Hacker News: skreutzer

New comment by skreutzer in "The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo"

skreutzer — Sat, 15 Dec 2018 11:46:30 +0000

Audio recordings of the separate, dedicated demo event on the 2018-12-08 are linked on this page:

    - https://www.thefutureoftext.org/8-december-2018.html

New comment by skreutzer in "The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo"

skreutzer — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 19:02:32 +0000

I personally don't like Google, they constantly mess up my writing/publishing and a lot more of bad/evil things. I don't have their software/code, can't selfhost it (not libre-freely licensed), and believe that things should always work offline just as well. Still, do you have a link?

Others in the community usually don't have such reservations/objections, or don't care enough about their own work and capabilities available to them.

New comment by skreutzer in "Getting to Xanadu"

skreutzer — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 16:13:21 +0000

What about a tax for citations? Or a tax for reading! Why can't we pass some more copyright legislation?

New comment by skreutzer in "The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo"

skreutzer — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 15:53:57 +0000

Somebody sent me this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8za_4g5zCOM -- sure, not the same, but somewhat related. I guess there are people at the Doug Engelbart Institute who know more and better chorded keyboard offers. At one point, there was work going on to produce them again, related to the HyperScope project.

New comment by skreutzer in "The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo"

skreutzer — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 15:42:32 +0000

Since Engelbarts death in 2013 or even the 40th anniversary of the great demo, there is a diverse group of people who for most of the time were unclear whether the human system side or the tool system side should get focus and come first, but in anticipation and preparation of the 50th anniversary, it got more practical and several separate, individual demos were created and will be demoed in a separate event today and during breaks between the celebrations tomorrow. They're listed here:

  - https://thedemoat50.org/symposium/demos/

Some of the history can be found here:

  - https://www.youtube.com/user/frodehegland/playlists (Future of Text playlists, 2014 is on Vimeo)
  - https://ualr.edu/jdberleant/URLtable-DB.html
  - https://soundcloud.com/samhahn/tracks
  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQw8OcRQ0Ws&list=PLYbSlBxcChOJ4KV2XIyR9oydfGzbvm1ai
  - https://doug-50.info/journal/
  - https://jrnl.global/journal/

There's more, spread all over the place.

New comment by skreutzer in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

skreutzer — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 14:05:01 +0000

No, they're totally reactive to everything. Why re-invent the wheel with NuGet if there's already software package repositories in the libre-free world for decades, but then not make it the main software distribution mechanism while allowing independent package signing and repository providers (to prevent Microsoft from gatekeeping the distribution channel), effectively eliminating viruses and the attached antivirus industry from the Windows OS? Why give out Internet Explorer gratis, but not the OS if it's that important for human communication? Why does Notepad only in 2018 get support for GNU/Linux line break \n and not in the many, many years before? Why can't Word export a valid XHTML file from a document in 2018, but VS never fails to generate valid XML? There are just thousands of examples like this that speak against the company having to do with engineering, it's more a law firm in my opinion. Let's not forget that it was their idea to claim that software is copyrightable in the same way like a novel is, with laws that are from the print era, and it made them an unbelievable amount of money and prevented the software field to enter a truly digital future. Humanity just lost several decades of progress because of this, and now GitHub, one of the few major innovations in the field, will go down the drain, too.

New comment by skreutzer in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

skreutzer — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 12:37:41 +0000

Is that really the case, obtaining to own code? Depending on the Terms of Use, did GitHub receive a special, separate license that allows them to make use of code under separate permissions of what's otherwise libre-freely licensed or proprietary/closed/private? If so, wouldn't the acquisition allow to exit existing contracts? Sure, the metadata is exclusively on GitHub and moving will result in a loss of stars, followers, contacts, etc.

New comment by skreutzer in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

skreutzer — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 11:34:07 +0000

Thanks to the work of projects like Debian, for some 20 years now people have the right and ability to run a computer in freedom, and there's little point for Microsoft to compete on the consumer/Desktop OS sector any more (compare to mobile, web, Apple, etc.). What do you think what they're competing over now? Imagine if Azure integration starts to appear in FLOSS, because it's an online/hosting service and the "Open Source" guys don't care much about SaaSS and don't favor the AGPL.

New comment by skreutzer in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

skreutzer — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 11:11:41 +0000

IE is abandoned, isn't it? Keep in mind that Microsoft bought Andreessens code from NCSA after Andreessen left to found Netscape, so Netscape was competing against a bad version of itself, made worse by Microsoft.

New comment by skreutzer in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

skreutzer — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 11:01:06 +0000

No. Software developers, doctors, post delivery personell, whatever, is supposed to do the best in their own field, and just because there are other sectors which are considerably worse doesn't mean that we should let ours ever fall to that level too. It's not difficult to see a dystopiant future in which software might help create the most horrible of all societies, and its reach could also be global.

New comment by skreutzer in "Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub"

skreutzer — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 10:57:14 +0000

But the users from 20 years ago aren't dead yet. It's difficult to get a widespread bad reputation in business, but once it's obtained, it needs an incredible amount of repairing and good-doing to get rid of it again, and it's not that Microsoft is doing any of it with their recent pseudo-openness approach, they just realized that OS lock-in doesn't work any more and that they have to massively invest in cloud data/services lock-in and the race for AI, by giving their OS/VS away gratis, to prevent a world of Java and web developers and Apple after loosing the entire mobile sector. Looks like people will fall for that lock-in/dependency again because they don't understand digital, and Microsoft can buy their way out of their previously miserable situation. Wonder who paid for that, probably all the companies with Microsoft licenses because of lock-in and market dominance.