BTW Musk's SpaceX basically is a Govt contractor in the same mold as Boeing and lives off NASA largesse funded by Taxpayers
Let's look at their 2017 launches:
Iridium NEXT 1-10 SpaceX CRS-10 EchoStar 23 SES-10 NROL-76 Inmarsat-5 F4 SpaceX CRS-11 BulgariaSat-1 Iridium NEXT 11-20 Intelsat 35e SpaceX CRS-12 FORMOSAT-5 Boeing X-37B OTV-5 Iridium NEXT 21-30 SES-11 / EchoStar 105 Koreasat 5A
That's three from NASA (CRS-10 through 12), two from the military (NROL-76 and Boeing X-37B OTV-5) and eleven that are neither. Granted, of the estimated remaining five launches there's one NASA, one military and three other so 4/3/14 might be the total count. Seems to me like SpaceX is today a pretty healthy private launch company even if the government dropped them completely. I'll admit though that some contracts like for commercial crew development is pretty much 100% government driven and will probably remain so for quite some time, in fact Boeing and SpaceX are the two awarded contracts so those claiming SpaceX is entirely unlike Boeing is clearly wrong.
SpaceX doesn't do cost-plus contracts and they're not subcontractors to NASA boondoggles like SLS though. I mean technically you can say that the people delivering overtime pizza to NASA are sucking off the government's teat, but usually we mean companies that deliver products and services unique to the government at very inflated prices. So far they're considerably cheaper than the alternatives, there's of course those who want to more or less shut down NASA which is in my opinion a whole other discussion. If you're trying to say something is a waste of money you wouldn't be pointing at one of the most cost effective changes of the last decade.
And oh, by the way, a lot of that corn (maize) that we grow is feed stock for cattle. Why? (...) It's because they can fatten cattle for market on corn in half the time it takes on grass. (...) Well, except when they can sell their grass fed beef at a substantial premium.
So... they sell a product that's more expensive to produce at higher prices? THE HORROR.
Can you do that? I mean selling when you know something bad happened and not selling when you know something good happened sounds like two sides of the exact same coin. I thought the entire point of the SEC filings was to say in advance that you've committed to selling stock to reduce speculation that the sale is due to undisclosed numbers or breaking events. Obviously if a crisis has been long in the making like this it doesn't always help, but it's only supposed to be a speed bump not a full protection against inside trading.
As an ideal... I would like to see EV charging stations to be like gas stations are now: You can stop anywhere and tank up, and just pick a station that has a reasonable price. No proprietary connectors.
I think it's unlikely that they'll find some super-rapid charging that's healthy for the battery. Here in Norway it's my impression that they're trying to kill off permanent street parking, like either you have a parking garage/lot for the apartment/office building or it's intended for shoppers and visitors with a maximum of three hours or they've taken them for bus/tram/bike paths. There's zone parking in some areas for residents because the buildings have no garages, but generally not when they're developing new areas. Most commuter cars occupy one parking spot in the general vicinity every night, it's just that right now there's no big incentive to make sure it's the exact same spot. I'm pretty sure that if we work out the other issues we'll adjust to having more permanent parking.
I rarely return anything, pretty much only if it arrives broken. It seems shocking to me that a full third of all purchases get returned online. Even that 9% for in-store seems crazy high. Are there people who just buy stuff and return it all day long?
I seem to remember a friend of mine studying in the US said they did a lot of renovation by simply buying power tools, using them for whatever they needed then returning it. Allegedly they got the idea from hearing that many other people did that, I don't think he was justifying because he didn't really have to tell me anything at all. My guess is that online shopping is equally skewed by a few, like ordering a whole wardrobe and returning everything but one dress. Personally I don't think I've returned any item that's not damaged, defective or deceptive. And on the few occasions I've wanted to return anything they've mostly wanted a photo of the damage and/or proof of its destruction, which to me makes sense. There's no business in having a broken item shipped back to them, they just want to know they haven't been scammed.
Windows 10 is still looking like a "has run" in the OS landscape. It is beginning to look as if the only way the marketshare will be increasing is through the forced bundling with new PC and corporate upgrades due to support issues with older versions, and not because Windows 10 is actually wanted.
It could have been a Vista "has run" if there would be a Win11, but since almost nobody is actually migrating away from Windows I think the Microsoft term is "success". StatCounter has Windows at a quite stable 83% desktop OS share, it's about to pass Win7 (43% vs 41% at the moment) and on Steam it's 96% Windows with Win10 on top. The enterprise market and other conservative organizations will eventually switch as the EOL date approaches, even if they lose marginally to Apple and Linux or see a bit of post-EOL use like XP I'd say they're on target to bring 95%+ of their existing users to Win10.
Microsoft has essentially seized all control over updates, upgrades, settings, telemetry, advertisements and will reset your preferences at will without losing any significant portion of their customers, how's that not a smashing success for Microsoft? I expect that once the Win7 EOL is over the frog will begin to boil for real, it's almost so I want to buy Microsoft stock because I think they'll make bank gouging their captive audience. No more passive resistance by not upgrading, it's now one Windows and you're along for the ride whether you want to or not.
That doesn't explain why many companies tried telecommuting, found the results disappointing, and went back to requiring everyone to come to the office.
My guess is that in every job there's a decent amount of slack between expected performance and how a really good/poor day is. At the office, you keep working until it's time to go home because there's not much else to do. At home I'm guessing many get tempted to say that even though you took an hour's lunch, surfed the net, ran a few errands and did a bit of housekeeping you still pulled off what you consider a full day's work. And you'd have days like that at work where you didn't get more done either, but you have more sub-par days and not a whole lot of days where you really raise the average. At least I know I have days where I kinda feel I'm "done" for the day but I sit an hour longer fixing whack-a-mole TODOs because it's not time to go home yet. I'm not sure I'd be that disciplined at home.
If managers were actually allowed and taught how to manage, I'd think they'd be able to tell the good workers from the poor ones.
Yeah, because people love professional managers who feel it's a discipline you can learn regardless of the subject matter where they can just go into a line of business they know nothing about and manage. When I look at the fairly diverse group of people my boss is managing it's pretty obvious he can't possibly know how hard the tasks are. Neither do business users. And to be honest sometimes we're wildly off as developers too because things have weird dependencies, ugly hacks and show-stopping bugs which means your small tweak is sometimes a full do-over. And he knows some people are junior and senior, that some people are the primary caretaker and some are the backup. Does he know if you're pulling your weight in context? No.
You can do metrics, but they're all pretty horrible. You can try to track delivery time and completed functionality, but you don't know if it's kludges and hacks and how much the person has been sniping easy wins while the ones building the backbone of the application suffer. He can try to ask your co-workers for their evaluation, but obviously that rewards patting each other on the back and throwing the non-player under the bus. Very often it ends up not being the best coder, but the best salesman who wins. The one who always make sure their contributions are highly visible to the boss and often made bigger and better than they actually are.
I have actually read some management theory and it's useful for interpreting how people think and respond with regards to motivation, engagement, incentives, when to step in and manage, when to pull back and not micro-manage etc. but if I actually became a manager I still don't know how to get good data on performance. And nothing is so demotivating as the feeling of not being treated fairly. I'd probably just be very critical of what I know because it used to be my job and oblivious to the things that weren't. Or I'd try to really understand what everyone is doing and totally burn out trying to know everything. And I won't know when I'm wrong because honestly most of us think that we're above average, people will be unhappy but I won't know if it's justified or not.
Nearly no other household item I have goes obsolete before it wears out. I'm not going to get significantly faster to work with a new car. Even my TV is 6+ years old and I'd only get +5" and incremental picture improvements for buying a new one at roughly the same price. This is the normal state of mature technology.
If I were designing a system to handle TOS violations I'd probably start with allowing employees to act swiftly but closed accounts go into a review queue with a note about what they did. I'd imagine Twitter has something like that in place and another employee saw it and quickly undid the damage. Or maybe they just have alerts set up on changes to Trump's account, since it's so valuable to them.
I'd probably make the review queue weight by number of followers as well as time so that any account with millions of followers would jump right to the top of the queue. You could say that past a certain number of followers they should have a two-tier process before it gets deactivated in the first place, but even a popular account could get hacked and those 11 minutes is a lot of time to spout a lot of garbage to many millions of people. Not that anyone would notice the difference in this case, but in general I too would go with instant deactivation, rapid review.
That is extremely unlikely to happen. If a user cannot sue Twitter for deleting his account, who is going to bother with the ex-employee?
Not sure what you're trying to suggest, the company has both made the terms of service and the employment contract so both favor Twitter. That Twitter can do whatever it wants with the users doesn't mean the employees can do whatever they want with Twitter, quite far from it.
As far as "illegal misuse", this employee was apparrently granted access to manage user accounts. Unless he circumvented security measures to get that access, he didn't break the law. Firing an employee for misuse is certainly reasonable, but Twitter doesn't need to bother if he already left the company.
I'm pretty sure that if I as a DBA "accidentally" dropped the production database on my last day of work there'd be some kind of criminal law on the books. I may not be charging with hacking as I'd only abuse privileges I rightfully have but I really doubt it would be purely a civil matter.
I anticipate no legal consequences. Is 11 minutes without Twitter even justification for a torte?
For Donald Trump? No. Could Twitter Inc. have a tort for the negative press this has created? Absolutely. On the premise that they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this was sabotage and not an accidental fail trying to deactivate a name-squatter I'd be quite likely to award a reasonable sum - and then I mean reasonable in terms of what damage they've suffered, not what kind of money the employee has. I really don't see why so many here is so quick to defend malice.
I think it's safe to say that this was happening all over the world in the 6th century and would not be some "perversion" unique to Mohammed. It might be inconceivable to you, but moral and ethical standards do change over the centuries.
Human standards do, religious standards supposedly don't. The ten commandments are still the ten commandments, unchanged for thousands of years and it is not up to man to change God's rules. Now I'd say both the churches and their believers do a lot of creative selection and interpretation of what the Bible says to make their beliefs compatible with their own moral compass and modern society, but they never put themselves above God.
The problem in Islam is that the Quran is not a story retold by disciples of allegories Jesus Christ made where you can make up your own interpretation. Muhammad's words and deeds are Allah's will, it's like his whole life was on stone tablets. If you're saying what he did back then was wrong you're putting yourself above Allah. If you're saying it's wrong now because times have changed, you're essentially saying you can pick and choose the parts you like. These are the things he said and did that are eternal, these are the things he said and did because it was 1500 years ago.
I mean if would be nice, because you'd get more of the same kind of "secularized" religious we have in Christianity. God loves me, my soul is going to Heaven but I'm not really doing anything religious, I just like the warm and fuzzy feeling of having a benevolent Creator that looks after me. On the other hand, the more religion insists on clashing with modern science and society maybe the sooner we'll get rid of this silly superstition.
Mobile and desktop systems really fill two different market niches so its a mistaken idea that the mobile can replace a desktop system. Working on a spreadsheet or taxes on a 3" screen? No thanks.
But it's also a mistake to think that you need a 100W CPU and 250W GPU to do everyday spreadsheets. Look at some of the micro PCs out there and compare them to a high-end smartphone. Why can't you make a "PC" like that with mobile guts? Mostly it's that it doesn't run normal Windows, not any technical reason. Take the Sony Xperia XZ Premium for example, 3840x2160 display, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage + SDXC, 8 core (4 high performance) CPU @ 2.45 GHz... does it matter if that 4K display is 5.46" or if it's a 32" monitor? Not really. I mean it wouldn't be a gaming monster. But if all you need is a desktop interface...
AMD had a fantastic Q3 and predicted a slower Q4 (as expected), and the stock has fallen a ton in the past few days. It really makes no sense.
Well, the stock has gone from $2 to almost $15 and then slumped back to $11 so it's not like the market has really lost faith but the expectations for AMDs recovery were maybe exaggerated. Right now AMD is probably billing a lot of semi-custom revenue for SoC that go into the launch of Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro was last year, next year will be a slow year. Also Q3 is generally when Microsoft/Sony buy chips for their Christmas sales. Ryzen and TR is doing well in some markets, but Intel has pretty aggressively slashed prices to close the launch gap and enterprise customers take a long time to trust AMD EPYC servers.
Vega is an okay response to Pascal as a GPU but it's better as a crypto-mining card, the question is how quickly does the Ethereum market move to FGPA/ASIC custom chips like Bitcoin has, will the ICO bubble pop and so there's a lot of risk there. And don't forget that AMD has sold off and licensed a ton of assets and got a pretty high debt burden. And the PC market is in a general slump, nothing their fault but it doesn't help. With Zen they've put enough product on the table that they seem to be out of immediate danger and breaking even, but I still think they have a long way to go towards stable growth and profit.
Steven Pinker last book The better angels of our nature talks about how much the cost of artificial light has fallen in the last three hundred years.
The absolute cost is one thing, that would make the absolute gain less. But it also matters than a few hundred years ago most people were farmers in the field and when it got dark you went to bed. Today the premise that shifting it matters is highly dubious, like here in Norway it's now pitch dark out and it's 6 PM. Does it matter? No, the lights are on and they'll stay on until I head to bed. As long as the daylight hours fall sometime between getting up and going to bed it doesn't matter when, because I'll fill the rest of the time anyway. The silly thing is that I'm wasting the precious daylight hours in the office. To flip the situation on its head, how many people would need more than ordinary interior lighting to work in the middle of the night? Looking at employment by major industry sector I'm guessing:
Mining 0.4% Construction 4.3% Utilities 0.4% Transportation and warehousing 3.2% Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting 1.5%
That's almost 10%, maybe there's a few in other categories too but I think I'm generous if I say 15% of jobs are outdoors and the rest in offices, factories, stores, hospitals or such where you don't get any more benefit than at home. If society was smart we'd just start waaay earlier and have our daylight after work when we can actually do something more useful with it like be outside, while the oddballs would be those working then instead of those doing the night shift.
Land a rocket on a barge? They never did that, because NASA's attempt at reusable rockets was based on tech from the 1970s. NASA could do it with modern tech, but why should they, when they can buy launch services from the private sector?
With that attitude NASA doesn't need to do jack shit while the private industry develops the products and services NASA needs, except fund it. NASA is supposed to do the experimental science, making rovers and probes and testing new propulsion technologies, power sources, zero-g experiments, spaceships, landers, habitats etc. that eventually may become a commercial product. Reusable rockets is exactly the sort of thing NASA should have been first to do. Instead they're in the back seat of SpaceX's taxi, which is nice because they pay the bills but they're no longer at the forefront of technology when it comes to rockets. They're just a layer of funding with Congress paying NASA paying SpaceX. Except for the SLS, which I'm guessing will be their last chemical rocket project ever.
Does not sound surprising to me, we have such an odd mix of traditions like some are trade based (Smith, Baker, Miller, Wright), some are relations frozen in time (Johnson, Wilson, Anderson, Robinson), some are location based (Hill), some are colors (Brown, White, Green), some are attributes (Young, Walker, Moore, Hall) and none are very dominating. Most of these would be highly volatile back before we started preserving them as-is. In other cultures the surname may have been a family/clan/caste/tribe name passed down unchanged, that would obviously make a huge difference. And slavery is its own story, they probably weren't very creative with slave names.
Uhm, it's a rocket engine. What kind of temperatures do you think it experienced during launch/reentry/landing burn? A tiny bit of excess fuel burning away post-landing is hardly a concern, probably a small timing issue with keeping the rocket fueled exactly until engine shut-off.
Half million dollars for one episode might have something to do with that...
From the stretch goals their running price seems to be $150-200k/episode, but yeah... this isn't your typical YouTube video but the lower end of pro animation. Big shows like Family Guy and the Simpsons are $1-2m/episode, when you consider the names involved the costs don't seem out of line. Whether you can get that kind of money from a Kickstarter, I dunno... my guess is that this might be an alternative pitch for a series no TV channel wanted to pick up, like if you got a script, a potential cast and a teaser trailer already having them say "support our Kickstarter" is not much extra work and even if it fails some channel might see it has potential.
The fundamental [issue?] with net neutrality is not all traffic is equally cheap or expensive to transport.
Not sure why you needed a full page to explain that, it's pretty obvious. Net neutrality means you pay the same whether you have a cheap or expensive mix of traffic. Note that this typically only means your half though, like if you're video chatting with someone in New Zealand you pay a bit to reach "the backbone" and they generally pay more because it's harder to reach. Still you have content services like Netflix, YouTube, Spotify and CDNs like CloudFlare and Akami who can set up local servers for really cheap traffic. So in theory, some consumers are paying a bit too much.
However, ISPs also have individualized costs maintaining your physical connection, there's users who use lots of data and others who use little data, peak and off-peak hours, there's burst use vs sustained bandwidth... really if you wanted to accurately meter the cost per byte, it would get really complex and nobody would really want that. And it's not like ISPs got no freedom, they can pick peering points and peering partners, refuse to upgrade expensive links, install caches and whatnot to manage costs. And on average they get their money. So why do they want to differentiate?
So that they can be the gatekeeper, you seem to be under the delusion that what the ISP would charge depends on their actual cost but you'd be auctioned off and pointed in the direction of the highest bidder. Either you get "free" bandwidth to service X because service X pays the ISP extra or they agree to sell you bandwidth with a 30% discount if the service installs a local cache reducing costs by 70%. They get to pick and choose and gouge every service, not for your benefit but for theirs. If you think they're doing this for the customer you're a fool, all those services will have to raise prices and they'll be passed back to you. In the end we'll all pay more not less.
The thing is: there is so much code to be written, that even these students - who evidently don't understand, don't care, and can't be bothered - even these students will find jobs, and some of them will be working on your web projects.
And some of them will be working for PHBs that don't understand, don't care and can't be bothered. Far too often the only metric people are measured by is whether the code does the right thing with the right input under normal execution. Error handling? Security? It's working, ship it. That's what you get measured on. That's what your boss gets measured on. If you say it "isn't any more complex" and they do it anyway it's clearly because they don't get corrected or rejected. Those errors conditions are for QA to catch. Those injection vulnerabilities is something for InfoSec to discover and flag. Instead of being a safety net on the off chance that you should fail, they become the wall you throw shit at and see what sticks.
All businesses want it yesterday, it's how the world works. Heck I'm equally bad when I want somebody else's code (internal or external) fixed. Somebody has to push back, but IMHO this is a management problem not a developer problem. If they don't want proper releases and testing, then it's eternal beta. Expect to be beta testers. As for frameworks, they usually try to do the right thing. It's when the frameworks aren't sufficient and they try to hack it on their own that most shit happens. But you can say that about everything, it's like asking a Java developer who isn't used to doing memory allocation or raw pointers to write C. Does it mean everyone should start off doing C or assembler? It actually doesn't, but don't go out of your depth.
The only thing I see wrong with alcohol as it is today is misuse and over use. Perhaps what we need is a little more self discipline and self control. Have a glass of wine with dinner or a beer at the ball game but don't go nuts.
Except most people intentionally use alcohol to loosen up and it's a socially accepted explanation for your behavior if you happen to do something stupid or embarrassing. If people managed to let go of their inhibitions and worries on their own and they weren't judged by different standards they wouldn't need alcohol. For better and for worse I've done things under the influence of alcohol I'd never imagine doing sober.
Remember Firefox was growing almost unstoppable in 2010 and within 2 years started declining FAST. Any piece of software it can happen too as we all remember the days of 90% marketshare of IE 6 too which started to wane in just a few years to Firefox previously.
A major difference: Internet Explorer was intentionally ignored and crippled by Microsoft to stall the development of web apps in favor of native apps. Firefox won because they pretty much got a walkover and everyone except Microsoft wanted it to win. Nobody at Mozilla wanted to lose users and few wanted a for-profit company to replace them but they lost anyway. IMHO because they took way, way, way too long to do multi-process. Close a Chrome tab and the resources get reclaimed. If it crashes, one tab crashes. In Firefox it all came crumbling down and you had to kill it completely. They lost to Chrome on merit and the sooner they get their head out of their ass and stop blaming other things the better. Yeah I saw the ads for Chrome too, but I wouldn't have switched unless it actually sucked less.
Meh, I've read that piece before and it's right except whenever it's wrong. I've ripped out smaller and bigger pieces of software and completely rewritten it from scratch, the problem is that you got people jumping the gun just like those who want to switch to fad language or framework or technology of the day. The people who clearly don't understand the complexity of the software but conclude that because I can't untangle this tangled mess it should be rewritten are dangerous as fuck. Then you have the people that have fought the code, mapped out the maze and when they say it can be done much cleaner and simpler, please listen. A lot of code is just bad, like structurally it's convoluted. Very often it's the result of the code being expanded or twisted into serving unexpected use cases that weren't in the original plan. It's often when you've lived with the system a while you understand the true requirements.
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BTW Musk's SpaceX basically is a Govt contractor in the same mold as Boeing and lives off NASA largesse funded by Taxpayers
Let's look at their 2017 launches:
Iridium NEXT 1-10
SpaceX CRS-10
EchoStar 23
SES-10
NROL-76
Inmarsat-5 F4
SpaceX CRS-11
BulgariaSat-1
Iridium NEXT 11-20
Intelsat 35e
SpaceX CRS-12
FORMOSAT-5
Boeing X-37B OTV-5
Iridium NEXT 21-30
SES-11 / EchoStar 105
Koreasat 5A
That's three from NASA (CRS-10 through 12), two from the military (NROL-76 and Boeing X-37B OTV-5) and eleven that are neither. Granted, of the estimated remaining five launches there's one NASA, one military and three other so 4/3/14 might be the total count. Seems to me like SpaceX is today a pretty healthy private launch company even if the government dropped them completely. I'll admit though that some contracts like for commercial crew development is pretty much 100% government driven and will probably remain so for quite some time, in fact Boeing and SpaceX are the two awarded contracts so those claiming SpaceX is entirely unlike Boeing is clearly wrong.
SpaceX doesn't do cost-plus contracts and they're not subcontractors to NASA boondoggles like SLS though. I mean technically you can say that the people delivering overtime pizza to NASA are sucking off the government's teat, but usually we mean companies that deliver products and services unique to the government at very inflated prices. So far they're considerably cheaper than the alternatives, there's of course those who want to more or less shut down NASA which is in my opinion a whole other discussion. If you're trying to say something is a waste of money you wouldn't be pointing at one of the most cost effective changes of the last decade.
And oh, by the way, a lot of that corn (maize) that we grow is feed stock for cattle. Why? (...) It's because they can fatten cattle for market on corn in half the time it takes on grass. (...) Well, except when they can sell their grass fed beef at a substantial premium.
So... they sell a product that's more expensive to produce at higher prices? THE HORROR.
Can you do that? I mean selling when you know something bad happened and not selling when you know something good happened sounds like two sides of the exact same coin. I thought the entire point of the SEC filings was to say in advance that you've committed to selling stock to reduce speculation that the sale is due to undisclosed numbers or breaking events. Obviously if a crisis has been long in the making like this it doesn't always help, but it's only supposed to be a speed bump not a full protection against inside trading.
As an ideal... I would like to see EV charging stations to be like gas stations are now: You can stop anywhere and tank up, and just pick a station that has a reasonable price. No proprietary connectors.
I think it's unlikely that they'll find some super-rapid charging that's healthy for the battery. Here in Norway it's my impression that they're trying to kill off permanent street parking, like either you have a parking garage/lot for the apartment/office building or it's intended for shoppers and visitors with a maximum of three hours or they've taken them for bus/tram/bike paths. There's zone parking in some areas for residents because the buildings have no garages, but generally not when they're developing new areas. Most commuter cars occupy one parking spot in the general vicinity every night, it's just that right now there's no big incentive to make sure it's the exact same spot. I'm pretty sure that if we work out the other issues we'll adjust to having more permanent parking.
I rarely return anything, pretty much only if it arrives broken. It seems shocking to me that a full third of all purchases get returned online. Even that 9% for in-store seems crazy high. Are there people who just buy stuff and return it all day long?
I seem to remember a friend of mine studying in the US said they did a lot of renovation by simply buying power tools, using them for whatever they needed then returning it. Allegedly they got the idea from hearing that many other people did that, I don't think he was justifying because he didn't really have to tell me anything at all. My guess is that online shopping is equally skewed by a few, like ordering a whole wardrobe and returning everything but one dress. Personally I don't think I've returned any item that's not damaged, defective or deceptive. And on the few occasions I've wanted to return anything they've mostly wanted a photo of the damage and/or proof of its destruction, which to me makes sense. There's no business in having a broken item shipped back to them, they just want to know they haven't been scammed.
Windows 10 is still looking like a "has run" in the OS landscape. It is beginning to look as if the only way the marketshare will be increasing is through the forced bundling with new PC and corporate upgrades due to support issues with older versions, and not because Windows 10 is actually wanted.
It could have been a Vista "has run" if there would be a Win11, but since almost nobody is actually migrating away from Windows I think the Microsoft term is "success". StatCounter has Windows at a quite stable 83% desktop OS share, it's about to pass Win7 (43% vs 41% at the moment) and on Steam it's 96% Windows with Win10 on top. The enterprise market and other conservative organizations will eventually switch as the EOL date approaches, even if they lose marginally to Apple and Linux or see a bit of post-EOL use like XP I'd say they're on target to bring 95%+ of their existing users to Win10.
Microsoft has essentially seized all control over updates, upgrades, settings, telemetry, advertisements and will reset your preferences at will without losing any significant portion of their customers, how's that not a smashing success for Microsoft? I expect that once the Win7 EOL is over the frog will begin to boil for real, it's almost so I want to buy Microsoft stock because I think they'll make bank gouging their captive audience. No more passive resistance by not upgrading, it's now one Windows and you're along for the ride whether you want to or not.
That doesn't explain why many companies tried telecommuting, found the results disappointing, and went back to requiring everyone to come to the office.
My guess is that in every job there's a decent amount of slack between expected performance and how a really good/poor day is. At the office, you keep working until it's time to go home because there's not much else to do. At home I'm guessing many get tempted to say that even though you took an hour's lunch, surfed the net, ran a few errands and did a bit of housekeeping you still pulled off what you consider a full day's work. And you'd have days like that at work where you didn't get more done either, but you have more sub-par days and not a whole lot of days where you really raise the average. At least I know I have days where I kinda feel I'm "done" for the day but I sit an hour longer fixing whack-a-mole TODOs because it's not time to go home yet. I'm not sure I'd be that disciplined at home.
If managers were actually allowed and taught how to manage, I'd think they'd be able to tell the good workers from the poor ones.
Yeah, because people love professional managers who feel it's a discipline you can learn regardless of the subject matter where they can just go into a line of business they know nothing about and manage. When I look at the fairly diverse group of people my boss is managing it's pretty obvious he can't possibly know how hard the tasks are. Neither do business users. And to be honest sometimes we're wildly off as developers too because things have weird dependencies, ugly hacks and show-stopping bugs which means your small tweak is sometimes a full do-over. And he knows some people are junior and senior, that some people are the primary caretaker and some are the backup. Does he know if you're pulling your weight in context? No.
You can do metrics, but they're all pretty horrible. You can try to track delivery time and completed functionality, but you don't know if it's kludges and hacks and how much the person has been sniping easy wins while the ones building the backbone of the application suffer. He can try to ask your co-workers for their evaluation, but obviously that rewards patting each other on the back and throwing the non-player under the bus. Very often it ends up not being the best coder, but the best salesman who wins. The one who always make sure their contributions are highly visible to the boss and often made bigger and better than they actually are.
I have actually read some management theory and it's useful for interpreting how people think and respond with regards to motivation, engagement, incentives, when to step in and manage, when to pull back and not micro-manage etc. but if I actually became a manager I still don't know how to get good data on performance. And nothing is so demotivating as the feeling of not being treated fairly. I'd probably just be very critical of what I know because it used to be my job and oblivious to the things that weren't. Or I'd try to really understand what everyone is doing and totally burn out trying to know everything. And I won't know when I'm wrong because honestly most of us think that we're above average, people will be unhappy but I won't know if it's justified or not.
Nearly no other household item I have goes obsolete before it wears out. I'm not going to get significantly faster to work with a new car. Even my TV is 6+ years old and I'd only get +5" and incremental picture improvements for buying a new one at roughly the same price. This is the normal state of mature technology.
If I were designing a system to handle TOS violations I'd probably start with allowing employees to act swiftly but closed accounts go into a review queue with a note about what they did. I'd imagine Twitter has something like that in place and another employee saw it and quickly undid the damage. Or maybe they just have alerts set up on changes to Trump's account, since it's so valuable to them.
I'd probably make the review queue weight by number of followers as well as time so that any account with millions of followers would jump right to the top of the queue. You could say that past a certain number of followers they should have a two-tier process before it gets deactivated in the first place, but even a popular account could get hacked and those 11 minutes is a lot of time to spout a lot of garbage to many millions of people. Not that anyone would notice the difference in this case, but in general I too would go with instant deactivation, rapid review.
That is extremely unlikely to happen. If a user cannot sue Twitter for deleting his account, who is going to bother with the ex-employee?
Not sure what you're trying to suggest, the company has both made the terms of service and the employment contract so both favor Twitter. That Twitter can do whatever it wants with the users doesn't mean the employees can do whatever they want with Twitter, quite far from it.
As far as "illegal misuse", this employee was apparrently granted access to manage user accounts. Unless he circumvented security measures to get that access, he didn't break the law. Firing an employee for misuse is certainly reasonable, but Twitter doesn't need to bother if he already left the company.
I'm pretty sure that if I as a DBA "accidentally" dropped the production database on my last day of work there'd be some kind of criminal law on the books. I may not be charging with hacking as I'd only abuse privileges I rightfully have but I really doubt it would be purely a civil matter.
I anticipate no legal consequences. Is 11 minutes without Twitter even justification for a torte?
For Donald Trump? No. Could Twitter Inc. have a tort for the negative press this has created? Absolutely. On the premise that they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this was sabotage and not an accidental fail trying to deactivate a name-squatter I'd be quite likely to award a reasonable sum - and then I mean reasonable in terms of what damage they've suffered, not what kind of money the employee has. I really don't see why so many here is so quick to defend malice.
I think it's safe to say that this was happening all over the world in the 6th century and would not be some "perversion" unique to Mohammed. It might be inconceivable to you, but moral and ethical standards do change over the centuries.
Human standards do, religious standards supposedly don't. The ten commandments are still the ten commandments, unchanged for thousands of years and it is not up to man to change God's rules. Now I'd say both the churches and their believers do a lot of creative selection and interpretation of what the Bible says to make their beliefs compatible with their own moral compass and modern society, but they never put themselves above God.
The problem in Islam is that the Quran is not a story retold by disciples of allegories Jesus Christ made where you can make up your own interpretation. Muhammad's words and deeds are Allah's will, it's like his whole life was on stone tablets. If you're saying what he did back then was wrong you're putting yourself above Allah. If you're saying it's wrong now because times have changed, you're essentially saying you can pick and choose the parts you like. These are the things he said and did that are eternal, these are the things he said and did because it was 1500 years ago.
I mean if would be nice, because you'd get more of the same kind of "secularized" religious we have in Christianity. God loves me, my soul is going to Heaven but I'm not really doing anything religious, I just like the warm and fuzzy feeling of having a benevolent Creator that looks after me. On the other hand, the more religion insists on clashing with modern science and society maybe the sooner we'll get rid of this silly superstition.
Mobile and desktop systems really fill two different market niches so its a mistaken idea that the mobile can replace a desktop system. Working on a spreadsheet or taxes on a 3" screen? No thanks.
But it's also a mistake to think that you need a 100W CPU and 250W GPU to do everyday spreadsheets. Look at some of the micro PCs out there and compare them to a high-end smartphone. Why can't you make a "PC" like that with mobile guts? Mostly it's that it doesn't run normal Windows, not any technical reason. Take the Sony Xperia XZ Premium for example, 3840x2160 display, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage + SDXC, 8 core (4 high performance) CPU @ 2.45 GHz... does it matter if that 4K display is 5.46" or if it's a 32" monitor? Not really. I mean it wouldn't be a gaming monster. But if all you need is a desktop interface...
AMD had a fantastic Q3 and predicted a slower Q4 (as expected), and the stock has fallen a ton in the past few days. It really makes no sense.
Well, the stock has gone from $2 to almost $15 and then slumped back to $11 so it's not like the market has really lost faith but the expectations for AMDs recovery were maybe exaggerated. Right now AMD is probably billing a lot of semi-custom revenue for SoC that go into the launch of Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro was last year, next year will be a slow year. Also Q3 is generally when Microsoft/Sony buy chips for their Christmas sales. Ryzen and TR is doing well in some markets, but Intel has pretty aggressively slashed prices to close the launch gap and enterprise customers take a long time to trust AMD EPYC servers.
Vega is an okay response to Pascal as a GPU but it's better as a crypto-mining card, the question is how quickly does the Ethereum market move to FGPA/ASIC custom chips like Bitcoin has, will the ICO bubble pop and so there's a lot of risk there. And don't forget that AMD has sold off and licensed a ton of assets and got a pretty high debt burden. And the PC market is in a general slump, nothing their fault but it doesn't help. With Zen they've put enough product on the table that they seem to be out of immediate danger and breaking even, but I still think they have a long way to go towards stable growth and profit.
Steven Pinker last book The better angels of our nature talks about how much the cost of artificial light has fallen in the last three hundred years.
The absolute cost is one thing, that would make the absolute gain less. But it also matters than a few hundred years ago most people were farmers in the field and when it got dark you went to bed. Today the premise that shifting it matters is highly dubious, like here in Norway it's now pitch dark out and it's 6 PM. Does it matter? No, the lights are on and they'll stay on until I head to bed. As long as the daylight hours fall sometime between getting up and going to bed it doesn't matter when, because I'll fill the rest of the time anyway. The silly thing is that I'm wasting the precious daylight hours in the office. To flip the situation on its head, how many people would need more than ordinary interior lighting to work in the middle of the night? Looking at employment by major industry sector I'm guessing:
Mining 0.4%
Construction 4.3%
Utilities 0.4%
Transportation and warehousing 3.2%
Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting 1.5%
That's almost 10%, maybe there's a few in other categories too but I think I'm generous if I say 15% of jobs are outdoors and the rest in offices, factories, stores, hospitals or such where you don't get any more benefit than at home. If society was smart we'd just start waaay earlier and have our daylight after work when we can actually do something more useful with it like be outside, while the oddballs would be those working then instead of those doing the night shift.
Land a rocket on a barge? They never did that, because NASA's attempt at reusable rockets was based on tech from the 1970s. NASA could do it with modern tech, but why should they, when they can buy launch services from the private sector?
With that attitude NASA doesn't need to do jack shit while the private industry develops the products and services NASA needs, except fund it. NASA is supposed to do the experimental science, making rovers and probes and testing new propulsion technologies, power sources, zero-g experiments, spaceships, landers, habitats etc. that eventually may become a commercial product. Reusable rockets is exactly the sort of thing NASA should have been first to do. Instead they're in the back seat of SpaceX's taxi, which is nice because they pay the bills but they're no longer at the forefront of technology when it comes to rockets. They're just a layer of funding with Congress paying NASA paying SpaceX. Except for the SLS, which I'm guessing will be their last chemical rocket project ever.
Does not sound surprising to me, we have such an odd mix of traditions like some are trade based (Smith, Baker, Miller, Wright), some are relations frozen in time (Johnson, Wilson, Anderson, Robinson), some are location based (Hill), some are colors (Brown, White, Green), some are attributes (Young, Walker, Moore, Hall) and none are very dominating. Most of these would be highly volatile back before we started preserving them as-is. In other cultures the surname may have been a family/clan/caste/tribe name passed down unchanged, that would obviously make a huge difference. And slavery is its own story, they probably weren't very creative with slave names.
Uhm, it's a rocket engine. What kind of temperatures do you think it experienced during launch/reentry/landing burn? A tiny bit of excess fuel burning away post-landing is hardly a concern, probably a small timing issue with keeping the rocket fueled exactly until engine shut-off.
Cold days may be a problem too...
If you try to authenticate outside in public that might be the least of your problems...
Half million dollars for one episode might have something to do with that...
From the stretch goals their running price seems to be $150-200k/episode, but yeah... this isn't your typical YouTube video but the lower end of pro animation. Big shows like Family Guy and the Simpsons are $1-2m/episode, when you consider the names involved the costs don't seem out of line. Whether you can get that kind of money from a Kickstarter, I dunno... my guess is that this might be an alternative pitch for a series no TV channel wanted to pick up, like if you got a script, a potential cast and a teaser trailer already having them say "support our Kickstarter" is not much extra work and even if it fails some channel might see it has potential.
The fundamental [issue?] with net neutrality is not all traffic is equally cheap or expensive to transport.
Not sure why you needed a full page to explain that, it's pretty obvious. Net neutrality means you pay the same whether you have a cheap or expensive mix of traffic. Note that this typically only means your half though, like if you're video chatting with someone in New Zealand you pay a bit to reach "the backbone" and they generally pay more because it's harder to reach. Still you have content services like Netflix, YouTube, Spotify and CDNs like CloudFlare and Akami who can set up local servers for really cheap traffic. So in theory, some consumers are paying a bit too much.
However, ISPs also have individualized costs maintaining your physical connection, there's users who use lots of data and others who use little data, peak and off-peak hours, there's burst use vs sustained bandwidth... really if you wanted to accurately meter the cost per byte, it would get really complex and nobody would really want that. And it's not like ISPs got no freedom, they can pick peering points and peering partners, refuse to upgrade expensive links, install caches and whatnot to manage costs. And on average they get their money. So why do they want to differentiate?
So that they can be the gatekeeper, you seem to be under the delusion that what the ISP would charge depends on their actual cost but you'd be auctioned off and pointed in the direction of the highest bidder. Either you get "free" bandwidth to service X because service X pays the ISP extra or they agree to sell you bandwidth with a 30% discount if the service installs a local cache reducing costs by 70%. They get to pick and choose and gouge every service, not for your benefit but for theirs. If you think they're doing this for the customer you're a fool, all those services will have to raise prices and they'll be passed back to you. In the end we'll all pay more not less.
The thing is: there is so much code to be written, that even these students - who evidently don't understand, don't care, and can't be bothered - even these students will find jobs, and some of them will be working on your web projects.
And some of them will be working for PHBs that don't understand, don't care and can't be bothered. Far too often the only metric people are measured by is whether the code does the right thing with the right input under normal execution. Error handling? Security? It's working, ship it. That's what you get measured on. That's what your boss gets measured on. If you say it "isn't any more complex" and they do it anyway it's clearly because they don't get corrected or rejected. Those errors conditions are for QA to catch. Those injection vulnerabilities is something for InfoSec to discover and flag. Instead of being a safety net on the off chance that you should fail, they become the wall you throw shit at and see what sticks.
All businesses want it yesterday, it's how the world works. Heck I'm equally bad when I want somebody else's code (internal or external) fixed. Somebody has to push back, but IMHO this is a management problem not a developer problem. If they don't want proper releases and testing, then it's eternal beta. Expect to be beta testers. As for frameworks, they usually try to do the right thing. It's when the frameworks aren't sufficient and they try to hack it on their own that most shit happens. But you can say that about everything, it's like asking a Java developer who isn't used to doing memory allocation or raw pointers to write C. Does it mean everyone should start off doing C or assembler? It actually doesn't, but don't go out of your depth.
The only thing I see wrong with alcohol as it is today is misuse and over use. Perhaps what we need is a little more self discipline and self control. Have a glass of wine with dinner or a beer at the ball game but don't go nuts.
Except most people intentionally use alcohol to loosen up and it's a socially accepted explanation for your behavior if you happen to do something stupid or embarrassing. If people managed to let go of their inhibitions and worries on their own and they weren't judged by different standards they wouldn't need alcohol. For better and for worse I've done things under the influence of alcohol I'd never imagine doing sober.
Remember Firefox was growing almost unstoppable in 2010 and within 2 years started declining FAST. Any piece of software it can happen too as we all remember the days of 90% marketshare of IE 6 too which started to wane in just a few years to Firefox previously.
A major difference: Internet Explorer was intentionally ignored and crippled by Microsoft to stall the development of web apps in favor of native apps. Firefox won because they pretty much got a walkover and everyone except Microsoft wanted it to win. Nobody at Mozilla wanted to lose users and few wanted a for-profit company to replace them but they lost anyway. IMHO because they took way, way, way too long to do multi-process. Close a Chrome tab and the resources get reclaimed. If it crashes, one tab crashes. In Firefox it all came crumbling down and you had to kill it completely. They lost to Chrome on merit and the sooner they get their head out of their ass and stop blaming other things the better. Yeah I saw the ads for Chrome too, but I wouldn't have switched unless it actually sucked less.
Meh, I've read that piece before and it's right except whenever it's wrong. I've ripped out smaller and bigger pieces of software and completely rewritten it from scratch, the problem is that you got people jumping the gun just like those who want to switch to fad language or framework or technology of the day. The people who clearly don't understand the complexity of the software but conclude that because I can't untangle this tangled mess it should be rewritten are dangerous as fuck. Then you have the people that have fought the code, mapped out the maze and when they say it can be done much cleaner and simpler, please listen. A lot of code is just bad, like structurally it's convoluted. Very often it's the result of the code being expanded or twisted into serving unexpected use cases that weren't in the original plan. It's often when you've lived with the system a while you understand the true requirements.