Readit News[0] https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/kodak-engineer-ha...
Dumb or evil, either way they are not people to be celebrated.
So much great tech has been lost to aggressive business practices of entrenched companies it would have disrupted.
The theme has been repeated... repeatedly: VHS vs Beta being maybe the typically cited archetype of business model vs technical specs.
To me the dominant example in the world today though, is that s/w engineers continue to use windows 8-(
C:? Does anyone ever stop to think about the abstraction of a file system directory hierarchy? The whole point is to remove the specifics of the h/w implementing it, and provide a logical abstraction of nested "directories". Explicitly specifying drive "letters", is the opposite of that. The only reason it ever existed was because the primordial DOS didn't have the horsepower to manage something like a unix mount. But why do we still have it in 2025?
Business triumphs over technology.
One aspect of the article that didn't track my experience was the description of linux in 2015. By that point I had long ago settled onto the fluxbox window manager, because I didn't like the constant churn of "desktop environments". It all just seemed too much like windows.
In 2025 I'm still using it, and it's still exactly the same, which to me is one of it's greatest features. Personally, I don't want the latest brainchild of some UI engineer at Canonical disrupting my workflow.
This veto power of equity over technical possibility is the story of modern tech development. Cory Doctorow cites this 2014 article in his post today:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
tl;dr US political policy making is 100% controlled by large financial equity stake holders. The support, for or against, a policy by the overwhelming majority of the population has a 0% effect.
This is also true of corporate decisions. "Innovation" is pursued if and only if it benefits equity, regardless of potential advantages to users, or the progress of the tech itself.
Now we think the 'prompt' and the writing magically happens. No finger motion, not thinking each word and writing it down, no re-reading 3-4 times (as we check if our handwriting is readable), and so on.
When I heard that the image (Wall-e) of the fat people on board the spaceship, sitting, and consuming 24/7 (food, drinks, 'content' on their VR headsets). Full tech everywhere, everything they ever desired - they got, but fat, clumsy, unable to walk, in the mercy of even the tiniest of adverse circumstance.
The people in Wall-E don't use VR headsets, at least not most of the time. Instead, images are projected onto thin air in front of their faces.
And AGA was a mixed bag. The extra bitplanes were really welcome, but not having chunky (1 byte per pixel) mode when all the 3d coming out really required it, and having to do an expensive operation to go from chunky to planar, did really hurt efficiency.
It was a great addition that extended the existing idea of bitplanes, which was a really good one in lots of ways though.
What an upgraded Amiga really needed was two things. The first is a fast blitter that could also horizontally stretch or shrink a bitmap by some fractional amount. The second was some sort of “flipper” device (or new blitter feature) that could reflect a bitmap across a diagonal line (or rotate by 90 degrees).
Here's how you'd use these for a third-person shooter. Store the wall bitmaps flipped along the diagonal; each line of those bitmaps correspond to a vertical slice of the wall. For each vertical line in the scene, find the correct wall tile and row, and blit that line of pixels into a scratch space, squishing it and shifting it by the correct amount. Then use the flipper to copy that to the screen.
So this guy was involved in the investigation with someone aged 15 or younger