I still have a cool laptop (with Mandrake and kde) with 192 megs of memory somewhere.

My menus need to be dynamically reloaded!

It’s still Javascript.

But why?

You don’t, it’s just more convenient. And according to the windows people, it’s the same thing there (except fewer people know how to use the terminal because it’s so arcane).

Ok, but all your dialogue will be spoken backwards.

The problem is that apart from a handful of geeks (a lot of which tend to gather on sites like this one), nobody is interested in computers. Which admittedly has consequences since computers are definitely interested in them. But then getting people interested in anything nowadays isn’t very easy.

They also did that stuff with DR-DOS, they’ve been pulling dirty tricks with all their competition since the beginning with little or no consequences.

And people whine because their laptops sometimes don’t work with Linux when it’s actually a fucking miracle that almost all machines currently work flawlessly despite all the hardware having been specifically designed to be hostile to anything that isn’t Windows.

No, not really. The original idea was that you could just push the mouse up and get to the menu as it would be at the edge of the screen. It’s fine if you have a single program.
Current window managers, especially the Unix ones are specifically designed to let you juggle with dozens of windows. And the screen resolutions we now have make this more comfortable. Maximising every window like people did on a Mac+ no longer makes any sense. So the Apple style of interface makes no sense either.

I think it’s like the people who are trying to turn Linux into Windows, a fear of the unfamiliar.

I know, back then people knew what files and directories were. Good times.

It’s great when you have a 15 inch 800x600 screen where every window is always maximised. Otherwise, not so much.

All those wondrous IDEs were nowhere to be found 20 years ago, especially if you didn’t run windows. While Emacs did it all and more.

So yes, you had to read the documentation. That’s what we did back then. We still do it when someone can be arsed to write one.

So, you’ve never actually used Emacs?

And possibly also never used vi either?

Yes, that’s the point of the shell. It’s the glue for all the little tools.

It might be possible, but you can be sure that Apple made it as inconvenient as they technically could. They try their best to lock everyone in. You’re probably better off getting some kind of Apple box to manage those machines.

Hey!

Dead is more of a legal than a biological definition nowadays. There’s definitely some leeway.

I’m not sure if you’re completely up to date on this whole Unicode thing.

Feel free to encode it whichever way suits you best.

That’s normal, you should just use Unicode in that case.