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flomo commented on A brief history of Times New Roman   typographyforlawyers.com/... · Posted by u/tosh
agalunar · 2 days ago
I may be wrong, but I believe the name of the type family is simply Times New; the name of the italic face would then be Times New Italic rather than the contradictory Times New Roman Italic. It’s strange that the name of the roman face specifically is always used; I’d suppose it’s merely because that’s how the digital fonts were inadvertently named? Times New Roman has been the name in dropdown menus, and most laypeople are unfamiliar with roman as a term of art, so there’s no reason people wouldn’t use that name. But I wonder how the digital fonts came to be named Times New Roman rather than Times New.
flomo · 2 days ago
IIRC, the Abobe Postscript font was simply called "Times", so that is usually what Macs had installed. Microsoft Windows shipped with the Truetype font called "Times New Roman", which was similar but not identical to the printer font.
flomo commented on GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches   grapheneos.social/@Graphe... · Posted by u/akyuu
fainpul · 12 days ago
I guess antitrust is the keyword here. Something that is considerably weakened in today's USA.
flomo · 11 days ago
IBM had/has a monopoly on mainframe systems. But they never were really dominant in midrange systems (e.g. VAX, UNIX), and Microsoft and Apple etc became huge companies in the PC market. So you can't really disagree with the rationale.

Obviously Google + Phone makers is a "trust", its frustrating the lawsuits aren't really going anywhere.

flomo commented on GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches   grapheneos.social/@Graphe... · Posted by u/akyuu
SubiculumCode · 12 days ago
Why was it that in the early PC days, IBM was unable to keep a lid on 'IBM compatible', allowing for the PC interoperability explosion, yet today, almost every phone has closed drivers, closed and locked bootloaders, and almost complete corporate control over our devices? Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice?
flomo · 12 days ago
Nobody gave you the actual answer. IBM was under an antitrust decree and had to openly license their technology for a nominal fee. (Supposedly about $5/PC.) So yes, they were in a hurry and used generic parts, but they still had tons of patents on it. When they got out from under this, they came up with Microchannel.
flomo commented on What Killed Perl?   entropicthoughts.com/what... · Posted by u/speckx
wk_end · a month ago
Not to dispute the overall premise that Perl 6 did enormous damage to Perl, I want to interrogate this a little bit:

> There are many languages still in use today that have all kinds of warts and ugliness, but they remain in use because they still have momentum and lots of legacy things built in them. So being ugly or old isn’t enough of a factor for people to abandon something in droves.

Nothing forced anyone to abandon Perl 5 code, and I suspect most Perl 5 wasn't abandoned for its own sake; it was a Cambrian explosion of new greenfield projects rising out of the ashes of Web 1.0 that brought Python and Ruby and PHP to the forefront. It's just that a lot of the Perl 5 code out there in the world was quick and dirty CGI scripts that died naturally after the dotcom crash and as the web became more sophisticated.

flomo · a month ago
My take is a lot of that Web 1.0 stuff was total spaghetti code, hardcoded to a table layout, full of injection holes, etc etc. (It was like everyone did my first CGI script x 100.) So in that sense Perl wasn't any different than classic ASP or cold fusion or etc, it became associated with bad legacy code. And because there was no 'Perl 6', people had to choose something else.

(There's stuff about the perl language, but that's probably secondary.)

flomo commented on Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'   9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/ti... · Posted by u/achow
cortesoft · a month ago
Peak was System 7!
flomo · a month ago
On the other hand, the low-point was MacOS 7.6.1 Update 2 or whatever.
flomo commented on AMD continues to chip away at Intel's x86 market share   tomshardware.com/pc-compo... · Posted by u/speckx
MBCook · a month ago
I'd love to see a market share chart going back far far more. At least to the middle of the 90s or so.

I'm very impressed though. I had no idea there were near 1/3 of the desktop market. Good for them.

flomo · a month ago
I know when AMD had the K8/Opteron, they were obviously doing really well, but their marketshare didn't really change because they were capacity-limited.
flomo commented on Ratatui – App Showcase   ratatui.rs/showcase/apps/... · Posted by u/AbuAssar
genidoi · a month ago
TUI libraries have sufficiently abstracted away the low-level quirks of terminal rendering that the terminal has become something like a canvas[0] available in the IDE with no extensions. This is quite a nice DevX if you want to display the state of an app that does something to data, without writing the necessary plumbing to pipe that data to a browser and render it.

[0] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples...

flomo · a month ago
The low-level terminal stuff is still grody as hell. Years ago, HN had some blogposts from someone who was rethinking the whole stack, but I dunno what happened to that project. If people really like TUIs, eventually they're going to stop doing the 1980s throback stuff.
flomo commented on Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?    · Posted by u/urnicus
james_marks · a month ago
If it’s survived this long, it likely because it has years of small fixes to make it reliable and useful, and more than anything—- predictable for the user.

Modernizing will roll some of that back; I would only consider it if there’s a plan to be around for the years it will take to get good again.

flomo · a month ago
Eh, I bet a lot of this stuff is running on some old SCO box held together with ducttape and prayers, because the vendor is long gone/dead.
flomo commented on Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?    · Posted by u/urnicus
privong · a month ago
An interesting theme here in the comments (that I am sympathetic to) is "TUIs have steep learning curves but are fast/efficient for people with proficiency". I wonder if a small part of the modern preference for GUIs is related to a lack of employee retention. If companies aren't necessarily interested in working hard to keep employees then training new hires needs to be faster/easier and that could work against TUI and keyboard-based tools.

Of course, if that's a factor I'm guessing it's a small one in comparison to expectations about what "modern" software should look like.

flomo · a month ago
What I heard from one large chain is they couldn't train warehouse employees on the green screen (3270) inventory app, its too different for them. They just wouldn't do it or would quit.
flomo commented on Removing XSLT for a more secure browser   developer.chrome.com/docs... · Posted by u/justin-reeves
RogBogTog · a month ago
I think that's sad. XSLT is in my point a view a very misunderstood technology. It gets hated on a lot. I wonder if this hate is by people who actually used and understood it, though. In any case, more often than not this is by people who in the same sentence endorse JavaScript (which, by any objective way of measuring is just a language far more poorly designed).
flomo · a month ago
IMO XSLT was just too difficult for most webdevs. And IMO this created a political problem where the 'frontend' folks needed to be smarter than the 'backend' generating the XML in the first place.

XSLT might make sense as part of a processing pipeline. But putting it on front of your website was just an unnecessary and inflexible layer, so that's why everyone stopped doing it. (except rss feeds and etc.)

u/flomo

KarmaCake day2314May 10, 2010View Original