- I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.
Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.
Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.
- Qt has many good features, but it is not as robust as Visual Studio. It can lock up while debugging. <F2> will take you to the extern in the same module, not the actual definition. Variable expansion during debugging is slow. You can’t display a.b.c, you have to expand all of ‘a’, then all of ‘a.b’
- Totally describes my experience, since 1965.
- I appreciate how lower-case ‘L’, digit ‘1’ and upper-case ‘I’ are differentiated. Also alpha ‘O’ and zero.
- CI = Continuous Integration
- There are three things a nation needs to accept about universal health care:
(1) It’s expensive (2) Everybody has to pay (3) The government’s gotta run it
- The WiX installer is a byzantine incomprehensible mess. Its only appeal was that it was free. If I have to pay, I'd rather have a commercial product that is supported and easier to use.
Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services. I guess that's not enough.
- What makes the author think we are entitled to free search? How much would you pay for ad-free search? The “golden era” of free search was just setting us up for the plucking.
- Would this also apply to a vendor’s encrypted file format?
- There would be a broader area affected.
- Yeah, SPF, DKIM and DMARC are incomprehensible. The only people with the time, motivation and expertise to understand and apply them, are professional spammers. Most of the legitimate email I get, fail one or more of these tests.
If I recall, SPF limits the number of domains you can enumerate in your DNS records.
- I write a genealogy app (family history). Recursion is the foundation of the code, and permeates everywhere. The call stack can go 200 deep or more (~4,000 yrs). The code has been successfully running on millions of desktops for thirty years, and has never caused a crash or infinite loop because of recursion.
The secret is to check at every step that there is no "he's his own grandpa" loops in the user's tree, where (s)he inadvertently makes one of a person's descendants, also his ancestor. This happens sometimes because re-using the same names can cause confusion.
Recursion is like magic :o)
- It is possible to store three decimal digits as three groups of four bits, in every 12-row column.
You can insert and delete when duplicating cards, by pressing with your fingers on the source or target card while typing on the keyboard.
- This is about the root of humanity’s problem: the inability to avoid misusing knowledge and technology. All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end (Thoreau)
- The car should have an option to stop, let the passenger & baggage out, then resume its search for a parking spot. Or leave altogether since it no longer needs to be in the airport parking lot.
Still, typical of poorly designed software.
- There were real bugs and there was a real possibility of major disruption. We were spared because of mobilization of resources and the dedication of the programmers involved.
- I did this for a while. I found a roll of heavy-duty aluminum foil (not quite pie-plate thick), and scavenged some old dot-matrix printers. Removing the ribbon, I printed text and low-res images on the foil. I inserted a roll containing my father's biography in the ashes of his funeral urn. Should be readable by archaeologists centuries from now.
- LSP = Language Server Protocol
- I'm working on a project to 3D-print tablets of text, press them onto clay slabs, and fire the latter in a kiln. Should preserve the information, such as biographies, for as long as Babylonian tablets.
- I worked for Sperry Univac 1974-79, in Halifax, Montreal and Calgary. I was an "SA", Systems Analyst at the service of the Sales team. It was a lot of fun. The Univac salesmen were the cowboys that didn't fit in at IBM. When preparing benchmarks, money was no object, we had lavish expense accounts. In the Oil Patch I saw $100K deals signed during coffee break.
One of Univac's problems was the proliferation of operating systems for the different incompatible architectures. There was Exec 8 for the premier 1100 series (36-bit); OS/4, OS/3, OS/7 and later VS/9 (formerly RCA's TSOS then VMOS) for the 9000 series (32-bit); also the 418 and 494 real-time OS'es (18-bit words). Then there was the CADE 1900. All written in Assembler of course. We even had Varian in the branch, with salesmen from the different product lines competing for business.
All this duplication resulted in overhead and squandering of programmer resources.
After the Burroughs merger, the joke was that UNISYS stood for "Univac is Still Your Supplier".
- Too cheap... :o)
- Funny airport call letters story: I once headed to Salt Lake City, UT (SLC) for a conference. My luggage was processed by a dyslexic baggage handler, who sent it to... SCL (Santiago, Chile).
I was three days in my jeans at business meetings. My bag came back through Lima, Peru and Houston. My bag was having more fun than me.
- There should be an intermediate syndicate that charges me micropayments for every article I choose to read, then charges one lump sum to my credit card at the end of the month. And also remits payment to each newspaper or Website.
- I would love to subscribe to a syndicate that accumulated micropayments for each article I choose to read, then charged my credit card one lump sum at the end of the month.
I don't want subscriptions to specific newspapers. There are not enough hours in the month to take advantage of all of them.
- I got a demo in Cupertino, and was blown away. I’m not a sports fan, yet I would get one of these to watch sports games. The realism is mind-blowing. One second you’re behind Team A’s net and watch the oncoming attack. Next second you’re at the other end. It’s better than being there in person. If they can figure out how to keep up with a running attacking player, that’s the killer app.
- How is this still happening? We discovered this in Canada in the 1970's. Except in our case, the Urea Formaldehyde foam was giving off formaldehyde gas.
- Historians describe that Russian peasants pre-1917 were basically living in Medieval conditions. Russia didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918! As flawed as Communism is, it did lurch Russians into the 20th century.
The Tsar and the aristocracy failed at their job. They deserved their fate, to be fired. Maybe Communism was the only way to drag Russian society, kicking and screaming, into the modern era that other European nations had attained, centuries earlier.
Unfortunately, Communism does not have the checks and balances of Capitalism, and it lends itself to abuse by tyrants and dictators.
- I've been happily programming since 1965, and I've been doing C++ since 1995. There is still so much to learn, it's never stopped being fun. However, Apple Notarization may just be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
(My customer demographic is seniors & casual users).