Posts by doublelayer 11536 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
You'll have to explain that one to me. Maybe I'm too young to have seen people doing it. What was the purpose? If it was to prevent you from secretly recording something, nothing would have prevented you from having a second battery so you could put the first one on the table or from using something else to record. If it was to prevent your phone from ringing, then that's something the interface can do just fine.
If they chose to do so, they have a variety of marketing methods they could use:
The iPhone with sealed battery can use a flexible cell, meaning this one is technically higher capacity than that one.
The iPhone with sealed battery is waterproof, because the EU never said the other one had to be, so we didn't try to make it.
The iPhone with sealed battery can have the battery replaced for £79 at the Apple store, and the one with replaceable battery can be replaced for £99 at home.
Or the simplest option: The iPhone with sealed battery is the one we sell in your country, and if you want an iPhone, this is the one you can buy here. You can do whatever you want, but this is the iPhone you'll get unless you specifically find one we sold somewhere else.
That last tactic isn't exactly new. They've had country-specific iPhone models before, for example a model for China which has multiple SIM slots. Android manufacturers go much further. It's common for Samsung devices to have two different versions involving completely different processors, GPUs, and modems depending on the region, and it's not even the same regional split each time. The models look the same and are called the same thing. For example, you can get a Samsung Galaxy S22. If you got it in Europe (I don't know what counts as Europe for this purpose), it has a Samsung Exynos 2200 processor. If you get it outside Europe, it has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 gen 1 SoC. Why? I don't know, and Samsung didn't explain it. I bet it has an effect on software updates and supported features though. It indicates that phone manufacturers aren't above making regional variants and they could use this if they object enough to a regulation so they can ignore it where it doesn't apply.
Most manufacturers will build just one model that meets all the requirements, but not all of them. If the EU has this regulation and nobody else does, they might get the model for those regulations and a different one will be produced for the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The UK could easily get that one. If other large countries had this regulation, that probably wouldn't be as likely; agreement by the EU, US, China, and India would be enough to make manufacturers design in one way.
My suggestion is that, if they're going to review computers, and they're not going to review a ton of them, to have a specific focus. Reviewing computers that are likely to appeal to the readership. If they review one of those and don't like it, they should say so. Nothing is guaranteed to be popular, but there are some things that people ask for in a laptop, and a review of a laptop that meets that requirement helps people decide whether it lives up to the expectation, whereas reviewing something that nobody expressed interest in doesn't really do anything.
There are hundreds of laptops out there. A review of a generic laptop tends not to provide much information that isn't already in the spec sheet. This is why targeting the reviews at something out of the usual, especially if the specific choices had some basis, would be more likely to interest readers. Basically, try to answer the question I asked: "Why did we review this one?" If the answer is "it had a long battery life", "its keyboard was supposed to be great", "it is easy to repair", or even "it has good Linux driver support", all things people have expressed interest in, then that's a valid reason whether you ended up having a positive or negative opinion. As far as I can tell, the only answer to that question is "we were able to get one to review", and nobody in the comments has expressed any interest in the model afterward.
Why are these computers being chosen for the reviews? They don't appear to check any of the boxes for the reviewers or those who comment later. The reviewer tends to be a bit more willing to praise something, but this review can be summarized as "I didn't like the sound feature, the keyboard, the ports, or the battery, now you could buy it if you want".
I don't mind the reviews in general, but it might be an idea to review devices that are more likely to interest somebody, such as ones that make a point of one of the things that people care about. Articles talking about the subjective experience of devices built for good keyboards, repairability, lots of ports, or even just cost-efficient models. As this one stands, the selling feature is a sound system that I've never seen anyone ask for.
"is Wifi 6 (2x2 802.11ax) sufficient for 4k streams"
Yes, very much so if the rest of the network can handle it. In many cases, slow speeds on WiFi has more to do with congested networks behind the access point than the wireless part, though if your building is obstructing signals or your access points are ancient, this can change. However, I must disagree with this point:
"Also why include a wired USB hub, better to include a Bluetooth/WiFi enabled smart plug that a user could plug into the back of their monitor and seamlessly wireless stream to the paired device."
There will always be more room for debugging a WiFi connection than a cable. It's useful at times, but in many cases, the cable is the fast solution and works better for the user who doesn't need infinite mobility and would prefer a quick setup.
I don't know about them all, but I've found at least a couple versions of the Surface to be pretty good at running Linux. It was easy to boot and everything had driver support the last time I did it. If software support is what interests you, you could try that. Alternatively, the hardware checks for Windows 11 can be bypassed, though no guarantees that they won't change this at some point.
My guess is that their device is one of those small desktops that was sold as a thin client but is capable of being a basic computer in its own right, and that they're RDPing into it either from a laptop, giving it portability that the original device doesn't have, or their main desktop, which is more powerful but this gives it a new environment and doesn't require moving peripherals.
Of course you don't have to throw them away, but it really wouldn't be suitable for their use case. You can do plenty of things with the old Macs running the latest version of Mac OS that's available for your use case or by installing some versions of Linux that still support the hardware (I'm guessing we're talking about the DDR2 limitation, meaning that 64-bit is still an option). They would be good enough to give to a child or elderly family member that you're willing to support. You may have to, because at some point those distros are going to get old and will be more difficult to upgrade, or the person will need more performance than the old machine can provide and you need to be there to tell them when they can do something and when they can't.
For users you don't have direct contact with, it's not as helpful to give them something that is likely to be insufficient or not easily updated in the near future. That's why organizations like this tend to be somewhat picky about the hardware they pass on. I've helped people use computers that are not really entirely useful anymore, but if it's the kind of machine where I would start by saying "You can still use it, but", then they don't want to be giving it to others. That's also true in my case; I will help someone use their own old computer for longer, but I won't give them a very ancient machine with the expectation that my support will prevent it from causing problems for them.
Time, money, quality – if you admit which one you're giving up and work for it, you can have any two. If you don't take this active point, you can have any one. I have seen way too many businesses that could have had two except they weren't very good at prioritizing, so they only got one of them. For example, they could have opted for money and time, but they spent a lot of time talking about but not getting quality, so they ended up with only money. It didn't always end well.
I had a different immediate reaction to the poll. At time of writing, there are a lot more yes than no votes. I don't believe those people. Sure, I believe that they would like to see a technical explanation of a failure, just as I would. What I don't believe is that they would follow this part: "Yes, I would trust them more and use them more." I've seen plenty of comments in response to a technical failure before, and if it involves a misconfiguration or any human-caused fault, there will be lots of complaints on how that was possible or how stupid the person who made it was. If it was a hardware fault, there will be complaints about why there wasn't redundancy which could handle that fault.
Those complaints aren't even unfair. I want a technical explanation to know whether it's a fault that could be realistically expected and whether the response was logical. If it was too small a cause, then I won't automatically trust them more because they told me about it. I think I'm often more charitable than the average poster of comments on topics like this, willing to accept some downtime as understandable and plan accordingly. However, I'm not infinitely generous when something indicates a high risk. As such, I decided I could not correctly vote either of the options on the poll.
I think you'll find they were being sarcastic and saying that Microsoft should be spending more effort on a tablet interface since they make tablets. If I saw people using them as tablets, I might agree more, but all the Surface users I've seen have been using them like laptops anyway.
You may have your suspicions, but all the conversations are about the choice of interface, suggesting that Microsoft using an HTML-based frontend instead of the native Windows interface features they wrote is contradictory. The cloud guy appears to be the one who created an unfounded assumption, so while it is theoretically possible that Microsoft could make a cloud-based mail client, nothing suggests they have or the people talking about the interface decision would be talking about something unrelated (you can use native interfaces on cloud clients) and unimportant (who cares about interface policies if there's a privacy issue). It's important not to turn one thing into an assumption, often incorrect, about something else.
Maybe the AI will be attached to that feature they introduced about two years ago which started predicting my sentences, at least in English. It would generally recommend about three words to continue my sentence. I couldn't tell whether it was trained on other emails I sent or not, because it would accurately predict what I was going for when the sentence was pretty basic, but those sentences were also the ones I was most likely to have typed many times already. One reason I never found out is that the feature was disabled with prejudice within about five minutes, most of that spent looking for the right checkbox.
And the first guy appears to be wrong. The web app just means they used some HTML and JS frontend instead of native controls. That doesn't mean they're storing mail data or settings on their server and only providing a dumb client. Not that there can't be something invasive in that program, but from other comments, I see nothing indicating that it will require cloud accounts or even any cloud services to function.
The QoS features built into hardware are usually intended to be implemented when the network is congested. The ones that net neutrality advocates are arguing against are not. Even net neutrality adherents accept contracts that, for example, allow users to be deprioritized when the network is busy based on their total usage, and they complain instead about ISPs trying to be selective about which traffic they will affect. I have already explained what the ISPs have done and would like to continue and expand which lead them to this opinion. I have a few other points about your last comment though.
"the 'user' generally has no service with the ISP, which is the problem. They create congestion, but don't pay the ISP to deliver any of the traffic served."
At first, I thought you were talking about the customer of the ISP. From your next sentences, this appears not to be true, but in case you were including both of them, the customer is certainly paying plenty to the ISP for all their stuff. But, as I say, this sentence suggests you were talking about the other end:
"They don't contribute anything towards the cost of capacity upgrades needed to deliver 4K adverts, even when they make lots of money pushing them to the ISP's customers, who generally don't want them."
Which is how the internet has generally worked. The ISP concerned is sending that data on because their customer has payed them to do so, and they received it from the ISP from the service provider, which has likewise been payed to do so. Those two ISPs may negotiate an agreement where they exchange data for free or where one of them gets money as a result, but either way, they will figure out a way to deliver the data from one paying customer to another one. That the data sent makes money for someone is irrelevant; they have already agreed to provide the service by signing a contract with the customer, and it is their responsibility to do so no matter who is making money using the service or how successful they are. Similarly, if I use an ISP-provided connection for something which makes me no money, I don't get to either have my connection for free or send the bill to every site I used, because I looked for a company that agreed to exchange bits and payed one to do so. Your electricity provider will not charge you more if you're using it to charge your work computer, and thus, get money. Your water provider will not charge you more if you're using that water in baking something that you sell, thus turning a profit. Your ISP doesn't get to do it either.
Where that has been made illegal, it is because ISPs don't intend to use those to improve the quality of service, but to extract more money from their customers. They do this effectively by tricking them: yes, we will give you unlimited bandwidth, with speed only restricted for congestion, unless it's somebody who has paid us, in which case their competitors will run slowly. The way they explain this is "video constrained except from certain providers". That has two effects: in the short term, ISPs can try to negotiate extra payments from users to reverse the decision to break their service, and in the long term, they can try to sweat their infrastructure for a bit longer. One effect it doesn't have is improving the quality of service.
"Gandi upset me because a .com domain that cost £14-something to renew last year, cost £23.99 this year. And *then* I noticed they were going to charge for email accounts (previously got 2 mail boxes for free I believe) and so it'd actually cost me ~£60 this year. So... nope... voted with my feet."
I have the same problem, and I have the downside that I've renewed for years in advance and the new mailbox prices will be charged later this year anyway. If you've found another registrar that offers a basic email hosting service, I'd be very interested to hear the recommendation. I may have to get a separate email host, but my needs are very small* for most domains, so I appreciated the included basic service.
* In many cases, it would be a domain for a project or open source product with a mailbox for users to contact. I don't want to forward that to my personal email since anyone who enters something plausible in a contact form can get it and because I might add others to the mailbox so multiple people can see incoming messages. My storage usage is very low though. For now, my utilization of the 3 GB quota on the basic mailboxes runs from 0.00 to 0.03 GB, so I don't really want to buy expensive email hosting that will be used very little unless I can find no better options.
This is all true, but assuming the companies making AI models are really the targets, we're talking about companies whose primary business model is spending millions and waiting months for something to finish training. They can afford to have a bunch of servers pulling pages and scraping them if they decide the training data is useful, and the cost in time can be decreased by spending a bit more on lots of nodes doing the work. For the same reason, they can also justify buying the API credits to pull it themselves, depending on how many new posts they want to retrieve. The problem is that nobody else can, so Reddit appears to be building their entire business model on hoping that AI companies will be consistently interested in their data when most existing companies already have most of it and hoping that outweighs the unhappy users who make that content.
They appear to. Montenegro and South Korea don't have a bilateral extradition arrangement, but they are both parties to the European Convention on Extradition, which should be sufficient. They have an extradition treaty with the United States from 1902, which has been passed through a variety of successor states but appears to still be in force. I looked for a good list of Singapore's agreements, but I didn't find one and I'm getting bored. Maybe if this means they don't have one, one of the other two will get precedence. I'm guessing South Korea will ask first and, if they decide to, send him wherever else asks.
Unfortunately, Gandi are the registrar I mentioned in another comment above who just changed the way they do email for their domains. They used to include two very basic mailboxes with each domain, which they will no longer provide, and the price per mailbox has been multiplied by ten. This means that, if I stay with them and continue to use them, my effective price for the same product will be 3-4 times as large next year as it was this year, even though I've already renewed and payed them for many years to come (they do not continue to provide the service they included when I bought it). For a domain that is set up for a small project, I only need a very basic mailbox, and I don't necessarily want that to forward to a personal account, so I'm quite disappointed to have lost this.
I used to prefer native mailboxes on the domains to deal with this problem. I still do, but the registrar I used has just increased the price for their mail hosting literally by an order of magnitude. I've only got one domain where I run the mail server myself because doing so when you don't operate at scale is a pain, but it's looking like a more and more necessary part of having email under your control which isn't ridiculously hampered by the operator or expensive.
"The story could have been that a digger drove a trench through a fiber optic cable up the road and shut down their internet leaving them locked out of their home, unable to control the lights, cooker, fridge, HVAC, entertainment system/TV and their alarm clock."
Except the facts, even the subset we had from the article, are clear in indicating otherwise. The guy has indicated that he did have local backups for the stuff he had, but was commenting on this because most users of the hardware would not. Even ignoring this, most of the IoT stuff has some kind of local option. Smart light bulbs still have wall switches which don't go online. Smart locks, assuming he had some which I doubt because I've never seen one that was any good, tend to have some plan for being unlockable manually. I was recently looking at some WiFi-enabled cooking equipment in an attempt to figure out what the WiFi was for and who would want it, and while I still don't have a great idea of how that's useful, every model I saw has buttons on it which do not require remote control to use. The thing that is lost when the account is shut down or the internet interrupted are the convenience elements, in this case the ability to control all those things using voice commands. Someone who relied on that could build a local backup voice control system, but for many users, they can deal with a loss in voice control by walking over to the existing local controls and activating them.
There are many here who appear to hate home automation hardware. I'm not just talking about not using it; I don't have any because I don't need it and I find the stuff I've seen to be of little use, and from the look of things, that applies to most authors of comments. However, that doesn't mean that I will look for reasons the equipment must be dangerous or stupid to the point that I'm inaccurate about its limitations or risks, nor that someone who chooses to have it is somehow less sympathetic. I'm seeing several comments that do one or both of these, and I find it a little confusing why there is so much hostility just because we may not use the same products.
You basically can't do the same things with Cortana as you could with Alexa. For one problem, I don't think Microsoft makes Cortana boxes which you can put somewhere you want to have voice commands recognized. You'd have to have laptops sitting around to do that because Cortana only works from devices running Windows. I'm not sure if you can hook Cortana into any of the services that can control automated hardware either, but that's at least more likely (I've never enabled Cortana, so I don't know what it is capable of doing). I don't have any voice control except the one built into my phone, but some systems are clearly more functional than others.
Exactly, and the other issue is Amazon responding incorrectly. Let's assume that an event like this actually involved a lot of intentional abuse directed at the driver. Amazon might want to do something about that, and they have the right to, but that shouldn't include deactivating the products they sold or they're likely to face legal risks, not to mention informing their customers that the products are as likely to fail as we know they are, but the general customer does not. Not only do they need to check whether incidents actually occur, they need to figure out what they'll actually do in response to them rather than going to the easiest automated switch.
That's an advert now? How about the one mine shows:
"Install the latest PowerShell for new features and improvements! https://aka.ms/PSWindows"
If that's what we're responding to, I'd like to see the massive complaint you must have for Canonical, which has been printing something like this every time I log in just because I never even tried to change it:
Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-200-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage
[...]
Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud
Expanded Security Maintenance for Infrastructure is not enabled.
0 updates can be applied immediately.
24 additional security updates can be applied with ESM Infra.
Learn more about enabling ESM Infra service for Ubuntu 18.04 at
https://ubuntu.com/18-04
When does providing information about updates when you start a program start becoming advertising? Is it advertising when I'm shown a license or copyright statement, more common in stuff with an open source license? This is not a good example of advertising in Windows. The ads in the start menu part is very different than this, and I could complain that someone even tried it for days, but a line in PS about a new version of PS doesn't qualify in my mind.
"Huge difference between email, which you don't need every day, and the lights and climate control which does require daily access."
I disagree. If a smart light fails, then you have to use the wall switch. Most lights I'm aware of (I haven't purchased any, so my sample size may be limited), have a perfectly functional manual mode which means you'll have no automatic timers, color changes, or scripts to automatically set things when other events occur, but if you can move to the wall, you can still have light or darkness as you desire. If your smart light bulb is somehow missing this feature, then you can replace it with a simple light bulb and have that until you get your smart one working again, the same way you would deal with a normal light bulb that had burned out. Email, on the other hand, is quite important. It is a method of authenticating to a lot of services, a way to get important communications, and if you use one for business purposes, can be quite valuable. I'd much rather deal with a prolonged smart light bulb outage than a prolonged email outage, and therefore I would and do spend more effort having backups for email than for light bulbs.
"Your post implies you must even generate your own electricity or you'te wrong."
Sort of, since I'm trying to make the point that, at some point, the difficulty involved in doing everything yourself means it's not justified to do so. The post to which I replied was quite disparaging of this engineer for not having a third, local, backup system for something comparatively unimportant, but if you really need that level of backup, there are a lot of other things that would also need to be backed up. Some people actually go to that effort, often when they already have plenty of resources to make that possible (your own servers in your own buildings is much easier for people who own multiple buildings), but most of us do not. It would be hypocritical to attack the engineer for lacking a level of redundancy they didn't use themselves.
Do you have backups for everything you've ever bought for personal use, no matter how inconsequential the purchase was and how minor an inconvenience a failure would be? I seriously doubt it. This was not a person who set up this system to provide life-critical services to a client who required extreme fault tolerance; it was a person setting up some conveniences in his own house.
Answer this question: where is your email handled? All your accounts, every one of them. Is it all on your own mail server? Congratulations. Now that server, it's on hardware you control, right? Nobody else is running it? And that server is in a building you control, and by control I mean that you own it so nobody can lock you out, right? And that server has a backup which you also own, in a different building in case the first one burns down, and you control that building too? And the email address that owns the domain for those private servers is also controlled entirely by you in the same way, so you can't be locked out through that channel either? My guess is that your personal email does not have this level of backup, and it probably falls far short of that ideal. I have taken a couple steps in this direction, but I don't have that level of control or certainty. Yet, our email is far more important to our lives than smart lights, if we decide to buy them.
By the way, if you actually have this level of control over your email, consider other services that you also rely on. Can you honestly claim to have redundant backups for everything you rely on, not just the most important ones? If you do not, then your criticism of this guy applies to you as well. Fortunately, it's unwarranted, and I don't think there's anything wrong with you or that you should spend the next few years overcoming that humiliation.
He clearly understands how it happened, but didn't expect that a misheard phrase would lead to Amazon turning off everything. That's not a strange assumption to come to, because disabling purchased products for an unrelated event, whether it happened or not, is the kind of stupid thing that can lead to lawsuits and Amazon should know that.
Probably. They most likely had a nested set of scripts, each doing one part. All the scripts responsible for doing something worked as expected. The umbrella script for monitoring those scripts had a problem interpreting their longer logs. It's even possible that the umbrella script properly handled most of the logs correctly, only failing on a log relatively late in the process.
"No message means a clean install ... you only need to throw a message in the event of an error."
That works great until your script takes a while to run. If your install script has been printing nothing for three minutes, is it still working successfully or did it get stuck in a loop somewhere? Of course, this is also the kind of script, that, should I terminate it because it appears to be doing nothing (whether or not it was actually stuck), no output means I'll have little idea on exactly what it has done and what I need to do to clean up the mess.
Yes, there are some ways to investigate what the script is doing by looking at files it accessed, attaching monitors to the process and its children, and reading its source (of course everything is open source, right). However, the average user doesn't know how to do that and the technical user doesn't want to do that unless it's necessary, which in most cases it is not. This model also requires the programmer to detect, handle, and have a message for every error condition that could occur on any system capable of trying to run it*. Of course, that's ideal and I'd like everyone to do it, but don't pretend everyone does.
* For example, install scripts that can run on any vaguely Unixy system, but weren't intended for every single one. If I run them in a tiny Unix-style shell that runs on an iPhone and has no services stack, most scripts won't be expecting that and will fail if they try to interact with one. It would be great if every install script checks that, but most do not try at all.
The part I thought was contradictory was this:
"Once upon a time, devs were proud of the ability to debug a User's problems, now they have to see the stack trace for themselves or it is marked "can't reproduce"."
You act like seeing a stack trace is a crutch, but seeing a core dump, which provides even more information to the debugger, is not. These statements don't seem to align. My story was not exactly the same, but an indication of why we try to use core dumps or stack traces before relying on less reliable user information, which is what I thought you wanted devs to be doing instead of asking for stack traces.
You appear to think that debugging got worse, when in fact the same tactics are being used in the same ways. People still collect logs and information generated by a crash and use those to diagnose problems. If they can't get them, they attempt to reproduce from other information.
Your reply suggests you might have had a different point: "So, yes, having *at best* a stack trace is nowhere near as useful as having the full core dump." I interpreted your previous comment to be expressing dissatisfaction with developers' skills, not their tools. However, I'm not particularly concerned about the loss of dumps; they're still available for programs that make them useful, but for many complex programs, unexpected errors still have some chance of cleaning up some resources from an unexpected error condition. A dump is a rather catastrophic fail method and it provides little information to the user, not all of whom can call the programmers quickly.
The sentence you quoted contradicts your assertion. After all, what was the core dump? It was a lot of data about the user's situation that led to the crash. It contained a lot more data than the stack trace does. Those dumps were useful to debugging programs for exactly the same reason and in exactly the same way that stack traces are, and both only happen when the programmer did not appropriately detect and handle an error condition. In the absence of the dump or stack trace, the programmer has to try to reproduce the problem from what the user describes, which we certainly will do, but it is less effective because they may have omitted an important factor because they didn't think of it, didn't know it was important, or wouldn't know about it at all.
This reminds me of a debugging exercise I did a few years back where I was asked to fix a problem my software had when opening a certain file. They gave me a copy, and I ran the software on it with complete success. I did so repeatedly and in a variety of environments. I duplicated their server and ran it on that image. Only after a few days did they explain that the thing they were doing which caused the failure was run two copies of the software on the same file simultaneously, set to write output and logs to the same places. Of course we start with anything the computer can tell us before we ask the user to spend a lot of their time providing information they might not have.
Inadequate testing and probably several problems in the design. It sounds like the success checker was using the logs to establish whether something worked or not (bad idea), and it wasn't tested on all the different levels of logging available (inadequate testing), and the logs were not analyzed when the first failure occurred for some reason (not optimal operations). There might be more parts of this problem.
I've dealt with this kind of thing on several occasions, but usually on scripts that were written for speed rather than quality, and thus more frequently for internal or open source projects than for companies who need to make a once-or-never sale and therefore have an incentive for it to all look good at the start. One easy way to get this kind of false negative behavior is to rely too much on exit codes from programs. I've debugged a few scripts which assume that the only successful exit code is 0 and programs where the programmer thought that multiple successful exit codes would make use in scripts easier. One of those was going to need to change before the scripts worked, but sometimes, the situation lined up in such a way that the testing environment actually got a 0 out of a program which, in actual usage, would return another successful code. Of course, I've also seen the programs that didn't check any indicator of success or failure and just plowed on under the assumption that nothing would break, so at least the ones that print an incorrect failure message can be tracked down to a specific part that supposedly failed with minimal effort.
"It also takes jobs away from local economy, don't pay taxes, and is this a form of corporate / modern day slavery?"
Usually, no. Some places have used forced labor, which is slavery, but they're not common in outsourcing and you clearly weren't talking about that. Hiring people in a different country to the one you live in, where you pay people an amount they accept and they have rights to participate or not is not slavery. It would not be slavery if I hired someone in the UK on that basis, nor if I hire them in a country which often pays less. Would you consider outsourcing to the UK, on a salary acceptable to the UK resident doing the work, following UK labor regulations, as enslaving that worker?
Similarly, the tax situation is not only not slavery, but not at all surprising. In my example, my British colleague would be paying tax to the UK, not to the country I'm in. That's to be expected, and my country wouldn't have a justification to complain about it.
Of course. The management consultant charges a massive amount and will get very angry if you say the work is garbage. GPT costs little or nothing and generates the same level of garbage, but if you say so, it will apologize as many times as you want it to and generate new garbage for you every time.
They probably calculated the expected value based on some incorrect assumption on how many people will bother filling out the forms. I wonder whether any class action places are smart and sneaky enough to make the forms even more complex than usual or actively broken so they can split that payment among some friends who coincidentally are the only people to actually have registered themselves in a database.
"Amazingly overconfident about basing his operation in Arizona. Because zero state income tax?"
Probably not, as the internet tells me that Arizona taxes individual income at rates from 2.59-8% and corporate income at 4.9%. Also, although the press release and the complaint don't indicate how Arizona got involved, it does identify his residence as being in Russia. Perhaps he got tired of the winter and went somewhere warm, picking the wrong place.
Most of their tiny civilian budget is focused on feeding its people, having turned basically every plot of land that isn't occupied by a military base or factory into a farm, even those plots that are not very good at being farms (a policy that has resulted in widespread crop destruction before after significant ecological damage). As for letting their citizens have peace, that's a bad idea for a dictatorship that has chosen the full Stalinism leadership style option, one they seem very gleeful to continue using.
It is not hosted in North Korea. North Korea has a very small address block, and I wouldn't be surprised that that block is firewalled in a lot of places anyway. It's far too obvious if you're running a phishing site. The actual address appears to be hosted by Cloudzy, formerly Router Hosting, a company in the United States.
South Korea could attempt to get that company to stop hosting it. They could also try to get the domain name revoked. Both would not prevent North Korea from setting up a new phishing site using a different name and address, but it could interfere with it at least a little.
Of course it's easy to translate that into human: "Let's do some work as soon as I'm done talking". If you want to translate each part, though, not so easy. For example, what does "synergize cross-functionally" mean? It's very clear that we're supposed to be doing it, but not clear on how we do that. The good news is that anyone can basically skim over it and assume that it means "work with each other", or more likely ignore it entirely and work the way they were already going to, but that is not what the words entirely mean. Someone who has worked for a few weeks will know what the key performance indicators are, but that doesn't automatically mean that they know what they're supposed to do to "align" them, although their assumption of "keep them looking positive, like you were already planning to" is likely to be close enough. People can learn the "low hanging fruit" analogy easy enough, but what does "provide visibility" on that mean? That you should work on it? That you should tell someone about it (who)? That you should write it down? That you should avoid focusing on that alone, which is probably a good idea but not implied by the words?
If it's just about understanding that the person talking wants you to work well, it's very easy to understand. If anybody says this stuff with a more specific plan of action in mind, they are not actually succeeding at communicating that plan to anybody. It's like the announcement for a new tech product where the release describes it as advanced, flexible, stable, smaller and lighter, faster processing, more memory, and after reading it all you know for sure is that they have a new product out there, but you can't tell any important details about what it will be like until they release the spec sheet.
"If you've never heard the phrase "Blue Sky Thinking" (lucky you), from the context of a sentence, you could probably work it out."
Time for an interesting experiment for me. I have heard the phrase, but so far my brain has always just skimmed over it thinking that I don't really need to know what they're trying to say. So I'm going to try to guess what it could mean and see if I get it right. Here are the options I came up with:
1. It refers to people thinking only for the ideal situation, I.E. for nice weather, without considering the likely problems, hence why it's just blue skies.
2. It's someone thinking of the situation from before they started the project, and it's an airplane metaphor.
3. It's referring to someone who lets their ideas grow too big, as if they're focusing on the sky instead of the ground.
Now I'll look it up...
Nope, I didn't get it. Also, I note that there's a perfectly good word for that concept, just one single verb which people will recognize already. I'm not posting the actual definition (well, first result from a search that had a definition on the page) in case anyone else who hasn't understood the phrase wants to try the experiment too. If you don't know and want to, here you go.
"Plot "% learnt" or "ability to do useful work" against time and it becomes blindingly obvious that a steep learning curve is good - everyone is finding it easy to learn, or there isn't much to learn in the first place."
Only if they plotted it the same way you just suggested. It's pretty easy to see that there are other ways. Here's a simple one: reverse the axes from the way you did it. Now it's the amount of time taken to reach a certain level of learning. If the curve is steep, then it takes a lot of time to make a small amount of progress. Or you could take the derivative of your equation. In this case a steep downward curve indicates that the subject matter is taking longer and longer as a student advances through it, common in disciplines where the introductory material is generally applicable but advanced material is often theoretical and intertwined. If we're just referring to steepness of a line drawn on a graph, we can make a graph where steep means whatever we want it to mean. The idiom isn't necessarily directly connected to any particular graph that was used elsewhere.
That is if the person who first said that was thinking of graphs at all. They might have been making an analogy to physically steep things, which are difficult to climb, and it's been mutated with usage.
I have similar objections, and another one about the "certain threshold". I wonder how they plan to specify that. It's not as if AI systems have a numerical complexity score that can be directly compared. A tiny program can be used in a damaging way and a massive program can be next to useless. A text-generating model and a facial recognition system are dangerous in completely different ways. I wonder whether any politician has considered even for ten seconds how they'd decide what would get the severe regulation* and what would not. This is in addition to the problem that they don't have much of a hope that anyone will comply with that regulation or that they will be able to penalize those who ignore them.
* They don't seem to have a great idea of what that regulation would be, but they do agree there would be a lot of whatever it is.
It has been approved now, so this is not really an issue, but I can answer the questions on what would have happened.
If they didn't get the restraining order, then the companies would not be prevented from merging. The FTC has to block a merge before it becomes illegal, and they haven't completed doing so. They could try to change their schedule to have the next hearing earlier, but no guarantee they could organize it or that that will be the last one they need. They would still be able to raise objections after the merger completes, but then you have to somehow pull apart two companies that have already merged, which is a larger mess. Any problems caused during that mess would probably get the FTC sued by one or both of the companies involved. This only covers the United States. If the two companies merged, they would have some problems in the UK where they have already been refused permission. What they could or would do about that isn't something I know enough about to explain, but they probably have hundreds of lawyers who studied British corporate law looking at it.
By getting the order approved, the FTC has a lot of power to cause problems for the deal. This is partially because they can still argue for the deal to be refused, but also because they can delay action until existing agreements expire. I don't know what's in those agreements, so I don't know how difficult it would be to negotiate an extension, but it would create more problems for the two.
Those are good data, and I'm not trying to pretend that they don't exist. However, people who advocate returning to the office (I should reiterate that I'm not one of those people), have studies of their own. Even without considering ones that might have been written specifically to come to that conclusion, there are reports like this one which concludes that remote workers get more done, but by working longer hours rather than by being more productive, which has other downsides in the long-term health of the team. Similarly, at least some companies have described that they're returning to the office because they've seen productivity declines, often specifically referring to new hires. Whether they have the data to defend that or they just made it up because it sounds convincing is harder to know, because most of them didn't bothering giving out data.
You appear to have a strong opinion, so I'm not surprised that you find the papers supporting higher productivity to be convincing to you. I still question whether those sources are as universal as the summaries of them would lead us to believe. I am less convinced in part because there are a lot of different kinds of work, and I would expect there to be a lot of differences in productivity based on exactly what you're doing at home, whereas a lot of these papers either try to study everybody or focus on one activity which isn't necessarily the same as the work we do. I sometimes work from an office and sometimes work at home, and anecdotally I have some advantages when at home and often prefer to work there. The problem comes when I decide that, because that's my experience, it must also be yours and that of everyone else I know.
"OK, so at what point as an "industry" of developers do we take responsibility for our work?"
At many points, but not the one you're complaining about. If your management judges you on something, you don't get to choose that. It might not even affect your work. I've written good quality code despite management clearly not caring about the quality, just wanting something that works. So if the statistic shows that 100% of coders are not judged on code quality, it wouldn't automatically follow that 100% of code is of poor quality as some will be self-motivated to produce good code. But even if that's not the case, this is clearly a management issue. Let's take an example from an unrelated field:
Let's say that you work in a call center and I'm your boss. You're receiving calls from customers who have problems and you're trying to solve them. I've decided that these customers are highly likely to remain customers, so there's not much need to treat them well. Therefore, I've given you instructions to go through a basic script to fix the really easy problems, and if it's more complex, leave them on hold forever until they give up. Since I've given you such a simple script, you need to spend no more than three minutes on a call, and if you do, I'll be monitoring and harassing you over it. Whose fault is it that the customer service is terrible? If we're following your logic, it's your fault. If we're following common sense, it's clear that it is my doing that led to the situation and it is I who need to change if the situation is to be resolved. Blaming people for management's mistakes not only punishes the wrong person but prevents you from improving the situation.
This is the outdated view I have come to expect. Microsoft did want a monopoly in servers, and I'm sure they'd happily take one now. They're not going to get one. They know that. They've stopped treating that goal like it's possible, and they stopped quite a long time ago now.
Similarly, blaming Microsoft for things you don't like and they had nothing to do with. Systemd is not a Microsoft product. It was designed by employees of Red Hat, and it was adopted and promoted by Red Hat. You know, one of Microsoft's competitors in the server space you think they're focused on. But since you have a negative opinion on it, you'll jump to the conclusion that it must have been their idea and somehow they've duped all the distros into using it. Poettering went to work at Microsoft only twelve years after developing that and all the other core developers didn't go to work there at all; what a long game they play.
"Microsoft *does* care. A lot. Every linux server is lost profit for them. You actually believe a greedy corporation like MS would *not* care about lost profit? If you do, you have serious disconnection from reality."
Well, they do appear to make a lot of money on all those Linux servers they sell to people through Azure. They've got the Windows server option up there as well and they charge more for that, but they figured out before even launching that service that people liked Linux servers and were going to use them, so they ended up providing their services for those as well. So basically, they don't care too much because they'd much rather you run Linux on Azure than avoid them because it's not an option. The ship has sailed away from their server monopolistic ambitions and they know it. You, however, appear not to.
