I've never been very interested in commercials and don't see why I'd be outraged about either of those apple commercials.
What strikes me though is that in 40 years we went from a Macintosh to an iPad, a watch and vr glasses.
I'm actually baffled by the lack of progress made given so much time and resources. There was so much optimism about microcomputers, yet so little has been accomplished.
there has been tons of progress made, just for shareholders, not users of the actual technology. SaaSification, subscriptions, weaponized feature tiers, emotional manipulation. We are living in the golden age of marketing, sales, and consumerism.
I find that questionable. What does "software engineering in a business environment" require that a competent competitive programmer couldn't also learn?
Specification. For any real business, it takes huge effort for a group of people across many domains to consolidate what should be done. That's only the what part.
Not saying competitive programming contest easy or something, but just pointing out that in a contest with timing constraint, the requirement realization phase cannot be fitted in.
When I was a kid in the 80s - I convinced my dad he needed a 286 for his construction company - so he could do his books. And he'd need a modem - its the new fax.
(This was so I could play populous, BBS to San Jose and get Grounded for a month for running the phone bill up to 926 for long distance calling into PCLink...
My dad yelled at me for playing video games "WHAT THAT EVER GUNNA DO"
--
years later I left my shift at Intel running the game lab.. to meet my dad for dinner.
He apologized to me for telling me that games and computers would never do anything.
I was touched he remembered.
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These dumb olympiads will never amount to much, id bet.
I don't know if cross-platform applications are very popular anymore. Most of the good software I use is either single platform using native code, or it's Qt or it's electron. Only rare cases use something else.
Sublime has their own cross-platform native widget system
Jetbrains/minecraft use Java
Spotify is chromium, discord is chromium, thunderbird is firefoxium, Obsidian is chromium, steam is (probably?) chromium.
Most software that I know is cross-platform uses Qt otherwise; qbittorrent (duh), Transmission, KeepassXC, VLC (mostly, but also uses other GUI frameworks sometimes), Calibre, Krita, OBS
Bitumen is getting more and more expensive, so I guess unless it’s crazy expensive it’s just a matter of time..
We’re using increasingly less gasoline to drive cars a given distance. For EVs it’s essentially zero. So we refine less oil for fuel, which means we’re also getting less bitumen. Not hard to see that using bitumen is completely unsustainable in the long term.
I guess it depends on regulations/carbon credits related to CO2 emissions too
I get that the subsidies themselves aren't going anywhere, but in evaluating the cost effectiveness of this alternative it should be part of the math in comparing to the previous version.
In the video I used closed captioning (English) since I am only fluent in Texas English. I have to say that the CC translation on that was pretty funny. Whatever they used did not produce a meaningful translation. It was impressively disjointed nonsense. It was easier for me to listen closely to his speech to peel out the root words and try to infer the rest.
I am not familiar with conventional bitumen processing or preparation for use on roads but if this process allows creation of an asphalt product that eliminates the need to mine low gravity petroleum resources then it is a great development. Perhaps it eliminates a lot of the incentive to continue mining the tar sands in Canada. Maybe?
