528 karma · joined April 5, 2016
I don't understand what you write about Valve, the Steam Deck supports unmodified Win32 games which use DirectX.
With Windows you have Phone Link which allows access to messages and notifications, but it is a far cry from Apple Continuity. For things like access to the phone camera you still need 3rd party software.
Mobile games at the time were all OpenGL ES, which Microsoft refused to support in favor of Direct3D.
Then there was Microsoft's perpetual need to start over. WM6.5 to WP7 broke app compatibility. WP7 to WP8, entirely new APIs. WP8 to WM10 there was UWP and Continuum, again forcing major rewrites if you wanted the new features.
And finally how Microsoft treated the devs themselves. Ad-supported apps depended on Microsoft's ad network which was artificially kept alive by Microsoft injecting money for Xbox and Office ads. Once Microsoft stopped, the whole thing folded, leaving developers with a sudden loss of income.
Developers from countries in Microsoft's 2nd tier additionally reported poor treatment and Kafka'esque bureaucracy preventing them from publishing apps: https://toshl.com/blog/why-publishing-on-the-windows-phone-m...
This is why I think the app situation would not have fixed itself over time, and MS efforts to ease transition like Project Islandwood were doomed from the start, because those fixed a problem but not the problem.
The snappiness of apps was also hindered by network I/O in the UI thread (I mean wtf Microsoft).
WP8 did some things better but it was too little, too late. Nokia at some point bitterly complained about Microsoft's inertia in getting important features implemented that Nokia needed in order to sell phones (besides the apps, but that is another whole can of worms). https://www.techspot.com/news/53405-microsofts-slow-developm...
> That sort of taking pride in ignorance is worse.
Being averse against reading is not the same as being ignorant. It reminds me of that famous Bill Gates quote, "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." That person will master ways to learn things without reading a whole lot.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tr...
Want to switch default browser? Adding yet one more step to stop you.
Want to boot other operating system? Now you have to go to UEFI setup and change boot settings.
etc.
One other reason for science being such a long-term process is Planck's Principle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
Basically, scientific innovations spread by the old orthodoxy retiring/dying and replaced by successors who are familiarized with the new ideas (and then proceed to form the new orthodoxy).
As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SUA had a number of long-standing limitations (like when replacing open files) which were probably unfixable without rewriting everything anyway. It allegedly is a continuation of Project Astoria which implemented only the minimum necessary part to make Android apps run, but was refocused to run all Linux applications.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle
Though probably Planck was at the time still under the impression of the C.G. Barkla affair.
The problem is that home lab owners who develop on their second-hand POWER8 hardware can no longer have the same software environment as the POWER9 systems running latest Ubuntu that they deploy to. And Ubuntu is very popular in the Cloud.
I remember discussing with an IBM representative at one of the last CeBIT shows (was it 2016?) that the community who did open source development on non-x86 were gravitating away from POWER/PowerPC towards ARM. The affordable hardware was a major selling point.
His offered "solution" was that IBM granted free access to its POWER cloud. But that is of course not interesting for someone who runs a home lab and works on Linux distros.
And even so, the blog post still does not aim to where they need to aim. Raptor systems are far from "affordable" for your average CS undergraduate or hobbyist. Power Pi's $250 target price is still off by almost an order of magnitude. The $250+ market is served by second-hand POWER servers, which are ok for home labs. Unfortunately, Ubuntu and IBM in their infinite wisdom decided to drop POWER8 support from upcoming releases, which will drive away home labs and the open source community further from Power.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-2...
You cannot order to any address, only to residential addresses that USPS ships to (as indicated by their Residential Delivery Indicator). Specifically, you cannot order to commercial addresses and PO boxes.
Resale is not prevented but (intentionally or not) limited by the distribution of only 4 tests per home, regardless of how many people live there. This means that poor folks where typically many people share a household get fewer tests per person to begin with, while more affluent folks (who are less likely to resell the tests) get more per person.
Various projects keep status pages of their mainlining efforts. Example for Allwinner hardware from the linux-sunxi project:
https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
Generally, SoCs that have lots of things marked "WIP" have community attention and are probably going to work at some point without kernel patches.
For example my $15 Orange Pi PC (Allwinner H5 SoC) that I bought many years ago from AliExpress went from no mainline at all to excellent with only minor parts like the Crypto engine still requiring kernel patches.
This is thanks to the linux-sunxi, lima, and other efforts. For AMLogic there is linux-meson. For RockChip this is more spotty, but you can look at what Pine64 did in the past and their track record is actually pretty good.
Despite its name, SARS-CoV-2 is not strictly a "respiratory virus". While it is spread airborne, it attacks multiple tissues besides the respiratory system, and causes multi-system dysfunction (including but not limited to MIS-C, type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, acute kidney injury, erectile dysfunction, ...). Many of the damages are immune-mediated, which is in line with what we know about T1D and celiac as autoimmune disorders.
Also vaccines reduce risk of some post-acute COVID disorders like MIS-C (which can result even from asymptomatic COVID).
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7102e1.htm
And of course you don't want to infect your child with a disease that has long term consequences which we are still learning about. Diabetes hit the news recently in the US, but it is actually been known for a while in other countries.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7102e2.htm
https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/43/11/e170/35903/N... (UK)
https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/27/archdischild-20... (Finland)
If that wasn't bad enough, diseases that are associated with T1D like celiac disease are on the rise, and show stronger association in COVID patients:
I think that is revisionist. Trump surely didn't help, but Hydroxychloroquine treatment was only ever promoted in special circles, while COVID-19 ravaged communities that would never even consider voting for Trump or consuming horse dewormer.
The actual failure is the CDC denying that transmission was mainly airborne and even later refusing to eat humble pie and publicly recant. WHO is even worse. (Google "situationally airborne" to read some of the mental gymnastics that they used to insinuate that they were right all along) Many regions to this day treat it as droplet based infectious disease, because there was never a clear and loud change of direction, it was mostly silent.
If CDC had taken measures against airborne diseases like mask mandates which helped Asia early on, there would have been a much different pandemic in the US.
Edit as this is being downvoted: the WHO's and national health bodies' resistance against labeling COVID-19 airborne is well documented. https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/6-126
Only in May 2021, the CDC updated their guidance to state that there is airborne transmission (but without using the word "airborne", go figure).
As the other commenter pointed out, the executive branch of government lacks authority to do so. Courts have decided over and over again (like with the eviction moratorium, worker vaccine mandate, etc.) that Congress needs to authorize this.
So it is very much a failure of Congress to act. And since no action was taken, neither before nor after changing majorities in Congress, all parties failed.
Perhaps there was a Chinese whispers (no pun intended) style miscommunication and while the original source meant "software component", it became "hardware component" somewhere along. Or the attack was actually developed as proof-of-concept but never applied in the wild. The attack is feasible as other security researchers have shown:
Of course this kind of vigilante justice by FDTI is illegal, but who is going to press charges if that means they will get their devices taken from them and destroyed?
Coincidentally or not, PoC/BAME folks have worse COVID outcomes in these countries, which could be due to vitamin D deficiency. There is of course socio-economic component too.
Besides, considering the food industry in most countries will not even get rid of kcal where there exist zero reason to use that unit, I don't think so.