Random bits out of my memory in no particular order, except the first one:
First and foremost Linux was free, no money, no licenses, no procurement procedures, download and install.
Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes.
It soon became PHP vs ASP and Java run on both OSes equally well.
There were still many Unix developers around and they picked up Linux at least as a deployment target.
Web servers were developed for Unix first. Porting to Linux was trivial. Porting to Windows not so. We had to wait for IIS.
> Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes.
No way. Why didn’t they have the foresight to see this was a bad idea?
Didn’t you just need one person to say something like requiring human intervention to provision servers is not scalable? It doesn’t require an expert to think of this really.
To be fair to them, one or two servers were enough for basically every single service back in the 90s when consumers started moving to the internet. Microsoft sold what they had. Their customers bought what they were used to. The usual stack was a mainframe or an AS400 exporting a file full of records. A Windows NT PC imported the file in either Oracle or SQL Server and served HTML pages either with ASP or Java. Then export from the local db, import into the AS400. The internet facing system was a bolted on afterthought.
Of course it was still a pain compared to command line, unless you grew up with only a Windows PC or a Mac under your fingers. No CLI on Macs until Apple rebuilt the OS on Unix so you didn't even know what a CLI was.
I'm afraid that the average user still does not think about backup. Sharing with other devices, probably yes, but the two concepts are only distant cousins.
But they have gotten used to lose all their files on a regular basis. Sure they lament it when in happens but most aren't willing to do anything about that.
My SO lost all her pictures several times over the year when changing phones. She still complains about it when she wants to share or find something old she knew she had but she has mostly accepted it.
I understand the frustration of the author but how many readers do have an old, unupgraded, maybe unupgradable epub reader? If authors want to make their work available to all readers they have to build for the least common denominator. If it happens to be something from 2013, sorry but that's the reality of the market.
1. How does the AI pais taxes. Nobody in the Argentinian statal structure will miss this. It's one of the core functions of every state.
2. Who actually runs the AI, which will be a kind of Openclaw with a LLM model. Anthropic and Google in the USA? One of their Chinese competitors? The people in Argentina that setup the box and will likely monitor what the AI do and could pull the plug? Anyway, it's the LLM that makes the decisions so control is delegated to someone outside the country, except for pulling the plug. And that final action has consequences on paying taxes and on liability. Local models? Yes, but they are still built somewhere else with somewhere else biases. And how about to trust their updates?
BTW, how about an AI that creates a number of other AI, incorporates them and iterates the schema? How can you pull the plug? It shuts down only if it can't pay the bill anymore.
Interviews work both ways: employers select employees, employees select employers.
Unfortunately often employees forget that part of the goals of an interview. An employer never forgets its goal.
Of course the asymmetry stems principally from who pais whom and secondarily from who can wait more to find a better fit. Sometimes that's the employee.
If one is not desperate to get a salary immediately, it helps thinking that the company applied for an interview and agreed to let the interviewer come and inspect their premises, their personnel and their processes. The right questions derive from that realization. By the way, that's what auditors do.
Probably because it got popular as the easy Linux distro back in the 2000s and that label is sticking.
I remember that I attempted to install Debian on my laptop in 2009. It was ugly. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and it was a totally different and much nicer experience. Because of that I've been on Ubuntu until they started pushing snaps very aggressively. I live booted Debian 11 and realized that its UI was exactly the same. I don't know when it happened during that dozen of years but there wasn't anymore a reason to stick to Ubuntu. I installed Debian 11 and got a faster machine with less background processes. I'm on Debian 13 now. I've been told that KDE is much better than what I attempted to use in 2014 so maybe I could give it a try, but it's unclear to me what I have to gain.
I prefer KDE (on Ubuntu, because I tried it and it's good enough) - it's got more stuff built into the OS in terms of settings. I tended to find that Gnome needs you to install more things to expose configuration settings, whereas KDE's configuration UI is pretty good.
Sometimes I manage to make the ghost move on mobile but I don't understand how to do it in a consistent way. Maybe there should be a tap area of 90 degrees above the ghost (from -45 to +45) to move it upwards, 90 to the right to move it rightwards, etc.
On mobile, you just swipe in the direction you want to move (e.g. swipe up to go up). You can also queue the move ahead of time. So even if you are nowhere near the intersection yet, you can swipe up and trust that the ghost will automatically turn once it reaches the intersection.
I think what's actually happening is that the game only counts your swipe as an input once you lift your finger off the touch screen.
You can kind of get away with that if you're implementing, like, 2048 (although the official version at play2048.co doesn't do this), but it feels way too unresponsive to be usable in an action game.
Games are games, work is work.
I disabled every animated transitions in my desktop UI. Elements appear instantly at full size in the place they rest and disappear instantly.
Reasons:
1) I'm doing that thousands of times per week, I know what's going to happen
2) It's my desktop, there is no one else who might be puzzled by a non standard behavior
3) It's faster.
By the way, it is a GNOME desktop on Debian 13.
Oops, I lied. I was about to click on Reply and I realized that the bottom panel (which on a standard GNOME is at the top) is on autohide with a short transition. Maybe because it's the only transition that I activate with the mouse pointer: I hit the bottom of the screen and while it's traveling the last pixels the bar starts sliding in. It's very fast.
Email is OK. The point is that most conversations moved to other media (mainly chats) and so 90% of my mail is notifications, 9% is newsletters, 1% are real messages. They used to be 99%.
First and foremost Linux was free, no money, no licenses, no procurement procedures, download and install.
Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes.
It soon became PHP vs ASP and Java run on both OSes equally well.
There were still many Unix developers around and they picked up Linux at least as a deployment target.
Web servers were developed for Unix first. Porting to Linux was trivial. Porting to Windows not so. We had to wait for IIS.
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