"I got my job because I'm white and connected" is the rule. It happens all day every day.

Yeah, a mechanical version of the Ergo 4000 it would sell like hotcakes. I keep contemplating trying to build one but it's beyond my meager fabrication capabilities and patience to improve theam.

> The OS's job is to manage hardware resources and get out of my way of what I want to do on the machine.

Exactly why I don't run Windows. It is crap at managing resources.

> Is everyone supposed to buy used Apple laptops from 2015 or earlier?

Yes. It's what I have done.

> not buying MacBooks will make Apple listen?

Yes. Apple has already seen their sales dip, and it is rumored that they will be discontinuing the butterfly keyboard. (https://bgr.com/2019/07/25/macbook-pro-keyboard-scissor-butterfly-design/)

Fn-arrow up and down?

It started with the 12" Macbook in 2015 (now discontinued). In 2016, they moved to the butterfly keyboard on Macbook Pros. Macbook Air was only recently converted to butterfly keyboard, some time in 2019 I think.

I can type all day long on my 2015 Macbook Air.

I'm ready to kill puppies after about 5 minutes on a butterfly Mac keyboard.

Algorithms and data structures for dynamic memory allocation is... algorithms and data structures. There's nothing magic about C. You could write a memory allocator in cobol, cshell, or brainf***.

> To write high quality kernel code you must fully understand what's going on down inside the processor.

OK. Then what does C have to do with this? C completely hides the processor from you.

The mainstream Rust toolchain does not translate to C, it generates LLVM.

(predicting your objection...) Yes, the LLVM tooling is indeed written in C++, but that's not relevant here.

You are confusing the implementation language of a compiler with the data structures and artifacts involved in the compilation process. A compiler takes input and translates it into output. Compilers for any language can be implemented in any other language. See for instance this C compiler implemented in pure Python. https://github.com/ShivamSarod... - Many other examples exist of compilers written in languages other than themselves.

This is pretty damn cool technology that will probably be mainstream in 5 years or less. Leave it to slashdot commenters to completely miss the big picture and pick apart some stupid technical detail.

> Myspace was THE social networking site.

Myspace had around 80M users at peak. Even the almost forgotten orkut had 300M users at peak before FB came along and crushed it. Myspace was never contender for the throne.

> One of the the more likely scenarios for something else to beat out Facebook

How is that likely? Because you said so? Is there really any evidence that people have any reason to flock to niche-oriented social networks? I'm not saying FB can't be dethroned somehow. But the idea that nurses will flock to nursenet to talk nurse stuff with nurses *in lieu of* talking to their friends on Facebook... well, it's absurd.

After many years of reading and posting on this Slashdot, I'm out. The only people remaining here seem to be angry, old, self-centered Ayn-Rand-loving baby-men who begrudge everyone, whom they blame daily for their sad empty lives.

It's been fun but I won't miss it.

Uh, no. I've been coding for about 35 years. I'll take Python any day over the mess that is Perl. There's no comparison.

Back in the day, tech journalists were people who knew tech. Many were dabblers in coding. Even the worst of them usually knew enough to understand that a computer isn't a magic box.

Nowadays, tech journalists are usually just writers who like gadgets and who discovered that there's money to be made writing about tech. They have no background in computer science or information theory. They have virtually no understanding about what makes any of it tick, the problem space, or the solution space. So they write about how twitter should get the Nazis off their platform. And how Facebook needs to fix its fake news problem. And how google should filter results better to provide more truthful stories.

Because they don't understand technology, they write incensed articles complaining about these technology problems. The reality is that what we are seeing are social problems. And all of these problems existed before any of these companies existed. Sadly, I see some tech people starting to agree with these misguided assessments claiming technology failures. But I am heartened to see the slashdot community commentary here pretty firmly grounded in reality.