Microsoft tried to ditch the technical debt twice, and it almost cost them their business each time.

WinRT, along with the mandate that all applications be UWP, was meant to be the foundation of that. Once migrated, the legacy plumbing could have been ripped out from underneath, but doing so took away the entire point of using Windows in the first place, and so consumers rejected it. Forcing it any further would have resulted in a mass exodus to anything that isn't completely crippled in terms of application availability. It's also what inspired Valve to start supporting Linux for gaming, as there was a sense of existential dread that they might not have a PC platform to sell to which didn't involve Microsoft as a gatekeeper and adverse competitor.

The second attempt was with MSIX packaging and the use of AppContainer technology, with the idea that if developers could be corralled into using a subset of modern APIs, that Microsoft could once again rip out all of the legacy plumbing, this time without upsetting everyone, who would now have plenty of time to adapt slowly to all the changes. But, instead of choosing Microsoft Windows APIs, developers simply chose cross platform technologies instead, and this put Microsoft in an even worse position than with UWP, as there was no going back. Not wanting to look irrelevant to shareholders, Microsoft threw their hat in the ring and pushed for technologies like React and competed with Electron using WebView2, only to make the problem worse.

Which brings us to where we are today, with Microsoft having to support three modern application development stacks that nobody wants to use, and several dead legacy ones, where ABI compatibility and developer familiarity with legacy APIs being the only thing preventing everyone from leaving. So, it's not like they didn't try, they just tried and failed too many times...

On a technical level, LED strips with opposing hues either side of the subject throws off the frontier models involved in nudity detection. You can see this in effect on YouTube daily, where sexual content bypasses filters for weeks or months at a time until some prude actually reports it, at which point, a stricter check is performed. Said stricter checks cannot occur on the client side on mobile platforms in practice (no reporting mechanisms in the first place) and the models on a resource constrained smartphone have to respect battery life and avoid tanking performance by design.

Then on a regulatory level, politicians are pretending that the people producing sexually explicit content aren't doing so knowingly and that the consumers of it aren't knowingly wanting to view it. The language of treating viewers as victims means that there's naturally zero penalty for young people discovering loopholes to exploit and share explicit content anyway. We saw this in effect with OnlyFans when people who were underage sidestepped ID checks to make money while attending school. Nobody got prosecuted as a result, and nobody could be because everyone got to claim they were a victim, including the parents who admitted to knowing what was going on. British teenagers willingly creating content, their British parents willingly allowing it to happen and the paying British viewers willingly funding it all had plausible deniability on their side, and all of them blamed OnlyFans who actually did all the necessary reasonable checks which were asked of them.

Everyone involved on all extremes of the ensuing debate became an absolute laughing stock, especially the politicians, and now everyone who isn't involved is being punished for it, without a single person actually being protected in any way from any actual harm. Business as usual...

This is basically what proper commercial Linux distributions (RHEL, SLE) do for their paying customers. They cherry pick fixes most months and then on a timed schedule, release actual version bumps after they've been community-tested in upstream distributions. It guarantees that someone out there will pick up on the problems before they strike without making things too stale. The catch is that developers need to stick to well known, vetted stuff that's older, a habit most offshore devs just can't seem to get into...

They said employer. Of course self-employed people are expected to use their own tools, as they are their own employer.

People do not have to authenticate in any way to use most websites, this makes their accesses to those sites anonymous if they take some simple precautions. The governments of the world wish to change that.

It can be reproduced with Qt apps, Microsoft Edge and many other pieces of software. It is not an Outlook bug but a Windows bug, where the hardware cursor vanishes during typing and doesnâ(TM)t come back when it is meant to. If you turn on cursor trails, which are software rendered, the problem goes away.

You can work around this with editing HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse: MouseTrails to be -1 to get a software rendered cursor, without any visible trails, to make everything work as expected again.

Just one of many tricks I am forced to roll out everywhere to work around developer incompetence.

What users are talking about differs from what the developers are talking about.

From a user standpoint, network transparency is possible with waypipe with all the same caveats and limitations of using it with modern X11-compatible software. People right now can directly compare the two and see they are both equally hobbled for anything built in the last decade. If all you want to run is a bunch of GTK+ or early GTK2 software standalone over an SSH session, then X11 will still have an advantage, but that still works, and will remain working over XWayland using X11 forwarding just as it did with Xorg anyway!

From the developer standpoint, modern X11-compatible software uses 3D acceleration via OpenGL, EGL or Vulkan to draw everything client-side, merely handing over the completed result to Xorg for it to then display. This means that modern applications are no longer technically network transparent under X11, as there is no sending of the draw commands over the network as the protocol intends, as everything has already been drawn before X11 is involved. Developers are thus right to claim nobody uses X11 network transparency any more as modern software is all developed in a manner which prevents the software from benefitting from it.

The same also became true on Windows with RDP when developers stopped using GDI objects as the mainstay of their applications. Microsoft inherited the same problem with modern software as Linux did and was forced to invent custom codecs and methods to efficiently separate said text from images, sending the rest as glorified H264/H265 video with some cached tiles thrown in where they make sense instead. Despite a lack of network transparency, nobody seems to have much of an issue with RDSes utilizing RemoteApp in this manner either.

The IRC network operators need only claim that NSFW chats are against the rules, which means no age checks needed, as it is not social media. As users do not have profiles and nobody is inherently identifiable, this means it only falls under the purview of OSA, and even then, assessments are only against what facilities the server can provide, not what clients can do on top of it.

This means people can use GPG to prove their own pseudonyms combined with OTR plugins to send encrypted comms which IRCOPs cannot observe. Private chats, file or image sharing can flow via obfuscated DCC, bypassing the server entirely without any legal comeback for network operators.

The law was written to enforce restrictions for web slop, and that is all it can really be enforced for.

I hope they do slow down to force developers to continue to target lower spec hardware and to give smaller indie teams a chance to wipe the floor with the giants that have been abusing their market positions for a while now.

One side teaches you to blame the immigrants while the other tells you that they are economically beneficial because diversity is our strength.

Both are wrong. Both spread propaganda and lies.

The real problem is that most cabinet politicians are useless at governing anything, and should probably be replaced by actual subject matter experts who actually understand the domain they are responsible for.

Good luck with that though, as actual experts are often too boring and uncharismatic to be voted in.

Uh huh...I totally didn't see a portrayal of senseless violence on the homepage without being logged in, no sir. There totally isn't a glut of entertainers shilling addictive F2P games and cleverly disguised lewdness either, not at all.

Sure, people couch some of the content with commentary and explanations, but this is done to allow people to be entertained by it without it being banned. The Chinese manipulate algorithms the same way we do, and the end result is no better.

We would have a fully usable Windows XP from the leaked source code as a base for both Wine and ReactOS instead, no reverse engineering needed. That is not the only example of decent leaks either. Also, the reason reverse engineering takes as long as it does is because to make it legal we have to do it in a clean room manner, take that away and people can straight up decompile a lot of software for a head start.

He only uses copyright law to enforce that people cannot share binaries without also offering to provide the source code because of copyright. If copyright laws did not exist, most proprietary software would be but one source code leak away from becoming free software, and even if it never leaked, reverse engineering would see to it that everything gets freed anyway.

It actually is in a lot of cases. It's pot luck if anything we buy will last long term, and companies see fit to dick us around as/when they feel like it. It's only because people are willing to violate the law that joe public is able to somewhat even the playing field. Even then, we've still created a society which produces rampant amounts of e-waste and abandons perfectly usable hardware because the barrier of entry is too high for anyone but rich billionaires to take over support or offer alternative ways to use said hardware.

People used to reverse engineer everything to make it more usable and it was considered normal to do so even as little as 25 years ago. For example, nobody in the know used the official, vanilla clients for AIM, MSN, ICQ. Instead, people would write programs to hook into them or replace them out with compatible clients entirely, and developers would even charge money for these things. These days, if you try to do that, you'll be sued or users will have accounts banned. People would modify routers, smartphones, televisions, DVD players and even games consoles (you think Action Replay was officially licenced?) irrespective of what the intellectual property owners wanted to give people better control over what they paid good money for. Nowadays, we're seeing products being artificially crippled post-purchase and the abuse of intellectual property legislation to prevent people from properly using what they paid for.

The truth is that we need both reverse engineering and free/open source software (with open hardware) to undo the damage.

It's not FUD. Just to name a few common pitfalls affecting a lot of Linux desktop and laptop users:

* Audio stack still lacks fully-featured DSP drivers, crippling laptop speakers in some of the most commonly sold computers
* GPU drivers all have poor VRAM management for discrete graphics cards (yes, even AMD and Intel dGPUs suck)
* Hybrid graphics still has mostly broken power management (mixed Intel/AMD and Intel/NVIDIA) for a lot of laptops
* Some WLAN cards will advertise support, except they only officially support one specific kernel version (e.g. Realtek)