Borborygymus

A meal is a pretty simple fixed-cost item from a retail outlet, not a service with a complex set of dependencies and shifting requirements. The cost of the meal is predictable to the seller - dynamic pricing has only one purpose - gouging customers.

If SaaS/consulting/architectural firms are engaging in price gouging of their customers, that is not an argument to bring the same to the fast food market.

I guess they must be doing something wrong.

As an old school Free Software kinda guy, I was a little shocked at the lack of enthusiastic support for "if you do not own the source code, you are not in control". From where does this apathy come?

There was a talk about Node.js at Open Source Bridge in Portland in 2011 or 2012 (nice con). I was volunteering doing mic handling at that talk.

I remember the speaker saying about how they had no idea about how to debug node programs. My personal reaction was that this was a fun little toy, but the idea of JS on the backend was utter madness. Little did I know what a monster it would become.

For the record I still think JS on the backend (or anywhere else) is madness.

> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces

Or maybe use: `find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ...`

I guess you're still hoping your filenames don't contain an ASCII NUL, although that's a fairly reasonable assumption for all but the most paranoid use-cases.

Remember COBOL's EXHIBIT?

Java is swell and all, but having seen how the vendor treats even their large customers, I could never in good conscience recommend them to anyone I do business with. Better to miss out on the latest features and work with more respectful vendors IMO.

more efficient than what? I loathe this marketing speak.

All Operating Systems suck. Linux sucks less for things I care about, and has done for a long time - much longer than 7 years for my purposes.

I too am required to use a Windows machine for work, which seems to get worse with every release. They even ruined notepad.exe. The bloat is unavoidable. The new laptop I got one year ago that seemed more than enough when new, is now struggling under the bloat. It takes me in excess of 10 minutes to log in, connect VPN, start teams, outlook and putty in a citrix session. Madness!

> with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure

Linux.

> AI

The slop people are complaining about.

> and enterprise solutions.

Business users are totally fed up of poorly-function Co-Pilot buttons in every UI. The people who sign contracts are not the people forced to digest the cruft.

The child predators are not stalking the adult forums. They're in the "for kids" ones. This "protect the kids" nonsense needs to be called out for what it is - a sham.

Microsoft has long been a company where the left hand and the right hand are not well coordinated. It'll be interesting to see if they can reconcile the "everything must be AI" mantra from the executives with the crystal clear "we do NOT WANT THIS" message from their customers.

Place your bets.

I concur.

I always wondered if it would be feasible to make the headlights produce polarized light (e.g. vertical), and have windscreens filter out that polarization... I guess it would only work if the scattering of light off of whatever is being illuminated sufficiently depolarizes the light. Anyhow, I thought it was a neat idea when I was a teenager.

There might be some issues with retro fitting the world's existing road vehicle fleet, but that's a deployment detail. :p

I guess Scumbag College's University Challenge performance must have edged them out.

Funny to see Emacs with a Y for small... one of the humorous expansions of "Emacs" I once read was, "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping", alluding to how bloated it was perceived to be.

There's not really a standard definition of an AI PC, but if there's anything beyond marketing, it would take the form of a neural processing unit, which supposedly makes some AI-related task fast by providing hardware acceleration. Cited examples include voice recognition and "training models", although I'm pretty sceptical about the later being at any significant scale.

I suspect what it will actually boil down to in many cases is having recall enabled by default and an always-listening voice assistant.

It's long gone the time people should stop doing business with Oracle.

Exactly.

Much of the discourse around this topic has described ideal testing and deployment practise. Maybe it's different in Silicon Valley or investment banks, but for the sorts of companies I work for (telco mostly) things are very far from that ideal.

My view of he industry is one of shocking technical ineptitude from all but a minority of very competent people who actually keep things running... Of management who prioritize short term cost reduction over quality at every opportunity, leading to appalling technical debt and demoralized, over-worked staff who rapidly stop giving a damn about quality, because speaking out about quality problems is penalized.

> the situations in which you need to use it are likely cursed.

So true, and yet so common.

I used to use it on HP-UX in the 90s.

You forgot all the other prompts that ssh might produce before the password prompt (e.g. add new host to known hosts yes/no). There are more possible prompts than most people realize.

It /was/ nice and quick. Thanks for putting the demo online. It was quick to tell me complete nonsense. Apparently 7122 is the atomic number of Barium.

It would be bad.

I through it would be a nice idea to have lights polarised vertically and screens polarized horizontally... scattered light gets de-polarized so object illuminated by the lights would still be visible through screen, but direct light from other people's headlights would get blocked.

Don't know how that would look practically (how bright can one really make a polaralized light source that is cost-effective / how expensive is it to create whole windscreens that are polarized / getting it rolled out would be a challenge).

Still it's a very anoying problem and it would be nice to find a decent solution.

In the late 90s I worked for a vendor of CRM software. A fair bit of billing and payment-handling code was written in COBOL. Wasn't mainframe - ran on a couple of flavours of proprietary Unix. The COBOL compiler vendor was Microfocus.

I didn't have any training in COBOL, but found it pretty easy to read and understand - at least for the fairly simple business logic in a billing system. I didn#t have to write anything - just do some debugging when it didn't output as expected. Wouldn't want to do anything too mathsy or heavy string processing with it, but it seemed a good fit for the application.

I did some more work for the same company later. A descendent of that software is still running today. At some point between 2000 and the late 20-teens they migrated to Linux, and I think at that point used some sort of COBOL-to-C transliteration software, and the Microfocus compiler was jettisoned. Not sure if the decision was because Microfocus was very expensive (I have heard that, but have no personal experience of it), or just didn't support Linux at that time.

That transliterated code is still running today, but a bit of a nightmare to maintain. If GNU Cobol has been mature enough whenever that migration happened, I suspect it would have been a much better approach than transliteration. Too late for that code base though.

The market economy deserves not one iota of credit for the Free Software I have written (millions of downloads). It was produced and donated to the world in spite of the market economy, not because of it.

ctrl-f linux

Nope. >:(

Pico was based on MicroEmacs 3.6. Nano is an open source clone of Pico - there's definite DNA in that series. I'm assuming not in this new Micro, but it's faintly amusing that the name seems to be a play on something that was a play on a name which was a play on a historical namesake of the new thing.

Circles.

Software project name DNA.

MicroEmacs -> Pico -> Nano -> Micro