IIRC, the issue was never how often the DVD-R/W could be rewritten.
The issue was the fact that everybody assumed that the DVD-R/W discs had roughly the same lifetime as actual DVDs and that turned out to be woefully incorrect.
The quality differences between DVD-RW brands and batches were huge, with some discs barely surviving ten rewrites while others managed many more. Exposure to heat or sunlight kills them quickly, even though they were not marketed as disposable. For real archival needs, options like M-DISC, tape, or cheap SSDs are more reliable than rewritable DVDs.
People did? I thought that was common knowledge, as it also was for CDs. Not only that, compatibility with players were much worse.
Though there were times were RW discs cost as much as normal ones, and some friends of mine defaulted to buying RW even for stuff that was write once. I didn't get that, but for them the ability to, maybe, reuse the disc outweighed any reliability issues.
> everybody had carpal tunnel syndrome and then just one day it all went away.
It didn't. It just became a routine thing to be diagnosed.
When I had wrist surgery for an accident, every single data entry person at the hospital (almost a dozen of them) knew the surgeon I was going to because they all had their wrists operated on because of ailments from the cheap-ass computer stuff they were using.
You would think that the hospital and insurance provider would see the link and decide that maybe providing better ergonomic conditions would be useful, but ... no. Putting people in for surgery doesn't come off the budget while ergonomic workstations would. So, here we are.
It also doesn't hurt that most tech workers are cognizant of the problem and now happen to be paid well enough that they can do something about it.
That is conflating two VERY different numbers. 60% is percentage of reported workplace injuries. 9% is of all adults.
That makes me suspect that the total number of RSI cases is much larger right now than from back in 1990. This would back up my assertion that RSI simply became a mainstream medical diagnosis.
> Direct responses, with care given, are also in a better position to alter working theories as any other evidence emerges.
The problem is that "mental illness" is a career limiting diagnosis.
Security clearance personnel have the same problem as airplane pilots. They can't get treatment for mental illness because it would cut off their career.
Consequently, while "Havana Syndrome" may be real, there are large confounding problems in sorting it out.
The evidence that something wrong is beyond credible.
You may be right, that one diagnosis doesn't have the evidence of another issue you point out. But that is diagnosis. That there is a problem is certain.
It's a complex issue. But a decision has to be made, to either deal straightforwardly with a complex issue, or in a deceptive, avoidant, or secretive manner.
This isn't a choice that removes fundamental complexity, but being direct about problems avoids a lot of manufactured complexity.
If someone is suffering long term life changing mental symptoms, in what sense does the cause make it mental health vs. not mental health? Obviously, it is a mental health issue whether caused by physical or psychological malfunctions.
There is no "winning" for sufferers, in any scenario. But there is better support, or less support.
Generally competent people insisting they are dealing with something serious, should be taken seriously.
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You may have identified the non-medical systemic problem here:
A strong case could be made that black and white "mental illness" disqualifications for any job are devastatingly out of step with reality and going to damage the careers of people it shouldn't. There should be some means of getting the all clear after any episode, given reasons to believe it has been resolved.
Beyond careers and people suffering unnecessarily, this also critically motivates people responsible for security and safety to hide and bury real problems!
How does that help institutions with safety and security concerns?
> Don't blame the ISA - blame the silicon implementations
That's true, but tautological.
The issue is that the RISC-V core is the easy part of the problem, and nobody seems to even be able to generate a chip that gets that right without weirdness and quirks.
The more fundamental technical problem is that things like the cache organization and DDR interface and PCI interface and ... cannot just be synthesized. They require analog/RF VLSI designers doing things like clock forwarding and signal integrity analysis. If you get them wrong, your performance tanks, and, so far, everybody has gotten them wrong in various ways.
The business problem is the fact that everybody wants to be the "performance" RISC-V vendor, but nobody wants to be the "embedded" RISC-V vendor. This is a problem because practically anybody who is willing to cough up for a "performance" processor is almost completely insensitive to any cost premium that ARM demands. The embedded space is hugely sensitive to cost, but nobody is willing to step into it because that requires that you do icky ecosystem things like marketing, software, debugging tools, inventory distribution, etc.
This leads to the US business problem which is the fact that everybody wants to be an IP vendor and nobody wants to ship a damn chip. Consequently, if I want actual RISC-V hardware, I'm stuck dealing with Chinese vendors of various levels of dodginess.
> we already have results which show that the distinction between stack and heap is artificial and phony.
That's not really true on modern architectures.
The "stack" is a way to time-alias memory and, on modern architectures, that also has performance implications. The stack gets pushed and popped repeatedly so that area of memory stays very hot in the caches.
Garbage collection, by definition, trashes locality. So, pushing onto the "stack" and unwinding it by "garbage collection" is pretty disastrous for performance on modern architectures.
> Garbage collection, by definition, trashes locality.
No, it doesn't necessarily. It is correct if you are thinking about mark and sweep GC. But that is 50 years old. Generational GC has much better locality. And GC can even improve locality sometimes by moving objects together that are connected by references. I am not claiming that GC is always a big win for locality. That would be very far from the truth. On the other hand it is not by definition so, that locality is trashed by GC.
> While I agree with your sarcasm, this proposal is a least bad scenario: no enforcement is worse as there’s less incentive to respect the lights.
I disagree. This is acknowledging that these are revenue products rather than safety enhancement.
If you want safety enforcement, put a damn cop there. It WILL work. This isn't hard. People are creatures of habit and you don't need to adjust the behavior of very many of them to make the whole group change.
If you don't want to put a cop there, you don't want safety enforcement.
Also missing from the discussion is that it is easy to prove that an N95 mask works because the effect is so dramatic.
The fact that the efficacy of a surgical mask is more difficult to prove does not mean that it doesn't work. And, as you point out, the major benefit is to the people around you so that you don't unintentionally spread the disease before you realize you have it.
Elderly in Sweden got hurt really badly while the very youngest didn't have the education losses seen elsewhere.
However, Swedes, unlike dumbass Americans, took sensible precautions even though there weren't required by law.
> Swedes were not forced to take action against the spread of the virus, but they did so anyway. This voluntary approach might not have worked everywhere, but Sweden has a history of high trust in authorities, and people tend to comply with public health recommendations.
> In its final report on the pandemic response, the Corona Commission concluded that tougher measures should have been taken early in the pandemic, such as quarantine for those returning from high-risk areas and a temporary ban on entry to Sweden.
> As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US.
Linux, historically, was terrible and then some; lots of us simply want to get on with life and not dork with the OS every day. If you didn't want to use Windows at your day job, that left OS X.
And, for a while, Apple hardware was quite nice. For a remarkably long time, you could get way cheaper high resolution laptop displays than the competition. The trackpads have always been far superior on Apple than Linux. And then the M-series came along and was also quite nice.
However, over time Linux has gotten better so it's now functional as a daily driver and reasonably reliable. And macOS has deteriorated until it's now probably below Linux in terms of reliability.
So, here we are. macOS and Windows do seem to be losing share to Linux, but only Linux cares. At this point, desktop/laptop revenue is dwarfed by everything else at both Microsoft and Apple.
The issue was the fact that everybody assumed that the DVD-R/W discs had roughly the same lifetime as actual DVDs and that turned out to be woefully incorrect.
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