It's almost as if we shouldn't treat their words as gospel. By them I mean people who were in the right place at the right time and had the right amount of luck, which is what success looks like usually.
You’re amazed that someone wrote a bunch of articles about opinions on the future of technology and they didn’t all turn out to be true? An expert’s opinion being wrong one time invalidates the expertise?
I don’t know. I just had to buy, and use, a Windows 11 pc. Remarkably, it shares a desk with a new M3 iMac, side by side. And equally remarkably, they’re set up so they behave almost identically, except that Windows 11 is a little snappier and has a few fewer keystrokes than the Finder for most operations. (And search works!). I quickly acculturated to it after a decade away. Entirely unexpected.
Are you noticing ads within Windows? I haven't used windows in over a decade and hear there are a lot of ads you see throughout the OS, which is something you don't get on macOS.
I use Windows 11 Professional at work, and I haven't seen a single ad.
There might be sponsored apps installed or something, but I don't care. I open the start menu, search for the application I want and run that. They're not getting in my way, if they are there.
That said, I prefer late-Windows 10 to current-Windows 11. But I hated Windows 10 when it launched and they fixed the key annoyances, so there's a chance they'll do it with Windows 11 as well. They've already fixed some, like the centered task bar.
This is false; there are ads in quite a few places in macOS, examples of which were shared in another reply to your comment.
While I'm not a Windows user much anymore, my understanding is that there are at least unofficial hacks/tweaks you can apply to remove many of the ads in Windows. In contrast, certain ads in macOS (e.g. the one nagging you to upgrade your iCloud plan when you're near your storage limit) cannot be disabled through any mechanism that I've been able to find.
I pretty much stopped using MacOS because they put so many fucking ads in the OS by default and smugly expected you to just accept that they were there. It's not as bad as Windows yet, but honestly it's just as annoying.
I'm just one data point, but I haven't personally seen any of those ads in macOS but I don't use Apple News. Also I see all of these links are reports from 3 - 8 years ago so perhaps some of them don't occur any more?
Regardless, it's rather rude to call people names here when we're just having a discussion. Your tone is offensive.
You were wrong. MacOS has advertisements, that's the long-and-short of it.
I correct people when they make this mistake because Hacker News has a habit of giving corporations undue lip-service. You can be mad at me if it makes you feel better, but the problem is that Apple doesn't respect your attention. MacOS today literally violates it's own Human Interface Guidelines to serve you advertisements; think on that for a moment.
It appears you have missed the point. I'm not upset with you for referencing reports; my frustration lies with your condescending tone and name-calling, which contribute nothing to the discussion. Your approach is frankly very off-putting.
I don’t even know what people are referring to exactly when they say Windows is full of ads. Windows 11 is my main OS, it’s the basic Home edition.
The only ads I see are when I mistype in the start menu, and get some web search results including ads, just like when I google something.
Inline web search results is a crappy feature to me, but it didn’t bother me enough to go regedit mode and disable it. It only appears when the computer search can’t find anything, it kinds of fall back on web search.
It seems the most outraged people are those who never use Windows and rage at the fact that it’s still a popular desktop OS.
Or maybe I’m just lucky and I don’t get the horrible in your face ads everywhere, for some reason.
What bothers me is not that it displays web results but that it forces Bing results and forces Edge to open said links despite it not being the default system wide web browser.
Yeah it’s even embarrassing for Microsoft, having to lure people into using edge. That may be the raison d’être of these inline web search results.
It’s a crappy feature anyway, I never use it. It doesn’t get in my way so it’s not a big deal to me. In any case if that’s all there is to this ad thing, the drama around it is surprising to me.
In what way? IBM wasn't prominent in as many areas 20 years ago as Microsoft is today. Today Microsoft has the leading business social media platform with linkedin, owns a leading consumer git platform with github, has a growing share of the enterprise cloud market with azure, now owns several of the most recognized game publishers with their acquisition of Activision and Bethesda, develops two of the top 10 most used programming languages with TypeScript and C#, and still has the leading os.
Windows is in cash-cow mode. It's a mature product that dominates a slowly shrinking market. And in terms of revenue it's not even that great compared to everything else they do. There is no point investing a lot of money.
That money goes elsewhere: pivoting MS Office to the cloud and pushing MS Azure - both by improving Azure and by improving developer tools like VSCode or languages like C# and the rest of the .Net ecosystem. And on the side they have minor projects like Github and LinkedIn.
I have the same feeling. Boredom is necessary for me to focus my energy on work. If I'm really into a game, it's easy to spend a large portion of my time and mental effort on something purely for fun. It's ok to indulge in entertainment if we are living comfortably, or need a break, but not if we're trying to actively build something.
At one point, my game playing and work kind of merged together.
Delivering features became quests, finding and fixing bad code was the equivalent of breaking barrels for the loot, and there are always lieutenants and bosses around generating defects...
I think "rock star" is a superficial term which is mostly poking fun at some programmers for having long hair, liking rock music, maybe even owning a guitar.
Being better aligned with astronomical events makes it more correct. The purpose of the calendar is to map the year, the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. The drift in the Julian calendar was not intended. It is a flaw.
I would say that the purpose of the calendar is tracking time/days in general. Astronomical events are just used as a tool to do that. Earlier calendars were lunar-based instead of solar-based, as keeping synchronized with moon is easier.
The solar cycle is extremely important for premodern agricultural societies, since it allows predicting growing and harvesting seasons. If you're going by the Julian calendar and the Autumn equinox is falling on September 10, there's probably going to be confusion as to when the harvest should occur. In the case of the Gregorian Calendar, Catholic countries rely on the Spring Equinox to schedule Easter, and when it started occurring well before March 21, this made it increasingly difficult to synchronize the religious and secular calendars.
While it's somewhat true, most of the people in premodern agricultural societies couldn't read (especially those concerned with when the harvest should happen), and probably couldn't care less about dates in the calendar. Even today, weather and actual crop lifecycle plays a larger role in agriculture than particular dates.
Even if people were tracking dates, adjusting for a couple of days every 200 years wouldn't be that hard: nobody would remember the good old times when we did the harvest on September 22nd in 1234, and now we do them on September 20th in 1434.
Finally, matching up with astronomical events would sometimes put sidereal year (and day) at the forefront: a day that's ~4 minutes shorter than the solar day making the tropical year Gregorian calendar is based on. Things get murky quite quickly once you start going down that path of what "correct" really is.
Note that in the Gregorian calendar, Spring equinox in 2021 and 2022 fell or falls on March 20th. It's only pretty good when averaged out over a 400-year cycle.
Basically, all of these calendar systems are attempts to "square the circle": find something resembling the least common multiple of non-integer values (solar day length and tropical year length), and then try to mix in a bunch of events observed in a different coordinate system (to overly simplify it, all the night stuff is "sidereal").
So we get back to what is really "useful"?
If you don't care about knowing how many days ago, or on what date in the proleptic calendar of your choice something happened in the past just from the date inscribed on it (eg. imagine a letter dated January 5th, 1605), you would certainly be fine with just dropping 10-13 days somewhere along the way. I can, however, understand when someone thinks it's easier to be off from astronomical events for a few weeks to avoid all that administrative trouble, for instance. However, the biggest practical problem today would be that everyone else has written those 10-13 days off, so it's probably easiest to switch too, especially in the global world we've got today.
But there is nothing intrinsically better in the Gregorian calendar that makes it win on all counts. It's just another agreed-upon approximation.
What about the drift in the Gregorian calendar? Solar day and tropical year do not have a least common multiple.
Earth's rotation is — arguably — better measured against the stars, so a sidereal day is more "correct", yet it would not map to our daily routine at all.
So I believe the question is not what is more "correct" (we've long established that we are dealing with approximations at best, Julian calendar included: it already had leap years), but what is more useful? And that's what has driven adoption of the Gregorian calendar in most of the world, but I am fine if somewhere it's more useful not to have to worry about did some days just disappear at some point in the past.
I mean the answer is pretty simple: Neither is perfect, but the Gregorian calendar is objectively more correct. It has a small amount of drift, but the drift is less than the Julian calendar. This also makes it more useful, because it will be able to predict solstices and equinoxes (and other dates needed for scheduling planting and harvesting of crops) more accurately than the Julian calendar. Its overwhelming dominance is evidence that not many people care about the ~2 weeks that disappeared a couple hundred years ago.
You missed my point: where continuous dates are useful, it's ok not to care about two weeks of discrepancy even today. Basically, I am saying is that the biggest advantage of the Gregorian calendar today is its prevalance: all the other things matter less.
You also seem to be overstating the importance of exact dates when it comes to agriculture: my experience is that +-13 days does not make a practical difference, especially if it slowly accumulates (it's not like you would suddenly have to do the harvest 13 days later from one year to the next — you actuslly had to do it 10-13 days "early" once the calendar was switched, and it didn't make a difference even then).
If human civilization continued using the Julian calendar, we wouldn't have been any worse off: nothing points at it that we would have been. I am not saying that Gregorian calendar is "worse" at all (though those born on Feb 29 might beg to disagree when they go 8 years between birthdays 2096-2104 :)), just that where it's better does not matter much.
And here we have the root of the disconnect between wall-clock time and stopwatch time.
In short: How long it takes to cook an egg doesn't change because someone inserted a leap second.
Of course, when people try to do the obvious thing, and measure time durations using a wall clock, that's when the fun begins. In that world, "a day from now" is not a consistent number of seconds in the future, due to the aforementioned leap seconds, daylight savings time, and, potentially, time zone shifts if the person doing the measuring is traveling, or is (or, perhaps, was) in a particularly "interesting" jurisdiction.
Using this threads sidearm to promote YouTube Premium is pretty much beside the point. I wasn't trying to emphasis my particular dislike for ads. In fact, if the ad is haflway decent, or even interesting, I dont mind getting the occassional ad, especially since I see it as a way of supporting the actual channel owners. What I object to, and in particular in the context of this posting, is that I regularily see ads which never would make it through on more local media. Some of these are outright scams. And I wonder, what is the difference between someone spreading "misinformation" on their channel, and someone else paying YouTube to spread "information" which will ultimately be used to scam the user.
Also, YouTube has channel which upwards of 1 mio subscribers which only consist of pirated content. I truely wonder how these slip through the cracks.
This sounds like "You're just bitter and hateful!", but with sarcasm mixed in.
That you can put a label on an emotion doesn't make it go away, nor does it make the emotion unreasonable. It does make you look like an asshole without any empathy, though.
not denying that part. And i have no problem with it since it doesn't control or take up my life. I'm happier now that I cut those people out and watched some of them get what they deserve. Go tell someone who is happy that the person who murdered their sibling got what they deserved that they are bitter and hateful.
“At the time” was a few hundred years after his death. There isn’t even Roman records for him, let alone his crucification. Christianity also underwent several drastic dogma shifts between their early years and what eventually came out a thousand years later, a Christian today would barely recognize an early Christian’s beliefs at all. None of this is unique to Christianity of course, all religions undergo similar evolutions.
Scholars generally accept that the book of Mark was written between 66-70 AD. The idea that the gospels were written "hundreds of years later" is a common myth on the Internet that scholars do not take seriously. It is clear that Jesus's followers believed in his resurrection, they proclaimed it loudly and suffered and died for it, gaining many converts.
The parent comments point is that it could have been regarded as fiction at the time, but that was lost over time. If that were the case, we would not know that it was ever considered to be fiction.
