Windows 95 was an incredibly bold and tricky effort, bridging Microsoft’s parallel development of Windows NT and 16-bit Windows without breaking existing apps and especially games. It’s the best example of a company escaping legacy codebase constraints without starting over.
In that timeframe, starting in 1994, I rapidly moved my early Unreal Engine 1 editor and renderer prototype from C to C++ in Borland C, then to Watcom C++ for 64-bit, then to an early Windows 95 beta with Visual C++.
It was a wild time for PC. Intel’s PentiumPro and Dave Cutler’s work on Windows NT were gaining traction for workstations and servers. When they expanded to consumers with Windows XP and Pentium II, the Wintel victory across consumer and business became inevitable.
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The Supreme Court denied both sides’ appeals of the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. The court battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States. A sad outcome for all developers.
Now the District Court’s injunction against Apple’s anti-steering rule is in effect, and developers can include in their apps “buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to IAP”.
As of today, developers can begin exercising their court-established right to tell US customers about better prices on the web. These awful Apple-mandated confusion screens are over and done forever.
People in this #BlockTheBlue pressure campaign are losers and goons. They're the cool kids from junior high who worked to exclude we nerds from cool kid events, plus the losers who joined in to gain cred. The elite-only verification system sucked, been criticizing it since 2018.
An online community like this should be a meritocracy, where everyone has an equal chance, and merit is earned rather than anointed by a corporation. Old school Twitter had found a great expression of merit with following & retweeting. The best rose to the top.
Then someone well-meaningly built a system for preventing impersonation through verification. But they broke the meritocracy with a policy deeming verification only for elite "noteworthy" users, while letting Twitter employees hand out verification to their friends as a perk.
A very interesting development in the AI art saga: litigation against several commercialized generative AI art sites whose machine learning models were trained on art scraped from the internet without the permission of the artists who made it.
The plaintiffs take the position that machine learning trained on art produces a model that’s comparable to a lossy compression of the original work, rather than generalized learnings comparable to those of a human artist. It’s an untested area of copyright law.
This technology moved from university research labs into commercialized use very rapidly, and the case highlights that content access that might constitute fair use in a research setting may become otherwise in a commercial setting.
Almost all of the changes in Windows 11 make it worse. Lots more nag screens, can't dock task bar horizontally (which is bad on 16:9 monitors and totally insane on widescreen), can't save files in c:\, now the task bar clock disappeared, more hard to hide crapware.
At least it's sort of acknowledged that One Drive failed since it's easy to uninstall now. But now we see a minefield of antipatterns to trick users into thinking they must create a Microsoft account to use windows, though it's bypassable. Unnecessary login to use widgets, etc.
Start menu contains a bunch of third party apps I haven't installed. Are they preinstalled, or are just links into the Microsoft Store? Are they paid ads or is Microsoft being genuinely helpful by pointing users to commonly used apps they might want? Can't tell.
This article leads with an outright falsehood. Journalists should beware of Google PR representatives giving talking points like this - it’s no longer “spin” as it was in the earlier days of the tech industry - it’s simply lies now. And they’ve done it to us before.
I am still very bitter about the time Epic sent a confidential email to Google senior executives and general counsel, documenting our plans for Fortnite, and they took it to a naive journalist to leak it with Google talking points, not citing Google as the source.
Google maintains a list of “friendlies”, journalists who will print Google talking points without the ordinary scrutiny expected in journalistic ethics.
When the press says I’m a billionaire, they don’t mean I have billions of dollars in the bank. Never had, likely never will. In my case it just means I started a company 30 years ago and my ownership stake in it is now very valuable.
For all American history, capital gains have been taxed when one sells stock. This new proposal would tax theoretical “gains” continually based on a company’s market value increasing.