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It hasn't turned out that way with Ford, who's been selling the Mach-E motor for years. It's useless because they don't sell any of the other necessary hardware. A battery, for instance.

This, the price, and the power level.

Meanwhile, Ford has been selling the Mach-E motor as a crate motor for years; but it's useless, because they sell nothing else for it. No battery pack, no controller, no regenerative brakes. Pretty much a PR sham. Why bother?

I have a Mustang with a half-disassembled engine that needs major work, so I thought hey this might be cool. Nope.


The article presents a pretty good rundown on the state of affairs.

"A growing body of work calls this output-competence decoupling"

Given that I don't think he meant that there's a thing called "output competence," I think he meant "output/competence decoupling."


I don't understand these statements:

"...smart displays and vibrant art pieces (that won’t fade over time)... However, when the display is turned off, the images become visible, which allows for information display without using any energy."

Nowhere does it say that the coloration can be changed, once applied. The different-sized particles are embedded in acrylic. So how does this enable a "smart display?" I guess you can say that a turned-off monitor can now show "information," but that information printed on the screen would be static for all time... wouldn't it?


Presumably they're making the leap that this printing technology can be leveraged to develop an alternative display technology that would change the structure in real time, kind of like color e-ink displays.

It's quite the leap, but that's science communication for you!



Especially since the breakthrough was to encapsulate the colored bits to keep them from clumping.

See the image and caption at the top of the article

  Images printed with structural colour ink can be made both highly transparent to transmitted light (top) and at the same time reflect light from above in vivid colours (bottom) – two properties that are typically considered mutually exclusive
The printing on the phone is not visible when the phone display is on as the structural printing is highly transparent. When the display is off, the printing is visible because of the reflected light.

Yes, thanks; but that's neither a "smart" display nor a means to show anything but a single, static printout of "information" when the display is off.

Microsoft is suffering from the lack of such a group today; they're definitely doing it wrong, where "it" is pretty much everything... except pissing off users.

Microsoft could implement the "Am I doing it wrong?" check via the shell script `/bin/true`

They’d need to install WSL2 first though!

It's a Linux subsystem for Windows so we'll call it Windows Subsystem For Linux.

For trademark safety, this is the correct approach. You can say "Blah for XXX" and that's fine but if you say "XXX blah" then you can get into trouble.

Is this really true, or is it just something people have repeated enough times like 'nuclear Ghandi'?

I mainly ask because Microsoft has another product called Linux Integration Services: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=551...


It's not a rule, it's just convention. Trademark law is about whether there is confusion about who made the product but not specific wording. Using "Blah For XXX" wording just makes it clearer.

"Tool for Windows" vs "Windows Tool"

The latter sounds much more like it could come from Microsoft. People repeat this because it avoids this confusion but it is not mandatory. A few projects on Github have had to be renamed because they've been challenged and the accepted solution from the trademark holder has has been to switch it around and become "for XXX".


In the present context, I'm reminded of IBM's "OS/2 for Windows", which, while actually a reduced-price version of OS/2 2.1 that used a customer's existing copy of Windows 3.1 to avoid the cost of licensing the Windows 3.1 components IBM shipped with OS/2 to support Windows compatibility, was also a marketing ploy to reposition OS/2 as a Windows enhancement rather than a replacement OS (which, to be fair, is not as misleading as it may sound, since OS/2 2.1, unlike Windows 3.1, is capable of memory protection and preemptive multitasking between Windows applications).

That makes sense, although in that case personally I would have named it Windows Linux Subsystem.

As a lawyer trained in trademark law, I've never heard this. Do you have any references?

What if you just apply for a free sublicense and you get approved and your massive cadre of attorneys aren't fighting each other over 5 letters?

Apparently some HN people think that MS is so sleazy that they will just go "GPL yoink" and start running/advertising/supporting Linux without notice or consent the benevolent dictator. That's projection.


To solve this matter, I propose renaming it to WNL:

  WSL is not Linux

For a recursive acronym, I prefer LiNT, officially LiNT is NT, and unofficially, either Linux in NT or Linux is Not There, with the official and second unofficial definitions reflecting the WSL 1 architecture where WSL, like Win32, is a subsystem layered on top of the NT kernel, and doesn't rely on any Linux kernel code.

It's not a part of Linux, so it can't be a Linux subsystem. It is a part of Windows, so it is indeed a Windows subsystem. Also it started/replaced a part of the NT kernel called a Subsystem, so it is called a Windows Subsystem.

I don't know where that strong objection to this particular name comes from. MS does do weird things with names, like with Live, .Net or CoPilot, but this isn't one of those, but in fact named quite sensible. Would you also object to the 'Linux kernel module for Android'?


Use of the English language can often lead to ambiguity.

In the case of "Windows subsystem for Linux", it can be reasonably read that "for Linux" means that the functionality applies to Linux, i.e., to provide it with a subsystem that gives it Windows functionality.

Similarly, in the case of "Linux subsystem for Windows", it can be reasonably read that "for Windows" means that the functionality applies to Windows, i.e., to provide it with a subsystem that gives it Linux functionality.


it’s a windows product therefore windows comes first in the name. at least that’s my recollection of the reason why i’ve seen before

Wasn't that due to trademarks?

A TRUE: device?

As long as I can plug in a serial console and it endlessly spits out 1s!

Also conspicuously missing from the story is what key IBM DID want to use. I mean... that's the first question you'd ask!

Lame.


It looks like it they wanted to use their existing special field management keys (field advance and field backspace) with tab being a different user experience. [0] Document does even use the word "Tab". "Field Backspace" seems to duplicate "Home" key usage under some conditions.

To be fair, Microsoft & Bill Gates are bad at quality user experience. "Ctrl+F" differs through their applications.

[0] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibm525xGA2onDisplaySys...

*Edited.

The more I think of it the current TAB (SHIFT+TAB) key should of been used for entry navigation navigation only while the white space tab should of been something such as "SHIFT+SPACE".


"To be fair, Microsoft & Bill Gates are bad at quality user experience."

In some ways. Gates deserves never-ending enmity for plaguing us with backslashes in paths. But in others, Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s.

"Would of?"


> Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s.

There is no universe where that is true.


There is: this one.

Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.


I don't really remember many Windows 95 firsts. One I remember is the ability to switch users without logging off. MacOS famously copied that (with a 3D cube look).

I think they made something really revolutionary at the IE3 time. Their News and Mail app was an Explorer extension that placed an e-mail reader as the presentation of a folder full of folders of mailboxes and messages. You wouldn't see the extension, as the apps launched as applications, but that's what the implementation looked like from what I investigated back then.

Unfortunately, the idea was seemingly abandoned almost immediately. I would love to have such views on top of a user-space file system keeping messages, address books, and calendars in sync.


At my first ISP job, I eventually started using mh for mail. It was based on an awesome concept of sorting everything into directories and having procmail and various helpers to pre-process, including upon receipt and reading. I remember little of the details, but it was truly for the gung-ho neckbeard crowd, and it was well-suited for processing "large amounts" of mail (1993 style). I think MMDF was the MTA trying to do similar things in that vein. Meanwhile my boss was in love with PINE...

Of course, working at an ISP I could also telnet to our NNTP server and read Usenet on the local filesystem. Ugh.


I think that’s right, but it’s fair to point out that Windows 95 was (if you believe Steven Sinofsky, who should know) heavily influenced by NeXT!

https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-passwo...


The use of recessed surfaces for displaying information and the rectangular buttons were very NeXT-like, but more compact because it needed to work at VGA resolutions, but I don't think they managed to capture the essence of their framework which is, impressively, still alive in every Mac sold.

I wonder how hard it would be to get NeXT source from the 1990's and compile it on macOS 26.


And the contemporaneous counterexamples are what? The various UNIX windows managers and X11? System 6-8 on the '90s Macs? None of those were great UI/UX IMO.

The big thing I remember from Windows back then were contextual menus (Windows 95 vs MacOS 8), the Start menu and Explorer (Not sure why the Mac never developed one - apps were easier to find, I guess) with a folder tree on the left, which Finder lacked (but you could always have two windows with different views). In general, the user experience with Macs was smoother than with Windows, with the move to PowerPC being a huge improvement in performance over the 68040 models.

As pointed out elsewhere, NeXT broke a lot of new ground at that time, thanks in part to its Unix underpinnings. Also Adobe brought great font management to both PCs and Mac before both embraced TrueType. Next had sub pixel anti-aliasing from the start.


Not sure the case that the parent refers to, but there's a good reason that CTRL-F in the Win95/Exchange Mail client and Outlook will invoke the Forward email message command.

It goes back to what is the common action that the user would perform in the app. Forwarding an email is more common that Finding text in an email - at least to Billg.

see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...


Ctrl-F6 ?

Shift Ctrl F6

Seriously. This baffling omission undermines the credibility of the whole thing.

"I want a serious Node.js alternative."

So you ignore the one developed by the same guy?


How is that better than Deno?

The world of many, many companies.

Freedom from the NPM mess was why I started my project from the ground up in Deno in the first place.

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