dcohenp

I bet you're thinking of macOS Server [1], which costs $19.99 (twenty dollars).

[1] https://www.apple.com/macos/server/

> 7. The Apple troubleshooting guides are out of date. They do not note that if you have a firmware password on a T2 Mac, you cannot reset PRAM as expected and therefore cannot resolve screen brightness issues this way. You also cannot run diagnostics due to the black screen.

"Hey Siri" has in fact been tied to the owner's voice since the iPhone 6s (2015): https://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/11/apples-hey-siri-feature...

I've seen at least one, but it's proprietary and internal to my bigco. I'm willing to bet there's quite a few more at other bigcos. So lucky for you if you can avoid them, but I'm pretty sure there's many of us who don't get that choice.

I do this often, too. Just FYI: all you need to do is tell WhatsApp "Never mind, I'm not actually changing my number" when prompted (which should only happen once per SIM card change). That's it. You'll continue being identified to your WhatsApp contacts by your "home" phone number (not your temporary one).

Car. Nightstand. Kitchen counter while you cook/wash dishes. There's a myriad situations where you want to use your device hands-free. In fact, it's the driver behind an entire new product category (see Amazon Echo, Google Home, etc.).

It looks like they're definitely working on bolting on some of that stuff onto C# and the Runtime in the near term: https://qconnewyork.com/system/files/presentation-slides/csy...

I'm gonna go with Tony Hoare here and say if I could pick just one it'd be NULL pointers.

(Braces though? Really?!?)

I'm sorry, but this line of argument is not even wrong as it relates to the entire modern infosec field, which is founded on the fact that there is no such thing as "100% security"; that is why concepts such as "threat models" and "defense in depth" exist.

Also, proving a program "correct" (for some definition of correctness that presumably includes "secure") is undecidable, ergo there cannot be such a thing as a "100% secure language". No, not even Erlang, nor Haskell, nor anything which is remotely close to Turing-complete. So all we can do is, in fact, decrease the attack surface.

That is indeed what the post you're replying to meant. Note that the pointed-to value is a constant string, yet the pointer itself is being modified. That's a fairly common idiom in C string-handling code, only possible because it's a const char , not a const char const.

> No one has ever found an efficient algorithm for an NP-complete problem, and most computer scientists believe no one ever will.

I find these kinds of assertions somewhat misleading. There _are_ "efficient" algorithms for, one could say, "pragmatic variations" of NP-complete problems. Some only work on some subset of cases (perhaps most of the useful ones), or non-deterministic (but you run them enough times and get the right answer), etc.

Apparently hardware would be under their "More Personal Computing" Segment: https://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Ear...

They don't break it down per-product, but the whole segment was $9.1B revenue out of $20.4B for the quarter. And the only hint we get about this product specifically is:

"Devices revenue decreased $1.8 billion or 49%, mainly due to lower revenue from phones, driven by the shift in strategy for the phone business, as well as lower Surface revenue. Phones revenue decreased $1.5 billion or 58%, as we sold 5.8 million Lumia phones and 25.5 million other non-Lumia phones in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016, compared with 9.3 million and 42.9 million sold, respectively, in the prior year. Surface revenue decreased $236 million or 26%, primarily driven by the release of Surface Pro 3 in June 2014."

Man, I just spent like 5 minutes looking up "Federal Cast", since it sounded fascinating. Then I just realized, maybe you meant "Federal Case"?

In fact, I believe they are doing exactly this in El Capitan. Under the umbrella of "Rootless", you will no longer be able to arbitrarily modify [1] some special blessed OS processes, like Finder.app.

Some discussion of the politics of this issue: http://atp.fm/episodes/128

[1] haven't read enough to know the exact mechanism, but presumably restricting some forms of IPC like Mach messages?

I came in here to make exactly your points 2 and 3. They cannot be overstated: they haven't even gotten the budget math to work out yet.

Given unlimited resources, sure, who wouldn't want free universities. But making it work within our real-life constraints means something else is going to suffer for that, and in today's reality it's going to be really hard to make the case that this is a priority. (Especially when many high school graduates are still basically illiterate, so only elite graduates will make it in, which means we'll be further subsidizing the elite).

I take it the submission title is a mistranslation. Not "Vulcan", but "volcano".

This reminds me of the people who, at the dawn of the smartphone age, were proudly boasting of their dumbphone's week-long battery life vs. the nightly recharging required by smartphones.

Until they realized they were completely missing the point, since they were comparing a phone to _a pocket computer with a constant data connection_. Most have since stopped boasting and just silently plug in their phone every night.

BTW, starting vim as "view" (through e.g. a symlink) is equivalent to "vim -R", precisely for this use case [0].

[0] http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/starting.html#view

"Oppressively colossal"? :) https://xkcd.com/1294/

So, I guess ArchieML is to JSON what Markdown is to HTML?

It's one thing when you plop down a ton of cash for something where you embrace the "silliness" or whatever makes it special (e.g. buying exotic cars with monstruous engines to drive them into traffic). It's another, however, believing something is objectively "better" because it cost more; e.g. spending money on Monster Cables thinking you can hear a difference.

In audio, you have people who love vinyl because they enjoy the distortion it makes, and that's perfectly fine; but you have others who somehow believe it sounds closer to the original, which is demonstrably ridiculous.

Well, but I guess theoretically it could be doing stuff like setting lower thermal thresholds for throttling. So perhaps not exactly a function of scheduling, but getting the CPU to make itself slower.

Still, this to me is the most interesting result from that set, and I'd really love it for someone to dig into it.

I'm a bit surprised at the "computational benchmarks" [1] though. Can anyone confirm these are indeed CPU-bound, and not somehow GPU-assisted? If so, how can the underlying kernel possibly make such a difference? Scheduling? (if so, what kind of load was the machine running?) Clearly there must be something more to it.

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=osx10_ubu...

No they didn't: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/my-coworkers-made-me-us...

There is some related precedent, with Orbitz charging Mac users more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230445860457748...

Neither is fopen, for that matter. Of course, many library functions end up doing syscalls underneath, which may be the source of the OP's confusion (e.g. malloc may do brk or mmap; fopen usually does open; etc.)

I didn't quite read a lot of skepticism about it being "eventually profitable". Rather there was more hand-waving about "not being a $100M - $1B" business, which is something else altogether. (Sort of depressing IMHO; does every new web business need to be Facebook-scale these days to be worthwhile?)

This was addressed by one of the founders here [1]. Basically, his argument was that their cost structure was not fixed, and if they could have gone on for a bit longer then they would have been able to turn it into a marginal profit. If true, then maybe they just couldn't pull it off fast enough.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7043555

Honestly, when I read the NSA one I started laughing, but then it kind of sent a shiver down my spine. Brrr.

Great news. The blog post discusses C++ specifically, but I wonder what (if anything) this means for C, which has traditionally been a pain in the ass in Windows due to Microsoft's refusal to support C99 (though that may be changing [1]). If they're using the native MS libc (which is great for integration purposes), it's possible they simply can't implement some features anyway.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/c99-ac...