From WEP/GPO repeal to getting a rational long term care insurance program, the work, pay, benefit and federal retirement issues never end.

The post Wow! Federal retirement, and protecting it, mean hard work! first appeared on Federal News Network.

If you have a simple exit strategy that provides the best deal for you in retirement, there is a good chance it may be wrong. Or at least not very simple.

The post Finding your retirement sweet spot(s) first appeared on Federal News Network.

If you are planning on retiring soon (this year or next) have you thought of the lifetime impact of long-term inflation on your diet-COLA annuity?

The post Inflation and your retirement date first appeared on Federal News Network.

The VA expects to grow its health care workforce to approximately 404,000 total employees next year, if Congress approves supplemental funding.

The post VA to remain ‘very discerning’ on health care hiring, calls on Congress to address $12B shortfall in December first appeared on Federal News Network.

A newly formed Disinformation Governance Board remains shrouded in secrecy a week after the Biden administration’s announcement of the new effort was met with widespread criticism

The post DHS disinformation board’s work, plans remain a mystery first appeared on Federal News Network.

In this episode of Market Chat!, we heard from 3 senior procurement officials from the Department of Homeland Security. 

The post Episode 16: Government and industry communication and collaboration – a discussion with Department of Homeland Security procurement first appeared on Federal News Network.

Federal News Network dug into federal employee retirement data and found the number of retirees in CSRS and FERS to be almost equal.

The post Retirement by the numbers: Feds in CSRS are dwindling fast first appeared on Federal News Network.

Twitter tests 'soft block' feature to remove unwanted followers as part of moves to improve privacy

We need to remove emissions at a major scale: Is carbon capture the answer?

FaZe did not have a good season. #esports #blastpremierworldfinal #counterstriker

Alitalia to lay off more than 2,000 remaining employees as liquidation nears

Do you (or someone you know) believe that people everywhere should have access to affordable, reliable, and resilient Internet connectivity? Are you passionate about ensuring that people everywhere have an Internet experience that is safe, secure, and protects them online? Do you have leadership experience in business, government, philanthropy, and/or the nonprofit sector?

Warzone Mobile’s November update is kicking older phones to the curb. If your device can’t keep up, enjoy the game until May 2025.

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- BD511.Y6 1928

Location: Electronic Resource- 

After blogging about ICANN's new gTLD policy or lack thereof, I've had several people ask me why I care so much about ICANN and new top-level domains. Domain names barely matter in a world of search and hyperlinks, I'm told, and new domains would amount to little more than a cash transfer to new registries from those trying to protect their names and brands. While I agree that type-in site-location is less and less relevant, and we haven't yet seen much end-user focused innovation in the use of domain names, I'm not ready to throw in the towel. I think ICANN is still in a position to do affirmative harm to Internet innovation.

You see, I don't concede that we know all the things the Internet will be used for, or all the things that could be done on top of and through its domain name system. I certainly don't claim that I do, and I don't believe that the intelligence gathered in ICANN would make that claim either.

Yet that's what it's doing by bureaucratizing the addition of new domain names: Asserting that no further experiments are possible; that the "show me the code" mode that built the Internet can no longer build enhancements to it. ICANN is unnecessarily ossifying the Internet's DNS at version 1.0, setting in stone a cumbersome model of registries and registrars, a pay-per-database-listing, semantic attachments to character strings, and limited competition for the lot. This structure is fixed in place by the GNSO constituency listing: Those who have interests in the existing setup are unlikely to welcome a new set of competitors bearing disruptions to their established business models. The "PDP" in the headline, ICANN's over-complex "Policy Development Process" (not the early DEC computer), gives too easy a holdout veto.

Meanwhile, we lose the chance to see what else could be done: whether it's making domain names so abundant that every blogger could have a meaningful set on a business card and every school child one for each different face of youthful experimentation, using the DNS hierarchy to store simple data or different kinds of pointers, spawning new services with new naming conventions, or something else entirely.

I don't know if any of these individually will "add value." Historically, however, we leave that question to the market where there's someone willing to give it a shot. Amazingly, after years of delay, there are still plenty of people waiting in ICANN queues to give new gTLDs a try. The collective value in letting them experiment and new services develop is indisputably greater than that constrained by the top-down imaginings of the few on the ICANN board and councils, as by their inability to pronounce .iii.

"How do you get an answer from the web?" the joke goes: "Put your guess into Wikipedia, then wait for the edits." While Wikipedians might prefer you at least source your guess, the joke isn't far from the mark. The lesson of Web 2.0 has been one of user-driven innovation, of launching services in beta and improving them by public experimentation. When your users know more than you or the regulators, the best you can do is often to give them a platform and support their efforts. Plan for the first try to break, and be ready to learn from the experience.

To trust the market, ICANN must be willing to let new TLDs fail. Instead of insisting that every new business have a 100-year plan, we should prepare the businesses and their stakeholders for contingency. Ensuring the "stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems" should mean developing predictable responses to failure, not demanding impracticable guarantees of perpetual success. Escrow, clear consumer information, streamlined processes, and flexible responses to the expected unanticipated, can all protect the end-users better than the dubious foresight of ICANN's central regulators. These same regulators, bear in mind, didn't foresee that a five-day add-grace period would swell the ranks of domains with "tasters" gaming the loophole with ad-based parking pages.

At ten years old, we don't think of our mistakes as precedent, but as experience. Kids learn by doing; the ten-year-old ICANN needs to do the same. Instead of believing it can stabilize the Internet against change, ICANN needs to streamline for unpredictability. Expect the unexpected and be able to act quickly in response. Prepare to get some things wrong, at first, and so be ready to acknowledge mistakes and change course.

I anticipate the counter-argument here that I'm focused on the wrong level, that stasis in the core DNS enhances innovative development on top, but I don't think I'm suggesting anything that would destabilize established resources. Verisign is contractually bound to keep .com open for registrations and resolving as it has in the past, even if .foo comes along with a different model. But until Verisign has real competition for .com, stability on its terms thwarts rather than fosters development. I think we can still accommodate change on both levels.

The Internet is too young to be turned into a utility, settled against further innovation. Even for mature layers, ICANN doesn't have the regulatory competence to protect the end-user in the absence of market competition, while preventing change locks out potential competitive models. Instead, we should focus on protecting principles such as interoperability that have already proved their worth, to enhance user-focused innovation at all levels. A thin ICANN should merely coordinate, not regulate.

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Engineering Library- TK7871.6.B69 2016

Location: Engineering Library- T57.L82 2015

Location: Engineering Library- TD442.5.M4586 2016

I see an “External” tag in front of the From field for pretty much all of my messages in the Message List.

How can I remove it?

350: Hymn Composed by St. Ephrem the Great | Mar Aprim Rabba (nightly bedtime prayer)

1840: Removal of More Artifacts from Nineveh

Weird Cosmic Object Identified As The Remains Of An Exploded Dead Star

Assyriska FF Reaches Sweden's Premiere Division 1 Championship

Syrianska's remarkable rise in Sweden

A Documentary on the Remains of the Assyrian “Nestorian” Churches in Hakkari

I Remember and Demand. Recognise! Do not Keep Silent!

Assyrian Genocide Remembrance Day Proclamation in Arizona

In this quick overview of Adobe Premiere Pro's Quick Export feature, Stjepan Alaupovic of Clear Online Video explains how producers can improve postproduction efficiency for quickturn projects by exporting a video in just a few clicks.

Army removes Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery as Civil War-era controversies continue to roil national and local politics.

Just months after the Supreme Court limited abortion access, infant mortality rates rose significantly higher, according to a new study.

Berkeley chemists have created a reusable material that pulls carbon dioxide from the air and holds onto it until it can be stored.

New members-elect arrived on Capitol Hill for orientation on Tuesday eager to jump in and get to work as the House prepares for fresh faces to join their ranks with a majority still in play. With most races in the 2024 election called, both Democratic and Republican representatives-elect participated in forums, meetings, and orientation classes […]

Supreme Court sidesteps a ruling on laws in Florida and Texas that would regulate social media platforms.

The Supreme Court refuses to shield Uber and Lyft from California state labor lawsuits that seek back pay for tens of thousands of drivers.

Optical density can be affected by sample conditions, the state of the measuring vessel, and instrument configuration.

The United States Coast Guard says it has recovered the remaining debris from the site of the Titan submersible that imploded four months ago while visiting the site of the RMS Titanic shipwreck.

New application of Raman spectroscopy imaging allows scientists to probe the chemical composition of sailors lost at sea over 500 years ago.

I was excited to see Microsoft bring the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) back from the dead this past year: At Build 2024 back in May, it announced that it would continue investing in this 20-year-old technology, starting with support for Windows 11 theming that would arrive as part of .NET 9. In fact, I was so excited about this that I brought my .NETpad project back from the dead as well, and I spent much of the summer modernizing my Notepad clone with the new features. I wrote 24 articles documenting this work, but I was stymied by the half-assed nature of the improvements.

Microsoft released exactly one WPF update during the several months of .NET 9 development, and it never added any of the features I discovered were missing. And so as we headed into today's release of .NET 9, my excitement was somewhat diminished. My assumption was that we wouldn't see those missing features implemented until .NET 10, if ever.

Well, Microsoft just released .NET 9. As part of that release, it published updated documentation for WPF (and all the other .NET technologies). And to my surprise, there are some updates to WPF that address at least one of those missing features.

So let's take a look.

To add support for Windows 11 theming to a WPF project, you need to add a reference to the new Fluent theme resource dictionary in its App.xml file. It looks like so:

<Application.Resources>
    <ResourceDictionary>
      <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
        <ResourceDictionary Source="pack://application:,,,/PresentationFramework.Fluent;component/Themes/Fluent.xaml" />
      </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
    </ResourceDictionary>
</Application.Resources>

But with the shipping version of .NET 9, there's a second, more elegant way to add Windows 11 theming support. Now, you can access a new Application.ThemeMode property of a new styling API to toggle the app's theme mode between Light, Dark, System, and None. And that's fantastic, because it addresses one of those missing features: To date, .NETpad has adapted itself to the system theme (Light or Dark), but there was no way to let the user pick a theme mode. (For example, if the system was set to Dark and the user wanted the app to use Light mode.) With this change, I can implement that feature.

Fortunately, .NETpad is ready for this change, too: If you followed along with my work this past summer, you may remember that I implemented the user interface for switching the app theme into its settings interface, but left the UI hidden because it didn't do anything. But I always felt that Microsoft would need to implement this features, so I left the code in there. Granted, I didn't think it would happen this quickly.

The shipping version of .NET 9 also adds explicit support for the Windows 11 accent color (as configured by the user in the Settings app in Personalization > Accent color). As it is, .NETpa...

The post Modernizing .NETpad: .NET 9 Arrives with a Few (More) Small Improvements for WPF (Premium) appeared first on Thurrott.com.