
HI SEAS
I'm glad to see the reference included to the Hawaii experiment. For some light drama, there is also a podcast about it called The Habitat, which makes for entertaining listening.
1737 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Oct 2015
One of the less pleasant elements of Windows 11 is, in my opinion, the recalcitrance of the Task Manager to take absolute control of the operating system and blow away hung processes as needed; instead, if the UI becomes unresponsive, Task Manager will either not appear at all or only appear partially. Just another of the many questionable choices made in Win11.
As much as people like to malign traditional banks, the usual threats to them are not simple theft. Electronic banking generally practices defense in depth, and, while there have certainly been some woeful security lapses, there are usually multiple safeguards to prevent exfiltration of funds by simple money transfer. There seems to be a large segment of cryptobros who resolutely refuse to recognize the centuries, if not millennia, of lessons accumulated in traditional banking.
What luck, I get to use the quote by Stockton Rush, the late CEO of OceanGate:
"You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste . . . . I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."
I was just thinking the same thing, that's it's a ballsy move indeed to take on entities that everyone perceives to be fronts for old-school organized crime. I can think of a number of outcomes, both pleasant and otherwise, but fundamentally I hope that the ransomware scum wind up sleeping with the fishes.
Except, notably, it's not really Microsoft's customers complaining but Microsoft's competition . . . who are also known for abusing their monopoly power in their own domains. It's a bit rich for Google and Amazon to complain about Microsoft using its market dominance to lock in customers when both other companies are demonstrably guilty of the same thing. All of them want the same lock-in, and all of them are happy to shaft their customers when it suits them. God help us all if any of them achieves full dominance over the others.
"an initiative from Ford, BMW and Honda's American arm"
This phrase highlights the importance of both the Oxford comma and singular/plural agreement. It implies that Ford is the American arm of BMW and Honda, whereas the article later stipulates that there are three companies involved in the project, Ford, BMW, and Honda. I know that the Oxford comma has been taken out back and unceremoniously executed, but it would certainly reduce ambiguity in this case, as would using the word "arms."
(I know, I could have just sent a note to the author, but by God, I am willing to die on the hill of defending the Oxford comma, and I don't care who knows it!)
You may get some disagreement about Microsoft earning their success in the 1980s, but the rest of your post was spot on.
In particular, I used to work for DoubleClick when the first privacy-protecting laws were being passed to place at least some minimal limitations on what DoubleClick was doing at the time. Kevin Ryan, the CEO, was overtly bullish about the company's ability to either fight that legislation or subvert it, with no thought given to the legitimate privacy desires of the users.
Specifically, it explains why I've been getting advertisements for quicklime, used carpets, and gasoline.
More seriously, I got this pop-up on my phone recently, smelled a rat, and went in and disabled all the privacy violating settings. Not that I typically use Chrome, mind you, but better safe than sorry.
Thanks for the answers, everyone! Things work a little differently over here, although some appointees, like Bill DeJoy, also have an incomprehensible staying power despite a record of almost perfect incompetence and malice. We do expect less of Republican nominees, however, because an informal plank of the Republican Party is deliberately undermining effective government.
For a while, I thought that Windows 11 wasn't so bad, but Microsoft keeps taking actions that demonstrate that they really are back to their 1990s form, ruthlessly trying to exploit their operating system monopoly to force users onto Microsoft tools. Also, Windows 11 is glitchy in ways that 10 simply was not, probably as a direct result of trying to coerce users into The Microsoft Way. Perhaps this finally is The Year of the Linux Desktop!
Pine was my favorite text-based newsgroup reader (basic, I know). Later, when I came to appreciate GUI clients, I used Gravity and then discovered that Outlook Express had a surprisingly capable newsgroup client built in, which made it good for downloading ... uh ... cat pictures from the alt.binaries groups.
IRC and Usenet coexisted happily for quite some time. The use cases for each are broadly different, with IRC providing real-time but mostly ephemeral interactions across the Internet vs. the durable, asynchronous nature of Usenet. I think what crippled Usenet was that the gravity of Internet-based interaction gradually shifted to the Web. For most novice Internet users, the Web became a media-rich one-stop shop for interaction and content consumption, and my guess is that most people these days have never even heard of Usenet.
I suspect that there are two key factors at play: collaboration and the perception of fairness. Collaboration is important for teammates working creative projects together and is fostered by in-person contact. This is especially true for new hires, who get a lot more out of in-person conversations than they do out of remote training. Fairness is a concern because some employees will feel resentful if not everyone is required to come into the office, so even people working solo must have the same rules applied as people working on a team, even if the solo people feel more productive working from home.
Welcome to corporate life!
Normally I appreciate Rupert's articles, but I think he's missing the point of this experiment (also, he's missing the point of experimentation). I see two possible objectives: 1) improve productivity by limiting access to the endless pointless distractions of the Internet and 2) improve security by reducing the attack surface of the affected employees. Note the word "improve" rather than "perfect." Many computer geeks see the world, unsurprisingly, in a binary fashion: either something works or it doesn't. In this case, however, I think Google is trying to observe whether there's an upswing in productivity and a downswing in security incidents.
Time will tell, and I'm sure the results will be interesting.
It appears to be available on Amazon Prime, although I can't imagine that Kevin would disapprove of finding alternate means to access it.
Also, finding it took me about 30 seconds with Duck Duck Go. Not to condescend, but are you sure you're reading the right Web site? Maybe Ars Technica is more your speed.
Tell me you don't have elderly relatives without telling me. I am currently trying to help my in-laws deal with computer issues after they got hit by a social engineering attack. Meanwhile, they have to change account numbers and passwords all over the place, which is confounding them. It's easy to blame the victim, and commentards do love to do so, but maybe cultivate an ounce of fucking compassion beforehand.