Posts by doublelayer 10188 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
"Nobody needs these tags, we all managed just fine before they appeared."
Nobody needs computers, we all managed just fine before they appeared. Computers can help someone who wants to kill someone else. Smash all the computers today.
You'll need better logic than "at one point we didn't have X, so X should be forbidden".
"here was an example of a company trying to keep older devices working properly for a longer period of time."
That wasn't it, and it wasn't about slowing down the devices. They had specified batteries that couldn't run their devices, and they were trying to hide their design error. Their batteries were not sufficient to run the electronics they attached to them, and they figured this out, so they artificially hampered the electronics to avoid crashing their users' devices so frequently. They still ended up crashing, but it took a bit longer to get there, meaning that warranties and consumer protection timelines ran out before the problems became as evident.
The problem comes because the feature was turned on without people knowing and because the problems when the feature is not turned on is so bad. When a normal computer's battery is old and the maximum performance setting is set, the battery doesn't last very long because it discharges to zero quickly. When the iPhone's switch is turned off, or even sometimes when it's turned on, the phone spontaneously reboots even though the battery says it has, and actually has, plenty of charge left. I had one of those phones. I never disabled the throttling. Even with the throttling on, it got to the point where doing something as simple as answering an incoming call would sometimes require more voltage than the battery would give and cause the phone to shut down. I would have to plug it in to reawaken it, the phone would come up saying that the battery had 45% or so of battery remaining, and I could call the person back and apologize for the downtime.
Other devices don't do that.
Let's see if DuckDuckGo is affected by the "worship" you suggest must be there:
Does your theory expect that eventually the worship will insert TBL into the search results so he can push out all the people who are actually in the search results? While some of those articles do mention him, they mention him later than these other guys and they explain that what he built was a part of the system we use today, not the whole thing.
"It's not simply disagreeing with an opinion. It is decades of past experience demonstrating that a one-word answer to a multi-level problem likely indicates a lack of familiarity on the part of the party uttering that one word."
The post you replied to has more than one word, and was not entitled "A comprehensive review of the Gopher protocol's advantages and disadvantages". The post was not trying to encompass every detail of the protocol, whether it was good or not both objectively and in comparison, and how it was and is used. It was expressing an opinion, and the one word you chose to quote simply indicates that the opinion is negative.
Not only do you appear to have completely ignored that reality, but you assume that the person never used the system. Their negative opinion, with which you disagree, can't be because they came to different conclusions than you did, nor can it be because they were unfamiliar with something you used which improves the experience. No, you allege that they didn't use the system at all, and presumably just made up an opinion out of whole cloth. You dismissed an opinion based on no evidence at all, and in a way that doesn't make logical sense. I never used Gopher, and I have no opinion about it. I could try using the remnants that are still around and come to an opinion, but unless I do, my view on it is neutral. Their view is not, which is a lot more likely to have come from using it and not liking it than deciding to make up an opinion for no reason.
You've expressed negative views on systemd in other posts. Usually, you don't write an essay explaining each complaint you have about systemd's design or use, you simply say it's bad or you call it a "cancer". That's "a one-word answer to a multi-level problem". How would you react to someone who said "How to tell me you've never used systemd"? It would be incorrect and I'm sure you know that.
Their characterization, that he only wrote a browser, is wrong. Your characterization is also wrong. Of course it wasn't unheard of, but it also didn't exist in a format like that and the format that was created has remained useful in a form quite similar to its original form today, rather than being superseded.
This is similar to the development of the internet. You could make a similarly derisive, simplistic statement about how the internet wasn't revolutionary: "they took computers that used digital data and had them send that data, still in digital form, over a phone line. Big deal." That is inaccurate about how the internet works and why it is actually new, and it ignores that the internet is still in use today, without having to be reinvented. Nor do I worship TBL's contributions, just recognize that they are important to a piece of technology that is very common in the world today, and thus his work has proved important.
Allow me to introduce you to humanity.
Every major invention has been idealized by somebody, often the initial inventors. Often some of those ideals truly come to pass. Never are those absolute ideas met absolutely, because humans want to do bad things and they will use any tools available to do so.
It did make knowledge available to all, not every bit of knowledge, and not to all people equally, but there's a lot more availability than there used to be and it covers a lot more people than any previous system did. However, it enables people to post any information, correct or not, that they want. It's obvious that that was going to happen from the start, even if people hoped it wouldn't happen.
That's not unique to the web, the internet, the computer, electrical technology, or anything in particular. Any advancement produces some benefits, often the ones the idealists hope for but in a limited fashion, and some downsides. It's not even as if the downsides weren't predicted. Science fiction writers are good at coming up with ways that a technology completely breaks things, and although many of their dreams end up being unrealistic, others prove prescient.
"I just find it disingenuous they attribute it to one man who [...]"
If you want to argue about disingenuous, you might want to learn what that one man actually did. It wasn't an invention of every internet-related technology used today, and nobody, especially him, ever said it was. Neither was it as limited as you claim.
"created a GUI method to view web pages."
Yes, he did that. And a GUI to edit them. Of course, what is a web page? If you asked a contemporary, they would have to guess at the details, because he also invented those as well. HTML was his invention, without which the web page concept isn't formalized. And that's just the page part. What makes it a web page? Part of it was the transfer protocol which he also invented, although it's a pretty simple protocol so it's not a really important or difficult invention. Except that doesn't do a web either, because that's still a one-to-one connection with a server. The part that makes a web is the URI system to identify resources from other ones, thus enabling hypertext (which already existed) to refer to other locations without having to agree on interoperability first. That's a short list of stuff that he invented.
"Didn't even create a search engine": No, he didn't. Why did he have to invent a search engine when the way he enabled global hypertext is the reason that search engines tend to work these days? He doesn't get the credit for inventing the search engine any more than the developers of TCP would get credit for his work, but each step allowed the development and proliferation of the next to happen the way it did.
"or DNS. No DNS no http.": Wrong. No DNS a much more annoying experience using HTTP, but it can and has been done. Those protocols are independent and you are free to use one and not use the other.
"The internet is the WWW. Who separates the two?"
People who want to be specific and refer to them separately, although your next statement is a bad example of this.
"How many times have you heard someone say I'm going to check the internet when they really mean the WWW?"
Not a distinction that matters. What they mean when they say "check the internet" is that they'll connect to something that will tell them information. I say it, and often I do mean the web, but sometimes I mean that I'll use a different communication system such as connecting to a remote terminal, accessing a database, email, or an FTP server. All of those are on the internet, and insisting that people use a specific service name instead of the generic and well-understood term is useless.
"Beside "World Wide Web" is the technology behind HTTP. HTTP is just something that sits on top of it and translates text to pages after you use DNS. A GUI."
All of that is wrong. Starting from the end. HTTP is not a GUI. It's a protocol for transferring things. HTML isn't a GUI either; it's a language for specifying content that can be rendered graphically or not. The GUI is in a browser engine such as Gecko, WebKit, or Blink. The WWW is a collection of inventions including HTTP and HTML but not limited to those. In fact one of the most important parts might be the URI system that is used by HTTP resources but also many other systems, both ones that existed pre-HTTP and ones created later. DNS doesn't necessarily come into it, as that is an internet system that is often, but not universally used in HTTP or other WWW technologies. A URI that has an address instead of a domain is still a valid one. Systems that have their own naming systems independent of DNS and use HTTP on top are also valid ones.
They are related technologies. The WWW could continue if the internet shut down by using a different communication system, but since we don't have another world-wide communication system available to the general public, it would be a much smaller WWW and there would probably be multiple separate ones. For the same reason, I could complain about anyone who gets credit for the internet because you're just piggybacking on the existing inventions made for computers and communication systems, which would be similarly simplistic. The internet was an important invention, and HTTP and related technologies another one. Both are extremely important to the way we live life today, and fighting for who should get credit, or rather in the case of this argument who should be denied credit, is pointless and petty.
How to tell me that you never used Gopher without having to say "I never used Gopher"
I really like how simply disagreeing with your opinion means they can't possibly have any experience, and that they're lying to boot. Can you tell me the secret to making my opinion the right one, disagreements with which are universally wrong without having to know any facts about the person who disagrees? So far, all the statement says is that they don't like Gopher, not any reason why or any allegations of what Gopher did or didn't do.
Then turn it off. If automatic updates are off, then you won't install it unless you push the button. The "rapid" part of the name is just because it no longer needs to send a full OS image, so it's quicker to develop, test, and download. It doesn't make it mandatory if you have disabled that switch.
You're including a lot of generations in your count. They don't release anywhere near that number every year, so while you can still choose last year's chip, you don't have to go through that choice if you're planning to build with the most modern parts available. They also need to have chips for a wide range of devices with CPUs, from handheld units to servers more powerful than the average server, so they need to have a lot of options just for power and performance. When you add in that people often don't need the most performance for their power situation that can be achieved, it makes sense that they also add in versions of most ranges that are cheaper and less performant.
These factors mean that you don't really have to look at all those models when choosing something. If you're building a desktop right now, you can eliminate the chips that are too expensive for your use, likely most of the Xeons, and you can eliminate those intended for laptops or low-end devices like the Processor range*. Furthermore, you can eliminate many of the older generations unless you're buying used or recycling because, even though the 9th generation is still fully supported and is perfectly good, it's not sold very often by retail providers of CPUs. There will still be many choices, but not hundreds of them.
* The Intel Processor range: it still sounds stupid when I say this. I would have preferred them to stick to calling them Celerons or Pentiums. They could eliminate one of the names and consolidated, but eliminating both of them just makes a mess.
I explained so you don't have to be, at least for now. The algorithm is as follows:
Check first digit. If it's not a 1, that is the generation number. If it's a 1, append the next digit, and that is the generation number.
Parsing the rest of the digits is much worse, but I never said I could understand those digits. Basically, the best answer I can give you is that bigger number beats smaller number, something I can't say of AMD where the most important digit is the third because it represents the type of cores you'll get, but not the number of cores, so you pretty much have to go to benchmarks to figure out where you stand. Intel could certainly improve this, but I'm expecting they'll just create a new arbitrary system and the small amount I've managed to learn about their system will become obsolete.
It's not so much that rebranding is usually negative, but that in most cases it doesn't do anything. Mozilla rebranding to Firefox was a legal necessity, but they could have chosen a lot of other names and gotten the same situation. Mac OS to OS X and back again did basically nothing. I'm sure they thought a new name would be good at indicating that they were now using NeXTStep, but if they had just called it Mac OS 10, people would have figured it out. I don't object to name changes, but I question whether the people who spend a lot of time and effort thinking of names before coming up with something rather obvious are very useful to the company or to the customers.
Intel runs a database that lists all the devices and gives you information on when it was released and what features are supported, so if you want to find those things out, you can always go there. I think the generation numbers have been generally easy to parse from the model number. It's the first digit or two digits, and they didn't have a 1 generation of these chips because they skipped from 0 to 2, so if it has a 1 as the first digit, read the first two digits. It could be better, but this is marketing, so it probably won't be. Of course, now they have a chance to start over and confuse things again.
What would that accomplish? Unless the actual performance is radically different, it will still mean the same thing to the user who's going to buy one of them. The I3/I5/I7 range has always translated to cheap/medium/faster, with the I9 representing basically just desktops and quite fast. The basic information can be quickly read in that two-character summary of where this is in the range, the generation number, and the suffix denoting how much power it's using. Why should changing the structure of the chip change this method of informing the buyer how it compares to the others? Most buyers don't care in the slightest how the thing is manufactured; either they want a CPU that's good enough, or they look at benchmark numbers and power usage information. Either way, the structure only matters as it changes those values.
This is the same thing they did a few months ago when they rebranded their low-end parts, formerly Celeron and Pentium, to just "Processor". That was probably a waste of time. The only time where a brand name change made sense was when they stopped releasing things with the Atom branding, having cemented the impression in anyone who cared that it translated as "so underpowered it isn't useful for anything". Calling everything Ultra won't convince people that it is in fact ultra, especially if it's 90% of the Intel parts available for typical computer purchases.
I get the point of some marketing people to toss around names for new things, although I'm not sure whether you really need any of the credentials that those people have since basically anyone can think up possible names, but I don't know if I've ever seen a renaming that had any benefits to the seller or to the customer.
That doesn't necessarily indicate technical knowledge, though. I wasn't around for those, but I did use computers not long thereafter, and I learned to get the more complex setup working. However, I managed that by reading and memorizing instructions and guides, not by having a lot of knowledge of why the settings had to be configured the way they were. The better understanding of what the components were doing when I issued commands only came later when I started focusing on understanding what was happening and why, not what I had to do to make it work.
Throughout my childhood, I assumed that someone who was good at using a computer must be really knowledgeable about how it worked. I knew a couple people, for example, who were quite at home with DOS commands and thus the Windows command line, and I assumed they must be technical people. Eventually, though, I learned that they were just people who had done work on DOS machines and that, although I hadn't, I had a better understanding of what was happening when they ran commands which is why they were asking me to fix things. For context, one of these people was convinced that a Bash session running on Linux must be DOS, no matter how I tried to clarify that it wasn't and that it was 2010 so they should know that a modern laptop running DOS was unlikely.
"If this manager gets all excited about a Soundblaster and CDROM then he has (had) much more clue than the typical manager."
Why? What does this prove other than that the manager knows what good 1990s computer parts entail? It doesn't necessarily indicate that the manager is good at using them, even if we assume that the manager has an intended use for them because they're not so unique nowadays.
I am younger than most of the people telling stories in these threads, which means as a side-effect that I have much less interesting hardware in my storage. However, it doesn't sound like the stuff we're nostalgic for, no matter our age, was necessarily the best equipment but rather the stuff we were familiar with. If I had a ZX81 around, it sounds like people would want it because it's a computer well-beloved by those who started with it, but it's not exactly the apex of hardware from the era or any real use today.
"I will suggest to people to purchase a Mac if they don't need windows, or are unable to install a new hard disk and Linux etc."
Before you do, consider Apple's support lifetimes for operating systems as well. They're doing the same thing that Microsoft is doing. I have a 2014 Mac which is stuck on Mac OS 11. It can run Mac OS 13 if I hack it, just as a similarly old computer can run Windows 11 if the checks are bypassed, but Apple will not allow me to install new versions normally. When they have made that change, they immediately stopped releasing new application versions for Mac OS 11, in my case the latest XCode version, but it applies to any applications they've made. They also have been known to lag security updates for the old versions if they get to them at all, including critical priority ones.
Microsoft's generation of ewaste is annoying to me, but it's worth keeping in mind that a computer of the same age would continue to run Windows 10, with full security updates, for two more years while Apple dropped the machine 18 months back.
"My prediction is WSL2's internal distribution (CBL-mariner) will "seemlessly" become the main kernel for Windows and the efforts to maintain drivers will land on the open-source Linux community."
You wouldn't be the first to have made that prediction, and it doesn't make any more sense to me than it did before. Windows doesn't just slot into the Linux kernel. Its services are tied into the NT kernel, so stripping that out would take a long time. As for drivers, Microsoft does not benefit from making drivers part of Linux. If anything goes wrong, it is Microsoft that will suffer, not the Linux community, so they don't have any reason to do Microsoft's work for them.
Moreover, if that happened, it would probably be pretty useful for driver availability in Linux, at least at the computer level (ARM will probably still be relentlessly nonstandard, so no benefit there). If you are in the belief that Microsoft is evil, and if you're not there are plenty of others who are, then there's another great reason for Microsoft not to do this: if they did, it makes shifting users and applications to desktop Linux much easier, making it much more convenient to stop using Windows.
If you go through a doorway, you end up on the other side, but not necessarily anywhere else since you can stop immediately on passing the doorway. If we're using the analogy, that means they should be supporting it at 23:59:59 on that date, thus having completely supported it throughout the date they set, and then they can drop support from a grammatical perspective. Since they weren't clear, let's say that's 23:59:59 at UTC-12:00, so that it's universally considered to be past that date everywhere on the planet when support is dropped.
I've been using Windows 11 on my work computer and have installed it on my Windows image for my personal computer. In both cases, it's very similar to Windows 10. A few things have changed, but they don't affect me very much and nearly everything looks the same. There are some problems, such as Windows 11 having more Microsoft account stuff, but since I'm not running the home version, I could bypass that without hacks.
I don't administer it across others' devices, but just as a user, it's not causing me any problems I didn't see in Windows 10.
"Eventually found the password and gained access to the files, but to change the email (or any settings) it had to send an email to the existing (and wrong) address."
To be fair to them, that's a pretty standard security feature, to prevent someone who has your password from locking you out of everything in perpetuity. Unless you have a second factor that is trusted to also change the email, they would have no way of verifying that you are who you say you are instead of someone who guessed or stole a string.
As for support, I agree with the sentiment, but companies rarely treat the people on the free trial program the same as ones who spend a lot of money. It's not that crazy when you consider the number of free Dropbox accounts they must have from years of offering the service; I have at least two of those, neither of which is used anymore. I don't think someone running a contracting business would treat someone they helped out for free a few months ago the same as their primary client for whom they've been working full-time for years, and Dropbox has a similar situation just scaled up to millions of accounts.
Anyone's itemized list will definitely lead to arguments. Anything that shows high costs of on prem will be derided by anti-cloud people as incompetent, whereas any pro-cloud person will argue that an expensive cloud bill is due to inefficient choices of which services are used to accomplish the goal. There's no winning, because in most cases I've seen they'll both be right. You can do both of them incredibly badly, and there are places who do.
In general, whenever I see someone saying that cloud is always better or always worse, I expect the person to be biased and unfamiliar with one, if not both, of the choices. There are some cases where there is a clear distinction, and many others where the difference will be determined by particular choices of how to implement the desired setup. I'm afraid I've seen too many uninformed people* with very strong opinions that rely on an incorrect or inexact assumption.
* Not that I'm particularly well-informed either, but I at least hope to be more careful about stating things with certainty if I haven't got the experience or rough calculations that defend it.
Since they've already decided to release it, I'm not surprised when new features are limited to that version. Yes, they lied about not releasing a new version, but now that they've returned to doing it, it's predictable that they're using a pretty typical method of encouraging people to update, and one to which I don't object that much; selling a new piece of software with "it has new and useful features" seems fair. I object more to the generation of ewaste because of their unrealistic hardware requirements they're not using; if they allowed 11 to run on all the equipment where it could run, I'd complain much less.
I have used it, but only a small subset of the features. The only part I found very useful was the ability to see and send messages from my computer. I'm faster when using a full keyboard to type messages, and there are some people who prefer to communicate by text rather than voice. That's not exactly new, but since SMS, iMessage, and Signal (no WhatsApp for me) have replaced IRC or other text-based communication methods that such friends used to use, it's handy to be able to use a computer to send those messages. It wasn't big enough to keep me using a Mac, but when I was already using one, I found the feature a bit helpful.
"Did you need any permission from the Linux Foundation to write that comment? Because you would need permission to write a similar comment about the corroded iron language."
That's not how this works at all. It's completely wrong in every detail. Trademarks don't prevent you from commenting on the trademarked item. Windows is a trademark, and Microsoft defends it. That does not now nor did it ever prevent me from saying "I like Windows" or "I hate Windows", or literally anything I want to say about Windows. What it restricts is me trying to sell some software and call it Windows. The same thing is true of the Rust and Linux trademarks, and Rust could have and probably will keep the trademark as they do now but should have described the usage differently.
The Linux trademark, for example, doesn't prevent me from using the word in a comment, or even in a product. It would, however, prevent me from making my own operating system, deciding that I'll call my OS Linux even though it doesn't work with real Linux software, and making money from that. It also prevents me from setting up the "I really make Linux company" and trying to get people to donate to or pay for whatever I claim to be building. I could still lie about being instrumental to Linux, but I have to use an unrelated name because otherwise the Linux foundation can defend their trademark. Rust is likely trying to do the same thing, but in an attempt to make things easier on their lawyers, they advocated a more restrictive usage policy for things related to the language. That was a misstep, but not because trademarks aren't compatible with open source. It was a misstep because they didn't work with the community and they had a lawyer, rather than a technical person, express the policy. Lawyers work in an area of "Don't do that or otherwise bad things will happen", whereas technical people tend to be a lot more open about what bad things and how close to that you can get before they start to happen.
"how much does that trademurk work these days?"
It worked out pretty well for them. After repeatedly fighting over it, Apple (computers) bought up all the trademark rights from the music people for an undisclosed probably a lot of money. Then they granted the previous owners the right to keep using it. So the previous company still has the right to call themselves Apple, they have exclusivity because the computer company has to defend their own trademarks, they got a pile of money, and they no longer have to get into legal arguments all the time. That sounds like a success to me.
Single-word trademarks are common and they work fine. Apple did trademark just Apple, as well as Apple Computer. They are now known as Apple Inc, having dumped the Computer part of their name long ago. See also: Windows, Office, Java, and a variety of others. Trademarks have to be granted in specific categories or industries, such that Apple can own the trademark for hardware and software, but someone else can own it for a company doing something completely different. This is exemplified by their working with the Apple-branded music company to share the trademark, which worked for three decades until it was decided that it would be better for Apple (computer) to have all the rights and just license them back to Apple (music) rather than get into fights every time Apple introduced a music-based product or feature.
Rust could do the same, and it makes some sense that they would. Unfortunately, instead of advocating that people are careful with where they use the trademark, they tried to prevent it entirely.
I'm not sure where they got those, but I wouldn't count on that being true. Living in a country that has used this system for longer than the UK has, it's been supported for years. I had an Android 4.4 device that was particularly annoying about it, because for some reason it cached an emergency alert and played it every time I turned on the device for the next month, but I blame the very patchy firmware for that. I don't think they invented a new protocol that would prevent all the old devices from sounding the alert.
Smartphones all let you do that, since they have plenty of other features that you don't need mobile service to use. Android and IOS handle not having a SIM pretty well. I'm not sure what level of non-smart phone you had, but if it literally did nothing other than calls and SMS, maybe the people writing the software figured bypassing that screen wasn't very important, or maybe it was possible to do so but just not intuitive as many of the cheap devices have had exactly thirty seconds put into making the UI understandable.
If it makes you feel any better, it's part of a standard which has included emergency messages for many years, and many countries have already deployed a system that produces them. The UK isn't writing new software to run on your devices; they're just sending messages which will be interpreted by the same software that already interprets them for millions of others who did the testing before it got to you. That leaves less room for the UK government to mess things up, and all possibilities are on the sending rather than the receiving end.
This depends on what kind of disasters can happen near you. The one that I've found most convincing is tornadoes, since they can appear with relatively little warning, but you still get minutes from a detection to gain shelter. If you have tornadoes where you are, that might make emergency alerts useful. Similar things can apply to flash floods or anything that you wouldn't know about a day in advance but would know about at shorter notice. I've decided to leave mine enabled, and if they end up being a problem for me, I'll disable them at that point. So far, there has not been a problem.
"Exactly what I should do with a four second warning when I live on the 11th floor remains unclear,"
Stand clear of any objects that can fall to the floor in case they decide to do so, away from windows in case they break, if possible move under something which will protect you if something does fall on it, get something to shield yourself from flying parts of the building, and drop to the floor to avoid falling injuries. Hope that nothing else happens. If it's severe enough to cause a larger disaster, the warning probably won't help you, but if the warning allows you to get to an empty space and therefore avoid a concussion when a heavy object falls off a shelf, you might benefit from that. A few seconds is enough to at least start doing these actions and time can be important.
The article's description of ScamShield from the Singaporean government doesn't sound great from a privacy perspective. I don't doubt that it does track and block scammers, but it is also in a position to collect a bunch of private communications. Singapore is not a government well-known for respecting its citizens' rights, although to be honest there are few governments with an unblemished record on that.
I was hoping to find a technical analysis of the system online, but some quick searches didn't turn one up. It did find a wonderfully disconcerting FAQ page. I'm not sure whether the phrases there are legitimately summarizing the risks for a nontechnical audience or trying to gloss over the truth, but the parts about privacy and security risks appear wrong. A few examples:
I am not familiar with any permission that works like this; usually, it's all SMS or none, not just ones from unknown numbers. For example, the service for handling calls doesn't have any exceptions built into it, so unless they're using something else, they see all incoming and outgoing calls.Are there any privacy concerns with using the app?
No, both iOS and Android have strict privacy rules on what ScamShield can or cannot read. If a message comes from a contact saved on your phone, the SMS will not be sent to ScamShield. [...] Only messages sent by unknown persons via SMS will be read by the AI.
Once installed, can hackers hack into my phone if the app is compromised?
As the app does not individually identify any users, and it does not access any other data on your phone, you and your phone are not at risk if the app is compromised.
This is just wrong. It doesn't identify users, unless the attackers manage to compromise the app in which case they can do that themselves. Whether there is a unique identifier has little or no relevance to whether an attack could happen. I think they might be saying here that the backend system doesn't send commands to the app, thus a compromised backend wouldn't allow code execution on the app, but the text doesn't say that specifically so it's just a guess.
I attempted to check the permissions using Exodus, an Android app privacy checker, but it can't scan it because it's restricted to Singapore.
They're not doing it correctly, but there is some basis for not focusing on the most expensive people during a layoff in the same way that a household budget would work. Consider your budget. If you had to save money, you might start by looking at the most expensive things, but those are likely rather important things since you've already focused on them most. It might be easier to cut small or medium expenses that are less important to you than it would be to find a cheaper place to live and deal with the downsides of moving to that location, especially if you have lots of smaller expenses.
In Google's case, there are only so many executives that could be fired, and that doesn't make the same kind of cut in expenses as thousands of lower-paid workers. Of course, those lower-paid workers are the ones who create the products that make revenue, but we're looking at this from a businessperson's perspective, not a logical person's. That's clear since, if we were looking at this from a point of logic, we'd see that if you have billions in profit, you are probably fine and might want to focus your attention on the long term, whatever investors might say.
I would keep coming back the next years, but I would no longer be trying to extract a bunch of cash. I'd take the money if offered, but I wouldn't be asking for any more. I'd now be doing the job as CEO to try to improve things, starting with Android hardware support. I'd be in it for the ability to improve the products, not the money. I think this means I'm even less likely to be hired as a CEO than you would be. My rallying cry of "I don't care that making people junk their devices quickly means more revenue, it's wasteful and makes us look incompetent" probably wouldn't help.
Anything is possible, but that's not a way we can make a lot of decisions. For example this part:
"Possibly, the "colleague" who spotted Xu in Hainan was one of those who had been given leave in preference."
Or possibly, the colleague who spotted him lived and worked in Hainan, which Xu did not, and was the colleague required to do the work Xu was supposed to do. Or perhaps the colleague in Hainan had traveled there for business purposes. Or both applied to take time off and both planned to go to Hainan, but the colleague had taken leave less recently and asked for it earlier. There are lots of reasons why that person could have been in Hainan. That can't be disproved any more than your possibility can, so it's hard to make an opinion based on what could have happened. However, what is not questioned is that Xu did apply for sick leave when not sick, which isn't generally allowed even if your boss is really annoying and denying leave requests.
Imagine that you're the coworker who has to work long hours because this guy is sick and work needs to be done urgently. Then you see him clearly not being sick, having dropped all his work onto you. How would you feel then? I can't guarantee that something like that happened, but I'm puzzled why you think coworkers should support someone else's lies, even when such a situation could be making things worse for that coworker. I don't tend to mess with my colleagues if they choose to do something like this, but nor would I lie on their behalf.
There is an alternative as well. What if the colleague mentioned Xu's presence without knowing it was disallowed, as in "I ran into Xu yesterday. I didn't know he had been sent to Hainan", and that tipped off the company? It doesn't have to be deliberate.
You could try, but if they go on that basis, they can then ask you to prove or at least state that you were not there. I'm not sure how Chinese judges would view the situation, but it would normally be fine to ask someone "Did you go to Hainan during that time or not", and being dishonest on that question would not help.
Oh sure, instead of making devices that boot Windows, and also anything else you might choose, go to Google who always puts out software that makes the hardware only work with a manufacturer-specific, update-restricted version of the operating system it shipped with. After seeing the problems with Android device support and the state of modern Chromebooks, you want a third Google OS?
It depends what you're doing. How much latency when typing leads to someone watching the screen failing to notice a typo? How much latency when moving a mouse causes the user to start estimating at final positions and possibly activating the wrong thing? Perhaps most importantly, how much latency can you have before you start hating this stupid box that just can't keep up? This would get markedly worse if you were dealing with something bandwidth-intensive as well, because now you're not just dealing with the network latency, which is often not a problem if the datacenter is close enough to you, but with other limiting factors that extend this.
"Yep. Talking to people usually is [pointless]. Especially when they're not listening. Talking with people is much more productive."
Since it tends to be pointless, I'm going to just review this little grammatical disagreement. Talking with someone, to me, is an activity that includes the whole conversation. It involves a loop of components: you talk to me and I listen to you, then I talk to you and you listen to me. Between those talking parts or simultaneously, we think about, understand, and create responses to what the other person said. I don't think "talk to" is opposed to "talk with", and would argue that you have to have the former in order to get the latter. I've been part of "conversations" where one person wants to talk and wants the other people not to talk, and although we're both there, it doesn't really work unless everyone is talking and listening.
In our case, I think it's the "me talking" part that isn't worth doing. You listen, but we don't seem to agree on any axioms which can be used to advance the conversation.
"Weirdest thing to me is, as a brilliant financial analyst once said, "Much sound and fury, signifying nothing". So why there's been so much media attention around M&A activity for a cash-bleeding chat app."
Because it's a chat app that's used by hundreds of millions of people frequently. It may seem weird to people like me and possibly you who have never had accounts there, but some people really like it. It is also being acquired by a famous person who makes it clear through pathological public statements that he has no clue what he's talking about and would like to make things worse, which he has now done. Of course people paid attention to it. Had one of those things been different: Musk buys an app that only a few people use or Twitter is to be bought by QWER Communication Investments Holdings Group, a really uninteresting company that wasn't planning to change much user-facing details, the attention would have been much smaller.
"And not the censorship issues that were going on under previous ownership."
Oh, that's where we were going. Talking to you feels kind of pointless. So you think that Twitter is worth a lot of attention, but only when it serves your political views (even if you have to make things up to support them), but when it might point the other way, you think everyone should shut up?
It's the same as all the people who sell useless things under vague suggestions that it will make you healthier and eliminate any disease or discomfort you might have. They have to put in the denials because otherwise they will face fraud charges, but it won't stop them from making claims that it will be very helpful and you need to buy it right now or you will die. They end up making money on usually inert, though sometimes toxic stuff. Why not try a variant of the scam where you have a program sound authoritative as it suggests such things to you? The main reason is because you don't have the morals of a parasite, but not everybody is in that group.
"Even today I don't think end to end encrypted phone(voice) calls are yet really a thing."
They exist on some VOIP protocols, but not using 4G/5G voice services. I can virtually guarantee they never will; governments have been wiretapping for so long that they view that to be their unrestricted right. Only because digital communication emerged so quickly was encryption permitted in it, because governments hadn't had the chance to establish the precedent that they own all of it. Should 6G try to introduce E2E voice services, I think the uproar from law enforcement would be deafening.
If I find out that something is quite insecure such that a student can get privileges they shouldn't have, I'm going to be tempted to tell someone about it. That situation may make it easier to fix things as in this situation, but it can also be abused. The only reason I wouldn't tell someone is if I thought I'd be unfairly punished for finding it out, which unfortunately is somewhat common.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
