another2another

Most democracies tolerate a degree of social chaos since self expression and freedom of action are part of the culture.

Dictatorships on the other hand are terrified of their own people, and so crush and expression of freedom that they don't directly approve (see for instance the lady that was arrested in Moscow for standing in public with a blank piece of paper).

However in times of threat from an external force, then people group together and there's more cohesion. Would a democracy like France press the button to protect themselves or an ally under such circumstances? Yes, I think they would.

However these societies are not run by a single small cell of egotistical leaders like feudal courts of old as current autocracies are. The question is more, would these deranged autocracies have the dumb courage to risk annihilation by directly attacking the democracies they hate? Doubt it.

There was always the free copy of Computer Weekly that would arrive in the post to keep you amused for half an hour or so.

>Surely Microsoft would like to shake out the last diehards running some VB5 app on a patched up PC in a factory. >Isn't it more beneficial to everyone to start sunsetting acres of ancient NT code and approaches and streamline the entire attack surface?

If your code somehow still relies on some buggy behaviour to work, then MS shouldn't do anything to preserve that anymore - apparently they used to, but I'm not so sure nowadays.

However 'ancient NT' code should probably still function just fine since the Win32 API hasn't changed much for a while, and MS don't actively deprecate function calls (unlike Apple who seem to do it a bit on a whim recently). I would put this down to the API being pretty well designed in the first place.

Air sirens had already started so most people had moved down to the basements. Probably some people who couldn't, or who were caring for those that couldn't be moved were caught in the blast.

Brutal thing to do. At least they didn't go for a double-tap, just for the lulz.

Well, if they'd used a different vendor (or nothing) on the DR servers we could have done a failover and gotten on with our day. But alas nobody saw, an app that can download data from the internet, whenever it wants to update itself arbitrarily without user intervention, as a problem.

So here we are.

>yet it went bankrupt because companies prefer to buy new plastic which is both cheaper and more convenient.

I would say that should make plastic recyclers a fair target for government subsidies since they're not making a financial profit, but are a net social benefit.

I think a better fit (for any measure of better you might like) might be Redhat / IBM.

IBM can sell it to customers as an Enterprise package with Enterprise support, and Redhat can host their own OSS software there on their own turf.

>In an era where performance mattered, and much software was written for hardware, and controlling hardware, it's hard to see an alternative

Actually, what made sense _was_ assembly when performance mattered above all. C was actually seen as a higher level language.

However C's advantage was the fact that it was cross platform, so you could compile or quite easily port the same code to many different platforms with a C compiler (Solaris,Windows,BSD,Linux and latterly Mac OSX). That was its strength (pascal shared this too, but it didn't survive).

You can see this in the legacy of software that's still in use today - lots of gnu utilities, shells, X windows, the zlib library, the gcc, openssl and discussed fairly recently POV Ray which has been going since the 80's.

>Does that mean we should just stop innovating and go into an indefinite state of maintenance

If you mean that not using Rust (or maybe some other languages e.g. Zig or Ada?) means that there can be no innovation in the Linux kernel, I would have to disagree since there's been plenty of progress in plain old c (see for instance io_uring), not to mention the fact that the c language itself could change to make developer ergonomics better - since that seems to be the nub of the problem.

It also raises the question of what happens in the future when Rust is no longer the language du jour - how do we know it's going to last the course? And now there's 2 different codebases, potentially maintained by 2 different diminishing sets of active maintainers.

The fuse is now lit for lots of apps currently working fine in production to be suddenly labelled 'legacy', and nobody wants to work on the crusty old React or (heavens to Betsy!) Angular anymore.

In 5 years time earnest conversations will be had about trying to find somebody who is willing to maintain the thing, or do we have resource for a complete rewrite?

Ask them to write the tests that will trigger the failure condition - i.e. make them prove that it's a possible thing that can easily occur.

If it is, then at least you have a simple test case to work with so they've done a chunk of the work for you. If it's not, then they'll spend ages trying to craft a test case for a scenario that's extremely unlikely.

People very often leave you alone when challenged to put in the work to prove their point.

You can still find documentation for Macos toolkit with Pascal bindings.

This is a bit of a nostalgia trip for me as I owned a copy of this book way back in the 90's

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...

>So yes, no one really cares.

This is how I feel, I own all the Half-Life and Portal games on Steam, but since the 64 bit ARM transition they're just useless bits. And it feels like it shouldn't that big a problem to port them, but nobody seems to care enough.

A good strategy might have been to pool their resources and create a new global channel that they all part-owned and distribute their content there. Like a big new Global TV Channel.

Yes, what people managed in pure assembly language was really impressive.

Unsurprisingly though they also spent a lot of time developing a lot of time-saving tools, like macro assemblers and higher level languages like C.

Probably the games on the Amiga and Atari ST was the last heyday of these kinds of development.

>They didn't have no gofmt back then.

Didn't need gofmt as plenty of IDEs and editors had automatic indentation and syntax colouring already implemented.

1993 wasn't the dark ages you know.

>It was the closest we've ever gotten to a natural language interface and that genuinely felt really different

Agreed, but I think we'll soon start to discover that interacting with systems as if they were text adventure games of the 80's is also going to get pretty weird and frustrating, not to mention probably inefficient.

Smile grimly and carry on. At least they're not trying to shoehorn blockchain in everywhere anymore.

I believe I probably started playing it when it came out, but abandoned it pretty early on, hence my initial confusion - like something you half remember.

The first 3 games though were great in their different ways, but Quake 1 will always be my favourite.

There was a Quake 4?! ...ah yes... no.. heh?

Must've blotted it out to preserve the affection I had for the first 3.

I think there's also more subtle improvements using e.g. object recognition.

Last week I was in an art gallery and took some photos of the paintings, when I suddenly noticed that it was drawing a focus around the frame and there was a 'Look up Artwork' option, which work fairly well (not 100%). Just as well, as I couldn't remember the works myself the next day after looking at the photos.

If I hadn't taken those pictures I probably wold never have known the feature existed.

iPhone 15.

That's been outsourced as a 3rd party plugin (iFolio? I think).

Works OK, but I did like the Apple interface better.

The 'Inside' Story Is More Disturbing

Is this a tasteless pun ?

"History is made by those who show up." (Disraeli) is the quote that springs to mind.

That "joke" currency currently has a market cap of $23 billion and a trading volume of $2.6B over the last 24 hours.

>Absurd times we live in, comedic and dramatic at the same time.

So yes, totally agreed.

An interesting read, which led me to lookup Kilbride in CA, and found it's even highlighted on Google maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/place//@43.4246699,-79.9457692,1...

Quite amusing reading that article, then glancing over at the Social media links where of course Twitter is now replaced by that X (which, let's be honest is one of the quickest and most effective rebrands I can think of. Hats off to the X (formerly known as Twitter) team for doing that so slickly).

Sounds like X11 needs its own equivalent of LibreSSL, but it looks like the will is there (many supporters of X continuation), but not the manpower.

In days of yore (when Windows 3 was young), there were even commercial X servers (Hummingbird I think it was), so there's plenty of other people implemented the protocol.

You don't want to visit Pen's Island?

It did at least reveal the playbook, and that you have to get pretty creative to hide things in plain sight.

I'm sure any binary blobs in OSS software, no matter what the reason for having them will be viewed with suspicion, and build scripts get extra inspection after that.

Maybe I'm naive in thinking that some people are already looking into packages that are included in all base Linux builds? Including simplifying the build env, and making sure that the the build tools themselves (cmake, pkgconfig, gmake, autotools etc) are also not compromised.