The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992.
Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.
And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.
In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.
In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.
At least in the finance world, there are still a million small processes driven by an Excel spreadsheet put together in an afternoon by an intern 20 years ago. If it is a really business critical process, then the input is usually a csv file, read by an Excel macro.
Because Excel is user friendly, and "is good enough". Mostly...
I drive a 2019 Passat, with lane assist, tempomat, road sign detection etc - it only beeps when there is no more washer fluid (but then it does beep every fcking 5 minutes - easily the most annoying feature of this car).
> The thing with GMaps is that everyone has traffic data, so nobody has an advantage.
It's not necessarily about "advantage", especially on longer journeys. What if there is a crash on the Autobahn 1 hour in front of me? Even if I don't reroute, I at least have a choice of planning my toilet and lunch stop _before_ the crash site.
It is also possible to plan a different route if the crash is visible so far ahead. There are usually multiple routes I could take, and I decide based on the traffic and other factors, where I go. It can depend on the time of day, the time of year, etc. Maybe usually I don't take the one which is 100kms longer, but in the case of a crash, or even just heavy traffic it could be quicker still.
So for any non-trivial journey, I always use navigation, even if I could drive to the other place blindly. It's not really about navigation, it is about the current situation on the roads.
My employer just finalized a contract with Anthropic, for enterprise Claude Code use. Which means that unless there is a _major_ downgrade in service quality, we are now locked in for the next few years (but at least for a year, although vendor contracts are renegotiated less frequently).
Just checked the dashboard, and we seem to have the exact same $200 credit as others, enterprise or not. Token inflation affects us just like everyone else.
It feels a bit like buying the same box of chocolates every day, but the size / weight of the box is shrinking... the price remains unchanged!
This is highly parasitic: someone does a Show HN about their hobby project, and then you come and snap on to it like a leech with your to-be-paid-for completely unrelated game demo.
I find this kind of behaviour disgusting. Why don't you do a Show HN on your own?
In this sense, Java is already the next Cobol. I usually ask one or two questions about class loading in interviews (of senior Java devs), the younger ones are frequently stumbling upon these, and they don't even understand why I'm asking this. Good old Tomcat days, when you could run out of PermGenSpace if you weren't careful :)
Good news is, Oracle extended extended extended support for Java 8 will not last forever, and eventually - if you work in a regulated industry - the company WILL have to pull the trigger.
On the other hand, "where there is muck, there is brass", so a little bit of legacy can be beneficial for some.
Certainly it might have been out of control of its original owner, perhaps due to a prompt injection attack. If I start a completely benign agent, but someone injects malicious instructions to it, would you still not say "the agent runs amok"?...
Windows 3.1 was probably the first mainstream version of Windows, with significantly less memory requirements (and it ran no problem on a 286 IIRC). Windows 3.11 came almost 1.5 years later (despite the minor version bump), and mostly added networking, which _was_ memory hungry, but back then, people were happily running their computers isolated, especially at home.
I guess my point is, 4MB was really a lot of memory around 1992, and fitting a windowing environment in 640K was more the norm, and not an especially outstanding feat. Just think about GEOS and how it ran on the C64... or the Amiga (with a preemptive OS running on 256KB), or the Atari ST...
Reviewing code in PRs is not a no-effort action. If there are 3 people working in the project, and thousands of people submitting bugfixes, then no matter how useful those bugfixes might be, the 3 people will be totally overwhelmed by the sheer number of PRs.
There might be value in your bugfix, but maybe that value is not greater than the cost of reviewing and accepting it.
> Reviewing code fixes is strictly easier than coming up with them yourself.
This is completely false, for any sufficiently complex project. The fix might be a single line change, but the consequences might be far reaching.
> As a user-and-eveloper, why would I sink time into a project with such rules that put a barrier to improving my life with the software?
Please don't! You don't owe the project anything. The other side of that equation is that the project also doesn't owe you anything. As simple as.
Firefox and Chromium are running much larger teams, let alone the Linux kernel, that other people suggested as a model. Maybe they can afford accepting your contributions.
I used VS6 professionally and for private business around 2000-2004, and it was still going strong then. VC++ was great.
One thing though that I still have nightmares about is Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's idea of a source control system for small teams. It was not only terrible to use (and slow), but we regularly lost data in it due to concurrency issues.
Yes, but if you compare the complexity of (Turbo) Pascal to the complexity of C++... language, environment, libraries and cross-compilation...
(A nice thought-experiment is to ask if Quake could have been coded in TP at all - even if memory hadn't been an issue (I think there was no DOS extender for TP, but I could be wrong).)
I had such an interview once. The recruiting agent explained to me beforehand that this is kind of a "stress-technical" interview, supposed to test my real knowledge as I would have to answer the questions without thinking, almost instinctively.
My interview happened on the phone while I was commuting on a crowded train, and was extremely successful - at the end, we both agreed that we were not looking for each other :)
This was back when leetcode was just coming in full swing (early 2010s), which since then replaced it completely. I think the (startup - coincidence?) company that was trying to hire simply didn't have the money to pay for a leetcode hosting service, a phone call costs nothing after all, only time...
You can enforce classification and privacy labels (or something similar) in Excel and other document files, at least in a closed corporate environment. Azure also supports this. Also, everyone has Office installed (in a corporate environment), anyone can open and work with an Excel file.
My biggest gripe with Zed right now (it seems they had changed the default force-formatting of source code) is that it is non-extensible.
I just wanted a custom action when I right click on a file (or multiple files) in the file tree - uh-oh, sorry, you can't have that.
Basically all text editors should be extensible. Emacs and vim, Notepad++ or Sublime - this is one of their core features. Do I need to explain this to the HN crowd?
GPU acceleration is nice, and in general, the whole basic editing experience is quite nice. But lack of extensibility is just a punch below the belt.
No plugins? Those are what give NP++ its real power and usability - for example I use the XML and JSON pretty print functionality daily (on Windows, on my work machine).
Having strong SETI@Home vibes from 25 years ago, except of course, this is not for the greater good of humanity, but a for-profit project.
Problem is, from a technical point of view, what kind of made sense back then (most people running desktops, fans always on, energy saving minimal) is kind of stupid today (even if your laptop has no fan, would you want it to be always generating heat?)...
I definitely want my laptops to be cool, quiet and idle most of the time.
Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.
And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.
In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.
In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.