Well, INTP here, so at least we have *some* common ground.
For me it was:
Apple II BASIC -->
"Classic" Macintosh with HyperCard -->
BASH / C / Python on Linux -->
disgusted with computers entirely and more or less Luddite for
about 5 years -->
Blackberry OS on my phone -->
Smalltalk, Scheme, Haskell, and JavaScript/HTML on
slightly better Linuxes -->
Same stuff on Mac OS X, mostly. Also, NetLogo.
I write this from work, where I'm juggling Fedora and WinXP, neither of
which quite "just work" for the fairly simple tasks I expect of them.
-- Max
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 1:19 PM, BGB <cr88...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/10/2011 12:45 PM, Max OrHai wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:09 AM, BGB <cr88...@gmail.com> wrote:
> < snip ... >
>
>> there is not a whole lot that seems in common between a browser and an OS.
>>
>> yes, there is Chrome OS, but I sort of suspect this will (probably) fall
>> on its face (vs... say... installing real Linux on the netbooks...).
>>
>
> BGB, you're being waay too literal-minded! This thread was (I thought)
> about architecture, rather than implementation details of current
> technologies.
>
>
> ermm... I think this is my natural tendency, and may have to do some with
> psychology...
> http://www.personalitypage.com/portraits.html
> http://www.personalitypage.com/html/ESTP.html
>
>
>
> Chrome OS is a case in point, and FWIW, I expect it to succeed, maybe
> even beyond Android, because it's been carefully built to give a seamless,
> painless end-user experience. That's what most people want. Almost everyone
> who casually uses a computer day-to-day doesn't give a damn about how
> "powerful" or configurable it is. They just want it to work, get out of
> their way, and not irritate them unnecessarily. Increasingly, most people
> spend most of their computer time in a browser anyway. For quite a few, that
> is (or easily could be) *all* of their time. Chrome OS just trims away
> several layers of what these users would consider pointless complexity. As
> others here have mentioned, the Web has *already* become the de-facto
> universal communications medium.
>
>
> dunno...
>
> I got a netbook before, and it came with Xandros...
> I was not very impressed, and soon enough ended up replacing it with
> Ubuntu...
>
> I actually spend a lot more of my time in the shell though (usually either
> Bash or CMD...).
>
>
>
> The interesting question to me is, how do we help ordinary people (like,
> you know, children) *use* this powerful new medium to learn, experiment,
> express and communicate powerful ideas? As far as this question is concerned
> Chrome OS and the Lively Kernel bring us back up to almost the level of
> Smalltalk (plus or minus some semantic noise from Javascript, but hey).
> Surely we can do better...
>
>
> dunno about kids now...
>
> when I got started, it was mostly with MS-DOS and QBasic... (and, there was
> Win 3.x and Win 95, but generally there wasn't nearly as much
> "interesting"/"relevant" in Windows at the time, as most of the "cool stuff"
> was in DOS, and if one tried using it from Windows their computer would
> generally crash anyways...).
>
> mostly, it all started out as lots of fiddling with stuff...
>
> most of this was in the days where internet was dial-up and generally
> exclusive to the computer owned by ones' dad...
>
> oh yays, things were much better with later getting Ethernet in the
> house...
>
>
> later, I migrated to C (first TurboC, later DJGPP), and following this,
> spent a number of years using Linux (I mostly skipped over Win98 for being
> "teh suck"...).
>
> ended up migrating mostly back to Windows with Win2K and WinXP though, and
> have been mostly back in Windows land since (mostly for sake of better
> driver support and more availability of games...).
>
> my recent discovery of being able to use VMware to run Linux rather than
> dual-booting, and VMware being a lot more convinient (albeit the lack of HW
> acceleration in VMware is lame...).
>
>
> or such...
>
>
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