Over the years and many phones and networks MMS has always been that thing that never actually worked. What's funny is that I noticed recently it started to get more consistently reliable but who cares because that which isn't Signal, Whatsapp or even RCS is irrelevant.

They have been doing their utmost to go against what their users want for years now so I suppose the answer would be... yes?

It's common for people to skip checks when they feel it's safe to do so. In this case it definitely wasn't safe to trust the Content-Length parameter of the server. But this is also why the bug is less scary than it's made out to be as it needs a webserver on your network to also be compromised so that your network booting machines fetch a malicious payload. It's probably a nice wake up call for people affected that they maybe should look into https and certificate checking so that a compromised host couldn't pull this off when someone finds another bug somewhere down the line.

If that was the goal the way people implemented it served exactly the opposite. A typical key/value pair .conf with some mis-typed parameters typically would throw a warning or two and fill in some defaults for anything you missed. Programs which used XML based configs on the other hand were pretty much guaranteed to stack dump on an unhandled exception. It was a running joke about Apache/Tomcat servers that they'd always be down because someone put a & in a field somewhere and now the XML interchange format that stored it is failing validation, raising an exception which goes unhandled and results in a hard exit.

Of course nobody HAS to write it this way. But they will. Because the default is hard failure and making it robust and capable of handling less than ideal data is not obvious when you're dealing with 3rd party libraries as a result of the golden rule being "thou shalt not generate nor parse XML oneself."

I'm more than fuzzy on the details but wasn't the 1st gen ipod actually lame? As in it was the 2nd gen that fixed many of the biggest complaints and THEN it became the worldwide phenomenon? Similarly just because the apple watch is a huge success NOW doesn't mean that it was always so. In other words maybe the future will be Apple Vision and various clones but history tells us that you don't want Rev1 of an apple product unless you are an influencer of some kind.

In the UK it's often easier to remove a privilege from the entire workforce than it is to reprimand a single employee who was abusing it. And hell mend you if you dare to remove a privilege from said abusing employee, that's discrimination and you'll probably lose the fight. Now, I'm not saying that this is actually the law, I'm just saying that this was the sequence of events that really occurred to the company I work for. My experience is that employment tribunals are more about the feels than the facts and the law is malleable to allow the judge to punish companies they just don't like.

People use "conspiracy theorist" to shut down questions they don't like. Smart people have concerns about things they don't understand but are clever enough to realise there's a conflict of interest, apparent bias or a laundering of the truth. They bring up a point that based on the limited information they have seems like a perfectly reasonable concern and they get shouted down by people who don't like that they are questioning their "betters." Generally all that's necessary is to explain how the process of CPI adjustment is achieved and show how it's historically amended and all of a sudden it doesn't seem so much like the government is leaning on people to fudge the numbers to make their economic policy look better than it is. But you don't get that. You instead get angry people calling you a conspiracy theorist for asking the question and angry people on the other side calling it a conspiracy with cherry picked facts and well, one side is telling you to shut up and the other is bringing (dodgy) evidence, so is it any wonder people latch onto the conspiracy nuts over the long haul?

On macs the ability to scroll a window by pointing at it and using the scroll wheel without actually affecting what currently has focus is right up there with my favourite features. That and "click-through" where you can activate AND action a clickable thing from an inactive window in a single click. GUIs where you have to click to activate then click the element feel so much more sluggish by comparison.

I wasn't a big mac user before OSX but surely it wasn't something as simple as an application infinite looping? Because I mean the hardware was completely capable of pre-emptive multi-tasking and memory protection, but the OS couldn't be built to take advantage of that without breaking compatibility, however that doesn't preclude the kernel simply using a smidgin of pre-emptiveness to give users an un-blockable way to Cmd-Opt-Escape any hung program. Obviously I never "lived the dream" of those days so I'm just speculating, but surely it had to be a system extension crashing or a program trashing memory that shouldn't belong to it and not something as simple as a program that just didn't cede control in a reasonable time? What little I saw of people's macs during that time was hundreds of 3rd party extensions being loaded. Just like drivers on win9x, you're bringing some 3rd party's code into your kernel then blaming Cupertino/Redmond for the crashes...

I have a machine that gets used for steam games and kodi and while I also haven't reinstalled it since win10 came out (and even that was an upgrade) windows definitely gets "crufty" even if you aren't installing and uninstalling system level stuff all day. I bet many of the weird performance issues and sudden inescapable long waits that happen on simple tasks would go away if I reinstalled, but to be honest next install probably won't be windows as I think it's about time I get away from the beast of redmond.

Windows just accumulates damage because there's so many competing methods to achieve similar goals, all supported and all used by various services in different amounts and all with surprise penalties once certain limits are breached with seemingly no automatic way to trim the fat when it happens. There are machines at work that do nothing but run firefox on an intranet that I just leave rebooting themselves for default windows update and over the years they just get "weird." Nobody is doing anything to them, windows is doing it to itself, and a reinstall fixes it. I had 3 laptops just infinitely bootloop on the last round of updates because they were in a box for 6 months. Apparently some update issued 6 months ago can't be patched with today's patches in a way that resolves even after 24 hours of "windows is preparing updates". A reinstall fixes it.

Linux tends to "just work" because it replaces your installed system with a set of files from the current, no layering necessary. Problems only occur when you've been editing configurations and then it tends to warn you of that before the next reboot.

I agree but there's a limit. Writing stuff down helps to memorise it right up until you burn out of whatever resource your consuming to memorise whatever you're writing down. After a point it becomes a mechanical task devoid of conscious thought. I only bring it up because I've had teachers who didn't understand this and sentenced their classes to extended periods of copying. If it was "keep them quiet" busywork I'd at least understand, but the "it will help you remember" fallacy was annoying when it was likely having the opposite effect in most.

Agreed and further to that back in the 80s I had several manuals that were thumbed and dog eared from over use and I could find what I needed really quickly... however it was largely because it was all the reference material I had and reading and re-reading to try and glean some hidden insight was the best I could achieve. Nowadays if this PDF doesn't do it for me, then I'll not waste time and I'll go find some other source. It's amazing how often I have to deal with convoluted descriptions of badly made REST APIs that require juggling several different references and a special ability to divine meaning from drivel but a simple google gets me a working example that suddenly makes all the pieces slot into place. Payment providers are the worst. I'm not looking to copy/paste your code, I just need a concise order of operations that makes your bag of spiders behave, thanks.

This was back when engines were going console friendly multi-core and were performing surprisingly sub-optimally on dual-core systems. Anything they could do to avoid having to make a dual-core optimised build was fair game and a few percentage points off for using uncompressed audio might have made the difference between 60fps and stuttery 55.

As much as the total societal collapse preppers buying gold is dumb, they've got a stopped clock thing going on where they have been doing rather well out of their gold thanks to higher than desired inflation (but not runaway). The people who are telling others that gold is a bad investment because in the event of collapse it's just as worthless are missing the forest for the trees. Their money will get frittered away to nothing by a bad economy while the preppers get a great start on the new society thanks to all the value holding assets they held for a dumb reason. There's too much binary thinking and too many instances of people thinking they are the clever one by refusing to do something sensible just because it would put them in spitting distance of the crazy people (who are probably not that crazy, they just know the youtube algorithm likes collpase bunker content.)

True, but what people in that situation have found is that sometimes the bank's solution to the problem is to call in the debt. You were quite happy with your appreciating assets and the debt that bought them, but the bank gave you the loan contingent on being allowed to re-evaluate your credit worthiness at any time and if they decide you're not good for it anymore, they force your hand. Smaller debts tend to be completely unsecured and the bank can't change their minds, but the big debts that companies operate on? Yeah, those don't work like your credit card and the bank has solutions to problems you've given them that you aren't going to like.