sedatk

Ouch. I'm surprised that it's still the case after so many years.

People who research new configuration formats should take a look at PSD1 too: https://ssg.dev/powershell-accidentally-created-a-nice-confi...

Computer magazines of the era also did that with C64 listings because they were such a pain to type as is. They usually distributed a tool to type your program in first, and then published much more legible and plain text (non-PETSCII) code listings instead.

I had briefly thought that C64 could use variables with GOTO/GOSUB. Sinclair BASIC could do that for example.

I remember having installed Win32s package to our Windows for Workgroups 3.11 machines at Osmangazi University in 1995. The idea was that Windows, as a 16-bit operating system, could run a subset of Win32 apps that were compatible with the Win32s API surface. However, the release of Windows 95 had almost immediately made it obsolete. I'm sure it was useful in certain scenarios, but our only win was Freecell. :)

> In this job market, that may not be enough

Could still be much better than a sudden layoff though.

> And people believed them?!

Probably because they could sue them for not keeping their word.

I dearly remember the keyboard's warm red Caps Lock light and my sessions of running Print Master and writing BASIC programs on it.

You probably don't need a UUID: https://ssg.dev/you-probably-dont-need-a-uuid/

It actually seems like Windows 11 shipping with Windows 3.1's memory manager that was kept in Windows 95 memory manager as a compatibility option.

From the abstract:

"In the experiment, we vary the socio-economic status (SES) of the patient and whether a second opinion signal is sent. Furthermore, measures of market, practice and dentist characteristics are collected. We observe an overtreatment recommendation rate of 28 % and a striking heterogeneity in treatment recommendations. Furthermore, we find significantly less overtreatment recommendations for patients with higher SES compared to lower SES for standard visits, suggesting a complex role of patients' SES. Competition intensity, measured by dentist density, does not have a significant influence on overtreatment. Dentists with shorter waiting times are more likely to propose unnecessary treatment."

It’s also similar to how mmap() on 32-bit systems maps files larger than 2GB.

It’s one of the secret ingredients to avoid a Big Kernel Lock™.

Microsoft doesn’t use Visual Studio internally for many of its products such as Windows.

> pbzip2 only can do parallel decompression on archives created with pbzip2

Oh I didn’t know that.

The latest release is a year ago, the last commit is two months ago, and the build is failing.

The claim “stronger than bzip2” is strange. What does it even mean?

Also, comparing parallel decompression benchmarks with bzip2 instead of pbzip2 seems unfair.

lO"*",8,1

Fascinating. But, I guess it's better to have superfluous invalid characters than missing real ones.

It really sounds like an urban legend, but apparently, Bill Gates admits it here himself. Not sure if it was the last piece of code he wrote though: https://web.archive.org/web/20120213015238/http://www.micros...

I once heard the rumor that DONKEY.BAS was the last piece of code Bill Gates wrote himself at Microsoft. I wonder if it's true.

> it can be updated, universally, on a dime

Not sure about "on a dime". AI companies are currently spending billions of dollars every year, with none making any profit.

Sure, AI will get better. I even say that at the end. But, the replacement scare is unfounded. My point is mostly, AI will make humans more human rather than more unemployed.

What the article tells us isn't about a certain group of people interacting with this person, but about that person's mindset, how he sees others.

I wrote about the harms of elitist social models and labels like that before: https://ssg.dev/trolls-dont-exist-9d879b960fd1/

A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (for AMD64 architecture) was based on Windows Server 2003 kernel. Because of that, Windows XP x64 Edition had some significantly different performance characteristics compared to other Windows XP editions. If anything, it was closer to Vista than XP in some aspects.

(2017)

Thanks, makes sense.

I skimmed it, many quotable stuff[1], fascinating:

"Symbiote or Parasite?

The Popular Reaction to Computers

Most people would concede that computers are strange new entities that have a significant impact on human life. However, I would suspect that most of them would classify the species of computer as a harmful partner rather than as a symbiote. Why has popular reaction to computers been so negative?"

----

"Next there is the common human fear that massive computers will be "Big Brother watching us." Indeed, there are a number of deep legal and moral questions concerning invasion of privacy, but I will not attempt to discuss these in this book.1 It is important to remember, however, that computers do only what they are told to do. If governments and big businesses are allowed to invade our privacy, it is our own fault for allowing them"

----

"A great deal of work has gone on, under the general title of "artificial intelligence," to try to teach a higher form of intelligence to computers. The decade of the 1960s showed that this task is vastly more difficult than some of the proponents of artificial intelligence had guessed. Although there have been a number of notable successes, in many cases the human effort to teach the computer has turned out to be' horrendous, and the amount of labor required for a computer to simulate human intelligence is discouragingly great. Often it reaches a point at which the effort is simply not worthwhile."

----

"On the other hand, it makes no sense for human beings to spend several days teaching a computer a task that a human being could do himself in an hour. In the present state of the art most of the attempts to teach higher intelligence to computers come under this heading. However, this rule has a clear-cut exception: if there is a task that human beings have to carry out over and over again, it may well be worthwhile instead to spend several days teaching a computer how to do it. It is also worthwhile to invest considerable effort in developing "artificial intelligence" in computers in the hope of possible future payoffs."

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4acfam7ybm4rtqrjpuss5hyb/po...

> is probably going to use LoRa

why not Zigbee or Thread?

273 people died from a 7.0 earthquake in Kumamoto in 2016.