enjoy-your-stay

In the UK dentists are mostly private, it hasn't increased the quality or availability in the least.

Public transport is actually a fairly small part of the nation's transport, the UK is very car-centric so the strikes largely inconvenience commuters and drive even more people onto the roads, unless they can WFH.

Strikes are also a very recent phenomenon, just in the last 6 months or so, so this is quite a new thing driven by inflation.

Problems with the NHS are very much poor management by the last run of governments where there is a quite a growing suspicion they are deliberately trying to run down the NHS in order to make a case for to privatise it, following e.g. America's disastrous model.

I can't say for sure, but I think cryptos are actually behaving a bit more like precious metals, in that people use them as speculative store of value - so a bit like you say, commodities.

The other thing that surprises me is the sheer number of currencies that currently exist - I had thought there would be a massive shake-out in the market but so far they seem to be multiplying like fungus.

.. serveral 'ours layter ...

Thanks for that rabbit hole of nostalgia, just remembered how wild Mac OSX 10.1 in its first release was. It was a real game changer, and looked great (albeit a bit slow on my poor G4 Cube).

>...and still, no one seems willing to answer if they or their kids should be among the dead/maimed

Why don't you instead ask that of the Chinese? How many of them are willing to go to the bottom of the ocean in order to complete a pointless and petty war? There's a lot of hostile water between the mainland and the sovereign nation of Taiwan that they'll have to cross, many would die. And for what?

The USA has one of the largest and most ready navies in the world, if it came to a fight, China - which has very little naval experience in war as far as I can remember - might find itself massively outclassed between the US and possibly Japan.

What then happens in a war of attrition where China can't win, but won't back down?

The allies will basically blockade China until it chokes to death on it's own hubris, and industrial production will return to the US and Europe.

Money flows out of equities and into bonds which yield a higher more dependable return when interest rates are high enough.

The equities market was already running at artificially inflated values for some sectors (like technology), which means there isn't much growth potential (if everything is deemed to be already overpriced), and so the outflows were quite significant from those sectors, accentuating the inverse relationship between equities and interest rates.

Really good article, and this made me laugh

"Essentially, to juice its P&L in the short term, SVB ambled into 2023 almost completely unhedged".

Was it denazification, demilitarization, or de-satanization? I've lost track of the many stated goals. Or was it to help those poor souls in the DPR shoot down more civilian jets? Can't quite remember. Or was it to protect German speakers in the Sudetenland?

And anyway, it's not a war. It's a Special Military Operation. How more plain can you get?

"ChatGPT lied to me and then tried to deny it"

It's getting more human every day!

I would the say the opposite is true, the western media is more than happy to discuss and (over) analyse every little detail of information that quite freely flows into our media machines from many different sources.

We agonize over failures and freely discuss tactics and events, report explicitly and react to horrors occurring, sometimes so much that we get a bit desensitized over time.

It could be argued that we sometimes omit too little. Unlike in Russia now where telling the truth can get you a criminal record and land you in jail.

People are tribal and emotional about the invasion of Ukraine principally because they see that Russia is a bully, and people naturally revile bullying - even to the point that their creature comforts might be a bit disturbed when confronting the bully.

I see that as a good thing.

Russia as it currently is, is a massive and diverse country with many talented and artistic people. It could take any number of courses, and act in many different ways to be a better world citizen, but it hasn't. Russia had, and still has many many options, but somehow seems stuck in a downward spiral of trying to throw its weight around the world whilst simultaneously casting itself as a perpetual victim.

For the longest time I've written my own smart pointers to manage the lifetime of pretty much anything that needs a cleanup - database connections, query objects, file handles, threads, mutexes and yes raw pointers.

All of this code built just fine on pre c++11 compilers, ran reliably, was performant and easy to maintain.

Rolling your own smart pointers is not something I'd discourage.

And step 1 in marketing a new language is a cute mascot, obviously.

I think the fact that it eventually ended up as a server app language took everybody by surprise - Sun never saw it as anything like that at inception I'm sure.

Adding JDBC and later nio is probably what got it there the most.

WaitForMultipleObjects (been in Win32 forever) is not really related to IO completion Ports, whose API came a lot later.

My understanding is that condition variables were designed to be a superior alternative to Windows Event objects.

I'm glad to read here that others find them fiddly and overly awkward to use since that was also my impression vs the consistent and usually easy to use Windows thread synchronization HANDLE based objects. Dave Cutler definitely did a good job there IMHO.

I'm surprised to say I feel the same. I'm Scottish and never really had much affection for the royal family, but I also feel quite sad and that it's the end of an era.

She was the last of the best, we'll see what comes next.

Doesn't matter, I read and enjoyed it anyway :)

Agreed, I can't see anything stopping it mutating further if the opportunity arises.

I believe the understanding is that the omicron variant may have evolved further in an immuno-compromised person (e.g. with AIDS, or undergoing chemotherapy), since it got to stay in the host longer without being killed by the immune system, it racked up more mutations until it got to its current virulent form and started infecting other people.

And there's absolutely nothing stopping that from happening again I guess.

Could somebody actually tell me which 'colonies' they're meaning when people talk of this?

As far as I can tell they're either already trading as much with the UK as they want to be (AUS,NZ), or have a rather one-way interest (India, US).

Could anybody elaborate more on these supposed advantages?

Well, that was all good up until the point that CDS's exposed the Ratings Agencies as corrupt, and LIBOR imploded, again due to corruption.

Motif is also a bit chunky, and the serif font looks a bit dated, but it is very consistent, and has well designed colour schemes so very easy on the eye.

The dock was a really useful tool though, drag and drop printing and workspace short cuts. The version I used on HPUX even had a small green blinking activity light like a disk activity light (probably also network) which I loved.

Lol, I can just hear the politicians now.

"Tough on bugs, and tough on the causes of bugs!"

As they add even more time-sapping process to every release.

>I'm tempted to say that this story uses hindsight to maybe give Apple at least a bit too much credit. >When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously special.

Well, it kind of was. It was the only player with the click wheel interface, and the only one that supported Firewire. This gave it the advantage of being generally easy to use and was very fast and convenient to load music. It also looked pretty good (I wanted one the minute I saw it).

With the downsides being that 1. it was pretty expensive and 2. that it had an in built hard-drive that didn't really enjoy being bumped about too much (my 3rd gen died with the HDD) so you had to treat it carefully.

However they iterated pretty quickly after that, adding Windows support, USB, colour hi-res screens and massively reducing the size whilst also reducing the price. All of this allowed them to outstrip the competition so much that they were pretty soon one of the very few players left in that market.

Or if your menu bar has so many items it can't all fit to the left of the notch? Would probably have to straddle the notch, but would still look pretty weird.

>people lose things, and Apple conveniently forgot about this to push the dongle ecosystem.

I think it's a bit unfair to say that Apple deliberately change interfaces in order to push their adapters.

They've got 2 different problems to address, firstly they want to update and be in control of the interfaces to their hardware, Firewire,Thunderbolt,USB-C but, at the same time their machines seem to last quite a long time, so at any time there's a pretty significant number of users stuck on older interfaces and with hardware that uses older interfaces too (e.g. I have an older Firewire external hd that I now dongle to Thunderbolt, have noooo idea how I'm going to get that to work when I get this new machine).

So in order to allow all that to work they need to support a multitude of interfaces because getting a new laptop shouldn't mean throwing everything else out.

Also large chunks of libc use it as well, e.g. the printf family of functions.

In the 80's Lebanon was also a bit of a crazy place, I remember seeing pictures of American battleships firing into the mainland to attack enemy militias, which kinda reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and thinking that place will never be stable. Looks like I was wrong up until a few years ago though, it's a real shame for the people there.

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/20/world/us-warships-fire-in...

>Some people are gonna get rich off this - partly because more people view it as a threat than an opportunity.

Bitcoin miners probably.

>I felt similarly about the pandemic exposing the fragility of our economy and the cracks in our political systems.

I have to say I'm of the opposite view - all things considered systems and people have been pretty resilient and have coped quite well.

Of course for some it's been worse than for others, but on the whole the planet has coped not too badly. It has also flushed out at least one useless govt from power (US), is in the process of hopefully doing so with another (Brazil), and we can only hope that it will also hasten the departure of England's PM too.

We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.

I wonder why they dropped support for cairo?