I've been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I'm running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it's annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.

The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn't working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that'll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.

All of this only applies to Windows 11 - if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you're in a world of pain.

It should work - possible that it won't let you create a one disk raid 0, but creating a one disk raid 1 and then converting it to a two disk raid 0 should word. It's been years since I played with a pure raid 0 (don't see much sense in them), but managed conversion back then.

If your install is using LVM (which anything installed over a bit more than a decade should be) you can set up the new second drive as a RAID with a missing device, add it as additional PV, use pvmove to move all PEs to the RAID, remove the old PV, and now add that disk to the RAID.

I just mentioned that because google drive links are one of the very few things I'm opening in chrome - and they're the only site where I need a 3rd party cookie exemption for.

Ability for AM radios to interrupt other playback for announcements has been around at least since the 90s. Back then it was commonly used to pause cassette playback when traffic announcements were made.

This just requires for the device to monitor radio when on, and to be on - and with how integrated it is in modern days cars functionality I'd say the chance for them to be on is higher than it was in the 90s. So having that functionality is a pretty good way to reach a lot of car drivers.

Wall is a linguist, which influenced several of his design choices. You have a wide variety of expressing what you want in perl, just as with natural languages - some ways are maybe a bit harder to read for newcomers, while others are not worse than something like python. Typically you'd have coding guides for projects.

I did a webchat in perl in the 90s, and eventually rewrote it in php3 - php was easier to manage properly isolated between users than perl via the CGI interface, so it became popular with hosters very quickly. I went back to doing all my web scripting in perl once I started hosting my own servers,though.

In IT contracting (at least the fields I'm around) it's quite common that "being able to acquire new skills quickly" is one of the skills you get paid for, and the time needed for you to do that is accounted for in the project planning.

I have 5 monitors, zero gaps, and fight for every pixel on the eww bar on the one screen I'm showing it.

You meant to say "a competent human", which a lot of programmers are not.

While I'd expect this to be of rather low quality I'd bet money on having seen worse projects done by actual humans in the last 25 years.

Definitely something else. The original motivation (and one of the reasons it never took off) was to have a rich messaging service under control of the operators, just like SMS and MMS today - meaning they can bill you per message, if they want to. Parts of the problems the protocol has also come from the design requirement to keep the operator in control, when it isn't really a requirement for a modern messaging service.

In the current setup with google running their own service that won't happen - but it seems google is cooperating with the operators for that, i.e., as the operators couldn't pull it off themselves they were happy to partner with google when google offered it. I don't know about you, but "a messaging system with the control split between google and the operators" doesn't sound like a very desirable thing to me.

Not really, it's now been roughly ten years since I was analysing the spec, so it'd be quite a bit of effort for me to dig my old analysis up (if I even still have it). Also, there have been some new revisions of the standard since then (possibly with google involved in the end), so they might have fixed some of the worse bits - though I wouldn't hold my breath.