Comments on: Reboot Page: "unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems"

By: dnebdal

dnebdal — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:48:00 +0000

@Antinous_Moderator:disqus :
Fair enough, I guess we can hope they’ll do something elegant in a future version. It’s not a huge problem, anyway. :)

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:52:00 +0000

Feel free to buy Disqus and implement. When we switched over to nested comments, I assumed that the limit was just visual, but no. The options are to leave it as is, have comments one character wide or go back to flat chrono threads.

By: dnebdal

dnebdal — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:15:00 +0000

@Antinous_Moderator:disqus :
Right- but wouldn’t it be nicer to establish a minimum comment width and just not shrink column width beyond that? The current form means you can’t really continue a sub-discussion for more than a few posts before it’s confusing/impossible to get reply notifications; sacrificing the visual nesting level indication seems like it would be a lower “cost” than sacrificing max comment depth.

Oh well, at least it has a practical and fairly sensible reason. :)

By: alxr

alxr — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:16:00 +0000

It’s kind of stunning to note that Windows XP is (almost) as old now as Windows 3.1 was at the time of XP’s release.

By: Ant

Ant — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:02:00 +0000

Or if you had a DOS card (486 DX speed IIRC) with that PowerMac or PowerPC. I forget which. It was back in the mid 1990s/90s.

By: Mr Baker

Mr Baker — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:41:00 +0000

Oh yes, I know. There is an iPad version, too (downloaded, played it through).

Where is the remake of Dune?

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:28:00 +0000

(Why does disqus (here?) have a shallow nesting limit?)

The alternative is to have comments at the end of a long thread that are one character wide.

By: benher

benher — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:54:00 +0000

That or you’ll end up staring at a bouncing red and white ball for hours on end.

Also, Guru med!!

By: cantsp3ll

cantsp3ll — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:02:00 +0000

Yes, please. Heck, booting BeOS 4.5 only took about 11-12 seconds on a dual P3 in 1999.

Oh, baby, you’ve been gone so long. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlOi-L-N0X4

By: jhhl

jhhl — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:45:00 +0000

On my Amiga, I replaced the hand-holding-Floppy with my own “Amiga 1800″ image, and on many floppies, I replaced the normal boot code with an antivirus “canary in a coal mine” boot track that played a shortened version of the Looney Tunes theme “Merrily we Roll along”, using a program I wrote called BootTune. The idea being when an SCA virus or one of its variants overwrote the boot track with the tune, its absence would notify you so you could clean it out. In true open fashion, I provided source code.

By: dnebdal

dnebdal — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:01:00 +0000

A question as old as the field itself, that. :D
To quote Babbage:

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

By: Nathan Black

Nathan Black — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:45:00 +0000

In case you didn’t know, there is a PC compatible version available, I played through it again a couple years ago for old times sake.
http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/

By: dnebdal

dnebdal — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:03:00 +0000

This in reply to Nathan Hornby. (Why does disqus (here?) have a shallow nesting limit?)

True, it doesn’t ask if you only change the non-extension part of the name. I’ve noticed OS X does the same, too. I’m not sure if it excuses anything, but at least it means it’s not a diffference between them. Fair enough.

Win7 is a bit less heavy on the EAC prompts than Vista; it sems to be better at remembering your answers. Running executables from the internet will give you a “signature could not be verified, run (yes/no)” dialog unless it is actually signed, which is a bit annoying. It makes more sense that installers get an EAC prompt, since they typically need some elevated access to install for all users. I can live with that, honestly; it makes sense.

What I do wonder is how Win8 will be – they’ve made some sweeping tablet-ish changes to the interface, so I kind of expect it to be littered with “did you really mean that”-prompts meant to handle accidental touches. We will see.

By: rocobo9

rocobo9 — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:30:00 +0000

i love the simplicity and thinking behind the dialogue in the top-right (where each button represents an answer to the question) compared to the example in the top-left where they print an explanation of each buttons function.

simplicity is all too often overlooked by professional designers

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:55:00 +0000

In all fairness, that’s when you change an extension, not a filename, and you ge the exact same prompt on OSX.

That said, the default setup for Vista does assume that you’re an accident prone 80 year old that neither knows where they are or what they’re doing and that every action taken on the machine is cause for concern.

Win 7 might be the same, but I hope they fixed that stuff. Doing anything seemed to involve 8 security steps.

By: dnebdal

dnebdal — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:54:00 +0000

Get this dialog, press enter again.

By: Henrique Olifiers

Henrique Olifiers — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:39:00 +0000

Guru Meditation.

By: Daniel Latta

Daniel Latta — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:42:00 +0000

What, no KDE? No Gnome?

By: univac

univac — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:26:00 +0000

Very nice nostalgic romp. I smiled.
How about BeOS boot?

By: Mr Baker

Mr Baker — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 06:14:00 +0000

Don’t do it, you’ll end up playing Out of the World, which is a total time suck.

By: twency

twency — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:38:00 +0000

Ah, my mistake. It’s right there. How could I not have instantly recognized my old friend, even after all these years…

By: twency

twency — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:02:00 +0000

What, no GS/OS?

By: Melinda9

Melinda9 — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:51:00 +0000

Yeah, I was laughing since it’s still only a click away on my computer.

By: robuluz

robuluz — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:47:00 +0000

If you want to talk about UIs that insult the user’s intelligence, I would go with Windows Vista/Windows 7 multilayers of confirmation when you have the temerity to try to rename a file, let alone delete or actually run an executable.

What are you talking about? Click on the file name. Type a new name. Hit enter.

By: teapot

teapot — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:37:00 +0000

This is all kinds of awesome.

By: bobcorrigan

bobcorrigan — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:49:00 +0000

Anyone capture the boot sequence of a PDP/11?

By: allium

allium — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:21:00 +0000

Kind of like back in the day when you could run a Pentium emulator on a PowerPC Mac, but not vice versa.

By: chaopoiesis

chaopoiesis — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:52:00 +0000

Anyone on the historical authenticity of the typo in the Amiga startup message (i.e., “All rights reserverd”)?

By: mat catastrophe

mat catastrophe — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:40:00 +0000

I don’t remember them being that fast.

By: kekko

kekko — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:30:00 +0000

The funniest thing happened, when Firefox 9.0.1 crashed during the fake OSX reboot on my Windows XP machine.