Hacker News Reader

Almost every system you interact with in the world has some critical thing in its innards running windows.

I like the idea that technology is so unreliable in star trek because the computers are all centuries of software accretion with Windows way down the stack somewhere.

The late great Vernor Vinge explored this in A Fire Upon The Deep. One of the characters is/was in a former life a programmer-archeologist. The idea being that so many thousands of years in the future every relevant program has already been written, so his job was to comb the archives for the right mix of codes and integrate them, rather than right something new.

“So we've got this CNC controller written in Rust from 2036, and, ah, here is a GUI for something like that written in late 90's Visual Basic 6… Just combine those and…”

“So uhm, you do know what you are doing, right?”

“Sir! I am a programmer-acheologist! Oh this is fascinating… Hold on, I must unearth and preserve this beauty of a BAT-file before we can go any further.”

Most stuff is fine in France.

Not according to Air France. https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/air-france-flights-and-...

No Crowdstrike salespeople in France?

We are using OpenOffice as firewall

https://www.numerama.com/politique/12508-albanel-le-minister...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com