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It has been said that much of the good stuff that Microsoft does is due to internal requirements.
One alleged example is improved long file path length support in Windows. Improvements in this were apparently encouraged due to internal use of node.js and problems that devs were having with path length limitations.
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Not surprising. There's nothing quite like eating your own dog food.
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One of the main reason why I so much enjoy that The Old New Thing[^] blog of Raymond Chen is the number of posts he makes about legacy software and backwards compatibility problems. (The fraction of such stories are higher in his book than in the online blog, though).
I have lost count of the number of people I have had to explain why you simply can't lift that maxpath limit and let all programs have access to the full filename with no further question.
Frequently (especially with Linux guys) I have to make parallels to replacing IPv4 with IPv6 - an application setting aside 32 bits for an Internet address, with display functions for showing it as a.b.c.d, cannot simply be thrown an IPv6 address. Or the switch from 7 bit US-ASCII, first to 8 bit ISO8859-1 that couldn't go unencoded through a 56 kbps connection, and then to UTF-8, where advancing to the next character could mean anything from 1 to 5 bytes forward (or alternately, a rewrite to replace char[] with uint32[] throughout and rewriting all libraries).
Lots of people believe that they know the simple and easy way to switch to long file names. None do.
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Well, quite. For the avoidance of doubt I wasn't suggesting that improving path length limits in much of Windows/Win32 was easy, only that the (alleged) story is that Microsoft were finally prompted to do it for node.js internal dev purposes.
In fact, didn't Raymond Chen do a blog article about path lengths?
G'wan, you're Raymond, aren't you?
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I don't think Raymond Chen makes any attempts to hide his identity on the net.
Why would he? He markets his competence and professional interests well enough under his real name!
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Enterprise software provider Sonatype has found a clear connection between DevOps and developer job satisfaction in its seventh annual DevSecOps Community Survey. If you're happy and you know it, deploy your code
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Golly, it's so good to have completely unbiased companies [^] looking into such things.
Yes, their product is used to: Automate DevSecOps
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Anyone who signs up will get two free months of Stadia Pro with instant access to nine games, including GRID, Destiny 2: The Collection, and Thumper. I guess they worked out the scaling issues?
This one's a "usual": "Give us your credit card and sign up for a subscription, but we promise not to charge you for two months. Oh yeah, and we might forget to tell you when the two months are up. So sad." type of offer.
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The laws of physics imply that the passage of time is an illusion. To avoid this conclusion, we might have to rethink the reality of infinitely precise numbers. Just another reminder that physicists (and theoretical mathematicians) have been doing this, "stay isolated at home long enough to start thinking about weird stuff" for a long time
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Quote: a century-old mathematical language called intuitionist mathematics, which rejects the existence of numbers with infinitely many digits. I'm a strong supporter of this.
In fact, we shouldn't really need more than one number.
I propose that it be four, because three's not enough, and five can get too noisy.Quote: If numbers are finite and limited in their precision, then nature itself is inherently imprecise, and thus unpredictable. Exactly!
So if there is only one number, then all the unexpected things in the universe can be explained!
(Like I say, though, let's stick with four, because I've got a headache.)
Essentially, what he's saying is that because we'll probably never have enough data to reliably predict absolutely everything, we should give up trying to figure out the causes and effects of how the universe works.
I don't think I'll be subscribing to his newsletter.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: So if there is only one number, then all the unexpected things in the universe can be explained!
Of course... 42
Sorry for the obvious, but it was too tempting
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Are you sure that's the answer to the right question?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Liquid nitrogen
Sorry for the obvious, but it was too tempting II
I am leaving it here... enough silly comments from my side for today
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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The accuracy required is a measure of how unstable and difficult a juggling pattern is. If they didn't, the balls would fall
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In other news, bees can't fly.
But "reaction times" don't come into the juggling thing. Jugglers don't stand there and wonder which ball is going to fall next or where; there's no thinking involved.
Each throw, catch, and movement has to be practised heavily, until it practically becomes autonomic.
So by basing the study on reaction times, they're looking in entirely the wrong direction.
I suppose that's what you get when you let a mechanical engineer and a mathematician make choices on how the body and brain work.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
modified 8-Apr-20 13:24pm.
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Right. Besides, you don't need any fast reaction time to know what happens if you throw a ball straight up: It comes straight down. If you throw a ball against the wall at a 45 degree angle, it will bounce back at a 45 degree angle. These are elementary rules of physics. When you have internalized then, you know what is going to happen; you don't have to analyze a visual impression of it to know.
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Just restating Mark's valid point.
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A real test would be for a juggler to just stand there and have people throw balls at him randomly from different directions at varying velocities.
Which sounds like fun.
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I'm not very accurate in ball-throwing, and worry that that could skew the figures.
Would it be OK if I threw darts, instead?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Fingerprint-based authentication is fine for most people, but it's hardly foolproof. All those surprised, don't raise a finger
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Kent Sharkey wrote: don't raise a finger Damn these KSS rules!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Kent Sharkey wrote: don't raise a finger
OK
(I raise 3) .|||.
Can they read between lines?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: All those surprised, don't raise a finger
How about two?
,|,, ,,|,
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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There was an earlier wave of fingerprint reading, maybe 20 years ago, years before smartphone readers were available. We had exactly the same kind of debunkers then. Mythbusters did a program on it, and for years people lost faith in it.
It doesn't matter that the stealing of your fingerprint requires a whole lot of effort (you don't meet that many possible intruders at the pub, and anyone who steals your empty beer glass before the waiter picks it up is somewhat suspicious!) The process from picking up the fingerprint to creating a false finger that can be used is rather complex and expensive. The lock to be opened must be available to the intruder - he must steal your smartphone or portable, or break into the house where the big PC is placed. In most cases, the risk is near-epsilon.
In those days, fingerprint readers were separate devices. Nanufacturers added safety features, like thermosensors to distinguish between a live finger and a cold rubber one. Intruders had to make hollow rubber fingers to be filled with lukewarm water. The sensors got sensors for electrical resistance between two points on the fingertip; intruders had to switch to a semiconducting rubber mixture. Software was extended to store all 10 fingers, asking you to present a randomly selected one - few intruders have picked up your left hand pinky! (Some fingerprint login systems demanded left hand fingerprint for privileged accounts, for improved security.)
And so on. The best readers became very resistant to fake fingers. But media had no interest in reporting about this; everyone "knew" that fingerprints don't work, as proven by Mythbusters; there was no need to reconsider that conclusion!
Until Apple started it up again. Who would raise any critical comment to something that Apple promotes? It had no thermosensing, no conductance reading, it lacked a lot of the safety features that the separate readers (the good ones) had. But coming from Apple, it must be good!
I wish that we could get back the old, advanced readers for use on plain PCs, either integrated (as they were for some years on the ThinkPad portables, although I don't think they had any conductivity or thermosensors), or as USB devices. Especially when used in 2FA, where you both must provide e.g. a password and a fingerprint, the security is way beyond what is needed in 99.99% of all systems. You wouldn't get the same security on your smartphone (until they add an advanced reader with all bells and whistles, and 2FA), but few smartphones hold information that needs military grade top secret protection.
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