I would find it extremely surprising, though more extremely surprising for some areas of their workforce than for others. However, the 1 woman figure is among new black employees only(of which there were only 7); not new employees workforce wide, for which TFA doesn't give a number; but provides some percentages indicating a modest increase in proportion of female workforce.
My suspicion is that facebook is doing some "good cultural fit" selection; but 1 black woman, of 7 black hires, is much more plausible than 1 woman, of 1,231 hires.
'Genocide'? I am more than ready to roll my eyes at assorted doomed feel-good initiatives; but until I can bask in the warm glow of the honkie ovens, this 'genocide' sounds like puffery.
I think the question is not 'is there a problem?' but 'is it Facebook's problem, or is something else picking them off earlier in the production chain such that Facebook's hiring is simply an accurate representation of the candidates it has to work with?'
Facebook is large enough that it has probably outgrown the most blatant 'Our hiring process is that you were the CEO's frat bro at Stanford, bro.' school of startup HR; but the question remains whether they've gone slightly more subtle, or whether they are even-handedly hiring from a field that, for reasons not under their control, has basically nothing to choose from if you are looking for a 'diversity' hire.
Either way there arguably exists a problem; but assuming that it's all facebook's fault is way easier than addressing the fact that, with rare exceptions, there's a pretty yawning gulf between a good American education and a lousy one.
If your resistors are large enough to have intelligible markings(and you don't have an excuse involving heroically sized bleed resistors for some excitingly dangerous looking apparatus), your ship probably sailed a decade ago, maybe 15 years.
Apparently, Facebook outsources a lot of its moderation tasks, via a Mechanical Turk like system, to whatever grim hellhole is cheapest; but still has internet access.
I suspect that they could...impressively boost...their diversity numbers if they were just able to find a way of counting those as 'employees' without actually paying them more. The effect would probably be even stronger than any benefit Apple gets from including their retail sales/support minions in the numbers.
Saving the corals might actually be the easy part: It wouldn't be a fun job, unless you are a real saltwater aquarium masochist; but taking 'cuttings' and propagating them in captivity is reasonably well understood, at least for the ones that have historically merited the attention. Even if you can't modify them to make them more durable, there is lots of ocean currently too cold for a given coral ecosystem that, if warmed, will become a viable location for transplants from the areas that are becoming too warm(the current cold-water reefs, which do exist; but don't get the attention of the tropical ones, may be pretty screwed, Rost reef, in the frigid waters off Norway, will be pining for the fjords).
However, much of the charm of coral reefs is the amount of ecosystem that they support. All sorts of weird stuff, the stuff that eats it, and so on to the top of the food chain. Transporting that, or convincing it to swim in the right direction, will be a much greater challenge. Plus, unlike the fecund swarms of tiny organisms, where 'genetic diversity' fits in a medium fish tank, and could probably re-mutate from a monoclonal strain in a matter of decades; larger organisms lose genetic diversity much more easily as individuals die, and don't recover nearly as easily. Some of the larger fish, say, will be will be a pretty inbred and sorry lot(exquisitely vulnerable to disease, as monocultures always are), if most of them die and a new population is seeded from a few transplants.
If there were some sort of payoff in it, we could probably have 'coral farms' up and running in short order; but they'd have roughly the same resemblance to natural reefs that tree farms producing papermill feedstock do to mature forests, or alfalfa fields do to prairies.
I'd be curious to know how well they deal with pH changes. We already know, from observing coral bleaching during short term warm periods, that they are touchy and somewhat feeble; but the survivors are capable of recolonizing, or building atop depending on the details, the skeletons of their fallen.
If those structures come under attack, or if wringing calcium ions out of the water becomes more difficult and energy intensive, they may have larger problems. As might, unfortunately, a surprisingly large number of other ecologically important aquatic organisms. That could really be a downer.
Deeper seas means exciting new shallow-ocean areas replacing such formerly dessicated locations as 'Florida' and 'The Netherlands, except that they actually believe in civil engineering over there, so maybe not'. This presents its own problems, of course; but the geometry of the earth's land area simply doesn't allow you to deepen-out the existing shallow areas without opening up new shallow areas; unless you have wrath-of-an-old-testament-god-in-a-genocidal-mood amounts of water available.
It's also an oddball small(by the standards of what's inside) form factor case. That likely takes the upper end of what they do make out of consideration on thermal grounds. The i7-4790K is a 90watt part, and AMD's thermally equivalent options compare even less favorably.
On-access scans are probably making everyone's disk access a joy even if no scheduled scans are running at the moment. Unfortunately, those can't be deferred(unless you are OK with receiving the results of any disk access attempts the next morning); and are probably the most valuable scans, since they actually have a shot at intercepting something before the user runs or loads it.
There may be some incremental improvements that the security people are stonewalling on; but certainly nothing that is going to make using an HDD fun again, so they are likely loath to provide any false hope that will make deferring SSD upgrades even easier to justify.
Perhaps Lenovo, even if they don't actually build this particular widget, should think very carefully about the fact that "Hey, what if we released a product that was just like what Thinkpads were before we started fucking with them?" is the most exciting idea they've had in a long time.
That may not be fun feedback; but it's important to know your strengths; and your limits.
So Warner Brothers either has management that hasn't learned that the only thing more expensive than doing the job correctly is totally fucking it up; or some raving lunatic who thinks that he has finally cracked the miracle of 100% efficient software development?
That's quite a brain trust. You'd think that they'd be either more bankrupt or smarter by now.
I'm just wondering how the game is so badly broken for people attempting to run it on an x86 with AMD drivers and Microsoft APIs, when there apparently exists an xbox version that 'works' by the standards of shrinkwrap software.
I do realize that the xbox does not run Windows(in any meaningful sense, they probably borrowed from NT rather than anything else when they needed OS bits; but it's a pretty specialized selection); But there are substantial similarities in both hardware and software between the two; and it's not as though both first and 3rd party engines, middleware, etc. weren't largely able to paper over much, much, weirder differences last generation.
Does anyone have some kind of coherent explanation, aside from Norton Antivirus, as to how you would (on AAA budget, handling a popular franchise that is also the video game presence of a very popular character) manage to release a game on both XBone and PS4; but have it suffer crippling performance issues on the PC, reported by both AMD and Nvidia users?
I realize that PCs are quirky beasts; but they are quirky beasts architecturally very similar to(typically more powerful than, for any vaguely serious gaming system) both contemporary consoles, and even some software/dev overlap with the Xbox; and somehow other people have managed to get a game to release and have it either be horribly broken everywhere, mostly working everywhere, or at least horribly broken for 'GCN 1.0 GPUs with drivers before Catalyst 10.x' or some other well defined group of deviants.
Wouldn't it be obnoxious if, rather than being 'unhealthy', that treasure-trove of historically scarce calories is simply a signal that whatever strategy we are using must be pretty much optimal, so wasteful expenditures on cognition can now be reallocated to building energy reserves. Thinking is, after all, the tool not the goal; because there isn't a goal.
And, for the few bastard applications that break on remotely modern JREs, it's fun with 'static installations' and breaking out the Deployment Rule Set.
Recitation of the thricefold forbidden execrations while bathing the system being updated in the blood of a freshly slaughtered goat is optional; but recommended.
There is also some hope that we'll be able to come up with a synthetic that is easier to store. In a proper hospital, or near one, that's a problem we've solved more or less well enough(given that demand is fairly constant and not too 'peaky', longer stockpile times would be nice; but inventory turns over fairly quickly); but if somebody can come up with a mylar pouch filled with a liquid perfluorocarbon and some specially crafted macromolecules that is an acceptable substitute for a modest percentage of your real blood, has no blood type whatsoever, and keeps as long as an MRE, there will be some happy campers further out in the sticks.
There is actually a fun(if now somewhat dated looking, just check out all those giant flip phones) British TV series that revolves pretty closely around synthetic blood. Called "Ultraviolet"(not to be confused with the terrible movie by the same name); didn't run terribly long, unfortunately; but worth a watch if you can find it around.
It definitely has the best answer to "How would a SWAT team be equipped if they were dealing with vampires?" that I've yet seen. A life lesson.
The only fully-automatic updates happen when a device previously unknown to the OS gets plugged in. Windows will check the local driver store for a driver and, unless the 'Device Installation Settings' option is toggled off, will then try Windows Update if nothing is available locally.
Once the hardware is considered 'installed', future updates will show up in 'optional'. That's what's so weird: if Samsung's USB3 controller is utterly fucked up, or whatever the sorry misadventure may be, so long as they preload whatever ghastly pile of shims and bodges covers up the problem, the OS will never take further action. Unless they are also doing something utterly dodgy like breaking their driver signatures.
It's doubly depressing because Samsung is either the producer of the hardware, in which case they can either provide MS with the correct driver, or use device ID data that won't trigger loading of default drivers; or they are just slapping somebody else' chips on the board, in which case they should have picked a more competent supplier; if you are just system-integrating that's pretty much your job. Pitiful, either way.
It's certainly the case that Team Content is already pretending that they have been so judged; but for the purposes of the copyright act you cite above, the DMCA, and similar laws where 'technological protection measure' is emphasized; it doesn't seem at all clear that 'geoblocking' qualifies.
At least up until now, 'technological protection measure' that protects access to a copyright work means some sort of DRM system. If you purchase something on ITMS, or stream a Netflix video or the like, using a VPN to be treated like a US customer, all DRM remains in place, operating as specified, no circumvention tools are in use at the DRM-system level; only at the market access level(and if that's a 'circumvention tool', then so are some plane tickets to a different country).
Sure, people in distant-monopolistan gaining access to a larger market is bad for whoever purchased 'exclusive' rights to exploit them; but the mere unhappiness of a distributor doesn't imply any copyright violation is occurring. You purchased the material from a distributor in its market area, imported it to New Zealand, and are now watching it at home. More convenient over the internet; but not architecturally different from picking up a book while waiting at Heathrow and carrying it back with you. Maybe the Customs guys want you to pay tax on the value of your imported netflix stream; but that's wholly unrelated to copyright law.
If you enjoy that hypocrisy, you'll love the fact that, not only is 'arbitrage' only OK when corporations do it(filthy consumer peons are 'grey market' at best, illegal at worst); but New Zealand is, ironically enough, simultaneously treated as the ass end of nowhere when it comes to offering media for sale and putting up absurdly generous subsidies to media producers.
It's especially insane because, while grabbing drivers from Windows Update is the default behavior, you can turn that off without disabling Windows Update.
"System Properties" -> "Hardware" -> "Device Installation Settings". There's not even any registry grovelling or other esoteric nonsense involved.
Things just get worse because, even if enabled, the Windows Update provided drivers will only be applied if no drivers are available locally(if drivers are available; but Windows Update has newer ones, they'll be listed as optional updates; but only installed with manual user intervention). So all Samsung has to do is add their drivers to the OS driver store (pnputil -a, not very hard) and the OS will apply them before even heading out to check for new ones, unless there is something egregiously wrong with them(if memory serves, unsigned drivers are treated as lower ranked than signed drivers when determining 'best driver available', and drivers that don't list the PCI/USB PID/VID, but have been forcibly applied, may also rank lower than drivers that do specify the matching PID/VID).
So, in summary and conclusion, this whole thing is an unbelievable clusterfuck and it isn't even clear why Samsung would think it necessary in order to ensure the drivers that they want installed get installed; much less how they could possibly think that the security consequences were worth it. Only its finite complexity saves this situation from fractal stupidity.
Don't forget the bits where you verify that the 'backups' actually restore into something useful; such verification ideally including integrity checks of every file; but at the very least a sanity check of the backup.
More than a few people have learned the hard way that screwing up the backup job such that it omits large portions of the important data makes it run nice and fast, and consume relatively few tapes; but substantially reduces the value of those tapes.
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I would find it extremely surprising, though more extremely surprising for some areas of their workforce than for others. However, the 1 woman figure is among new black employees only(of which there were only 7); not new employees workforce wide, for which TFA doesn't give a number; but provides some percentages indicating a modest increase in proportion of female workforce.
My suspicion is that facebook is doing some "good cultural fit" selection; but 1 black woman, of 7 black hires, is much more plausible than 1 woman, of 1,231 hires.
'Genocide'? I am more than ready to roll my eyes at assorted doomed feel-good initiatives; but until I can bask in the warm glow of the honkie ovens, this 'genocide' sounds like puffery.
I think the question is not 'is there a problem?' but 'is it Facebook's problem, or is something else picking them off earlier in the production chain such that Facebook's hiring is simply an accurate representation of the candidates it has to work with?'
Facebook is large enough that it has probably outgrown the most blatant 'Our hiring process is that you were the CEO's frat bro at Stanford, bro.' school of startup HR; but the question remains whether they've gone slightly more subtle, or whether they are even-handedly hiring from a field that, for reasons not under their control, has basically nothing to choose from if you are looking for a 'diversity' hire.
Either way there arguably exists a problem; but assuming that it's all facebook's fault is way easier than addressing the fact that, with rare exceptions, there's a pretty yawning gulf between a good American education and a lousy one.
If your resistors are large enough to have intelligible markings(and you don't have an excuse involving heroically sized bleed resistors for some excitingly dangerous looking apparatus), your ship probably sailed a decade ago, maybe 15 years.
Multiplication is timeless, at least.
Apparently, Facebook outsources a lot of its moderation tasks, via a Mechanical Turk like system, to whatever grim hellhole is cheapest; but still has internet access.
I suspect that they could...impressively boost...their diversity numbers if they were just able to find a way of counting those as 'employees' without actually paying them more. The effect would probably be even stronger than any benefit Apple gets from including their retail sales/support minions in the numbers.
Saving the corals might actually be the easy part: It wouldn't be a fun job, unless you are a real saltwater aquarium masochist; but taking 'cuttings' and propagating them in captivity is reasonably well understood, at least for the ones that have historically merited the attention. Even if you can't modify them to make them more durable, there is lots of ocean currently too cold for a given coral ecosystem that, if warmed, will become a viable location for transplants from the areas that are becoming too warm(the current cold-water reefs, which do exist; but don't get the attention of the tropical ones, may be pretty screwed, Rost reef, in the frigid waters off Norway, will be pining for the fjords).
However, much of the charm of coral reefs is the amount of ecosystem that they support. All sorts of weird stuff, the stuff that eats it, and so on to the top of the food chain. Transporting that, or convincing it to swim in the right direction, will be a much greater challenge. Plus, unlike the fecund swarms of tiny organisms, where 'genetic diversity' fits in a medium fish tank, and could probably re-mutate from a monoclonal strain in a matter of decades; larger organisms lose genetic diversity much more easily as individuals die, and don't recover nearly as easily. Some of the larger fish, say, will be will be a pretty inbred and sorry lot(exquisitely vulnerable to disease, as monocultures always are), if most of them die and a new population is seeded from a few transplants.
If there were some sort of payoff in it, we could probably have 'coral farms' up and running in short order; but they'd have roughly the same resemblance to natural reefs that tree farms producing papermill feedstock do to mature forests, or alfalfa fields do to prairies.
I'd be curious to know how well they deal with pH changes. We already know, from observing coral bleaching during short term warm periods, that they are touchy and somewhat feeble; but the survivors are capable of recolonizing, or building atop depending on the details, the skeletons of their fallen.
If those structures come under attack, or if wringing calcium ions out of the water becomes more difficult and energy intensive, they may have larger problems. As might, unfortunately, a surprisingly large number of other ecologically important aquatic organisms. That could really be a downer.
Deeper seas means exciting new shallow-ocean areas replacing such formerly dessicated locations as 'Florida' and 'The Netherlands, except that they actually believe in civil engineering over there, so maybe not'. This presents its own problems, of course; but the geometry of the earth's land area simply doesn't allow you to deepen-out the existing shallow areas without opening up new shallow areas; unless you have wrath-of-an-old-testament-god-in-a-genocidal-mood amounts of water available.
You know how it is in the handset market, people just stop caring and start phoning it in after a while.
It's also an oddball small(by the standards of what's inside) form factor case. That likely takes the upper end of what they do make out of consideration on thermal grounds. The i7-4790K is a 90watt part, and AMD's thermally equivalent options compare even less favorably.
On-access scans are probably making everyone's disk access a joy even if no scheduled scans are running at the moment. Unfortunately, those can't be deferred(unless you are OK with receiving the results of any disk access attempts the next morning); and are probably the most valuable scans, since they actually have a shot at intercepting something before the user runs or loads it.
There may be some incremental improvements that the security people are stonewalling on; but certainly nothing that is going to make using an HDD fun again, so they are likely loath to provide any false hope that will make deferring SSD upgrades even easier to justify.
Perhaps Lenovo, even if they don't actually build this particular widget, should think very carefully about the fact that "Hey, what if we released a product that was just like what Thinkpads were before we started fucking with them?" is the most exciting idea they've had in a long time.
That may not be fun feedback; but it's important to know your strengths; and your limits.
So Warner Brothers either has management that hasn't learned that the only thing more expensive than doing the job correctly is totally fucking it up; or some raving lunatic who thinks that he has finally cracked the miracle of 100% efficient software development?
That's quite a brain trust. You'd think that they'd be either more bankrupt or smarter by now.
I'm just wondering how the game is so badly broken for people attempting to run it on an x86 with AMD drivers and Microsoft APIs, when there apparently exists an xbox version that 'works' by the standards of shrinkwrap software.
I do realize that the xbox does not run Windows(in any meaningful sense, they probably borrowed from NT rather than anything else when they needed OS bits; but it's a pretty specialized selection); But there are substantial similarities in both hardware and software between the two; and it's not as though both first and 3rd party engines, middleware, etc. weren't largely able to paper over much, much, weirder differences last generation.
Does anyone have some kind of coherent explanation, aside from Norton Antivirus, as to how you would (on AAA budget, handling a popular franchise that is also the video game presence of a very popular character) manage to release a game on both XBone and PS4; but have it suffer crippling performance issues on the PC, reported by both AMD and Nvidia users?
I realize that PCs are quirky beasts; but they are quirky beasts architecturally very similar to(typically more powerful than, for any vaguely serious gaming system) both contemporary consoles, and even some software/dev overlap with the Xbox; and somehow other people have managed to get a game to release and have it either be horribly broken everywhere, mostly working everywhere, or at least horribly broken for 'GCN 1.0 GPUs with drivers before Catalyst 10.x' or some other well defined group of deviants.
How does this happen?
Wouldn't it be obnoxious if, rather than being 'unhealthy', that treasure-trove of historically scarce calories is simply a signal that whatever strategy we are using must be pretty much optimal, so wasteful expenditures on cognition can now be reallocated to building energy reserves. Thinking is, after all, the tool not the goal; because there isn't a goal.
Only on a very short lease, and only because the alternatives are even worse.
The fact that you have to slog through the Java Platform, Standard Edition: MSI Enterprise JRE Installer Guide for Windows to neuter the worst of its behavior is pretty damned annoying, however. Just a few last legacy uses and I can finally pull the plug...
And, for the few bastard applications that break on remotely modern JREs, it's fun with 'static installations' and breaking out the Deployment Rule Set.
Recitation of the thricefold forbidden execrations while bathing the system being updated in the blood of a freshly slaughtered goat is optional; but recommended.
There is also some hope that we'll be able to come up with a synthetic that is easier to store. In a proper hospital, or near one, that's a problem we've solved more or less well enough(given that demand is fairly constant and not too 'peaky', longer stockpile times would be nice; but inventory turns over fairly quickly); but if somebody can come up with a mylar pouch filled with a liquid perfluorocarbon and some specially crafted macromolecules that is an acceptable substitute for a modest percentage of your real blood, has no blood type whatsoever, and keeps as long as an MRE, there will be some happy campers further out in the sticks.
There is actually a fun(if now somewhat dated looking, just check out all those giant flip phones) British TV series that revolves pretty closely around synthetic blood. Called "Ultraviolet"(not to be confused with the terrible movie by the same name); didn't run terribly long, unfortunately; but worth a watch if you can find it around.
It definitely has the best answer to "How would a SWAT team be equipped if they were dealing with vampires?" that I've yet seen. A life lesson.
The only fully-automatic updates happen when a device previously unknown to the OS gets plugged in. Windows will check the local driver store for a driver and, unless the 'Device Installation Settings' option is toggled off, will then try Windows Update if nothing is available locally.
Once the hardware is considered 'installed', future updates will show up in 'optional'. That's what's so weird: if Samsung's USB3 controller is utterly fucked up, or whatever the sorry misadventure may be, so long as they preload whatever ghastly pile of shims and bodges covers up the problem, the OS will never take further action. Unless they are also doing something utterly dodgy like breaking their driver signatures.
It's doubly depressing because Samsung is either the producer of the hardware, in which case they can either provide MS with the correct driver, or use device ID data that won't trigger loading of default drivers; or they are just slapping somebody else' chips on the board, in which case they should have picked a more competent supplier; if you are just system-integrating that's pretty much your job. Pitiful, either way.
It's certainly the case that Team Content is already pretending that they have been so judged; but for the purposes of the copyright act you cite above, the DMCA, and similar laws where 'technological protection measure' is emphasized; it doesn't seem at all clear that 'geoblocking' qualifies.
At least up until now, 'technological protection measure' that protects access to a copyright work means some sort of DRM system. If you purchase something on ITMS, or stream a Netflix video or the like, using a VPN to be treated like a US customer, all DRM remains in place, operating as specified, no circumvention tools are in use at the DRM-system level; only at the market access level(and if that's a 'circumvention tool', then so are some plane tickets to a different country).
Sure, people in distant-monopolistan gaining access to a larger market is bad for whoever purchased 'exclusive' rights to exploit them; but the mere unhappiness of a distributor doesn't imply any copyright violation is occurring. You purchased the material from a distributor in its market area, imported it to New Zealand, and are now watching it at home. More convenient over the internet; but not architecturally different from picking up a book while waiting at Heathrow and carrying it back with you. Maybe the Customs guys want you to pay tax on the value of your imported netflix stream; but that's wholly unrelated to copyright law.
If you enjoy that hypocrisy, you'll love the fact that, not only is 'arbitrage' only OK when corporations do it(filthy consumer peons are 'grey market' at best, illegal at worst); but New Zealand is, ironically enough, simultaneously treated as the ass end of nowhere when it comes to offering media for sale and putting up absurdly generous subsidies to media producers.
It's especially insane because, while grabbing drivers from Windows Update is the default behavior, you can turn that off without disabling Windows Update.
"System Properties" -> "Hardware" -> "Device Installation Settings". There's not even any registry grovelling or other esoteric nonsense involved.
Things just get worse because, even if enabled, the Windows Update provided drivers will only be applied if no drivers are available locally(if drivers are available; but Windows Update has newer ones, they'll be listed as optional updates; but only installed with manual user intervention). So all Samsung has to do is add their drivers to the OS driver store (pnputil -a, not very hard) and the OS will apply them before even heading out to check for new ones, unless there is something egregiously wrong with them(if memory serves, unsigned drivers are treated as lower ranked than signed drivers when determining 'best driver available', and drivers that don't list the PCI/USB PID/VID, but have been forcibly applied, may also rank lower than drivers that do specify the matching PID/VID).
So, in summary and conclusion, this whole thing is an unbelievable clusterfuck and it isn't even clear why Samsung would think it necessary in order to ensure the drivers that they want installed get installed; much less how they could possibly think that the security consequences were worth it. Only its finite complexity saves this situation from fractal stupidity.
How does Adobe distinguish between 'normal' and 'emergency' when it comes to attacks facilitated by the Adobe Malware Runtime?
Don't forget the bits where you verify that the 'backups' actually restore into something useful; such verification ideally including integrity checks of every file; but at the very least a sanity check of the backup.
More than a few people have learned the hard way that screwing up the backup job such that it omits large portions of the important data makes it run nice and fast, and consume relatively few tapes; but substantially reduces the value of those tapes.