In my copy of Word 2010, under "Save As...", I see the following supported formats: Word Document (*.docx) Word Macro-Enabled Document (*.docm) Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc) PDF (*.pdf) Word XML Document (*.xml) Word 2003 XML Document (*.xml) OpenDocument Text (*.odt) Works 6-9 Document (*.wps) and a bunch more besides, like HTML, plain text, rtf, xps, etc...
For opening documents, there are even more options, like old WordPerfect 5.x and 6.x documents. I didn't see an option for opening.wri files from twenty years ago though, so there's that. Aha, gotcha M$!
Word 2010 opens lots of old file formats, and can save to quite a few of them as well. Did MS drop support for these in newer version of Word? I have no idea, but that would seem pretty strange to me. Smells like FUD to me.
Because, sorry, but the "AI" is really just a set of rules still. A set of rules that can't take account of every situation. Sure, it can drive more carefully than a human driver, but it can also make just the same kind of dumb mistakes as a human driver too.
Yes, but at the heart of the algorithm is a big overriding rule of "don't drive off the road or hit anything". That's pretty cut and dried as far as rules go. The car's hardware can literally see in every direction and track everything around it, static or moving. It will react to danger and determine the best course of action even before most humans even recognize there's a problem. Unless there's a really serious flaw in the system, that means at worst the car is going to come to a stop or simply avoid all obstacles when it sees anything dangerous or that it doesn't understand.
Honestly, far more important is this: It won't ever get distracted. It won't drive angry, or intoxicated, tired, on medication, or while putting on lipstick or eating a sandwich. It won't freak out if a wasp gets into the car. It won't turn it's head and yell at the kids to be quiet and stop bouncing around in the back seat. It won't drive recklessly in an effort to impress it's girlfriend.
My prediction: Even the first generation of self-driving cars will be statistically 20 times safer or better than an average human driver (at least in terms of accident fault), and it will rapidly improve as incidents occur and the black boxes are analyzed to determine how said incidents could have possibly been prevented. Eventually, car-related deaths will be relegated to freak accidents, like when a tree falls on a car or an overpass collapses, etc.
Sometimes in life, ubiquity and commonality trumps design logic. Look at the qwerty keyboard scheme. At this point, there's so much momentum in that layout, there's really no point in trying to "improve" it for the vast majority of people. I certainly have no desire to try to rewire decades worth of muscle memory to change schemes. The "save" icon is another one that occasionally get hipster designers foaming at the mouth - a floppy disc, for pete's sake, which kids under sixteen probably have never even seen in person. The imperial system in the US was also far more difficult to dislodge with the metric system than many believed. The steering wheel, petal arrangement, and more or less standardized shifting levers are just another example.
Whatever benefit you think switching schemes gives you, there's an argument to be made that it may not be worth the short-term pain during the transition. It's tough to know where that boundary lies, I think. Metric vs imperial? Yeah, I'm sort of sorry we didn't switch. Changing the behavior of a car's shifter? Probably not worth it.
The "standard" automatic shifter layout has been around for many decades. I can't imagine there would be any patents still valid that prohibit its free use. At least, I certainly hope not, or our patent system is broken far worse than I fear.
If anything, I would suspect the opposite - that this new design scheme was patented, and the auto maker was hoping to popularize it as an exclusive feature that the competition doesn't have. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems like greater care should be taken when screwing around with long-standardized core operational controls.
I recently drove my dad's car when dropping my folks off at the airport, and noticed that the gearshift was bifurcated. P-R-N-D, and then you had to shift the lever over to explicitly use specific gears. Given that the 99% use case is just putting the car in D and stepping on the gas, this makes a lot of sense to me.
The *worst* design was my mom's car, which, instead of stopping automatically at D after pressing the release, like my car does, instead stopped at the location just below it - either second or third gear, I can't remember which at the moment. Who the hell would purposefully design something like that?
It's especially easy to stay in the wrong gear if you're not used to the sound and feel of the car you're driving. And with an automatic, drivers are trained to NOT have to look at the RPM gauge, so unless they can hear the difference, I can't really blame people for making this mistake.
I had Flash uninstalled from my computer for several years for safety purposes. I actually only re-installed Flash once I got the ability to control auto-play Flash content - there are still a few annoying holdouts that only have Flash solutions, like video streaming services. So, yes, you can control Flash's auto-play behavior as well, except you're essentially controlling whether you want to turn Flash on for a particular website or not.
Yeah, I can see that for decent-sized operations. I've actually been looking at cloud services (EC2 and Azure) lately in order to gather telemetry data from beta software, in order to help with the design and refinement process. We're such a small operation that there's no way we could or should do dedicated servers, nor would it be economical. I can actually rent the smallest server for less than $15 a month with continuous operation, and proportionally less than that if I'm only turning it on part-time, like during development and testing. Best of all, as the need arrives, I can simply scale up as needed. Both Microsoft and Amazon's offerings are roughly on par regarding pricing and services.
For all the idiocy about the cloud bandwagon and people using it inappropriately, the ability to rent and dynamically scale virtual servers on demand is actually really handy in many cases.
Don't get me wrong... I've always lambasted the pundits who seem intent on declaring the PC "dead" - that's only true for people who don't actually do any work on a computer. Mobile devices are best at consuming content or *very* light work. Only idiots would argue otherwise. But let's face it - that's the bulk of what most people actually *do* with their personal computers outside of actual work.
And I'm not saying that there isn't still a need for high-powered workstations. It's just that the market for those machines isn't nearly as big as it used to be. And I think PCs have reached a tipping point where, at least outside of gaming or specialized jobs, there's less pressing need for them to be more powerful, so I think that's also contributing to the slowing market.
Sort of. Cutting edge custom hardware is expensive. There's no good reason not to use commodity hardware-based designs these days for their next console. Sony and Microsoft have both already figured this out.
Signing software prevents it from being surreptitiously tampered with by a third party. Other platforms do not require you to purchase a developer certificate from them - this is specific to Apple and it's walled garden (or other closed stores and platforms). Don't conflate whatever issues you have with closed ecosystems and the security benefits of signed software in general! That's as flawed as blaming encryption because bad actors might use it to avoid being snooped on by law enforcement.
I'd argue that it's also the case that most computers for the past decade have been ridiculously overpowered for what most average consumers are asking of them. That's partly why the market is moving to mobile. For many common tasks, a tiny mobile computer is still more than enough to do the job just fine. And in the case of Windows, the required minimum specs for an OS hasn't jumped nearly as substantially since Windows Vista, as MS focused quite a bit on performance optimization rather than letting things keep bloating up. If you had a reasonably powerful computer that could run Windows Vista when it first came out, you could almost certainly still run Windows 10 on it.
Vista recommended specs: 1-gigahertz (GHz) 32-bit (x86) processor or 1-GHz 64-bit (x64) processor 1 GB of system memory 40-GB hard disk that has 15 GB of free hard disk space Windows Aero-capable graphics card w/ 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
Windows 10 minimum specs: Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
Note that I'm comparing recommended to minimum specs, but it's still fairly impressive given the time between these two OS releases. In general, I just think there's less market pressure to keep creating faster and faster CPUs.
The premise is right that restrictions inconvenience users who aren't interested in piracy and probably drive many of them to piracy.
Yep, and it's not just the DRM. I've found that legitimate channels are often worse than illegitimate ones in many ways. Hulu is a fantastic example of this. You pay monthly and are still subjected to advertisement. Even at the highest paid service level with (mostly) no ads, Hulu insists on plastering a damned watermark of the local affiliate station (essentially an advertisement) over the stream for the entire duration of the show. Actually, calling it a watermark is a stretch, because it's not even translucent - it's nice and bright and in your face for the entire show. It's very distracting to me.
Moreover, Hulu doesn't provide past seasons of many shows, so if you haven't been watching for the past few years already, you can't catch up. What's the point of an on-demand streaming service if they don't provide a full catalog so new subscribers can catch up? I could rent those shows, but the prices are outrageous. That's old-school broadcaster thinking for you. Idiotic.
On the other hand, I could easily download every show I currently watch on Hulu via bittorrent with better quality encoding and no distracting watermark, and I can download all past seasons of any show with no hassle. Why am I being a chump and paying Hulu for the privilege of a degraded experience? Well, because I want to support the shows I like, I suppose. I've honestly been considering cancelling Hulu, as I already subscribe to a few other streaming services. This is what happens if your legitimate offering is worse than pirating.
That's surprising. I just went there as a test with a browser that had no adblocker or script blocking installed, and sure enough, the site popped open a page telling me some critical software was out of date, trying to trick me into upgrading.
Honestly, I think Google's a little scared by the advent of adblockers, which also tend to both implicitly and explictly double as malware blockers. I see this as a move by them to make web browsing safer without having to resort to installing ad blockers. They can't exactly drop support for ad-blockers plugins, as they'd just hand their market share back to Firefox, but they can try to make them a bit less compelling to use.
Fair enough. If they warned everyone ahead of time that they'd be making breaking changes to the language, then that's not quite so bad (I must have missed the memo). And of course, the inclusion of migration tools certainly helps to mitigate whatever minor pain is involved. It's just that I tend to view those sorts of changes as the hallmark of a beta product - one still below the 1.0 release threshold. I guess that's what happens when version numbers don't mean what they've historically represented anymore. It confuses old-timers like me.
I recently began porting my project to OS X (and will eventually do iOS as well), so I had to pick up Objective-C. Swift looked interesting, but didn't work for me because it couldn't as easily interop with my native C++ libraries. So, yeah, of course... there's no way that Apple can abandon Objective-C anytime in the near future either (as some have speculated), because again, a lot of people have a very substantial investment in Objective-C code as well.
Language stability is a very big deal if you've got a sizable body of code, say a few hundred billion lines or so that have been written, bugfixed, and hardened over the past few decades. It's something that people with very large investments in very large code bases that are maintained for a long time tend to care about.
I suppose if you're banging out the latest iOS app in six or twelve months the stability of the language isn't as big of a deal. Nothing wrong with that, but you have to remember that different developers and different projects value different things in their programming languages.
I read the first item ("guard" keyword) a couple of times, and I'm still having trouble figuring out what it does that a simple "if" statement doesn't do. It is just syntactic sugar for the if statement, but used to indicate precondition checks? I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
Defer keyword... interesting idea. C++ has destructors, but in many cases, if the object isn't already wrapped up, it's a lot of boilerplate code to do so. Still, for most of the daily work I do, I'm not dealing with raw handles, so I'm much better served with simple destructors. It would be pretty handy if I were writing a lot of C-style code - could replace a lot of those ugly goto statements used to do end-of-function cleanup.
do...repeat. Sigh... figure this stuff out before version 1 of the language guys. One of C/C++'s strengths is that it's an incredibly stable language. Code written 25 years ago still compiles just fine today. Breaking changes at version 2 doesn't bode well for future stability.
Apple has also revamped all of the Objective-C APIs that required NS_OPTIONS values to use the new OptionSetType. This causes breaking code changes, but continues to move Swift’s syntax forward along with the APIs that it supports.
Well, maybe Apple can get away with this. Mmmm... koolaid...
Wow... 1000km is a pretty hefty pilot program. And here's the important phrase:
This project will supply 5 million people in France with electricity if it is successful
So... 1000km and they have no idea if it's going to be successful? It seems like the reasonable thing to do would be to pave a few km of road and see how it holds up under real conditions for a few years. But hey, money is no object when you're saving the planet, right? Well, I'm glad it's their tax dollars that are doing a giant feasibility study for the rest of us.
The Dutch have the right idea. They've started with a 100m strip to start with to see if the things actually work as intended first. I like the concept, but new products and concepts like this need to be tested pretty carefully.
Does Nexus not have carrier-specific crapware on their phones? I was under the impression that only Apple was able to swing that sort of deal. Everyone else seems to be beholden to the carrier overlords.
Microsoft gradually chipped away at it and eventually supplanted PalmOS as #1 for the simple reason that Palm wouldn't allow PalmOS on other hardware. Anyone else who wanted to make their own PDA had to invest in making their own OS (Nokia) or use Microsoft's offering. (This is the same mistake Apple made in the PC market, thus relegating them to a 5% market share today.)
And yet, this same strategy seems to have worked brilliantly for the iPhone, or at the very least, doesn't seem to have hurt Apple at all. Any theories as to why this would supposedly be a disadvantage in one case but not in another? Personally, I'm not sure that licensing an OS to third-parties is a huge factor in success given the top two players have wildly diverging strategies in this regard. And remember, Android isn't a big money-maker for Google like the iPhone is for Apple.
But in an idiotic move, Microsoft insisted on tying it together with their desktop OS monopoly by forcing it to use the Win32 API and UI paradigm. (A Start button on a phone? Really?) Nobody wants to use the Windows desktop UI on a 4-inch screen.
And hilariously, Microsoft made the exact same mistake in reverse with Windows 8.1 by forcing users to use a ridiculous mobile / touch interface on a desktop PC.
IMHO that will go down in history as Ballmer's biggest blunder - missing the PDA and cell phone convergence.
Oh, and don't forget the convergence of digital cameras with phones as well. I'd imagine the bottom dropped out of the low-end stand-alone digital camera market, since nearly everyone has a camera on their phone these days.
I know it's fun to be snarky about the fallibility of the cloud at times like these, but in fairness, I think one has to measure these unexpected outages against the productivity gains of having a convenient centralized point to synchronize your project online, especially for historically decentralized teams like your typical open source projects.
The notion that "git is decentralized" is obviously tempered against the requirement to synchronize everyone's repositories, right? Still, I agree... the whole "github is down, I can't code today" is an even weaker excuse than something like "it's okay if I'm goofing off - I'm compiling." One of the benefits of git (and Mercurial as well, which is actually my system of choice) is that it's trivial to make a local branch and start working on some new feature. If you're working on a project, then by definition you have an entire copy of the repository locally - it's not like you need to connect to github just to see your code or check in changes locally. Even if you can't see your bug/todo list, that just means it's a great time to make a branch and start some other little project, like doing some refactoring or code cleanup - or even, heaven forbid, some documentation.
I wouldn't want to have someone complicit in illegal anti-trust activities put in a leadership role in an organization I had anything to do with either. I don't put this in the category of "butthurt", which is a word, if I must call it that, typically reserved for petty, squabbling nonsense. Not that this doesn't apply to Wikipedia editors in general, at least from what I've heard, but this appears to have some merit at first blush.
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In my copy of Word 2010, under "Save As...", I see the following supported formats:
Word Document (*.docx)
Word Macro-Enabled Document (*.docm)
Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)
PDF (*.pdf)
Word XML Document (*.xml)
Word 2003 XML Document (*.xml)
OpenDocument Text (*.odt)
Works 6-9 Document (*.wps)
and a bunch more besides, like HTML, plain text, rtf, xps, etc...
For opening documents, there are even more options, like old WordPerfect 5.x and 6.x documents. I didn't see an option for opening .wri files from twenty years ago though, so there's that. Aha, gotcha M$!
Word 2010 opens lots of old file formats, and can save to quite a few of them as well. Did MS drop support for these in newer version of Word? I have no idea, but that would seem pretty strange to me. Smells like FUD to me.
Because, sorry, but the "AI" is really just a set of rules still. A set of rules that can't take account of every situation. Sure, it can drive more carefully than a human driver, but it can also make just the same kind of dumb mistakes as a human driver too.
Yes, but at the heart of the algorithm is a big overriding rule of "don't drive off the road or hit anything". That's pretty cut and dried as far as rules go. The car's hardware can literally see in every direction and track everything around it, static or moving. It will react to danger and determine the best course of action even before most humans even recognize there's a problem. Unless there's a really serious flaw in the system, that means at worst the car is going to come to a stop or simply avoid all obstacles when it sees anything dangerous or that it doesn't understand.
Honestly, far more important is this: It won't ever get distracted. It won't drive angry, or intoxicated, tired, on medication, or while putting on lipstick or eating a sandwich. It won't freak out if a wasp gets into the car. It won't turn it's head and yell at the kids to be quiet and stop bouncing around in the back seat. It won't drive recklessly in an effort to impress it's girlfriend.
My prediction: Even the first generation of self-driving cars will be statistically 20 times safer or better than an average human driver (at least in terms of accident fault), and it will rapidly improve as incidents occur and the black boxes are analyzed to determine how said incidents could have possibly been prevented. Eventually, car-related deaths will be relegated to freak accidents, like when a tree falls on a car or an overpass collapses, etc.
Sometimes in life, ubiquity and commonality trumps design logic. Look at the qwerty keyboard scheme. At this point, there's so much momentum in that layout, there's really no point in trying to "improve" it for the vast majority of people. I certainly have no desire to try to rewire decades worth of muscle memory to change schemes. The "save" icon is another one that occasionally get hipster designers foaming at the mouth - a floppy disc, for pete's sake, which kids under sixteen probably have never even seen in person. The imperial system in the US was also far more difficult to dislodge with the metric system than many believed. The steering wheel, petal arrangement, and more or less standardized shifting levers are just another example.
Whatever benefit you think switching schemes gives you, there's an argument to be made that it may not be worth the short-term pain during the transition. It's tough to know where that boundary lies, I think. Metric vs imperial? Yeah, I'm sort of sorry we didn't switch. Changing the behavior of a car's shifter? Probably not worth it.
The "standard" automatic shifter layout has been around for many decades. I can't imagine there would be any patents still valid that prohibit its free use. At least, I certainly hope not, or our patent system is broken far worse than I fear.
If anything, I would suspect the opposite - that this new design scheme was patented, and the auto maker was hoping to popularize it as an exclusive feature that the competition doesn't have. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems like greater care should be taken when screwing around with long-standardized core operational controls.
I recently drove my dad's car when dropping my folks off at the airport, and noticed that the gearshift was bifurcated. P-R-N-D, and then you had to shift the lever over to explicitly use specific gears. Given that the 99% use case is just putting the car in D and stepping on the gas, this makes a lot of sense to me.
The *worst* design was my mom's car, which, instead of stopping automatically at D after pressing the release, like my car does, instead stopped at the location just below it - either second or third gear, I can't remember which at the moment. Who the hell would purposefully design something like that?
It's especially easy to stay in the wrong gear if you're not used to the sound and feel of the car you're driving. And with an automatic, drivers are trained to NOT have to look at the RPM gauge, so unless they can hear the difference, I can't really blame people for making this mistake.
I had Flash uninstalled from my computer for several years for safety purposes. I actually only re-installed Flash once I got the ability to control auto-play Flash content - there are still a few annoying holdouts that only have Flash solutions, like video streaming services. So, yes, you can control Flash's auto-play behavior as well, except you're essentially controlling whether you want to turn Flash on for a particular website or not.
Yeah, I can see that for decent-sized operations. I've actually been looking at cloud services (EC2 and Azure) lately in order to gather telemetry data from beta software, in order to help with the design and refinement process. We're such a small operation that there's no way we could or should do dedicated servers, nor would it be economical. I can actually rent the smallest server for less than $15 a month with continuous operation, and proportionally less than that if I'm only turning it on part-time, like during development and testing. Best of all, as the need arrives, I can simply scale up as needed. Both Microsoft and Amazon's offerings are roughly on par regarding pricing and services.
For all the idiocy about the cloud bandwagon and people using it inappropriately, the ability to rent and dynamically scale virtual servers on demand is actually really handy in many cases.
Don't get me wrong... I've always lambasted the pundits who seem intent on declaring the PC "dead" - that's only true for people who don't actually do any work on a computer. Mobile devices are best at consuming content or *very* light work. Only idiots would argue otherwise. But let's face it - that's the bulk of what most people actually *do* with their personal computers outside of actual work.
And I'm not saying that there isn't still a need for high-powered workstations. It's just that the market for those machines isn't nearly as big as it used to be. And I think PCs have reached a tipping point where, at least outside of gaming or specialized jobs, there's less pressing need for them to be more powerful, so I think that's also contributing to the slowing market.
Don't worry - PCs and workstations aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Cutting edge hardware is expensive
Sort of. Cutting edge custom hardware is expensive. There's no good reason not to use commodity hardware-based designs these days for their next console. Sony and Microsoft have both already figured this out.
Signing software prevents it from being surreptitiously tampered with by a third party. Other platforms do not require you to purchase a developer certificate from them - this is specific to Apple and it's walled garden (or other closed stores and platforms). Don't conflate whatever issues you have with closed ecosystems and the security benefits of signed software in general! That's as flawed as blaming encryption because bad actors might use it to avoid being snooped on by law enforcement.
I'd argue that it's also the case that most computers for the past decade have been ridiculously overpowered for what most average consumers are asking of them. That's partly why the market is moving to mobile. For many common tasks, a tiny mobile computer is still more than enough to do the job just fine. And in the case of Windows, the required minimum specs for an OS hasn't jumped nearly as substantially since Windows Vista, as MS focused quite a bit on performance optimization rather than letting things keep bloating up. If you had a reasonably powerful computer that could run Windows Vista when it first came out, you could almost certainly still run Windows 10 on it.
Vista recommended specs:
1-gigahertz (GHz) 32-bit (x86) processor or 1-GHz 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40-GB hard disk that has 15 GB of free hard disk space
Windows Aero-capable graphics card w/ 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
Windows 10 minimum specs:
Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit
Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS
Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
Note that I'm comparing recommended to minimum specs, but it's still fairly impressive given the time between these two OS releases. In general, I just think there's less market pressure to keep creating faster and faster CPUs.
The premise is right that restrictions inconvenience users who aren't interested in piracy and probably drive many of them to piracy.
Yep, and it's not just the DRM. I've found that legitimate channels are often worse than illegitimate ones in many ways. Hulu is a fantastic example of this. You pay monthly and are still subjected to advertisement. Even at the highest paid service level with (mostly) no ads, Hulu insists on plastering a damned watermark of the local affiliate station (essentially an advertisement) over the stream for the entire duration of the show. Actually, calling it a watermark is a stretch, because it's not even translucent - it's nice and bright and in your face for the entire show. It's very distracting to me.
Moreover, Hulu doesn't provide past seasons of many shows, so if you haven't been watching for the past few years already, you can't catch up. What's the point of an on-demand streaming service if they don't provide a full catalog so new subscribers can catch up? I could rent those shows, but the prices are outrageous. That's old-school broadcaster thinking for you. Idiotic.
On the other hand, I could easily download every show I currently watch on Hulu via bittorrent with better quality encoding and no distracting watermark, and I can download all past seasons of any show with no hassle. Why am I being a chump and paying Hulu for the privilege of a degraded experience? Well, because I want to support the shows I like, I suppose. I've honestly been considering cancelling Hulu, as I already subscribe to a few other streaming services. This is what happens if your legitimate offering is worse than pirating.
That's surprising. I just went there as a test with a browser that had no adblocker or script blocking installed, and sure enough, the site popped open a page telling me some critical software was out of date, trying to trick me into upgrading.
Honestly, I think Google's a little scared by the advent of adblockers, which also tend to both implicitly and explictly double as malware blockers. I see this as a move by them to make web browsing safer without having to resort to installing ad blockers. They can't exactly drop support for ad-blockers plugins, as they'd just hand their market share back to Firefox, but they can try to make them a bit less compelling to use.
Fair enough. If they warned everyone ahead of time that they'd be making breaking changes to the language, then that's not quite so bad (I must have missed the memo). And of course, the inclusion of migration tools certainly helps to mitigate whatever minor pain is involved. It's just that I tend to view those sorts of changes as the hallmark of a beta product - one still below the 1.0 release threshold. I guess that's what happens when version numbers don't mean what they've historically represented anymore. It confuses old-timers like me.
I recently began porting my project to OS X (and will eventually do iOS as well), so I had to pick up Objective-C. Swift looked interesting, but didn't work for me because it couldn't as easily interop with my native C++ libraries. So, yeah, of course... there's no way that Apple can abandon Objective-C anytime in the near future either (as some have speculated), because again, a lot of people have a very substantial investment in Objective-C code as well.
Language stability is a very big deal if you've got a sizable body of code, say a few hundred billion lines or so that have been written, bugfixed, and hardened over the past few decades. It's something that people with very large investments in very large code bases that are maintained for a long time tend to care about.
I suppose if you're banging out the latest iOS app in six or twelve months the stability of the language isn't as big of a deal. Nothing wrong with that, but you have to remember that different developers and different projects value different things in their programming languages.
I read the first item ("guard" keyword) a couple of times, and I'm still having trouble figuring out what it does that a simple "if" statement doesn't do. It is just syntactic sugar for the if statement, but used to indicate precondition checks? I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
Defer keyword... interesting idea. C++ has destructors, but in many cases, if the object isn't already wrapped up, it's a lot of boilerplate code to do so. Still, for most of the daily work I do, I'm not dealing with raw handles, so I'm much better served with simple destructors. It would be pretty handy if I were writing a lot of C-style code - could replace a lot of those ugly goto statements used to do end-of-function cleanup.
do...repeat. Sigh... figure this stuff out before version 1 of the language guys. One of C/C++'s strengths is that it's an incredibly stable language. Code written 25 years ago still compiles just fine today. Breaking changes at version 2 doesn't bode well for future stability.
Apple has also revamped all of the Objective-C APIs that required NS_OPTIONS values to use the new OptionSetType. This causes breaking code changes, but continues to move Swift’s syntax forward along with the APIs that it supports.
Well, maybe Apple can get away with this. Mmmm... koolaid...
Wow... 1000km is a pretty hefty pilot program. And here's the important phrase:
This project will supply 5 million people in France with electricity if it is successful
So... 1000km and they have no idea if it's going to be successful? It seems like the reasonable thing to do would be to pave a few km of road and see how it holds up under real conditions for a few years. But hey, money is no object when you're saving the planet, right? Well, I'm glad it's their tax dollars that are doing a giant feasibility study for the rest of us.
The Dutch have the right idea. They've started with a 100m strip to start with to see if the things actually work as intended first. I like the concept, but new products and concepts like this need to be tested pretty carefully.
Does Nexus not have carrier-specific crapware on their phones? I was under the impression that only Apple was able to swing that sort of deal. Everyone else seems to be beholden to the carrier overlords.
Microsoft gradually chipped away at it and eventually supplanted PalmOS as #1 for the simple reason that Palm wouldn't allow PalmOS on other hardware. Anyone else who wanted to make their own PDA had to invest in making their own OS (Nokia) or use Microsoft's offering. (This is the same mistake Apple made in the PC market, thus relegating them to a 5% market share today.)
And yet, this same strategy seems to have worked brilliantly for the iPhone, or at the very least, doesn't seem to have hurt Apple at all. Any theories as to why this would supposedly be a disadvantage in one case but not in another? Personally, I'm not sure that licensing an OS to third-parties is a huge factor in success given the top two players have wildly diverging strategies in this regard. And remember, Android isn't a big money-maker for Google like the iPhone is for Apple.
But in an idiotic move, Microsoft insisted on tying it together with their desktop OS monopoly by forcing it to use the Win32 API and UI paradigm. (A Start button on a phone? Really?) Nobody wants to use the Windows desktop UI on a 4-inch screen.
And hilariously, Microsoft made the exact same mistake in reverse with Windows 8.1 by forcing users to use a ridiculous mobile / touch interface on a desktop PC.
IMHO that will go down in history as Ballmer's biggest blunder - missing the PDA and cell phone convergence.
Oh, and don't forget the convergence of digital cameras with phones as well. I'd imagine the bottom dropped out of the low-end stand-alone digital camera market, since nearly everyone has a camera on their phone these days.
Besides, if you do happen to get cancer, you can just 3D print yourself a replacement organ.
I'm not sure how many people are expecting to manage a Linux system using DOS.
I know it's fun to be snarky about the fallibility of the cloud at times like these, but in fairness, I think one has to measure these unexpected outages against the productivity gains of having a convenient centralized point to synchronize your project online, especially for historically decentralized teams like your typical open source projects.
The notion that "git is decentralized" is obviously tempered against the requirement to synchronize everyone's repositories, right? Still, I agree... the whole "github is down, I can't code today" is an even weaker excuse than something like "it's okay if I'm goofing off - I'm compiling." One of the benefits of git (and Mercurial as well, which is actually my system of choice) is that it's trivial to make a local branch and start working on some new feature. If you're working on a project, then by definition you have an entire copy of the repository locally - it's not like you need to connect to github just to see your code or check in changes locally. Even if you can't see your bug/todo list, that just means it's a great time to make a branch and start some other little project, like doing some refactoring or code cleanup - or even, heaven forbid, some documentation.
Once the lawyers have been disbarred, all parties involved should then be brought on criminal charges of extortion:
The obtaining of property from another induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right.
You're obviously not a lawyer. That's both a criticism of your suggested legal tactics and an endorsement of you as a human being.
Sure... why not?.
I wouldn't want to have someone complicit in illegal anti-trust activities put in a leadership role in an organization I had anything to do with either. I don't put this in the category of "butthurt", which is a word, if I must call it that, typically reserved for petty, squabbling nonsense. Not that this doesn't apply to Wikipedia editors in general, at least from what I've heard, but this appears to have some merit at first blush.