Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
Not that you as an end-user can do anything about it, but fibers were only added to NT to make it easy to port from other OSes that had tried them and not yet found them to be more trouble than they were worth. The advice to Windows programmers has always been "don't use them in new software".
That was over 20 years ago. Very sad to hear they are actually used by any software still on sale.
I think you are massively underestimating how much 32-bit code there is. It took them about 10-15 years to kill Win16 and it had significant functional limitations compared to Win32. Win32 code has no such limits compared to Win64, unless your problem has datasets bigger than 2GB. Unsurprisingly then, there are still plenty of expensive speciality apps that are sold as 32-bit software. It ain't broke, so why fix it?
Methinks Mat Powell is trying to spread FUD. Do MS have an alternative file format they are trying to push? Is this a (laughable) attempt to badge STL as proprietary, in contrast to their own one, which of course isn't proprietary because it is the Microsoft Industry Standard (tm).
It's not just vaccines. Mental health issues have a cost to wider society, so where's the harm in gently "nudging" people towards taking mind-altering drugs?
And whose society are we protecting here? There are 225 million people in Pakistan. Millions of them have "been told" that the vaccine causes infertility or even death within a couple of years. Now "the government" is telling them that the screws are turning and they'll have to have the vaccine eventually. The vaccines were all developed abroad. Last time this happened, it "turned out" that a foreign government wanted their DNA.
If you were to call for a vote in the UK, you'd have a huge majority in favouring of taking the vaccine. Evidence out this week suggests that even the "vaccine hesitancy" of some has not actually materialised as "vaccine refusal". We didn't force the issue and people were persuaded by the experiences of friends and family. However, if you were to call for a vote in some parts of Pakistan, you'd just lose the vote. What's your authority for imposing sanctions on a regional majority population that numbers in the millions?
I believe so, which would suggest that earlier attempts to get people to accept vaccination did not use effective strategies. As the article relates, at least some of those attempts did not treat the local population with respect and left people feeling pretty pissed off about it.
So we created a reservoir for polio to reside in and perhaps mutate one day, and we might now be creating a similar reservoir for covid. Great work, guys!
When you have this many skeptics, there is considerable social pressure involved, so I don't think you can just rely on people being amenable to having their minds changed and getting vaccinated. (Their kids don't even get asked, for one thing, so a "Darwinian fallback position" is not really acceptable.)
You have to go in an actively persuade people that their doubts are mis-placed. You have to win the argument. (And as I've argued above, I don't think that coercion is a winning argument.)
Well throwing someone in jail wouldn't be *forcing* them, but I doubt people would see it that way. Vaccination is a medical intervention and there is much to be said for the principle that the state should keep out of people's bodies. If your society is so broken that rational argument isn't sufficient to ensure that most people take up vaccination voluntarily, then you aren't going to fix it by saying to all of these people "You really ought to let us inject you with something that we know is biologically active.".
Looking at it from another perspective, if you were already sufficiently skeptical of the vaccine that you were refusing it, would government bullying make you more likely to acquiesce? I suspect not. Instead, this policy will entrench the belief that the vaccine is to be resisted. Whilst I accept that society can force an issue of public good over personal freedom, I don't believe this will have the effect that it is hoped to have.
His successors are planning to turn ITER on in just over four years. It may not work and it may not itself be commercially viable, but that "always 25 years" slogan is wearing pretty thin.
It turns out that all fusion needs is a fraction of the cash regularly spaffed in the direction of other technologies, whether those be subsidies to get renewables up and running or a tacit agreement to externalise the environmental costs of non-renewables.
A fair question, but I'm guessing that the answer is ...
Because the refractive index of air is one point oh fuck all, so you are already enjoying 99% of the possible benefits and getting a long-lived vacuum seal on a thin tube several million times longer than it is wide is Quite Hard.
Also, if memory serves, there is something called Knudsen flow which in this case means that evacuating the tube would be quite hard too. But my memory is definitely flaky on this point so I expect that someone who can be bothered to google will shortly be putting me right.
This is precisely the issue and it is (slightly) worse than suggested. Because of this historicalbehaviour, there are apps that rely on this locking. They "know" that if they are running then theycan'thavetheir dependencies upgraded under their feet, so things like config data formats and protocols are stable.
I doubt whether anyone knows how widespread this actually is, but MS have considered changing it in the past andbacked away. I think oldnewthing had an article on it a few years back. Don't expect it ever to change.
We are all human, so there is no such thing as a Health sector.
Most of us have or use motorised vehicles, so there is no such thing as the Motor sector.
Every country has an army, so there is no such thing as a Defen{s|c}e sector.
Very large numbers of us have mobile phones, so there is no such thing as the Tech sector. Oh wait, that's not something MS want to crow about.
You say that like it is a specific thing, like everyone working in an enterprise is doing the same job. It isn't. They aren't. But the IT admins need /some/ commonality, so they roll out a single platform that is capable of being many different things, which (as the article says a few lines earlier) is the desktop model and not the sandbox model.
Happy to hear otherwise from enterprise admin commentards who have rolled out a sandbox-style OS across the entire organisation and managed to find apps for every aspect of their business. Not expecting to, though.
Good luck finding suitable filters for phones and tablets that a determined teenager can't get past (in collaboration with like-minded friends).
Also, what you actually want to do is filter once, on your router. But good luck doing that on a conventional router. Hence, 99% of parents look to their ISP or other external source for these functions.
20th century digital standards like JPEG, PNG and MP3 (date?) are fully documented, still widely supported by modern software, and likely to remain so for ages. I think old PDFs are still ok.
Smarter/richer standards like DOC or flash from that era are now occasionally unreadable by the modern software. You may have to resort to a VM and "now you have two problems".
Actual media from 20 years ago might not be readable. You definitely need a rolling program of copying to new media. Fortunately, sizes appear to be growing faster than the years are adding new content, so this isn't a problem until civilisation has one of its every-millennium-or-so resets and we lose both the industrial means to support the media and the cultural means to understand the language/format.
The latter may not seem like a big problem until you realise that, despite all the clay tablets from 1750BC, we have no idea what any music sounded like prior to the late Middle Ages.
If the artwork is digital, a suitably timestamped digital signature is almost certainly proof of creatorship. They've been acceptable evidence in courts for decades in some places. If it isn't digital, just take a photo of it.
(Similarly signed proof of current ownership might be a problem that Ethereum solves.)
I'm amused by the claims made for "native" apps. On a phone, iPhone or Android, there are no "native" spps in the sense that a traditional OS would recognise. Everything is running in a sandbox for apps. The real native code is below that.
"Has anyone worked out how Russia has still not collapsed?"
I think if you were living there you'd be confused by that question. Life expectancy is shit. Living standards for the majority are harsh. The regime lingers on solely because so many crooks would be first up against the wall when the revolution comes that there are enough crooks to terrorise the rest. You could ask the same question of N Korea and get the same answer -- at almost any time in the last 60 years. The same probably applied to the last days/centuries of the Roman Empire. In that case, the missing ingredient was Something Better, which was eventually supplied by invaders.
It's been proved to be possible. But that was never really in doubt. (Every time the kernel team accept a bug fix they are implying that they had previously accepted a bug.) What's new here is that we've found out the consequences when you get found out. It doesn't look "fun" to me.
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