Thursday, July 22
Microsoft Ends Windows
With the arrival of Windows 11, and its once-a-year update cadence, Microsoft is effectively turning its back on its Windows-as-a-service model.
Microsoft's once-vaunted Windows-as-a-Service (WaaS) is in tatters. Windows 11's introduction last month — and more importantly its proposed servicing and maintenance scheme — did that.
The fact that Microsoft bent to the seemingly inevitable should be credited, even if the company took years to reach a cadence that many customers had pleaded for almost immediately. But the failure of the Windows-as-a-service model likely also has a downside, chief among them the tainting of that strategy — perhaps to the point where it's no longer an option through the foreseeable future.
Pluses and minuses, then, as usual. But which is which?
Microsoft had big plans for Windows 10. Enormous plans. The operating system would not be the next upgrade from Windows 7 but would be the final version for the rest of time. Rather than replace Windows 7 with another edition that would eventually age out of support and be supplanted in turn by Windows 10+x, Windows 10 would be constantly refreshed, with new features and functionality added to major updates released first three, then two times a year. TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...
Western Future
With no living memory of such scenes, Western audiences reached for the timeless literature of apocalypse to make sense of it all. But whereas ancient traditions of end times blamed spiritual causes for the collapse of civilisations, we, being the moderns that we are, opted for what we imagined to be a ‘scientific’ discourse – the so-called genre of collapsology.
Although some modern scholars, such as Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, retained essentially spiritual explanations for civilisation decline, while embedding them in empirical ground, those who would shape our interpretation of COVID-19 came from a different tradition, one that took inspiration from Thomas Malthus’s 1798 thesis about the natural consequences of human development.
Neo-Malthusians credited environmental feedback loops, not moral failings, for regime collapse. In the 1960s and ’70s, works by Paul Ehrlich and Donella Meadows et al argued that the world’s population was growing so fast it would soon outstrip resource supplies, leading to (among other things) widespread food shortages. More recently, Jared Diamond wrote of the role that environmental depletion and diseases played in the fall of civilisations, and his theory that the collapse of Easter Island resulted from overexploitation of the natural environment has enjoyed particular resonance.
Neo-Malthusians credited environmental feedback loops, not moral failings, for regime collapse. In the 1960s and ’70s, works by Paul Ehrlich and Donella Meadows et al argued that the world’s population was growing so fast it would soon outstrip resource supplies, leading to (among other things) widespread food shortages. More recently, Jared Diamond wrote of the role that environmental depletion and diseases played in the fall of civilisations, and his theory that the collapse of Easter Island resulted from overexploitation of the natural environment has enjoyed particular resonance.
For its part, the COVID-19 pandemic revived old theories about the role that diseases played in regime collapse, and we were reminded that plagues had laid low the Roman Empire and destroyed European feudalism.
Except, that wasn’t what happened. At least, not quite the way supposed.
The thesis that environmental stresses cause regime collapse remains a topic of great debate. We can start just with the cases mentioned above. The alarmist warnings in the 1970s about overpopulation soon gave way not to concerns about food shortages, but about the problems caused by global overproduction of food, which was driving down food prices and accelerating the urbanisation of the developing world.
Except, that wasn’t what happened. At least, not quite the way supposed.
The thesis that environmental stresses cause regime collapse remains a topic of great debate. We can start just with the cases mentioned above. The alarmist warnings in the 1970s about overpopulation soon gave way not to concerns about food shortages, but about the problems caused by global overproduction of food, which was driving down food prices and accelerating the urbanisation of the developing world.
Regarding Diamond’s book about Easter Island, pretty much from the get-go it faced strong criticism for its questionable evidence. For similar reasons, many historians of the Roman Empire doubt that the plague played a part in its downfall. As for the Black Death, in much of Europe it didn’t end feudalism but actually reinforced it.
More generally, measured by the scale of the loss in human life as a proportion of the total population in the affected areas, 19th-century epidemics of cholera, and the flu pandemic of 1918, all took a far greater toll in the Western world than COVID-19. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find hints of regime stress in response to any of them. TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...
Wednesday, July 21
Technology: A Double Edged Sword
Like William Rogers, a tech school teacher who fell through the ice on a frozen river. Hypothermia quickly set in.
"First thing I did was try to walrus up on the ice, knowing that I needed to get out of the water as quickly as possible, and the ice just kept breaking underneath me," he said.
Thankfully, while he didn't have his phone on him, William was able to use his Apple Watch to call for help. "I told them that I probably had 10 minutes before I was not gonna be able to respond anymore," he said.
Fortunately, firefighters made it there in five minutes.
Elsewhere, a high school lacrosse player's near-death experience led to a protocol change in the league.
Peter Laake was hit in the chest by a routine shot, but he fell and was unresponsive. On-site doctors began chest compressions, but they didn't work, so they used an automated external defibrillator (AED), which reset his heart.
"I heard voices for a couple seconds, and my eyes wouldn't open for a couple seconds," Laake said. "But when my eyes did open, I remember seeing seven to eight people just in a circle around me. So, pretty crazy."
Moving forward, USA Lacrosse decided to make chest protectors mandatory for all players, not just goalies.
In another story, a National Guardsman invented a new beacon that might just be the future of rescue methods, using drone technology.
Saige Martinez, who has a math degree, said, "The time that it takes search and rescue personnel to get to the person, it’s supposed to fill that gap and provide first aid supplies and live updates about the situation as well as GPS location."
The beacon was his final project for a college course he took to break into the tech field.
So a hiker just has to find it and click a button. The device records their location and their oxygen levels, but Saige decided to make it more resistant to the elements.
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