Many times I've seen people state that they use Windows because they know it, but they can't do trivial things such as set up a printer or connect to WiFi.

Most user's Windows ability is to look for apps on the desktop or Start menu.

I tried a handful of small distros in order to give new life to an old laptop with an AMD C-50 and 2GB of RAM.

The most responsive one, unexpectedly, was Raspberry Pi OS.

The Acorn Archimedes had the whole OS on a 512KB ROM.

That said, OSs came with a lot less stuff then.

That's only RISC OS 2 though. RISC OS 3 was 2MB, and even 3.7 didn't have everything in ROM as Acorn had introduced the !Boot directory for softloading a large amount of 'stuff' at boot time.

If that is a lot less of things not needed for the specific use case, that is still a big plus.

It was GUI defined manually by pixel coordinates, having more flexible guis that could autoscale and other snazy things made things really "slow" back then..

Sure we could go back... Maybe we should. But there are lots of stuff we take for granted to day that were not available back then.

RISC OS has the concept of "OS units" which don't map directly onto pixels 1:1, and it was possible to fiddle with the ratio on the RiscPC from 1994 onwards, giving reasonably-scaled windows and icons in high-resolution modes such as 1080p.

It's hinted at in this tutorial, but you'd have to go through the Programmer's Reference Manual for the full details: https://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/risc-os/wimp-prog/window-theo...

RISC OS 3.5 (1994) was still 2MB in size, supplied on ROM.

The OS did ship with bezier vector font support. AFAIK it was the first GUI to do so.

P.S. I should probably mention that there wasn't room in the ROM for the vector fonts; these needed to be loaded from some other medium.

You can still get brand new generic motherboards for old CPUs.

I swapped out old ASUS MBs for an i3-540 and an Athlon II X4 with brand new motherboards.

They are quite cheaper than getting a new kit, so I guess that's the market they cater to: people who don't need an upgrade but their MBs gave in.

You can get these for US$20-US$30.

This book got a bad reputation in Brazil because a famous actress (who supposedly isn't very bright) once said it was her favourite book.

When I finally decided to give it a try, I found it to be a very interesting read.

So, you can bet people who show disdain for it probably haven't read it. Or they have weak character and are afraid to be considered dumb by association.

Your comment made me think of Charli XCX's recent post https://itscharlibb.substack.com/p/the-realities-of-being-a-...

Who was the actress?

Vera Fischer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Fischer_%28actress%29

I love Charli but hadn't seen this, thanks for sharing

There are probably more people around the world who know about The Little Prince from the distinctive illustrations that show up everywhere, than there are people who have actually read the book. It's like Peter Rabbit. Everyone instantly recognizes the illustrations, but often has a hard time explaining what the book was about.

I grew up in Brazil and never heard that the Little Prince had a bad reputation there. Quite the contrary, at least in my circle of people.

They are everywhere. The only limit to adoption is that many people live in buildings where chargers can't easily be installed.

The limit to adoption is non existent or slow public charging infrastructure.

Both limit adoption. Public charging infrastructure would solve the problem of nit being able to charge at home.

You have to consider that South America is the most dangerous continent.

You can't just leave your car charging unattended in a public space. It has to be done at home or somewhere closed (which would make it expensive) or you would have to watch over your car (which would take a lot of your time).

How do parking lots even work in South America then?

At supermarkets and malls they usually have guards.

Lots where people park overnight are gated.

There you go then.

Not having public charging means you can't travel more than << 50% range away from home.

I remember all taxis in Portugal being beige Mercedes in the 80s,when Portugal wasn't well off. I guess their durability is what made them worthwhile.

If there's an evil plot, it's goal must surely be to accelerate environmental degradation.

First we had the blockchain, now AI to consume enormous amounts of resources and distract us from what we should be investing in to make the environment healthier.

I feel that many coders have a very basic understanding of SQL, don't really want to get better at it, and don't really care.

If they can get away with a query that takes 2s to return a single row, they will be quite content and will not be bothered to look at the query plan.

It's a shame, because everything could be a little better with hardly any effort.

> It's a shame

No, it's not. This goes against the whole thread and the article posted.

My dad was also an Engineer. He was also a Fortran fan.

Once he asked me to explain OOP. After I explained the basics he said it was useless and never looked back.

Where OOP shines is implementing user interfaces. Most engineers doing math can ignore objects. But when a programmer has to implement a partitionable window with scroll bars and menus, constructing complicated objects built of simpler objects is a mess without OOP.

Get your dad a copy of the classic Scientific and Engineering C++: An Introduction With Advanced Techniques and Examples by John Barton and Lee Nackman. It was written to introduce C++ to Fortran programmers using examples from scientific/mathematical domains. The fact that it is old (from 1994) makes it better suited for folks from Fortran (or other languages) since there is none of the complexity of "Modern C++" to confuse them. Check reviews on Amazon etc.

Unfortunately he has left our presence and is now probably getting to grips with the universe being mostly hacked together with Perl.

Nope ;-) He would tell us that the world is a simulation implemented using Fortran Coarray SPMD.

I guess as a typical engineer (not CS person type of engineer or software engineer) it is easy to think that. One might be working with machines or buildings and so on, all which require _calculation_ of processes. Those are typical cases for "just write a correct function", possibly one that takes many things into account. For such scenario OOP is truly useless and only over-complicates the matter. However, when we get to simulations, where maybe there is no known formula, or the precise calculation would be too expensive, then OOP can make sense. Doesn't have to, but could.

OOP is for problems that require complex modeling, indeed if you require just complex calculation it is useless.

Seems like a common theme of every veteran to dress the way used to in their prime for the rest of their lives, listen to the same music, watch the same movies, etc. and to use the same belief systems as well. On the one hand, if it worked for them, why not? There's no incentive to change. Heck, it is very much the definition of conservatism. Old men who don't change is so common that it borders on proverbial.

Very rarely, however, do you see a brilliant mind like Richard Feynman, a man who was so open to new ideas and out of the box thinking. Even in old age. Seeing someone, in good faith, question what they believe in light of new knowledge is very rare. Now that is a special thing.

Chad Dad