abhibeckert

First of all, you're implying it runs latest Windows - but Windows 11 shipped a few years ago.

Second - not really a fair comparison. 18 years ago the iPhone didn't even exist. And the oldest model (17 years old) had really weak hardware. 4GB of storage, 128MB of RAM, and the CPU was an order of magnitude slower than current spec CPUs (it was also 32 bit - and 64 bit ARM is a completely new architecture - similar to the failed Itanium).

Even if it was supported, it would be a horrible experience.

Is there some huge benefit that I’m missing?

For example I recently fixed a bug where a function would return an integer 99.9999% of the time, but the other 0.0001% returned a float. The actual value came from a HTTP request, so it started out as a string and the code was relying on dynamic typing to convert that string to a type that could be operated on with math.

In testing, the code only ever encountered integer values. About two years later, I discovered customer credit cards were charged the wrong amount of money if it was a float value. There was no exception, there was nothing visible in the user interface, it just charged the card the wrong amount.

Thankfully I'm experienced enough to have seen errors like this before - and I had code in place comparing the actual amount charged to the amount on the customer invoice... and that code did throw an exception. But still, it took two years for the first exception to be thrown, and then about a week for me to prioritise the issue, track down the line of code that was broken, and deploy a fix.

In a strongly typed language, my IDE would have flagged the line of code in red as I was typing it, I would've been like "oh... right" and fixed it in two seconds.

Yes — there are times when typing is a bit of a headache and requires extra busywork casting values and such. But that is more than made up for by time saved fixing mistakes as you write code instead of fixing mistakes after they happen in production.

Having said that, I don't use TypeScript, because I think it's only recently become a mature enough to be a good choice... and WASM is so close to being in the same state which will allow me to use even better typed languages. Ones that were designed to be strongly typed from the ground up instead of added to an existing dynamically typed language.

I don't see much point in switching things now, I'll wait for WASM and use Rust or Swift.

What technical limitations?

I'd guess it was the small battery in the watch. A lot of features on Apple's smartwatch cause serious battery life problems unless they can be offloaded to your phone at least most of the day.

For example if you have the weather conditions on your watch face... the watch can lookup the weather but it generally will ask your phone to do that. Stuff like that is a lot easier if you control the phone operating system and aren't just running an app.

... for example if you never launch the weather app on your phone, both Android and iOS will reduce it's ability to drain the phone's battery by running in the background. Apple makes an exception to that rule for weather apps where the user has a widget an Apple Watch face. How could the Android battery management systems know what widgets are on your Apple Watch?

The legal aspect is crystal clear. It's blatantly illegal to ban entry based on gender with very few exceptions (such as toilets or domestic violence shelters). I expect the court will be angry that it even went to court at all.

The purpose of a judge is to settle disagreements. When both sides of a court case agree with the facts, then there is nothing for the judge to do, and it should not go to court at all. It should be settled out of court.

It's likely to be a really short case "did you have a policy to ban men?" "yes". "case closed; moving on to damages"... but the thing is, even though the meat of the case will be over almost instantly... there will still be weeks of work done in the lead up to the case, by both legal teams, but the court, by the judge, preparing the jury if it's a jury trial, etc (imagine how angry your boss would be if they had to give you paid time off work, delaying project schedules, over this case).

If you want to make a political statement, the court room is not the place to be doing that. At a minimum I'd expect the court to force one side to pay all of the legal fees of the other side, and on top of that the court might charge them with abuse of the court process which could result in punitive fines and also discipline against the lawyers involved (they could even be banned from practicing their craft). Judges don't have a sense of humour and they are not interested in political debates.

Pulsar is a fork of Atom, which was discontinued because almost everyone jumped ship to VSCode.

What does Pulsar do that is better than VSCode? All the features this article highlights are in VSCode too, and I can think of a bunch of features that Pulsar doesn't have (dev containers are a big one for me - they allow you to have different versions of the same software installed, depending what project you're working on right now... and you can work on/run both versions of the same software at the same time, on the same hardware... you can also emulate other CPU architectures in a dev container, some of the software I work with every day can't actually run natively on my hardware).

it’s just never used or enabled in the software by default

...and most people who own those devices have never heard of IPv6 and don't know how to enable it. They just won't be able to access your website. If Amazon dropped support for IPv4, there wouldn't be anything i'd be able to do to deal with the fall out. I'm not going to send a technician to every single home of every customer I have. What I could (and would) do is move all my stuff off Amazon.

Meh - I'm pretty sure Torvalds is just saying in public what thousands of other people were thinking quietly.

It sure is unpleasant to have your mistakes pointed out in public... but it's a hell of a lot better than not even knowing you made a mistake at all which is usually what happens.

It would be better if Torvalds told the guy he's an idiot in a private email but I'm not going to get worked up over that. Honestly I have a bigger problem with The Register making a headline out of it. The kernel mailing list is relatively private... this article is going to be attached to this poor engineer for the rest of his career. They should have omitted his name at least.

What am I missing?

The patent in question, if it's valid, would have expired several years ago. The fact that it's everyday technology today is pretty normal considering how fast technology advances. Ordinary toilet rolls were also a patented invention and there's nothing in the law that says a patent has to a complicated solution to a problem.

iTunes was the first shipping product that ever actually did what's described in the patent... and the person who ran the iTunes department that "invented" this feature was previously a subcontractor working for the guy who holds the patent - he was literally paid to implement what the patent described and then Apple poached him and he continued the work at his new job without any patent license.

I don't support patents and never will, but if there was ever a case for clear infringement then this is it. It's already been to court and apple was found guilty of patent infringement... only to have an appeals court overturn the decision in pretty questionable circumstances.

I dunno about you, but I would love to get a notification on my watch when the machine has finished it's cycle. The stupid high pinched repeated beeping noise sucks... especially when it's the next door neighbour's washing machine and they're not even home, so it goes on and on for fucking hours. And I'd like to see proper error descriptions on my phone, instead of just "UE" on the timer LCD. WTF is a "UE" error?

If we're going to get really fancy... I'd love to be able to load the machine in the morning, but tell it to actually start running several hours later while I'm at work. I obviously don't want clean wet clothes going mouldy in the washing machine all day... but I don't really want to run the washing machine when I'm home either, because it's noisy.

Remote activation would also be better for the environment and also better for my clothes - I'd use the the slow gentle economy cycle every time if I could remotely trigger it at 3pm on a weekday. I'm definitely not going to use that on the evenings (when I'll be asleep in 3 hours) or on weekends (when I don't know if I'll be home in 3 hours time).

A wifi connected washing machine sounds like a great feature to me, and I'd happily pay for it (with dollars, not with an invasion of privacy). I guess that means I won't be buying an LG.

For me the optimal conference is one where your accommodation is included in the ticket price and in the same building as the conference. Book out an entire resort or cruise ship and encourage people to socialise late at night and/or early in the morning outside of the main conference track.

And with the actual talks, spread them out so there's plenty of time for attendees to have discussions in between talks.