One day...
The boffins and boffinettes will learn to speak English and I'll know what they're talking about. Either that or I will have to learn Boffinish. Every day a little bit more hope drains from my world.
130 posts • joined 16 Mar 2018
When I was a civil servant 40 years ago hardly any data sharing between government departments was allowed. For low clearance staff departments had no access to criminal records and instead personnel departments collected press cuttings relating to staff with convictions. When I later worked on computerising HR functions of a department I was amazed at the number of people whose careers had been stopped in their tracks without their knowledge because they were unlucky enough to have a local reporter write up their conviction. Now the pendulum is swinging too far in the other direction.
"Netflix remains (very) profitable"
Netflix has only been reasonably profitable for 3 out of the last 12 years. It has accumulated over $15 billion in debt which it services by being a cashflow business. It's incredibly dependent on the US, UK, Brazil and, to a lesser extent, Germany. The US and UK are incredibly overcrowded markets which have only shown revenue growth because of price increases and consumers not being overly price sensitive. That's all changing because inflation is running riot. There's good reason to worry about Netflix because if it loses too many subscribers it can't afford content which means it loses more subscribers. Available content is dwindling because content owners want their own streaming services and unlike them Netflix doesn't have other significant revenue streams.
The BBC renegotiated its Terms of Trade with independent producers that it commissions programmes from. Previously it had a one month IPlayer window now it has one year window with outside commissions which it can then extend non-exclusively in return for dropping its UK commercial exploitation cut from 25% to 20% and its international exploitation cut from 12.5% to 10%.
In Netflix's two biggest markets (the US and UK) it is certainly close to saturation with subscription count being equal to around 20% of overall population. Places like Germany and France hover around 13% so there's room to grow in those places. Unfortunately, Netflix makes over half its revenue from 4 countries even though it has a presence in 190 countries.
What you are describing is the equivalent of old fashioned cfront. When C++ came out there were no native compilers so cfront emitted C and the C was compiled. It was an unholy mess. For example, when templates came out cfront would create a .pty directory and emit often hundreds of C source file to speculatively represent each specialisation possible of the parameterised types. LLVM is a vast improvement on that approach.
Corporates will never shift the hoi poloi to Macs. The vast majority of their users send emails, write Word documents, watch cats being cats on YouTube and order shit off Amazon. Moving to very expensive and very fragile Macs makes no sense.
So, companies can get loans at 3% if they don't lay off staff and index wages. The rest of the world, quite rightly, intends tanking the Russian economy creating all of the attendant inflation that entails. What use is a debt service cost of 3% if the inflation rate is 20% (at least) and I have to lock wages to inflation and retain staff? The only way the 3% service cost can be provided is by money printing which feeds inflation which feeds the cost of indexed salaries which feeds my need to borrow more money which is, by definition, an inflationary spiral. The only way out is to remove the locks of cheap lending, enforced indexing and staff retention.
"I guess your idea of writing multithreaded code is to FORK and manually use IPC, rather than just using async and letting the runtime manage it.
Just because you can spend your life debugging race conditions, doesn't mean you should.
Or is all your code strictly single-threaded, and runs a single processor core at 100% whilst leaving the other 7 idle?"
Async/await in C# is nothing to do with multithreading. When an async function hits an await the function becomes split at that point and the code following gets wrapped as a completion routine which gets processed on the same synchronisation context so execution can return to the caller while it completes during idle time on the same thread. The async modifier indicates that the return result of the function will be wrapped in a Task generic for that type which can be awaited on. The code only becomes multithreaded if you create another Task on which you call Run. In most cases you remain single threaded and your code has full thread affinity. In short async can allow you to make optimum use of the synchronisation context to do different things while waiting whereas multithreading allows you to make use of multiple synchronisation contexts to do things in parallel. The reason async applications which are busy appear to be shared over multiple cores is scheduler hopping which may continue a thread on a different core to the one it was paused on. It's still one thread.
The Windows message loop has always been required even in the dread days of writing applications in C and still today in C#. I started as a C developer and the version 2.0 of MFC which you are misremembering was a nightmare but not as big a one as MFC 1.0 with C++ 7 which came in a box a yard long for the manuals in the shadow of OLE 2 (which later became COM) when you hand crafted virtual function tables. No sane person would today write a desktop presentation layer from scratch using even the latest version of MFC. It's not about handholding. It's common sense.
Employees might have to go to work. Shockwaves spread throughout the technology sector today when a leading employer suggested people it pays should turn up for work. Amnesty International would have issued a statement condemning the move but there was no one available in their Indignant Directorate to issue a statement due to staff shortages. However, Russell Wilson of the Information and Technology Workers Union called from his seafront retreat in the Bahamas to reject out of hand all forms of modern day slavery in the industry.
Possibly but he was clearly at both ends of the deal in that he influenced the buying and profited from the selling. If the company was unaware (or could reasonably argue that they were) that he was actually the buying decision maker but simply an intermediary charging markup the directors could be spared pokey. It's the degree of separation from the buyer that ends up being an important factor when selling in a no questions asked world.
Under the Cooksley criteria it is highly unlikely Anne Saccoolas would spend time in prison. The circumstances fall under category 1 (out of 4 with 1 being the least serious) which carries a sentencing guideline of 12 months to 2 years with the sentence suspended for someone with no previous convictions. Before 1988 hardly anyone was imprisoned for the equivalent of causing death by dangerous driving and even when the offence was created it only allowed for a 5 year maximum. It's gradually had the possible sentence increased to up to 14 years but she is, at worst, guilty in a category 1 sense only.
Which I expect him to do before undergoing top level training in appearing autistic, suicidal and desperately sad. In other news Google has seen a marked spike in searches for embassies of nations without an extradition treaty with the US in walking distance of the High Court. Mr Lynch, a notable Chinese citizen and staunch defender of the CCP, was seen earlier today shaking hands with the Chinese ambassador before boarding a Eurostar to Paris, his ancestral home, to reclaim his French citizenship. In a brief exchange with reporters he denied categorically having any knowledge that France does not extradite its citizens outside the European Union: "Non, non Je ne sais rien about les matters such" he exclaimed before being rushed to hospital with a possibly fatal illness for which there is no treatment in the US which tragically renders its sufferers unfit to face trial.
I'm in England and in English law:
(1) A person is guilty of burglary if—
(a) he or she enters any building or part of a building as a trespasser and with intent to commit any such offence as is mentioned in subsection (2) below; or
(b) having entered any building or part of a building as a trespasser he steals or attempts to steal anything in the building or that part of it or inflicts or attempts to inflict on any person therein any grievous bodily harm.
(2) The offences referred to in subsection (1)(a) above are offences of stealing anything in the building or part of a building in question, of inflicting on any person therein any grievous bodily harm ... therein, and of doing unlawful damage to the building or anything therein.
(3) A person guilty of burglary shall on conviction on indictment be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding—
(a) where the offence was committed in respect of a building or part of a building which is a dwelling, fourteen years;
(b) in any other case, ten years.
(4) References in subsections (1) and (2) above to a building, and the reference in subsection (3) above to a building which is a dwelling, shall apply also to an inhabited vehicle or vessel, and shall apply to any such vehicle or vessel at times when the person having a habitation in it is not there as well as at times when he is.][2]
A contractor on £700 a day who operates under an umbrella and pays full employer's class 1 NIC can still sacrifice £91 a day in salary to put £24,500 a year into his pension with the taxman throwing in another £15,500 to meet the allowed maximum to take home £6,866 a month all clear and avoid the 45% bracket altogether. Cry me a river. Yes, I am such a contractor.
The reason why manufacturers have a "recycle" option is to starve the remanufacture market. Currently many charities distribute postage paid cartridge bags which send empty cartridges to a London company. The company pays the charities a few pennies to the for every filled bag. The company refills the cartridges and re-brands them for major retailers. By offering a recycle option the manufacturers disrupt this market and rob from the charities at the same time.
The majority of remanufactured cartridges in the UK and, indeed, Europe are manufactured by one North London company called Environmental Business Products. If you buy an own brand cartridge from a major retailer it more than likely comes from them.
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