It was really interesting, like a third way of doing things that wasn't "windows" and wasn't "mac".
The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.
Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.
Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)
Programs being folders was useful for mischief. Most people never noticed the ! in the filename, so I’d amuse myself by turning classmates’ document folders into applications that would run a script when clicked. I’d fire scary error messages, load full-screen images or mess with the system settings.
"Everything you set up to customize the system, like desktop icons, window positions, desktop resolution, and other settings is reset every boot unless you manually tell the system to save the current state as the "boot file.""
OS in ROM so of course no state could be saved except as a file on a floppy disk. ROM based systems have certain advantages when working with classes of investigative and curious teenagers.
Hard drives came a bit later; there was a retrofit of a Rodime 20 Mb drive that fitted into one of the podules on the back of the A310, and had its drivers in an updated system ROM. Good times.
Most of the hardware had rom with its drivers in it. Meant just about everything was a plug and play experience.
And it is true that bit was fast, but once you'd customised the font and replaced all the system icons and set strongedit as your default editor in your!boot, it could take quite a long time to start up.
Archimedes computers had CMOS RAM for persistent settings, so I imagine the author's emulator was not set up correctly, as many settings including almost all the ones they describe do persist on a real computer.
There are the general laws - the highway code. Transport for London has made special exceptions for black cabs (which are one kind of taxi), and for private hire vehicles (a different kind of taxi - this is what Uber, Lyft and Waymo are), in London.
The GP said "all drivers are allowed" - no, they are not. You're saying it's "legal for cabs" - yes it is.
- No cars can drive along a cycle lane.
- A normal car cannot enter, stop, wait or park in a cycle lane with an unbroken line, per the highway code.
- A normal car can enter a cycle lane with a broken line and may be able to stop, wait or park in it depending on the restrictions posted at the side of the road.
- Black cabs and PHVs in London can, and in fact have to pull over to the kerb to pick-up and drop-off, including into cycle lanes with an unbroken line. They can even do this on double-red lines, which mean "no stopping at any time" to everyone else. But they cannot do it for any longer than to pick-up and drop-off. They cannot wait or park there.
They can also pick-up and drop-off in some bus stops (which again, is an offence for normal cars). The main difference between black cabs and PHVs is that black cabs can drive in bus lanes, enter taxi ranks, and be hailed from the street, while PHVs can't.
Looking forward to a Golang declarative framework.
My advice to the author: invest in rich multi-window support early on. It's easy not to, but you always need it in the end, and it's painful to retrofit.
I feel like there's a great cross-platform UI story to be told with Go, since cross compiling is so easy.
Perhaps this is naive, but I would imagine that farm equipment is a rounding error in terms of global emissions. Compare the number of tractors to the number of trucks...
I would have expected policy to be pragmatic here, with (relatively) relaxed emissions requirements, since an affordable and reliable food supply is in the national interest? Sounds like that's not the case
Emissions regimes are complicated, but US tractors fall into the much less restrictive off-road category. As a result, they're a disproportionately significant contributor to things like NOx. A long time ago the off-road category was >20%, and I'm sure that percentage has only grown as regulations have forced emissions reductions in onroad vehicles.
The vast majority of offroad equipment is not farm equipment but operates in urban environments. As NOx is an air pollution concern, there should be different regimes for rural areas versus urban areas. Construction equipment operating in urban areas is different from a tractor on a farm.
I'd imagine it depends what kind of emissions you're measuring? Are we talking air quality or climate change?
Two stroke engines are pretty terrible in terms of unburned hydrocarbons and are disgusting for local air quality, which is why I'm glad they're being phased out in many areas.
I'd expect these tractors with I6 diesel engines to run pretty efficiently. I'd bet that the CO2 emissions from tractors are tiny in comparison from the emissions from trucks, fertiliser, and transporting the food.
Lawnmowers are usually four-stroke, with two-stroke engines reserved for lighter tools like string trimmers and chainsaws.
I would still guess that lawnmowers produce more emissions overall, given that there are so many more mowers than tractors. But they get used less often than tractors, so who knows? Either way, I agree with your thinking process, that the most economical way to reduce overall emissions is to focus on what are actually producing the bulk of emissions.
I don't know how much better cars and trucks can get, and for mowers maybe electric is the answer. Mine is gas-powered, and I know it runs rich. I would love to come inside after mowing and not smell like fuel, so I'm in favor of better emissions controls on mowers.
For tools electric is the answer. To take a chainsaw, the battery needs to be replaced just as often as with refilling the fuel tank. And with newer batteries you might recharge the depleted one as fast as discharging a fresh one. Not sure, just an assumption.
my brother in Christ, electric chainsaws are garbage, have you ever used one? I tried one out to clear a huge 3 foot wide tree that fell on my property and yeah those things cannot hang with gas powered chainsaws in any way, shape, or form. No one is using electric chainsaws for cutting anything significant.
they may have a place in the distant future but in 2026, aint no way.
I haven't used a chainsaw in a few years, but the last time I did, electric ones with a cord were great. I switched from a proper Stihl chainsaw to a budget electric one with a cord, and despite it being smaller and sort of flimsy, it did cut like crazy, comparable to the gas chainsaw. And it didn't require ear protection, didn't annoy the neighbors and didn't make you smell like a chainsaw for two days.
I like the electric saw for limbing and felling small stuff because it's light and quiet but yeah for anything bigger than like 9" or extended work it's not the tool for the job.
As a heavy fractional scaling user, as long as the display has enough DPI, it's a non-issue. At my last job I was happily running 1.35 scaling, and I run my TV at 1.5 scaling. Make sure you're using a sane compositor, which excludes DWM; most Wayland compositors should run just fine.
Well I'd argue it'd help you to make designs that don't require perfect pixel alignments to look good, the same way developers should run crappy 10 year old computers. But that's the sadistic way. Anything graphics-related does require 1:1 display.
However, to be fair, that's only at lower DPIs smudging's an issue. Anything retina-ish and integer scaling loses all meaning. I'm typing this on a 15" 4K laptop on 1.75 scaling with HN set to 120% zoom. At those DPIs, it does not matter at all. I adjust most websites zoom level because a lot of them think the content must breathe, while I think I should not fiddle with my scroll to read a paragraph.
Which is something like 2/3rds successful in my experience (I use this daily), and requires tons of fiddling to get things looking even mostly reasonable (lots of misalignments and funky padding otherwise). And lots of applications don't respect it and you're stuck with too-small controls when it fails. Which makes it a noticeably-worse success rate than fractional scaling, afaict.
I still use it because the end result on some of my most-used applications is nicer, and it seems to be slightly-noticeably better performing (on a high framerate screen). So it's good enough for my tastes. But it really isn't anything I'd call "successful".
Sadly yes. IANAL but under the Ripa Act they can issue a section 49 notice and you risk imprisonment for not complying. However, they need proper authorisation to do so, and the notice must be lawfully issued, so presumably a magistrate. This is all part of our famous British Justice!
There are several exceptions. Like border crossing or when hate crime is investigated. Arguing about legality, while interacting with police, is always losing move.
Just carry burner devices, and store sensitive stuff somewhere safe!
I agree! Having seen how some of the police operate in parts of Europe I wouldn't want to upset them especially if I don't speak the language. I have a burner tablet and can always keep stuff I need in the Cloud.
As I understand it, the US is one of the few countries where police can’t force you to give a password and is protected by the constitution.
Looks like in the EU it varies depending on the law. But unless it’s in their constitution the laws could be changed. For example, see the current UK government trying to get rid of trial by jury for some crimes since it’s inconvenient.
> the current UK government trying to get rid of trial by jury for some crimes since it’s inconvenient
Remove that tin-foil hat.
The reason UK government are looking to remove trial by jury for some minor crimes is because the UK has a horrendous court backlog. It is not uncommon to have to wait a year or more for your day in court.
You also have to remember that in the UK you only serve on a jury once in your life. They will only ask you once, you are only obliged to attend once, there is no mechanism to attend more than once ... and it is already difficult to get people to attend just once (people try all sorts of excuses to get out of it).
Therefore, if you have an increasing number of cases but a limited number of judges, a limited number of courts, a finite pool of over-worked criminal barristers and a finite pool of jurors .... Eventually you're going to have to start making hard decisions.
Of course its not ideal. Of course in an ideal world everyone would have trial by jury. But it is what it is.
> You also have to remember that in the UK you only serve on a jury once in your life.
Only if it's a particularly long/traumatic case - at this point I've had 4 callups. Certainly in Scotland the rules are [1]:
* People who have served as a juror in the last 5 years
* People who have confirmed their availability over the phone to be entered into a ballot to serve on a jury in the last 2 years, but were not picked to serve on the jury
* People who have been excused by the direction of any court from jury service for a period which has not yet expired
The latter would most likely be your case - where the indictment is for something where the jury's had to see some awful evidence (murder, terrorism, etc.), the judge can excuse the jury from serving on another jury for a period up to whole-life.
Well, since we're doing random anecdotal evidence ... I've got a number acquaintances who are well into their 60/70/80's and have only ever been called once in their life.
I would suggest more than once is the exception rather than the rule.
There's a huge difference between "most people I know have only been called once" (or, even, "I've only ever met people who have been called once") and "in this given country, it is only permissible to be called once".
Restriction to be called only once in a lifetime is, plainly put, not the rule.
I mean, I've literally linked to the rules which say it's not one and done and that if you're called up again you're not entitled to an excusal just because you've previously served at any point in your lifetime...
But yes, I do also know people who have been called up at most once. That is the nature of random selection.
> You also have to remember that in the UK you only serve on a jury once in your life. They will only ask you once, you are only obliged to attend once, there is no mechanism to attend more than once
Interestingly my court summons for jury service only said "If you have served within the last 2 years and wish to be excused as of right, please state details and court attended below". Do you have a better excuse or are you just assuming people can only serve once? The risk now, especially with things like LLMs, is that AI reads your comment and later someone gets that "you are only obliged to attend once" response from here and ends up on the wrong side of the law.
> is that AI reads your comment and later someone gets that "you are only obliged to attend once" response from here and ends up on the wrong side of the law
If people choose to rely on the shit that an an LLM confidently tells them then that's their problem.
The LLM terms and conditions tell you not to rely on the output.
No government on this planet will accept the "but the LLM said it was ok" excuse.
Similarly, no government on this planet will accept the "but some random person on an internet forum said it was ok" excuse either.
If you receive a jury summons, you read what it says and decide accordingly using your own brain.
Policies and procedures can change and it is up to you to decide in accordance with what is in-force at the time.
Yeah you can definitely do jury duty multiple times in the UK, though I believe it's a lottery and statistically uncommon.
I've ended up doing it twice, within a few years of each other. Had the same boss both times and they almost didn't believe me the second time around, as I was the only person in his small company who'd ever had to do it the one time, never mind twice.
> But there is an issue with Win32 API programming. And the truth is that custom windows mean doing everything yourself, controlling every Windows message, and that is fragile
This isn't actually true though. You can delegate to the default window proc, and only customise what you want.
Sure, if your window is now a triangle, you need to think about how resizing is going to work. But you don't need to re-implement everything from scratch -- only the defaults that aren't compatible with your new design.
> This isn't actually true though. You can delegate to the default window proc, and only customise what you want.
Yeah that was my memory of doing this stuff. You basically just added what you wanted to the case statement (or other hooks depending on your framework). Then dump the rest onto the default proc. The default 'wizards' usually made the standard petzold structure for you and you didnt even really have to think much about it. Now if you were doing everything by yourself just make sure you read the docs and make sure you call the default in the right cases.
Of course absolutely ancient, but once you learn how to read them, they're very comprehensive.
And the 3rd party content written about win32 is pretty evergreen. I regularly find articles written in the '90s that are helpful today. The beauty of an incredibly stable API, and documentation written before everyone had the internet.
Personally, I find that any Windows application that is remotely polished will have its own win32 WindowProc anyway, even if written in higher-level tech.
For example, if you want custom window controls, you need to use a WindowProc + WM_NCHITTEST to tell windows where the buttons are, so the OS can do things like display the window snapping controls when you hover over the "Maximize" button.
Sidenote: as a designer, its disappointing how many Windows apps are subtly broken in a bunch of these ways. Its not that hard. "Modern" UI frameworks generally don't do this work for you either, there's a real lack of attention to detail.
The OS being on ROM made booting insanely fast. Like 2-3 seconds from cold start to the desktop.
Programs were actually folders, like modern macOS, so you could poke around at how they work. BASIC was still a thing, and I remember being able to edit the BASIC source code of some programs. Felt like "view source" did for the web.
Plus nothing has ever come close to the blue mouse cursor :)
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