yggdar

Phrased differently: Microsoft announces the end of support for a product. If you want to pay for it, they will make an exception and continue to support it just for you.

I understand people dislike Windows 11, but complaining about life cycle management isn't going to help that.

That exact version will end up making "true" false any time it appears on a line number that is divisible by 10.

During the compilation, "true" would be replaced by that statement and within the statement, "__LINE__" would be replaced by the line number of the current line. So at runtime, you end up witb the line number modulo 10 (%10). In C, something is true if its value is not 0. So for e.g., lines 4, 17, 116, 39, it ends up being true. For line numbers that can be divided by 10, the result is zero, and thus false.

In reality the compiler would optimise that modulo operation away and pre-calculate the result during compilation.

The original version constantly behaves differently at runtime, this version would always give the same result... Unless you change any line and recompile.

The original version is also super likely to be actually true. This version would be false very often. You could reduce the likelihood by increasing the 10, but you can't make it too high or it will never be triggered.

One downside compared to the original version is that the value of "true" can be 10 different things (anything between 0 and 9), so you would get a lot more weird behaviour since "1 == true" would not always be true.

A slightly more consistent version would be

((__LINE__ % 10) > 0)

Sadly, yes. On the off chance you speak Dutch, here is a fact-checking article on that exact ad. I know it's a weird thing to link articles in uncommon languages, but I came across that article recently and thought it really provided a lot of context, so I'm afraid it's the best source I have. You can always run it through a translator too :-)

It sounds like you have a very specific set of requirements that requires a specific type of premium phone. Not everybody needs 128 GB of storage eon their phone (mine only has 64). I agree that a lot of storage and SD-card slots are good features to have on phones, but the truth is that not everyone needs those. Each feature will add cost and require more resources to build, and for a lot of people not having them will work just fine.

You want to translate COBOL to another language? That exists as a commercial product! The complexity is not the syntax though, it is the environment and subsystems surrounding the code. A lot of COBOL is designed for mainframe systems, and emulating a mainframe is complex.

You also end up with code that is still written as if it were COBOL. The syntax for COBOL is the easy part and that is all you can easily replace. Afterwards you're still stuck with the way of working and mindset, both of which are quite peculiar.

The company I work for recently looked at all of this, and we decided not to translate our code.

They are very busy charging an arm and a leg for crappy software with shit support.

AI is a field of research in computer science, and LLM are definitely part of that field. In that sense, LLM are AI. On the other hand, you're right that there is definitely no real intelligence in an LLM.

Sure, but that isn't the scientific process. Typically a first team publishes what they did and the result they obtained, then others will try to replicate and improve on those results.

What you describe is interesting, but more of a closed/proprietary approach. A team says they have something and invite others to take a look, and then the second team will need to make sure they aren't being bamboozled somehow. But until the second team can actually recreate the entire situation, it isn't very useful to them. They just get to be onlookers, and will remain sceptical that there is some bamboozling being done.

It is the only safe thing to do! Unless you were meant to do something, and your inactivity changes the world forever...

I like your optimism, but no, they are actually serious.

According to this article, an average smartphone uses 2W when in use. That number will largely be dependent on the screen and SOC, which can be turned off or be placed in a lower power state when the phone isn't actively being used. (The 5W - 20W figure is for charging a phone.)

With 8 of these cells, you'll have 800μW, or 0.0008W, and you need 2W. You will need to add a few more batteries... About 19,992 more. If 8 of these batteries are about the same size as a regular smartphone battery, you will need the equivalent of 2,500 smartphone batteries to power just one phone.

Too bad they don't say how much the new batteries weigh! It would have been fun to see...

If we ballpark it and assume something the size of a regular smartphone battery is 50g (1.7 oz), then our stack of 20,000 of these new batteries could be about 125kg (275 lbs).

I won't be replacing any of my batteries just yet.

Cars are not weapons. They are dangerous, but they haven't been invented to kill. You also need to do an exam before you're allowed to drive a car.

It would also be very hard to compete with products that are this mature. Linux, Windows, and macOS have been under development for a long time, with a lot of people. If you create a new OS, people will inevitably compare your new immature product with those mature products. If you had the same resources and time, then maybe your new OS would beat them, but you don't. So at launch you will have less optimizations, features, security audits, compatibility, etc., and few people would actually consider using your OS.

One of the arguments that gets used is that the employees should look neutral. For example, if you want to get your gender changed you might not be comfortable with someone who is visibly associated with a religion that disproves of gender changes.

It is correct, because 'nothing' is indeed written in stone!

That's a good tip, but I assume he meant he drinks juice of burned beans, rather than burned juice of beans. After all, coffee beans do need to be roasted (burned) before you use them!

For me it's Chrome for work, because we're not allowed to install anything on our machines :(

This is great! My phone doesn't get updates very often, but this feature is already available and was turned on by default. (Moto G31)

You couldn't really do that with beer, because beer is typically carbonated and thus you'll need a very strong bag inside of the box. So strong that you'll end up with a can or bottle.

That is true, but from a human perspective it can still seem non-deterministic! The behaviour of the program as a whole will be deterministic, if all inputs are always the same, in the same order, and without multithreading. On the other hand, a specific function call that is executed multiple times with the same input may occasionally give a different result.

Most programs also have input that changes between executions. Hence you may get the same input record, but at a different place in the execution. Thus you can get a different result for the same record as well.

With my professional experience in COBOL, I can honestly say I'm not surprised at all!

premium phones that have SD cards, but there aren't many options. The only one is a $1400 Xperia I V

There are other options too, like the fairphone or Galaxy A-series mentioned by others in this thread. They never disappeared, they just became less common because there is less customer demand.

If you need a phone with a lot of storage or extensible storage, you can get one. There will be a cost associated with that need, but it is not necessary to pay $1400 either. It is hardly anti-consumer to say that a lot of people don't need this option.

What you do with your phone is your choice, and if you want to store 1 TB of pictures, audiobooks, or even porn, you should go ahead and do that. All I'm saying is that this is not a typical use case, and you can't expect any random phone to support it. But there are phones that do, and you should get one.

Does life suck, or not?

I manage a team of about 30 people in IT. Your job is not valued enough, and I know the importance of what you do. Thank you for your work!

You're absolutely right! USB storage devices are blocked and we don't have the right to execute arbitrary executables anyway. It is a pretty secure environment.

Are sd card slots cheaper than 128 GB of flash storage chips? I'm not sure, but yes, probably. You would also need to factor in the additional complexity of allowing physical access to the slot, which would take some additional designing and a few more components. The sd card itself will probably be a more expensive and slower than integrated flash storage. By contrast, it is probably extremely easy to just shove some flash storage chips in a phone. Still, I agree that it sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff for me.

That may be true for the exact hardware you used, and the exact tests you have done. For Microsoft the problem would be that they need to actively continue supporting older and older devices. At some point it makes sense to drop active support. If it works, that's fine, but they won't continue testing and fixing for unsupported configurations.

Good point, somehow I completely missed the point you were trying to make about getting samples and analyzing them outside of the original laboratory. That would indeed be completely scientific.

Somehow taking the samples out of the original laboratory didn't cross my mind. What I understood was a team going over there to look at the samples. In that case I would be very weary of any possible manipulations, like with magicians' tricks or such.

I'm really having issues thinking straight these days with the stress I've been under and the stomach flu I just had. Sorry about that brainfart!