I HATE APPLE

xp good link. That NeXTSTEP-y consistency is a really big thing for me too. Fuck Swift/JS/etc anyway imo

Bummed that Apple is discontinuing wifi routers, allegedly a response to Google entering the wifi market. Does anyone have any experience with mesh routers in general, or the Google Wifi mesh system specifically? Do we have a dedicated Google thread that is not about the search engine but the company and its other services/products?

they get at what appealed to me when I read about Elementary -- that there's a single preferred programming language (Vala, which I hadn't heard of, and is really an intermediary but w/e) and it's apparently a first-class citizen in the desktop environment

there are always cross-domain inconsistencies in that the way you program a device driver and the way you program a GUI application are different by necessity. now, you can skip the rest of this as tl;dr but...

Are Dashboard widgets made out of JavaScript because of a compromise, or an aborted change of direction?

Dashboard widgets were meant as something non-programmers could put together and were an adoption of an idea that was done by a couple other small projects that screamed when Apple introduced their own version. iirc Dashboard widgets are mostly if not completely dead now (unless the slide-from-the-right widgets are the new dashboard). Ideally for consistency these, if they existed on a dashboard, would now be in Swift.

Is the lack of consistency between the same API’s names for things in Swift and in Objective-C a cognitive overload that’s worth carrying around?
Not sure what a good example is here, but some things will have slightly different naming scheme to accommodate language paradigms. Pretty sure Apple has two different teams and some of the naming is just wrong.

Do I ignore the funky dialect of C++ that drivers are written in (I have written IOKit drivers and edited a book on the technology, so this isn’t a hypothetical concern)? While some ObjC APIs use message-sending and others use block callbacks, am I right to call them both the same thing? Does this process communicate with that process using XPC, Mach IPC, UNIX pipes, sockets, signals, or distributed notifications?

funky dialects for drivers, idk. I have no inclination to address that realm definitively because I lack the expertise. terminology is messy, but there's still a divide between providing multiple approaches that work better across different situations and providing new solutions while supporting old ones. programming is far from a mature discipline and use cases keep varying

as for inter-process communication, who the hell knows. if you're writing a GUI desktop standalone you're not going to use UNIX pipes, but there are muddy areas. I'm mostly fine with some ambiguity because some of these things fit in different layers and you're going to have native approaches for different layers

i am also reluctant to commit to such a young desktop OS. i shall watch their progress with interest though. also i miss debian so much.

Bummed that Apple is discontinuing wifi routers, allegedly a response to Google entering the wifi market. Does anyone have any experience with mesh routers in general, or the Google Wifi mesh system specifically? Do we have a dedicated Google thread that is not about the search engine but the company and its other services/products?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, January 5, 2017 11:58 AM (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark

same

This post coming to you from Elementary. Took 23 minutes to install VirtualBox and install Elementary on top of it, and that includes setting up networking in our funky work network environment. It is ... not awful? I wonder if I can get mwm running.

i run windows 10 on a htpc and it looks nice but is still super annoying. office360 notifications pop up unannounced and apparently there's no real way to turn them off other than turning off notifications. also the office360 notification thing is a program that can't be uninstalled because it reinstalls itself after you try to delete it.

OTOH you can run Windows 10 without activating for pretty much forever lol

desktop OSes stalled because they got good enough for business/enterprise use, and younger generations interface with the internet primarily through their phones, is how i break it down to an extent

The terminal on elementary does seem to have tabs fwiw

i am also in elementary on virtualbox. i don't think i gave it enough RAM. also clipboard and mouse scroll don't work but those are virtualbox problems. otherwise it seems nice!

omg the battery indicator works out of the box. incredible scenes.

The graphics are a bit slow. Dock icons bouncing like it's 10.1 up in here. Trying more memory and fiddling with gfx settings.

i pressed a hardware volume button and the menu bar disappeared so i had to reset.

also it got confused when i connected an external display while it was in full screen mode, which ... fair enough.

The terminal on elementary does seem to have tabs fwiw

gotta be a new feature then, cuz i remember taking it for a test drive around 6 months ago and i couldn't believe it

are you guys complaining about graphics speed based on a virtualized version?!

Maybe.

i got in a mess with vbox guest additions. this OS sucks.

I was going to play with it since work is slow, but I remembered virtualbox doesn't work on my work computer. Most likely due to some shady corporate asset tracking crap.

Good reason to reimage my work computer imo

binned it and am now playing with Mint, which is pretty good so far!

Tried the new MBP that keyboard blows. Time to find out if any Windows machines have decent trackpads.

> playing with Mint

Which desktop? Mint with Mate is old skool Gnome 2 goodness which I switched to after the Ubuntu unity debacle (and the Gnome 3 wars, and the kde4 misstep) #ifearchange

I have cinnamon. I really don't understand the range of desktops, but then last Linux desktop I used was xfree86 with mwm. Is this all still X under the covers?

yes, but not for much longer 8)

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protocol) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software) )

hope you dont like taking screenshots, cuz wayland is going to make it a pain in the ass

Very close to buying a 2012 quad core Mac mini. That's kinda fucked up.

scratch that, would probably get the latest one. not sure I need the 2 extra cores in trade for more modern (relatively) processor.

even with the same clock speeds the newer ones have a lot of features specific to video encoding and media that make them better

or so I hope as I use an 8 core Mac Pro to rip/compress blu ray discs and grumble when it takes a while

still miss grouping notifications by app in ios

https://i.imgur.com/CYmfCkL.jpg

a case?

special jay leno edition iphone

so weird that you can't set the touch bar to show function keys at all times. like it's SO weird it's hard to even be mad about it, I just can't grasp it.

http://i.imgur.com/HVx3osU.png

i love rumor sites

I have just discovered the SkyView app, after some Mars/Venus confusion recently - it is amazing.

https://twitter.com/cdzombak/status/795800189239984129

just got my new MBP from/for work. immediately had to go to best buy to drop another $100 on adapters and still have to go to the Apple Store to spend another $50 on a thunderbolt to usbc adapter that ONLY apple is selling, so I can use my apple thunderbolt display....

this is for really real unreal. $150 more to just get it working with a pretty normal setup. probably gonna have to spend more too.

A term comes to mind: "sucka bunny"

you mean usb-c (on computer) to displayport (the standard over that port for display) right? there are a lot of cables for that

I had to buy this.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207266

There will be more options as USB-C gains traction but https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=13234

sorry that was was large DP, they also have mini DP

Don't think that will work with the display I have

"Apple Thunderbolt Displays, like the video input on Thunderbolt iMacs, drop compatibility with all previous standards, including VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort.[5] They are not compatible with computers that do not have a Thunderbolt port, including pre-2011 Macs and the vast majority of PCs."

Thunderbolt is not DisplayPort. You can plug a mini DP into a Thunderbolt port, but TB also has high speed data, USB etc.

ah crap yeah, if you want to do thunderbolt passthrough it probably wouldn't work

lmao what the fuck, the monitors ONLY work on macs?

made after 2011?

i just bought a new phone today. an iPhone SE. its pretty great. its a massive upgrade from my last iPhone 5s, which couldn't download apps anymore because it required a OS version too advanced for my machine. there's that designed obsolescence for you.

the picture quality is very nice, and it is much lighter than my old phone. design wise it looks sick, like some real life TNG shit. the camera is way way better and includes slow-mo, which i am super thrilled to have! i have already made a slow-mo video of my cat leaping off the ground. this is really cool.

most importantly i can now download apps and use things other than Instagram. and the internet works. my last phone was like using a dial up modem. 3 out of 5 times it would just fail to load any webpage. tbf i had dropped it on the ground a lot, to the point where the screen was permanently shattered. it still worked, and it looked so cyberpunk! RIP old phone

???
iOS 10 runs fine on my 5s