Aloha

(3) wasn't relevant (or even really true) in 1977-1983 when Ada was being standardized.

MS-DOS was mostly x86 assembly, Classic MacOS was a mix of 68k assembly and Pascal, CP/M was written in PL/M, UCSD P-System was Pascal, and this leaves out all of the OS Options for the Apple II - none of which were written in C. I'm hard pressed to identify a PC OS from that time period that was written in C, other than something Unix derived (and even sometimes the unix derived things were not C, Domain/OS for example was in Pascal).

If we leave the PC space, it gets even less true - TOPS10/20 NotC, RSX-11 NotC, VMS also NotC - and I can keep going from there - the only OS from the time period that I can point at from that time period that was C is UNIX.

I'd actually argue that C/C++ were not enshrined as the defacto systems programming languages until the early-90's - by that time Ada had lost for reasons (1) and (2) that you noted.

I got my ticket at 14 in 1996, which led me to a career in the LMR/Telecom world - I have few regrets, my job is close enough to my hobby that it never gets old. I did my extra on a lark without studying for it.

I did end up getting a vanity 1x3 along the way, because my original call was awful, both over phonetics and spoken.

The issues that killed webOS had nothing to do with its technical merits (which were many) - it instead was a failure of product management.

* The TouchPad was priced too high for a new entrant with embryonic app support.

* It probably needed more development time before going to market, CTO doesnt really make GTM timing decisions.

* Insult to injury, as this fella pointed out - the applications for webOS extended far beyond a tablet, HP threw the baby out with the bathwater.

* They tried to make a strategic shift into software and services without having a great track record of doing those thing, which compounded all of the above, Palm did have some expertise there, but it was still tossed away.

webOS very much feels like a path not taken in mobile technology, it really was slick to use, even though as this fella mentioned it wasnt polished in terms of what was released.

PL/M

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/M

You always lose something when doing optical printing - you can often gain things too, but its not 1:1.

I adore this hybrid workflow, because I can pick how the photo will look, color palate, grain, whatever by picking my film, then I can use digital to fix (most if not all of) the inherent limitations in analog film.

Sadly, film is too much of a pain today, photography has long been about composition for me, not cameras or process - I liked film because I got a consistent result, but I can use digital too, and I do today.

Why is chicano culture "antisocial, criminal, and destructive"?

I love those USCSB videos!

The biggest thing we have done is managed to protect the general public, which IMO is what should be done.

Very much agreed - and actually the fact that people can poison the water table is the exact problem we have, abstract and diffuse risks (tragedy of the commons type stuff) is treated one way, but the chance of risk to an individual is treated another. We worry very much about individual lead or asbestos exposure, but yet there is no system plan to clean it up. An example - We've spent lots of effort on trying to eliminate Leaded AvGas (which primarily effects users of it), but not as much on environmental lead from batteries.

Part of this is driven by the social media discourse and polarization - We essentially had a whole bunch of ideas which were outside of the window of normal discourse that have now been adopted as ideology and dogma by their respective camps. Once an idea is dogma/key ideological tenant it's really hard to challenge it.

Vision Zero should be viewed for what it is.. as a dumb idea.

rear backup cameras are one of the cases where I think the math falls apart - its like 250m dollars to save approx 30 lives a year - where is does work is reduced body damage to vehicles, however I dont know thats enough to mandate them.

The biggest issue I have, is we allow large organizations to make decisions on difuse/abstract risks - often without owning the liability from those choices, but roll many liabilities up for an individual choice to an organization - its perverse, and should be the other way around.

If I do something that earns me a darwin award at work, my company probably should not be liable for it.

The regulatory and legal strangleholds we have put on modern society allows large organizations to roll the dice with abstract and diffuse risks - often without owning the liability from those choices, but often preclude individuals from taking their own personal risk assessments and deciding to take part or not - because the liability rolls someplace else (aka, you can always sue).

I think one of the problems of modern society is the level of risk people deem acceptable - its now near zero, instead of "reasonable risks".

Aside from that, culturally the value we impart on a single human life has also changed too - death used to be much more common, infant death in particular - its not uncommon to go to an old cemetery and see a single family having buried three or more children, with another 2-3 having survived to adulthood. This was not something limited to the lower classes either, Calvin Coolidge had a son who died of sepsis from a blister while he was president.

Its better to know who is stealing from you (and how much) than not - sometimes the evil you know is better than the evil you dont.

Slower yes - there is typically a 15-20 min lag time - not two hours.

Before (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192913

The reality is that modern (meaning LTE) public networks are more secure today, than they have been, its also trivial to bring an LTE base station with you now - with the hardware at this point being no more complex than a controller driven wifi network.

The escape hatch is OpenSilver basically.

A clean rewrite isnt possible for a variety of business reasons.

I’m still dealing with the long goodbye of a silverlight app which now must be somehow ported.

Why use something so… old?

This is very cool!

As someone who wishes more people got some programming exposure to IBM z and how it works differently than minicomputer derived operating systems (both *nix and Windows count here), I think this is awesome.

You dont know many poor people, or very young people.

I work a furry convention in the Southern US, about 3% of our attendees have some ID related malady - can't get a timely appointment at DMV, missing core documentation, unable to prove residency, etc - nevermind rural voters who may live hours from a DMV.. which they can't get to without a license (assuming they can afford a car) or a ride. No bus service to speak of either.

Its a huge issue, I'd 100% support voter ID if getting an ID was free and easy, without it I'm skeptical.

No, but it is why we keep making tanks, even though the odds of a land war needing large number of tanks is tiny.

There is another one where they had to recall retirees to restart Stinger Missile production.

The F1 is particularly interesting, because if we'd undergone a program in 1985, we probably could have restarted production, maybe even 1995 - but every decade another n% of the engineering knowhow sluffed off into the permanent dirt nap until there wasnt enough left.

Another recent example was when Jay Leno had a new heat exchanger made for his Chrysler Turbine car, and they were able to call some retirees in to help make a new one.

I suspect a bunch of technical debt - the core of the application dates to 2000 or before (there are menu's changed for a very very long time).

> and have her walk back and forth until the problem solves itself.

God I had a memory of Lemmings pop up. Thank you for that, it made me smile.

Good catch, I didnt quite catch that she was denied reentry to Canada!

IMO - the trans stuff feels like a moral panic, like on the same level as the Satanic Panic of the 80's - or the violence in video games panic, or any number of other things - I'm just waiting for the storm to blow over.

All of this is made much worse by social media too, which fans the flames hotter than it ever could have been before.

I'm more skeptical of that statement - sure, I think some are aware.

Some are just blind partisans, otherwise those places wouldn't have been voting for team red for the last 35 years or so.

There is also the paradox of the low information voter too, which seemed to have broken for Trump 2:1 - that does concern me some.

Trump also has a huge benefit with low information voters, he spews noise all the time which the news media covers with baited breath.

I call it the "Trump says alot of things" problem - it allowed people to paint whatever they wanted him to be onto him by essentially cherry picking the various things he's said to make up their own collage view of whatever they wanted him to be.

It's like you and I are reading from the same book! - If I just go off what I see online, most of the loudest anti-trans voices, and most of the racists, I'm more or less convinced have never met or gotten to know any trans people or any black people. It's a certain amount of willful ignorance on their part.