> Stratus was the hardware fault tolerant company. Tandem, our arch rivals, did software fault tolerance. Our architecture was “pair and spare”.
To expand on this, when Tandem switched MIPS from their proprietary processors, the CPUs were duplicated on a board and compared, and if they disagreed, the logical CPU would halt, similar to Stratus. The software-pair backup processes in a different logical CPU would then take over.
> Just confirms that BeOS had the right windowing features all along.
Which windowing features are you referring to? I recall with BeOS (and I assume Haiku) you could shift-click on the "yellow window tab" to move it along the top of windows, so you could have multiple windows stacked, but with their tabs visible on the top, but I don't recall a split-view.
And the silly thing is, as ridiculous as they are for mouse click/drag or touch use, those kind of dial controls are actually reasonable when coupled to a scroll wheel (like you can do in GNURadio). But Apple has never wavered from "one mouse button and nothing else is good enough for everybody," and scroll wheels aren't really an option for a touch interface.
Ah yes, skeuomorphic design, where you take something that's a physical artefact of the hardware and force-fit it onto an utterly different device on which it makes no sense whatsoever.
> The scary thing is that Indian juduciary is infamous for being incapable of tolerating any kind of criticism against it and not hesitating to put people in jail for "contempt" for just calling out corruption.
From [0]:
"India's Supreme Court has banned a school textbook after a chapter in it made a reference to corruption in the judiciary.
The revised social science book was published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which designs the syllabus and textbooks for millions of schoolchildren in the country.
On Wednesday, after Chief Justice Surya Kant criticised the book, saying it could damage the reputation of the judiciary, NCERT apologised and withdrew it from distribution.
Now the court has ordered a complete halt on the book's publication, saying its contents were "extremely contemptuous" and "reckless".
"A complete blanket ban is hereby imposed on any further publication, reprinting or digital dissemination of the book," the court said on Thursday, according to legal news website LiveLaw.
The judges also issued notices to the top bureaucrat in the school education department and the NCERT director, asking them to explain why they should not be held in contempt of court for including the "offending chapter".
> On the other hand, what Windows didn't yet support in this era was DirectDraw — i.e. the ability of an app to reserve a part of the screen buffer to draw on itself (or to "run fullscreen" where Windows itself releases its screen-buffer entirely.) Windows apps were windowed apps; and the only way to draw into those windows was to tell Windows GDI to draw for you.
> This gave developers of this era three options, if they wanted to create a graphical app or game that did something "fancy":
> 1. Make it a DOS app.
This vaguely reminds me of WinG[0][1] - the precursor to DirectDraw. It existed only briefly ~ 1994-95.
My vague "understanding" of it was to make DOS games easier to port to Windows. They'd do "quick game graphics stuff" on Device Independent Bitmaps, and WinG would take care of the hardware details.
To expand on this, when Tandem switched MIPS from their proprietary processors, the CPUs were duplicated on a board and compared, and if they disagreed, the logical CPU would halt, similar to Stratus. The software-pair backup processes in a different logical CPU would then take over.
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