The cable and copyright cartels saw those un-cool Silicon Valley types doing well and decided to try to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
1) Comcast and Verizon broke with standard ISP peering to extort money they weren't due from Netflix. This caused Netflix to have to raise prices. And some people who used to, or still would, pay for Netflix left. And now that they have their puppet running the FCC, this problem is unlikely to be fixed for at least 3-7 years.
2) The copyright cartels decided to launch a bunch of their own fake Netflix-like services. To go along with these, they pulled a bunch of shows and movies away from Netflix and made them exclusive to their own knock-offs. This made even FINDING the show you want to watch into a royal PITA. And it made it necessary for Netflix to start producing their own content; which, of course, costs money and raised the price, driving more people off the service.
People don't like being nickel-and-dimed to death. They don't want to have to maintain a dozen different subscriptions just to watch the one show they want from each. They want to just turn on Netflix and watch their shows. And they DON'T want to have to waste their time hunting through Hulu, HBO Go/Now, CBS All-Access, Disney streaming, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Dramafever, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah. For more than a few people; if something is not on Netflix, the next step isn't a quest to find which fake Netflix it IS on. The next step is The Pirate Bay. This should come as a surprise to no one.
A few years ago in the Bay Area, BART workers went on strike; affecting not just the agency or a single company's bottom line, but screwing over hundreds of thousands of third parties who were not part of the dispute: BART riders who had to find some other way of getting to work (Often adding HOURS to their commute times.), riders of other transit agencies that were then swamped, drivers who were trapped in gridlock, and yes companies that rely on those riders & drivers to be at work to do their jobs.
They were demanding a 23% pay hike, amongst other concessions that drove that up to an effective 29%. Even at the lower number though... The only times I've gotten a 23% pay raise have been when I've changed jobs, either via promotion or by moving companies. I'm pretty sure that's true of most of my friends and peers as well. But even if it's not... dragging uninvolved third parties into your dispute and effectively holding their livelihoods hostage is the epitome of pure, unadulterated, greed and scumbaggery.
Those are real-world conditions in which real-time translation would actually be... you know... useful. The thing is nothing more than a bad gimmick if it only works in a quiet old-timey lecture hall on properly enunciated, grammatically perfect church latin.
If *I* go out, in my city, the top non-english languages I'm going to hear are Chinese, Tagalog, and Spanish; all spoken in a wide variety of accents and dialects owing to what region within China, the Philippines, or Latin America the speaker (or his/her parents) originated, how long and where they've been in the US, their socio-economic class, and so on. And yes, I'm going to hear them on noisy streets and in restaurants and shops and bars.
If a device that bills itself as a realtime Star Trek style universal translator can't cope with those languages and conditions; it's useless for that purpose. I may as well just try sticking a fish in my ear.
The problem with trying for the "+1 Funny" mod is that a lot of people who think they are funny, aren't. Or, if they're funny in person, aren't funny in prose.
Most security is not about security. In fact it really just makes things worse. Whenever I've had the misfortune to travel on a busy airport day and am waiting halfway through the TSA line, or if I'm waiting to get into a concert at a venue that's inserted the security stick up its ass and added metal detectors and pat-down thugs, or if I'm at a theme park that does the same (Even DisneyWorld has jumped onboard this particular stupid train.)...
... I'm kind of forced to stop and think: why would the terr'ists I'm supposed to be so frightened of bother trying to get onto the plane, into the Above & Beyond show, or onto Space Mountain? There're a lot of people penned up, close together, and moving only very slowly waiting to be "screened". The "security" line would be a fine target for someone with a semi-automatic rifle or three. Or, just how much explosive and ball-bearings could a suicide bomber pack into a carryon suitcase he could set off in the midpoint of the line on the day before Thanksgiving?
California's water problem is not one so much of supply though. Allocation is the problem. Thanks to a ridiculous hodgepodge of "water rights" laws dating back over a century and a half; a single industry, agriculture, is allowed to use... mostly for free and often for wasteful flood and spray irrigation... 80% of the state's water supply while contributing only 2% of the state's economic output. Every other industry plus all the households have to fight for what's left; paying increasing rates and accepting usage restrictions.
Reforming the laws, such that all users pay a fair rate based on availability and production, storage, and transport costs... along with a ban on revoltingly wasteful practices like spray and floor irrigation, in favor of modern drip systems... would solve the problem for decades to come, even if no additional supplies were brought online. Of course the agriculture companies fight tooth-and-nail every time this is proposed. They like their feee ride, and they have heretofore had enough sway in Sacramento to torpedo such efforts. But California does have the advantage of the ballot initiative system. So if the water situation continues for too long, or worsens, and the people get too upset. Well... 2% vs 98% and with the majority of the people NOT being in the 2% industry; BigAg could very well find themselves on a shorter end of the stick than if they embrace good-faith reform.
Oh, jersey can be an adventure for sure. I'd just just be an entirely different KIND of adventure.
"Ding dong, the Christie's fed..." "Follow the foul-smelling road..." "If I only had a gun..." "Crackheads and junkies and bums, oh my!" "Just click your heels together and repeat: 'There's no place like SOHO... there's no place like SOHO...'"
The economy recovered, that's what. In 2002, the economy... especially tech... wasn't just receding or declining, it was collapsing. When companies were closing down left and right, half the world was laid off, and even if you were employed you were never confident that your company wouldn't go under next week then sure; half-assed solutions hacked together with whatever scrap you could find lying around made a certain amount of sense. Back then, I had a closet of castoff junk that resembled the droid bay of a sandcrawler too; and built my fair share of bad ideas myself.
Now? For the value of the time I would spend MacGyvering a home-audio rig out of cast-off iPods (Old ones at that, with spinny HDs that are almost certainly near or past EOL by now.), duct tape, and paperclips; I could easily buy something incomparably better and spend my sparse leisure time hiking Mt Tam, camping or snowboarding up by Yosemite or Tahoe, catching up on the backlog of games I haven't had time for, or going out dancing and drinking. And if I was full-out determined to do more "tech stuff" outside my job, I could just pick up some 1099 hours.
Oh yeah... and another big plus. The Genius Bay people LISTEN to me when I describe my problem and the troubleshooting steps I've already taken. They let ME guide them to my problem, and don't try to force me through the scripted "Are you sure it was plugged in? Have you tried rebooting it?", crap that most support types are limited to.
Oh, they can compete. They just have to compete on customer service instead of price. Case in point: Apple retail, which have been the most profitable retail chain per square foot for what... a decade? Longer?
Yeah, I can find a cheaper phone from some no-name vendor that drop-ships from china. But if the thing craps out on me, I'm just SOL. With Apple? I've had three hardware issues with iPhones that weren't my fault. (A flakey button on a 5, and I got bit by the 6s' battery issue twice.). Every time, I've walked in for my Genius Bar appointment, showed them the problem, and walked out with a new phone with the only questions asked being: "Do you have a backup of your data?" and "Would you like us to help set it up for you?".
That's the sort of service that keeps me going back to the Apple store, even when I could technically pay less elsewhere. My time and a lack of aggravation are worth more to me, even if I pay a little more.
What you're missing is that these laws don't have these "loopholes" by accident. This is the way it's supposed to be. They were bought and paid for years ago by the likes of Halliburton, Exxon, Arthur Anderson (Sorry... Accenture), Bechtel, the Koch brothers, and the like. The only reason that DC have their panties in a wad about Apple's, Google's, or Amazon's taxes... and are dragging their names through the mud in the propaganda campaigns that the public is eating up... is that they're not the ones who paid for the laws. They were just clever enough to realize that, once on the books, the laws apply to everyone and not just the companies who bought them. And if Congress were to change the laws, the original purchasers would scream bloody murder and have the offending reps and senators replaced.
Okay. How about: "An important part of our culture is lively debate. But don't expose the company to liability under both state and federal non-discrimination laws by creating a hostile work environment for women when our entire industry is already suspected of being a hostile work environment for women."
The nitwit made himself a liability to the company. And if they HADN'T fired him, Google would have been tolerating, and could be seen as endorsing, his screeds. Fact is, even a company like Walmart or Halliburton would give Damore the pink slip in this situation. And even if he somehow wins his case, which isn't bloody likely, Google is still better off for having fired him and losing one case, versus losing multiple cases filed by the people he wants treated as second-class.
Kaepernick is not really that good though. Do these numbers look familiar to you?
11-4-1 12-4-0 8-8-0 5-11-0 2-14-0
Sure, Kaepernick certainly looked good in the beginning. But he flared early and burnt out. He choked when it really mattered and delivered the 49-ers their first Super Bowl loss in the history of the team. And it just got worse from there. If I were running a team, I'd take a chance myself as well on a new player out of college, who might be on the rise; over someone who is well into his decline into obscurity.
Plus, Kaepernick and every single other 49-er outed themselves as a pack of backstabbing turncoats the day they first played in that stadium in Santa Clara. He and they deserve nothing but misery, failure, losing seasons, and career-ending injuries until they move back to San Francisco, or at least have the minuscule shred of integrity to stop falsely using the name.
I've been a software engineer, a QA engineer, traditional IT SysAdmin, and have now found my niche in SysOps/DevOps/SRE/whatever-we're-calling-it-this-week. And good lords of Kobol, QA is absolutely necessary. The usual reasons definitely apply. A separate pair of eyes will find things you've been blind to because you're too close to your own work. Building things and breaking things are different skillsets and different mindsets. There will be edge cases that even the spec didn't anticipate. Blah blah blah.
But try being on the operations front line some time, and you'll REALLY appreciate a good QA team. Right now, I'm responsible for multiple products from teams that, due to acquisitions and re-orgs and different companies doing things differently, some have dedicated QA and some let the developers test their own code. I see the errors and failures before anyone else. And the QA'd stuff invariably causes me less grief than the "we trust the developers" stuff. Hell, if I had my way, we'd have QA vet ops changes and updates too; because I'm under no illusions of infallibility myself.
Not that Moore's Law will necessarily last forever; but it doesn't actually predict a doubling of clock speed. It predicts a doubling of the number of transistors on a chip. And while clock speeds have been pretty stagnant, pretty much everything is multi-core nowadays. So I wouldn't worry about the apocalypse just yet. Damn application & game developers need to drag themselves out of the last decade and write proper multi-threaded code to take full advantage of modern CPUs, that's all.
I have a fine vacation property west of Miami that you'll love. And I'm willing to part with it for a price that's practically a steal. In fact, I'll handle all of the work for you. Just post your checking account and routing transit numbers here and I'll handle the money transfer myself. I'll also need your DOB and SSN to properly change ownership of the property, and your home address so I can mail the deed to you. Don't miss this opportunity! You'll love it! Be the envy of your friends and family with a vacay home that's practically oceanfront.
You can trust me. I say I'm honest and truthful, therefore, I'm honest and truthful, ipso facto, nolo contendere, de facto, ex facie, cosa nostra, jus primae noctis, in extremis, ustre eme, expressio unius est exclusio alterius.
Apple and Qualcomm are actually in a (strained and adversarial at the moment) legitimate business relationship. As a customer of Qualcomm, Apple has every right to expect that the embedded chipsets they but, as part of that relationship, will be adequately documented. There's probably even be a contractural obligation on Qualcomm to that effect.
Apple and J. Random fly-by-night iPhone repair kiosk in the mall are NOT in a business relationship. Apple (And Samgsing, HTC, etc.) does not, nor should they, have any obligation to them whatsoever. No one does or should, except whatever god-knows-where vendor from which they buy their parts.
Heh. I wonder when these people are going to take notice that Apple... having realized that the market for a $18K status symbol that will, like all technology, be a obsolete in three years, is fairly limited... has refocused the Watch, and its accompanying marketing, almost entirely on health and fitness.
The apoplectic fits whenever one of them sees that little black square on everyones' wrist will be fun to watch.
Agreed on the spec stagnation lately, especially at the price point, which actually increased with that touch bar. But you do realize that your argument about getting rid of legacy USB, Thunderbolt, and such is the exact same argument that the naysayers made when the original iMac shipped without SCSI, ADB, and Serial ports, right?
Personally, I like the "one universal port & cable for everything" approach. I do regret the loss of MagSafe though. And they did waste an opportunity there. I really of wish they'd worked out some way to modify or extend USB-C to add MagSafe or equivalent functionality.
Why NOT all at once? There are reasons why it could or should happen all at once. There is, of course, the "better to fire people on a Friday" idea that, while I first heard about it from Office Space, does seem to be how companies do operate in real live. If, and the GP and GG suggest, they're correcting the mistaken hires, an annual performance review bay have just been completed and they know now who is the deadweight. If, as the GGP and suggest, they did some post complaint investigation and cleanup prompted by some HR violation; the investigation may be have ended and they have their list of names. Or if, as you and the thread originator believe, this is a "stacked ranking" thing, that would occur just after a performance review as well.
Or, it could be a purely practical matter. Perhaps they chose to handle the matter once summer ended and no one in HR or legal was scheduled to go on vacation for a while. Or maybe processing the paperwork is easier in batches than piecemeal. And while stacked ranking has been shown to be pretty stupid and ineffective, "What is the performance review process" is one of those questions that you always ask of your employer during the interview process. So without additional data, it's hard to conclude that anything sinister was going on.
And at the end of the day, "Tesla" looks pretty damn good on a resume. In most cases, you can salvage an involuntary termination in your job history. Car companies have a long and known history for mass-firings any time the quarterly has a blip. And its very much a job-seeker's market, especially in the Bay Area. For anyone who wasn't a total screw-up, this was an inconvenience, not a catastrophe. They'll have jobs elsewhere in the valley in short order; probably at a higher salary than what they left behind.
Do you make a point to keep to the same sleep/wake schedule on the weekends as the weekdays? Because that's what does it for Mondays for me.
I love what I do, and am generally happy at work, too. But going out and being social on Friday and Saturday nights, then sleeping late on Saturday and Sunday morning, is just enough of a shift to my body's expectation of when I'll be going to bed and waking up to make me groggy and miserable Monday mornings.
> Should we panic and see evil communists on every > corner?
No, we shouldn't panic or indulge in paranoia. But we should be cognizant of who our enemies are, and be vigilant and wary of them. It's not like we're talking about HP giving up source code to the UK, Japan, Canada, or Germany here.
Vladimir Putin openly pines for his good old days in the KGB and Soviet Union; having called the dissolution of the latter the "greateast geopolitical catastrophe of the 20thcentury.". This is not paranoia or speculation or exaggeration or McCarthyism. Those are Putin's own words, spoken openly and publicly. And he's been invading neighboring countries like Georgia and Ukraine. He's not our friend and he's not someone we should be helping.
Well... even if you genuinely are the smartest person in the room, the second and third smartest people in the room, working together, are smarter than you. Only a few people in the world are ever so much smarter than everyone else as to leave any potential rival in the dust. Those people tend to wind up having elements or units of measurement named after them.
Have bomb threat calls EVER been considered trustworthy? When I was in college in the '90s, most professors included wording in their syllabuses to the effect that exams would most definitely NOT be cancelled or postponed in the event of a bomb threat; and gave a meeetup point elsewhere on campus where we would be expected to show up and take our exams in the event that a bomb threat was called in for the building in which our exam was scheduled. That would indicate to me that, by that point in time about two decades ago, there were so many phony bomb threats going around that pretty much everyone knew they were BS; and that they'd go through the motions just in case, but they were considered to be no big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
The cable and copyright cartels saw those un-cool Silicon Valley types doing well and decided to try to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
1) Comcast and Verizon broke with standard ISP peering to extort money they weren't due from Netflix. This caused Netflix to have to raise prices. And some people who used to, or still would, pay for Netflix left. And now that they have their puppet running the FCC, this problem is unlikely to be fixed for at least 3-7 years.
2) The copyright cartels decided to launch a bunch of their own fake Netflix-like services. To go along with these, they pulled a bunch of shows and movies away from Netflix and made them exclusive to their own knock-offs. This made even FINDING the show you want to watch into a royal PITA. And it made it necessary for Netflix to start producing their own content; which, of course, costs money and raised the price, driving more people off the service.
People don't like being nickel-and-dimed to death. They don't want to have to maintain a dozen different subscriptions just to watch the one show they want from each. They want to just turn on Netflix and watch their shows. And they DON'T want to have to waste their time hunting through Hulu, HBO Go/Now, CBS All-Access, Disney streaming, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Dramafever, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah. For more than a few people; if something is not on Netflix, the next step isn't a quest to find which fake Netflix it IS on. The next step is The Pirate Bay. This should come as a surprise to no one.
Easy one:
A few years ago in the Bay Area, BART workers went on strike; affecting not just the agency or a single company's bottom line, but screwing over hundreds of thousands of third parties who were not part of the dispute: BART riders who had to find some other way of getting to work (Often adding HOURS to their commute times.), riders of other transit agencies that were then swamped, drivers who were trapped in gridlock, and yes companies that rely on those riders & drivers to be at work to do their jobs.
They were demanding a 23% pay hike, amongst other concessions that drove that up to an effective 29%. Even at the lower number though... The only times I've gotten a 23% pay raise have been when I've changed jobs, either via promotion or by moving companies. I'm pretty sure that's true of most of my friends and peers as well. But even if it's not... dragging uninvolved third parties into your dispute and effectively holding their livelihoods hostage is the epitome of pure, unadulterated, greed and scumbaggery.
Those are real-world conditions in which real-time translation would actually be... you know... useful. The thing is nothing more than a bad gimmick if it only works in a quiet old-timey lecture hall on properly enunciated, grammatically perfect church latin.
If *I* go out, in my city, the top non-english languages I'm going to hear are Chinese, Tagalog, and Spanish; all spoken in a wide variety of accents and dialects owing to what region within China, the Philippines, or Latin America the speaker (or his/her parents) originated, how long and where they've been in the US, their socio-economic class, and so on. And yes, I'm going to hear them on noisy streets and in restaurants and shops and bars.
If a device that bills itself as a realtime Star Trek style universal translator can't cope with those languages and conditions; it's useless for that purpose. I may as well just try sticking a fish in my ear.
The problem with trying for the "+1 Funny" mod is that a lot of people who think they are funny, aren't. Or, if they're funny in person, aren't funny in prose.
Most security is not about security. In fact it really just makes things worse. Whenever I've had the misfortune to travel on a busy airport day and am waiting halfway through the TSA line, or if I'm waiting to get into a concert at a venue that's inserted the security stick up its ass and added metal detectors and pat-down thugs, or if I'm at a theme park that does the same (Even DisneyWorld has jumped onboard this particular stupid train.)...
California's water problem is not one so much of supply though. Allocation is the problem. Thanks to a ridiculous hodgepodge of "water rights" laws dating back over a century and a half; a single industry, agriculture, is allowed to use... mostly for free and often for wasteful flood and spray irrigation... 80% of the state's water supply while contributing only 2% of the state's economic output. Every other industry plus all the households have to fight for what's left; paying increasing rates and accepting usage restrictions.
Reforming the laws, such that all users pay a fair rate based on availability and production, storage, and transport costs... along with a ban on revoltingly wasteful practices like spray and floor irrigation, in favor of modern drip systems... would solve the problem for decades to come, even if no additional supplies were brought online. Of course the agriculture companies fight tooth-and-nail every time this is proposed. They like their feee ride, and they have heretofore had enough sway in Sacramento to torpedo such efforts. But California does have the advantage of the ballot initiative system. So if the water situation continues for too long, or worsens, and the people get too upset. Well... 2% vs 98% and with the majority of the people NOT being in the 2% industry; BigAg could very well find themselves on a shorter end of the stick than if they embrace good-faith reform.
Oh, jersey can be an adventure for sure. I'd just just be an entirely different KIND of adventure.
"Ding dong, the Christie's fed..."
"Follow the foul-smelling road..."
"If I only had a gun..."
"Crackheads and junkies and bums, oh my!"
"Just click your heels together and repeat: 'There's no place like SOHO... there's no place like SOHO...'"
The economy recovered, that's what. In 2002, the economy... especially tech... wasn't just receding or declining, it was collapsing. When companies were closing down left and right, half the world was laid off, and even if you were employed you were never confident that your company wouldn't go under next week then sure; half-assed solutions hacked together with whatever scrap you could find lying around made a certain amount of sense. Back then, I had a closet of castoff junk that resembled the droid bay of a sandcrawler too; and built my fair share of bad ideas myself.
Now? For the value of the time I would spend MacGyvering a home-audio rig out of cast-off iPods (Old ones at that, with spinny HDs that are almost certainly near or past EOL by now.), duct tape, and paperclips; I could easily buy something incomparably better and spend my sparse leisure time hiking Mt Tam, camping or snowboarding up by Yosemite or Tahoe, catching up on the backlog of games I haven't had time for, or going out dancing and drinking. And if I was full-out determined to do more "tech stuff" outside my job, I could just pick up some 1099 hours.
Oh yeah... and another big plus. The Genius Bay people LISTEN to me when I describe my problem and the troubleshooting steps I've already taken. They let ME guide them to my problem, and don't try to force me through the scripted "Are you sure it was plugged in? Have you tried rebooting it?", crap that most support types are limited to.
Oh, they can compete. They just have to compete on customer service instead of price. Case in point: Apple retail, which have been the most profitable retail chain per square foot for what... a decade? Longer?
Yeah, I can find a cheaper phone from some no-name vendor that drop-ships from china. But if the thing craps out on me, I'm just SOL. With Apple? I've had three hardware issues with iPhones that weren't my fault. (A flakey button on a 5, and I got bit by the 6s' battery issue twice.). Every time, I've walked in for my Genius Bar appointment, showed them the problem, and walked out with a new phone with the only questions asked being: "Do you have a backup of your data?" and "Would you like us to help set it up for you?".
That's the sort of service that keeps me going back to the Apple store, even when I could technically pay less elsewhere. My time and a lack of aggravation are worth more to me, even if I pay a little more.
What you're missing is that these laws don't have these "loopholes" by accident. This is the way it's supposed to be. They were bought and paid for years ago by the likes of Halliburton, Exxon, Arthur Anderson (Sorry... Accenture), Bechtel, the Koch brothers, and the like. The only reason that DC have their panties in a wad about Apple's, Google's, or Amazon's taxes... and are dragging their names through the mud in the propaganda campaigns that the public is eating up... is that they're not the ones who paid for the laws. They were just clever enough to realize that, once on the books, the laws apply to everyone and not just the companies who bought them. And if Congress were to change the laws, the original purchasers would scream bloody murder and have the offending reps and senators replaced.
Okay. How about: "An important part of our culture is lively debate. But don't expose the company to liability under both state and federal non-discrimination laws by creating a hostile work environment for women when our entire industry is already suspected of being a hostile work environment for women."
The nitwit made himself a liability to the company. And if they HADN'T fired him, Google would have been tolerating, and could be seen as endorsing, his screeds. Fact is, even a company like Walmart or Halliburton would give Damore the pink slip in this situation. And even if he somehow wins his case, which isn't bloody likely, Google is still better off for having fired him and losing one case, versus losing multiple cases filed by the people he wants treated as second-class.
Kaepernick is not really that good though. Do these numbers look familiar to you?
11-4-1
12-4-0
8-8-0
5-11-0
2-14-0
Sure, Kaepernick certainly looked good in the beginning. But he flared early and burnt out. He choked when it really mattered and delivered the 49-ers their first Super Bowl loss in the history of the team. And it just got worse from there. If I were running a team, I'd take a chance myself as well on a new player out of college, who might be on the rise; over someone who is well into his decline into obscurity.
Plus, Kaepernick and every single other 49-er outed themselves as a pack of backstabbing turncoats the day they first played in that stadium in Santa Clara. He and they deserve nothing but misery, failure, losing seasons, and career-ending injuries until they move back to San Francisco, or at least have the minuscule shred of integrity to stop falsely using the name.
I've been a software engineer, a QA engineer, traditional IT SysAdmin, and have now found my niche in SysOps/DevOps/SRE/whatever-we're-calling-it-this-week. And good lords of Kobol, QA is absolutely necessary. The usual reasons definitely apply. A separate pair of eyes will find things you've been blind to because you're too close to your own work. Building things and breaking things are different skillsets and different mindsets. There will be edge cases that even the spec didn't anticipate. Blah blah blah.
But try being on the operations front line some time, and you'll REALLY appreciate a good QA team. Right now, I'm responsible for multiple products from teams that, due to acquisitions and re-orgs and different companies doing things differently, some have dedicated QA and some let the developers test their own code. I see the errors and failures before anyone else. And the QA'd stuff invariably causes me less grief than the "we trust the developers" stuff. Hell, if I had my way, we'd have QA vet ops changes and updates too; because I'm under no illusions of infallibility myself.
Not that Moore's Law will necessarily last forever; but it doesn't actually predict a doubling of clock speed. It predicts a doubling of the number of transistors on a chip. And while clock speeds have been pretty stagnant, pretty much everything is multi-core nowadays. So I wouldn't worry about the apocalypse just yet. Damn application & game developers need to drag themselves out of the last decade and write proper multi-threaded code to take full advantage of modern CPUs, that's all.
I have a fine vacation property west of Miami that you'll love. And I'm willing to part with it for a price that's practically a steal. In fact, I'll handle all of the work for you. Just post your checking account and routing transit numbers here and I'll handle the money transfer myself. I'll also need your DOB and SSN to properly change ownership of the property, and your home address so I can mail the deed to you. Don't miss this opportunity! You'll love it! Be the envy of your friends and family with a vacay home that's practically oceanfront.
You can trust me. I say I'm honest and truthful, therefore, I'm honest and truthful, ipso facto, nolo contendere, de facto, ex facie, cosa nostra, jus primae noctis, in extremis, ustre eme, expressio unius est exclusio alterius.
World of difference.
Apple and Qualcomm are actually in a (strained and adversarial at the moment) legitimate business relationship. As a customer of Qualcomm, Apple has every right to expect that the embedded chipsets they but, as part of that relationship, will be adequately documented. There's probably even be a contractural obligation on Qualcomm to that effect.
Apple and J. Random fly-by-night iPhone repair kiosk in the mall are NOT in a business relationship. Apple (And Samgsing, HTC, etc.) does not, nor should they, have any obligation to them whatsoever. No one does or should, except whatever god-knows-where vendor from which they buy their parts.
Yes, but back then wasn't there a checkbox you could use to filter out Jon Katz's supercilious and presumptuous claptrap?
Heh. I wonder when these people are going to take notice that Apple... having realized that the market for a $18K status symbol that will, like all technology, be a obsolete in three years, is fairly limited... has refocused the Watch, and its accompanying marketing, almost entirely on health and fitness.
The apoplectic fits whenever one of them sees that little black square on everyones' wrist will be fun to watch.
Agreed on the spec stagnation lately, especially at the price point, which actually increased with that touch bar. But you do realize that your argument about getting rid of legacy USB, Thunderbolt, and such is the exact same argument that the naysayers made when the original iMac shipped without SCSI, ADB, and Serial ports, right?
Personally, I like the "one universal port & cable for everything" approach. I do regret the loss of MagSafe though. And they did waste an opportunity there. I really of wish they'd worked out some way to modify or extend USB-C to add MagSafe or equivalent functionality.
Why NOT all at once? There are reasons why it could or should happen all at once. There is, of course, the "better to fire people on a Friday" idea that, while I first heard about it from Office Space, does seem to be how companies do operate in real live. If, and the GP and GG suggest, they're correcting the mistaken hires, an annual performance review bay have just been completed and they know now who is the deadweight. If, as the GGP and suggest, they did some post complaint investigation and cleanup prompted by some HR violation; the investigation may be have ended and they have their list of names. Or if, as you and the thread originator believe, this is a "stacked ranking" thing, that would occur just after a performance review as well.
Or, it could be a purely practical matter. Perhaps they chose to handle the matter once summer ended and no one in HR or legal was scheduled to go on vacation for a while. Or maybe processing the paperwork is easier in batches than piecemeal. And while stacked ranking has been shown to be pretty stupid and ineffective, "What is the performance review process" is one of those questions that you always ask of your employer during the interview process. So without additional data, it's hard to conclude that anything sinister was going on.
And at the end of the day, "Tesla" looks pretty damn good on a resume. In most cases, you can salvage an involuntary termination in your job history. Car companies have a long and known history for mass-firings any time the quarterly has a blip. And its very much a job-seeker's market, especially in the Bay Area. For anyone who wasn't a total screw-up, this was an inconvenience, not a catastrophe. They'll have jobs elsewhere in the valley in short order; probably at a higher salary than what they left behind.
Do you make a point to keep to the same sleep/wake schedule on the weekends as the weekdays? Because that's what does it for Mondays for me.
I love what I do, and am generally happy at work, too. But going out and being social on Friday and Saturday nights, then sleeping late on Saturday and Sunday morning, is just enough of a shift to my body's expectation of when I'll be going to bed and waking up to make me groggy and miserable Monday mornings.
> Should we panic and see evil communists on every
> corner?
No, we shouldn't panic or indulge in paranoia. But we should be cognizant of who our enemies are, and be vigilant and wary of them. It's not like we're talking about HP giving up source code to the UK, Japan, Canada, or Germany here.
Vladimir Putin openly pines for his good old days in the KGB and Soviet Union; having called the dissolution of the latter the "greateast geopolitical catastrophe of the 20thcentury.". This is not paranoia or speculation or exaggeration or McCarthyism. Those are Putin's own words, spoken openly and publicly. And he's been invading neighboring countries like Georgia and Ukraine. He's not our friend and he's not someone we should be helping.
Well... even if you genuinely are the smartest person in the room, the second and third smartest people in the room, working together, are smarter than you. Only a few people in the world are ever so much smarter than everyone else as to leave any potential rival in the dust. Those people tend to wind up having elements or units of measurement named after them.
Have bomb threat calls EVER been considered trustworthy? When I was in college in the '90s, most professors included wording in their syllabuses to the effect that exams would most definitely NOT be cancelled or postponed in the event of a bomb threat; and gave a meeetup point elsewhere on campus where we would be expected to show up and take our exams in the event that a bomb threat was called in for the building in which our exam was scheduled. That would indicate to me that, by that point in time about two decades ago, there were so many phony bomb threats going around that pretty much everyone knew they were BS; and that they'd go through the motions just in case, but they were considered to be no big deal.