Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"A company in Iowa or Vermont or small town Texas able to recruit nationally can get access to a lot of talent who would never consider them otherwise."
It probably works the other way round as well - companies elsewhere prepared to recruit nationally will be able to get access to talent that prefers to live in such places.
As I've said before, my daughter's employers are virtually 100% remote working where remote really means anywhere. She joined it after her previous job, which she'd taken just before Covid went RTO*. There's no chance that could possibly be an office based job - the UK office, if it really exists, must be little more than an accommodation address. By being able to pick specialist from anywhere in the world they're in a position to outcompete those who restrict themselves to local staff.
To pick up on Machdiamond's point above, although she only lives a mile or so away if there's a need to go over there during the working week for something it's carefully scheduled.
*I don't know why she took it. Her previous one was work from home because it meant frequently visiting sites over 100 miles from the HQ so it suited both sides.
I think the original point was that it was discovered that many jobs could be WFH.
A great many of those jobs were originally clustered in urban centres so large that housing the workers was spread over many hundreds of square miles. The commuting from such large areas sucked up unreasonably large percentages of people's lives and had a carbon footprint that really shouldn't have been acceptable. Now we know that it was largely unnecessary those calling for RTO should be asked some searching questions to which woolly answers such as "company culture" and "team cohesiveness" are unacceptable. They should be asked would they still require it if they had to pay commuting time and a carbon tax - asked in the form of being required to pay those things.
The situation should never have been allowed to have existed in the first place. Now it's time to dismantle it.
"My currently employer fully supports WFH but at the same time ensures that at least once a quarter the team are in the office for a day at the same time."
Do they pay for the long distance/international travel and overnight accomodation? If not they're not taking full advantage of remote working. Can they fit everyone into the office? If so they're not tull advantage of remote working.
Your post is most informative. Informative about your management abilities. It tells us, for instance, that most of the staff you were employing weren't up to scratch anyway (at least in your judgement) - so why employ them? It tells us that you didn't have any idea what the developer you thought was good was actually producing.
I very much doubt you'll be better managing staff in the office than remotely but look on the bright side - your own managers probably haven't noticed.
It just goes to show that although taking down the infrastructure is temporarily it's not substitute for taking down the people responsible. The solution to that would be to offer rewards for information leading to the prosecution of offenders. Information might include "So-and-So is asleep in room whatever of some hotel something in somewhere with an extradition treaty even if the last thing they remember is walking into a Moscow bar." Apart from delivering results it would leave then wondering how far they can trust those around them.
"the only way the government will get it passed will be to include it in the manifesto at the next general election & win."
In which case they'd have failed the target of having it up and running (an ambitious target to say the least) by the end of the current parliament.
"There would have to be solid, set in stone, immutable laws in place to protect the public from abuse of an ID before it could even become close to being palatable.
And that'll never happen"
Another reason why it won't happen. Somewhere along the line, either because it uses a US corporation's infrastructure or the contract's just handed to a US corporation in its entirety there'll be no way any such laws being enforceable because the USG will be able to ride roughshod over thm.
"Also, the demand for digital sovereignty is on the rise in Europe, and all sensible answers to how that could be done are based on open source software. Well-known examples include Neonephos, Open Internet Stack, EuroStack, and IPCEI-CIS (Important Project of Common European Interest – Cloud Infrastructure and Services). "
All these examples seem to be organisations or initiatives - talking shops, not products.
"When it comes to open source, Europe needs to stop talking, and start acting."
Indeed.
Metal can on a single die was not unknown. A long time ago the circuit board from an IRA remote controlled bomb had one of those. All the text had been scraped off all the ICs but someone took the top off the can and brought it over for me to check under a microscope. There was the ID, plainly readable and I remembered seeing it advertised in Wireless World. And given that the 8 pin package clearly wasn't an op-amp it must be a 555 so the rest of the board was fairly easily worked out.
Like I said, if they don't want to follow the laws of a country they don't have to do business there. And it's is most certainly not up to US businesses to dictate what governments countries should vote in.
From the perspective of a citizen fo a non-US country a better government would be one prepared to dump US companies as critical service suppliers and insist that if they want to do business in the country they should have a legal presence there and trade through that.
Too many US companies seem to have decided that the United fruit Company was a good model to follow.
"We urge the public to take note of our tips to spot these robo calls so they can tell us when they've received one,"
How? There seem to be a series of different reporting sites with different criteria, none of which seem to deal with attempted fraud. The site for reporting scam calls is only interested if the caller has been defrauded, otherwise it just redirects to a page of advice.
Marketi survey call reporting is, I believe, managed by the marketing industry and they seem to give themselves a free pass even for TPS registered lines.
ICO need to knock heads together and arrange a single portal, hand out the reports to the appropriate organisations and ensure that between them those organisations handle all situations.
The licencing seems to be interesting. It's dual GPL2 & BSD. The GPL2 secures the Spinel fork. BSD alone would enable Shopify or whoever to make their own private changes but would the historic GPL licence require release of the amended source if someone got stroppy?
But if the maintainers are gone it looks as if the original project will be well and truly forked and that maybe its new proprietors didn't understand how FOSS works.
"The application lives in a container."
If you mean a container in the Docker sense - why? Why not the good, old-fashioned directory tree that lives in /opt? It's a long-solved problem that suffers from being re-solved in increasingly complex ways.
"I don't eat anything that doesn't want to be eaten"
Nevertheless most animals that ever lived got eaten, whether or not they wanted to, the exceptions being those that decayed. Much the same goes for plants but they didn't even get to have an opinion. (I'm also a biologist but more specifically a botanical palaeoecologist.)
Please think about the objective here - giving Windows users an easy route off. They are not renouncing the world and all its sins to go and wear a hair shirt, they are wanting to make the best use of the hardware they have to run a maintained OS to accomplish their existing tasks in a way they know best. You and I are familiar with other ways to accomplish those tasks, they are not and easy steps are needed; the more and easier that can be provided the better.
To put it bluntly, the Zorin approach can work where yours wouldn't.
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