nickcw

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• brucecohenpdx commented on Why I don't use the iPad for serious writing
  Jumping ahead without reading the rest of the thread; if anyone's already addressed this I apologize, but I'm somewhat rushed this morning. if you have each app running atop a single-process OS instance, handled by a VM layer, how do you manage a GUI with multiple windows? And the simple answer is, you don't. Sure you do. X11, which is now more than 25 years old, has a good part of the necessary architecture: it's built on a network architecture, with the server (read display) connected via socket to it's clients. And the window manager process is a client, so...
• Charlie Stross commented on Why I don't use the iPad for serious writing
  Spot on about X's client/server model being perfect; but X itself is ... well, it's probably not somewhere you'd want to start from these days, is it?...
• brucecohenpdx commented on Why I don't use the iPad for serious writing
  well, it's probably not somewhere you'd want to start from these days, is it? No, certainly not. I have a lot of respect for the people who built X; I worked with one of them for several years, and used him as a source of advice on the system I was working on1. But there's a lot of art in the field that's come along since, and there's no reason not to take advantage of it. One of the things that I think OS X did right, that Linux did not, was to start with the Mach microkernel OS. In...
• Charlie Stross commented on Why I don't use the iPad for serious writing
  WOOT! I might be about to eat my words over the title of this blog entry, because it's official: Scrivener for iOS is under development....
• brucecohenpdx commented on Why I don't use the iPad for serious writing
  And Keith Lofstrom, who invented the Lofstrom Launch Loop, was working at Tektronix at the time. And there was a project in the late 80s to build the first commercial 1 megapixel perfect CCD sensor for astronomical use. They built one before the project was shut down. Oh, and I mustn't forget the work on hypertext software, or the distributed test and measurement equipment (probes here, signal processing electronics there, and display and user interface a few miles down the road. That was my last project at the Computer Research Labs in Tektronix before they shut the lab down.) Now...