That said, Hiaku is there if you want it. It's still pretty cool, and still not much good for anything but being pretty cool.Me? I'm still bummed BeOS never caught on. That shit was slick.
BeOS was beautiful, but it was too late to be able to just toss an OS out there and have it catch on. There were no applications, and not much reason to write them. If they'd had some good graphics applications they might have been able to win over the TV people who still missed Amiga, or maybe the movie people fleeing SGI, but they didn't. The free unixes were better nerd toys, and BeOS wasn't suited for the server-side applications where the money was. There were no games for it, and making the kind of games that would draw people had already gotten too expensive for someone to do as a hobby. Plenty of people bought copies, and I've never heard anyone who didn't remember it being really cool, but no one found a use for it. Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
The web is like that.
OS/2 let you move a window without bringing it to the front. That's the only thing I miss. Surely someone has posted In the Beginning was the Command Line by now. Has any computer essay from the last century held up so well?
Focus-follows-mouse and click-to-raise could give you something like that in X window managers that let you pick their focus policy.OS/2 let you move a window without bringing it to the front. That's the only thing I miss.
Surely someone has posted In the Beginning was the Command Line by now. Has any computer essay from the last century held up so well?
The Rise of "Worse is Better"
Yes, that's pretty good, thanks. He makes two points:I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.
He supports the first point well, but I don't see the values by which he makes the second claim. Is market dominance the measuring rod of quality?