If you just do time() you are missing a bunch of other important interfaces, gettimeofday(2), and stat(2) along with fstat(2). The stat calls also interface with on disk data structures...

All something that can be done, but not just one trivial thing.

Im can believe that, although it is a kind of weak reason. They could keep 32 bit FreeBSD around and make time_t a “long long”, I mean it is a typedef already isn't it? Sure it would be kind of a pain in that code that assumes it is an int or long wouldn’t work until patched, and the actual hard part would be on disk structures (like FFS inodes) very likely have 32 bits allocated (actually I think the FFS on disk structure had an adjacent unused 32 bit field, if so that one would be fixable!).

I mean that isn’t trivial (it is similar to a lot of the Y2K work people were doing in 1998/1999). It isn’t exactly hard though.

It is easier to drop 32 bit support though, so I can totally believe it.

at least from other companies, so they can have all the data for themselves

As an ex-Apple employee I can say at least a decade ago Apple didn’t want your data, like it wasn’t a “non-goal” to get it, it was a goal to NOT get it. They viewed it as inherently of little value, but having the data means they have to protect it, a data breach is bad for the corporate image, as is a warrant attack (i.e. any government forcing Apple to give up customer data was also viewed as bad for the corporate image, and it is expensive to decide which things to fight in court and fight them but even worse to just roll over for any request, and far far better to just not have any data so “yes, we turned it all over -- we had nothing, and we made a copy of that and put it in this empty envelope”; most of that was before Apple publicly started pushing privacy as a thing the iPhone (and to a lesser extent other products) bring. Which increases the downside of having anything that can get stolen or legally searched.

I’m not saying Apple does it out of the goodness of their hearts, or that all the board members/upper management actually believe privacy is a valuable thing to offer, but they do largely agree that making a promise at that level and breaking it is bad, or that was the view about a decade ago. Which is a big part of why most Apple product that could make use of more private data don’t really have it unless they can have it on only on your device(s) or as an encrypted blob that Apple doesn’t have the keys for.

Someone useless occupies a high position because he convinces peers he is somehow insightful

Not really useless, he was an ok design lead for iTunes...and I think he did Xcode design a little later as well that wasn’t awful. So I think this was more of an example of being better at getting himself promoted than actually doing the work after that point.

Sure it plays an important role. The problem with it is that the meta-language of modern techology design is enshittification.

I don’t think that is true in general. In specific cases, sure. In this specific case? No, Dye’s designs are the regular kind of shit. He loves information hiding, and isn’t god at usability, aces ability, or legibility. Hierarchy of information isn’t a strong suit either (other then things he hides by default, as opposed to shows by default). Back when he was “just” the design lead for iTunes he wasn’t too bad, running all Apple UX? Nope.

Subaru do a lot of things well - they're masters of all-wheel drive - but this is nuts.

I bought a VW Taos earlier this year with the usual trial subscription to Sirius XM. I was going to pull the plug when it expired but Sirius XM offered me a steep discount if I re-upped, so I did. They did it so readily that I wonder how many people are paying full price...

The bulk of my listening is two channels, Hits One and The Pulse.

...laura

Yes, there are corridors and city pairs in the U.S. where high-speed rail could get people from one city to another quickly and efficiently. But what do they do when they get there? How do they get around?

...laura

Last time I checked , this is not what businesses want. Business leaders want the end of remote working, they want bums on seats to justify the expense of owning large offices to their investors and therefore maximise the cost to the environment.

Too much money for not enough content.

When I had my morning toast and coffee earlier today I chose between three YouTube videos. An analysis of a high-performance motorcycle engine, a review of an off-road vehicle and troubleshooting a hybrid car. All cable ever has these days is reality shows.

...laura

The company standard for servers is RedHat 10. RedHat 10 does not support 32 bit applications.

The legacy app is running happily on RedHat 9.

...laura

I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.

The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.

When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.

The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.

...laura

Even the heist movie would choose a better password than that - otherwise the hacking scene would be boring - unless it was a comedy of course.

If you are going to worry that “they” are going to lie about the actual changes they make, or what studies show you are thinking small.

If “they” are going to lie about those, why would they tell the truth about using GMO v non-GMO crops? If you can’t trust them to tell the truth about the food supply you can’t trust them to tell the truth about, well, the food supply can you?

Copying features already available in other operating systems .... tut tut.

The issue is not that the climate has changed - it has, and it will continue to do so - but what we're going to do about it. No matter what the crisis, the solution always seems to be greater government control. Usually at the cost of our way of life.

What part of NO do you not understand?

...laura