Posts by Name3 22 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2018
Nope, StarOffice had it already since at least 1997. StarOffice got open sourced as OpenOffice, and OpenOffice got forked as LibreOffice.
StarOffice optionally even offered an alternative shell including a desktop and startmenu for Win9x, just like Internet Explorer 3/4 offered an alternative improved shell for Win95, that came preinstalled with Win98 and onwards.
SpaceShipOne and now SpaceShipTwo are great, and less overhyped than SpaceX. Whereas SpaceX just borrowed rocket designs from 1950s (former WWII German rocket designs), SpaceShipOne backed by Microsoft Founder and now SpaceShipTwo backed by Virgin are way better projects one can look up to and follow the progress.
Oracle with its licensing enforcement is rather infamous, next to MSFT and IBM. But, Oracle is actually developing really great and big open source software, it bought out of Sun Microsystems like MySQL and Java.
What does IBM do, working on some Apache foundation projects, what does MSFT do beside working on a free texteditor that they forked of Atom texteditor. Oracle work on open source has a lot more impact for sure.
IRC is going strong, most open source projects rely mainly on IRC for devs, and a forum like phpbb for community.
All these proprietary chat solutions are a short fad, get unpopular very quickly and die a slow long death after a few years. Or is anyone using one of the following chat services for dev work in 2018? ICQ, AOL, AIM, Baidu Hi, BlackBerry Messenger, Google Allo, Google Hangouts, Google Talk, GroupMe, Hike Messenger, HipChat, FaceTime, IBM Sametime, IMVU, Palringo, RetroShare, Ricochet, Ring, Wickr, Wire, Yahoo! Messenger
Why are all home network devices designed by idiots(?) / compromised three letterer paid employees.
I mean, why do they use software stack from 1995? CGI web server. Perl scripts. Funky admin panels.
Name me one home network device maker we can trust nowadays to deliver trustworthy hardware and software.
Siri, Cortana, Alexa, etc are still as dumb as the annoying Office assistant in M$ Office 1997.
While in 1997, we had Nuance Naturally Speaking running on Pentium 1 with whopping 166 MHz. Now, the speaking agent needs constant "cloud" web access, so the Nuance software that powers Siri, Cortana and Alexa now runs on internet "cloud" servers instead of on a high end 3GHz octo-core smartphone, that is running loops around the good-ol Pentium 1.
And of course Google shut-down Freebase.com, (was the biggest open source ontology), to prevent competition (from smaller companies) in software assistants.
We had these expert systems, the hated telephone computers for four decades. And guess what, A.I. winter is coming again, because the progress just didn't happen, well except for semi-automated FakePorn, I guess.
> Seriously, outside of Android, smart cards and the mentally insane, the JVM is kinda dead.
You forgot server. Lot's of enterprise and open source server software is written in Java. Think of all the Hadoop and Lucene tech. And Oracle, IBM, and SAP, have lots of Java code bases.
But dotNet is in the same boat. And while Java has a open source community with millions of projects, there is a wasteland and a dead zoo (former CodePlex, a failed Github competitor by MS). And dotNet Framework 4.x is labeled as "legacy", and dotNetCore 1 is already unsupported, and only the unfinished dotNetCore2 with the missing APIs and lack of open source projects is "the future". Beside enterprise server hardly anyone cares about them anymore. If Java is dead, what is dotNet then?
Can someone Archive Codeplex: https://www.codeplex.com ... they will turn it off any minute :(
Serverless as AWS Lambda, simplified operations, but essentially PaaS, so basically the old shared-hoster with know from Perl and PHP haydays. (btw PHP7 is great again nowadays)
About AWS Lambda, I was quite underwhelmed by it's crude implementation. One has to re-upload a zip file with the complete source code, again and again. Even shared hosters that have support Perl and PHP since 1997 have been more advanced and offered FTP or upload form where one could re-upload only the altered source code files, not the whole repo everytime.
> Centralized Computing's sell-by date was roughly when IBM legitimized the personal computer.
Exactly. It goes in cycles of maybe 15 years going from one extreme to the other (centralized computing <-> de-centralized).
1) single big computers and super computers
2) main frames with linked terminals
3) personal computer (PC)
4) Web2.0 / cloud and smartphones (with cloud services)
5) upcoming next de-centralized hype
What I meant in the other comment:
"Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies" March 2017
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2017-March/005298.html
What's the news about that? Now that XUL is EOL, they certainly need a migration path, right?
Yeah. Unfortunately Thunderbird is still an XUL application, meaning it's legacy code and they will have to fork it off Firefox codebase soon. Some months ago they were speculating on their blog if they should rewrite Thunderbird A) from scratch in HTML5 with a modern GMail UI or B) rewrite from scratch piece-per-piece and keep the same Thunderbird old-school look&feel. Apparently they choose C) just update the theme a little bit and decide on the hard part, what do next, later.
It's a shame, as Thunderbird is pretty good though still unfinished and stayed in the year 2005 forever. Thunderbird has been in maintenance mode for years, and the only things that gets fixed are little graphical theme changes no one asked for, while the issues lists grows by the day and rarely someone fixes the broken parts, let alone introducing new features like a conversation-view or complete the Lightning calendar integration. Now that Mozilla declared XUL dead, the future of Thunderbird seems more uncertain than ever. Sad progres.
It will be interesting when the first autonomous self-driving car can handle non-perfect weather and road conditions like heavy thunderstorm or winter wonder land.snowy icy roads or even low standing sun in the evening. The car that can excel on that will definitely need both LIDAR and stereo cams.
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