Hacker News: gt0

New comment by gt0 in "PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes"

gt0 — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:23:43 +0000

I used RISC OS as my main platform in the nineties and still play with it now. With small screens, I agree with you on how saving works on RISC OS, but it really comes into its own on larger screens (say QHD or above) where you can easily have your application and filer on screen at the same time.

It has its annoyances, but I still like that style of saving.

New comment by gt0 in "Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10"

gt0 — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:57:48 +0000

Indeed it is subjective, I think the "Krups" was beautiful.

New comment by gt0 in "Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10"

gt0 — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:55:44 +0000

We had this at a job I had many years ago. We had a Sun Niagara system with some Sun Rays attached, and I had a Sun Ray laptop at home, on the other side of the world. Office in London, home in Melbourne. It wasn't even that slow.

New comment by gt0 in "Write some software, give it away for free"

gt0 — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:29:32 +0000

If I was going to write something for free, it would some weird itch-scratching thing for Plan 9 or something, it wouldn't be something most people would ever want.

Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.

FOSS has delivered some great software, it's also demonetised a lot of areas where software developers could be earning a living. I don't think software developers should feel any need to give away their efforts than any other professional should.

FOSS has created pricing race to the bottom in software, and taken away financial incentive for improvement, it's not a 100% net positive.

New comment by gt0 in "Windows Server 2025 Runs Better on ARM"

gt0 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:45:21 +0000

That's what I mean, no actual processor model.

New comment by gt0 in "Windows Server 2025 Runs Better on ARM"

gt0 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:17:44 +0000

Am I missing something or is the article avoiding saying what Intel processor they are using?

New comment by gt0 in "MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany"

gt0 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:37:03 +0000

They're 18650 cells, a bit bigger than AA.

New comment by gt0 in "Every GPU That Mattered"

gt0 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:02:45 +0000

GPUs existed in the 1960s, but apparently Sony invented the actual term "GPU" in 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit#1990s

New comment by gt0 in "Every GPU That Mattered"

gt0 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:00:37 +0000

Glad to see I'm not the only person that noticed the lack of SGI stuff.

New comment by gt0 in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

gt0 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:29:04 +0000

Agree, and this is my point. Apple absolutely has a very clear message on how developers should make software, but as you say, developers often do not care.

I am a desktop app "believer" I like desktop apps, I like native desktop apps, but I also have to make software that makes economic sense, and following Apple's guidelines just doesn't make any sense for me, and a lot of other companies too.

New comment by gt0 in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

gt0 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:59:26 +0000

When a platform can’t answer “how should I build a UI?” in under ten seconds, it has failed its developers. Full stop.

That's fine, except no platform answers this.

Obviously Linux doesn't, but the Mac doesn't either. Apple of course has it's recommendation, but most developers do not take Apple's recommended path because of course, it's Apple-only, most developers make cross-platform apps these days.

Even if Microsoft decreed the one-and-one Windows development path, most developers are not taking that path.

It used to be the case that Mac developers used Apple tools, Windows developers used Microsoft tools, but those days are gone. Developers want to use Electron, or Qt, or some other system to support multiple platforms in one codebase.

Microsoft has less to do with this than the article makes out. I'm a desktop developer. I don't care what Microsoft recommends, or what Apple recommends, because neither work in the real world where supporting only their platform just isn't realistic.

New comment by gt0 in "Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari"

gt0 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:41:25 +0000

Safari is a monopoly on iOS and iPadOS, that's a problem if you want to make a bleeding-edge PWA app, in that it's probably not going to work very well on iPad and iPhone and there is no web alternative on those platforms.

Firefox is entirely optional, not a monopoly anywhere.

The problem for me isn't making bad web browsers, it's enforcing those bad browsers as the only option on a computer platform.

New comment by gt0 in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

gt0 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:29:19 +0000

Perhaps not single thread, but Rock was a dead end a while before Oracle pulled the plug, and Sun/Oracle's core market of course was always servers not workstations. We used Niagara machines at my work around the T2 era, a long time ago, but they were very competitive if you could saturate the cores and had the RAM to back it up.

New comment by gt0 in "A new Oracle Solaris Common Build Environment (CBE) release"

gt0 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:14:20 +0000

I haven't used Solaris since the last time I used it for work over 10 years ago. Agree ZFS and Zones are both exceptional, I would still use Solaris now where it made sense.

New comment by gt0 in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

gt0 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:23:47 +0000

I don't think anybody suggests Oracle couldn't make faster SPARC processors, it's just that development of SPARC ended almost 10 years ago. At the time SPARC was abandoned, it was very competitive.

New comment by gt0 in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

gt0 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:32:38 +0000

I was really surprised by the s390x performance, but I also don't really understand why there are build time listed by architecture, not the actual processors.

New comment by gt0 in "IBM Mainframe Business Jumps 67%"

gt0 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:56:55 +0000

Neither were mainframes though, Watson and Deep Blue were both POWER systems.

New comment by gt0 in "30 Years of ReactOS"

gt0 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:02:13 +0000

I tried ReactOS a little while ago, in some ways it's closer than it feels to being acceptable as a daily driver, in others it's quite far away.

I like the idea of there being more alternatives Operating Systems that aren't just a Linux distro. Operating Systems like Haiku and ReactOS I think are great for being a direction that isn't Linux. It's not that Linux is bad, but it's a slow moving change-resistant juggernaut that isn't going to be a place where innovation will thrive.

New comment by gt0 in "Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code"

gt0 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 07:23:56 +0000

It's free, it has support for loads of languages, and it's kind of fashionable.

Personally I'm kind of lukewarm on VS Code, it's fine, but CLion, Visual Studio Proper, and RustRover are better for me.

I see why people use it though, it's not a bad editor at all.

For Java, I'm all over IntelliJ.

New comment by gt0 in "Ask HN: How locked down are your work machines?"

gt0 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 01:09:50 +0000

Small company, < 50 people, industrial automation.

Machine not locked down at all, I could install OS/2 and nobody would care.