I would buy this argument if Flash as a browser plugin had been proven to perform well on a mobile device of the time, but it never was, on Android or any other platform.
Even AIR apps - think Electron, an application shell for Flash apps - were on the edge of usable on desktop Macs of the era.
For the first year, Scott Forstall, the Senior Vice President in charge of the iPhone's software, very directly encouraged companies like Pandora[0] to jailbreak iPhones in order to get a head start on app development, protected that community from Steve Jobs' ire, and then used the existence and popularity of jailbreaking to convince Steve that a sandboxed app store would be a better idea than Apple writing every single app for the iPhone[1].
Once native APIs were available, that was true, but before it was even clear that the iPhone would have an app store, they very much did let it flourish.
One of the clients I’m consulting with has one of the best cloud onboarding docs I’ve ever seen. Lays out exactly the services supported. Who does what pieces. What is self service. They break out latency differences between the cloud environments and on-premises. A serious amount of good work that’s incredibly useful working within their system. I use it frequently. Their head of cloud engineering has a permanent “away” message on Teams pleading with people to check the cloud docs first instead of just asking him directly. I would be frustrated too.
It's bad for us, but I imagine the tech writers feelings are even darker. They spent years being demonstrating how important good docs were, nobody in management cared, they were mostly laid off and discarded before there was even a credible replacement available.
My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
At least as of when I left the company, GitHub was being deployed to fairly close to once every 60-90 minutes (the frequency of a deploy train/merge queue batch going out) 24 hours a day, at least during weekdays… there are a fair number of international engineers and deploy trains get crowded during main US business hours, so while there are fewer PRs going out at odd hours US time, there were typically still some. There aren’t dedicated releases as such for GitHub-hosted instances - everything you release needs to be gated behind a feature flag or other mechanism if it’s not going live immediately, and your code either needs to handle the database in both its pre- and post-migrated state, or you need to run the migration in advance of your code shipping out.
Fun fact: it used to be the case that GitHub was actually _less_ reliable if nobody deployed to it… there used to be various resource leaks that we didn’t see when people were deploying all day, since then the app wasn’t getting restarted constantly. After GitHub went down during a holiday break we had volunteers to deploy GitHub once a day during holiday breaks, until the underlying issues were eventually fixed.
Wow - I remember that from the System 7 days. I thought that was long gone - how did I not notice that checkbox was still there in Get Info this whole time?
Oh, I completely agree. But I admit I'm a bit of a retro enthusiast and preservationist at heart, so I was curious what "mattered" to a rando HN commenter :P
EDIT: For anyone unfamiliar, the MiSTer is a homebrew FPGA project originally built around a Terasic DE-10 Nano that can emulate in hardware a wide variety of consoles and computers, leading to extremely low latency and (often) higher accuracy than most software emulators due to it being easier/more efficient to recreate cycle-accurate effects in hardware. It’s extremely flexible, allowing for both HDMI and analog output (with scaler effects, if desired), as well as both modern USB/Bluetooth HIDs as well as adapters for original controllers. It’s a very cool project and worth checking out if you’re enthusiastic about such things - retroremake.co has had some well-liked clone/re-engineerings of the MiSTer hardware but they’re going through a big shipping backlog so I don’t know when they’re in stock; there were some decently regarded Aliexpress clones as well, but I don’t know what the status of those is. An authentic DE-10 Nano is an option too, it’ll just be more expensive and you’ll still need to get an SDRAM board to run most cores.
Exactly the first thought I had too. I know extremely little about FPGA development, but three things I noticed that came to mind re: difficulty:
- Alex used a Xilinx FPGA, the MiSTer uses an Altera Cyclone - dunno how portable code (if that’s even the right term for e.g. VHDL) is from one to the other. I know the MiSTer has a light framework for cores to plug into to get input handling, scalers, etc.; so maybe it’s more a matter of porting to the framework…?
- Alex mentioned the SCC didn’t have a pre-made FPGA core so they used a real one. I don’t think serial handling would be critical but I do suspect you’d at least need a dummy to get the OS to pass self-tests and boot properly. Possible that maybe the Mac core has already handled this, though.
- What little I know of RAM and the MiSTer would lead me to think the SDRAM card a MiSTer setup typically needs wouldn’t be a problem over the SRAM Alex used, and that either the framework or the wiring of the RAM card handles the details for you - but I definitely don’t know that.
On the plus side I suspect/hope maybe a bunch of stuff from the classic/original Mac core could be borrowed to get it up and running.
There’s definitely plenty of cores that haven’t yet been developed on the MiSTer… for instance there isn’t a color 68K Mac core, only recently have people started on 3D0 and CD-i and Apple IIgs cores, the Saturn core was pretty shaky until a recent overhaul, etc. I think what’s there is just a function of what was either already developed for an FPGA or what had the biggest demand from their respective communities.
I just watched the Vertasium video[1] on ASML's EUV lithgoraphy machines over the weekend, and I think the qualifier they used was "most complex machine _you can purchase commercially_".
I can't remember if it was an ASML representative that said that, or if it was an overlaid asterisk that popped up on the screen at some point - but I definitely remember thinking about the space shuttle and Saturn V/Apollo and those sorts of things before I saw the qualifier.
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