Hacker News: sillywalk

New comment by sillywalk in "Firefox introduces Split View: Two tabs side by side, right where you need them"

sillywalk — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:51:37 +0000

> 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.

New comment by sillywalk in "The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)"

sillywalk — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:35:22 +0000

I'd add the volume control for Quicktime 4. A dial that you had to use a mouse to use.

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

EDIT:

previously

763 points by yankcrime on July 13, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 477 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384

New comment by sillywalk in "FCC chair threatens to throttle news broadcasts over 'hoaxes' about Iran war"

sillywalk — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 06:32:31 +0000

Dupe:

Head of FCC threatens broadcaster licenses over critical coverage of Iran war

(twitter.com/brendancarrfcc)

https://xcancel.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/203285541423304717...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380294

New comment by sillywalk in "ArcaOS 5.1.2 (based on OS/2 Warp 4.52) now available"

sillywalk — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:15:29 +0000

Ars Has a good / long article on the history of OS/2.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/half-...

New comment by sillywalk in "PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon"

sillywalk — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 07:02:19 +0000

At one time, Intel thought/said that NetBurst - the uarch for the Pentium 4 - would scale up to 10GHz.

New comment by sillywalk in "India's top court angry after junior judge cites fake AI-generated orders"

sillywalk — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:11:07 +0000

> 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".

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c627l7zexr8o

New comment by sillywalk in "The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)"

sillywalk — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 02:17:12 +0000

> 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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG

[1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/a-whirlwind-tour-o...

New comment by sillywalk in "The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)"

sillywalk — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:22:47 +0000

From Raymond Chen's Old New Thing:

How did the Windows 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=11...

New comment by sillywalk in "Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser"

sillywalk — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:12:39 +0000

Raymond Chen has more on this:

What were the MS-DOS programs that Windows used the progman.exe stock icons for?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250506-00/?p=11...

What were the intended uses of those icons in moricons.dll?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...

New comment by sillywalk in "NASA uses Mars Helicopter's SoC for rover navigation upgrade"

sillywalk — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:21:45 +0000

It looks like the FPGA that monitors/controls the redundant/lockstep CPUs might be radiation tolerant. From [0]:

"..the critical FPGA which is always on for the duration of the mission, the radiation tolerant ProASIC3 is chosen with the military temperature grade (-55 C to 125 C) and -1 speed grade to mitigate the degradation in the propagation delay caused by the total dose radiation. The single-event upset (SEU) is mitigated with triple module redundancy (TMR) in the FPGA design.

...

The FPGA device is a military-grade version of MicroSemi’s ProASIC3L, which uses the same silicon as the radiation-tolerant device from the same family."[0]

The specs from [1] say there is also a specific radiation-tolerant variant.

So it looks like the CPUs themselves have dual lock-stepped cores, and the CPU checks for errors each cycle. If there's an error it flags the FPGA, which switches to the other CPU.

[0] https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...

[1] https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/aemDocuments/documents/F...

New comment by sillywalk in "FCC asks stations for "pro-America" programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance"

sillywalk — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 03:57:53 +0000

There was a good book[0] about where that came from. Big business and religious leaders joined forced to fight the New Deal.

[0] One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America Kevin M. Kruse https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22928900-one-nation-unde...

New comment by sillywalk in "iOS 27 'Rave' Update to Clean Up Code, Could Boost Battery Life"

sillywalk — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:26:44 +0000

> Snow Leopard was incredibly buggy on release

New comment by sillywalk in "macOS Tahoe Finder Bug Underscores Apple's Slipping UI Polish"

sillywalk — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:35:47 +0000

Finder has always been pretty garbage. Which view will the finder show this folder in? I never know, because it's always inconsistent.

Another bug, I'd been running the beta macos Sequoia 15.7.4, and if I'd search for all the e.g. PDFs in my ~/Downloads, then move them to the trash, they'd still show up in the search, but if you clicked on them, the filepath would show trash.

I doubt they will, but I hope they keep updating sequoia with security fixes for a while longer.

New comment by sillywalk in "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube"

sillywalk — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:08:20 +0000

I just had to add more, because I remember they used DEC Alpha systems at some point.

" Alphas for design stations serving 5 animators and one animation assistant (housekeeping and slate specialist). Most of these stations run Lightwave and a couple add Softimage. VERY plug-in hungry. PVR's on every station, with calibrated component NTSC (darn it, I hates ntsc) right beside.

P6's in quad enclosures for part of the renderstack, and Alphas for the rest, backed up 2x per day to an optical jukebox.

Completed shots output to a DDR post rendering and get integrated into the show.

Shots to composite go to the Macs running After Effects, or the SGI running Flint, depending on the type of comp being done, and then to the DDR (8 minutes capacity on the SGI)."[0]

[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html

New comment by sillywalk in "Apple withholds 18.7.5 security update from iPhones and iPads supporting iOS 26"

sillywalk — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:03:56 +0000

I agree with you, and with the OP title, Apple is withholding updates in this (and other cases).

The little blurb I quoted is sort of an excuse for some other updates.

New comment by sillywalk in "iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day"

sillywalk — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:02:11 +0000

Doesn't look like it. It looks like it's only iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR

https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347

New comment by sillywalk in "Can my SPARC server host a website?"

sillywalk — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:06:55 +0000

I like the design of that generation of Sun Servers. Also, for some reason it bothers me that it's titled SPARC not UltraSPARC :)

New comment by sillywalk in "Apple withholds 18.7.5 security update from iPhones and iPads supporting iOS 26"

sillywalk — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:00:12 +0000

This has been policy for years. I just can't make myself upgrade to Tahoe.

From [0]:

"Because of dependency on architecture and system changes to any current version of Apple operating systems (for example, macOS 26, iOS 26, and so on), not all known security issues are addressed in previous versions (for example, macOS 15, iOS 18, and so on)."

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/deployment/depc4c80847...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/apple-clarifies-secu...

New comment by sillywalk in "Apple XNU: Clutch Scheduler"

sillywalk — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:28:46 +0000

They moved their password monitoring service from Java to Swift.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44172166

https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-pass...

New comment by sillywalk in "Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights"

sillywalk — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:53:40 +0000

Not The Onion.

It's worse, because I think that Karp might actually believe that.