Re: It shouldn't matter
Google will not be happy to you.
It’s not the choice between a Ford and the bus. According to Google, it’s the choice between a Ford and a BMW, according to me more the choice between a Ford and a Vauxhall.
2110 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2014
You can. Well, not right now, because Epic got themselves removed from the AppStore, but epic can sell whatever they want on their website without a penny going to apple, or they can sell things on Android without giving a penny to apple, and they can make it available to anyone they want.
Apple wants their cut _for things purchased on an iOS device_ and epic can make it available to anyone they want. And the app is free to download.
Since you ask… Apple sends a purchase receipt to your server. Your server needs to figure out that the same app on different devices is owned by the same user, so you make the in-app purchase available on all the customer’s devices. The only difference is that Apple helps you if the same user uses your app on multiple iOS devices; I hope Google does the same with android devices.
"With the vaccine you can still get the virus, but your body has a head-start on fighting it which means that the virus doesn't get a chance to establish itself."
That is correct. However, the first effect is that a large number of vaccinated people won't get Covid at all in a situation where someone who isn't vaccinated would. So if 100 people with / without vaccine come too close to someone with Covid, 10 people instead of 100 catch it, and those 10 will have on average less bad effects than the 100 and will on average spread the virus less than the 100, on top of the 90 that don't get Covid at all, have no health effects and don't spread anything
"It's worth stressing this is different from the COVID Tracing app abortively launched last year that knows about everyone you meet"
What the hell? Did you read _anything_ about how this works? COVID tracing doesn't know _anything_ about anyone you meet. It knows you were near a phone that used a random ID which changes every 15 minutes. It's impossible to find out which phone that was.
Double or extended precision is entirely appropriate - if you know what you’re doing. If you can estimate worst cases for rounding errors and compensate for them.
If you were nowhere near finished after reading “the first hundred lines” of code then they didn’t know what they were doing. And that would be the problem, not floating point.
To say something positive I found amazing…
So my download speed went down to 150kbit per second. Still working, but really slow. I tried to call them, but my phone want working! Eventually they came to my home and found that one of the two wires to my home was cut. Ends still close together, but separate. No wonder my phone wasn’t working. But broadband still managed 150kbit per second over a broken cable! I found that massively impressive.
Swift traps integer overflows, unless you explicitly tell it not to. So a + b will trap on overflow, taking the application down reliably, a &+ b will add without overflow check; I think it's defined to wrap around. The optimiser seems to be quite good at avoiding checks that are not needed; for example a + b in a loop with the same values a and b will only check once.
"Quite. The app stores should have a fee structure similar in size to a payment processor such as Visa and MasterCard."
But they are not payment processors. For example, Apple pays the complete cost of hosting free apps. Apple provides services to all apps. When you get notifications while the app is not running, that's because Apple is sending them to your phone through the phone network. And lots of other things.
Sale of Goods Act says that after 6 years in the UK all your rights against the seller (you have no rights against the manufacturer anyway) disappear, and you're on your own, even if it is the seller's fault. It's the limit. The time when the seller can say "I don't know you, go away".
That doesn't mean you have many rights after say two years. For example no rights to have defects fixed even after two years for many items. What the six years mean for example that if your phone breaks down after 23 months on a two year trip to Australia (within the two years), you can go to a store there, have them write down what is wrong and when, and two years later back in the UK they have to fix it.
"Once a product stops being supported, last update should unlock any protection that stops 3rd party OS's being installed, many a good phone or tablet has plenty of life left in them."
So when my phone isn't supported anymore, the manufacturer issues a kill switch that opens my phone up to attacks from any hackers, basically forcing me to stop using it? Think about what you're asking for. "Stops being supported" doesn't mean "stops working".
"Instead of publishing a death date, force the manufacturer to publish the OS as open source, so we don't have to toss a good device into the landfill"
There are two things I don't understand. The first is, how would you justify the government stealing a manufacturer's OS code? The second is, how would having an open source OS stop a good device from being tossed into the landfill?
Wouldn't recycling and making long living devices be much better?
"A male colleague exposed himself to a female colleague."
There are many, many reasons why you would want to get rid of them instantly that have nothing to do with sexual harassment whatsoever. Like you can expect him to sue the company if any dangly bits get caught in the vacuum cleaner. Or for general hygienic reasons. I would go ballistic if I found out he planted his naked backside on my desk, or my chair.
"Woke" comes in two variants: The one where "woke" actually just means "being a decent human being who cares about the people around them", which is obviously a major problem to the holes surrounding them. And the "look I'm woke" brigade, which is actually a tiny minority.
BTW. "Narrative" is one of the words that let you immediately recognise a brain-washed individual. Like "MSM", mentioning "Bill Gates" is also often a sign.
I'd say that if you tell the truth (and not just literally the truth but in a way that nobody will draw wrong conclusions from what you say), then _you_ are not disparaging anyone. Sure, it's possible that a company might disparage itself by its actions, but that's not your fault.
I must have been very lucky. I've worked in companies from $5bn market caps to startups with three employees, and I haven't seen any case where bullying or sexual harassment was accepted. All software companies with women being a small minority, but fortunately with (mentally) adult co-workers who would behave as decent people, always several people who would be protective if needed, but also several women where you wouldn't be protective but get out the popcorn and watch an attempting harasser being thoroughly destroyed :-)
And one case where someone with an unacceptable attitude that he wasn't willing to change is not with the company anymore, since our very non-woke boss has this attitude that everyone should be able to enjoy coming to work every day.
"I am surprised that the judge allowed that level of jury-rigging. Did her council contested that and if so what was the answer?"
You are basing this solely on what the plaintiff claimed. The plaintiff is unlikely to be unbiased here, and the real situation is likely just a little bit different.
What "rounded images" patent? Are you talking about the Bill Atkinson patent that allowed having view with rounded corners are arbitrary shapes to be drawn efficiently? Which IMO was a very well-deserved patent, easily worked around (in a slightly less efficient way), and completely irrelevant today with modern graphics hardware.
From a discussion I read on a non-UK census: Politician says: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Other person: "I thought the idea with a census was that _if_ you have something to hide, you have nothing to fear".
It should be obvious to everyone, even a politician, that having correct information about the population is very valuable. And we can only get correct information about everyone if it is guaranteed that this correct information, which might hurt someone, is guaranteed to not ever get into the wrong hands.
I would make a strong suggestion that MI5 for example should put some request for information to the Office for National Statistics, that the office refuses it, and then gets all newspapers to print the story. Together with all the background given here.
You’re making it worse. Neither of them invented Unicode. You were thinking about utf-8 which is an encoding of Unicode code points, easily described in ten lines and implemented in ten lines of code. You are so infatuated with Stallman, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Ken Thompson calls you a liar as far as UTF-8 is concerned. Stallman wrote a primitive first version of the C pre-processor which shouldn’t take a decent developer more than a week. I don’t care about emacs. But I’m sure that I wouldn’t leave my granddaughters alone with him (not what you think, they would _hurt_ him if he tried anything).
Apple was built on various Pascal compilers, several third party C compilers, Metroworks compilers, MPW. gcc was used for a very short time and they invested lots of money to replace it with something free and better in the form of Clang. So “Apple is based on Open Source software” is quite rubbish. Stallman is actually mainly responsible for Apples switch to Clang.
What I learned is that teachers are by profession always right. And if they are not right, then in countries like the UK they are right because they have the authority. Except obviously they are not. My teachers (not in the UK) knew that with 17 year olds there was just a chance that sometimes a pupil would know better, so “I’m right because I say so” wasn’t happening that much.
"Look at how the mainstream OSs have mushroomed in size."
It depends on what you call "OS". Look at MacOS. What I would call "OS" (the Darwin kernel) is actually tiny. And then there's tons and tons and tons and more tons of software written around it. If Apple decided to replace Darwin with Plan 9, you wouldn't see any difference at all.
To be honest, the census people should keep all the information in your census secret, and the MoD shouldn't trust them to do that, so their advice is totally right. Now where does that leave us if we don't work for the MoD... Same. The census people should keep everything in your census secret, and you shouldn't trust them. As one politician said: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" with the reply "I thought the rule for the census was if you _have_ something to hide you have nothing to fear".