Sci-fi authors.

I could be wrong about 'meatspace', but I'm pretty sure that was Ian M. Banks.

Some interviewees quickly decide who's the boss, or primary decider in the interview, and then totally focus all their charm on them.

Pity those that have to maintain it later though.

>SON and Rest waltzed in and (somewhat) did that organically without the hype.

This is a perfect description of how it happened, and how practicality trumped the bombast of the people pushing SOAP and what later became the terrible framework that is WCF (whatever happened to Don Box? He was all over the place for a while).

Biztalk also lands nicely in the 'conceived and designed by astronauts' camp.

>How does one get close to mastering software engineering?

By doing it, doing it a lot

And then listening to, and watching your users use your stuff. They'll teach you more about creating better software than anything else.

>The language needs to do a lot of file access for includes, and on NTFS those are super slow,

I'm not sure I'd blame NTFS as such - but you can massively improve build times by creating a precompiled header .pch include file in your projects.

I already use PCH but can't put everything in them either otherwise it becomes a negative

Would agree with you on Winforms, it's a pretty good GUI RAD development environment, and I wish they'd just stop trying to replace it with something 'better'.

WPF I found to be constantly irritating and produces weird looking GUI apps, but maybe others have a better experience.

By the same logic, XBOX and the OS that runs it should be separate, and the PlayStation and the OS that runs on that should also be split into separate legal entities.

But that really makes no sense either.

> By the same logic, XBOX and the OS that runs it should be separate,

That's kind of the case, nowadays; XBOX runs a slightly modified Windows 10, and you don't need to buy a Microsoft brand computer (the XBOX) to play XBOX games (you just need Microsoft Windows 10).

> and the PlayStation and the OS that runs on that should also be split into separate legal entities.

https://wiki.debian.org/PS3

And that's besides the point. Games consoles are for playing video games on, but Apple is selling a general-purpose computing device (according to the adverts, at least). Their smart watches, yeah, I can understand treating that as an embedded system, but the iPhone‽ When they're profiting from their App Store monopoly, they have ulterior motives to keep it locked down, and antitrust should swoop in to save the day.

If you can only put one OS on a device,

>he wanted to achieve herd immunity without having enough vaccines or not having them at all

Instead he managed to brew an exciting new variant, which is what every health official was warning against.

And I'm guessing that unless the majority of the population are rapidly inoculated then exciting new strains could constantly evolve until we have something truly nasty.

Sounds like you want to pontificate just to have a moan off about the PM.

Did we not see the same effect last year (probably for the reasons you mentioned)? Numbers declined in summer, but then massively rose again in Oct-Nov.

I think this Autumn will reveal whether the vaccinations are giving us the protection needed to gradually open up society again.

For my part I really hope it does, as it will also encourage other countries to do the same and give the vaccination campaign a worldwide boost.

Let’s hope the peak just gone is the last big spike. In the final analysis I imagine the British public’s _willingness_ to get the jab will be seen as an enormous success factor, on top of the vaccine itself’s efficacy. This willingness merits study. High social trust of the NHS, historic common understanding of vaccines and everyone knowing someone affected by the virus all play their part. As an aside, I believe this to have been the NHS’ finest hour, and in future “the pandemic” will replace “the war” as the lynchpin reference point in time, as it were.

The UK government definitely seems to consider the British public's willingness to get vaccinated to be one of the key parts of the success story, from what I've seen. I will also say that their handling of issues like the AstraZeneca blood clotting issue has been really good compared to the shitshows elsewhere - careful, measured, with really clear communication about what they know and why it justifies the decisions about whether to vaccinate people with it.