I'm afraid this theory is not based on any real-life experience. Sure, you can made up some theoretically possible architectures where it would be the case, but it is definitely not the case with processors that we have today.

Transition from PowerPC to Intel x86 processors was simpler exactly because x86 has a richer set of commands, and no one forces you to combine many RISC instructions in one complex CISC instruction, because all modern x86 processors run the microcode internally, so they as efficient with simple instructions as RISC processors. There are a few simple patterns that you can use to improve code density and perhaps performance, but doing so is a child play.

The real problem with code translation is not the difference in instruction sets but in memory ordering. PowerPC and ARM are more weakly-ordered than x86, so it is relatively straightforward to translate their code to x86 -- you do not need to add any extra memory barrier that did not exist in the original code.

On the other hand, if you translate any multithreaded x86 code to more a more weakly-ordered CPU, you have to detect where additional memory barriers are necessary, and that is complicated even for very simple cases, and it cannot be done in general, so you end up adding many more memory barriers than it is really necessary, which is bad for performance.

You may ask how does x86 perform well despite being stronger-ordered? The key to that is leveraging speculative execution capacity that all modern x86 have, but you can't do the same thing in software.

You can't do that, because that internal translator heavily relies on information that is available only at runtime as well as on some specialized hardware features, such as speculative execution.

Could you provide links to those studies, because as far as I know, studies have produced mixed results. Some of them showed no difference, for example: https://www.frontiersin.org/ar...

Some others showed better results for e-books. For example, most students with dyslexia were better with e-books:
https://journals.plos.org/plos...

Some studies looked at adults and found that they were better with printed books. For example:
https://www.academia.edu/78681...

While there is not enough data to draw a firm conclusion, I would not be surprised if it is a matter of one's habit than anything else.

Sorry, I meant to say: they can NOT be "dead" or "alive"

Viruses are not living organisms, so they can be "dead" or "alive", but "inactive" or "active".

There are different types of vaccines, and some of them based on inactivated viruses, some others are based on attenuated virus, and some others are based on other processes. There are advantages and disadvantages of each type as discussed in this lecture: https://youtu.be/SEYa0R62nWk?t...

The problem with the article is that the author does not understand the problem that we have now. It is not that we do not have something that can act like a vaccine (there are over 60 potential candidates already), but how to ensure their safety and effectiveness. Unfortunately, that takes a lot of time to do that properly.

BTW, another issue with some vaccines is whether they can be mass-produced cheaply and in large quantities to vaccinate the whole population. I heard that one vaccine that is far ahead of others in terms of clinical trials cannot be mass-produced. So even if it is approved, it will be available only in small quantities and be rather costly. Of course, eventually we will have a cheap, effective, and widely available vaccine, but it will take time to get there.

That's not true. The 737 MAX is NOT dynamically unstable in any part of its flight envelope. The plane is perfectly safe without MCAS. The reason why MCAS was added is to make the 737 MAX behave like its predecessors, which sped up the certification process and avoid the need for airlines to retrain their pilots (which is rather expensive).

Though speed and memory efficiency were important, I don't think those were primary reasons why people started to ditch IE.

One of serious problem was security. IE used many Windows interfaces, which often were not designed to deal with untrusted data. As Microsoft tried to integrate IE with Windows as tightly as possible, there was no clear boundaries for security audit of the code. Moreover, having a majority of users meant that IE was a very attractive target for all malware.

Another problem is the lack of any significant improvement over long time. Even something trivial as 'tabs' took long time to add. When it came to improvement to the rendering engine, there were hardly any improvement over many years. This is probably due to the fact, that Microsoft did not develop this rendering engine but bought another company that had a very good rendering engine (which is why Microsoft jumped so ahead of Netscape with release of IE4). However, many developers left soon after Microsoft bought it. Also Microsoft had policy to keep full backward compatibility, which was good for Intranet solutions, but it was a serious challenging if you want to remove some quirks in the IE code, or add some latest Web standard feature.

There is one serious problem with growing popularity of cyber insurances. Usually, cyber-insurance companies encourage their ransomware victims to pay for decryption keys, because it is the cheapest option for them (at least, in the short-term). However, that makes file-locking malware attacks much worse in the long run.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

If you looked at PC sales, their rapid growth ended in 2008, and PC sales peaked in 2011 and have declined each year ever since. Traditionally, when people buy a new PC, they often buy new software or software updates. This reduction of PC sales hurt many software companies. In addition to that, more people started to use free alternatives. Also, the EU court decided that reselling used software licenses is legal. All of that combined with popularity of cloud services moved many companies towards the SaaS model.

Also most price increase came from cheaper apps, which probably means that many those early apps were under-priced to gain a larger market share, and now the companies are trying to make profit on their initial investment.

IMHO, the best summary of what can be done to counteract quantum algorithms: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/3...

Intel reported that it did (expect Spectre variant 1): https://www.anandtech.com/show...

AFAIK, Spectre variant 1 affects all processors with speculative execution, and there is no known fix for it without unacceptable high performance penalty.

It is much more difficult to raise venture capital in Europe, because of different culture only a small percent of all investment goes to venture capital. For example, in the UK, 4% of British investment goes to venture capital, compared to about 33% in the U.S. Also Europe is not a single country, and each country tries to promote its own technological centers, which means you don't have a single talent pool, so it is more difficult for any successful company to grow.

The key difference between Airbus and Boeing is that Airbus has never relied on a single source of data, while Boeing did. A320 has never affected by unreliable data reading, but the modified version of the algorithm used in A330/A340 contained a bug, which could lead under certain conditions to a pitch-down command due to multiple spikes of incorrect reading from just one of ADIRUs.

We do not know all facts yet, but it looks like Boeing’s decision to base its MCAS system on a single source of data was very reckless, especially after they increased the limit from 0.6 to 2.5 degrees.

Most mental abilities do not decline significantly in otherwise healthy individuals as they age, but multitasking gets more difficult with age. So you need to adjust how you work to reduce interruptions when it's feasible.

Accordingly to the article: "Starting with this version [version 2.3.9], the Apache HTTPD server got an option that would allow server owners to ignore custom security settings made to individual folders via .htaccess files. This setting was made for security reasons, was enabled by default, and remained so for all subsequent Apache HTTPD server releases."

I wonder how many other plugins are silently broken due to this change.

When the “View As” feature was developed, the motto was "Move Fast and Break Things." Should we be surprised that this feature is broken?

Clearly, moving fast is very important for any company that wants to be successful, but if you prioritize speed over security, it is going to catch with you later. Security bugs are different from regular software bugs in that you may never find out about them until serious damage is already done. Therefore the idea "let's move fast and fix a few bugs later" never works well when it comes to security.