> At some point your UI has reached peak usability and the you can only go downhill.

That point happened in 2009.

Also another case of Microsoft touting a "new" feature that other OS's have had for decades.

There's also the subject-verb disagreement bubble.

The school administrators, unlike the people who actually make the schools work, such as it is, tend to be paid pretty well.

I get so tired of hearing the school systems stress technology so much, because they are inevitably 20-30 years behind in their understanding of how to best utilize it, leave alone secure their systems. I always fantasized about teaching a computer class that didn't even touch a keyboard for the first half year...

I recall Windows 3.51 was quite secure for the time. But once they merged the DOS branch of the OS with the NT branch, things got a lot worse for several years.

It's good to hear AWS has never been hacked because just about every other company with data has been. A lot of people rely on AWS, and what you are saying is accurate and if they are running their systems correctly, there can be a reasonable expectation that they will be secure. That's nice to know.

> What I learned is that teachers have literally no time for anything.

The school system in the U.S. is notorious for this. Teachers get so much stuff dumped on them, much of which has little to do with actual teaching. It's a truly thankless job that cannot be fixed by dumping more money into the system. It's fundamentally broken. There are plenty of good teachers, but their effectiveness becomes more and more fettered every year.

Source: father of 4, and husband to a school teacher

In my experience the two worst things to combine are "education system" and "technology".

If the script kiddies are hacking your system, you've got bigger problems.

Is "script kiddies" still a thing?

I'm so old.

OMG THIS!!! A million times this!!! You have hit on every pet peeve of mine that has become a norm with the advent of the "everyone can code" movement. What used to be an elegant art form of writing bullet proof software to withstand the test of time has devolved into a "we'll clean it up later" enshitification of the craft. I used to see mind-blowing artisans at work, then came the StackOverflow cut-and-pasters, then the "duct tape 20 packages together" to print a string to stdout, and now the vibe coders with 3000-line PRs of AI slop.

Every sign points to a new COBOL-esque super cycle where graybeards get pulled in to scape away countless layers of machine-generated "code" in order to get a broken system back on track.

Was there much overlap between the 6502 version and the 8088 version, or did it need to be completely rewritten?

I could see them having a higher level design, which could in theory actually be C code, which just needed to be rendered, er, compiled down to the specific instruction sets. I'm assuming all this assembly was written as assembly, but there could still be a higher-level design, rendered as flowcharts or whatever that was translated for each architecture.

It's a fascinating part of computer history. I miss those days, even though I never actually had my own computer until after I graduated from college.

It's just another catalyst for people who are mentally ill (and probably not very smart) to do harm. It's inevitable with any new kind of technology.

> Also, no one is committing suicide because of ChatGPT

According to the news that is happening, and even if it hasn't, it will.

There is nothing society creates, good or bad (and I think AI is mostly good) that will not have some terrible side effects.

/. isn't what it used to be, but more importantly, the world in which /. was great also isn't what it used to be.

Well, that and no CmdrTaco.

Both US10912502B2 and US10945648B2 are piss-poor patents. There's nothing novel there; it's just rearranging components from other manufacturers into a use case based on refining an existing use case and patenting that remixed use case. I'm not delusional enough to imagine we'll wake up and ban utility patents, but I am crazy enough to think that if we're going to let these things stand, then we need to have a federally mandated cap on what holders can charge for an idea. If there's one thing I've learned in this life, it’s that ideas are worthless; execution is everything. So we should monetize ideas based on what value they have. For utility patents, it should be a minute amount. Like a cap of $0.0001 per unit or a 1-time fixed license of $1000. That would end this waste of resources and court time. When it costs more to hire a lawyer to sue than you can recover, the idiocracy will end.

Europe is suffering under the weight of poor policy choices:

1) Over-regulation

On paper, strict regulation protects consumers, the environment, and markets. But in a global economy, excessive red tape can stifle innovation and push industries abroad. Multiple studies from the European Commission note that fragmented regulations and bureaucratic compliance burdens weaken competitiveness compared to the U.S. and Asia.

2) Terrorism

Contrary to common perception, terrorism remains an ongoing challenge in Europe. According to Europol’s EU-TE-SAT 2025 report, between 2020 and 2024, the EU recorded over 200 terrorist incidents and over 2,000 terrorism-related arrests. In major urban centers, heavily armed counter-terror units are now a routine presence in train stations, airports, and large public gatherings.

3) Emigration

Over-regulation and terrorism don’t foster innovation or "joie de vivre“; it makes people want to look for a better life elsewhere. Europe’s innovation pipeline is under pressure and faces sustained emigration of highly skilled workers. North America continues to draw top European talent, particularly in AI, biotech, and finance. There may be a Trump blip in early 2025, but the regulation and security concerns still exist, so it will be a short-lived blip.

I, for one, have a lot of two-digit numbers to factor, so I'm waiting impatiently for quantum supremacy.