..
I have had to argue with people so many times over that "you can't have race conditions in systems that have cooperative multithreading" in teams that couldn't fix those race conditions because they didn't believe they can exist.
Like yeah, thread A can't stomp on data that thread B depends on but you can definitely have situations where different things happen because of different orders of events. Like I was working on a knowledge graph editor in GWT around 2005 or so that had problems because it would try to cache results of XHRs and very different things could happen if a function called a callback synchronously with data from the cache or if later that callback got called by a callback that was called by the XHR. If you are systematic about things you can do it right, everybody is aware of these problems in threaded systems and threaded systems give you tools for protecting your data but in cooperative systems people will tell you don't exist even when the systems are crashing and corrupting data right before their eyes.
(Look at how Python has synchronization primitives for async that are roughly parallel to the ones in threading. In old school cooperative multithreading you are taking code that could be threaded and cutting it up into pieces manually and that gets super-difficult as complexity. Even if you don’t want to face up with concurrency means concurrency doesn’t want to face up to you.)
Only if the application explicitly set the cursor. There was no default indication that an application had stopped processing events - your only clue was that everything stopped responding.
> My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from the keyboard and mouse and once you added more events from the network it exposed race conditions. It probably didn't help that we were on "Internet 2" had were early to get 100 Mbps ethernet. If you were using dialup it was probably not so bad.
They added preemptive multitasking around System 7.5, but anything that used the Toolbox still had to run in the main thread and be cooperatively multitasked so it wasn't much of an improvement (hence the lockups).
For that matter when they added SMP support to Linux they put most of the kernel behind a giant lock so, effectively, applications could run multiple processors even though the OS could only handle one. I guess you could have done the same thing with a single-process OS.
The list of classic Mac OS programs which actually spawned preemptive threads was probably in the single digits. Very few of the machines were multi-core, so it didn't matter much.
I'm not sure exactly how many programs used them, but support was fairly widespread in a lot of popular programs because it was the only way for Classic Mac OS to make use of the second processor in multiprocessor machines. Some examples of software that used preemptive threads are Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Premiere, Lightwave, and Cinema 4D (see https://www.macworld.com/article/159778/mp_mac.html ).
The network stack was fine (they licensed the same STREAMS implementation also used in AIX, UnixWare, VxWorks, etc) - it was everything else around it (cooperative multitasking, no virtual memory, no memory protection) that was a house of sand.
At least the iBook would come out of sleep when you opened the lid, I don't think Windows laptops could manage that until 2007.
You still have to turn off USB power management on a windows machine to avoid serious problems just as you have to turn off Bluetooth power management if you don't want to be connecting and reconnecting your headphones several times a day.
> At least the iBook would come out of sleep when you opened the lid, I don't think Windows laptops could manage that until 2007.
I think that was very hardware-dependent. I don't recall what hardware I had, but it had a > 90% success rate of resuming from suspend and/or hibernation under Windows XP.
Apple's advantage there being pretty obvious: they control the entire range of hardware
> You still have to turn off USB power management on a windows machine to avoid serious problems just as you have to turn off Bluetooth power management if you don't want to be connecting and reconnecting your headphones several times a day.
The irony being that I still have to turn wifi and bluetooth off and on on my macbook air regularly today, as airplay stops working every ~10-20 transfers / every other week.
Back in the day you had to go dig up an Adaptec 1542 or something similar if you wanted a CD-ROM on your Linux box. IDE CD-ROMs were essentially unsupported.
Best part of SCSI was the required sorcery. "No no, young padawan, you must put the terminator on the scanner, not on the hard drive, lest your device chain causes the computer to no longer boot."
I had a film scanner that would not work on any other SCSI ID that was not 4. Why? Because. Alacazam!
I can remember the day I switched to using Linux - the third coaster from the CD-burner that couldn't work under Windows 95 without dying, but Linux handled it fine while playing music if I reniced it.
Terminators - now there's something I'm glad are gone, it was always fun finding out that something "auto-terminated" to "help" you.
I'm not even sure how you'd define a great programmer. Like Justice Potter Stewart I sort of "know it when I see it". For example, I don't think anybody is going to put Rasmus Lerdorf on the Mount Rushmore of Great Programmers, but man alive is PHP really important and quite good, even at the time of release.
Yes it does. However, I have sent messages to more than a few people who tell me that my message is completely empty. I have my client set to send text-only, no HTML, and apparently the system on the other side drops the HTML version altogether. Something on the other end only processes the HTML part. No HTML, no message.
(I believe these are Outlook/MS based systems, but I don't know for sure. It's certainly not ALL Outlook/MS systems that do this.)
For these people I have to set my client to send HTML. It's all well and good to blame them, but I can't make them do something. They may not even be in a position to do anything. And I don't have an option to tell them "too bad, so sad".
The email situation is really quite bad if you don't conform to the Big Three. I've run my own email infrastructure for a very long time, and it's quite irritating that when we get something good (like DMARC, SPF, etc) it gets forced by the Big Three because along with that we also get things like Google toying with the requirement that you have to have AAAA MX records too.
You missed the point. The guy thought she was playing a game, but she was actually using the built-in web browser on the PSP. Whether it was Candy Crush or Tony Hawk Pro Skater or Super Mario Bros. (also not on PSP) doesn't matter.
She was using what is broadly comparable to a WebTV browser to access a government site, and it worked because the guidelines for gov.uk are so very, very good.
(The UK gov sometimes gets a bit of stick for being needlessly useless, but their web guidelines are extremely good. Absolutely a fantastic starting point for anybody interested in web development.)
After the blowout success of the Macbook Neo, I'd think the bet would be on a cheap iPhone. Maybe not, as so many people finance their expensive phone through their carrier, but I suspect a $300 iPhone would eat the mid-range Android market.
I really doubt it, for several reasons. The Neo is cheap because it mainly leverages a compute core that already existed, consisting mainly of binned parts.
Yes the chassis had to be designed, but that can be used in common for future iterations. That's much harder for phones where the chassis is very tightly coupled to the specific circuit board design.
The 17e already is the cheap iPhone and it's $599. Putting it's internals in a different shell is one thing. Designing and building a half price internal board is quite another, especially as it would either require an entirely new SOC, or mean continuing production of a legacy SOC thus taking up valuable die production pipeline capacity.
Even if they did use an older SOC. Now they'd have to continue supporting that anaemic underpowered SOC with OS updates for years to come, and these future OS updates would have to run well on it.
People would buy a $400 iPhone even if it's fatter than the competition. They most definitely have the ability to create a cheap phone from binned parts, even if they have to go as far as being unapologetically pastic.
Nobody would have guessed that Apple could ever produce the Neo, so you can't say Apple isn't looking into an iPhone Neo.
Not sure about this- Windows laptops have been a disaster for a decade- consumers have basically no clue of what they're buying and how it will work- will it be a piece of cheap, creaky plastic; will the basics actually work (e.g. audio in and out); will the speed be acceptable, will its fans constantly sound like a jet taking off, etc. A well made cheap laptop with guaranteed quality is a godsend.
The case of smartphones is completely different: Android is actually a good OS and there's plenty of excellent devices and high quality brands in the mid range.
Back in the day it was useful to know RPN. Because somebody will ask to borrow your calculator, and if you hand them an HP they'll say "oh... thanks, but no thanks". You get to be nice and you don't have to worry about some bozo forgetfully walking off with your calculator.
A bog standard Sony radio would run for a long, long time on a few AA batteries. Back then, you could also pick up the audio portion of UHF and VHF analog TV too. It was the main lifeline for news and local updates.
Radio is a fantastic technology that is being wasted. Cheap to transmit, cheap to receive, and covers a wide area. It would be great to see a radio renaissance. Maybe the Zoomers reconnecting to older technologies will revive it.
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