I'm with 'jacquesm here. Without being there, taken in isolation, hearing about being stolen-from (email republished without attribution), then brought along to Sun for potential blowback(?) or (semi?)-publicly by being labelled an apparently under-sexed nerd doesn't make Cringely sound like much more than a sort of sociopath.
I feel like if a “friend” is posting that stuff in an obituary, it sheds a little more context on their type of relationship and humor. But who knows, I guess the way you paint it, it does seem kind of rude.
I chose Algebra II, which I'm currently re-visiting as an adult learner starting a new direction in college. It immediately thrust me into problems I've not seen before. I skipped multiple times and was never presented with something I recognized. I went into settings an turned on Algebra I, thinking that would start with more basics, but had the same issue. Gave up after 5-6 tries, feeling just as frustrated and dumb as I do in class.
Programmer of 27 years, doing math by other names. I continue to be frustrated by how bad math-as-a-programming-language is. This tool did nothing to improve that feeling.
The goal of the product is to give practice and help build automaticity in topics you already know, which makes learning harder stuff (e.g. through Math Academy) easier later to raise your ceiling.
So, I'm not sure if maybe you're less familiar with the material (below the threshold) and you should take a course focused on teaching the material OR that the material in Mathy is too hard for the selected topic. Because if you're familiar, it should be helping you rather than frustrating you.
It's an offline app so I don't capture that kind of data. But you make a good point, and at a minimum for each topic I can have it start with easier problems then increasingly get harder as you do better.
I'll think more about that today and maybe get a fix out once I have some time.
I got this working a few years ago on era-appropriate hardware. It was awful -- unstable and crashy. There were glimpses of what they were trying for, but it was painfully obvious they were a long way from even the stability of 7.5. I'm sure it was a tough call, but whoever decided to axe it made the right one. Besides, if it had succeeded, they might not have bought NeXT and we might not have gotten OS X!
I was at WWDC in 1996. Each presentation showing off a new feature of Copeland required booting a custom build of the binary, and even then it was flakey as hell because it didn't implement proper memory protection. I vividly remember getting a sudden realisation that Copeland was never going to ship.
When Apple showed Copland on Computer Chronicles, it was just the Apple guy playing animated mock-up demos and pretending that he was using the computer. I think that shows an incredible lack of confidence, as they weren't even willing to demonstrate the actual OS in a controlled environment. I'm not sure why Computer Chronicles let them get away with this. I would have expected that as a news program, they wouldn't let guests do fake demos. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRKzJMS6Uw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXfsAYUjvms&t=242s
Based on what has been reported, I don’t think it was all that tough a call to axe it. What to do after that has hard but cancelling Copeland was an obvious decision to make.
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