Ahhm. At previous $DAYJOB, I inherited a WPF app written in 2012; I stumbled upon several WONTFIX bugs through the years - mostly having to do with shared memory bitmaps, having to manually call GC at times, and a host of other things.

Stable, but many issues. Stay away if you value your sanity and do anything nontrivial.

That was a late edition. I have working DVD drives that will happily read anything on a disc, even if they can’t decode it.

Newer drives I bought will refuse reading what they won’t decide themselves (e.g. wrong region).

KDB v1 is from sometime in the late 1990’s (I met v2 in 2002; but v1 was internal use only at some investment bank).

But that follows A and A+ which were extremely column oriented and date to early 1990s or even late 1980s ; and to various APL implementations going back to the 1960’s

Columnar DBs were very much a thing among APL users (finance and operations research) but weren’t really known outside those fields - and even in those fields, there was a period of amnesia in the late ‘90s/early 2000’s

The existing laws are rarely well specified enough for precise enforcement, often on purpose.

You cannot have precise enforcement with imprecise laws. It’s as simple as that.

The HN favorite in this respect is “fair use” under copyright. It isn’t well specified enough for “precise enforcement”. How do you suggest we approach that one?

We can fix it by fixing the law. In this case the obvious solution is to abolish copyright (and other IP laws).

Good Luck!

The name “Calcalist” is indeed a play on “Economist” (it is not a proper Hebrew word, but fuses the Hebrew word for economy “calcala” with the English suffix for a professional work “ist”.

However, it is just an expanded version of Ynet’s business/economy section, and Ynet is probably the closest equivalent to USA Today or The Sun.

Is it etymologically related to "calculate" or is it a coincidence?

Seems to be a coincidence - the Hebrew word comes from the Bible (old testament), and means "the feeding, and generally providing of needs".

The English word comes from "calculus", meaning, apparently, pebble, because original counting was done with pebbles.

(I had to look both up. Thanks for asking)

How can a word come from the Bible? It must have existed before the Bible in order to have a meaning inside of it. Or did you mean to write it came from Aramaic?

Hebrew is a reconstructed language. Whilst some roots will predate the Torah, most won't.

Several words, like the infamous "shibboleth" won't be inherited, or their meanings may wildly differ.

I mean that it already appears in the Bible, in old Hebrew (which is close to, but isn’t exactly Aramaic), with the meaning “to feed and provide” - and I did not find any documentation about how it formed (or came into) Hebrew.

Which means of course m, that it was already in use before the Bible was canonicalized.

Hardcore gamers are not a big enough market segment to sustain x86. If everyone else switches to ARM/RISC-V, games will too, eventually.

Hardcore gamers were the reason behind a whole new chip type being introduced - the GPU. This was also when this market was a lot smaller. I don’t see this changing. The market will continue rewarding chips that cater to it. It is absolutely big enough to sustain several different completely bespoke chip types, regardless of what non-gamers are doing.

x86 will lose to ARM/RISC in gaming only if those chips provide a better gaming experience.

What they did not win was the popularity contest, mostly thanks to Windows - the Wintel market was just too massive to compete with.

But that’s changed somewhat - Apple has managed a larger mind and market share (while switching into ARM). The vast majority of uses are now available on the web, which is CPU agnostic, and there is a huge amount of open source software available.

The only things for which x86 still shines a little brighter are games, and native office. But office is mostly available on web, on Mac, and on Winarm. So games. Which aren’t big enough market mass to sustain the x86’s popularity — and is a segment (soon) under attack by Valve.

> The only things for which x86 still shines a little brighter are games, and native office. But office is mostly available on web, on Mac, and on Winarm. So games. Which aren’t big enough market mass to sustain the x86’s popularity — and is a segment (soon) under attack by Valve.

You've missed a huge segment:

Random in-house apps or niche vertical market apps that are closely tethered with a business workflow to the point that replacing them is a massive undertaking, where the developers at best aren't interested in improving anything and at worst no longer exist.

No I did not miss it. That has moved to web, either directly Or through an RDP/VNC interface where the actual windows virtual machine is hidden.

Embedded/hardware is the last segment still not replaced by web.

It absolutely has not. I absolutely agree most of those kinds of apps could, and those that can probably should, but more than enough have not.

I support a lot of dental practices using Patterson Eaglesoft and they still don't officially support VMs in any form, even for the server (despite it working fine) while they have removed all support for using terminal services. Obviously the basic application works fine, but a dental practice needs to be able to take digital x-rays. Shock the sensor drivers only exist for Windows and back when RDP and Citrix were supported it required a special bridge running on both the client (which of course still had to be Windows) and the server.

We used some thin clients back in the day for front desk stations and hygiene rooms that didn't need any special hardware, but the main practice rooms and the pano stations always needed full Windows PCs.

The client app is built with PowerBuilder so it'd require a deep rewrite to support any other platforms.

The server side is a Sybase SQL Anywhere database and a SMB file share so it could easily be run natively on Linux but the vendor can't be bothered.

This is a company that still insists that every user needs local admin privileges, despite literally nothing going wrong when they don't have it, and who usually doesn't support new Windows releases until a few months after it becomes the default for new PCs.

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There are other dental platforms that do have web interfaces intended mostly to enable the use of iPads and other tablets but switching platforms is far from straightforward for practices with years of data, custom integrations, etc. Even if you are willing to go through the trouble (or starting fresh) those platforms, to my knowledge, still require Windows PCs for digital x-ray support.

I did write “embedded/hardware”. Yes, you need special drivers for your X-ray/drill/whatever so you earned an another decade of windows.

But in the places I frequent (backoffice, municipal, finance) it’s all gone web and rdp-through-web (which is web, in the sense that it doesn’t require windows on the client) with centralized administration with minimal (not quite self-serve but reasonably close) thin client users.

Most people outside US, and similar G8 countries, aren't going to pay Apple.

No, but Microsoft are also going arm. Where the us goes, the world goes eventually.

Microsoft keeps trying to go ARM for a decade already, most Windows devs and consumers don't care, backwards compatibility rules on PC world, regardless of Prism and ARM64EC.

Additionally beware what to wish for, as CoPilot+ PC are locked down with Pluton security processor, from XBox and Azure Sphere.

The x86 emulation for fallback is (I’ve heard - not tried) usable for the first time.

Microsoft tried in the past without a Rosetta equivalent; Apple succeeded twice with Rosetta. They did not try to switch cold turkey the way Microsoft did.

It doesn't cover device drivers, nor stuff like DAWs plugins.

Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility like the PC, who doesn't move, stays behind.

Are you familiar with anyone who uses a 20 year old DAW?

Retro Amiga trackers don’t count.

servers

Worked very well for Apple in their transition to Apple Silicon.

for real, rosetta is crazy good

I am typing this on a 9 year old iPhone 8 Plus. Battery was replaced once after 6 years, replacement battery is still lasting more than a day. Apps are slowly losing support for it, but other than that it mostly does what I want, and still gets security updates for really bad stuff.

Is there a comparably usable 9 year old android?

Because it has been trained on Java class spaghetti.

When it’s trained on enough APL/K code, you’ll get minimal abstraction.