Amazing how Mr. Regulations, suddenly gets it when "wrong people" people are able to use them to obtain a barrier to entry.

Yet regulations are never a problem, when small shops are threatening to out compete big union controlled entities, private schools make public education officalls running indoctrination mills look like clowns, etc.

No infringement on the rights or property of adults is to great if it advances your Bolshevik agenda; but when government actually steps in to protect people who actually are able to be responsible for their own well being, like children, suddenly - government bad...

Very interesting indeed... Says so much about you!

Has it been "Fundamentally Changed" enough yet?

Yeah but Work 6.0 on Windows was actually pretty good. It had everything you'd expect for the most part even in a contemporary word processor to day.

I don't think if took Word 2019 away from most users and gave them 6.0 they'd care much, if you could some how make the document compatibility issues vanish.

The problem with Word on Mac's was the Macs, by the time PC got 33 or 66mhz 486 CPUs, PCs were just better than Macs all around.

So much this. Unless there is a reason you CANT continue without an update, or possibly on first run, you should never ask a user to update on start up. They already use the software. They did not click it because felt installing something right now. The clicked because they wanted to do something. Let them! Ask if they want to update on close and do it in the background!

If you feel you really must, you can pop up the 'what's new' dialog the next time they fire it up.

I don't think there will ever be a simple fundamental physics again. Unless reality is 3D FEM simulation, then the fundamental equations might be simple (and almost useless).

This is so true, so true.

And it's not even US specific. In the wake of the Ukraine war, German parliament voted to give itself 100 billion of additional taxpayer money (i.e. debt) to spend on defense. Recently a report came out of all the money spent so far, 90% did not go towards the intended purpose.

Why any of the jokers in charge of our governments are still not in jail baffles me more and more every year. Oh yes, it's because they make the rules, sorry, my bad.

That's what campaign donations get you, if they are large enough.

This is why congress occasionally bullies the big tech companies. We all think they might want to have some regulation or to punish them. Oh sweetie... they're saying "nice company you have there... would be a shame if something happened to it..."

The best time to leave github was when the evil empire bought it. The second best time is now.

Seriously. Anyone who thought MS wouldn't fuck it up in the same way they fuck up everything they touch can't be helped. It's Microsoft for crying out loud.

Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.

I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.

I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.

And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.

I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash plugin loaded too.

FWIW that old machine would take about 15 minutes to encode a 3 minute mp3 file and my current machines does it in about six seconds. So the hardware gains are real.

Maybe ML will actually be able to find some optimizations that are too cumbersome for humans to manage.

Officers in charge of these kinds of programs rotate on to a new assignment after 3 to 5 years. Contractors keep personnel on staff whose whimsical title is "project manager" but whose real job is to work the rotating cast of government program managers into keeping the program going.

In such an environment it is almost structurally impossible to contract smart for any program that takes more than a few years from start to finish.

Bell Labs was part of AT&T, AT&T was a monopoly, a legal monopoly with one limitation (that it not enter the computer business) and in return it was guaranteed a fixed profit margin.

The more money AT&T spent, the greater profit they made. AT&T was happy to fund expensive 'blue-sky' projects because the expense drove revenues up, which increased profit.

It is FAR from the only, or even majority influence/factor of Bell Labs success, but it was a very, very unique arrangement.

Lol, cogent conservative responses here get modded to oblivion.
Frothing leftist flamer "Insightful"

Slashdot is so ideologically captured.

Did you think the benefit of being the 'only surviving industrial infrastructure' faded what, a week after ww2? /huh?

So basically the FCC said guys, say your really sorry and promise not do it again.

Some codebases have been poorly cobbled together bits of code from stack overflow long before AI became capable of replacing the human developers who were doing it. A well trained statistical model doing a better job than some batch of cowboys that couldn't pass a Turing test themselves is hardly surprising.