Judging from what I've seen, if WDC trademarked the original Steamboat Willie character and renewed the mark as required, it has been in use continuously via pins, toys, etc..

You technically don't have to renew the mark - you just have to use it. Registering the mark is useful in legal proceedings, but even without registration it doesn't mean there's no protection in place. Most small businesses don't register their company name as a trademark, but the law still protects them from other companies trying to represent them falsely. It's just their damage claims will be limited and you'll have to prove usage.

Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, so you are free to use it for your content. You cannot say it's Mickey Mouse, but you're free to do whatever you want - colorize it, etc. You can remove the ears off the mouse and modify the film that way to avoid trademark issues as well - you are free to create a derivative work of a public domain work. So if you wanted to replace Mickey with a human and use the rest of the imagery, you can.

In fact, wasn't there a pornographic movie that was using Steamboat Willie? Disney didn't sue them, likely because they didn't have anything to sue over.

Of you could do what Jobs did and find a way through the demo that won't lead to problems. It's well known that the iPhone OS was highly unstable in the early days and there were lots of bugs ranging from crashes to things like Wi-Fi not working.

What Jobs did was basically spend a month going through and finding a path to demo what he wanted to show while avoiding all the bugs and traps. Sure the bugs were being fixed all the time to get it ready for release 6 months later, but for the demo there had to be a "good way" through it.

If you're betting that farm on a product, you spend time trying to make it work. If that means taking a month finding a way to demonstrate it without running into issues, that's what you do. And you don't stray. It takes a lot of discipline to go from "hey this is cool check it out" to sticking with the script and showing what works and what's cool but not showing them this other thing that can lead to a crash.

The blue screen for Gates was likely something random - it was scripted to show it works and it likely did 99% of the time. He just got unlucky with that 1%. Likely Jobs rehearsed the demo so often he dropped stuff that was going to be flaky - even if it worked 99.9% of the time, he didn't want to tempt the gods with that 0.1%.

I am skeptical we won't find a use for datacenters. The cooling, electricity, and servers can be reused for more mundane tasks. Sure, nVidia AI chips are wasted money if you can't find a use for them, but every other facet of infrastructure can be reused for any general-purpose computing. I would wager that even the GPUs can be repurposed to be powerful business servers if someone wrote some drivers to move more Java/JavaScript/Python routine processing to GPUs...it obviously won't be as efficient as a conventional CPU, but I am sure it can offset the price of buying new chips.

Just like we got a lot of cheap office furniture on eBay when the dot com bubble popped, I am sure there are going to be some firesales on cloud computing hardware or services when this horrid AI bubble finally pops.

The problem is buildings need constant maintenance. When the first dot-com bubble popped, we had a lot of unused infrastructure - notably in the telecommunications sector where lots of fiber optic cable was laid during the boom to facilitate higher speed connectivity. But after the dot-com bust, most of that remained unlit for a decade and chances are, most of it ended up being scrapped because it was unsuitable for use. Sure some companies, notably Google, bought up some of the dark fiber and used it to connect their datacenters, but so much more was laid and sat unused.

Likewise, most of these buildings may simply not be fully occupied - they'll need renovations because it's unlikely the original company needs that space for other purposes, and the renovations would be needed to have multiple companies be able to have their own space that's secure.

And the unused buildings will likely rot in place - after a year, you can probably still renovate it to make it usable again. After 5 years of neglect, you're starting to look at tearing it down. Even if everything was brand new, years of neglect will take its toll and if people aren't willing to buy it up, landlords will stop maintaining them. What started as a minor roof leak will cause a roof collapse.

So cheap computers yes, but all the other stuff? Not so much. AC units, power handlers, etc

Yeah, as if we needed any more reason to consider this bloated "security" software to be malware. I really don't understand why anyone in their right minds would install it or allow it to be installed on their systems. Giving some third-party company complete control over what software can run on your machines basically screams "I don't understand anything about security" better any almost anything else you could possibly do as a system administrator, IMO, short of posting the shared-across-all-machines root password on USENET.

For most IT administrators, having complete control over what users can run is the idea. There's no need for your work PC to be able to run anything and everything - most work can be done using a limited set of applications. If your job involves doing nothing but paperwork and filing stuff all day, you generally only need access to an office package and a web browser for the online components. You don't need them running things like music players or chat apps beyond the company required one.

Even if what you do is more sophisticated, it's still generally limited. Architects need access to their CAD package, and maybe a lightweight photo editor and 3D rendering package to do produce pretty photos and analysis software. They too probably don't need access to a music player and other stuff.

IT admins have always wanted an iOS-like control over what runs on their systems - it keeps the attack surface much smaller if users can't accidentally run some ransomware.

If you're a software developer, things are more complex since you need to run a compiler, and often the results of that compiler so you need the ability to run arbitrary executables. And that's pretty tricky to do and to stop developers from running ransomware on their computers. There are ways to isolate them but it's still hard.

LIkewise, as you saw in the past, often it's used in kiosks where the only application running should be the kiosk front end. If someone breaks the app they shouldn't be able to get to a shell and run other programs.

This implies the different approaches are like building a house with a safe and solid foundation, or patchworking a foundation with copious amounts of duct tape.

And in this vein, the C++ EWG prefers the duct tape approach... because laying new foundations in a well-regulated manner is hard, or rather, presents an "irreconcilable design disagreement...."

Taking a step back, the EWG (like all corporate programmers) are taking the path of least resistance ("what checks the box yet requires the least amount of effort, and has an off switch?").

No, what's happened is a choice. In your house metaphor, the house has already been built, and people have been living in it for years/decades/

The Rust proposal is like a change to the building code - to get the new benefits of the new code, you need to update everything - basically a major renovation. In the meantime, the people living in the house must live somewhere else until it's all fixed. They get the benefit of the new code (safety, security, etc), but it's a major inconvenience.

The proposal they went with is more like what happens today when the code changes - you have to build your new additions to the house to the new standard, but you don't have to renovate your entire house just because you wanted to enclose the patio.

C++ code has an extremely long lifetime, and it's undergone extremely big changes in the past 20 years. But the fact is you can still compile code from the late 90s using today's compilers is a huge thing. Other languages have had problems - Perl not so much, but most people don't see Perl as more than a temporary language - you write it one, then you write it off. But the Python 2 to 3 transition took way too long - Python 2 was deprecated at a time when Python 3 code was incompatible, and we're still dealing with the problem today where you're not sure "python" is 2 or 3, and there's still python2 code out there despite it being obsoleted at least a decade ago.

There's a lot of C++ code out there, likely way more of it is in maintenance mode than new C++ code written. Memory safety is a good ideal, but if you have to renovate the entire house to use it the vast majority of C++ code would choose not to use it over having to go through the entire code base to fix it up. Decades later that code will still not be up to spec because no one has the time/effort/money to fix up the code and only the new code will have the benefits.

And if you give anyone the thought of having to rewrite the codebase, that's where you get enshittification happening because why modify the existing application when you can start a new version from scratch that includes cloud, subscriptions and all sorts of stuff you couldn't easily do in the old code. You can abandon the old codebase and give everyone an upgrade to the new version.

Do not assume that the maggots are fully autonomous idiots.

In other parts of the world, there are fledgling maggot movements too. What is particularly interesting and relevant about those is that they often quote some ideas and misconceptions that simply do not apply where those movements are forming. This is due to cultural and legal differences in the other countries.

You can see this by observing marches and protests and interviews in other countries. The slogans and demands just don't make sense locally most of the time, yet are carbon copies of American ideas.

You can thank the fact that the US' biggest export is culture. Movies, TV, books, music, etc are the single biggest export products of the United States. It's not manufacturing - that requires inputs and outputs. The raw input to culture is simply ideas while the material output is fairly cheap media. It's a high margin business, like tourism that attracts a lot of money from overseas.

Manufacturing is a low margin business for basically all consumer goods where price is king. The US does manufacture things, but only high margin low volume goods like aircraft and vehicles.

Cultural exports are huge, and it's why that stuff gets exported to other countries. Of course, those people probably don't understand what they're saying, but they see the results and generally speaking that's what they want because their government is likely corrupt and they want change.

Ish.

I would not trust C++ for safety-critical work as MISRA can only limit features, it can't add support for contracts.

There have been other dialects of C++ - Aspect-Oriented C++ and Feature-Oriented C++ being the two that I monitored closely. You can't really do either by using subsetting, regardless of mechanism.

IMHO, it might be easier to reverse the problem. Instead of having specific subsets for specific tasks, where you drill down to the subset you want, have specific subsets for specific mechanisms where you build up to the feature set you need.

Oh, absolutely. These days, I spend so much time checking the output from computers, it would normally have been quicker to do searches by hand. This is... not useful.

I can fully understand that.

Blaming the people is a very dangerous, and frankly extremely undemocratic approach to take. If you look around the western democracies I think the problem is that voters are getting increasingly fed up with politicians who are not addressing the increasing problems that they are facing: salaries rising slower than inflation, house prices going through the roof, immigration out of control etc. Mainstream politicians on both the left and the right seem either incapable or unwilling to address these problems.

This has opened the door for more extremist politicians on either the right or left who promise to fix things by whatever means necessary and people are increasingly voting for them because it looks like they are the only ones who may be capable of actually addressing their problems. It's not that people are broken, it's that when you are drowning in problems you'll reach out to whomever is offering to help, regardless of who they may be.

So it was worse than falling asleep at the wheel - they bent the knee to him. That is what has largely amazed me seeing this play out as a non-American. For all the bluster about how free and democratic the US is, the courts, politicians, press and companies all seem to have just largely capitulated and accepted Trump's rule by proclamation and speech-suppression by firing/intimidation tactics.

Not arguing here, but is there reliable information about the salaries of H1-B and L1 compared to residents and citizens? All my coworkers are immigration visa - India and China. I assume we are paid salary commensurate with title and salary band (i.e., staff engineer might have 2-3 tranches of salary range).

I've always wondered if it's true or not that the mostly Indian workforce in US is paid way below.

Why don't you ask them? Discussing salary with your coworkers is a protected right (your boss cannot fire you) under the labor code for now.

Being open about salary is the only way you'll discover pay discrepancy. People think they don't want to share because they feel they may be overpaid and discussing will result in a pay cut, but that's also a good way to get a constructive dismissal.

How do you figure that? A human generally can't tell AI generated text from human generated text although I will admit that I'm getting a bit of an AI-vibe from your post.

How do you figure that? The fee is $100k _per year_ not just one off!

As someone with a PhD, although I arrived in the US with it, I left as soon as it was reasonable to do so and that was in the early 2000's. What I found interesting was that when I arrived most of the discussion amongst my fellow European immigrants was jobs in the US but within a few years it changed very much looking at jobs in Canada, Europe and elsewhere - far fewer were considering staying in the US and I suspect that number has now cratered given that I'm a member of an international collaboration where a lot of the European members are now not even willing to visit the US.

Could I have earned a bit more had I stayed in the US? Probably but the point of money is to make your life easier and more enjoyable and frankly being treated like crap (and I don't just mean as a foreigner - your government and many companies often treat even US citizens like crap too) undid for me any benefit of slightly more money. So for me it was an easy choice even back then, although even now I still enjoy visiting the US - but you could not pay me enough money to make me want to live there.