An inconsistent age counting system doesn't count as "culture" or "tradition". It has no deep spiritual, social or historical meaning -- it's a quirk, nothing more.

Oh yeah? Well I was in Korea last week and had this system explained to me by someone who's lived there their whole life. Koreans, especially the younger generations, have already been using the international system for a long time.... they celebrate birthdays on the day of birth! This law change (which is widely supported, even by people who don't support the current government) is specifically about ensuring that legal and government documents use the same system that people use in their everyday life. Having two systems always created problems.

.... and Slack knows this. Five years ago, Slack's CEO was making a big deal about how they were going to supplant Exchange in the workplace:

Exchange is only one of Microsoft's many entrants in the company collaboration/communication market. Microsoft has also had Windows Live Messenger, Yammer, Office Communicator / Lync / Skype for Business, and Groove. And pretty much all this stuff has been a part of Office in one fashion or another for 15 years. Heck, Microsoft NetMetting videoconferencing software came out in 1996, fully 20 years before Slack introduced similar functionality!

Microsoft fixed this a little while ago!

Settings -> Network -> click on "Properties" for the network connection -> click on "Edit" under the IP settings section

This is objectively simpler than the old way:

Control Panel -> Network and Internet -> Adapter settings -> right-click on device, choose "Properties" -> click on "Internet Protocol Version 4" then click "Properties"

The new UI also lets you copy/paste IP addresses. The old one, you had to always type each octet out manually.

Autodesk employee here -- Python 3 in Maya and Shotgun is "coming soon" (I know when, not allowed to say), but yeah, you're right, we have a ton of big customers and partners who are sitting on large Python 2 code bases that run significant portions of their rendering pipeline. Breaking them isn't an option, especially mid-project. Most studio directors don't give two shits about the differences between Python 2 and 3 anyways, so why would they take the risk?

And sure, I get it, it's easy to blame Autodesk for holding things back at Python 2. But it's an industry-wide transition that's been slow to come. Pixar, for example, just finished porting their Universal Scene Description Python implementation to Python 3, like, in the last few weeks... and I think it still took someone at NVidia to actually provide a lot of the code.

Sure, it's fun to say this on an Internet message board, but it's hard to see that decline out in the real world -- Microsoft stock is at an all-time high, as is revenue. Even Windows -- you know, that ole' thing that everyone is positive has been dying in favour of macOS and Linux? -- just saw revenue go up 10% compared to a year ago.

That's the expected outcome after decades of harassing beardy Unix sysadmins who wear t-shirts that read "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script."

You were warned, people! You should've left him alone to play Nethack in peace!

Okay, hold up there. You can't draw this conclusion from the actual discussion. This proposed addition to Go was never about adding try/catch blocks. Go already has a similar concept called panic/recover.

The proposal was to allow changing this:

f, err := os.Open(filename)
if err != nil { return ..., err }

into this:

f := try(os.Open(filename))

and that's it. There is no transferring of control to another block of code in the current or a parent function. The idea wasn't liked for a few reasons, but mainly because it hides the "return" keyword, so it's less clear that control flow is changing.

Is this how we're desperate we've become to feed our addiction to negative news?

Windows 10 May 2019 Update is still in beta testing -- they've given out ISOs to developers for testing purposes, but that's it. Microsoft already said the release date is the end of May. And besides, they've also said that they've fixed this bug.

But nah, nobody's mentioning that part, are they? The tech media needs to get people worked up about bugs that've been fixed in order to drive advertising revenue, and you're falling for it.

Isn't this whole bit about Google sabotaging Firefox performance, exactly the same thing we just heard from someone who used to be on the Microsoft Edge team?

At the time, folks around Slashdot were all like, "haw, haw, haw, karma's a bitch, eh there Billy?" Which is, of course, the easy and fun thing to say because of a predisposed hatred of Microsoft.

Now we see that Google has persistently been sabotaging Firefox as well. So maybe the problem wasn't Edge, after all.....

And given how many former Microsoft people are (or have been) at Google -- it's a four-digit number -- I'm really not surprised to see those sleazy late-90s Microsoft anticompetitive tactics show up once again.

This isn't actually true with Windows 10. It does have a built-in package manager that is capable of installing & updating packages from Chocolatey, GitLab repositories, etc..... and it has the Microsoft Store, which has an auto-update mechanism and is perfectly capable of supporting classic Win32 programs like WinRAR, including the command-line version. (Yes, console apps in the MS Store is a thing nowadays.)

Problem is.... nobody really seems to know any of this. This is mostly Microsoft's fault since they rarely talk about anything other than superficial improvements in Windows 10.... and because telemetry & update policies have kept a ton of people on Windows 7 (despite the upgrade being free) so software developers haven't been especially motivated to take full advantage of Windows 10 features and deployment techniques.

A Store App version of WinRAR would actually be mostly invulnerable to these attack vectors because the app containers which they run in aren't allowed to write to the "Startup" folder in the user's profile. Anything other than Documents, Downloads, Desktop, etc. requires explicit access, controllable via the Privacy settings page. On top of all that, the authors want to charge $29 for WinRAR.... wouldn't publishing to the store be a useful way of getting some more people to pay?

This theory ignores the fact that the primary attraction for many Mac users, especially web developers and science/engineering types, is the POSIX underpinnings and the GNU toolchain. Apple did not create POSIX or GNU and do not substantially contribute to the development to them. Their support of CUPS and Clang is welcome and appreciated, and they recently open-sourced FoundationDB, which is nice if Cassandra isn't small-batch-craft-beer-check-shirt enough for your hipster ass..... but.... what else do they do in this space? Almost 100% of people working in these fields could use Linux instead, but they choose macOS because of the well-polished hardware integration, especially the screens, keyboards (maybe less so now) and touchpad.

Yes, there was a period where Apple was well-defined by great software: The early-mid 2000's. Programs like iPhoto, Garageband, and iMovie cemented their reputation as a company that could create really innovative software that was really easy to use. But that's a long, long time ago now. Here's the reality: There has been exactly one entirely new Mac application from Apple this entire decade. Yes, just one, and you'd never guess it: iBooks Author. That's it. Everything else they've done has been iterating on products from the Steve Jobs era (Mainstage, Motion, iTunes), or doing mediocre ports of mediocre iOS apps, like Homekit and Stocks. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. Nobody's buying a Mac instead of a Surface because it can run desktop versions of mobile apps.

Apple isn't exactly the gold standard in pro software either. Most software devs don't love XCode.... Final Cut Pro X isn't capturing converts from Premiere.... Logic is very good but ProTools is still the industry standard.... tons of people choose Office over Pages, Sheets, Keynote and Mail.... Safari is generally considered inferior to Firefox and Chrome....

Add to that the fact that almost nobody can name a new feature of Mojave other than Dark Mode.... it sure feels like Apple is coasting on their Mac software efforts, not leading.

I know it's fun and exciting to blame a web browser hotfix for a booting problem..... especially when it's Internet Explorer, right? But..... ahhh, shit, hate to spoil the fun, but this is just another case of "journalists" not doing the bare minimum of reading before shitting out another article they'll get paid $10 for.

This booting problem with Lenovo laptops has existed for a month and a half -- it was introduced in the November 2018 cumulative security update. It even says so right there in the patch notes! But because these "journalists" don't know how to read anymore, we end up with Slashdot articles like this one that don't have the correct information in them.

All Windows patches are now cumulative, so sure, if you apply the IE hotfix to a machine that is three months behind in updates, then you can hit this problem. But it's not the IE part that's causing it.

A lot of people around here don't keep up with Microsoft technology, so here's a few notes and caveats:

1. The Windows and Mac versions of Visual Studio 2019 are completely separate products built from different code bases. They share compilers and .NET Core stuff, and a lot of work is going into making the editors feel the same. But you can't actually use Visual Studio for Mac to work on classic Win32 / .NET Framework applications.

2. Windows Forms and WPF are also Windows-only technology, and that isn't changing even though they'll work with .NET Core 3. There are way too many hooks and dependencies on Windows-specific technology (e.g. DirectX, text rendering, themes, handles) for these to be made into cross-platform applications without major rearchitecting work. In other words, don't wait up for them to produce a competitor to Qt....

3. The source code for Windows Forms and WPF have actually been available as "reference source" for more than a decade, so there are no real surprises to be discovered here.

4. All three libraries are being hosted on Github and are licensed under MIT. These aren't mirrors -- the teams at Microsoft will actually be doing their everyday work in the open on Github. Unfortunately, the full commit history didn't come along for the ride.

5. One of the nice little improvements here is the ability to package your own version of Windows Forms with your app, instead of relying on whatever is installed with the system. .NET Core doesn't (currently) support static linking so it'll still have to exist as a DLL file beside the EXE.

Always blows me away when developers draw the line at "Javascript frameworks".

Never mind the dependency on several different web browsers, each of which are loaded with thousands of capabilities, but behave a little different from eachother. Never mind the hard dependency on a mediocre programming language that changes frequently, cannot be compiled ahead of time, must be served in an inefficient text format, and whose corresponding graphical assets must be sent across the Internet every time the user wants to see them. Never mind the fact that we have to use transpilers like babel or Typescript, minifiers, packaging & loader engines like webpack or SystemJS, polyfills to cover older browsers..... Never mind the fact that there was NO STANDARD LIBRARY for most of JavaScript's existence...... never mind the fact that we have to slow everything down on the server -and- client side because we have to use HTTPS to protect our application at runtime. No, let's not blame all that, let's blame Lodash, Sizzle, Wolkenkit, Redux and SignalR for having the temerity to exist and be useful to developers.

Makes no sense, dude. Makes no sense at all.

Take this Slashdot page I'm looking at right now. According to Firefox's own dev tools, this Slashdot browser tab I'm typing in is taking 150 MB RAM, but just 22 MB of that is actually for the page's content and scripts. The addition or removal of some JavaScript isn't going to make a big difference here!