Blade Runner 2049 was excellent. I'm glad they didn't mess it up. 🤓

Apple has a real problem.

Their hardware has always been overpriced, but at least before it had defenders pointing out that it was at least capable and well made.

I know, I used to be one of them.

Past tense.

They have jumped the shark.

They now make pretentious hipster crap that is massively overpriced and doesn't have the basic features (like hardware ports) to enable you to do your job.

I mean, who needs an ESC key? What is wrong with learning to type CTRL-[ instead? Muscle memory? What's that?

They have gone from "It just works" to "It just doesn't work" in no time at all.

And it is Developers who are most pissed off. A tiny demographic who won't be visible on the financial bottom line until their newly absent software suddenly makes itself known two, three years down the line.

By which time it is too late to do anything.

But hey! Look how thin (and thermally throttled) my new laptop is!

Happy Birthday DevRant!
🎂

The "Progress 4GL", now "OpenEdge" doesn't only allow you to abbreviate reserved words, it goes even further.

It allows you to abbreviate database field names.

Yup. Make a spelling mistake and you are messing with a different field.

Forget to declare a variable and there's a field in scope beginning with the same letters? It'll cheerfully assume you mean that field.

This is truly the WORST, most bone-headedly STUPID decision ever taken in the entire history of programming languages.

I defy anyone to offer anything worse than this.

Developers switched from Windows to Macs because monkey-boy Ballmer claimed to want Developers whilst doing his best to drive us away - and Macs were a Unix laptop "That Just Worked".

Now we are going to have a MacBook "Pro" that doesn't even an Escape-key.

Great news for manufacturers of Windows ultrabooks - Asus and Dell must be rubbing their hands with glee!

Just bought a Chromebook Pixel. Love the hardware - Chromebooks in general are a great way to get a Linux laptop with guaranteed driver support.

But why is it still so hard to get decent HiDPI support in Linux (or for that matter Windows) desktop environments?

I realise Apple had an advantage in using vector-based Display Postscript, but massively divergent screen sizes and resolutions have been around for YEARS now, so why is it still such a faff?

I've just bought myself a standing desk!

Woot!

(It's actually for at work, seeing as they would never cash out for anything like that themselves).

Early 1970s, when I was around 8 years old. I read about Artificial Intelligence and it blew me away. I knew nothing about computers, other than I wanted to program them.

I still have old computer magazines, starting from around 1978 not long after the microcomputer revolution started.

My first computer had 2K RAM. That's 2048 bytes. I expanded the memory 1K at a time, and it took 2 chips - they were 4 bits by 1024 so you needed 2 chips to have 8 bit wide memory.

2114 static ram, 300ns.

I think they still make them!

Thursday.

Otherwise known as Day 4 of the hostage situation....

Just had a User asking to recover something from her Deleted Items folder which is where she puts things she wants to read later. Seriously! I thought this was a joke but people really do do this! The clue is in the name: "DELETED Items". Aargh!