> Why would they bother making it user upgradable if they were going to lock it down like that?
The cynic in me would suggest they'd do that to teach their customers an expensive lesson. Like their Genius Bar currently does with small repairs they no longer bother diagnosing and just lie about the cause and recommend a new unit instead.
Do you want to list some game you want to play on Linux that don't, or just talk in sweeping generalizations? Because a few of my "regular" games play quite nicely under Linux with the Linux Steam client.
Rocket League Borderlands 2 and TPS XCOM 2 Kerbal Space Program
They used to do that, but years ago Dell called their bluff and Intel didn't do squat, then HP joined them in building systems with AMD chips. Go look at Dell and HP's product pages today and you'll see a large number of AMD based offerings.
And besides, nowadays Intel needs to keep those two vendors - who together represent 45% of all shipped PCs - happy with Intel or that's a major gift to AMD right when Intel is having yield problems. Grandma buys a laptop for home use, John buys a laptop for college, Steve buys a PC for work. None of them really give a crap if its an i3/i5/i7 or a Ryzen on the motherboard, as long as the price is right and the machine works as fast as they expect it to. And a significant segment of the "enthusiast" market is getting positively giddy with the price/performance of the AMD parts over Intel. Ryzen and Threadripper were great surprises when the real world numbers and prices were seen, Ryzen 2 is looking even better. Now is not the time for Intel to badly play poker with its customers.
Maybe for a monopoly, but AMD can already service that market and if Intel raises prices more because their pricing guy only took econ 101, they'll see AMD snap up that market share for a lot longer than the shortage persists. That's econ 202, don't go for a short term gain that will cause you long term pain.
Did you actually read the article you posted? It kind of undermines your own argument. Some salient points, emphasis mine ** :
But critics would argue that’s not enough, pointing to his delays implementing congressional sanctions and frequent praise of Putin’s leadership, as well as the reluctance to act on Moscow’s cyber aggression. They’ve also cited U.S. intelligence conclusions that the Kremlin meddled in the U.S. election in favor of Trump.
In August 2017, Trump signed into law the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, or CAATSA, despite calling it “seriously flawed.” **He then bypassed a congressionally mandated deadline in January to act on the bill** and impose new sanctions on Russia for the election allegations.
Also in March, following the poisoning of former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the U.K., the Trump administration expelled 60 Russian diplomats from the U.S., **although reports indicated he was not happy with the move.**
In early July, Trump seemed to challenge the long-held U.S. policy of refusing to recognize Moscow’s Crimea annexation, saying only in response to questions on the issue: “We’ll see.” He also reportedly argued to officials at June’s G-7 summit that Crimea should belong to Russia because “everyone there speaks Russian.”
Washington's UN ambassador Nikki Haley promptly promised further sanctions against Russia for its refusal to condemn the chemical attack — only to be left hanging when Trump walked back his threat and no new sanctions were imposed.
He talks a big game sometimes but hasn't really done much, and in a few cases like the CAATSA act, signed it and then refused to implement it. Not so tough.
> You realize that the guys who actually leave at 5 PM every day are usually the first ones to get laid off, right? If the boss man doesn't see you slaving away in your cube while he's walking out, it means that you're likely expendable in his mind.
When I was younger I used to think that as well. But reality and watching many companies I've worked at go through rounds of layoffs just doesn't bear that out. Some companies will lay the 5pm guys/girls off first, but those companies are actually doing those people a favor as they're really shitty companies that are badly managed. Most places will lay people off based on their measurable output or lack thereof - or based on other negative factors. A lot of those 5pm-ers are actually quite productive.
Years ago I'd do the 60 hour weeks but it really did get you little or nothing, except another 20 hours a week of your life spent doing things that don't really matter to your life's trajectory in the long run. We worked the 60 hour weeks and it was expected. It was taken for granted. Nobody got raises based on that extra work. Nobody got bonuses. If anything most of the places threw a couple of extra vacation days at the end of the project at you and expected you to be grateful for them.
So I said "fuck it" and stopped doing 60 hour weeks. I'll work a couple hours here and there extra, and maybe in extraordinary circumstances work a Saturday or something, but for the most part I work 40 to 44 hours a week now, tops. And you know what? The sky hasn't fallen, I haven't negatively suffered because of putting my foot down, but I do get home by 6 to have a nice dinner and a relaxing evening on weeknights, and on weekends I actually go out and do things that are fun.
> but when the job market goes to shit you really need to more conscious as to how your work ethic looks to other people.
Again, disgree. In my experience that work ethic you're talking about there is actually signaling to your bosses that you have zero spine and will take any and all unreasonable work piled on you because you won't put your foot down. And when you inevitably burn out, they'll toss you aside and get another invertebrate to replace you if they can.
While I agree with the idea, the chances of that actually happening any time soon are very slim. The public sees a need to maintain cars on a road. They don't see a need to maintain routers for everyone's safety. And companies are in a desperate race to get new shiny things in consumers' hands and those things are more connected and also have new interesting gaping holes in their security. And nobody cares. Legislation has to be written to fix this. And it won't be until something very shitty happens.
> you run a device, itâ(TM)s your job to keep it up to spec, no different than a car passing annual inspection.
The problem with that line of thinking is that many devices are seen as appliances in the minds of many. This MikroTik one is a bit more of a commerical router, but similar vulnerabilities have been discovered in many off the shelf routers grandmas buy at Best Buy. It's simply not reasonable to expect your average Joe or Jane to keep the router firmware up to date when it was probably a Herculean struggle for them to figure out which port you plug which Ethernet cable into on initial setup. Bricking them just becomes an exercise in frustration in warranty, and a tax on those people if it's out of the warranty period - and in it as well now that I think about it. What's Grandma gonna do, send it back to Linksys and wait 6 weeks all the while paying for an internet connection she's not able to use ?
More regulation of these companies' products and massive fines are the only thing that will make them take notice. Any off the shelf router granny buys at a box store should be set up for remote updates to be pushed from a trusted signed source, and those updates should be proactive.
> Also remember, no one ever earns enough to keep their employer afloat. So employed or not, they aren't a sustainable consumer of the product they make.
Boy howdy, you're right. This whole civilization thing is an illusion. I hope I wake up in my cave from this fever dream soon and start hunting bison again...
Although that fella I dreamed up named Henry Ford seemed to think otherwise on the whole "pay your employees well and it helps keep your company afloat" bit. But what did he know eh?
The counterpoint is that IMO Google is basically giving away the Chromecasts to keep peoples' eyeballs on their content through Youtube and other services. I mean how profitable can it possibly be to sell one for $35, after build, packaging, transport, and letting retail take a piece? Like maybe $5? Instead of making $5 twice, why not delay a few months and then release the ChromeCast Pro Two - Revenge of the AVI codec and charge $50 for it? That way instead of 2 x $5, you make 1 x $20 !
So I really don't think selling these things twice is a motivator here.
> Right now, they enhance their own research by not giving out too many details,
Sure, but how hard would it be for them to put out a piece of proof like saying "we found this chip (pictured at right) on several motherboards of the following model that appear in Supermicro chassis x, y, z and bb." And then anyone who owns one of those can just *go look for themselves* to see if the chip is there too.
> how they could siphon off gigabytes of data and ship it to China, presumably over network connections and through firewalls, That's the interesting thing to me as well. If your network and firewalls are properly designed, it shouldn't matter if your servers have a rogue little chip wanting to call home - your network should shitcan any attempt regardless.
> I'm still wondering where the 3rd party games are
You mean these? Here's just the list for the next couple of months of releases (with the 1st party games removed by me): https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-10-04-nintendo-switch-games-list-2018-release-dates
October 2018: Mega Man 11 (Capcom, October 2nd) Child of Light (Ubisoft, October 11th) Darkest Dungeon: The Color of Madness DLC (Red Hook Studios, October 11th) The Missing (Swery + White Owls, October 11th) The Swindle (Size Five Games, October 11th) Game Dev Story (Kairosoft, October 11th) Dungeon Village (Kairosoft, October 11th) Hot Springs Story (Kairosoft, October 11th) Disgaea 1 Complete (NIS America, October 12th) The World Ends With You -Final Remix- (Square Enix, October 12th) Starlink: Battle for Atlas (Ubisoft, October 16th) Valkyria Chronicles (Sega, October 16th) The Room (Team17, October 18th) Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption (Darkstar, October 18th) Dark Souls Remastered (Namco Bandai, October 19th) LEGO DC Super Villains (TT Games, October 19th) Windjammers (Dotemu, October 23rd) Just Dance 2019 (Ubisoft, October 26th)
November 2018: LEGO Harry Potter Collection (Warner, November 2nd) Diablo 3: Eternal Collection (Blizzard Entertainment, November 2nd) Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum Session! (Bandai Namco, November 2nd) Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom (FDG Entertainment, November 6th) World of Final Fantasy Maxima (Square Enix, November 6th) Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Ubisoft, November 8th) Pokémon Let's Go! Pikachu and Eevee (Nintendo, November 16th) SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (NIS America, November 16th) Civilization VI (2K, November 16th) Warframe (Digital Extremes, November 20th) Football Manager 2018 Touch (Sports Interactive, 'November') This War of Mine (11bit studios, 'November') Moonlighter (Digital Sun, 'November')
December 2018: Carcassonne (Asmodee Digital, 'December') Everspace (Rockfish Games, 'December')
'Winter' 2018: Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon Everybuddy! (Square Enix) Grandia I and II HD Remaster (GungHo Online Entertainment America) Katamari Demacy Reroll (Namco Bandai) Pitfall Planet (Bonfire Studios) R-Type Dimensions (Tonzai Games) Shadowgate (Abstraction Games) Team Sonic Racing (Sega)
If you want the complete list including unreleased titles, go here and sort as you like:
I'm not sure how Amazon does their bonuses, but for many salaried positions I've been at, a bonus is a tantalizing carrot that appears much larger than when it's finally in your hands - if it gets there at all. The company can have a "bad quarter" or "bad year" and suspend them, they can allocate a certain amount per group and the the manager divvies it up according to their whims instead of using metrics, etc.
At this point in my career any time a manager talks about a bonus, I'll believe it exists when I see it land in my bank account, not before. So others in the company below me pay-wise getting a raise and eliminating some fairy tale bonus that probably wouldn't materialize to cover that? Sounds fine to me.
> I found it most interesting that while the levels of lead are higher than EPA regulations allow, they're lower than what everyone in the US was exposed to before 1995 from leaded gasoline.
You know, we used to let people put radium on watch faces without protective gear, re-pointing the tip of the brush by smoothing it with their mouths. We also used to cover the insides of buildings with asbestos. All of that was 100% legal under the laws of the time.
Just because it was like that before and was legal doesn't mean it was SAFE.
> These anti fraud systems often result in false positives which are extremely painful for the legitimate users.
And sometimes they are just useless anyway. I was on a business trip to Europe for 2 weeks. I got called on my cellphone by one of my credit card companies whose card I had been using on the trip in Switzerland... literally while I was using that card to gas up the rental car on the way to the airport to fly back home.
That's right, after **13 days** of activity on that card in Europe, an ocean away from where I live normally they decided it was time to call to see if I knew anything about those purchases.
And we're gonna start believing posters when they're not Anonymous Cowards....Or at least taking their posts with a grain of salt instead of a bag. Seriously, it takes 5 minutes to sign up. If you can't be arsed to do that, or have a vested interest in staying 100% anonymous, chances are anything you post is garbage meant to sway opinion instead of real info.
> Sounds to me like IBM figured out that younger workers can do the job they used to delegate to older and better paid workers
That's the open question though. CAN the younger workers really do the same job? If a team with 20 years of experience can solve a problem in an hour or two, but a bunch of younger workers take all day or into the next day, I'd say they can't do the same job.
It's also worth noting that the utter shit show that is the Phoenix Payroll system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system) is an IBM project. This isn't the first majorly public fuckup IBM's been involved with in Canada in the last few years. I'm thinking their getting rid of their experienced workforce is playing a large part in that. Short term gain, long term company destruction, similar to HP when Carly took the knife to all their institutional experience. But at least the quarterly numbers look good here and there on the way down, right?
The US (and the west) has spent decades integrating cheap Chinese goods into its economy. Trying to unwind that all at once is just a bad idea, even if it's necessary.
Most of the criticism is being leveled at HOW it is being done, not that it needs doing. How it is being done is like you deciding you don't want to rely on China's dinghy that you're sitting in but instead of taking the oars and moving the dinghy to shore in a controlled fashion before getting out of it, you just take a chainsaw and cut it in half when you're 2 miles offshore.
I can't, really. It's $5 for a Pi Zero with tons of support for the platform and a million people doing stuff with that exact size build to draw on for info/experience/inspiration. Someone comes out with the $3.50 SalmonBerry Cake Zero that nobody's seen before with some kitbashed board config, are you really going to try and save $1.50 going with the weirdo board? If it causes you 20 minutes of trouble, then you've already lost compared to just going with the Pi Zero.
I have dealings with IBM on equipment from time to time. Back in the last 90s, it would be experienced people in their mid 30s and 40s, sometimes an old experienced greybeard with encyclopedic knowledge was also on the team I dealt with. It gave you the impression they were well versed in what they were selling and supporting.
Gradually they started pushing the older people out of their workforce here, until it's now reached absurd levels. The last 2 times I had IBM SAN people here to discuss storage, they sent 1 manager who I'd hazard a guess to say they couldn't be over 30, and 2-3 techs who looked the same age as our college interns. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence that IBM is retaining their institutional knowledge and experience if the shit hits the fan and you need a crack support team to sort out an issue on site.
Slashdot Mirror
> If Apple cared about the environment more than their money, they would make them repairable.
thatsthejoke.jpg
> Why would they bother making it user upgradable if they were going to lock it down like that?
The cynic in me would suggest they'd do that to teach their customers an expensive lesson. Like their Genius Bar currently does with small repairs they no longer bother diagnosing and just lie about the cause and recommend a new unit instead.
Do you want to list some game you want to play on Linux that don't, or just talk in sweeping generalizations? Because a few of my "regular" games play quite nicely under Linux with the Linux Steam client.
Rocket League
Borderlands 2 and TPS
XCOM 2
Kerbal Space Program
etc..
They used to do that, but years ago Dell called their bluff and Intel didn't do squat, then HP joined them in building systems with AMD chips. Go look at Dell and HP's product pages today and you'll see a large number of AMD based offerings.
And besides, nowadays Intel needs to keep those two vendors - who together represent 45% of all shipped PCs - happy with Intel or that's a major gift to AMD right when Intel is having yield problems. Grandma buys a laptop for home use, John buys a laptop for college, Steve buys a PC for work. None of them really give a crap if its an i3/i5/i7 or a Ryzen on the motherboard, as long as the price is right and the machine works as fast as they expect it to. And a significant segment of the "enthusiast" market is getting positively giddy with the price/performance of the AMD parts over Intel. Ryzen and Threadripper were great surprises when the real world numbers and prices were seen, Ryzen 2 is looking even better. Now is not the time for Intel to badly play poker with its customers.
Maybe for a monopoly, but AMD can already service that market and if Intel raises prices more because their pricing guy only took econ 101, they'll see AMD snap up that market share for a lot longer than the shortage persists. That's econ 202, don't go for a short term gain that will cause you long term pain.
Did you actually read the article you posted? It kind of undermines your own argument. Some salient points, emphasis mine ** :
But critics would argue that’s not enough, pointing to his delays implementing congressional sanctions and frequent praise of Putin’s leadership, as well as the reluctance to act on Moscow’s cyber aggression. They’ve also cited U.S. intelligence conclusions that the Kremlin meddled in the U.S. election in favor of Trump.
In August 2017, Trump signed into law the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, or CAATSA, despite calling it “seriously flawed.” **He then bypassed a congressionally mandated deadline in January to act on the bill** and impose new sanctions on Russia for the election allegations.
Also in March, following the poisoning of former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the U.K., the Trump administration expelled 60 Russian diplomats from the U.S., **although reports indicated he was not happy with the move.**
In early July, Trump seemed to challenge the long-held U.S. policy of refusing to recognize Moscow’s Crimea annexation, saying only in response to questions on the issue: “We’ll see.” He also reportedly argued to officials at June’s G-7 summit that Crimea should belong to Russia because “everyone there speaks Russian.”
Washington's UN ambassador Nikki Haley promptly promised further sanctions against Russia for its refusal to condemn the chemical attack — only to be left hanging when Trump walked back his threat and no new sanctions were imposed.
He talks a big game sometimes but hasn't really done much, and in a few cases like the CAATSA act, signed it and then refused to implement it. Not so tough.
> You realize that the guys who actually leave at 5 PM every day are usually the first ones to get laid off, right? If the boss man doesn't see you slaving away in your cube while he's walking out, it means that you're likely expendable in his mind.
When I was younger I used to think that as well. But reality and watching many companies I've worked at go through rounds of layoffs just doesn't bear that out. Some companies will lay the 5pm guys/girls off first, but those companies are actually doing those people a favor as they're really shitty companies that are badly managed. Most places will lay people off based on their measurable output or lack thereof - or based on other negative factors. A lot of those 5pm-ers are actually quite productive.
Years ago I'd do the 60 hour weeks but it really did get you little or nothing, except another 20 hours a week of your life spent doing things that don't really matter to your life's trajectory in the long run. We worked the 60 hour weeks and it was expected. It was taken for granted. Nobody got raises based on that extra work. Nobody got bonuses. If anything most of the places threw a couple of extra vacation days at the end of the project at you and expected you to be grateful for them.
So I said "fuck it" and stopped doing 60 hour weeks. I'll work a couple hours here and there extra, and maybe in extraordinary circumstances work a Saturday or something, but for the most part I work 40 to 44 hours a week now, tops. And you know what? The sky hasn't fallen, I haven't negatively suffered because of putting my foot down, but I do get home by 6 to have a nice dinner and a relaxing evening on weeknights, and on weekends I actually go out and do things that are fun.
> but when the job market goes to shit you really need to more conscious as to how your work ethic looks to other people.
Again, disgree. In my experience that work ethic you're talking about there is actually signaling to your bosses that you have zero spine and will take any and all unreasonable work piled on you because you won't put your foot down. And when you inevitably burn out, they'll toss you aside and get another invertebrate to replace you if they can.
While I agree with the idea, the chances of that actually happening any time soon are very slim. The public sees a need to maintain cars on a road. They don't see a need to maintain routers for everyone's safety. And companies are in a desperate race to get new shiny things in consumers' hands and those things are more connected and also have new interesting gaping holes in their security. And nobody cares. Legislation has to be written to fix this. And it won't be until something very shitty happens.
> you run a device, itâ(TM)s your job to keep it up to spec, no different than a car passing annual inspection.
The problem with that line of thinking is that many devices are seen as appliances in the minds of many. This MikroTik one is a bit more of a commerical router, but similar vulnerabilities have been discovered in many off the shelf routers grandmas buy at Best Buy. It's simply not reasonable to expect your average Joe or Jane to keep the router firmware up to date when it was probably a Herculean struggle for them to figure out which port you plug which Ethernet cable into on initial setup. Bricking them just becomes an exercise in frustration in warranty, and a tax on those people if it's out of the warranty period - and in it as well now that I think about it. What's Grandma gonna do, send it back to Linksys and wait 6 weeks all the while paying for an internet connection she's not able to use ?
More regulation of these companies' products and massive fines are the only thing that will make them take notice. Any off the shelf router granny buys at a box store should be set up for remote updates to be pushed from a trusted signed source, and those updates should be proactive.
So what's the line? 1 week? 1 month? 3 months? Did this get a lot of attention? Would people have reasonably heard about it by now?
> Also remember, no one ever earns enough to keep their employer afloat. So employed or not, they aren't a sustainable consumer of the product they make.
Boy howdy, you're right. This whole civilization thing is an illusion. I hope I wake up in my cave from this fever dream soon and start hunting bison again...
Although that fella I dreamed up named Henry Ford seemed to think otherwise on the whole "pay your employees well and it helps keep your company afloat" bit. But what did he know eh?
The counterpoint is that IMO Google is basically giving away the Chromecasts to keep peoples' eyeballs on their content through Youtube and other services. I mean how profitable can it possibly be to sell one for $35, after build, packaging, transport, and letting retail take a piece? Like maybe $5? Instead of making $5 twice, why not delay a few months and then release the ChromeCast Pro Two - Revenge of the AVI codec and charge $50 for it? That way instead of 2 x $5, you make 1 x $20 !
So I really don't think selling these things twice is a motivator here.
> Right now, they enhance their own research by not giving out too many details,
Sure, but how hard would it be for them to put out a piece of proof like saying "we found this chip (pictured at right) on several motherboards of the following model that appear in Supermicro chassis x, y, z and bb." And then anyone who owns one of those can just *go look for themselves* to see if the chip is there too.
Put up or shut up...
> how they could siphon off gigabytes of data and ship it to China, presumably over network connections and through firewalls,
That's the interesting thing to me as well. If your network and firewalls are properly designed, it shouldn't matter if your servers have a rogue little chip wanting to call home - your network should shitcan any attempt regardless.
And just like the CDR tax, all of us took that as a "license" to pirate anything that moved because hey, we'd already PAID for it.
Law of unintended consequences, SCGC...
> I'm still wondering where the 3rd party games are
You mean these? Here's just the list for the next couple of months of releases (with the 1st party games removed by me):
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-10-04-nintendo-switch-games-list-2018-release-dates
October 2018:
Mega Man 11 (Capcom, October 2nd)
Child of Light (Ubisoft, October 11th)
Darkest Dungeon: The Color of Madness DLC (Red Hook Studios, October 11th)
The Missing (Swery + White Owls, October 11th)
The Swindle (Size Five Games, October 11th)
Game Dev Story (Kairosoft, October 11th)
Dungeon Village (Kairosoft, October 11th)
Hot Springs Story (Kairosoft, October 11th)
Disgaea 1 Complete (NIS America, October 12th)
The World Ends With You -Final Remix- (Square Enix, October 12th)
Starlink: Battle for Atlas (Ubisoft, October 16th)
Valkyria Chronicles (Sega, October 16th)
The Room (Team17, October 18th)
Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption (Darkstar, October 18th)
Dark Souls Remastered (Namco Bandai, October 19th)
LEGO DC Super Villains (TT Games, October 19th)
Windjammers (Dotemu, October 23rd)
Just Dance 2019 (Ubisoft, October 26th)
November 2018:
LEGO Harry Potter Collection (Warner, November 2nd)
Diablo 3: Eternal Collection (Blizzard Entertainment, November 2nd)
Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum Session! (Bandai Namco, November 2nd)
Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom (FDG Entertainment, November 6th)
World of Final Fantasy Maxima (Square Enix, November 6th)
Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Ubisoft, November 8th)
Pokémon Let's Go! Pikachu and Eevee (Nintendo, November 16th)
SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (NIS America, November 16th)
Civilization VI (2K, November 16th)
Warframe (Digital Extremes, November 20th)
Football Manager 2018 Touch (Sports Interactive, 'November')
This War of Mine (11bit studios, 'November')
Moonlighter (Digital Sun, 'November')
December 2018:
Carcassonne (Asmodee Digital, 'December')
Everspace (Rockfish Games, 'December')
'Winter' 2018:
Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon Everybuddy! (Square Enix)
Grandia I and II HD Remaster (GungHo Online Entertainment America)
Katamari Demacy Reroll (Namco Bandai)
Pitfall Planet (Bonfire Studios)
R-Type Dimensions (Tonzai Games)
Shadowgate (Abstraction Games)
Team Sonic Racing (Sega)
If you want the complete list including unreleased titles, go here and sort as you like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games
I'm not sure how Amazon does their bonuses, but for many salaried positions I've been at, a bonus is a tantalizing carrot that appears much larger than when it's finally in your hands - if it gets there at all. The company can have a "bad quarter" or "bad year" and suspend them, they can allocate a certain amount per group and the the manager divvies it up according to their whims instead of using metrics, etc.
At this point in my career any time a manager talks about a bonus, I'll believe it exists when I see it land in my bank account, not before. So others in the company below me pay-wise getting a raise and eliminating some fairy tale bonus that probably wouldn't materialize to cover that? Sounds fine to me.
> I found it most interesting that while the levels of lead are higher than EPA regulations allow, they're lower than what everyone in the US was exposed to before 1995 from leaded gasoline.
You know, we used to let people put radium on watch faces without protective gear, re-pointing the tip of the brush by smoothing it with their mouths. We also used to cover the insides of buildings with asbestos. All of that was 100% legal under the laws of the time.
Just because it was like that before and was legal doesn't mean it was SAFE.
> These anti fraud systems often result in false positives which are extremely painful for the legitimate users.
And sometimes they are just useless anyway. I was on a business trip to Europe for 2 weeks. I got called on my cellphone by one of my credit card companies whose card I had been using on the trip in Switzerland... literally while I was using that card to gas up the rental car on the way to the airport to fly back home.
That's right, after **13 days** of activity on that card in Europe, an ocean away from where I live normally they decided it was time to call to see if I knew anything about those purchases.
And we're gonna start believing posters when they're not Anonymous Cowards....Or at least taking their posts with a grain of salt instead of a bag. Seriously, it takes 5 minutes to sign up. If you can't be arsed to do that, or have a vested interest in staying 100% anonymous, chances are anything you post is garbage meant to sway opinion instead of real info.
> Sounds to me like IBM figured out that younger workers can do the job they used to delegate to older and better paid workers
That's the open question though. CAN the younger workers really do the same job? If a team with 20 years of experience can solve a problem in an hour or two, but a bunch of younger workers take all day or into the next day, I'd say they can't do the same job.
It's also worth noting that the utter shit show that is the Phoenix Payroll system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system) is an IBM project. This isn't the first majorly public fuckup IBM's been involved with in Canada in the last few years. I'm thinking their getting rid of their experienced workforce is playing a large part in that. Short term gain, long term company destruction, similar to HP when Carly took the knife to all their institutional experience. But at least the quarterly numbers look good here and there on the way down, right?
The US (and the west) has spent decades integrating cheap Chinese goods into its economy. Trying to unwind that all at once is just a bad idea, even if it's necessary.
Most of the criticism is being leveled at HOW it is being done, not that it needs doing. How it is being done is like you deciding you don't want to rely on China's dinghy that you're sitting in but instead of taking the oars and moving the dinghy to shore in a controlled fashion before getting out of it, you just take a chainsaw and cut it in half when you're 2 miles offshore.
I can't, really. It's $5 for a Pi Zero with tons of support for the platform and a million people doing stuff with that exact size build to draw on for info/experience/inspiration. Someone comes out with the $3.50 SalmonBerry Cake Zero that nobody's seen before with some kitbashed board config, are you really going to try and save $1.50 going with the weirdo board? If it causes you 20 minutes of trouble, then you've already lost compared to just going with the Pi Zero.
Even in Canada.
I have dealings with IBM on equipment from time to time. Back in the last 90s, it would be experienced people in their mid 30s and 40s, sometimes an old experienced greybeard with encyclopedic knowledge was also on the team I dealt with. It gave you the impression they were well versed in what they were selling and supporting.
Gradually they started pushing the older people out of their workforce here, until it's now reached absurd levels. The last 2 times I had IBM SAN people here to discuss storage, they sent 1 manager who I'd hazard a guess to say they couldn't be over 30, and 2-3 techs who looked the same age as our college interns. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence that IBM is retaining their institutional knowledge and experience if the shit hits the fan and you need a crack support team to sort out an issue on site.
As people still think in France, England, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Norway, The Netherlands, and Canada among many other places.
And Argentina isn't and hasn't been socialist, FYI.