Remembering Windows 2000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.howtogeek.com/676095/remembering-windows-2000-microsofts-forgotten-masterpiece/ <comment> amiga-workbench Windows 2000 also represents the zenith of UI design for Microsoft software. I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers, and installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down.

The in-your-face over decoration of UI's thankfully hasn't persisted, but instead we're seeing a similar kind of decadence among our supposedly minimal and flat interfaces. The misuse of space and screen real-estate has gotten pretty bad as of late, and I'm all for an appropriate amount of whitespace (I keep railing against certain linux DE's for not getting this right) but modern software seems to be devoid of any kind of efficiency with layout or a sensible information density.

<comment><USER3> Windows 2000 always reminded me of brutalist architecture. It was efficient, functional, and worked well, but it wasn't pretty at all.

This is probably a very unpopular opinion but I rather liked Windows Vista's design. It was still very compact compared with later designs, and it had a certain charm from its prevalent use of translucency. I disliked XP for the same reason you cited, and upgraded to Vista almost as soon as it came out, despite early Vista's instability.

<comment><USER4> But, and I say that as a brutalist hater, W2K is then one of those more humane brutalist designs. Some detailing, rounded instead of sharp edges, a concrete that is ever so slightly warmed toned than basic concrete, nooks and crannies to break up long flat surfaces.

I find flatUI far more brutalist in the way it disorients by removing and humane clues as to its structure and use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The memories this brings back!

I turned 18 midway through 1999 and since I was deeply interested in multiprocessor OSes (chiefly, BeOS) I asked for (and was lucky enough to get) a dual PIII-450 system as an 18th birthday/high-school graduation gift.

I dual booted BeOS 5.5 and Windows NT 4.0. Windows 98SE would work, but it didn't have support for SMP, so one of the processors would be deactivated. On the other hand, it NT 4.0 didn't support USB, and I had several USB peripherals (my very first digital camera, a Canon IXUS, and a flatbed scanner).

That's why in June 1999 I joined the Windows 2000 beta programme. It was amazing to have the full power of the dual processors, the "interesting" new GUI, and USB support all rolled into one system. I remember being quite smitten with Windows from just about then until a couple of years after the release of XP (the fabled "XP SP2" being when I jumped ship and switched to Mac OS X 10.2).

Anyway, yes, Windows 2000 (or "Win 2k" as it was affectionately known in those millennial years) was a true monument, a watershed, a massive accomplishment when compared technically to its immediate predecessor Windows NT 4.0 (SP6a) and an immense effort bring the NT line to "functional parity" with the Windows 9 _x_ line. I was stunned that it was replaced so soon by Windows XP (and also, stunned that XP endured for so long thereafter, but that's another story).

<comment> core-questions Well, despite the "fisher-price" UI, XP did build upon 2000 in many good ways - much better 9x compatibility, newer DirectX, lots of small UI improvements, and then SP3's firewall which finally made Windows somewhat safe to use, despite the continual security war and dangerous IE 6.

XP stuck around because Vista simply wasn't compelling. A technical failure by MS, released too early, for no good reason; it never had the things we were promised like the database filesystem, and offered really no reason for a normal consumer to want to upgrade. So around it stuck, just like 7 did while 8 floundered.

Things are different with 10, the Eternal Windows, and so who knows what will happen next in regards to this tick-tock cadence of OS progress?

<comment><USER6> But Vista was not a technical failure but more a commercial failure. I am not an expert but I am pretty sure massive chunks of the OS were updated in Vista that took years to debug and smooth out to what is now Windows 10. You are also correct that XP was technically more advanced than 2000 but I am not sure of the specifics. All I remember is pro audio applications and audio device drive drivers ran much better in Windows XP sp2.

<comment><USER7> 1\. Driver issues plagued Vista.

2\. Xp capable systems weren't powerful enough to run the new generation of operating systems.

Vista was the scapegoat to force hardware upgrade.

Samething happened with windows 8 forcing upgrade to touch screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft's best OS of all time was Windows 2000. Imho, Snow Leopard was Apple's best.

There is something nice about a bug free operating system that "just works" as intended. No problems, no hassles. No load times, even back then. Back then it was common to have a computer with 128MB+ of ram but Windows 2000 ran on 64MB of that, so it was the first non page file heavy OS that just snapped. In comparison, a year later Windows XP could use over 256MB of ram before getting to the same speed, and this was when computer magazines were recommending less than 512MB of ram, because it was overkill.

Today computers are fast, but Catalina feels quite a bit slower than Windows 2000 did when it came out, and Catalina is quite a bit more buggy.

Extreme system stability is nice, but I question if most people even know what that is like.

<comment><USER9> I didn't use 200 much, but I feel this way about windows Xp. It just worked. It seemed super stable and not bloated.

<comment><USER10> That Fisher Price colored theme though...

<comment><USER11> Not sure why so many people complain about it when it was trivial to enable a classic theme to make it look like Win2K.

<comment><USER12> I did the same but I recall there was a few elements that remained - <USER2> windows logo on the start menu was a bit colourful, and a few other bits couldn't be changed too

<comment><USER13> The Windows logo in the Start menu was a bit colorful in Windows 95 and NT 4.0 as well. I'll grant you that the logo itself is slightly different in XP, but it had been colorful for years by that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those who liked Windows 2000's no-nonsense interface, another forgotten masterpiece IMO was Windows Server 2003 as a desktop OS. It had all of the clean minimalism of Windows 2000, both in terms of UI and lack of cruft, with the good bits of XP installable on demand. It's my most fondly remembered Microsoft OS.

<comment><USER15> Same here. I don't remember where I got it from, I _think_ I had a license from MSDN AA when I went to university. It was hands down my favorite Windows ever. 2000 was the second most-favorite, and 7 was the third.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> From what I remember it went like this:

      Microsoft: we're giving everyone the NT Kernel

      Geeks: No, we want 9x Kernel

      Microsoft: Fine, here's Windows ME

      Geeks: Noooooo!

      Microsoft: Releases Windows 2000

      Geeks: We want Windows 2000

It was so much more solid than Windows ME and they had 99% of the NT compatibility layer figured out by SP1 (if that's what it was called). But the best thing for me was that I had 2 processor motherboard with 2x 1Ghz P3s and the 9x Kernel couldn't handle that.

<comment><USER17> Who was clamoring for the 9x kernel? No me nor any geeks I knew...

And as sibling mentioned, ME was before 2000. I remember this because at one point the actively marketed versions were Windows ME, NT and of course CE for those ARM devices. Some people, complaining Windows was slow, pointed out that if you rearrange those version identifiers you get Windows CE-ME-NT (cement).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Windows 2000, with New NT Technology!

I always got a giggle out of that. It's the only Windows OS I've ever professionally developed for and I have to say I found it surprisingly pleasant when I could avoid the legacy APIs. Jeffrey Richter's book[1] was a great resource and helped me to appreciate the OS.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1572319968/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1572319968/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Try it out in your browser - emulated in WebAssembly: [https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=https://bellard.org/...](https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=https://bellard.org/jslinux/win2k.cfg&mem=192&graphic=1&w=1024&h=768)

</comment><comment><USER20> People tend to forget this was during a period when computers were computers and actual work was done on them. Now they're over powered terminals.

<comment><USER21> But you need lots of power to run a browser nowadays.

Love the expression 'over powered terminals' that's sooo true!

<comment><USER22> > But you need lots of power to run a browser nowadays.

Quite right; the vast majority of "actual work" that one would do locally on the machine, requires a lot _less_ power than booting up a web browser and surfing to a random "modern" website. Funny how that works.

We're all forgetting about the 'real' work that we routinely do on our computers, because that kind of thing has gotten so rock-solid and doesn't even measurably tax compute resources - even as _browsing the web_ , of all things, has only become increasingly fiddly and heavy on our systems.

<comment><USER15> Problem is, the actual work we used to do locally and now do over webapps has to pay the performance price of browsing the web - resulting in severe UX degradation for anything but the most casual of uses.

<comment><USER13> It's partially modern web frameworks, too. I happened to load up the web version of Slack on a Core 2 Duo running at 2.2 GHz today, and it was unusable. By comparison, I remember using AIM via Meebo (remember that site?) on dial-up back in the late 2000's, on a Pentium 166 MHz laptop. It wasn't exactly snappy, but it was better than Slack was today on a 2 GHz laptop with 500 times the bandwidth and a fraction of the latency.

It probably would have been even better if I'd been using a native AIM client instead of Meebo, but I'm amazed by how inefficient some modern websites are.

<comment><USER23> AMSN under TCL/TK was even faster than Slack under Electron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Windows 2000 is easily the best Microsoft OS I've used. I miss it dearly. I wrote VB6 apps for fun on it and was just the happiest clam. What an incredibly simple and enjoyable development experience!

</comment><comment><USER25> Aside from the deep consistency of 2000's UI (after all it more or less progressively improved on the 3.x traditional widget set with in some cases little more than a recompile required to get the new theme), 2000 was the first consumer experience of a PC OS featuring real per-process virtual memory, and this is probably a big reason why everyone (including myself) remembers it so fondly.

<comment><USER8> Because this would increase stability?

<comment><USER25> NT had it first, but NT didn't really get much of any consumer exposure. Windows 95 was much closer to the Windows 3.1 everything-shared memory model: 16-bit apps (which were still in widespread use) continued being able to access hardware and each others' memory, and memory belonging to the most recently executed 32-bit app. NTVDM in Windows 2000 also supported 16-bit apps, but they were strictly isolated from each other, the hardware, and any 32-bit app.

The upshot was a 16-bit utility that would crash or corrupt an unrelated app (or the entire machine) in 3.1 or 95 would only crash itself in 2000. The driver model was also completely redesigned, but I don't know much about that.

Any time you hear the old meme about Linux being more stable than Windows, it's important to realize it dates back 20 years when Linux had per-process virtual memory and Windows did not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was given cracked/pirate install disk at a LAN party in ~2000 because I was having SMB network problems with 98. Win2k was so much better in all ways and it could play counter-strike and medal of honor just fine. I kept using it till the mid-2000s around my switch to Ubuntu 5.04.

</comment><comment><USER27> _" If you used a PC in the late '90s, you were quite familiar with the frequent crashes, lockups, and reboots that were common on MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x. The DOS-based PC ecosystem was a house of cards built on an ancient patchwork of code that ran on endless variations of hardware."_

House of cards literally and figuratively -- I have fond memories of fighting with QEMM386 and PROTOCOL.INI/NET.CFG and IRQs to get both my network card _and_ sound card working at the same time, only to then have to then get that all to work with Windows!

<comment><USER28> I remember writing essays in Word, and if you didn't save them every minute, who knows how much work you might randomly lose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Windows 2000 is my favorite windows version. I like the color scheme and how lightweight (from today's perspective) it is. A vm of win2000 and office 2003 is a good option for old office file comparability.

</comment><comment><USER30> Win 2000 was a revolution for me, back then I was a heavy delphi user and it's debugger crashing would kill Win98, like straight BOOM gone.

Win 2000 just shook it off and kept going, that alone was worth the upgrade.

<comment><USER31> We had twice-daily reboots for anyone in our marketing department that worked with Photoshop or Quark. After upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, all the problems were solved and I looked like a hero.

<comment><USER30> David Cutler is a Man of Focus, Commitment and Sheer Fucking Will - the bodies of microsoft operating systems he buried that day are the foundations of what they are today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > It Was Rock-Solid Stable, Unlike Windows Me.

Under Windows NT, each process runs w/ its own LDT (Local Descriptor Table). Process memory bounds are enforced by the processor MMU.

Windows 95, 98, Me, used a single shared LDT, for better backwards compatibility, but with far less protection. I believe I've got this right, but happy to be corrected.

The sad thing about this, is just how long Windows users had to suck it up (5 years!?), until 2K finally came along, pushed as a consumer OS.

</comment><comment><USER33> By far the best GUI experience. I will also attest to its rock solid stability.

Next to BeOS (#1), it's on my top list of favorite OS's

On both OS's ATI's TV Wonder ran like a dream!

</comment><comment><USER34> I managed to avoid the whole Windows-on-DOS family. I went from DOS 6.2 to Windows NT 3.51, then Windows NT 4, then Windows 2000, then Windows 7. Only the good ones. Why run Microsoft's dud products?

Now, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

It's too bad that Microsoft no longer sells a good desktop OS. Windows 10 is a warmed-over tablet GUI forced onto a desktop. With ads. With terrible updates which break things. Do not want.

<comment><USER15> > _Windows 10 is a warmed-over tablet GUI forced onto a desktop. With ads. > With terrible updates which break things._

... as a Service.

I'm stuck with it, but God, I miss Win2k and Win2k3.

<comment><USER34> I was OK with Windows 7. So was most of corporate America. That's when they finally got the thing pretty much debugged. Between the Static Driver Verifier and the classifier for panic dumps sent to Microsoft HQ, they were finally able to get the kernel to crash very rarely.

Microsoft had to apply heavy pressure to get companies and individuals to upgrade to Windows 10. It was "an offer you can't refuse", not an improved product. That's different from previous versions, where there was real forward progress.

Yes, "as a Service", and with built-in spyware, er, "telemetry".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Recommended for admin systems class, ended up using it as personal OS for much longer. It was a beast of stability! (Although win98 rev2 was a quite good ironed out OS before win2000 and with less requirements, given you didn't install/uninstall a lot of apps, prob windows registry messing up)

</comment><comment><USER36> Windows 2000 is still in use in a microSD factory in Taiwan!

It's being used by some pick & place machines and ovens. The machines are rented with a 30-year lease. Changing the software will void the warranty.

They're not connected to the Internet. My task was to parse the binary data to log machine usage and yield, and post that to a SQL database.

There's no .NET framework. I went back to Visual Studio 2005, and coded it all in C++. It was an interesting challenge! I was left with a good impression of how reliable Win2k is though, especially compared to newer OSes (even macOS > 10.9). I hope that some flavour of Linux will break into the mainstream this decade, probably taking cues from the Win2k/OS9 user experience.

<comment><USER37> I know company that have a sawmill device running on Windows98SE.

Also not connected to internet and working standalone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Windows 2000 felt like a tank. You'd boot it thinking it was meant to run servers and web sites, but you could run it on your PC, and play games on it. It was robust. You could finally boast of high uptimes like the Linux folk!

</comment><comment><USER39> The best macOS interface was 10.3 in my opinion, here's some screenshots:

[https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosx103](https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosx103)

<comment><USER40> I loved the "brushed metal" look in 10.3, I remember trying to install various mods to force "brushed metal" onto more applications.

You can't really tell from the static screenshots, but Apple put a lot of effort into making brushed metal windows look good -- it wasn't just a static texture, but instead a composition of multiple layered elements that scaled in different ways as you resized the window. I remember seeing "brushed metal" themes on Linux and Windows at the time, and none of them could come close to 10.3's level of polish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have many not so fond memories of hitting a specific key sequence to allow loading an hdd controller driver or something like it when installing win2k. But it was miles better than 98se. And wow the contemporaneous ME was such an enormous disaster at the time— still remember one of the other computer nerds in high school espousing the benefits of what he saw as the soon to come "made for Windows ME" games." Thankfully my dad knew better and saw through the ME hype, sparing the expense and the terribly buggy UX.

</comment><comment><USER42> There's a great book on the history of Windows NT (precursor of Windows 2000) called "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft".

</comment><comment><USER43> I still have Windows 2000 (air-gapped, naturally) running on an ancient system for some pretty old hardware. I remember being on the Beta list for it when it was "NT 5."

</comment><comment><USER44> My uncle put Windows 2000 on a new PC I got around 2001 or so. I liked the stability, but didn't like how it didn't run any DOS games. You really had to mess something up for it to crash. Fun fact: turning off the machine while booting would corrupt the installation, requiring a reformat and reinstall. It happened to me at least once.

I used it until about 2005, when running 2000 instead of XP didn't make sense anymore.

</comment><comment><USER45> Call me cynical, but Win2k was probably developed by a small and tight-knit group of engineers, PMs and designers. It felt focused and ran most software well.

I think if I remember correctly, Win2k was meant to replace the Windows 98/DOS kernel but they couldn't get it to work in time. That's when WinXP came out instead. WinXP felt like the result of a much bigger org. Am I correct to speculate that in Microsoft, the NT teams and the DOS teams merged to create WinXP?

If so, that would explain XP and that probably created all kind of tonal and structural shifts, a result that was a massive eyesore of an OS. Plus their attempt to come up with a cute theme-able UI like OS X's Aqua was seriously half baked.

<comment><USER22> That's what Vista felt like too, compared to XP. And then it only got worse with Win 8+ and Win 10. Huge increases in bloat, for not much actual function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I did some of my best development work on Windows 2000. From a developer's perspective it was just so simple, stable, and fast. MSSQL + IIS + ASP/PHP was a breeze for those early web apps.

</comment><comment><USER47> 2000 was so stable, and ran well in 128mb ram. It also introduced Active Directory with group policies, which still runs the majority of business Windows networks today (*source: I made that up)

</comment><comment><USER48> > Windows 2000 also served as an alternative to its successor, Windows XP, for > several years. XP included some features that were controversial at the > time. These included an Internet-based product activation system that > complained if you changed your PC hardware, and a colorful new shell > interface some derided as "Fisher-Price."

Did nobody ever change the theme back to Windows Classic? It was really simple to switch over (like, ten clicks at most) and then you could get comfortable with the 2000 interface again.

<comment><USER49> First thing I did after reinstall or if I was "fixing printer" or whatever in the family, then drop all crap from startup/registry, defrag, uninstall every toolbar/crapware that had uninstall. I always thought who is responsible for not giving to people system cleaned up like that? Mystery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I loved Windows 2000 but it is so long ago.

KDE plasma with the windows like menu is just better in every way. I use to have a dual boot into Windows 10 but even that has been gone for a year or two.

</comment><comment><USER51> Would still use win2k today as far as UI and such is concerned.

Still remember the day my last w2k machine booted - an ex was on myspace and just had to have the added benefits of 'zwinky' \- foggy memory, but I think it was some kind of cartoon emoji thing you could use around myspace - well it apparently came with crapware installer that also loaded some malware that killed the machine on the next upgrade.

what a terrible way to lose my favorite machine at the time.

<comment><USER52> I had a desktop with Win2k installed on it from 2002 through 2010. My account was a regular user account and I only logged into the Administrator account if I needed to install or upgrade.

I actually lost the installation due to a lightning strike that damaged the system board. The surge protector wasn't enough it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> >"For a true blast from the past, let's take a look at Windows 2000 Professional's bare minimum system requirements at the time:

133 MHz or higher Pentium-compatible CPU.

64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum; more memory generally improves responsiveness.

2 GB hard disk with a minimum of 650 MB of free space."

My guess is that with any reasonable speed SSD and a swap file -- you could have a responsive system at as little as 32 megabytes (MB) of RAM -- or possibly even less...

<comment><USER23> No. The BUS would still hinder it. For realistic purposes, 2k needed 96-128MB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Windows 2000, together with Windows ME, was the last Windows version which didn't have WPA ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Product_Activation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Product_Activation)), so you didn't have to worry when you upgraded your hardware (not to mention the privacy implications).

</comment><comment><USER21> Yes i have to say i pirated W2k, WinME (preinstalled) was unbearable, i put my money away for one year to buy a nice Desktop, and Windows ME just made me sad, nothing worked, i just had no additional 300$ to buy Win2000pro...i was so mad about Microsoft, i called them to ask for a exchange from WinME to W2K..cost still 300$ thanks Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER55> This was the last version of Windows I used outside of work. I remember that it didn't support a lot of things I had hoped to do with my PC. A lot of "Windows" software either didn't run at all in Win2k or was unreliable in it. Games and multimedia software were especial offenders.

</comment><comment><USER56> Windows 2000 ran smoothly on a pentium 1 233mhz laptop with 96MB memory and allowed me to do websites in 2001.

<comment><USER57> I share the same memory. I remember being very impressed how it run on my Dell laptops Pentium 233 MMX and 64 MB RAM. It even had the driver support for 3Com 14.4k PCMCIA modem... ah the nostalgia!

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I was just starting college and Windows 2000 was all the rage. I installed it but I had a nasty issue where I kept getting a BSOD randomly in games after 5-30 minutes of gameplay.

I updated my drivers for everything and spent hours looking for a solution. No dice. Went back to 98 till XP dropped.

</comment><comment><USER59> Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version of Windows.

Its a good thing MacOSX came along right before Windows XP.

</comment><comment><USER60> Just a reminder that "Showstopper", about the development of Windows NT, is a great read.

</comment><comment><USER61> Gee, I was using Windows ME until 2012, then OS X 10.4 until this year. After all the comments on this page, I shall feel less ashamed/embarrassed about that in future, seems I got good operating systems. I loved them, they worked great. (And still do.)

</comment><comment><USER62> Unpopular opinion: Remembering with great fondness Quarterdeck's DESQview/X, the open systems, off-the-shelf windowing environment that could have won the windowing war. How life would have been different if it had...

</comment><comment><USER63> I remember[1] Windows 2000 somewhat differently. It was the windows that made me finally install debian potato.

[2] > Overall, there are more than 65,000 "potential issues" that could emerge as problems, as discovered by Microsoft's Prefix tool. Microsoft is estimating that 28,000 of these are likely to be "real" problems.

And now I'm curious about what this Prefix tool was.

[1] [https://slashdot.org/story/00/02/11/1840225/windows-2000-has...](https://slashdot.org/story/00/02/11/1840225/windows-2000-has-65000-bugs) [2] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/bugfest- win2000-has-63000-defe...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/bugfest- win2000-has-63000-defects/)

</comment><comment> iso-8859-1 You can get back that old-school Windows feeling on Linux with [https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95](https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95)

<comment><USER22> Chicago95 is nice, but I'd like to see a reimplementation of the old _GTK2_ themes, now that GTK3 seems to have gotten a stable theming interface. It could even be merged upstream, or at least be contributed to the major distro repositories.

<comment><USER23> I miss Gorilla and the one with a metallic theme. And the one from the Java Metal theme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale Not that Win2K was that amazing (the Win32 API was then and still is today really full of inconsistencies, always favoring quantity over quality), but it certainly was the best Windows I've worked with.

</comment><comment><USER64> The article missed the best part, you could install Windows 2000 from 4 floppy disks!

I've used it a lot in my younger years, it only was manageable after SP4. God those updates took forever

<comment><USER65> The floppies only bootstrapped an environment to install the rest of the OS from a larger storage media, though.

<comment><USER22> Even Linux did that back in the day. CD-ROM boot was far from universally supported, let alone USB mass storage. Boot floppies were the most reliable way of starting up an external OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> My first job was on Windows 2000. Rock solid, fast, with perfectly consistent UI. How did we end up with the 10 different UI styles of Windows 10?

</comment><comment><USER67> Remember how much more solid it felt than 98, Windows dragged and resized smoothly and I don't remember them really having tearing.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wouldn't it be nice for MS to release A GNU/linux distro with the official Win2k UI.

PS. That network monitor icon in the taskbar was quite brilliant!

<comment><USER23> Icewm has something similar to that tray icon. Also, with Chicago 95 icon theme and some IceWM/GTK2-3 themes you can almost copycat the W2k theme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> If only it had been better at gaming. Everything about it seemed solid but gaming always felt like a 2nd class citizen.

</comment><comment><USER69> Would Microsoft consider putting in the classic desktop in Windows 10 if enough people wanted it?

</comment><comment><USER70> Windows 2000 was great and really reduced bluescreen frequency compared to Windows 95 and 98.

<comment><USER71> It was mainly because Win2k was basically the next version of WinNT which had nothing in common with Win95/98 under the hood.

<comment><USER72> Yeah, windows has had 3 major flavors in its history. Win 1.x-3.x were just GUIs on top of DOS. Win9x was a true operating system with a kernel, but the kernel was still running on top of DOS. NT, what we have now, is a kernel that runs directly on the hardware. On 32-bit machines dos programs are run using a virtual machine

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Steve Gibson was running 2000 until about 2011. I was doing the same on a 1GHz p3 laptop.

</comment><comment><USER74> This is such an "ok boomer" thread, but what can we take away from it? What lesson can we take from this to repeat the success with today's tech?

IMO the key was drivers:

> While the press criticized some of Windows 2000's driver support at launch, > the OS actually supported far more hardware configurations than Windows NT > 4.0.

I ran NT 4 as a desktop and it was quite the chore with a mix of hacks and repurposing other drivers for similar hardware.

This reminds me of the Linux desktop experience now. With comprehensive driver support and an intuitive UX, Linux can be dominant as a desktop alternative to Win/Mac.

The litmus test is if Mom and Dad can manage it themselves, it's attained equal status to the above.

</comment><comment><USER75> Windows 2000, like many 'server' Windows OS, took FOREVER AND EVER to boot up. It could have been more popular on desktop-class machines if it wasn't due to that.

<comment><USER49> Yeah, slow spinning disks that needed defrag from time to time. I think we would all be surprised if booted from current cpu, ssd and amount of ram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> What a great OS.

</comment><comment><USER77> 133 MHz

64 MB

2 GB

Luxury. Back in the '95 days you were lucky if you had 4 MB RAM.

<comment><USER23> When 2000 arrived everyone had at least 64/128MB of RAM for sure, and the k7/Pentium2 was the most common CPU.</comment></comment>


Bail of $30,000 set for UK cyber expert Marcus Hutchins - k-mcgrady http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40833951 <comment> k-mcgrady Didn't want to change the title but the interesting bit of the article isn't the bail, it's the first sentence of two:

"US prosecutors say a British computer expert has admitted to creating software that harvests bank details.

But Marcus Hutchins' own lawyer says he denies six charges of creating and distributing the Kronos malware."

<comment><AUTHOR> I find more interesting the final part.

Everyone is sympathetic with Mr.Hutchins, including a UK MP, Courage and the EFF, and in this time of real-time (or near real time) communications, noone (including all the friends and colleagues at DEFCON) managed to put together the US$ 30,000 for bail in time.</comment></comment>


Young people in U.S. dying at high rates - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/life-expectancy-young-americans-dying-ccf19571-4a7d-4022-bfba-f4707086a7f1.html <comment><USER2> Here's the paper with a less sensationalized title, "Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates in the United States, 1959-2017": [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2756187](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2756187)

The paper concludes as follows:

> US life expectancy increased for most of the past 60 years, but the rate of > increase slowed over time and life expectancy decreased after 2014. A major > contributor has been an increase in mortality from specific causes (eg, drug > overdoses, suicides, organ system diseases) among young and middle-aged > adults of all racial groups, with an onset as early as the 1990s and with > the largest relative increases occurring in the Ohio Valley and New England. > The implications for public health and the economy are substantial, making > it vital to understand the underlying causes.

<comment><USER3> The paper might have a less sensational title, but that does not make the content any less news-worthy. I don't think the author is wrong at raising alarm about this.

<comment><USER2> 2 different titles:

"The rate of life expectancy increase slowed over time and life expectancy decreased after 2014"

vs

"Young people in U.S. dying at high rates"

Which one seems sensationalist to you?

<comment><USER4> This:

> life expectancy decreased after 2014

is explained by this:

> "Young people in U.S. dying at high rates"

Unless something terrible happened, lowered life expectancy for 3 years in a row should be unacceptable and warrant sensationalism.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/theres-something- terri...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/theres-something-terribly- wrong-americans-are-dying-young-at-alarming- rates/2019/11/25/d88b28ec-0d6a-11ea-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html)

[https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/921858](https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/921858)

[https://www.healio.com/primary-care/practice- management/news...](https://www.healio.com/primary-care/practice- management/news/online/%7B257bd9d1-41b0-4bbc-bc7d-79c4b8a8f8dd%7D/us-life- expectancy-drops-after-decades-of-improvement)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anectodal comment here: n=1.

I stopped actively viewing news in all formats around 4 years ago. I actively shunned TV news, newspapers, radio, and I block all ads online.

Some still got through, making me more determined to avoid them: leaving the room when the news came on for example (my wife switching the channel over!).

But it made me angry because I couldn't escape it. I literally could not get away from it.

When I enter the supermarket, the newspapers are right in front of the damn door! I actually look away from them. Look past them. Whatever it takes.

I've now resigned myself to absorbing some of it passively but I have developed a kind of shield. I almost internally say "meh, so what!".

Almost none of it directly affects me or if it does I am in no position to do ANYTHING about it.

Almost. Some still gets through and pisses me off expecially since every news broadcast or story has a politician in it.

But it was depressing. I actually think that before I stopped I was depressed. Not just feeling down. Clinically depressed.

I am a different person now. I talk to other entrepreneurs: by definition, the successful ones are quite positive people.

I honestly think the constant depressing and negative news was what made me depressed.

The sooner you get rid of it, the better you'll feel.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a problem of a culture that is lost in the woods. We are incredibly divided, you're probably not going to know or have much in common with your neighbors. The world seems small, and you're just holding on. We are functionally going down the same cultural road as Russia, with a "fuck it" sort of cynical attitude that leads to excess seeking of dissociation and alcoholism. I have many friends who do absolutely nothing but work, play games and drink.

There are many countries where people have to work with their hands to put food on the table, who are quite happier with their lives individually than people in the US are. There's plenty of ways to look at the problem and actually study the differences from culture to culture - I'd love to see a few of them. My hypothesis is one of the causes is a lack of dynamism caused by economic insecurity. There's n ot a whole lot thats new because there's little appetite for risk. We still have the same 8 restaurants in malls that we've had since the 90s because incumbents make it too difficult to succeed. This is super rambly I admit, but in the US its so fucking depressing.

<comment><USER7> I don't want your salient comment to fall to the bottom in a discussion about food trucks and mall food. Your point is far more important than that stuff. I really do think that America is turning into Russia (oligarch control of mass media , hopelessness, alcoholism/drug abuse, propaganda everywhere, instability and un- and under-employment), and that Russia is turning into America (inheriting the worst aspects: mass consumer culture, little public participation in civil society, obsessed with social media, media conglomerates complicit with the government, money over everything else. The only other person I've seen make that argument is Max Keiser, whose show, ironically, is broadcast on RT.

I agree with your hypothesis is that lack of dynamism in society is caused by economic insecurity. And I, too, have many friends who do nothing but work, play games, and drink (not that I don't do these things myself). I don't know where this is all going, but I don't like it.

<comment><USER6> Part of the reason I seize on malls and food is it seems like the place where people should be going out to, rather than sitting at home with a bag of fast food every day. Past other activities, everyone has to eat, and eating is a huge part of thriving cultures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

\-- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

</comment><comment><USER7> >Death rates among young and middle-age adults stemmed mostly from suicide, drug overdose, obesity and liver disease.

These are mostly deaths of despair. When people feel like they have no way out of crappy circumstances, and time marches on. And when the only treatment is completely unaffordable, or worse, results in gigantic bills, it can seem almost logical to turn to suicide or alcohol abuse (what a teacher in my 7th- grade "life skills" class called 'slow-motion suicide').

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Look at what these kids are being handed for a future and tell me they don't have the right to be in life-threatening levels of despair.

<comment><USER10> I just don't understand these kinds of comments. On every measurable metric, there has literally never been a better time to be alive and living in America. It seems to me that people's expectations are outpacing our relatively abundant affluence. That may still be a problem, but it has little to do with "what we're being handed for a future." My suspicion is that hit has more to do with the rise in social media and the fact that we're constantly comparing our lives to other people's highlight reels.

<comment><USER11> Remember most of us on Hacker News make well over the national average. The annual median personal income is about 31k a year. This means that there are a lot of people working mind numbing, dead end, minimum wage jobs (likely retail, service industry, or warehouse jobs with no benefits or bad benefits), barely struggling to survive paycheck to paycheck. They don't feel like "there has literally never been a better time to be alive and living in America".

Social media is bad, but it's not the cause. Our society is seriously suffering, and the gap between those of us who are privileged and those of us who have nothing is just getting wider.

<comment><USER10> I keep hearing that there's growing fraction of impoverished people in the US, but the data tell a very different story. See figure 1 and 2 here: [https://www3.nd.edu/~jsulliv4/2017%20Consumption%20Poverty%2...](https://www3.nd.edu/~jsulliv4/2017%20Consumption%20Poverty%20Report%20Meyer%20Sullivan%20final.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Eh I disagree for a multitude of reasons, first is that I really don't agree with the government assumed line of "what is poverty" and I seriously doubt that is the first thing that jumps into everyone's mind when they say people around them are "impoverished". Strictly speaking for 2018, 13064 is the official poverty line for an individual with no dependents below the age of 65. You can easily make above the poverty line working those jobs above, but working minimum wage is quite frankly poverty level in my mind, even 50% more would be pushing it.

Secondly there are additional items that are necessary for this next generation that I don't believe are really accounted for. A lack of good internet access in the form of a smartphone or pc is a literal handicap, if someone can't justify affording that, I would very much consider them impoverished. Time is literal money and denying the most advanced tool in our day and age that will save you large amounts of time/money is poor from my perspective.

Yes I realize this measures something else, but it is rather opaque, and it fails to account for other things like debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Trade policies and immigration decimated the United States middle class. The rich got rich. It's pretty simple

<comment><USER6> The rich are always going to have an advantage towards staying rich. Heck, the people that voted for candidates who talked about trade policies and immigration cheered a massive corporate tax cut.

<comment><USER14> True, we will always have the rich in our society. HOWEVER, the rich got richer at stupendous rate in the last few decades, while the rest got poorer at increasing rate.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how the charts look if you graph them on a log scale. Wealth concentration is exponential by nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was research work that showed a causation between smart phones/social media and increased loneliness and depression rates.

I wonder how we can increase awareness and ethical decision making around our industries actions.

<comment><USER14> So I am an older dude living in a coastal city with a high cost of living, and not a teenager who's easily impressionable.

And I cut the cord years ago so most of my screen entertainment is from youtube videos. And I don't even watch the `trending` videos that youtube pushes. I simply watch documentaries, old TV/movie shows, highlights of soccer/baseball (since I don't have cable TV), some game playing videos, and vlogs.

It was the vlogs that got me feel depressed even more. I don't watch vlogs of the pop stars but of normal people who are just going about their life. Like sailing with family, working on their big houses and cars, flying to places in airliners, flying around in private planes for work/pleasure.

These are completely normal/awesome people who I would love to have as friends. But as I watched the vlogs, I realized that I did/do/will NOT have what they have. Yes yes, it's shallow of me to think this way, of material goods.

With scripted TV shows/movies, you knew the nice houses/cars/toys were fantasies. But with vlogs, you know they are real people. It's true that they are often showing just better part of their lives, but still these houses/cars/toys are real in real people's lives.

Watching these youtube videos inevitably lead to introspection.

The other part of internet that get me down is real estate websites. Before internet, you really had to go out of your way to see inside of expensive houses. Now, with a browser, you can see how the others live. As someone who is paying $$ for dumpy/small space in an increasingly expensive coastal city, it surely does depress me. I initially started viewing the sites to look for my own house possibly to buy, and it inevitably leads to viewing more and more expensive houses. Soon enough, you wonder, what have I done with my life.

I've started cutting out vlogs/real estate websites. But I cannot unsee what I have seen.

For anyone who will see this as rantings of a materialistic person, I am pretty sure I am not. I can fit what I use/need in daily life into a suitcase, except for my 24" monitor. What really gets me is I can't provide for my family.

Oh well, maybe I AM a shallow materialistic dude who just doesn't admit to it.

>>> I wonder how we can increase awareness and ethical decision making around our industries actions.

Frankly, not sure what our tech industry can do to address the complaints I laid out...

<comment><USER15> My local newspaper has started to write articles about the fancy homes in the area. It's harder to avoid these kinds of things.

Some of this comes down to ethics. Am I making something that will hurt people? When I took engineering classes in college I was required to take an ethics class where we talked about thinking these things through. I know not everyone has been taught this.

I wonder how we can add this to our culture as creators. To think about the repercussions of our actions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hopefully this is just coincidence; a few bad years so to say. However, based on my own experiences and having a few friends die due to drug overdose I can say I think not. I wouldn't even know where to start when it comes to placing blame or if it would even help.

I am 33 now and if I have noticed anything in my lifetime it's that people seem so much more divided now than in previous generations. I look at my mothers generation and all the amazing things people accomplished with civil rights, women's rights and environmental action/protection here in the US... that I can't help but feel like we have dropped the ball.

Perhaps the media has simply poisoned my mind s/t I feel a need to absorb blame. Perhaps our generation simply has more complex and overwhelming problems than previous generations. Either way, I feel as though we have all disconnected from one another despite the fact that our generation is more connected now (smart phones, tech, social media) than ever before.

</comment><comment><USER17> Most of this thread seems like it belongs on reddit/r/thanksimcured.

</comment><comment><USER18> The first 3 cited: suicide, drug overdose, obesity.

In my opinion (having been born 50+ years ago to a large family without a lot of money), life is a lot easier now than it was then. We have a lot more technology to help us with all sorts of things.

I think it's easy to lose your sense of purpose today. Not having a strong reason to get out and work to improve things can affect the mindset, and I suspect that can lead to all 3 of the cited causes of death.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Young people" and then they provide some broad data on "age groups" as if the entire U.S. were some homogeneous blob.

</comment><comment><USER20> From a report linked in the article.

>China surpassed the U.S. for healthy life expectancy for the first time in 2016.

Ouch.

<comment><USER7> Without intending to disagree, is there a link to that you could provide? China notoriously hides/doctors/doesn't publish public data like this.

<comment><USER20> Here is the link: [https://www.axios.com/life-expectancy-every-country- world-b3...](https://www.axios.com/life-expectancy-every-country- world-b37971d8-76b9-4777-b86d-5ae99a082fae.html)

According to the chart the growth of life expectancy in China is pretty much inline with growth in India, so it looks legitimate.

While in the US the trend for life expectancy correlates more with Venezuela.

It's a long span (16 years) and only two data points per country. But still...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can it really be a surprise? This system is so filled with mixed values that any moral compass at all becomes a burden like a cross borne. The most immediate example that comes to me is the Logan Paul/KSI drama, plastered in unison across the front pages of the internet. Hyper-sensationalized celebrities who exemplify everything that would've been considered immoral in bygone eras. Logan's business acumen is honed, it seems, or at least looking on the bright side he's successful in his endeavors, creating a self- sanctifying brand. But his character is that of a stupid and inconsiderate miscreant, and yet, he's represented as a valuable contributor to society, as evidenced by his vindication and wealth.

Movies that portray unrealistic human interaction across the spectrum while arresting disbelief create worldviews that are equally disruptive. Our stupid ape brains absorb it, regardless of the divisions our higher processes might place on it. It's why horror movies can elicit their jump scares, why sad moments play the heart strings, and fictionalized steam triggers sexual response. It's all in there, and while we might deride it as fiction, and while that might detract from cross comparison to reality, it still possesses a weighted influence on each and every person's conception of reality, and they adjust their expectations accordingly.

And likewise, even in the landscape of reality, people are altering and editing their social personas with social media. Diligently rehearsed and masterfully placed. Photographs of perfection and all the words that follow, flawless relationships and airbrushed skin. Exotic vacations, and cars, with all the invisible debt that follows. All the trauma that comes alongside maintaining the smoke and mirrors of an expertly crafted life designed to erect some caricature of what we're supposed to be. How we're supposed to live.

Peers, parents, and our internal selves. Society at large. There is no union between a value system any more, and while I believe in diversity for the sake of evolutionary pressure there is no reason to except such a catastrophic schism from blame in matters like this. I won't play at the idea we need religion to survive, but I will say this: at least we had a value system that could machinistically produce a reasonably predictable environment. In the here and now everything comes with some unreasonably tumultuous hurtles, unpredictable even in the best of circumstances. Even were we to crawl back into the trenches of religion, the church is just as confused. It seems now status is god, in the church of fame.

Politics incite vitriol and divide us, first by wont and then by class. The binds of unified labor were dissolved decades ago. The poor and the middle class draw closer and closer as the ascension of the wealthy create an insurmountable gap. A continuum of exposure to the extremes of the world, the best in class in product and producer. Athletes and artists paraded around the facets of the internet, and where, and who is one left to compare themselves to? Everyone must aspire to the apex, don't you know? You're either a saint or a sinner, but there is no holy man in between. And even seditious breaths whisper at the foot of sainthood.

And everyone caught in between all this has only enough control to pound their fists, or a bottle, or a needle, or a bowl.

</comment><comment><USER22> Drug overdoses and suicides are probably two sides of the same coin. The feeling of "despair" and "hopelessness" that young people often speak of are surely exacerbating things and causing some of these deaths.

And while I can empathize, having been the demographic in question until last year, and having experienced exactly those feelings; I think despair and hopelessness is not so much "real" as it is "manufactured".

The media of 2019 is partly to blame. I'm not talking about a specific publication, but the state of "journalism" in general. It's doom and gloom, 24x7 piped to our eyeballs from dozens of sources. Sensationalism and outrage are the goals, and they've gotten very very good at it.

Smartphones and social media are another part of the issue. Zombie scrolling through instagram looking at fake lives and photoshopped images, all the while yearning for the things those people have. Or getting worked up over some post on Facebook or some hot take on Twitter.

I quit reading media, and eliminated all social media from my life, and I've never been happier. I don't feel that sense of dread and despair I used to. I have more time to create, more time to exercise, and I sleep better at night.

Things are actually amazing in 2019 if you think about it. There are endless possibilities for people who want to get out and actually _do_ something.

<comment><USER23> How do you keep in touch with people, then? I've also cut out social media and started spending more time outside and around cities. And sure, I don't encounter much frustration, outrage, or extreme dysphoria anymore. I also have lots of time to do and see exciting and fulfilling things, which I enjoy.

But I can't share the experiences or talk to anyone about them. It seems like there's no way to meet people without social media, bevause a quick introduction or "hello" by someone outside of a pre-approved friends list is universally treated as an aggressive imposition these days, even in group settings where people ostensibly share interests. And none of my friends from when I had Facebook / etc were willing to stay in touch through other means.

So this is obviously very anecdotal, but I still deal with crippling loneliness and will probably join the cohort that this study is looking at soon, since it's clear that there is no hope for any of this to change in the near future. But I can hardly blame other people or the media for "manufacturing" those feelings, so I'm not convinced that avoiding toxic screen time is going to be a workable solution for many people.

<comment><USER24> Personally, I think the idea of completely cutting off from social media isn't something that most people can (or even should) do. Rather, it's important to moderate your interaction with it.

For example, while I've excised most social media from my life, I find Reddit to be generally positive so I keep it. Facebook, Twitter, etc. not so much, so I hardly go there. Now, am I missing out on things? Of course, but I've decided that, for me, those things aren't important enough to deal with the rest of what comes with them (privacy concerns wrt Facebook, for example).

I also forbid social media on my phone - which can go a long way to breaking cycle of swiping/scrolling. I generally forbid myself from going on Reddit while at work, restricting myself to only Hacker News.

For you, that calculus may be different. Maybe most of your friend group interacts via Facebook and that's what they're most comfortable with. In your case, it may be best to stick with Facebook to keep your social circle intact. You just have to moderate your usage. For example, maybe all you really need is Facebook Messenger, so you never actually have to go on Facebook proper. Avoid the parts that drag you down while keeping the parts that maintain your sanity. Maybe only have messenger on your phone so you're not tempted to go to the Facebook site.

It's not easy, which is why a lot of people (myself included) choose to simply throw them away; it's not worth the trouble for us, but it may be for you.

<comment><USER5> >Personally, I think the idea of completely cutting off from social media isn't something that most people can (or even should) do

Incoming anecdotes...

I'm not so sure. I think the only solution is total cut-off.

Remember that the goal of social media is to get you hopelessly addicted and to give away as much information as possible so that THEY can make vast sums of money off your content. They employ thousands of brilliant minds who's sole job is to break down your will power with dark patterns and deep psychological tricks to keep you clicking and scrolling.

No one posts their fuckups, or their bad side, or the boring stuff like doing the ironing or cutting the grass or being stuck in traffic: the normal, everyday things. All you see is edited highlights.

You only see aspirational things that most people will never achieve. That they haven't even achieved.

In fact, I know a guy, a model, who has shunned social media now but still has friends on there who constantly lie and do stuff like buy a bunch of Calvin Klein clothes and pay for their own photoshoot with them wearing it saying things like "Big thanks to Calvin Klein for the gear" etc.

It's utter bullshit from one end to the other.

It's an addiction we have as a nation and the cure is abstinence.

Edit: used the word "stuff" a bit much :)

<comment><USER25> Agreed. Repeating your anecdotal disclaimer, I too have completely severed from social media (and almost all "infotainment" sites, such as Reddit) and have only been the happier for it.

Obviously this depends wildly on each person's individual situation, but I haven't found that it seriously affects the relationships I care about. I no longer know the minor details about the lives of acquaintances from college or high school, but so what?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vispy: OpenGL-based interactive visualization in Python - <AUTHOR> http://vispy.org/index.html <comment><USER2> I've been working on something similar.

[https://github.com/fogleman/pg](https://github.com/fogleman/pg)

Here are a couple of things I've created using it so far, beyond what's in the pg examples folder:

[http://www.michaelfogleman.com/hirise/](http://www.michaelfogleman.com/hirise/)

[http://www.michaelfogleman.com/gps/](http://www.michaelfogleman.com/gps/)

<comment><USER3> it looks cool but it takes the control of the main loop, no ? The ability to integrate an OpenGL scene in another framework in critical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I knew I liked vispy after I spent some time to write this Mandelbrot set example [1]. I only knew a little bit of OpenGL, and it took me less than a day to understand vispy's API and create it. This was also before the new scenegraph functionality was rolled out (the example is based on the core app and gloo modules).

The core development team is very receptive to issues and pull requests. They all also have experience building their own Python visualization libraries, so it's exciting to see how their ideas synthesize into vispy features.

[1] [http://vispy.org/examples/demo/gloo/mandelbrot.html](http://vispy.org/examples/demo/gloo/mandelbrot.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone know how this compares to Mayavi?

Is it targeting different use cases, or just higher performance, or ...?

<comment><USER6> Vispy dev here. Mayavi/VTK are mature, very powerful and feature-complete. Vispy is not even close to offer the same amount of functionality. But eventually, we hope it will.

The low-level OpenGL interfaces in Vispy are now relatively solid, and are the foundations of higher-level, more abstract graphical interfaces we are currently developing (similar to VTK and Mayavi). Our goal is to let scientists easily create fast interactive visualizations in 2D and 3D without any knowledge of OpenGL.

Here is a very early example of these higher-level interfaces: [http://vispy.org/examples/basics/scene/surface_plot.html](http://vispy.org/examples/basics/scene/surface_plot.html) We also have started to work on an OpenGL backend for matplotlib.

Finally, a few remarks:

* Vispy focuses on performance and big datasets (with tens of millions of points or more) with minimal memory footprint (using NumPy)

* Vispy is pure Python and depends just on NumPy, basically. VTK is a heavy C++ library, sometimes complicated to install.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Vispy is what's been missing in the scientific python ecosystem, in my opinion. I've been watching the project closely for a good while, glad to see this release and will try it out as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER8> There was an excellent VisPy talk at EuroSciPy, not sure if Enthought has already put the video on youtube. The team behind VisPy is excellent, and they are doing really good work of making OpenGL usable from a high level language.

</comment><comment><USER9> Gloo looks like a superior alternative to the clunky pyopengl package.

Do you plan to distribute it separatly in the future?

<comment><USER6> That's something we've been considering, indeed. Especially given that we now ship our own OpenGL wrapper with ctypes.

In the meantime, you can just install vispy and import vispy.gloo: nothing else will be imported. The dependencies are the same (just NumPy).

FYI, although gloo's interface is now relatively stable, we're likely to change its internals very soon. This should lead to a cleaner, smaller, and more robust code base for gloo. There will be virtually no change for the user.</comment></comment>


Is a computer science degree worth the paper it's printed on? - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231162/Is_a_computer_science_degree_worth_the_paper_it_s_printed_on_

<comment><USER2> You dont need a degree if you have a portfolio of awesome software you authored to back you up. Programming is an art that requires talent. You cant guarantee that every person who graduates with a degree in CS has the ability to solve and innovate at the pace of the competition.

There is a high demand for talent in Silicon Valley and any company who will not hire programmers without a degree is probably skipping by alot of talented people who could give that company the competitive edge over the competition.</comment>


Maryland bill would outlaw ransomware, keep researchers from reporting bugs - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/good-news-maryland-bill-would-make-ransomware-a-crime/ <comment><USER2> Smart move! Next bill: I suggest make climate change illegal!</comment>


Saudi Arabia adopts the Gregorian calendar - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21711938-hauling-saudi-arabia-21st-century-saudi-arabia-adopts-gregorian?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/saudiarabiaadoptsthegregoriancalendar <comment><USER2> Like always, normally reputable news organizations throw all semblance of journalistic principle out of the window when it comes to the Saudis.

The title should read: "Saudi Arabia adopts the Gregorian calendar _in paying government employees_." According to arabnews.com, this brings the public sector in line with how the private sector is already being paid.

So no, they won't be "running the state" based on the Gregorian calendar. Ramadan will still be observed in the month of Ramadan.

And how is the decision not to award employees 11 extra days' pay because of an administrative change a case of "globalisation favouring rulers at the expense of the ruled?" Just a year ago, when the king awarded all the employees bonuses, wasn't the Economist accusing him of trying to buy his subjects' loyalty? He can't win, it seems.

As for the Wahhabi clerics complaining of a "slippery slope," who are they? And what is the technical term in Arabic they used that translates to "slippery slope?" To claim that any official cleric in the Kingdom would speak out openly against the ruling family is, frankly, ridiculous.

All of this article is utter stupidity, as if the author read half of a headline in an Arab paper and extrapolated it to mean the conversion of the entire country to Christianity.

<comment><USER3> You raise some good points about how the article portrays the issue. Here[1] is another reputable source with some more information that confirms some of what you say.

You also got me thinking about what "slippery slope" would be in Arabic. It could be directly translated but the idiom would lose its meaning. Regardless, I think the point the article's author is trying to convey is that religious conservatives are wary of the slow creep of Western concepts into their society.

[1] [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi- ar...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia- calendar-gregorian-switches-to-pay-workers-less-save-money-a7342331.html)

<comment><USER4> > You also got me thinking about what "slippery slope" would be in Arabic. It > could be directly translated but the idiom would lose its meaning. > Regardless, I think the point the article's author is trying to convey is > that religious conservatives are wary of the slow creep of Western concepts > into their society.

I went to Slippery Slope article on English Wikipedia and then clicked on Arabic. This is a way I often use with languages I regularly use (such as English, Dutch, German, and Spanish) in order to figure what something means in one of those languages. I wanted to describe this process because I believe it can help others in a similar situation. An alternative is Wiktionary, but I find it working less good.

So, the Arabic Wikipedia entry for Slippery Slope is [1]. Using Google Translate, I ended up with it meaning also "Nose of the Camel". This is apparently an Arabian tale.

Quoting: _The Camel 's Nose In The Tent.

One cold night, as an Arab sat in his tent, a camel gently thrust his nose under the flap and looked in. "Master," he said, "let me put my nose in your tent. It's cold and stormy out here." "By all means," said the Arab, "and welcome" as he turned over and went to sleep.

A little later the Arab awoke to find that the camel had not only put his nose in the tent but his head and neck also. The camel, who had been turning his head from side to side, said, "I will take but little more room if I place my forelegs within the tent. It is difficult standing out here." "Yes, you may put your forelegs within," said the Arab, moving a little to make room, for the tent was small.

Finally, the camel said, "May I not stand wholly inside? I keep the tent open by standing as I do." "Yes, yes," said the Arab. "Come wholly inside. Perhaps it will be better for both of us." So the camel crowded in. The Arab with difficulty in the crowded quarters again went to sleep. When he woke up the next time, he was outside in the cold and the camel had the tent to himself._

Disclaimer: I know practically nothing about the Arabic language.

[1] [https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D9%86%D8%AD%D8%AF%D8%B1...](https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D9%86%D8%AD%D8%AF%D8%B1_%D8%B2%D9%84%D9%82)

[2] [http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1800611/posts](http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1800611/posts)

<comment><USER5> Good to see that the Free Republic is as rabid as I remember it being.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm going to take this opportunity to shamelessly self-promote my own attempt at creating an entirely new calendar system, inspired by Paul Graham's Maker/Manager Schedule essay.

It's called Maker Time, and the current Maker Time is 35. Here is it's pitch:

Your clock has it backwards.

* Time is infinite, but our time on earth is not.

* Clocks should count down, not up.

* Time keeping should be based on meaningful celestial events like the year (one earth rotation around the sun) and the day (one rotation of the earth)

* Each unit of time should be based on a viable period of work for makers.

* Maker Time is reset on January 1st each year. The year is divided into 1095 blocks (1098 in leap year). Every 8 hours the count decreases by one.

Here is a browser-based Maker Time clock:

[http://willholloway.net/makertime.html](http://willholloway.net/makertime.html)

Here is a github repo for a simple Maker Time API Flask server and the algo for calculating the current Maker Time if one wants to implement it. I still hope it catches on.

[https://github.com/willholloway/makertime](https://github.com/willholloway/makertime)

<comment><USER7> Interesting idea. Do people not find stressful a clock counting down on them constantly? I've always been stressed out by the idea of time "running out" in various contexts (games, tests in school). So much so that it hinders my performance.

<comment><USER8> Not as much if there's no real impact other than that it's going to be reset.

Watching Maker Clock count down from 1000 each year of the rest of my life would not be too stressful. I will grant that a clock that counted down from 50,000 or so to zero on my expected deathbed would not be as zen-like as the Maker Clock purports to be. Just calculating that number is zen-like, but a daily reminder would not be.

A warning: if you're stressed out by the idea of time running out, don't click this link. But I found this graphic description of the years, months, and weeks in a typical life to be surprising: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life- weeks.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html) I don't typically think of a year or a week as lasting as long as it appears to in those images.

<comment><USER7> I will never see a waitbutwhy link and not click on it. Thanks, this is actually fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're on a Linux/MacOS/BSD machine, "ncal -p" on the command line gives you a nifty list of when various countries switched to Gregorian.

Interesting factoid: Russia's "October Revolution" actually took place in November in most of the rest of the world!

(edit: I had originally said ncal works on all "POSIX" systems but that turned out to be incorrect)

<comment><USER10>
        $ ncal -p
         AL Albania        1912-11-30      IT Italy          1582-10-04
         AT Austria        1583-10-05      JP Japan          1918-12-18
         AU Australia      1752-09-02      LI Lithuania      1918-02-01
         BE Belgium        1582-12-14      LN Latin          9999-05-31
         BG Bulgaria       1916-03-18      LU Luxembourg     1582-12-14
         CA Canada         1752-09-02      LV Latvia         1918-02-01
         CH Switzerland    1655-02-28      NL Netherlands    1582-12-14
         CN China          1911-12-18      NO Norway         1700-02-18
         CZ Czech Republic 1584-01-06      PL Poland         1582-10-04
         DE Germany        1700-02-18      PT Portugal       1582-10-04
         DK Denmark        1700-02-18      RO Romania        1919-03-31
         ES Spain          1582-10-04      RU Russia         1918-01-31
         FI Finland        1753-02-17      SI Slovenia       1919-03-04
         FR France         1582-12-09      SW Sweden         1753-02-17
         GB United Kingdom 1752-09-02      TR Turkey         1926-12-18
         GR Greece         1924-03-09     *US United States  1752-09-02
         HU Hungary        1587-10-21      YU Yugoslavia     1919-03-04
         IS Iceland        1700-11-16

<comment><USER11> Sorted:

        1582-10-04 ES Spain
        1582-10-04 IT Italy
        1582-10-04 PL Poland
        1582-10-04 PT Portugal
        1582-12-09 FR France
        1582-12-14 BE Belgium
        1582-12-14 LU Luxembourg
        1582-12-14 NL Netherlands
        1583-10-05 AT Austria
        1584-01-06 CZ Czech Republic
        1587-10-21 HU Hungary
        1655-02-28 CH Switzerland
        1700-02-18 DE Germany
        1700-02-18 DK Denmark
        1700-02-18 NO Norway
        1700-11-16 IS Iceland
        1752-09-02 AU Australia
        1752-09-02 CA Canada
        1752-09-02 GB United Kingdom
        1752-09-02 US United States
        1753-02-17 FI Finland
        1753-02-17 SW Sweden
        1911-12-18 CN China
        1912-11-30 AL Albania
        1916-03-18 BG Bulgaria
        1918-01-31 RU Russia
        1918-02-01 LI Lithuania
        1918-02-01 LV Latvia
        1918-12-18 JP Japan
        1919-03-04 SI Slovenia
        1919-03-04 YU Yugoslavia
        1919-03-31 RO Romania
        1924-03-09 GR Greece
        1926-12-18 TR Turkey
        9999-05-31 LN Latin

<comment><USER12> This is a bit anachronistic, since Canada in 1752 was still part of France, depending on how you see it (Acadia had been in British hands since 1710). I also wonder what political entities are counted for Germany.

<comment><USER13> For Germany it's the year the Protestant states of the Holy Roman Empire adopted it. The Catholic part had adopted it ~120 years before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is the sort of mayhem we can expect to see on the IT side of this transistion? It seems like there is already a ton of infrastructure in place for them to deal with the dynamic nature of their current calendar, so how do they move to the Gregorian without tripping overthemselves? (Never mind the cultural hurt that will follow, though I'm not sure why they're losing holidays - wouldn't those just follow under different Gregorian days, like Easter does?)

<comment><USER15> I tested support for the Islamic (Hijri) calendar last year. The tabular variant can be handled at the locale level for the most part. The observed variant, on the other hand, is a bit of pain, as it depends on whether someone claims to have seen the new crescent moon (hilal).

Since a lot of people depend on Saudi observations, I imagine this will be influential. People grumble about Saudi Arabia, but they set the trends. They're kind of like California that way.

<comment><USER14> I had no idea there was that sort of requirement - I guess I had just assumed it was systemized. It sounds fascinating - are there ever conflicts that need to be resolved?

<comment><USER16> All the time. You will see Muslims in a same city celebrating same festival a day apart. I think some serious Muslims get into arguments but most people just enjoy an extra day of festivities.

<comment><USER14> I have long held that there aren't any good solutions to the date/time issue (like naming things and cache invalidation :), other than just find some way to hitch to UTC, but you've shown me a case that just... wow. I can't imagine trying to make a computer system integrate with that style of timekeeping. Is there any hope? Or is it actually the solution to give up and switch to something a bit easier like the Gregorian calendar (or whatever)?

<comment><USER17> > wow. I can't imagine trying to make a computer system integrate with that > style of timekeeping.

I don't mean to harsh on you but I feel you have it completely backwards. The computers should do the heavy lifting to adapt to how people want to live, not the other way around. If people want flexible calendars that optimize for strange things let the computers do the heavy lifting for them.

I have been quite sorry when countries have attacked their languages or even alphabets in a misguided way to support computers (consider the letters ll and ch in Spain which were "reformed" just in time for the "improvement" to become irrelevant) when the responsibility lies with the computer.

This is not only a computer issue: cities and suburbs were restructured for automobiles, and even the law changed (the invention of "jaywalking" at the behest of car manufacturers) rather than forcing the machines to adapt to the needs of humans.

Technodeterminism is simply a weakness of will.

<comment><USER18> You suggest making absolutely _no_ compromises in order to move technology forward?

Not everything we do is without question; we do some pretty dumb stuff. Why not improve our systems where it makes sense to?

<comment><USER17> Almost, yes. Certainly I advocate that the technology adapt much much much more to humans than the other way around! After all, who decides what "improvement" is?

The cry of "progress!" has resulted in plenty of destruction as well as benefit, not to mention mountains of premature optimization (think of those elevated freeways into cities that created dead zones and had to be dismantled only decades later, or for that matter the alphabet changes I mentioned).

We used to vary the length of the hour; now we have a second that is fixed and we vary the length of the human day in order to match the rotation of the earth. I happen to think that's a good optimization but I have friends who argue vociferously that those leap seconds are a bad idea. Who's right (hint: on all topics _I_ am).

And there are no absolutes: some languages let their spelling fluctuate (e.g. English), some fix it somewhat rigidly (e.g. French) and some change it systolicly to re-align with perceived practice (e.g. German) -- who is right? I speak all three daily and frankly I consider the German practice the worst of the three. But enough people prefer it so why not?

Sure there's tons of stupid practice (e.g anti-vaxxers). But at the end of the day technology (τέχνη) is an art in service of humans, not the other way around. And to tie this back to HN: if a business doesn't think that way it will not survive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find it fascinating that in the footer of the article it reads …

"""

This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the headline "The prince's time machine"

"""

Sounds like the online version of the Economist is starting to play around with less clever titles. To optimize for social media traffic perhaps?

<comment><USER19> If a clever title does not express the gist of the article, it's a poor title. A clever but unclear title feels like clickbait, one weird trick that prevents me from clicking it.

You may have a clever subtitle when the article is already before the reader's eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Calendars are all kinds of crazy. But can you imagine the pain we would have if the French Revolutionary decimal clock had actually taken hold?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time)

In some countries, a second would be 1/86400 of a day. In others, it would be 1/100000\. Awesome potential for insane bugs!

<comment><USER21> Sounds like the better system, and by making compatible with the metric system (easier to calculate velocity etc.) maybe we'd all be on metric by now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I always liked the simplicity of 28 days/month fixed calendar [0] - 13x28 = 364, with delta time as global holidays.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar)

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately, it will never get adopted...

<comment><USER22> Yes, its more about religious rituals than simple logic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From wikipedia[1] it looks like the previous countries to switch were Turkey in 1926 and Greece in 1923

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Adoption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Adoption)

</comment><comment><USER25> Now let's just cross fingers and hope the US will adopt the metric system

<comment><USER26> The US has adopted the metric system just as completely as, say, the UK has. (Watch UK television and look for how many times the script will say "miles" or "pints" or "pounds" for weight or even better, "stone"!)

The UK in daily use has as many imperial measurements left as the US does. Americans are just more honest with ourselves about it.

<comment><USER27> > The US has adopted the metric system just as completely as, say, the UK has.

I've lived in both, that's inaccurate.

The UK is mostly metric with exceptions (MpH, pints, pounds & stone for "people weight") but in all other ways it is metric, cooking is in metric (grams, liters/milliliters), parts are in metric, temperature is in metric (centigrade), and most measurements are metric (metres, cm, mm, etc). It is a metric country with a few leftovers.

The US conversely is imperial with exceptions. Meaning most "day to day" activities are in imperial units with certain industries (like science) and activities (?) being metric. But if you go buy a cookbook in a US bookstore then good luck finding a metric one unless it is an international cookbook (it will be in "spoons" "cups" "ounces" and so on). You buy a new cookbook in the UK and it is almost certainly metric unless it is from a used book store.

So, no, the UK has adopted metric much more thoroughly than the US. To use made up percentages, the UK is 65% metric, the US is 20% metric. Again, I've lived in both for a decent chunk of my life.

<comment><USER26> I guess everybody in the UK switched to metric, except the few who write the television shows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The only date that matters is the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970.

<comment><USER29> TAI seconds or UTC seconds? (-:

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So there is hope America finally switches to the metric system!

</comment><comment><USER31> Do computer systems in the Kingdom of Saud report date/times according the lunar calendar?

Or did they?

<comment><USER32> The Islamic Calendar has had support in Java since 8 introduced the Date and Time API. I don't know if OS support was around, Wikipedia is sparse on the topic.

[#] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar#Computer_supp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar#Computer_support)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Handy factoid: Saudi Arabian visas list the date and length of validity using the Islamic (lunar) calendar. For example, a three-month visa issued on "38/02/22" (22 Safar 1438, 1 March 2016) is valid until 38/05/22 (22 Jumada al-Awwal 1438, 28 May 2016), not until 1 June 2016!

</comment><comment><USER34> > _Still, Saudi Arabia is not alone in wrestling with ancient calendars. It is > 1395 in Iran, 2628 in Kurdistan, and 5776 in Israel's Knesset. Nor is it > just the Middle East that is out of sync with the times. It is 2559 in > Thailand, though only year 28 (of the Heisei era) in Japan._

Can someone explain the difference between the years in Iran and Saudi Arabia? It seems that Iran uses the Solar Hijri calendar, while SA used the Tabular Islamic Calendar, but I don't really understand why the years are different. Is it because one is solar and one is lunar, increasing the year count more quickly?

(I also had no idea that Japan's years reset with every emperor.)

<comment><USER35> Japan also uses the Gregorian Calendar. I think the Emperor era designation is an informal thing, as in daily life it would be to complicated.

<comment><USER36> The Imperial era years are quick commonly used on official forms. If you live in Japan you will soon learn the current year and the year you were born. The Gregorian Calendar years are also common, and the New Year is on the same day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > _" Still, Saudi Arabia is not alone in wrestling with ancient calendars. It > is 1395 in Iran, 2628 in Kurdistan, and 5776 in Israel's Knesset. Nor is it > just the Middle East that is out of sync with the times. It is 2559 in > Thailand, though only year 28 (of the Heisei era) in Japan."_

Does anyone have a map of the world with current year written on every nation? It would be nice to see which countries are in which year, depending on their calendar.

</comment><comment><USER38> Saudi Arabia is so resistant to change that a local joke claims "Vision 2030" _is_ using the hijri calendar.

Another good one is that in Saudi Arabia, _" 24/7"_ means 24 hours a month, 7 months a year.

</comment><comment><USER39> When the Saudi government built their giant tower clock near the Kaaba in Mecca, there was talk of running it on Mecca solar time. But that didn't happen.

At least we have only one prime meridian, despite Jules Verne.

</comment><comment><USER40> > Nor is it just the Middle East that is out of sync with the times. It is > 2559 in Thailand, though only year 28 (of the Heisei era) in Japan.

That just might take the reward for most western-centric statement of the century.

</comment><comment><USER41> Like clockwork, anytime there is a terrorist attack linked back to the extremist Sunni style Saudi Arabia exports and teaches in its Islamic centers we get some PR about how they are modernizing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> link for getting around the paywall:

[https://google.com/search?q=economist+saudi+gregorian](https://google.com/search?q=economist+saudi+gregorian)

<comment><USER42> HN automatically provides a link to do that. It is labeled "web" and appears on the line below the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


C++20 Draft Approved as Major Update to C++ Programming Language - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ISO-Cpp20-Approved <comment><USER2> Already being discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24389549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24389549)</comment>


Ask HN: Best app for keeping track of information as a manager? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I've recently been promoted from software engineer to manager of an 8 person department. I now have to lead projects, keep track of things discussed in meetings, and generally maintain some kind of record of what's going on with teams and individuals in the department.
Do you have a recommendation for software I could use for this? I already looked at Evernote, Asana, and Trello, but they seem to either be good for project management or organizing notes, but not both. Ideally, I'd like a kind of cross platform data store that lets me share information with my team, keep track of everything related to projects and meetings (agenda, decisions made, action items), and be easily organizable and searchable.
I'd really appreciate your thoughts and recommendations. Thanks! <comment><USER2> It's not quite a simple solution, but Redmine has always been my go to for keeping up on personal projects. There is the fact that it requires you to setup a server somewhere to reside, but it comes with so many plugins and third party applications that make it fully configurable to meet the most complex needs.

[https://www.redmine.org/](https://www.redmine.org/)

[https://www.redmine.org/plugins](https://www.redmine.org/plugins)

[http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/thirdpartytools](http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/thirdpartytools)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey we're building a tool that we think might solve your problem. I'd love to get connect with you. Let me know at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER4> Confluence is pretty popular, especially if you are already using Jira.</comment>


Review: HTML5 for Web Designers (A List Apart book) - <AUTHOR> http://paulstamatiou.com/review-html5-for-web-designers

<comment><USER2> _I wanted to see sections about things like geolocation, drag and drop, Web Storage, Web SQL Database, Web Workers, WebSockets and so on.

Instead I was greeted with this quote in the book:

        The [JavaScript] APIs in HTML5 are very powerful. They are also completely over my
        head. I'll leave it to developers smarter than me to write about them. The APIs
        deserve their own separate book.

Fair enough. Those are rather technical subjects and this is an introductory book. I can live with that._

More than this being an _introductory_ book, it's a book _for designers_. The target audience is neatly contained in the title of the book. This means that _developers_ aren't going to get everything they might want out of this book. As he mentions in the article, the term "HTML5" has become an abbreviated moniker for a fairly large set of new-ish web technologies and standards. I'd expect a book entitled _HTML5 for Web Designers_ to read more like _CSS3 for Web Designers_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I'm just used to smart folks in SV that call themselves web designers but know tons of JS in addition to their Illustrator/Fireworks/PS magic..

I find that his quote about "completely over my head" being a little shocking.. he's written a book on DOM scripting and another on Ajax. If he can't grok these JS APIs I'm a bit worried.

<comment><USER3> It would seem by your definition they're not designers. The fact that they know "tons of JS" would imply they have at least knowledge of basic programming concepts, which is something I would not want, nor expect a web designer to know.

The muddle of knowledge that's expected of SV designers, and other designers in general is a result of the fragmented and confused state the web was/is in, IMO. Frankly, with the current toolsets available, there's no reason a web designer should have to focus on anything other than their design, and pass that off to someone that's skilled in the programming aspect to get their vision functioning. Personally I'd rather hire someone along those lines, rather than a jack-of-all trades.

<comment><USER4> That's very very wrong thinking. All the best designers who were moving the web forward few recent years are also good with coding: Dan Cederholm, Douglas Bowman, Jason Santa Maria, Dunstan Orchard, etc. Remember, design is "how it works", and you cannot do a good design without the knowledge of the surrounding parts. This knowledge helps to bring the most of your main area of expertise. Hire a designer who knows nothing about limitations of the platform, hire a programmer who cannot tell cyan from blue and you will spend the majority of your time trying to fit square pegs in round holes and acting as a translator between the two with little success. And let's not forget that with the current move to more and more interactive designs doing static mockups makes less and less sense. There is some truth in "CSS is the new Photoshop". A designer who knows how to code that nice menu effect with css transition is highly preferable to the one who does not. Saves time and money too.

<comment><USER3> While I can recognize there designers that are the exception, it's silly to think and expect your designers to have this ability. The fact of the matter is that most don't. The same use true for developers. By and large the ones that do are self-motivate individuals running their own startups, or participating on a similar level.

I could easily say that it's preferable to have someone understand the core facets of every part of any field, but the truth is that you're lucky if you can find someone that has the core competencies in any specialized area.

I've successfully separated our designers from the code that implements their designs for the past 5 years and have got only positive results. The designers don't need to learn anything else, or fumble with code, they enjoy living in Photoshop/fireworks and passing it off. Developers shouldn't be doing any interpreting, the designs should be such they can clearly see what things should be.

Nobody said anything about static-mock ups, I said they should be focused on design, not coding. There are plenty of tools available that can allow them to mock-up an effect without coding.

I don't know what idealized world you live in, but sometimes you have to accept the situation and work with it. In any event, we can agree to disagree. Since we clearly have 2 different sets of opinions and 2 different sets of work experience history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is much more a summary (+ star rating) than a review.

<comment><AUTHOR> "review" is a better term for SEO than "summary" in this context :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Safari on ipad crashes on this page. Is that a new kind of sarcastic review?

<comment><AUTHOR> Non-iOS4 Mobile Safari doesn't like Google WebFonts. <http://code.google.com/webfonts></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How is my new book's landing page? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, I saw that one user who get some pretty amazing feedback on his landing page. I was wondering if I could get some thoughts on mine? I'm writing a book on Linux for Hobbyists to get the casual Raspberry Pi, Chromebook, and cloud Linux box crowd a good introductory text.
Your thoughts are much appreciated!
http://linuxforhobbyists.com <comment><USER2> Hello,

It looks good as a style. I like that. I think the style fits the audience. But I am a sucky graphic designer.

However it's not immediately known that what you offer is a book (at least in the medium of a book).

If people visit the page without a context, they might not expect a book at the end of the page. You prepared us here that the page is about a book, but will that be the case with everyone visiting it?

You can do a little quick research to see if random people get what is this about.

[https://usabilityhub.com/](https://usabilityhub.com/) provides 5 seconds tests - people see the page for 5 sec and they answer a simple question, for example - "what is this page about" or something like that. The 5 sec tests are pretty cheap. Last time used that site you could trade making 1 test for someone else for 1 participant for your test.

10 people should be enough to spot patterns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! I completely agree that people may not know that it's a book. I'm going to work on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's great - you could safely leave it as-is. I could have used a friendly- sounding text like this when I got into Linux way back when so I'm sure it'll be a big help to a new geeration of users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much! I appreciate your comment. I thought the same thing which is why I'm writing it. When I got into this it just seemed like all the resources assumed a ton of knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find the text to lack a bit of contrast that makes it just a little hard to read. Other than that, I like the design and the contents, it's intriguing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know! Which text specifically - all of it, or in a specific section?

<comment><USER4> I think the headlines are generally okay, but the "text" sections are a bit too soft. For me, the grey is just a little bit too light. Same for the text on the orange background, but the headlines are okay here, too. One exception: the headlines at the top (orange background with picture), for me that's a little hard to read too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool - thank you for the feedback! I will take it into consideration as I redesign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Simple and directly to the point - I think it's great. If I was in the market I would certainly pre order.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I appreciate your feedback =)</comment></comment>


Microsoft Needs to Check Itself  - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385972,00.asp <comment><USER2> The author seem complete asshole to me. I don't think , he thinks about anything he write. You can see his other article the kind of bias he has in mind. ( I completely understand some bias , but this level is insane ) . No credibility.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you read reactively or proactively? - <AUTHOR> With HN, RSS feeds, email subscriptions and all other sources of content I read and watch not what I actually need, but what these sources give me. YouTube and other recommendations add to that.
On the one hand, it expands my awareness. But on the other hand there's no point in adding anything else to my already giant ToRead/ToWatch list.
I don't know if it's a term, but I call it "Reactive Information Consumption": you consume what is given.
I see it's a procrastination issue, but sometimes it's not so easy to understand what's going on, because those sources are credible and "hey, I learn new stuff!" (though in most cases I don't).
And for me it goes even further, when I start reading something I really need, like docs of a tool I am going to use and then spend an enormous amount of time to read every available page on it so I can say "I understand this thing in detail!" (which is often far from truth anyway, but time's spent and no visible progress has been achieved).
The counterpart of this behavior is "Proactive Information Consumption": first you have a specific question, second you try to answer it ASAP. If you manage to answer the original question, you immediately stop. No aimless link hopping.
I've found a mention of "Proactive Reading" (http://academic.regis.edu/ed205/proactiveread.html), but not much on how to nurture this style of reading and how to prevent yourself from diving into info-devouring.
So I wonder, how do you balance between these two styles of consumption? Do you consciously control what and for how long you read? <comment><USER2> As a very busy individual, I have to manage the amount of time I spend reading things provided through sites such as HN. If I did not monitor or control the time spent on these sites I would never get the things done that are high priorit. It is simply too easy to be drug down rabbit trails through endless links, etc.

Reaching for the sake of business/work is a requirement in and of itself that I can only control to a point. However, I do not allow myself to be sent down trails unless it is for the sake of product improvement, skills enhancement, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's a great question.

I don't know the answer but your thread has reminded me of a book called "How to Read" that may be helpful to you. It sits next to me on my bookshelf and ironically I have yet to read it.</comment>


"In 2016, we will be shipping Rust code and Servo components in Firefox" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/rustlang/status/674243649987850240 <comment><USER2> This week is a Mozilla "Work Week", where the whole company gets together to say hi face to face.

This quote is from David Bryant, Interim CTO and Vice President of Platform Engineering, (read: platform == Firefox) during the opening keynote this morning.</comment>


Gocelery: Celery Distributed Task Queue in Go - <AUTHOR> https://shicky.github.io/gocelery/ <comment><USER2> I have written a similar library a while ago called machinery.

Though inspired by celery I tried to write it in a more idiomatic Go way.

Currently supports RabbitMQ and Redis brokers and many backends.

[https://github.com/RichardKnop/machinery](https://github.com/RichardKnop/machinery)

</comment><comment><USER3> Really awesome. Definitely going to consider porting some python workers to Go as our current throughput is suboptimal!</comment>


Low code enables SAP cloud customer to build app in 9 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.sap.com/2018/06/14/observations-after-talking-to-100-customers-across-na-about-sap-cloud-platform/ <comment><AUTHOR> Key take away after talking to 100 SAP cloud customers: Low code realy works.</comment>