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Comment How else would Windows Hello work? (Score 2) 97

And does M$ think they can mandate what ports manufacturers put on their PC.s
I remember them saying that LapTops had to have a camera.

This article claims that the camera requirement exists to support Windows Hello authentication. How would Microsoft's Windows Hello or Apple's Face ID work without a camera? Or what other means of quickly authenticating the user to the operating system and to the external passkey/password store would you recommend instead?

Comment It'd make low-end laptops more expensive (Score 1) 97

There are no downsides to this.

The only downside I can think of is that low-end Windows laptops could become a lot more expensive to support display and 40 Gbps on all ports. This could drive laptop makers toward an operating system with even more restricted functionality: ChromeOS.

Comment String length API unchanged? Facepalm. (Score 1) 99

unless there is a discovery in calculation of length of a string.

Incidentally, there was such a discovery. 'It's not wrong that "[facepalming man with brown skin emoji]".length = 7' by Henri Sivonen came out in September 2019. It explains the difference among code units, code points, and extended grapheme clusters, the difference among UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, the difference among JavaScript, Python 3, and Rust length semantics, and the difference among storage, display width, and arbitrary quotas that are roughly fair across languages.

Comment Government complicit in private censorship (Score 1) 95

Even if you define "censor" to refer only to public sector acts, the government can censor on behalf of a private person by enforcing exclusive rights asserted by said private person. In the case of iMessage and other closed platforms, the exclusive rights in question are often those granted under anti-circumvention statutes implementing the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, such as 17 USC 1201 and foreign counterparts.

Comment XML and JSON schemas are for semantics (Score 2) 95

Both XML and JSON have a syntax, which describes what makes a document using those languages well-formed. However, not all well-formed markup is valid in a particular application. For example, you don't want "-567" or "butt" as the value of the "width" attribute in an "img" element in HTML. For this reason, applications of XML and applications of JSON have semantics, which further refine what is considered "valid" for that application. An XML or JSON schema can be used to quickly reject documents that are well-formed but not valid.

Comment "Application" dates to mid-1980s (Score 1) 187

Programs for macOS and its predecessor Mac OS have been called applications since the mid-1980s. Three usage examples for the short form "app" in Wiktionary come from computing books and magazines from 1999, which predates the iPod, let alone the iPhone. The term "killer app" in particular dates to PC Week in 1988.

Comment Re:no. (Score 1) 187

The Node.JS came up, and Javascript's status in the browser could not explain the existence of Node.

That one's easy. Running JavaScript on the server allows using the same code on the client to validate data in form inputs before submission that the server uses to authoritatively validate data in received submissions. Writing the code once and only once eliminates the class of errors where the client's pre-submission validation (in JavaScript) differs in behavior from the server's authoritative validation (usually in C#, Java, Perl, Ruby, Python, or Go).

Comment JS as bridge between WASM and DOM (Score 1) 187

JavaScript's main advantage was that it was the privileged scripting language in the browser. That advantage is disappearing now that runtime and toolchain support is increasing for WebAssembly.

JavaScript's main advantage remains that it is the privileged scripting language for moving values back and forth between the DOM and WebAssembly in the browser.

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