It strikes me as like setting up an IDE. People have preferences, switching is possible, but there are advantages to saying "we are a Visual Studio + Resharper shop" or "everyone uses IntelliJ to work on this project".
Browser behavior like mixed content warnings (and a clear slide towards discouraging all non-HTTPS traffic) was the impetus for us at Twitch to TLS all our video in the mid-2010s. Mixed content delivery on a website would, I think, also fall below the bar for doing certain kinds of commerce, and ejecting people from your webapp to a separate payment flow discourages spending.
EDIT: I recall reading that the Netflix client can continuously select between multiple content caches. I'm guessing they do this because it's a quality-of-service and capacity win over making a "best guess" at the start of a session, and sticking with it. It should also enable transparent recovery from a broken or slow cache node. If you test in a busy place with multiple caches, the loss of one needn't be a big deal.
> Bizarrely, to protect dBase, there was no compatible Turbo C++ objects integration in dBase (you could import OBJ files from Microsoft C++). There was no way to natively use dBase from Turbo C++ or TurboPascal.
I'm guessing dBase was itself built using Microsoft's compilers, so pulling in other code from the same compiler was plausible. Not a product choice re: the Turbo compilers, just a disjoint path dependency between two acquired product lines (Ashton-Tate's dBase, and Wizard C).
This is the reason that Clipper, a third-party dBase compiler, could only link against .OBJs from particular versions of Microsoft C. Clipper compiles to p-code whose interpreter is implemented in Microsoft C; "linking" a Clipper program is actually linking a Microsoft C program with a static array comprising the Clipper compiler's output. So you can mix in a .OBJ expecting that version of the Microsoft C runtime library. Not a .OBJ expecting the Turbo C++ runtime library.
OS/2 1.0 and the first edition of the CUA were both released in December 1987 according to Wikipedia; Raymond's story isn't dated but could've happened before this. (If I had to make a wild guess, I could imagine this request was a side effect of some internal IBM battle about what the CUA should dictate).
1. Potential donors get upset that they can't make directed donations to specifically support Firefox or Thunderbird rather than the whole kit-and-kaboodle
2. Separate entity spun up to focus on Thunderbird only. Now you can support Thunderbird development directly.
3. New separate entity is now in the business of extensible AI clients?
EDIT: I went back and read the launch announcement [1]. I'll concede it does say "will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation" which could mean anything, really. And this development was funded by a Mozilla grant, importantly not by Thunderbird donors. I'm still struggling to not see this as a distraction from the core mission. I wish they'd spun up a new entity instead.
AIX is still ppc64be. That and s390x are the only big-endian CPUs I can think of which aren't end-of-life, which I think is going to be an increasing maintenance burden over time for IBM alone.
Did he write down everything he learned? That way the next person only needs to cover the intervening time period.
Conceivably LLMs might be good at answering questions from an unorganized mass of timestamped documents/tickets/chat logs. All the stuff that exists anyway without any extra continuous effort required to curate it - I think that's key.
I worked for a company that published a PalmOS app. Palmgear.com was a very important distribution channel, but so was our own website, I forget the exact ratios.
You could do "network shares" as in mount the filesystem from Linux and export over Samba/NFS/etc; it would probably also be possible to export the drive as an iSCSI device and mount HFS(+) filesystems directly from the Mac.