In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

Why not contract out program development to some of those Iranian hackers who seem to have drones flying at will over US military bases? It might not be a perfect solution, but it would probably be cheaper and better than the clusterf^ck they've had going on for the best part of a decade.

Check out Clive Sinclair - he was an engineer and did pretty damn well selling his computers in the UK.

Kinda, I mean he did well, but it went under. Acorn did somewhat better and parts of Acorn are alive and well to this day.

Furber and Wilson lacked that marketing muscle. Were they a unique talent? I mean... no one else did that. Their CPU worked first time, outperformed their contemporaries, ran at a fraction of the power cost a fraction of the amount and went on to become massively popular.

Maybe Woz couldn't have done that, but it doesn't mean Jobs was the one required to help him, any competenant marketing type could have done the same. Vew few people could have designed the hardware and software that Woz did at the time.

I'd argue that Jobs was unusually good at marketing. Maybe as rare as Woz. I mean, look at the cult of personality that's developed around him where people think Apple (or really Jobs himself) invented all sorts of things which were actually popularized by Apple, but invented by someone else.

His schtick works.

Wait what?

Are you also dating that love does not in fact transcend the fifth dimension and interstellar was also bullshit?

Come on man.

Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit,

Suit? The guy who famously wore a black turtleneck all the time?

Anyhoo. I think people outside tech overestimate the importance of CEOs and people in tech underestimate it. Without Jobs, Woz probably would have been a really great engineer in some company and you'd never have heard of him at all. He wasn't a product guy, and you need a product not just raw tech to sell. Selling stuff being somewhat important for a company.

Steve Jobs also had a functioning reality distortion field, something not all that many people have and that's really important for building a company...

Age verification is an outgrowth of the christian nationalism, it is a core part of Republican identity politics.

It may be many things but it ain't that.

Slavery was once legal because there were not laws AGAINST it. Laws don't make things legal, they make them illegal.

What utter bullshit.

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, -- Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield

And you know that general line of reasoning was why slavery had to be actually recognised in the constitution because if you have a nation of any laws at all you need to pass a law to not have them apply to some people.

Tencent?

They are on the steering committee.

no matter how "open source" they claim the process to be, and subject to American export laws.

What? A process isn't open source, code is. There are open source implementations of AV1 (or 2) and H.265 (and 6). Anything can be subject to American export laws, whether or not it makes sense, but America can't enforce that outside America (or even inside some of the time).

You can get porn for free you know, there's no need to wait 5 years for your fridge to show it to you.

Then, considering that this is at the Swizz and German border,

A swiz is a swindle as any fule kno.

and AAC is better than Ogg for the same bandwidth

Is it? When I followed such things that was the case for a while, but the encoders started getting better. Heck the MP3 encoders got so good they were surprisingly close. I thought all of the codecs of that later gen ended up basically on a par.

Anyway didn't Opus wipe the floor with all of them being better in every combo of bitrate and latency than the competition?

Yep.

But also I'm guessing they are suing Snap because they consider them to be a much softer target than, say, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Samsung or Tencent (like they'd care lol) who would likely kerb stomp them into the next millennium without even noticing.

Big enough to matter, not big or experienced enough to put up a good fight. And also holy shit they've been having a terrible time of it on the NYSE! Halved in value this year (and 1/10 from the covid peak). I expect they are perceived as not likely to want a protracted and expensive legal battle, and Dolby have identified the weakest zebra worth eating in the herd.

Patent troll fuckers.

General Protection Fault outranks Colonel Panic and says drop and give me 20 reboots.

Yeah that happened to me! Turns out the stuck was just a bit loose. After thoroughly cleaning it and reseating, the crashes vanished. Fortunately because DDR5 is stupid expensive now.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.