Problem is that law cannot fix this sort of thing. Yes it is illegal, now how to prove that it actually occurred in an illegal way.
The person who fails to get in the door due to discrimination? They have no *idea* what the other candidates had in terms of experience, so any such claim is as likely to blow up in their faces as anything else.
Whistleblowing? Well, in the first case, there's a *chance* of that working, though even there it can be argued that it's not discrimination, it's just one of the evaluators having a different opinion than the others, and imaging gender has a role. In the second case, all of the above applies *and* carries the additional problem of being the sort of problem a misogynist or racist would claim, so the potential sympathy is not there.
Waiting for a qualified and 'diverse' candidate may also be illegal, but it's something I would mind less personally than jumping at the first possibility to meet that goal that comes along. It's not *good*, but at least I get a competent coworker.
It's a bit of a blow to the community, because it means we are down to 2 real browsers, so the Chrome/Google monoculture will expand. That's bad for the development community.
Eh, I would argue that in theory that's the case, but in practice it's better.
The theory assumes that all the stakeholders stand as equals and describe perfectly specific standards in W3C and any discrepancies uncovered in implementations are reconciled in W3C and any vendor is equally likely to have to modify their behavior. In this theoretical world, Microsoft's investment in taking care of their interests focused on W3C participation and their own implementation, without following Blink development too closely.
In practice, W3C standards (like any standard) will have lots of room for interpretation. In Edge, Microsoft's strategy in practice was not 'hey, there's a difference in how Edge and Chrome act, we need to reconcile in a fair and equitable way', it was 'oh crap, we aren't chrome compatible, we have to change to be like Chrome'. Here shifting the technical investment to the Blink engine allows them to be more on top of what's going on and improve what little chances they may have in serving as a check and balance as well as ensuring any technologies they have are on top of the state of the art. This is not such a terrible thing, to have a 'reference' implementation of a spec. I would say that's a great failing of W3C standards, without a reference implementation it's impossible to find all the implicit design decisions and other things that crop up and can be a difference between implementations.
It's more about 'We want to cater to people who don't install our 'App' and for those who scream 'we want a desktop client', being able to fake providing that by shipping a bundled browser. Most don't care about supporting macOS and Linux desktops that much, and ChromeOS, well Electron doesn't matter because you are forced to deliver it as a browser extension anyway.
PWA's can 'install' and run in a browser that doesn't look like a browser without ever requiring contact with an internet server. PWAs can read/write local files (with restrictions).
Electron is the strategy for 'webapp hipsters' to displace native applications. So if you are of a mind to call people 'webapp hipsters', Electron represents the worst nightmare of letting the webapp hipsters displace native application.
Note that there are indeed 'shitgoblins', there is plenty wrong in professional cultures both ways.
People are absolutely discriminated against. I'll always remember one time faced with a few candidates the obviously best candidate happened to be a woman. She didn't get the job, because everyone else was so skeptical as to not recognize that fact that she was the best.
On the other hand, I can also recall being in another company and generally we'd go through many rounds of candidates before we found a fit. One time part of the first wave was a woman, which is a rare occurrence. In *this* case, she was woefully under qualified, but this team jumped at the chance to hire a woman. This actually repeated a couple of times and there was understandable resentment that we got stuck with unqualified people by happenstance of their gender or race. There are teams that relax their expectations in the pursuit of diversity. I wouldn't even mind if they wanted to fix imbalance by waiting longer to find a candidate who is both qualified and a member of an underrepresented group, but management of this mindset is not confident they can do that.
In both the first example and the second example are prejudiced against certain groups, the first by not letting them work and the second for not believing any could qualify fairly. Part of the problem is that circumstances leading up to the professional world are imbalanced (our culture, our educational system) and particularly culture is hard to fix balance. Many diversification initiatives at professional levels are forced to ignore the other problems not getting fixed and pretend they are and target balances of the general population when a given niche has the deck stacked a certain way.
Well that's not the situation. It's people pursuing those degrees to have 'a college degree' because of some *very* bad advice/interpretation that companies just want *a* degree and don't care about curriculum.
I remember in college someone was majoring in a humanities, but his goal was to make a lot of money working in computers. The person he was talking to was understandable confused and said 'but then why not study one of the computer related majors?' 'I tried, but the course work was too challenging, I figure I'll just get an easy degree and one of those certifications and that should be good enough'. I can only remember *one* time seeing it that badly blatant, so this is probably rare. I did know some people that followed their dream and studied a liberal arts course and was disappointed at their prospects coming out. They weren't expecting to work at a tech company or anything, but somehow they didn't realize demand for liberal arts greatly exceeds the people who love to study liberal arts. The happiest ones paired up and married people with more robust prospects and so their problematic careers were not an issue, but those that married fellow liberal arts graduates have had a rough time of it.
Reading the article, if Blink had any context in the survey, then they clearly intended the 'unhealthy sexist culture' as well as discrimination and micromanagement. I would wager that the respondents in that case would have also considered 'too much inclusion' dysfunctional, so the only way for a workplace to get a good score is for everyone to be like-minded, otherwise the workplace is damned if they do, damned if they don't.
If they didn't provide the respondents context, then it's useless and needs to be ignored because my first thought was actual health related, like reasonable working hours, whether it's practical to exercise, that sort of thing.
If Microsoft had plaid it differently, the OS could have provided a framework for this that would be federated, in the same way yum and apt are federated on Linux distros.
The problem is that as a commercial endeavor, no one is particularly motivated to provide that neutral, no-charge federated solution.
Wine does an admirable job and does a solid job of supporting third-party software built originally for Windows.
When it comes to trying to support Microsoft software built for Windows, it falls over hard more often than not.
Microsoft would have better luck doing it, but I think the argument that porting the Windows architecture to the linux kernel is more expensive than status quo is strong, and Microsoft would gain nothing except to enable a small portion of the population to reduce their use of microsoft software.
While it may have been ill-advised, realistically netscape was screwed by the gigantic disadvantage of having to be downloaded in a time when 57 kbit was the typical internet bandwidth.
So they suffered from two things: -Microsoft bundling it into the OS meant that *everyone* had a serviceable browser -Netscape did not manage to overcome this through getting the OEMs to bundle their alternative (Hardware vendors wouldn't do this without getting paid to do so, and MS stood there with always deeper incentives for OEMs to *not* bundle Netscape).
There's no amount of doing the technology part of the browser better that could have saved them.
I presume the call is 'EdgeHTML just makes more expensive work', as in their web development efforts are forced to support Edge, Blink, Webkit, and (maybe) Gecko engines. One of those is a self-inflicted wound so ditch it.
In addition to the obvious burden of developing their own rendering engine for no obvious benefit. *If* Edge had taken the crown back and been majority browser then maybe they could have returned to proprietary shenanigans and get benefit, but as that didn't pan out the engine is just a liability in every way.
Most of the hype I hear is around smaller cells to better serve urban populations. I haven't read a whole lot about how they are expecting or not expecting 5G to make a difference in rural/mountainous areas.
I would love to see any material that expressly documents 5G from the perspective of those markets.
It is a very good point that somehow despite all our advances, running terrestial communication lines is somehow impossible now, even though all these sites, for example, have grid power which is a much more challenging infrastructure.
When I'm with my rural family, it's absolutely a signal issue. Drive car 30 meters up the mountain, solid signal and high bandwidth (yes it's a tower covering a large area, but we are talking about 1 person per 50 acres or so, so it's not like the tower was vaguely busy.
I suspect the ROI for Starlink or similar will ultimately be poor.
The problem is for any aggregation of population, terrestrial strategies are going to compete. Meaning the market of people best served by a strategy like Starlink is probably going to be 10% of the population at the very most optimistic, I'd wager more like 2-3%. Of that population, I'd say most of them could pay a few hundred dollars to get an antenna setup to get acceptable cellular coverage for LTE which would be 'good enough'. Many of the rest won't care enough to bother.
Meanwhile, the altitude of these satellites is a problem. It's both high enough to require expensive rocketry to reach, but low enough for acceptable latency that they will need frequent replacing (drag will tear them out of the sky) and require many more thousands than we currently have out there to get coverage.
FCC will approve them to do it, but FCC doesn't require validation of the fiscal sense.
Problem is that it won't be viable for the rural population to go without, but at the same time launching satellites won't be economic when supported *solely* by the rural population.
I think they are *much* better served by sorting out a strategy for economicly viable high speed internet rather than continuing to try to find ways to have them not require internet so much. If they have satellite broadcast television and the urban population breaks from that, either way the rural population would be missing out.
Most experts agree that China most likely did *NOT* do this. Not because they *wouldn't*, but a mix of they *couldn't* (the alleged component isn't in a useful position to actually *do* anything that interesting from a snooping perspective) and they would have much better ways of doing an attack (the platform in question had no protections for firmware, China could have freely replaced firmware and it would have been *much* less likely to get caught and have much greater access to actually useful data.
You have to remember both companies dumped SuperMicro as a supplier around the same time a couple of years ago
Yes and at the time, sources noted that Supermicro's download site had been hacked once with malicious firmware, and that incident reminded everyone that SuperMicro wasn't doing anything to protect the integrity of the firmware from malicious attack, and that's enough strikes to be out. There may have been a desperate 'premium' vendor in the mix too willing to compete on price with a much better product.
Or do I believe an investigative journalist who found multiple sources confirming the hack happened?
The one named source in the original story came forward and said his interaction should *not* have been interpreted as confirmation, and that his conversation was misrepresented. He was asked 'what's a signal coupler?' and answered with a link to a part catalog showing what a signal coupler is. Additionally he provided hypothetical explanation of how a hardware hack might work. This became 'Joe Fitzpatrick confirms this is a hacked chip found in the hardware!'
The way his response was misinterpreted caused him to understandably be skeptical of the whole article.
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about supply chain security. However this specific article is in all likelihood a completely bogus take on a much more mundane reality more widely reported about SuperMicro not being generally secure enough at the time to continue to be a supplier to certain datacenters.
I doubt there would be a single example of a person who would forsake their ambition simply because they couldn't pass it on as highly liquid value.
Those that are interested in using their wealth for a legacy would find other more concrete ways to confer an advantage to their heirs. Those heirs would be advantaged, but would have no choice but to actually work to get benefit out of it, versus a trust fund which *may* have useless entitled benefits.
It's a challenge because you are right, there is enough wealth for basic human rights for every person, as it stands.
However if you take away the need to work, much of that 'wealth' evaporates.
We have a conundrum, we *can* take care of everyone even if some people are unwilling or unable to have a job. The day will come when we can't even come up with anything for all the capable and willing people to work to have a job. As far as being decently human, we should take care of folks even if they don't have a job. However, some people must carry on working in order for those few to be taken care of. So how do we fairly decide who is stuck having to work to take care of those who don't have to work if everyone is well compensated? Going the other way, how can we stand to withhold surplus resources from the needy when we know full well it can be spared?
In practice, registrar and CAs and the most prominent companies are doing things so that visual inspection of the name part of the url+padlock is enough to feel somewhat good, seeing the legal entity name (EV SSL) is even better. It's unlikely that a phishing site can have a domain that visibly resembles a well-known site's name with a trusted cert in this day and age.
Yes, places bouncing around through third party servers exist. If that third party is obviously a well known payment processor (paypal, visa, etc) or a well known identity provider (google, facebook), ok (and that is unfortunately the compromise needed to support smaller businesses online where reputation is very tricky). If it is some obscure provider the site you were trying to do business with is using that you have never heard of, take your business somewhere else that you can be confident about and let them know their use of no-reputation third party service caused them to lose your business.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem is that law cannot fix this sort of thing. Yes it is illegal, now how to prove that it actually occurred in an illegal way.
The person who fails to get in the door due to discrimination? They have no *idea* what the other candidates had in terms of experience, so any such claim is as likely to blow up in their faces as anything else.
Whistleblowing? Well, in the first case, there's a *chance* of that working, though even there it can be argued that it's not discrimination, it's just one of the evaluators having a different opinion than the others, and imaging gender has a role. In the second case, all of the above applies *and* carries the additional problem of being the sort of problem a misogynist or racist would claim, so the potential sympathy is not there.
Waiting for a qualified and 'diverse' candidate may also be illegal, but it's something I would mind less personally than jumping at the first possibility to meet that goal that comes along. It's not *good*, but at least I get a competent coworker.
It's a bit of a blow to the community, because it means we are down to 2 real browsers, so the Chrome/Google monoculture will expand. That's bad for the development community.
Eh, I would argue that in theory that's the case, but in practice it's better.
The theory assumes that all the stakeholders stand as equals and describe perfectly specific standards in W3C and any discrepancies uncovered in implementations are reconciled in W3C and any vendor is equally likely to have to modify their behavior. In this theoretical world, Microsoft's investment in taking care of their interests focused on W3C participation and their own implementation, without following Blink development too closely.
In practice, W3C standards (like any standard) will have lots of room for interpretation. In Edge, Microsoft's strategy in practice was not 'hey, there's a difference in how Edge and Chrome act, we need to reconcile in a fair and equitable way', it was 'oh crap, we aren't chrome compatible, we have to change to be like Chrome'. Here shifting the technical investment to the Blink engine allows them to be more on top of what's going on and improve what little chances they may have in serving as a check and balance as well as ensuring any technologies they have are on top of the state of the art. This is not such a terrible thing, to have a 'reference' implementation of a spec. I would say that's a great failing of W3C standards, without a reference implementation it's impossible to find all the implicit design decisions and other things that crop up and can be a difference between implementations.
It's more about 'We want to cater to people who don't install our 'App' and for those who scream 'we want a desktop client', being able to fake providing that by shipping a bundled browser. Most don't care about supporting macOS and Linux desktops that much, and ChromeOS, well Electron doesn't matter because you are forced to deliver it as a browser extension anyway.
PWA's can 'install' and run in a browser that doesn't look like a browser without ever requiring contact with an internet server. PWAs can read/write local files (with restrictions).
Electron is the strategy for 'webapp hipsters' to displace native applications. So if you are of a mind to call people 'webapp hipsters', Electron represents the worst nightmare of letting the webapp hipsters displace native application.
Note that there are indeed 'shitgoblins', there is plenty wrong in professional cultures both ways.
People are absolutely discriminated against. I'll always remember one time faced with a few candidates the obviously best candidate happened to be a woman. She didn't get the job, because everyone else was so skeptical as to not recognize that fact that she was the best.
On the other hand, I can also recall being in another company and generally we'd go through many rounds of candidates before we found a fit. One time part of the first wave was a woman, which is a rare occurrence. In *this* case, she was woefully under qualified, but this team jumped at the chance to hire a woman. This actually repeated a couple of times and there was understandable resentment that we got stuck with unqualified people by happenstance of their gender or race. There are teams that relax their expectations in the pursuit of diversity. I wouldn't even mind if they wanted to fix imbalance by waiting longer to find a candidate who is both qualified and a member of an underrepresented group, but management of this mindset is not confident they can do that.
In both the first example and the second example are prejudiced against certain groups, the first by not letting them work and the second for not believing any could qualify fairly. Part of the problem is that circumstances leading up to the professional world are imbalanced (our culture, our educational system) and particularly culture is hard to fix balance. Many diversification initiatives at professional levels are forced to ignore the other problems not getting fixed and pretend they are and target balances of the general population when a given niche has the deck stacked a certain way.
employer demands 4 years of feminine studies
Well that's not the situation. It's people pursuing those degrees to have 'a college degree' because of some *very* bad advice/interpretation that companies just want *a* degree and don't care about curriculum.
I remember in college someone was majoring in a humanities, but his goal was to make a lot of money working in computers. The person he was talking to was understandable confused and said 'but then why not study one of the computer related majors?' 'I tried, but the course work was too challenging, I figure I'll just get an easy degree and one of those certifications and that should be good enough'. I can only remember *one* time seeing it that badly blatant, so this is probably rare. I did know some people that followed their dream and studied a liberal arts course and was disappointed at their prospects coming out. They weren't expecting to work at a tech company or anything, but somehow they didn't realize demand for liberal arts greatly exceeds the people who love to study liberal arts. The happiest ones paired up and married people with more robust prospects and so their problematic careers were not an issue, but those that married fellow liberal arts graduates have had a rough time of it.
Reading the article, if Blink had any context in the survey, then they clearly intended the 'unhealthy sexist culture' as well as discrimination and micromanagement. I would wager that the respondents in that case would have also considered 'too much inclusion' dysfunctional, so the only way for a workplace to get a good score is for everyone to be like-minded, otherwise the workplace is damned if they do, damned if they don't.
If they didn't provide the respondents context, then it's useless and needs to be ignored because my first thought was actual health related, like reasonable working hours, whether it's practical to exercise, that sort of thing.
If Microsoft had plaid it differently, the OS could have provided a framework for this that would be federated, in the same way yum and apt are federated on Linux distros.
The problem is that as a commercial endeavor, no one is particularly motivated to provide that neutral, no-charge federated solution.
The moment it is no longer cheaper, then devs will go elsewhere.
The issue is that 'app stores' take an obscene cut compared to rates in other industries.
Wine does an admirable job and does a solid job of supporting third-party software built originally for Windows.
When it comes to trying to support Microsoft software built for Windows, it falls over hard more often than not.
Microsoft would have better luck doing it, but I think the argument that porting the Windows architecture to the linux kernel is more expensive than status quo is strong, and Microsoft would gain nothing except to enable a small portion of the population to reduce their use of microsoft software.
While it may have been ill-advised, realistically netscape was screwed by the gigantic disadvantage of having to be downloaded in a time when 57 kbit was the typical internet bandwidth.
So they suffered from two things:
-Microsoft bundling it into the OS meant that *everyone* had a serviceable browser
-Netscape did not manage to overcome this through getting the OEMs to bundle their alternative (Hardware vendors wouldn't do this without getting paid to do so, and MS stood there with always deeper incentives for OEMs to *not* bundle Netscape).
There's no amount of doing the technology part of the browser better that could have saved them.
I presume the call is 'EdgeHTML just makes more expensive work', as in their web development efforts are forced to support Edge, Blink, Webkit, and (maybe) Gecko engines. One of those is a self-inflicted wound so ditch it.
In addition to the obvious burden of developing their own rendering engine for no obvious benefit. *If* Edge had taken the crown back and been majority browser then maybe they could have returned to proprietary shenanigans and get benefit, but as that didn't pan out the engine is just a liability in every way.
Most of the hype I hear is around smaller cells to better serve urban populations. I haven't read a whole lot about how they are expecting or not expecting 5G to make a difference in rural/mountainous areas.
I would love to see any material that expressly documents 5G from the perspective of those markets.
It is a very good point that somehow despite all our advances, running terrestial communication lines is somehow impossible now, even though all these sites, for example, have grid power which is a much more challenging infrastructure.
When I'm with my rural family, it's absolutely a signal issue. Drive car 30 meters up the mountain, solid signal and high bandwidth (yes it's a tower covering a large area, but we are talking about 1 person per 50 acres or so, so it's not like the tower was vaguely busy.
I suspect the ROI for Starlink or similar will ultimately be poor.
The problem is for any aggregation of population, terrestrial strategies are going to compete. Meaning the market of people best served by a strategy like Starlink is probably going to be 10% of the population at the very most optimistic, I'd wager more like 2-3%. Of that population, I'd say most of them could pay a few hundred dollars to get an antenna setup to get acceptable cellular coverage for LTE which would be 'good enough'. Many of the rest won't care enough to bother.
Meanwhile, the altitude of these satellites is a problem. It's both high enough to require expensive rocketry to reach, but low enough for acceptable latency that they will need frequent replacing (drag will tear them out of the sky) and require many more thousands than we currently have out there to get coverage.
FCC will approve them to do it, but FCC doesn't require validation of the fiscal sense.
Problem is that it won't be viable for the rural population to go without, but at the same time launching satellites won't be economic when supported *solely* by the rural population.
I think they are *much* better served by sorting out a strategy for economicly viable high speed internet rather than continuing to try to find ways to have them not require internet so much. If they have satellite broadcast television and the urban population breaks from that, either way the rural population would be missing out.
The last republican *president* worthy of respect, but there have been plenty of respectable republican politicians.
Of course it's hard to notice them among the rabid anti-science, racist, and sycophantic behavior that dominates the party.
Well, chances are China DID do this.
Most experts agree that China most likely did *NOT* do this. Not because they *wouldn't*, but a mix of they *couldn't* (the alleged component isn't in a useful position to actually *do* anything that interesting from a snooping perspective) and they would have much better ways of doing an attack (the platform in question had no protections for firmware, China could have freely replaced firmware and it would have been *much* less likely to get caught and have much greater access to actually useful data.
You have to remember both companies dumped SuperMicro as a supplier around the same time a couple of years ago
Yes and at the time, sources noted that Supermicro's download site had been hacked once with malicious firmware, and that incident reminded everyone that SuperMicro wasn't doing anything to protect the integrity of the firmware from malicious attack, and that's enough strikes to be out. There may have been a desperate 'premium' vendor in the mix too willing to compete on price with a much better product.
Or do I believe an investigative journalist who found multiple sources confirming the hack happened?
The one named source in the original story came forward and said his interaction should *not* have been interpreted as confirmation, and that his conversation was misrepresented. He was asked 'what's a signal coupler?' and answered with a link to a part catalog showing what a signal coupler is. Additionally he provided hypothetical explanation of how a hardware hack might work. This became 'Joe Fitzpatrick confirms this is a hacked chip found in the hardware!'
The way his response was misinterpreted caused him to understandably be skeptical of the whole article.
https://appleinsider.com/artic...
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about supply chain security. However this specific article is in all likelihood a completely bogus take on a much more mundane reality more widely reported about SuperMicro not being generally secure enough at the time to continue to be a supplier to certain datacenters.
It could have been much worse, it could have been posted as 6 distinct articles.
I doubt there would be a single example of a person who would forsake their ambition simply because they couldn't pass it on as highly liquid value.
Those that are interested in using their wealth for a legacy would find other more concrete ways to confer an advantage to their heirs. Those heirs would be advantaged, but would have no choice but to actually work to get benefit out of it, versus a trust fund which *may* have useless entitled benefits.
It's a challenge because you are right, there is enough wealth for basic human rights for every person, as it stands.
However if you take away the need to work, much of that 'wealth' evaporates.
We have a conundrum, we *can* take care of everyone even if some people are unwilling or unable to have a job. The day will come when we can't even come up with anything for all the capable and willing people to work to have a job. As far as being decently human, we should take care of folks even if they don't have a job. However, some people must carry on working in order for those few to be taken care of. So how do we fairly decide who is stuck having to work to take care of those who don't have to work if everyone is well compensated? Going the other way, how can we stand to withhold surplus resources from the needy when we know full well it can be spared?
In practice, registrar and CAs and the most prominent companies are doing things so that visual inspection of the name part of the url+padlock is enough to feel somewhat good, seeing the legal entity name (EV SSL) is even better. It's unlikely that a phishing site can have a domain that visibly resembles a well-known site's name with a trusted cert in this day and age.
Yes, places bouncing around through third party servers exist. If that third party is obviously a well known payment processor (paypal, visa, etc) or a well known identity provider (google, facebook), ok (and that is unfortunately the compromise needed to support smaller businesses online where reputation is very tricky). If it is some obscure provider the site you were trying to do business with is using that you have never heard of, take your business somewhere else that you can be confident about and let them know their use of no-reputation third party service caused them to lose your business.