Patches welcome! The UI is currently very bad. I got it to the state where it was just about useable, but never quite found time to fix all of the annoying little bugs. Or, in fact, many of the things that annoyed me about OO (such as the fact that currency is not part of the document, it's from the user's locale, so you can't have one column of pounds and one of dollars).
Oh, and it intentionally doesn't compress the XML file and does pretty-print it on output, so it works better with things like git.
Yup, a nice 10-core Xeon with 128GB of RAM, 1TB NVMe, 512GB SSD and 4TB of spinning rust. They also have me a Surface Book 2, which is a very nice machine (even better now I'm not using the Windows build that broke resume from sleep!) and I'm using it a lot (though not for Slashdot because I haven't got around to telling it my Slashdot password). I expect that I'll gradually move over to doing more and more on the Surface. With WSL I can run most *NIX apps that I want as easily as I could on the Mac and vcxsrv works better than the Apple X11. Hyper-V works nicely with FreeBSD out of the box and so I can run Konsole in WSL and ssh into a FreeBSD VM for most things. Windows 10 is a lot better than the last Windows I regularly used (which, to be fair, was Windows 2000) and macOS Mojave is part of a trend of getting steadily worse since 10.6 (the last OS X release that was unambiguously better than the preceding one), so I'm not really missing macOS except for two things:
The buttons in dialog boxes are almost always the wrong way around (which is even more annoying than if they were consistently wrong.
Copy and paste in the terminal uses different keystrokes to copy and paste everywhere else.
If MS could fix those two, I'd drop macOS without a second thought.
That said, I still use my iPad (old 9.7" iPad Pro) quite a lot. It works very nicely with all of the Office stuff and is often a good choice for anything that isn't document editing or programming. I've be tempted by an iPhone if not for the fact that 90% of the things I do on my phone are from F-Droid and don't have direct iOS equivalents...
AppleCare was affordable/convenient to use
It's worth noting that anything Apple sells in the EU has a 3-year warranty as standard, even if you don't but AppleCare. They used to give this to anything bought through the HE store (your SUCS address should still work for that!).
I'm typing this on a late 2013 MacBook Pro, with a 2.6GH quad-core (Haswell) i7, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I got this machine just after it was released, five years ago. They only released a noticeably faster model a few months ago. The starting price for the new model is £2,349, which gives you 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD (seriously, in 2019! The older one that this machine replaced had an SSD that big!) and a 2.2GHz (6-core) processor. If I want the 2.6GHz model, it's £2,699. Upgrading to 32GB of RAM is another £360. Upgrading the SSD to 2TB is a whopping £1080! 2TB of NVMe costs less than that retail! This brings the price for a machine that's a bit better than my current one to £4,139. Sorry Apple, I'm not willing to pay £4K for a slight upgrade. Especially not when this machine has quite a nice keyboard and the newer ones have absolutely horrible ones. The same specs two years earlier, and I'd have jumped at it. Now? It's just not competitive.
If I max out the specs (bigger GPU, 4TB SSD on top of what I listed above), it's £6,254. That's a silly amount of money for what you actually get.
Make more water resistant. Deeper depths like with old watch ads.
I used to swim with my watch on, so being water proof to a few metres deep was a valuable feature. How many people want to swim with their phones?
Better screen with HDR and a faster GPU. Support all the HDR standards and make new smartphone HDR standards.
Increasing picture quality rapidly hits diminishing returns. How many people can actually tell the difference and how much is it worth to them?
The 5G upgrade will start sales again.
Why? GPRS was slow and painful to use. UMTS was about a minimum to be basically okay for web browsing and email. HSPA was fairly painless for most things. LTE is enough for streaming. What does 5G enable users to do?
Stick two phones designs together as a huge flip phone with twice the cpu and cpu. A SLI smartphone.
Who wants to carry two phones? If you have that much space, why not get a tablet or a laptop?
Games. Make the GPU stronger again. With different GPU math to set it apart from all other types of games.
What does the second part of this even mean?
Build in a better DAC and real headphone amp.
Why? Existing phones already make most headphones or the source material the bottleneck for audio quality. How many people are willing to pay for studio-quality audio from their phone?
Neither the Mac Mini nor the Mac Pro exist to be good sellers. The Mini was introduced because Apple needed an entry-level device. The cheapest Mac was 3-4 times the price of the cheapest Windows machine and it's very hard to make people switch operating systems and buy an expensive computer at the same time. The Mini was intended to be the device that got customers hooked on OS X and encouraged them to then buy a second Mac.
The Pro was there to be the device that developers and content producers would buy to produce all of the things that made people buy the cheaper Macs. Classic MacOS suffered a lot from Apple lacking high-end machines, so developers would develop on Windows first and then port to the Mac because their compile times were too painful working on the Mac first. The Pro is there to avoid this situation.
Neither product exists out of altruism, both exist to support the rest of Apple's ecosystem. I suspect that the Mini is largely dying because Apple now regards iOS / tvOS / watchOS devices as their gateway products.
Some people (actually, a lot of people) now spend a lot more time on their phones than on laptops or desktops. If you're spending more time on your phone than on your laptop, then why not spend as much money on the phone as you would on a laptop?
Smartphones are small mobile generic personal computers. What they can and cannot have is exactly like with big PCs.
This argument makes as much sense as saying 'PCs are just small mainframes. What they can and cannot have is exactly like with big mainframes'. It's superficially true, in that they're both general-purpose computing devices, but form factor matters when defining sensible use cases. A camera on a phone is useful, because it's about the same size as a stand-alone camera and most people carry their phone everywhere. A camera on a desktop is much less useful - you can use it for video conferencing, but not much else. In a desktop, you can have large cooling fans and mains power, so power efficiency is less important than flexibility and cost. Most mobile SoCs, for example, include dedicated hardware for face detection, because doing it in dedicated hardware uses a lot less power than doing the same thing on the CPU or GPU, but on a desktop doing it in software would use such a small amount of the power / performance budget that the extra hardware would be pointless.
Copyright includes the notion of a 'derived work,' which ends up being a fairly fuzzy concept, but is a very rough rule of thumb is something that could only have been created after looking at the original. As the other poster says, a story set in Hogwarts would most likely be a derived work of Harry Potter. On the other hand, a story about a boy that goes to a school for wizards, which does not include any of the major plot lines, characters, or settings from Harry Potter would be fine.
There are two kinds of danger for USB devices. This is intended to protect against the first: that a cheap cable from SuperGoodHappyCablesCompany advertises that it's able to carry 40W but actually catches fire if you run more than 5W through it for an extended period. This can be addressed by adding some authentication to everything in the chain so that you can drop the power when things are not certified.
The second problem is that the firmware in the USB controller is typically buggy, as is the USB stack in the host OS. The highest-profile example of this was the Nintendo Switch, where they backed part of the USB stack for firmware updates into ROM and then discovered that it had an exploitable buffer overflow, but a number of attacks have been found on other USB controllers. A malicious device can exploit flaws in this firmware and often install persistent malware: the USB firmware is often running in SMM, so if you find an exploit in it then your malware is more privileged than the hypervisor (and can install EFI-based rootkits for persistence).
Adding more complexity to the USB firmware makes the second type of attack a lot more likely. Given how many people plug their devices into random USB sockets for charging, I expect that we'll see a lot more of this kind of attack in the wild (if I were the NSA, for example, I'd be installing USB chargers in the first class lounges at Dulles and taking copies of everything that foreign diplomats had on their phones / tablets).
Imagine if Facebook closed the accounts of all Republican candidates.
This would be obvious to any user, Fox News would have a field day, and Facebook would be in trouble.
What if Walmart laid off all Democrat employees.
Firing people for political affiliation is, as I understand it, illegal in the USA, so they'd end up in court. They'd also likely see a boycott from Democrat voters, so it would be a terrible business decision.
What if Youtube shut down all gay content creators.
Again, this would be visible (though if they only moved them down search rankings and displayed lower view counts on them, it probably wouldn't be) and would cause a backlash.
The point of Schneier's example is that it's something that could affect the outcome of an election (a 4% swing is enough to alter the outcome in many elections) and would be totally undetectable. It's also, currently, completely legal. The only way that anyone would find out about it is if a Facebook whistleblower came forward, and if they did then they wouldn't be exposing any illegal behaviour by their company, only unethical behaviour.
If you opt into a system designed from the ground up to build psychological profiles to manipulate the masses, you don't get to complain when the system is used for psychological manipulation.
Most people only have the one, so "every machine" equals "one machine".
No, one machine per person equals a number machines equal to the number of people, not one.
Most people only have the one, so "every machine" equals "one machine".
No it isn't. Now, BIOS updates are pushed out as part of Windows Update for the majority of computer users. Apple pushes out UEFI updates as part of macOS updates, and I believe a couple of Linux vendors do so as well.
A jumper on the board would do that, and restrict upgrades to people who know at least the basics of hardware maintenance.
The firmware is right at the root of your trusted computing base. If you require opening up the case and moving a jumper in every machine to push out an update, then most people are never going to do it. This means that, if there's a security vulnerability then it will never be patched for 95% of users. Given that BIOS vendors are responsible for some of the worst code in production, which is often able to be attacked over the network or via USB, do you really think that this would improve security?
It's also completely flawed methodology. It gives one bound on value. Ask them as well how much they'd be willing to pay to keep using Facebook. I bet most people wouldn't pay more than $10/month for a Facebook subscription and, if that's the case (actually, I'd be shocked if it's that much), then the value is somewhere between $120 and $1000. In both cases, the answers that you're getting are likely to be nonsense. There's a big difference between saying 'I wouldn't give up Facebook for $500' on a survey and turning down $500 to give up Facebook. I bet most college students would give up Facebook for $500.
Most people don't care about abstractions of any kind. They suddenly care when that abstraction has real consequences, but by then it's usually too late.
Bruce Schneier had a good simple example in Data and Goliath. Facebook now lets you put 'I've voted' badges on your account. This has a measurable effect on voter turnout, something around 4-5%. Facebook knows where you live (even if you lie in your account signup, it tracks where your phone is when you're sleeping if you install any of the apps that shares data with Facebook). It tracks the news stories you read and can, with fairly high confidence, determine your voting preferences. Now, imagine if Facebook identifies all of the people who are likely to vote for party X and all the people who will vote for party Y. It shows the 'I've voted' badges to supporters of party X, but not to the supporters of party Y. In a lot of elections, that's enough to swing the outcome.
Now, you may say 'I vote anyway, this doesn't impact me'. You may even be right. The problem is that Facebook provides almost no value by itself. The value of Facebook comes from the fact that other people use Facebook. If you have a Facebook account, this increases the value of Facebook to a load of other people, many of whom will be influenced by things like this. Everyone who signs up to Facebook makes the world a very slightly worse place.
The new version of OmniOutliner is full of hipster crap and they've moved a bunch of features to the Pro version without fixing the bugs. The older version crashes on start on newer macOS. Oh, and it won't open OmniOutliner 2 files anymore. It annoyed me enough to start writing a replacement (which can open OO2 and OO3 files), rather than buy the new version.
RiscOS had a public release that did it in 1987, NeXTSTEP (the direct ancestor of macOS) had a public release that did it in 1988. Given how integral directories-as-files (a.k.a. bundles) was the the whole NeXT design, it's hard to imagine that they copied it so quickly. Given how obvious the idea is, it's more likely that it was invented independently. HFS (Apple, 1985) had resource forks, which let you have a directory inside a file. Bundles are simply the realisation that you don't actually need two ways of representing directories in the filesystem, you can just do it at the UI layer. On macOS, HFS+ introduced a one-bit flag in the metadata for a directory to indicate that it is a bundle, so it can be displayed as such in the Finder without the Finder having to be aware of every single possible bundle type, I don't remember what ADFS / RiscOS did.
This sort of attidude is why the fuckwits at GNOME want to kill off middle click paste. Even though Apple have a crap version that only works in the terminal. but because Apple only have a crap version, Linux should too!
Huh? Apple doesn't have middle-click paste, it has command-v paste everywhere. The main thing I miss about macOS on other platforms is having the same copy and paste shortcuts in the terminal as everywhere else. Other platforms (including crappy X11 DEs that originated on '90s PCs, but not proper UNIX DEs that originated on machines that had a meta key) decided to overload Control-C for paste and therefore made something incompatible with any environment that uses control key combinations for sending control codes.
Mainly so that when the straight A students bomb out and get a B they don't jump off the roof because they "failed."
I've heard from a few companies that this is a real problem with fresh MIT graduates. They've never failed in their academic career and if you hire them for the kind of job where an MIT education is useful they definitely will fail at something. They have never had to learn the skills to handle recovering from failure. Some of them are fine, a lot of them end up handling it really badly and you have no way of knowing which it will be in advance.
How long ago did you do your A-levels? They've been primarily rote for at least 20 years. Chemistry in particular is almost entirely rote. Physics is slightly less so and does require you to apply some rote-memorised formulae to problems, but because the entry requirement for a physics A-level is a B in GCSE maths, you aren't required to be able to know how to solve a quadratic, let alone a differential equation, so you're expected to memorise a dozen or so partial solutions to a single equation and not ever taught how they fit together.
Standardised testing is part of the problem. You want a test with high reliability that is applied over a large population. Unfortunately, you then hit practicality: you can't have one person mark all of the scripts (and even if you could, one person is not likely to be perfectly consistent if they mark even 1,000 tests). So you end up having lots of different people mark the tests. If you want consistent marking, then you must have very detailed mark schemes. If you want to produce a new test every year (which you do, or people will just find last year's one and memorise a good answer), then you end up with very questions that have only one correct answer and a lot of detail describing what that answer looks like. It is incredibly hard to write a good test that will be taken by tens of thousands of people a year, gives consistent marks, and measures the ability to produce creative solutions to problems.
One of my colleagues at Cambridge described the UK A-level system as training one-piece jigsaw puzzle solvers. He wasn't wrong: they teach you that any problem that you'll encounter has precisely one correct solution. Even in a subject like maths, you're given a handful of tools and then problems where you must apply the correct one in the correct order. For humanities subjects, there is one correct line of argument for each essay topic and one list of sources that you're meant to cite. At the end of it, students are not prepared for a decent university education or the real world, either of which expects people to come up with original solutions to new problems.
Bitcoin can handle something like 7 transactions per second on the public ledger. The vast majority of trades are not on the ledger, they're derivatives. An exchange owns N bitcoins and holds them for their customers. Customers can trade them by simply updating the exchange's record of who it will pay the bitcoins to. If someone wishes to claim their bitcoins, the exchange will transfer them to that person's bitcoin wallet, though with the speed of processing that may take a day or two to actually go through (and will incur a transaction processing cost from the blockchain).
Because exchanges are unregulated derivatives markets, they can sell options and participate in all sorts of financial shenanigans that real financial markets have heavily regulated for around a century, without any oversight.
No, for the same reason that no one puts an embargo on China. Because the USA, the EU, and China are the three largest economies in the world and of these the USA is the largest. If you embargo the US, that means nothing produced in the world's largest economy will get to your citizens and that nothing produced by you will get to consumers in the world's largest economy. Both of those will hurt you a lot. If the EU and China jointly imposed an embargo on the USA, that would hurt the US more than it would hurt anyone else, but it would still hurt everyone. In a system of government that is accountable to the population (and especially one that is accountable to corporations), that's politically infeasible.
Of course, 'never' is a long time and if the US continues trying to kill its own economy then there may come a point where it's no longer prohibitively expensive for the rest of the world to place them under an embargo, but that's unlikely to be in the next decade.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and it intentionally doesn't compress the XML file and does pretty-print it on output, so it works better with things like git.
Did "work" give you a desktop?
Yup, a nice 10-core Xeon with 128GB of RAM, 1TB NVMe, 512GB SSD and 4TB of spinning rust. They also have me a Surface Book 2, which is a very nice machine (even better now I'm not using the Windows build that broke resume from sleep!) and I'm using it a lot (though not for Slashdot because I haven't got around to telling it my Slashdot password). I expect that I'll gradually move over to doing more and more on the Surface. With WSL I can run most *NIX apps that I want as easily as I could on the Mac and vcxsrv works better than the Apple X11. Hyper-V works nicely with FreeBSD out of the box and so I can run Konsole in WSL and ssh into a FreeBSD VM for most things. Windows 10 is a lot better than the last Windows I regularly used (which, to be fair, was Windows 2000) and macOS Mojave is part of a trend of getting steadily worse since 10.6 (the last OS X release that was unambiguously better than the preceding one), so I'm not really missing macOS except for two things:
If MS could fix those two, I'd drop macOS without a second thought.
That said, I still use my iPad (old 9.7" iPad Pro) quite a lot. It works very nicely with all of the Office stuff and is often a good choice for anything that isn't document editing or programming. I've be tempted by an iPhone if not for the fact that 90% of the things I do on my phone are from F-Droid and don't have direct iOS equivalents...
AppleCare was affordable/convenient to use
It's worth noting that anything Apple sells in the EU has a 3-year warranty as standard, even if you don't but AppleCare. They used to give this to anything bought through the HE store (your SUCS address should still work for that!).
If I max out the specs (bigger GPU, 4TB SSD on top of what I listed above), it's £6,254. That's a silly amount of money for what you actually get.
Make more water resistant. Deeper depths like with old watch ads.
I used to swim with my watch on, so being water proof to a few metres deep was a valuable feature. How many people want to swim with their phones?
Better screen with HDR and a faster GPU. Support all the HDR standards and make new smartphone HDR standards.
Increasing picture quality rapidly hits diminishing returns. How many people can actually tell the difference and how much is it worth to them?
The 5G upgrade will start sales again.
Why? GPRS was slow and painful to use. UMTS was about a minimum to be basically okay for web browsing and email. HSPA was fairly painless for most things. LTE is enough for streaming. What does 5G enable users to do?
Stick two phones designs together as a huge flip phone with twice the cpu and cpu. A SLI smartphone.
Who wants to carry two phones? If you have that much space, why not get a tablet or a laptop?
Games. Make the GPU stronger again. With different GPU math to set it apart from all other types of games.
What does the second part of this even mean?
Build in a better DAC and real headphone amp.
Why? Existing phones already make most headphones or the source material the bottleneck for audio quality. How many people are willing to pay for studio-quality audio from their phone?
Neither the Mac Mini nor the Mac Pro exist to be good sellers. The Mini was introduced because Apple needed an entry-level device. The cheapest Mac was 3-4 times the price of the cheapest Windows machine and it's very hard to make people switch operating systems and buy an expensive computer at the same time. The Mini was intended to be the device that got customers hooked on OS X and encouraged them to then buy a second Mac.
The Pro was there to be the device that developers and content producers would buy to produce all of the things that made people buy the cheaper Macs. Classic MacOS suffered a lot from Apple lacking high-end machines, so developers would develop on Windows first and then port to the Mac because their compile times were too painful working on the Mac first. The Pro is there to avoid this situation.
Neither product exists out of altruism, both exist to support the rest of Apple's ecosystem. I suspect that the Mini is largely dying because Apple now regards iOS / tvOS / watchOS devices as their gateway products.
Some people (actually, a lot of people) now spend a lot more time on their phones than on laptops or desktops. If you're spending more time on your phone than on your laptop, then why not spend as much money on the phone as you would on a laptop?
Smartphones are small mobile generic personal computers. What they can and cannot have is exactly like with big PCs.
This argument makes as much sense as saying 'PCs are just small mainframes. What they can and cannot have is exactly like with big mainframes'. It's superficially true, in that they're both general-purpose computing devices, but form factor matters when defining sensible use cases. A camera on a phone is useful, because it's about the same size as a stand-alone camera and most people carry their phone everywhere. A camera on a desktop is much less useful - you can use it for video conferencing, but not much else. In a desktop, you can have large cooling fans and mains power, so power efficiency is less important than flexibility and cost. Most mobile SoCs, for example, include dedicated hardware for face detection, because doing it in dedicated hardware uses a lot less power than doing the same thing on the CPU or GPU, but on a desktop doing it in software would use such a small amount of the power / performance budget that the extra hardware would be pointless.
Copyright includes the notion of a 'derived work,' which ends up being a fairly fuzzy concept, but is a very rough rule of thumb is something that could only have been created after looking at the original. As the other poster says, a story set in Hogwarts would most likely be a derived work of Harry Potter. On the other hand, a story about a boy that goes to a school for wizards, which does not include any of the major plot lines, characters, or settings from Harry Potter would be fine.
The user won't be prompted with a certificate error, the device will just fall back to charging at the lowest power mode.
There are two kinds of danger for USB devices. This is intended to protect against the first: that a cheap cable from SuperGoodHappyCablesCompany advertises that it's able to carry 40W but actually catches fire if you run more than 5W through it for an extended period. This can be addressed by adding some authentication to everything in the chain so that you can drop the power when things are not certified.
The second problem is that the firmware in the USB controller is typically buggy, as is the USB stack in the host OS. The highest-profile example of this was the Nintendo Switch, where they backed part of the USB stack for firmware updates into ROM and then discovered that it had an exploitable buffer overflow, but a number of attacks have been found on other USB controllers. A malicious device can exploit flaws in this firmware and often install persistent malware: the USB firmware is often running in SMM, so if you find an exploit in it then your malware is more privileged than the hypervisor (and can install EFI-based rootkits for persistence).
Adding more complexity to the USB firmware makes the second type of attack a lot more likely. Given how many people plug their devices into random USB sockets for charging, I expect that we'll see a lot more of this kind of attack in the wild (if I were the NSA, for example, I'd be installing USB chargers in the first class lounges at Dulles and taking copies of everything that foreign diplomats had on their phones / tablets).
Imagine if Facebook closed the accounts of all Republican candidates.
This would be obvious to any user, Fox News would have a field day, and Facebook would be in trouble.
What if Walmart laid off all Democrat employees.
Firing people for political affiliation is, as I understand it, illegal in the USA, so they'd end up in court. They'd also likely see a boycott from Democrat voters, so it would be a terrible business decision.
What if Youtube shut down all gay content creators.
Again, this would be visible (though if they only moved them down search rankings and displayed lower view counts on them, it probably wouldn't be) and would cause a backlash.
The point of Schneier's example is that it's something that could affect the outcome of an election (a 4% swing is enough to alter the outcome in many elections) and would be totally undetectable. It's also, currently, completely legal. The only way that anyone would find out about it is if a Facebook whistleblower came forward, and if they did then they wouldn't be exposing any illegal behaviour by their company, only unethical behaviour.
If you opt into a system designed from the ground up to build psychological profiles to manipulate the masses, you don't get to complain when the system is used for psychological manipulation.
Most people only have the one, so "every machine" equals "one machine".
No, one machine per person equals a number machines equal to the number of people, not one.
Most people only have the one, so "every machine" equals "one machine".
No it isn't. Now, BIOS updates are pushed out as part of Windows Update for the majority of computer users. Apple pushes out UEFI updates as part of macOS updates, and I believe a couple of Linux vendors do so as well.
A jumper on the board would do that, and restrict upgrades to people who know at least the basics of hardware maintenance.
The firmware is right at the root of your trusted computing base. If you require opening up the case and moving a jumper in every machine to push out an update, then most people are never going to do it. This means that, if there's a security vulnerability then it will never be patched for 95% of users. Given that BIOS vendors are responsible for some of the worst code in production, which is often able to be attacked over the network or via USB, do you really think that this would improve security?
It's also completely flawed methodology. It gives one bound on value. Ask them as well how much they'd be willing to pay to keep using Facebook. I bet most people wouldn't pay more than $10/month for a Facebook subscription and, if that's the case (actually, I'd be shocked if it's that much), then the value is somewhere between $120 and $1000. In both cases, the answers that you're getting are likely to be nonsense. There's a big difference between saying 'I wouldn't give up Facebook for $500' on a survey and turning down $500 to give up Facebook. I bet most college students would give up Facebook for $500.
Most people don't care about abstractions of any kind. They suddenly care when that abstraction has real consequences, but by then it's usually too late.
Bruce Schneier had a good simple example in Data and Goliath. Facebook now lets you put 'I've voted' badges on your account. This has a measurable effect on voter turnout, something around 4-5%. Facebook knows where you live (even if you lie in your account signup, it tracks where your phone is when you're sleeping if you install any of the apps that shares data with Facebook). It tracks the news stories you read and can, with fairly high confidence, determine your voting preferences. Now, imagine if Facebook identifies all of the people who are likely to vote for party X and all the people who will vote for party Y. It shows the 'I've voted' badges to supporters of party X, but not to the supporters of party Y. In a lot of elections, that's enough to swing the outcome.
Now, you may say 'I vote anyway, this doesn't impact me'. You may even be right. The problem is that Facebook provides almost no value by itself. The value of Facebook comes from the fact that other people use Facebook. If you have a Facebook account, this increases the value of Facebook to a load of other people, many of whom will be influenced by things like this. Everyone who signs up to Facebook makes the world a very slightly worse place.
The new version of OmniOutliner is full of hipster crap and they've moved a bunch of features to the Pro version without fixing the bugs. The older version crashes on start on newer macOS. Oh, and it won't open OmniOutliner 2 files anymore. It annoyed me enough to start writing a replacement (which can open OO2 and OO3 files), rather than buy the new version.
RiscOS had a public release that did it in 1987, NeXTSTEP (the direct ancestor of macOS) had a public release that did it in 1988. Given how integral directories-as-files (a.k.a. bundles) was the the whole NeXT design, it's hard to imagine that they copied it so quickly. Given how obvious the idea is, it's more likely that it was invented independently. HFS (Apple, 1985) had resource forks, which let you have a directory inside a file. Bundles are simply the realisation that you don't actually need two ways of representing directories in the filesystem, you can just do it at the UI layer. On macOS, HFS+ introduced a one-bit flag in the metadata for a directory to indicate that it is a bundle, so it can be displayed as such in the Finder without the Finder having to be aware of every single possible bundle type, I don't remember what ADFS / RiscOS did.
This sort of attidude is why the fuckwits at GNOME want to kill off middle click paste. Even though Apple have a crap version that only works in the terminal. but because Apple only have a crap version, Linux should too!
Huh? Apple doesn't have middle-click paste, it has command-v paste everywhere. The main thing I miss about macOS on other platforms is having the same copy and paste shortcuts in the terminal as everywhere else. Other platforms (including crappy X11 DEs that originated on '90s PCs, but not proper UNIX DEs that originated on machines that had a meta key) decided to overload Control-C for paste and therefore made something incompatible with any environment that uses control key combinations for sending control codes.
Mainly so that when the straight A students bomb out and get a B they don't jump off the roof because they "failed."
I've heard from a few companies that this is a real problem with fresh MIT graduates. They've never failed in their academic career and if you hire them for the kind of job where an MIT education is useful they definitely will fail at something. They have never had to learn the skills to handle recovering from failure. Some of them are fine, a lot of them end up handling it really badly and you have no way of knowing which it will be in advance.
How long ago did you do your A-levels? They've been primarily rote for at least 20 years. Chemistry in particular is almost entirely rote. Physics is slightly less so and does require you to apply some rote-memorised formulae to problems, but because the entry requirement for a physics A-level is a B in GCSE maths, you aren't required to be able to know how to solve a quadratic, let alone a differential equation, so you're expected to memorise a dozen or so partial solutions to a single equation and not ever taught how they fit together.
Standardised testing is part of the problem. You want a test with high reliability that is applied over a large population. Unfortunately, you then hit practicality: you can't have one person mark all of the scripts (and even if you could, one person is not likely to be perfectly consistent if they mark even 1,000 tests). So you end up having lots of different people mark the tests. If you want consistent marking, then you must have very detailed mark schemes. If you want to produce a new test every year (which you do, or people will just find last year's one and memorise a good answer), then you end up with very questions that have only one correct answer and a lot of detail describing what that answer looks like. It is incredibly hard to write a good test that will be taken by tens of thousands of people a year, gives consistent marks, and measures the ability to produce creative solutions to problems.
One of my colleagues at Cambridge described the UK A-level system as training one-piece jigsaw puzzle solvers. He wasn't wrong: they teach you that any problem that you'll encounter has precisely one correct solution. Even in a subject like maths, you're given a handful of tools and then problems where you must apply the correct one in the correct order. For humanities subjects, there is one correct line of argument for each essay topic and one list of sources that you're meant to cite. At the end of it, students are not prepared for a decent university education or the real world, either of which expects people to come up with original solutions to new problems.
Indeed. In my entire life, this is the number of times an interviewer has asked about my GPA: 0.
Why would they ask you? That information is normally on your CV, which will be filtered by HR drones long before you get to the interview.
Bitcoin can handle something like 7 transactions per second on the public ledger. The vast majority of trades are not on the ledger, they're derivatives. An exchange owns N bitcoins and holds them for their customers. Customers can trade them by simply updating the exchange's record of who it will pay the bitcoins to. If someone wishes to claim their bitcoins, the exchange will transfer them to that person's bitcoin wallet, though with the speed of processing that may take a day or two to actually go through (and will incur a transaction processing cost from the blockchain).
Because exchanges are unregulated derivatives markets, they can sell options and participate in all sorts of financial shenanigans that real financial markets have heavily regulated for around a century, without any oversight.
No, for the same reason that no one puts an embargo on China. Because the USA, the EU, and China are the three largest economies in the world and of these the USA is the largest. If you embargo the US, that means nothing produced in the world's largest economy will get to your citizens and that nothing produced by you will get to consumers in the world's largest economy. Both of those will hurt you a lot. If the EU and China jointly imposed an embargo on the USA, that would hurt the US more than it would hurt anyone else, but it would still hurt everyone. In a system of government that is accountable to the population (and especially one that is accountable to corporations), that's politically infeasible.
Of course, 'never' is a long time and if the US continues trying to kill its own economy then there may come a point where it's no longer prohibitively expensive for the rest of the world to place them under an embargo, but that's unlikely to be in the next decade.