It was also designed to be legible with poor ink on worse paper, and to be used in narrow columns (like what is used in newspapers). It looks horrible and unprofessional in a book or a normal business document.

There are lots of much better serif fonts that work well for business documents. They also tend to cost more because of licensing.

MS has created a lot of horrible, ugly fonts, but Calibri is actually good. Also, if you are already using MS Office, essentially free.

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.

Hedge funds and private equity firms demurred on investing in NTP, reportedly claiming that the foundation didn't have a credible plan for improving engagement.

...This is my embarrassed face.

I had previously assumed you were speaking of allocating $1M across all projects used by Google. In fact, you were speaking of giving $1M to each such project.

One would wonder what sorts of strings would be attached to such largesse. Still, that would indeed be game-changing and amazing.

Google could create a new corporate policy to provide a minimum of $1M/year to any open source project it uses.

That would be real innovation.

While acknowledging your noble intentions, no, it wouldn't be innovation. It would be cheaping out.

In the San Francisco bay area, $1.0E+06/year gets you maybe five skilled engineers. Set against the quantity of Open Source projects used by such organizations -- FFmpeg, GStreamer, OpenSSL, ssh, rsync, gcc, gdb, coreutils, nanopb, Samba, Lua, Python, Perl, Git, Vim/Neovim, Yocto, ImageMagick, Blender, the Pipewire framework, the Linux kernel, the Debian packaging system, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc... -- five engineers is miserly.

Google appears to have understaken the expense of spinning up an ocean-boiling slop machine to automagically generate plausible bug reports, and then casually fire off an email to the maintainers.

Note that Google has not undertaken the expense of assigning an engineer to also write a fix.

That they are not doing that is a conscious, management-approved choice.

...Y'know how Google relishes in closing bug reports with "WONTFIX - Working as designed?" I think FFmpeg should close slop reports from Google with, "WONTFIX - Unfunded."

"Hey, everyone! Don't pay any attention to those Japanese translators who'd been volunteering their time and expertise for the last 20 years that we just insensitively and comprehensively shit on... Look! New mascot logo! Giz cash..."

(Narrator: New revenues did not materialize.)

00000000 I'll see your luggage and raise you nuclear armageddon.

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?

50% of coal gas is (or was) Hydrogen. Conversion from Town Gas to Natural Gas meant converting to mostly methane.