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I have The Complete Hypercard Handbook. I think that was one of the coolest pieces of software ever written. I had hoped to recreate it at one point with Intertexi, but never got far with it. Wish there were people willing to donate their scarce free time for no compensation to work on a product that may never find a market in a language (C#) that many open source programmers, especially those youngins, disdain. 
Imagine a web-based version of Hypercard where you could share cards, decks, etc. If something like that exists, I don't know about it.
Marc
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You may be interested to look at LiveCode [^] : note that it is multi-OS and open-source. Their web-site embodies everything I hate in web-design and marketing  They want US$1000 for a single-dev license, and make figuring out what that gives you ... compared to the open-source version impossible.
Other examples of HyperCard functionality still "alive" : [^]
«While I complain of being able to see only a shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is now, since I'm not at a stage of development where I'm capable of seeing it. A few hundred years later another traveler despairing as myself, may mourn the disappearance of what I may have seen, but failed to see.» Claude Levi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, 1955)
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BillWoodruff wrote: note that it is multi-OS and open-source.
It's open source? Where? Or is what you make open source?
There site, if created with LiveCode, doesn't exactly inspire me. It's rather sluggish. But then again, it may be hosted in Scotland by a slow server. 
LiveCode, published by LiveCode, Ltd., expands greatly on HyperCard's feature set[41] and offers color and a GUI toolkit which can be deployed on many popular platforms (Android, iOS, Classic Macintosh system software, Mac OS X, Windows 98 through 10, and GNU Linux/Unix). LiveCode directly imports extant HyperCard stacks and provides a migration path for stacks still in use.
I'll have to poke at it. Thanks for wiki link!
Of course, my poor CPU (8 cores!) is running at 20%. It seems that a console app sitting at Console.ReadLine() consume a LOT of CPU time! I need to investigate that. It's unacceptable.
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: It's open source? Where?
LiveCode on GitHub: [^].
«While I complain of being able to see only a shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is now, since I'm not at a stage of development where I'm capable of seeing it. A few hundred years later another traveler despairing as myself, may mourn the disappearance of what I may have seen, but failed to see.» Claude Levi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, 1955)
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BillWoodruff wrote: LiveCode on GitHub: [^].
Ah! Thanks!
Gads, there's so many things I want to take a look it. 
Marc
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One of my early jobs was to port a HyperCard app to Windows. The source code had been lost as had the original copies of the artwork.
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Joe Woodbury wrote: The source code had been lost as had the original copies of the artwork.
Marc
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For its time, HyperCard was visionary, and enabled lots of "mere mortals" to create interesting and useful hyper-media software.
The decline of HyperCard as popular software? from Wikipedia: [^] Quote: Bill Atkinson later lamented that if he had only realized the power of network-oriented stacks, instead of focusing on local stacks on a single machine, HyperCard could have become the first Web browser.[30]
«While I complain of being able to see only a shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is now, since I'm not at a stage of development where I'm capable of seeing it. A few hundred years later another traveler despairing as myself, may mourn the disappearance of what I may have seen, but failed to see.» Claude Levi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, 1955)
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Supercapacitors promise recharging of phones and other devices in seconds and minutes as opposed to hours for batteries. But current technologies are not usually flexible, have insufficient capacities, and for many their performance quickly degrades with charging cycles. Researchers have found a way to improve all three problems in one stroke. Just a warning - don't lick these candy canes
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Musk must mull this much.
Marc
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I was thinking Elon the same lines.
... such stuff as dreams are made on
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Hardware capability increases exponentially, but software somehow just bloats up, using the power and space, without providing much more functionality or value. "Data expands to fill the space available for storage"
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One person's bloat is another person's feature.
(So it's lacking intellisense, tabs and colors, but damn, Visual C++ 6.0 used to load fast! Add Visual Assist and it still loaded fast.)
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One of the sources of the bloats in software are the layers of general purpose libraries that a specific software depends upon. Maybe only 1% or less of the said libraries are actually used for the specific tasks of the software, but they (the libs) all consumes resources according to their general settings nevertheless. As the number of the layers grow, the resource wasted also grow exponentially.
It would be better if the next generation of language, compilers and/or linkers could be such that it's possible to enable the software production process to be smart enough to extract only the needed bits of the generic parts (of the software) to produce the final result, like what is done in the early days in which things are simple enough that everything can be build up from ground just for the specific tasks of a software ...
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Shuqian Ying wrote: to be smart enough to extract only the needed bits of the generic parts (of the software) to produce the final result
There used to be a tool, ages ago, for C/C++ that did that, and I thought there was once such a thing for C#/.NET as well. But it's all "gotten" so entangled. 
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: There used to be a tool, ages ago, for C/C++ that did that
The linker and static libraries, perhaps?
The user can't update the up: we update it for them (Choice in the CP poll)
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"There used to be a tool, ages ago, for C/C++"
There still is - its called the linker. Link to static libraries and only the parts used (directly or indirectly) are pulled into your program (especially with Whole Program Optimisation).
Even better, using Modern C++ many libraries are "header only", in these cases the optimiser can sometimes work wonders - eliminating entire sequences of function calls and replacing it with the value where that can be determined statically.
(Nix'd by Code Wraith)
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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I won't even bother to answer that with the obvious pun on "rails".
Haven't read the article yet, there might be more, haha!
Marc
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And here it is:
So what are the underlying problems?
Well, the OS. And the fact that everything has to be connected now, using various data stores (local, cloud, SQL, NoSQL, key-value, etc), and we have to deal with internationalization, translation, multiple devices, complex UI's (come now, how complicated was it when you had an 80x25 character display, if you were lucky), and everything has gotten faster -- from data feeds to demand for data (we're no longer putting you on hold on your analog phone line while we get your insurance folder from the file cabinet, you know).
So these aren't problems, they are solutions to problems that create their own problems. Um, ok, they are problems.
What are some potential solutions?
Solar flare? Nuclear war? Military state? The real problem is that people want more, and want it faster. Oh, and everything is entertainment nowadays.
I know. Less government regulation! Less government! I mean, geez, you should see the hoops we have to go through in the insurance industry!
Or is is just inevitable that we'll keep writing software to fill up the ever-expanding space those amazing hardware engineers keep coming up with?
Yes. To deal with it, invent new technology that sucks up more processing power, memory, and data storage, but makes it simpler to program and use.
Basically, the processing power, RAM, and storage requirements are where we shove the problem of "how much and how fast" so we can do cool things like land the first stage of a rocket back on earth and re-use it.
Marc
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[tldr]
Computers are great things that solve so many problems so quickly that wouldn't exist if there weren't any computers.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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H.Brydon wrote: Computers are great things that solve so many problems so quickly that wouldn't exist if there weren't any computers.
What impresses me the most, when watching something like The Extraordinary Genius of Albert Einstein - Full Documentary HD - YouTube is how people used to solve problems 1) without computers and 2) by thinking.
Nowadays, it seems like, instead of thinking deeper about the problem that needs to be solved, we reach for Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc., and hack together a bandaid solution.
Marc
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When was software ever "on the rails" ?
«While I complain of being able to see only a shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is now, since I'm not at a stage of development where I'm capable of seeing it. A few hundred years later another traveler despairing as myself, may mourn the disappearance of what I may have seen, but failed to see.» Claude Levi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, 1955)
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A new study suggests that including emoji in your work emails may be making you look incompetent. 
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