Just
So.
944 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2009
Is just like any other goods or service and should be treated as such. If they do not work as described, then they are not fit for purpose. The consumer Rights Act 2015 and the amended Sale Of Goods Act 1979 are quiet clear on that. Well, in the UK at least. Other jurisdictions may vary.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/notes/division/3/1/4
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/faulty-goods-digital-content-services/
I think that if a council area is run into bankruptcy (section 114 notice), then all the responsible elected officers should be bared from office and the whole council should be put up for re-election. Letting the same bunch of councilors that caused the issue (or at least didn't deal with previous issues) try to fix them seems ludicrous.
It's not the public that make the decisions on which CPU architecture to use, which language is better for which task, which development environment to use, whether to develop and support your own code or trust some crap off the internet, which OS brings the best blend of features and risks or any other of these types of system decisions. The public are innocent bystanders in a drive by shooting.
We choose the gun (and the car) and it's usually the cheapest the company can get away with.
Take your pick on abstraction. VME had libraries where each library only contained one type of thing, usually some sort of file but it could be other sorts of objects. The library contained the information the OS needed to do things with that sort of object. Oh, and all of the access controls etc. No one bothered where they actually were stored (they certainly weren't all in the same physical location, or even logical location) unless you were like me and tasked with performance.
It could have been worse. You might have majored in Javascript. Python is just wrong, C is a horrible set of compromises, and dBase?
You mention cost a lot. I would posit that the cost of using inappropriate languages and systems is far higher than that of the odd training course (do they still exist?) and a bit of time to get you head around some syntax or concept. Look around at the mess that is the current insecure, bloated, bug ridden, untested, etc. etc. set of systems we have to use. All built on top of built to the lowest cost hardware. The risk and the real cost have been passes on to us, the users. It's our data that gets stolen, it's our photographs that get 'lost', it's our time that gets wasted, it's our infrastructure that gets hacked, it's our cars that won't work without an internet connection, it's...
What we have now is so so much less than it might have been if the cost of making the poor decisions had been truly taken into account and not just the profit of whichever tech company was selling it's wares.
/end rant
ICLs Goldrush used a chorus system microkernel with a special high speed IPC system that was implemented in both software and hardware. Basically cut out any (well most) buffer copying. This meant that calls coming and going across the user land/system land boundary were not copied (fancy memory protection hardware) and between node IPC (fancy low latency network hardware) calls were addressed as if local. Goldrush was a true UNIX implementing a version of SVR4. Seems to be forgotten now.
Don't see any reason Apple or any other company has to provide one feature or another with it's operating system.
Now this withdrawal of a previously available feature may piss off people that use it but this is hardly the first time OS providers (and others like network and service providers) have done that. It may seem to be high handed and petulant, given it's geo location boundaries and its introduction due to a piece of national (well, super national) legislation but it's hardly the only differences in OS provision due to national location. This is an inevitable result of nations passing different and varied laws within their jurisdictions. Features and services provided by OS are there by the will of the provider. If they decide that feature X or Y is either no longer necessary or too much hassle or too expensive or whatever, then it would seem to me that they are in no way obliged to keep it. If that decision ends up being detrimental to the company, then it probably was a bad decision. Companies make bad decisions all the time.
There are times when things such as anti-trust laws may muddy the waters and in the way that US law enforcers seem to think their laws apply everywhere but this case seems straight forward. The EU passed a law demanding that if Apple provided OS feature X within it's jurisdiction, then it had to be available to other OS users and not just internal Apple developers. Apple has looked at this and decided that the best (easiest, cheapest, best, most secure... take your pick) way of complying with this law so that it can still provide it's products within this jurisdiction, was to just not provide the feature within the EU. A perfectly good way of complying with the law if likely to piss off to those who use the feature within the EU.
Companies are amoral beasts. I doubt there is anything more that self interest and money behind this decision.
Space isn't. No ones going to hear you scream but pressure waves do propagate in the thin stuff that makes up what we puny humans call the vacuum of space.
So what is the speed of sound in space. It varies depending upon the density of space but is approx 10-100 Km per second. The exhaust gasses coming out of a liquid fueled rocket nozzle have a speed of about 4.5 Km per second. So, not supersonic with reference to moons (lack of) atmosphere.
History shows us the solution. Most stay put, farm and attempt to defend their wealth. Others travel around and steel the wealth from those who stay put. There are also the fringe bands that travel to stay close to moving resources such as migrating animals. In time those that raided tend to join in with the subset of the stay-putters that defended the farms and offer to 'protect' the farming communities from their neighbors. Thus are kings and nations born. The nomads never get a look in. Best not to have an apocalypse as none of it sounds fun.
If there was a load of anti-mater in the universe we would certainly be able to 'see' as it interacts with normal mater quiet well. Dark mater on the other hand, if is actually exists, keeps itself to itself as far as interacting with the stuff we can see. Oh, and by the way, we can 'see' quiet a long way, almost back to when the first stars were forming.
p.s. As for an equal amount of mater and anti-mater at the beginning, still just a theory. There is some wiggle room with the CERN experiment which might yet show that anti-mater behaves differently than mater in some crucial way which might account for it's lack of existence in the universe we observe. Perhaps it might go some way to explain why less anti-mater than matter formed during the big bang leaving the mater we can see. Or, perhaps we are just wrong about the big bang and all that.