that should be good for almost no one

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpetapixel.com%2F2025%2F01%2F...

We had old billing systems (think: AOS/VS II hosted COBOL

If I remember correctly, AOS/VS stored dates as a 16-bit number that represented the number of days since some time in 1967. It should theoretically have been good until at least 2100.

VR can't replace the real world.

Exactly. To flesh out your idea a little further, VR won't take off until it's like the holodeck on Start Trek. How do I run across a huge hallway or field, that I might see in the latest FPS game, if I live in an apartment?

We have to thank BASIC for Microsoft.

Sadly, you're probably right. I still have an OSI C4P, from roughly 1978. It prints the following message when it boots:

OSI 6502 BASIC VERSION 1.0 REV 3.2
COPYRIGHT 1977 BY MICROSOFT CO.

If you actually look in the BASIC ROM, it says "WRITTEN BY RICHARD W. WEILAND".

I'm so old I can remember when there was Windows/NT for the PowerPC

And DEC's Alpha

When they released Windows for the Alpha, everyone at my old job was like "Woo hoo! No more Unix!", and we started porting our software to Windows. Then we started doing benchmarks.

That was the last time anyone mentioned Windows on our servers.

people who voluntarily give information to third parties ... have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information

I could see their point, if it was actually voluntary, but banks, phone service, and ISPs are basically required by today's society.

Personally, I think someone (with more money than most of us) should buy that same information for all Secret Service, FBI, and DHS employees, and make it publicly available.

Python is the go-to for unmaintable, once-off, kludges.

Not in my experience. Just recently, we had had to connect a third-party piece of software to a messaging server (IBM MQ). I did it in Python in a couple of weekends, with about 300 lines of code. Unfortunately, we're officially a C# shop, so they paid a consultant to write a new program in C#. It took him eight months and I don't know how many lines of code.

Sorry, but I don't see how you could call 300 lines of code unmaintainable.

The basic x86 instruction set is 46 years old. 8086 was released in 1978.

And it has far outlived its usefulness. How much farther ahead could we have been in computer technology if we'd standardized on a better architecture?

I'm not planning on upgrading from Windows 7

I'd like to do the same, but the only thing I use Windows for is games, and more and more games are refusing to run on Win7.

Nearly every word you wrote is just factually incorrect.

It's funny: I have a nephew that's kind of a semi-pro photographer. (He does some photography for his company, but that's not his full-time job.) I had this exact discussion with him about five years ago, and I took your side. He said that, no, phones were actually pretty good today, and the only reason to get a real camera was if you intended to make something like a 10-foot square poster with the image.

Let me be clear: I don't have a problem banning plastic bags.

Or you could do like the majority of people on the planet, and bring bags with you.

This is fine, unless you're on vacation. Some years ago, I was visiting California and bought a bunch of stuff from a convenience store. For whatever reason, they couldn't give me a bag, so I had to carry the stuff back to the hotel without one. (I wanted to just ask for my money back, but it didn't look like that was going to happen.) I made it without dropping anything, but I wouldn't want to have to do that again.

I've been calling for corporate and individual liability for bad software for at least 35 years.

LOL. The only kind of corporate liability I've seen in my lifetime is where the corporations get bailed out and the taxpayers pick up the tab.

No. The only way you're going to get a company to change their ways is to stop using their products and impact their bottom line.

Maybe I'm blaming the victim here, but instead of "demanding" anything from them, people should go elsewhere. It's the only way they'll listen. Stop using Microsoft software.

Kubuntu has really come a long way. Until 18.04, I would have told you the best desktop I had ever used was Fedora 14, and then, at 15 or 16, they went to Gnome 3, which was a complete disaster. Between then and Kubuntu 18.04, I was doing the same as you - switching distributions often. Not anymore.

This sounds like one of those let's get a patent to pad our resume filings more than anything else.

To me it sounds more like Microsoft is trying to control the Python market. Add an incompatible function here, and an incompatible statement there, and in five years, everyone will be talking about how CPython sucks and everyone should be using MicroSoft Python.