In Argentina the ban went into effect this year, and it was (surprisingly) fairly painless because of Halogen lamps which naturally replaced traditional lightbulbs. They are dimmable, and the color temperature is almost the same, and only slightly more expensive.

The thing is that even the way they relate to their customers is different. For example, once a customer came to visit Oracle HQ (it was a large European bank that shall remain unnamed) and I got pulled for some technical question that they had regarding an old version of some product.

I found astonishing to see the way the customers asked for things. The power play was reversed, rather than the vendor trying to convince the customer that his was the right way, it was the other way around. It was the customer trying (even begging) to sell us on some ideas that we should consider including in our roadmap for the next two or three years (pretty pleaasee?).

I actually was acquired by Oracle, so I started in a small company, and ended up in the belly of the beast. So I was used to thing being the other way around, more like having demands from customers, or we'll go to other vendor. In this case it was more like: we'll buy anyway, but please add this, it will make our lives a lot easier.

I'm not defending them, but an Oracle-size company is a very unusual beast. At the very least it should not be surprising that it takes them some time to move.

Oracle is a huge organisation. I mean mindbogglingly huge (think planet Vogon). There is a lot of red tape that you have to cut to get anything done, and in 4 months they're probably still scheduling meetings to figure out if it should be fixed, and when, and by whom.

Unless an SVP gets involved, it's unlikely that it will be rushed.

Actually Apple does not license technology.So, you basically can't use it.

if that happens, we'll become a LOT more expensive.

Not really, there are very good router manufacturers, such as TP-Link (it's a chinese brand, but they're really good). Their software is much better than CISCO Linksys or D-Link, and if you don't like it, most support DD-WRT, etc.

Let me say that one more time: you should never outsource your core business

It's fine to outsource non-critical parts of your business, but never your core. I would think that building software is at the core of the company based on what you describe, and it should be treated as such, but apparently management at your company doesn't seem to think so.

I'm from a 220V country, they last only if you don't turn them on/off often. For example, the ones in the bathroom burn out every 3 to 6 months (I tried Philips, GE and Osram). What usually breaks is the power source/starter.

It might be way worse. Since this updates the stack pointer, it might be exploitable.

It depends on the vaccine, some vaccines are designed to also spread to the community. The most well known example is the oral poliovirus vaccine, which spreads through contact to others (because it uses attenuated live viruses).

For some diseases, you have more than one option (again, polio for example) the choice of which one is used mainly depends on epidemiological considerations, which are made at a population level (i.e. herd).

We used that approach for PBL some years ago. It is wasteful to having to rewrite parsers and lexers for languages to build IDEs, and other tooling.

For example, code indentation can be done by walking the AST (you need to be careful to preserve hidden tokens, such as comments).

You can also allow code completion by changing the compiler to accept a "COMPLETION" token in some places in the grammar. Then, from the editor, when someone presses "Ctrl+SPACE" (or whatever) you mark the location in the lexer and send the code to the compiler. When you build the ast, you insert a completion node in the AST, and you have now contextual information about what can go in there and produce a list of potential things that can go in there.

Also, syntax highlighting can use the lexer for basic coloring and some type information to then add more information (such as what are field, or functions, etc.)

What's new is exposing these phases in a standardized manner in the language. That's a bold move, since backward compatibility will be tricky to maintain. Maybe they're thinking in finally stabilizing C#.

They also sell the "safe" version but if you want it, it costs way more than the other version (and usually is just the same product or older and well-known product, plus insurance). As the recolidesnake said, this is can be very very expensive.

This is going to be a rant.

Firefox is the most pedantic browser out there. It is way better than IE, but it's always working against the user. The timeouts in the accept buttons, the stubborn refusal to accept invalid certificates (there is no way to bypass its, which means I cannot use it to configure my router), the awful memory management and the obnoxious update mechanism made me finally switch to Chrome.

They sacrificed all usability for reasons that escape me. What moron thought that forcing the user to wait in order to click a button was a good idea? How much has security improved because of that? I would guess that not much.

The only advantage it used to have was the huge selection of plugins to configure it to your taste (in the end I only use AdBlock), and that is lost already since pretty much anything you need is also available for Chrome.

I keep it around just in case some site doesn't work with Chrome (which are not many), but that's it.

You should use a combination of methods and be prepared to move your backups to a new place every few years.

For off-site backups I use Backblaze which is just $3.96 a month unlimited storage if you buy two years (these are the guys that build a half a petabyte custom servers). I also backup to a removable drive every once in a while that I keep in the office.

Maybe once a year, I pick the very best pictures and print them and build an album. Even cheap photo paper lasts at least 50 years. Archival quality lasts over 100 years if stored properly.

There are many projects like this. Many times crowdsourced translations are better than professional translations, and for many situations they are the only option.

Languages like spanish have a huge number of variations (it's pretty much different in every country, heck, even inside the same country), and we end up enduring a washed-up version of an international spanish that's usually awful. Crowdsourced translations at least let you correct the translation and add variations that feel better for a speakers of a certain variation of the language.

One good example of this type of crowdsourced effort is subtitles. See "subtitulos.es" for example. You can get a complete movie or series chapter translated in a few hours. From the basic result obtained there, several teams around the world further localize the language (for example to Argentinian spanish).