I was a big Mac user. I had a IIcx and an LC, and I evangelized it even when apple stock was $0.95 and the wolves were at the door. I couldn't afford a PowerMac at the time, but I generally used them at the university when I could. I had a desk lamp iMac, then bought the first big screen iMac, which lasted me quite a while. I really liked everything up to Snow Leopard, probably a little beyond that, too.
But in a long time I haven't really enjoyed using the mac and I use other systems instead. They got rid of subpixel rendering and now text is blurry on my monitors. The interactions are much more of a chore. Features were removed from Preview and other apps that were better before. I quit using XCode for a few years and couldn't recognize it when I came back. So I use it maybe every 3-4 weeks now. I have no interest in buying another one.
I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users.
I loved Apple IIs at schools and libraries as a young child, fell in love with my Mac IIsi at home at the age of 7. Later, at 13, I had a Macintosh-evangelizing web site and mailing list that Guy Kawasaki (Apple's lead evangelist) even subscribed to.
I've been a primary Mac user through the 68k, PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon days, from System 6.0.7 through today. Got an original iPhone and iPad, have upgraded my iPhone every few years since.
The technofeudalism, bugginess, and UI crappiness has me done and looking for the exits, to say nothing of the embrace of Trump. My next laptop won't be a Mac, and my next phone won't be an iPhone.
The best way is to set up samba on a Linux machine, even a raspberry pi, and create a domain. Then you can create group policy to turn off a lot of nonsense and set up your computer by connecting to the domain. No MS account required, although you can associate one of you like.
Windows feels like it has a lot of attrition from home users now and perhaps it is only a matter of time before it's no longer worth writing exclusive software for it.
Six year old me sent an idea to McDonnell Douglas for an airplane with turboprops to back up the jets in case of engine fire. There was also a fire suppression system. They sent me some nice brochures about the DC-8, -9, and -10, but looking back on it they could have mentioned that the jets are already redundant and will usually stop burning when the fuel is cut.
I hope they at least acknowledge that it was quite impressive for a six year old to understand the distinction between different types of engine and consider engine fires.
Anyway, YC's Heart Aerospace's intended commercial airframe design now does use a turboprop as a backup (for range extension beyond the capabilities of their battery electric engine), so six year old you was clearly onto something :)
Teenage me sent a letter to a US airline maintenance department asking why they don't put a one-directional fin on the landing gear tires to cause them to rotate in the air, so they wouldn't create as much smoke when they contact the runway. I don't remember what the reason was, but they wrote me back so I appreciated it.
I'd include sed and awk, because these tools are ubiquitous and can accomplish in a few readable lines what people write long programs to handle in other languages, seemingly because they are unaware of sed and awk, don't know how to use them, or are required for some reason to do it in the project language.
In fact, generally teaching people to select the right tool for the job is a good skill to prevent them from using golden hammers.
Most “cs” students don’t work in aviation, majority (statistically) work on yet another SaaS that is a CRUD that has been solved millions of times already.
I think it's a bit like `rails generate`, where it massively speeds up getting a CRUD webapp 0 to 1, but once you get to GitHub or Shopify size, you need a lot more than that to add a new data model.
AIs are pushing many things forward, but due to training sets and context windows, I think meaningfully adding to actually valuable apps, at least as we currently write them (the kind with many DBs/caches/message queues, services) will take a fair bit longer.
Because the companies doing these will either not employ as many people as they do now or will cease to exist altogether since their customers will not need their services
What?
Sometimes the culture shock from Android is just too much. You expect things to be there that simply are not.
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