The ICQ network was unified with AIM years ago. I remember using my ICQ credentials with iChat to log into the AIM network and talk to AIM users back in 2005/6ish. If they're turning off AIM, why do you think they'll leave ICQ enabled?
Which is why his point makes no sense. The things that are approved by the FDA are more or less the same things that are approved in the UK. The existence of the NHS doesn't prevent you from having a private doctor prescribe you approved drugs or performing approved surgery, even if the NHS won't cover it.
In the UK, the Weights and Measures Act defines a small glass as 125ml and 175ml, and multiples of these, as the permitted serving sizes. Most places use 125ml and 250ml as the standard serving sizes.
Nobody uses glasses that small anymore. I don't know how anyone did in those days. They were like shot glasses.
They had armies of servants to keep them filled. Small was a feature, because it meant it needed refilling more often and so you got to show off the number of servants that you had more visibly. If you had larger glasses then you wouldn't have an excuse for your servants to wander around the room refilling glasses as much and people might not notice that you could afford so many.
The middle classes (who couldn't afford servants, but could afford wine and expensive glasses) used small ones because that's what fashionable people used. This changed when mass production meant that the size of a fashionable glass was set by the more-numerous middle classes.
It's also somewhat disingenuous to conflate capacity with serving size. Modern red wine glasses, which TFA appeared to be talking about, are generally very wide to allow a large surface area at the top. They are supposed to be filled to their widest point, which is typically around 20% of the way up, and have a larger area that narrows higher up to reduce the risk of spilling.
There's also a lot of fashion involved in glass design. A couple of hundred years ago, only rich people would have drunk wine from a glass (poorer people who drank wine would have usually drunk it watered in a tankard). One big shift comes from the fact that most wine drinkers now poor their own. A hundred or two years ago, the fashion was for very small glasses and servants who would keep them filled. Having small glasses that required frequent refilling allowed you to show off the fact that you could afford a load of servants who could keep the glasses full.
Champagne flutes vary considerably in size even today (the nice crystal ones that I have are about double the capacity of the cheap mass-produced glass ones that I use when I can't be bothered with washing up and want ones that can go in the dishwasher). Its chief competitor, the Champagne coupe (which wikipedia informs me was fashionable from the 1700s to the 1970s) is a monumentally stupid design, with a large top surface area so that the champagne goes flat quickly. This was partly for the same reason: it makes your guests drink quickly so that your servants can poor a lot and you can show off how much champagne you can afford as well as the number of servants you have to pour it.
Sherry glasses have seen a shift in fashion from tiny ones that you filled to near the top, to much larger ones that look like scaled-down red-wine glasses (and are filled to around 20-30% full). Again, the glass size has one up but the serving size hasn't changed much.
A lot changed when glass became cheap to produce. For example, now it's very rare to have a bottle of sparkling wine explode, whereas a hundred and fifty years ago it wasn't too uncommon for a major champagne grower to lose a significant chunk of their inventory to bottle explosions.
Do you know why the UK can negotiate better rates than the US? Because the country negotiates as a single entity and if a drug isn't offered at a reasonable rate then the company may find that they lose their right to sell the drug at all. In contrast, individual hospitals in the USA negotiate rates separately and (on top of having little bargaining power) have little incentive to negotiate good rates because they're going to pass on the costs directly to the insurance companies.
The fact that the US moving to single payer and negotiating drug rates centrally would push up the cost of healthcare in other countries is a pretty weak argument to advance to US health insurance payers as to why they should keep being overcharged.
In the US:
"We won't insure this procedure!"
"Fine, I'll pay cash."
"Ok, good luck."
In the UK:
"We won't permit this procedure."
"I don't need you to pay for it, I can afford it myself."
"No doctor in all of the United Kingdoms will perform it. If you're serious, go somewhere else and stop bothering us."
You are conflating two things: whether a procedure is allowed and whether it is covered. In the USA, you can't have procedures performed that the FDA doesn't approve, but you can pay a licensed surgeon to perform any operation that is permitted. The same is true of the UK (though currently the approval is done by the European regulator, so no idea what's going to happen there next year).
In the US, if your insurance doesn't cover an operation that is permitted by the FDA, then you can pay someone to perform it, and if an FDA-approved medicine is not covered by your insurance then you can pay for it. In the UK, if the NHS doesn't offer an approved procedure or drug it, then you can get it privately. If you have a fairly high income, then you can get medical insurance that will cover a lot of the things that the NHS doesn't pay for.
For rich people, there is very little difference between the two. For poor people; however, the situation is very different: getting a serious illness in the US can result in bankruptcy, whereas in the UK it results in some time off work.
In the UK, we had a bit of weather on Monday, snow everywhere (was brilliant!) so on the day that we needed power the most - as it was bloody cold - all the solar panels were covered in snow, and the sky was cloudy, and as it was a snowy day (ie there was a big high pressure area over the UK) the wind farms were barely turning.
The reason it 'was brilliant!' was that it's so unusual. It was the most snow I've seen here in the last 4 years - no other day in that time has had enough snow that it hasn't melted by mid morning. As long as you have enough backup capacity, having the occasional day of no generation from solar and wind doesn't matter too much. A couple of days later, wind and solar are up to 20% in total.
The bigger problem is that most of the UK uses gas or oil-fired central heating. It's a lot cheaper than using electricity, so even if you switch the whole grid supply over to renewables you're still burning a lot of fossil fuels for heating (which is one of the largest single contributors to energy demand).
It produces a great return on investment for the owner of the land, but it causes a drop in property value for their immediate neighbours (would you rather live next door to a house or a 10-story condo?). Those neighbours, in aggregate, define the planning regulations. If, rather than owning a house, you owned a 100th share in the value of a housing cooperative that owned 100 houses, then you'd have an incentive to demolish one or two of those houses and build condos. Most people would rather own a house though, because they don't want to discover that they're the ones living in the two houses that 98 of their fellow shareholders have just decided to demolish.
Tying wealth to essentials such as housing cause a lot of problems, but not doing it can cause even more.
I don't entirely understand the US political system, but my understanding is that if he had been convicted of child molestation after the election then he would have gone to prison and been replaced by another Republican. If you are a Republican in such an election, you have one bit of unknown knowledge (are the allegations true?) and three options (vote R, vote D, abstain), giving four possible outcomes:
You vote for him and the allegations are true. You get a Republican Senator, though not the one that ran.
You vote for him and the allegations are false. You get a Republican Senator who is the victim of a smear campaign.
You vote for the other guy. You get a Democratic Senator.
You abstain, the Democrats don't. You get a Democratic Senator.
If you trust your legal system, then there are no down sides to voting for him. If you don't, you'll almost certainly get a Senator from the other party. If you do, and he's guilty, then you'll get a Senator from your party, but not the one who ran.
Is it really that bad in the US? My phone cost £100 in 2013 and I spend about £1/month on average on a pre-pay SIM-only deal. Amortised, that works out at about £3/month for the phone plus connection (dropping for each year that I keep it). It's not an amazing phone, but it does everything I need it to and with LineageOS is still getting regular security updates. If you can live for £3/month (about $4/month) in the valley, I'd be very surprised.
That's the US site and I'm perfectly willing to believe that they give much worse service in a country with consumer-hostile laws.
The UK HE site has given 3 years as standard for about 15 years. I think that it's standard for other corporate customers too, and can be purchased by anyone ('AppleCare'). The Consumer Rights Act (and before that, the Sale of Goods Act) require that the product last for a reasonable length of time, defined in part by manufacturers claims and can be returned for a full refund if not repaired at any point within 6 years of purchase if deemed not suitable for the purpose for which sold. Apple quotes 1,000 full discharge cycles for the batteries in their new machines and will replace them even out of warranty if they do not meet this.
Discussion with the Citizens' Advice Bureau confirmed my interpretation of the Consumer Rights Act, by the way: unless the manufacturer explicitly states up front that batteries are consumables (Dell doesn't, and has a consumables section on their online store, but puts batteries in the components section) and gives an expected lifetime for them, then they are covered. Their legal advisor confirmed that Dell was breaking the law by refusing to replace the battery (even if it's not under warranty if it fails earlier than a reasonable consumer would expect).
The 'and margin' part of that is the real problem. If people are using secured credit, such as mortgages, then it isn't such a problem: worst case, they lose their house (more likely, they will just end up paying back their mortgage over a longer time), but all that's happening to the economy is money moving around a bit. The problem with margin is that you're borrowing against the value of the thing that they're investing in. In a system with fractional reserve banking, that borrowing increases the money supply (more money is created by the act of borrowing). As long as the asset increases in value, that's fine (that's what fractional reserve banking is meant to do: keep the amount of money in proportion to the value of the economy). As soon as there's a crash, these people no longer have assets that can be recovered to pay their debt and they have no option but to declare bankruptcy. This results in a sudden contraction of the money supply, which reduces liquidity across the entire economy and can cause a recession or depression. Bitcoin probably isn't large enough to have a serious impact on the global economy when it collapses, but it's likely to cause some localised problems.
More to the point, you can only get a mortgage if there is unmortgaged equity in your house (and you have disposable income enough to cover the difference) and the process takes a few weeks / months. Most people will only be able to lose a few thousand, maybe a few tens of thousands of dollars (but much less than their total house value), because that's all the banks will lend them. Most of these will spend so long getting the mortgage that investing in BitCoin is likely to seem like a less good idea by the time that they actually have the money.
I'm not sure why you'd ding Dell for exactly the same thing you're praising apple for.
Huh? Apple has replaced batteries for us out of warranty if they don't retain 80% charge in under their rated number of discharge cycles. Dell refuses to replace batteries for machines that are under warranty. How do you think this equates to dinging Dell for the same thing I'm praising Apple for.
The difference with the iPhone batteries is that they don't (that I know of) provide users with a mechanism for seeing the full charge capacity or the recharge cycle. This means that the only way that you have of knowing whether the battery is dying is by the amount of time that it lasts on a full charge. Without providing this information, throttling the CPU and GPU to lower power consumption will prevent users from realising that they're entitled to a warranty replacement.
Apple rates their laptop batteries as retaining 80% of their initial charge after a fixed number of recharge cycles. If they die in the three-year warranty, they'll replace them anyway. If they die after the warranty has expired, but within the number of recharge cycles that they advertise, then they'll also replace them. I had a battery die in my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro after 4 years. System Profiler shows the number of charge cycles and the full charge capacity (for me, this was down to about 20% of what it was new). I called up Apple's customer support line at 3pm and after quoting these two numbers they shipped a new one that arrived at my house at 9am the following morning. I expected Dell's in-warranty service would be as good as Apple's out-of-warranty support, but I was mistaken. After three hours of arguing with various people, I eventually gave up. Dell machines just aren't worth my time - those three hours of my time are worth more than the price differential.
For those too lazy to click on the link, the Xeon is 25% and 50% faster on the geekbench single- and multi-threaded benchmarks, respectively. To get an idea of why, the Xeon has twice as much L2 cache and almost three times as much L3 (which is shared among all cores, whereas the Ryzen has theirs split into two halves, so data used on all cores will be more expensive to modify).
Not voiding the warranty is not really a good argument, because if the battery needs replacing in warranty then Apple will replace it for you. I assumed that this was normal across computer vendors, but had a recent experience with a Dell laptop whose battery failed after about a year and was told that the battery wasn't covered by the warranty because batteries are consumables. I couldn't be bothered to take them to court over it, but hopefully we can knock Dell of the approved supplier list at work, which would likely cost them a lot more than replacing a battery.
If you look at which large corporations run SAP - really the question should be inverted - and ask which ones do not? Now if SAP was as bad as its image here on Slashdot, the statistic here would also be inverted.
That doesn't tell us that SAP doesn't suck, it just tells us that the alternatives suck more (or, at least, are perceived by people that haven't tried them to suck more).
I think the notion that social media is tearing apart the country ignores that, like soylent green, social media is people.
For a sufficiently broad definition of 'people', that's true. It's pretty unlikely that a random person that I meet in the streets will be a marketing person (unless they identify as such) or a representative of a foreign power attempting to influence my opinions on political topics. It's also unlikely that they'll have access to a profile of me that includes the topics of news articles that I read, the people whose opinions I follow, my address, a subset of my purchasing history, and so on. This is in direct contrast to the people that you'll encounter on advertising platforms (which, for some reason, we're not calling 'social media').
Despite the complaints that systemd is somehow the "wrong" way to do this because it's a large collection of integrated tools which is totally unlike Unix (LOLWUT?), the only other place you could put all this crap would be in the kernel itself.
That is not the argument, and if that's all you've taken away from it, then you are a disingenuous douchebag who refuses to listen to other people's arguments at best. The argument is that it's a large collection of tools which are designed to replace existing tools without actually being compatible with them, and built in such a way that you have to take many of them on. Its modularity is mythical at best.
It's also worth noting that a large collection of integrated tools is totally unlike UNIX. The UNIX philosophy is about providing a large set of loosely-coupled tools. The UNIX tools are not designed to be tightly coupled (which shows at times, for example try doing ls -h and then use other tools to sort the result by size), they are designed to be composeable in ways that the authors didn't anticipate and to be replaceable by others. This is very different from systemd, which has a bunch of tightly coupled components that happen to be in different processes. This may be good for fault isolation (though most of them run as root, and I don't know to the degree that they each gracefully handle failure of the others), but it's not great software engineering.
Note: I have some issues with this aspect of the UNIX philosophy, which is largely a work around for the fact that UNIX didn't support dynamic shared libraries and so the only options for code reuse were statically linking all of the useful things (infeasible for space reasons) or have a bunch of utilities that you chained together. Lisp machines and the Alto running Smalltalk had much more elegant ways of composing useful bits of functionality.
This doesn't require an entirely new RC system. For example, on FreeBSD this problem is solved by devd, which receives hotplug events from the kernel and runs scripts in response to events matching filters.
The real problem is the combination of both hotplug hardware and dynamic responses. For example, when I plug in a USB network or sound interface, I probably want to configure it once and have the same event trigger the same action every time. In contrast, when I plug in a USB mass storage device or insert a DVD into an optical device then the action that I want to run depends on the user that's logged in and the software that's currently running. FreeBSD's devd is not a great fit for that, because it doesn't provide a convenient mechanism for registering events dynamically. Well, it kind-of does: it forwards all of the events to a socket so that another process can add the missing functionality, and this is typically something that then forwards the events to DBUS and let's the running DE handle them. That's generally a better solution, because the events with statically configured actions tend to be ones that want to run with high privilege and the rest do not, so it's fine to have something as untrustworthy as DBUS[1] in the path for delivery (though it would be nice for devd to have some integrated support for adding and removing events beyond adding a file in devd.d and sending SIGHUP to the process).
[1] DBUS uses XML and so inherits vulnerabilities from expat (the XML library that they use) as well as providing its own in addition.
If they're only a few years away from retirement, then they absolutely should be spending that time in training, but not the way that the original question was posed. You should hire people who understand the technologies that you're using and have the old guys train them to understand the business needs. They sound as if they're too valuable to waste for the few years that you still have them.
Slashdot Mirror
The ICQ network was unified with AIM years ago. I remember using my ICQ credentials with iChat to log into the AIM network and talk to AIM users back in 2005/6ish. If they're turning off AIM, why do you think they'll leave ICQ enabled?
Which is why his point makes no sense. The things that are approved by the FDA are more or less the same things that are approved in the UK. The existence of the NHS doesn't prevent you from having a private doctor prescribe you approved drugs or performing approved surgery, even if the NHS won't cover it.
I'm not a homophone, some of my best friends sound the same!
A 449ml glass sounds about right for 125ml of red wine or 250ml of white wine.
In the UK, the Weights and Measures Act defines a small glass as 125ml and 175ml, and multiples of these, as the permitted serving sizes. Most places use 125ml and 250ml as the standard serving sizes.
Nobody uses glasses that small anymore. I don't know how anyone did in those days. They were like shot glasses.
They had armies of servants to keep them filled. Small was a feature, because it meant it needed refilling more often and so you got to show off the number of servants that you had more visibly. If you had larger glasses then you wouldn't have an excuse for your servants to wander around the room refilling glasses as much and people might not notice that you could afford so many.
The middle classes (who couldn't afford servants, but could afford wine and expensive glasses) used small ones because that's what fashionable people used. This changed when mass production meant that the size of a fashionable glass was set by the more-numerous middle classes.
It's also somewhat disingenuous to conflate capacity with serving size. Modern red wine glasses, which TFA appeared to be talking about, are generally very wide to allow a large surface area at the top. They are supposed to be filled to their widest point, which is typically around 20% of the way up, and have a larger area that narrows higher up to reduce the risk of spilling.
There's also a lot of fashion involved in glass design. A couple of hundred years ago, only rich people would have drunk wine from a glass (poorer people who drank wine would have usually drunk it watered in a tankard). One big shift comes from the fact that most wine drinkers now poor their own. A hundred or two years ago, the fashion was for very small glasses and servants who would keep them filled. Having small glasses that required frequent refilling allowed you to show off the fact that you could afford a load of servants who could keep the glasses full.
Champagne flutes vary considerably in size even today (the nice crystal ones that I have are about double the capacity of the cheap mass-produced glass ones that I use when I can't be bothered with washing up and want ones that can go in the dishwasher). Its chief competitor, the Champagne coupe (which wikipedia informs me was fashionable from the 1700s to the 1970s) is a monumentally stupid design, with a large top surface area so that the champagne goes flat quickly. This was partly for the same reason: it makes your guests drink quickly so that your servants can poor a lot and you can show off how much champagne you can afford as well as the number of servants you have to pour it.
Sherry glasses have seen a shift in fashion from tiny ones that you filled to near the top, to much larger ones that look like scaled-down red-wine glasses (and are filled to around 20-30% full). Again, the glass size has one up but the serving size hasn't changed much.
A lot changed when glass became cheap to produce. For example, now it's very rare to have a bottle of sparkling wine explode, whereas a hundred and fifty years ago it wasn't too uncommon for a major champagne grower to lose a significant chunk of their inventory to bottle explosions.
Do you know why the UK can negotiate better rates than the US? Because the country negotiates as a single entity and if a drug isn't offered at a reasonable rate then the company may find that they lose their right to sell the drug at all. In contrast, individual hospitals in the USA negotiate rates separately and (on top of having little bargaining power) have little incentive to negotiate good rates because they're going to pass on the costs directly to the insurance companies.
The fact that the US moving to single payer and negotiating drug rates centrally would push up the cost of healthcare in other countries is a pretty weak argument to advance to US health insurance payers as to why they should keep being overcharged.
In the US:
"We won't insure this procedure!"
"Fine, I'll pay cash."
"Ok, good luck."
In the UK:
"We won't permit this procedure."
"I don't need you to pay for it, I can afford it myself."
"No doctor in all of the United Kingdoms will perform it. If you're serious, go somewhere else and stop bothering us."
You are conflating two things: whether a procedure is allowed and whether it is covered. In the USA, you can't have procedures performed that the FDA doesn't approve, but you can pay a licensed surgeon to perform any operation that is permitted. The same is true of the UK (though currently the approval is done by the European regulator, so no idea what's going to happen there next year).
In the US, if your insurance doesn't cover an operation that is permitted by the FDA, then you can pay someone to perform it, and if an FDA-approved medicine is not covered by your insurance then you can pay for it. In the UK, if the NHS doesn't offer an approved procedure or drug it, then you can get it privately. If you have a fairly high income, then you can get medical insurance that will cover a lot of the things that the NHS doesn't pay for.
For rich people, there is very little difference between the two. For poor people; however, the situation is very different: getting a serious illness in the US can result in bankruptcy, whereas in the UK it results in some time off work.
In the UK, we had a bit of weather on Monday, snow everywhere (was brilliant!) so on the day that we needed power the most - as it was bloody cold - all the solar panels were covered in snow, and the sky was cloudy, and as it was a snowy day (ie there was a big high pressure area over the UK) the wind farms were barely turning.
The reason it 'was brilliant!' was that it's so unusual. It was the most snow I've seen here in the last 4 years - no other day in that time has had enough snow that it hasn't melted by mid morning. As long as you have enough backup capacity, having the occasional day of no generation from solar and wind doesn't matter too much. A couple of days later, wind and solar are up to 20% in total.
The bigger problem is that most of the UK uses gas or oil-fired central heating. It's a lot cheaper than using electricity, so even if you switch the whole grid supply over to renewables you're still burning a lot of fossil fuels for heating (which is one of the largest single contributors to energy demand).
It produces a great return on investment for the owner of the land, but it causes a drop in property value for their immediate neighbours (would you rather live next door to a house or a 10-story condo?). Those neighbours, in aggregate, define the planning regulations. If, rather than owning a house, you owned a 100th share in the value of a housing cooperative that owned 100 houses, then you'd have an incentive to demolish one or two of those houses and build condos. Most people would rather own a house though, because they don't want to discover that they're the ones living in the two houses that 98 of their fellow shareholders have just decided to demolish.
Tying wealth to essentials such as housing cause a lot of problems, but not doing it can cause even more.
If you trust your legal system, then there are no down sides to voting for him. If you don't, you'll almost certainly get a Senator from the other party. If you do, and he's guilty, then you'll get a Senator from your party, but not the one who ran.
Is it really that bad in the US? My phone cost £100 in 2013 and I spend about £1/month on average on a pre-pay SIM-only deal. Amortised, that works out at about £3/month for the phone plus connection (dropping for each year that I keep it). It's not an amazing phone, but it does everything I need it to and with LineageOS is still getting regular security updates. If you can live for £3/month (about $4/month) in the valley, I'd be very surprised.
The UK HE site has given 3 years as standard for about 15 years. I think that it's standard for other corporate customers too, and can be purchased by anyone ('AppleCare'). The Consumer Rights Act (and before that, the Sale of Goods Act) require that the product last for a reasonable length of time, defined in part by manufacturers claims and can be returned for a full refund if not repaired at any point within 6 years of purchase if deemed not suitable for the purpose for which sold. Apple quotes 1,000 full discharge cycles for the batteries in their new machines and will replace them even out of warranty if they do not meet this.
Discussion with the Citizens' Advice Bureau confirmed my interpretation of the Consumer Rights Act, by the way: unless the manufacturer explicitly states up front that batteries are consumables (Dell doesn't, and has a consumables section on their online store, but puts batteries in the components section) and gives an expected lifetime for them, then they are covered. Their legal advisor confirmed that Dell was breaking the law by refusing to replace the battery (even if it's not under warranty if it fails earlier than a reasonable consumer would expect).
The 'and margin' part of that is the real problem. If people are using secured credit, such as mortgages, then it isn't such a problem: worst case, they lose their house (more likely, they will just end up paying back their mortgage over a longer time), but all that's happening to the economy is money moving around a bit. The problem with margin is that you're borrowing against the value of the thing that they're investing in. In a system with fractional reserve banking, that borrowing increases the money supply (more money is created by the act of borrowing). As long as the asset increases in value, that's fine (that's what fractional reserve banking is meant to do: keep the amount of money in proportion to the value of the economy). As soon as there's a crash, these people no longer have assets that can be recovered to pay their debt and they have no option but to declare bankruptcy. This results in a sudden contraction of the money supply, which reduces liquidity across the entire economy and can cause a recession or depression. Bitcoin probably isn't large enough to have a serious impact on the global economy when it collapses, but it's likely to cause some localised problems.
More to the point, you can only get a mortgage if there is unmortgaged equity in your house (and you have disposable income enough to cover the difference) and the process takes a few weeks / months. Most people will only be able to lose a few thousand, maybe a few tens of thousands of dollars (but much less than their total house value), because that's all the banks will lend them. Most of these will spend so long getting the mortgage that investing in BitCoin is likely to seem like a less good idea by the time that they actually have the money.
I'm not sure why you'd ding Dell for exactly the same thing you're praising apple for.
Huh? Apple has replaced batteries for us out of warranty if they don't retain 80% charge in under their rated number of discharge cycles. Dell refuses to replace batteries for machines that are under warranty. How do you think this equates to dinging Dell for the same thing I'm praising Apple for.
The difference with the iPhone batteries is that they don't (that I know of) provide users with a mechanism for seeing the full charge capacity or the recharge cycle. This means that the only way that you have of knowing whether the battery is dying is by the amount of time that it lasts on a full charge. Without providing this information, throttling the CPU and GPU to lower power consumption will prevent users from realising that they're entitled to a warranty replacement.
Apple rates their laptop batteries as retaining 80% of their initial charge after a fixed number of recharge cycles. If they die in the three-year warranty, they'll replace them anyway. If they die after the warranty has expired, but within the number of recharge cycles that they advertise, then they'll also replace them. I had a battery die in my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro after 4 years. System Profiler shows the number of charge cycles and the full charge capacity (for me, this was down to about 20% of what it was new). I called up Apple's customer support line at 3pm and after quoting these two numbers they shipped a new one that arrived at my house at 9am the following morning. I expected Dell's in-warranty service would be as good as Apple's out-of-warranty support, but I was mistaken. After three hours of arguing with various people, I eventually gave up. Dell machines just aren't worth my time - those three hours of my time are worth more than the price differential.
For those too lazy to click on the link, the Xeon is 25% and 50% faster on the geekbench single- and multi-threaded benchmarks, respectively. To get an idea of why, the Xeon has twice as much L2 cache and almost three times as much L3 (which is shared among all cores, whereas the Ryzen has theirs split into two halves, so data used on all cores will be more expensive to modify).
Not voiding the warranty is not really a good argument, because if the battery needs replacing in warranty then Apple will replace it for you. I assumed that this was normal across computer vendors, but had a recent experience with a Dell laptop whose battery failed after about a year and was told that the battery wasn't covered by the warranty because batteries are consumables. I couldn't be bothered to take them to court over it, but hopefully we can knock Dell of the approved supplier list at work, which would likely cost them a lot more than replacing a battery.
If you look at which large corporations run SAP - really the question should be inverted - and ask which ones do not? Now if SAP was as bad as its image here on Slashdot, the statistic here would also be inverted.
That doesn't tell us that SAP doesn't suck, it just tells us that the alternatives suck more (or, at least, are perceived by people that haven't tried them to suck more).
I think the notion that social media is tearing apart the country ignores that, like soylent green, social media is people.
For a sufficiently broad definition of 'people', that's true. It's pretty unlikely that a random person that I meet in the streets will be a marketing person (unless they identify as such) or a representative of a foreign power attempting to influence my opinions on political topics. It's also unlikely that they'll have access to a profile of me that includes the topics of news articles that I read, the people whose opinions I follow, my address, a subset of my purchasing history, and so on. This is in direct contrast to the people that you'll encounter on advertising platforms (which, for some reason, we're not calling 'social media').
Despite the complaints that systemd is somehow the "wrong" way to do this because it's a large collection of integrated tools which is totally unlike Unix (LOLWUT?), the only other place you could put all this crap would be in the kernel itself.
That is not the argument, and if that's all you've taken away from it, then you are a disingenuous douchebag who refuses to listen to other people's arguments at best. The argument is that it's a large collection of tools which are designed to replace existing tools without actually being compatible with them, and built in such a way that you have to take many of them on. Its modularity is mythical at best.
It's also worth noting that a large collection of integrated tools is totally unlike UNIX. The UNIX philosophy is about providing a large set of loosely-coupled tools. The UNIX tools are not designed to be tightly coupled (which shows at times, for example try doing ls -h and then use other tools to sort the result by size), they are designed to be composeable in ways that the authors didn't anticipate and to be replaceable by others. This is very different from systemd, which has a bunch of tightly coupled components that happen to be in different processes. This may be good for fault isolation (though most of them run as root, and I don't know to the degree that they each gracefully handle failure of the others), but it's not great software engineering.
Note: I have some issues with this aspect of the UNIX philosophy, which is largely a work around for the fact that UNIX didn't support dynamic shared libraries and so the only options for code reuse were statically linking all of the useful things (infeasible for space reasons) or have a bunch of utilities that you chained together. Lisp machines and the Alto running Smalltalk had much more elegant ways of composing useful bits of functionality.
The real problem is the combination of both hotplug hardware and dynamic responses. For example, when I plug in a USB network or sound interface, I probably want to configure it once and have the same event trigger the same action every time. In contrast, when I plug in a USB mass storage device or insert a DVD into an optical device then the action that I want to run depends on the user that's logged in and the software that's currently running. FreeBSD's devd is not a great fit for that, because it doesn't provide a convenient mechanism for registering events dynamically. Well, it kind-of does: it forwards all of the events to a socket so that another process can add the missing functionality, and this is typically something that then forwards the events to DBUS and let's the running DE handle them. That's generally a better solution, because the events with statically configured actions tend to be ones that want to run with high privilege and the rest do not, so it's fine to have something as untrustworthy as DBUS[1] in the path for delivery (though it would be nice for devd to have some integrated support for adding and removing events beyond adding a file in devd.d and sending SIGHUP to the process).
[1] DBUS uses XML and so inherits vulnerabilities from expat (the XML library that they use) as well as providing its own in addition.
If they're only a few years away from retirement, then they absolutely should be spending that time in training, but not the way that the original question was posed. You should hire people who understand the technologies that you're using and have the old guys train them to understand the business needs. They sound as if they're too valuable to waste for the few years that you still have them.