larryjw

I've been hoping Apple's Swift Playgrounds would become the vehicle for automation. Apple's announced Playground upgrade gives me hope

boxcatcher said:

@StrangeDays ;

I agree with everything you said -- just asserting that it'll be 5+ years before you can legitimately leave your plastic ID home.

You're probably correct that it will be 5+ years, but it just takes that long to replace legacy systems -- or add features to legacy systems. 

When I toured Eastern Europe in 2017, the Apple Watch worked everywhere, where in the US, there was no support anywhere. Where there is little legacy, one can start fresh; with a legacy system, it takes time. 

The old legacy systems must continue to exist. Not everyone has access to new systems, and many don't trust the new way of doing things -- and I'm not sure they should. We've certainly seen many weaknesses exploited in recent months. But, that won't likely slow the transition down by much. 

The transition simply can't be stopped -- at minimum, it's as sexy has hell -- if not convenient for many. And, there is plenty of money to be made in the industry. Nobody is going to say no to that. There is no state that will be immune to that pressure. 

nht said:

waveparticle said:

nht said:

waveparticle said:

Trouble is not from Beijing. Taiwan is the trouble maker. Notice it politicizing the vaccine donation event?

Right.  A vaccine for a virus that may be from a PRC lab leak at worst or at best a virus that was allowed to escape early detection and contact tracing due to suppression of information and arrest of whistleblowers.

The PRC lost any chance of peaceful reunification by their heavy handed and unnecessary power grab in HK that resulted in riots and further heavy handed responses like arresting anyone that disagrees with the party line.  Anyone smart (and rich) in Hong Kong is going to try very hard to move to Canada or the UK.

The one China policy is effectively dead.  The US will pay lip service to it but support for Taiwan is going to be stronger than ever.

One Country Two Systems is dead dead.  

Not even KMT politicos are going to want to rejoin China and risk ending up in Qincheng Prison for saying the wrong thing or simply for being in the wrong power block at the wrong time.

The only good thing about the PRC system is that if you are high enough up then in a purge they DO send you to prison so maybe 20 years later you can be habilitated.  As opposed to being executed by antiaircraft guns like in North Korea.

Taiwan is a tiny little island the size of New Jersey that has little importance other than Winnie the Pooh wants to go down in history as the bear that “reunified” China.

Whatever you want to say about the DPP, they never sent in tanks to crush a student protest in Tiananmen Square.  There are asshats from the PRC that are so brainwashed that they don’t believe that it happened or that the students deserved it.  

For folks that lived through both the cultural revolution and Tiananmen Square the events in Hong Kong were sadly predictable.

Did the western leader US say any virus should not be allowed to escape early detection and contact tracing should be allowed? Let's take a look of history of the example set by US. Is HIV a virus? What kind of leadership US set of AIDS? The patient name is strictly confident to protect privacy. Tens of millions of people have died of AIDS. 

We made a mistake with AIDS.  Unfortunately, in hindsight, even if we were more reactive our patient 0 turned out to be only one of many in an early SF cluster.  The earliest cases come from Congo sometime between 1915 and 1941 most likely through consumption of bushmeat.  That the US was homophobic back in the 80-90s led to stupidly slow response.

The Wuhan COVID event, particularly after SARS, was an unnecessary fiasco at best due to the actions of the local cadre trying not to get crucified by Beijing and at worst the cover up of a lab leak by the central leadership.  

EVERY national health organization in Asia was on the lookout for SARS or SARS like cases because SARS was super scary and sucked. 

That the PRC dropped the ball in Wuhan in such a spectacular fashion can’t be dodged by infantile false equivalences with AIDS.

According to virologists, the genetic distance between the current closest bat virus to the covid virus is 30 to 40 years of mutations. I think we can be certain that viruses akin to the covid virus have been in the wild during these years. And it certainly could have been mixing not only in China broadly but outside China, into other asian countries in particular. 

There is no reason to conclude that because the covid virus was first detected in Wuhan means the virus first arose in Wuhan. That certainly can be true, but it is also a given that only places that have the facilities to detect virus strains would be among the first to detect them -- it doesn't mean they arose there. 

Then, there's the issue of the illness itself. We've probably been in the grips of pandemics for years. Nobody cares because most of these pandemics just cause runny noses. This pandemic became important, and we actually called this a pandemic, is because it kills lots of people. So, sometime in 2019, a virus close to the Covid virus mutated in just the right way to cause humans problems. 

Given the nature of the world economy, this shows the self-defeating, if not immoral, nature of me first.

The rich nations hoarded the vaccines. 

elijahg said:

crowley said:

Maybe I will, maybe I won't.  But some people definitely won't, they'll go somewhere else, or put off that upgrade another year; 

Which is exactly what I have done since Cook ballooned iPhone prices. I had a new iPhone every other year since the original, until the 6S. Since then I have only bought one: the X - and that was second hand. Cook's absurd pricing has caused them to lose a number of iPhone sales from a historically avid fan, and thus average revenue from me has nosedived in the latter 5 years compared to the 5 before. ASP is up, but that is meaningless. Many of my friends have switched away from iOS or are still rocking an ancient iPhone 6, and they all say it's down to the crazy prices.

When I started my law practice back in the early '80s, I bought two printers. The fast dot-matrix printer cost me $1200. I needed a computer so purchased the Osbourne luggable computer for $1800, Z80 CPU with 64KB of memory and two floppy disks and 5" screen, all running under the CPM OS. My first large brief was 100 pages of Constitutional Law, printed on the second of my printers. The printer could print 10 characters a second max. It took 2 days to print the brief. I typed the brief on the Osbourne using the CPM equivalent of nroff and troff. 

My first "smart" phone, circa 1995, was $1200 from Radio Shack, flip-phone from Verizon. I had no connection from my home. 

When I was working my first job, circa 1970, at a UW-Madison lab, we needed a hard disk to run a real-time OS I had written for a PDP-8, which controlled lab equipment. It cost us $8000 for a 32K hard disk. Before that I had to write my software on a Classic Linc computer in the basement of the UW Hospital. Then dump the compiled code onto a paper-tape, walk the paper-tape back over to the lab and feed the paper-tape into the ASR-33 teletype and debug it, walking back and forth between the hospital and lab fixing coding errors. Of course, I had to work at night from 10p.m. to 6 a.m in the morning, because we were running experiments during the day. 

You really have no idea how good you have it.