Note: to clarify, the Open Code of Contact has very similar positive statements as Ubuntu's. I just feel all the negative examples and definition (which Ubuntu omits) are, if you'll pardon the pun, not a positive thing.
I'm not asking people to agree on every contentious issue. Yes, there will be some variance on what "be civil" means, but working in a group also requires a bit of tolerance. That's part of peacefully coexisting in a diverse workforce. No, I'm not talking about tolerating blatantly racist or sexist behavior, but recognizing that, so long as there is no ill intent, we should be willing to forgive minor trespasses or foibles.
My concern with creating a list of all principles, rules, prohibitions, etc, is that it appeals to rules lawyers, and no one else. I'm pretty sure Uber has a big list of these rules and prohibitions, but look at what that place is (allegedly) like, especially for female engineers. In short, it feels a bit to me like a feel-good measure that doesn't actually prevent bullying and backstabbing, and in some cases, even provides the tools for doing so.
I don't actually oppose codes of conduct per se, despite my Devil's advocate position. I just think recently that they've taken on a life of their own, and have gotten too complicated or convoluted, and in the process undermines their purpose. You've probably heard of this line in the Open Code of Conduct:
Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort.
I think it's inappropriate for a code of people to define and divide people into "marginalized people" and "privileged people". Are people surprised then, when the Code of Conduct itself becomes controversial? This line is, by its own admission, quite divisive.
Ubuntu's, on the other hand, reads like this:
Be considerate
Our work will be used by other people, and we in turn will depend on the work of others. Any decision we take will affect users and colleagues, and we should consider them when making decisions.
Be respectful
Disagreement is no excuse for poor manners. We work together to resolve conflict, assume good intentions and do our best to act in an empathic fashion. We don't allow frustration to turn into a personal attack. A community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one.
Take responsibility for our words and our actions
We can all make mistakes; when we do, we take responsibility for them. If someone has been harmed or offended, we listen carefully and respectfully, and work to right the wrong.
And then goes on for a few thousand more words... But one thing I appreciate is they try to offer advice on how to achieve technical excellence as well as inter-group harmony, which I think makes sense for an open-source project.
If you feel you must have a Code of Conduct, it seems better to affirm the positive attributes to which community members should strive, rather than listing all the ways one person can be horrible to another person, like the Open Code of Conduct, which defines "harassment" with a litany of examples.
I understand the necessity of a Code of Conduct for a business that hires employees. Because federal laws, and lawsuits, and all that other fun stuff.
I don't understand why a programming language, as a recent example, requires a Code of Conduct. If you want your official forums to be civil, than enforce civility. Why on earth would you write up a multi-page document explicitly listing every little prohibition and affirmation, unless it's just for virtue signalling?
I see they're recommending a "Code of Conduct" for open source projects. How else could we possibly get along with one another if all the rules of behavior aren't spelled out in the most minute details. Generally speaking, all of those boil down to "Be civil" anyhow, just expressed in a few thousand more words.
Is it really not adequate these days for a project or community to just tell everyone to "be civil", to enforce that civility with common sense, and leave it at that?
On Jan 10th 2017 Mozambique's Civil Aviation Authority reported in a press conference in Maputo that they concluded the radome most probably failed as result of a structural failure caused by air flow pressure, contributing factors probably were a defective installation of the radome and inspection of the ribs. A foreign object damage was ruled out. The CAA added, that the radome had been purchased second hand through an American company supplying aircraft parts and components, the radome was installed on the aircraft during major maintenance in South Africa on Jun 27th 2016.
Notice that there was no collateral damage beyond the radome, which would seem unlikely with a drone strike.
I recently had USPS packages lost. You first have to sign up on their website, which is irritating enough. After a lengthy claims-reporting procedure, it was LITERALLY impossible for me to file a claim on their website, as the mechanism was completely broken, preventing me from submitting. When I called the tech support number listed on their web site to report this, I got an advertisement/marketing survey asking me my age (and if you're not in the correct age range, they just hang up on you). Beautiful. Then I called a general help number, selected the "claims / lost package" section, and still wasn't able to talk to a human being (apparently, you could only look up an existing claim by ID). All other options resulted in the same thing. No way to talk to a person that I could discover. I had already wasted several hours by this time, and the package wasn't valuable enough to pursue things further, so I just wrote it off as a bad experience.
NEVER, EVER send anything you deem valuable or important via USPS unless you have no alternative, or are willing to write it off if it goes missing. Most of the time it gets their fine, but if not, you're probably screwed, and they apparently don't give a crap about fixing mistakes like these.
Lost packages happen - I'm not asking for perfection. But I've dealt with other carriers and have gotten rare mistakes quickly resolved.
That comic also shows the downsides in a humorous way. You miss out on the social experience of sharing your thoughts about said movie (or game). Or if you do try to share, people will probably roll their eyes and walk away.
How much do you want to bet that North Korea releases a report of their own stating that life expectancy in their country now exceeds 95 years, only exceeded by their glorious leader, who is expected to live for two centuries?
I doubt it. In case you haven't heard, Volvo has already committed to doing this prior to any government regulations. It seemed likely that most were going to have to take this step anyhow to bolster consumer confidence. Plus, this just makes sense. If manufacturers aren't willing to accept liability for real-life accidents caused by their software, then that software obviously isn't ready for deployment on a mass scale.
At that point, with very few accidents *caused by* the self-driving vehicle, there won't be a financial incentive to shift the burden away from the manufacturer and onto the customer. The PR hit alone probably wouldn't be worth it.
Keep in mind that "acts of god" and other stuff for which the manufacturer can't be blamed is still going to require individual insurance.
I definitely agree that MS made some bad decisions that annoyed a lot of their customers, and that may have pushed a few of them away, but let's be honest here: we still haven't seen any significant shift away from Windows in the desktop numbers. Microsoft Windows still dominates at 96%, Mac is an also-ran, hanging in their at ~3% or so, and Linux trails at 1%, like it always has, with even that spread across several popular distros, and dozens of less popular ones.
For gaming, you're seeing more support for Mac and Linux because the major engines support those platforms, and so it makes sense to release for all platforms possible. That's definitely the good news. I think many game developers (including myself) would LIKE to see Linux doing better as a hedge against MS, so go out of their way to support it when feasible.
If you're waiting for MS to die, though, it's going to be a long wait. They've wisely started focusing on things like cloud services, Xbox, new high-end hardware, and so on, and of course, they still completely dominate in the business world (for PCs and productivity software). They've also got a lot of cash reserves. They're no longer the dominant player in the industry like before, but they're hardly becoming irrelevant.
TL;DR: Wake me when Linux on the desktop breaks 1%.
But the game industry, and Valve in particular, are in a difficult spot as Microsoft moves to force everyone to go through their app store.
No one except a few outspoken crazies in the game industry believe that's going to happen. Even APPLE hasn't shut down non-store apps. There are simply too many legacy apps that are critical to businesses and/or individuals for MS to kill the Win32 API, and that's what would essentially be required to force this on everyone. Windows' strength is its backwards compatibility and the size and robustness of its 3rd party ecosystem. Windows isn't open-source of course, but it IS still a very open development platform.
So, no. Will not happen anytime in the foreseeable future. There's plenty of other stupid shit that MS is doing with Windows (like you mentioned) without worrying about stuff like this.
I heard a rather heated argument the other day at work. It was heated because the devs were up against a deadline, and the debate was (from what I gathered) whether to push a fix forward or not for the next release. Not once did I hear any rudeness toward other team members by those in the debate. Any swearing and most of the frustration was directed at the code and process, not other people.
More to the point, such a culture is set by the guys at the top. Our boss isn't the type to rant or yell at others, and in turn, everyone understands that such behavior doesn't belong at our company. Simple as that.
It's entirely possible to remain civil with fellow employees at all times, even when you're frustrated or tense. It's not exactly *necessary* for a company to behave that way to be successful, but all in all, I'm going to prefer working at a company in which people are expected to remain civil with each other.
Besides, we already have all the technology we need to keep our data private. It's just that current law won't *allow* us to keep it private. As such, the *laws* need fixing, not the technology.
The mice infiltrating my house were driving me crazy, which led me to acquiring a cat from the local shelter. Rodent problem solved. So, sure, maybe you could phrase it that way.
Also, have they solved the rampant security issues with IoT shit yet? If not, WTF? Thanks for adding to the botnet problem, San Diego. Can't wait to hear about how your entire IoT net has been hacked, and is now under the control of some unknown third party.
THREE THOUSAND BUCKS. THREE FUCKING THOUSAND BUCKS.
Um, that's pocket change for a company wanting to do some early prototyping or experimental work. Do you really think a company is going to balk at a device that costs less than a week's salary for one of their programmers? These kinds of things take years to develop anyhow. The display tech will change, but it's definitely not too early to start establishing early designs and best practices, and getting familiar with the APIs and dev environment. Those are not likely to change all that much.
BTW, in the game industry, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than what one normally pays for console dev kits before the consoles launch. I recall hearing numbers around $10-20K per kit for the last several generations. And you have to be established industry players to even get the privilege of buying them. So, this isn't all that unusual.
He's already Uncle Dinosaur. He doesn't need to elevate that to Uncle Tinfoil. If anything, Snapchat is far better than Facebook due to the ephemeral nature of the chats.
Actually, if I had to speculate, I'd wager MS has realized that the tech needs to take a pretty significant leap before it can be considered remotely usable, and so this announcement reflects that consideration. It's likely that version 2 was only a moderate improvement, but had many of the same limitations of version 1. I haven't worn the headset myself, but the near-universal feedback seems to be that while the tech itself is impressive, the experience is like looking through a mail slot, and the headset is uncomfortable to wear. Improving the viewing angle and shrinking the device should be easier in the future as both processing power and battery tech improve.
The women who posted the blog has plenty of documentation about these interactions, but it's probably illegal for her to post that documentation. It could likely only be used in a lawsuit. What I meant is that there's no way for us to obtain any of that documentation. As such, all we have is our personal judgement as to whether the woman was telling the truth in her blog or not. There's no real possibility of ever getting any proof.
Do I believe the woman? Her story sounds plausible to me, yes, but that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge that she could be making up parts of or all of the story. She's not filing a lawsuit, so I don't see the motivation for doing that. Revenge maybe? Possible, but given the way she claims she was treated, I'd probably do the same thing. Overreactions on her part? No, she's pretty clear about the events that transpired, and there's very little room for interpretation there. This feels very different than other angry, whiny, self-entitled "safe space violation" type complaints I've seen before.
I freely admit I have no proof beyond her story, but then again, my personal judgement carries no weight beyond whether or not I'd do business with Uber (maybe), or whether I'd consider working there (no way in hell). I'm not advocating anything. Whatever happens beyond this is up to her and Uber. It sounds like she's gotten on with her life, and that Uber is going into PR damage control mode (nothing will change).
Yep, agreed. But consider what the first cell phones looked like both in form factor and feature set when compared to modern smartphones, and you can see some pretty amazing potential. At some point in the future, it's likely they'll be able to shrink the form factor down to a lightweight set of glasses, which will be a pretty amazing experience. That's probably the point at which this will stop being a niche product. There are a ton of really cool potential uses for ubiquitous AR glasses you can wear around. But no one wants to walk around with a Spaceman Spiff helmet on their heads while doing so.
1. Apparently the boss did not make sex a condition of continued employment.
HR flat-out stated she'd have negative reviews if she chose to stay in the same group with him, and that there was nothing they could do about it. She could "choose" to transfer out of his group. I can't imagine a reasonable person believing this is not sexual harassment, dictionary definition aside.
Bosses "holding her back" so that she couldn't get promoted and would be stuck in their department - which is a pretty standard thing to do to exceptional workers.
I'd like to think that's only "standard" if you work in a toxic, shithole environment. Not to mention she believed he was holding her back from transfer specifically because it made his department look good to have more women in it. That's even a slightly deeper level of shithole, along with the fake poor reviews (which they wouldn't disclose to her) made behind her back meant to block her transfer.
Anyhow, ignore the click-bait Slashdot title, because the sexism was only a part of the problem. Or rather, I'd call it symptomatic of a much larger problem. The woman's blog post was eye-opening and face-palming at the same time. The part about the leather jackets was... just amazing. I'd give it a read if you haven't yet (second link in the summary).
This forum is not a criminal court of law. I'm personally under no obligation to treat a corporation with a history of slimy behavior as "innocent until proven guilty." How exactly would any of us "prove" this anyhow? There's almost no possible way to do that. That raises the bar so high that no reports like these could ever see the light of day. This is someone exercising her freedom of speech to let the world know about some shitty corporate behavior.
And what exactly do you think people are "crusading for justice" for? A few have wished Uber to be successfully sued by the woman, but beyond that I haven't noticed any "crusades", other than a reasonable desire for workplaces to be not be as toxic as this one.
If I was in an office not only do I rarely if ever get uninterrupted coding sessions and distractions, but that 2pm basically would be my end of day.
I can easily work eight hours in a day, but doing it all in a big stretch is a lot harder for me than breaking it up into several parts, often interrupted by some mental downtime or even a nap. I worked on my own software for a few years, interrupted by some remote work. It's amazingly liberating to be able to do this. At the moment, I'm doing some on-site contract work, and it's amazing how distracted and tired I am at the end of the work day, compared to when I work at home.
That being said, it's not for everyone. Some people don't have a distraction-free environment or room to work in, while others would end up distracting themselves. You need a reasonable amount of self-discipline and self-motivation to be able to make it work.
The Echo animates a bright blue light rimming the top of the device when it hears the trigger keyword and begins recording. The required Alexa app contains a complete history of everything recorded right on the home screen, and what it thought you said, allowing you to give feedback on each item. Given this, I'd wager that most people that own one have a pretty clear idea of what its doing. Granted, Amazon could modify this behavior at any time, but given that it would be possible for a security researcher to sniff this behavior out, I suspect they have a pretty strong financial incentive NOT to pull a Lenovo and sabotage their own product and company reputation. Well, I guess we'll see.
At the moment, I feel that the more significant danger of IoT devices is not malicious behavior on the part of the manufacturers, but terrible security practices. This makes those devices potential attack vectors for true malicious actors, turning those devices on their owners or against the internet as nodes of a botnet. I'd wager that Amazon has taken reasonable precautions and implemented good security practices with their devices. I'd also wager that the odds of any random IoT device being secure, like an internet-connected doll, would be rather low in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Note: to clarify, the Open Code of Contact has very similar positive statements as Ubuntu's. I just feel all the negative examples and definition (which Ubuntu omits) are, if you'll pardon the pun, not a positive thing.
I'm not asking people to agree on every contentious issue. Yes, there will be some variance on what "be civil" means, but working in a group also requires a bit of tolerance. That's part of peacefully coexisting in a diverse workforce. No, I'm not talking about tolerating blatantly racist or sexist behavior, but recognizing that, so long as there is no ill intent, we should be willing to forgive minor trespasses or foibles.
My concern with creating a list of all principles, rules, prohibitions, etc, is that it appeals to rules lawyers, and no one else. I'm pretty sure Uber has a big list of these rules and prohibitions, but look at what that place is (allegedly) like, especially for female engineers. In short, it feels a bit to me like a feel-good measure that doesn't actually prevent bullying and backstabbing, and in some cases, even provides the tools for doing so.
I don't actually oppose codes of conduct per se, despite my Devil's advocate position. I just think recently that they've taken on a life of their own, and have gotten too complicated or convoluted, and in the process undermines their purpose. You've probably heard of this line in the Open Code of Conduct:
Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort.
I think it's inappropriate for a code of people to define and divide people into "marginalized people" and "privileged people". Are people surprised then, when the Code of Conduct itself becomes controversial? This line is, by its own admission, quite divisive.
Ubuntu's, on the other hand, reads like this:
Be considerate
Our work will be used by other people, and we in turn will depend on the work of others. Any decision we take will affect users and colleagues, and we should consider them when making decisions.
Be respectful
Disagreement is no excuse for poor manners. We work together to resolve conflict, assume good intentions and do our best to act in an empathic fashion. We don't allow frustration to turn into a personal attack. A community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one.
Take responsibility for our words and our actions
We can all make mistakes; when we do, we take responsibility for them. If someone has been harmed or offended, we listen carefully and respectfully, and work to right the wrong.
And then goes on for a few thousand more words... But one thing I appreciate is they try to offer advice on how to achieve technical excellence as well as inter-group harmony, which I think makes sense for an open-source project.
If you feel you must have a Code of Conduct, it seems better to affirm the positive attributes to which community members should strive, rather than listing all the ways one person can be horrible to another person, like the Open Code of Conduct, which defines "harassment" with a litany of examples.
I understand the necessity of a Code of Conduct for a business that hires employees. Because federal laws, and lawsuits, and all that other fun stuff.
I don't understand why a programming language, as a recent example, requires a Code of Conduct. If you want your official forums to be civil, than enforce civility. Why on earth would you write up a multi-page document explicitly listing every little prohibition and affirmation, unless it's just for virtue signalling?
I see they're recommending a "Code of Conduct" for open source projects. How else could we possibly get along with one another if all the rules of behavior aren't spelled out in the most minute details. Generally speaking, all of those boil down to "Be civil" anyhow, just expressed in a few thousand more words.
Is it really not adequate these days for a project or community to just tell everyone to "be civil", to enforce that civility with common sense, and leave it at that?
From your own link:
On Jan 10th 2017 Mozambique's Civil Aviation Authority reported in a press conference in Maputo that they concluded the radome most probably failed as result of a structural failure caused by air flow pressure, contributing factors probably were a defective installation of the radome and inspection of the ribs. A foreign object damage was ruled out. The CAA added, that the radome had been purchased second hand through an American company supplying aircraft parts and components, the radome was installed on the aircraft during major maintenance in South Africa on Jun 27th 2016.
Notice that there was no collateral damage beyond the radome, which would seem unlikely with a drone strike.
I recently had USPS packages lost. You first have to sign up on their website, which is irritating enough. After a lengthy claims-reporting procedure, it was LITERALLY impossible for me to file a claim on their website, as the mechanism was completely broken, preventing me from submitting. When I called the tech support number listed on their web site to report this, I got an advertisement/marketing survey asking me my age (and if you're not in the correct age range, they just hang up on you). Beautiful. Then I called a general help number, selected the "claims / lost package" section, and still wasn't able to talk to a human being (apparently, you could only look up an existing claim by ID). All other options resulted in the same thing. No way to talk to a person that I could discover. I had already wasted several hours by this time, and the package wasn't valuable enough to pursue things further, so I just wrote it off as a bad experience.
NEVER, EVER send anything you deem valuable or important via USPS unless you have no alternative, or are willing to write it off if it goes missing. Most of the time it gets their fine, but if not, you're probably screwed, and they apparently don't give a crap about fixing mistakes like these.
Lost packages happen - I'm not asking for perfection. But I've dealt with other carriers and have gotten rare mistakes quickly resolved.
That comic also shows the downsides in a humorous way. You miss out on the social experience of sharing your thoughts about said movie (or game). Or if you do try to share, people will probably roll their eyes and walk away.
How much do you want to bet that North Korea releases a report of their own stating that life expectancy in their country now exceeds 95 years, only exceeded by their glorious leader, who is expected to live for two centuries?
I doubt it. In case you haven't heard, Volvo has already committed to doing this prior to any government regulations. It seemed likely that most were going to have to take this step anyhow to bolster consumer confidence. Plus, this just makes sense. If manufacturers aren't willing to accept liability for real-life accidents caused by their software, then that software obviously isn't ready for deployment on a mass scale.
At that point, with very few accidents *caused by* the self-driving vehicle, there won't be a financial incentive to shift the burden away from the manufacturer and onto the customer. The PR hit alone probably wouldn't be worth it.
Keep in mind that "acts of god" and other stuff for which the manufacturer can't be blamed is still going to require individual insurance.
I definitely agree that MS made some bad decisions that annoyed a lot of their customers, and that may have pushed a few of them away, but let's be honest here: we still haven't seen any significant shift away from Windows in the desktop numbers. Microsoft Windows still dominates at 96%, Mac is an also-ran, hanging in their at ~3% or so, and Linux trails at 1%, like it always has, with even that spread across several popular distros, and dozens of less popular ones.
For gaming, you're seeing more support for Mac and Linux because the major engines support those platforms, and so it makes sense to release for all platforms possible. That's definitely the good news. I think many game developers (including myself) would LIKE to see Linux doing better as a hedge against MS, so go out of their way to support it when feasible.
If you're waiting for MS to die, though, it's going to be a long wait. They've wisely started focusing on things like cloud services, Xbox, new high-end hardware, and so on, and of course, they still completely dominate in the business world (for PCs and productivity software). They've also got a lot of cash reserves. They're no longer the dominant player in the industry like before, but they're hardly becoming irrelevant.
TL;DR: Wake me when Linux on the desktop breaks 1%.
But the game industry, and Valve in particular, are in a difficult spot as Microsoft moves to force everyone to go through their app store.
No one except a few outspoken crazies in the game industry believe that's going to happen. Even APPLE hasn't shut down non-store apps. There are simply too many legacy apps that are critical to businesses and/or individuals for MS to kill the Win32 API, and that's what would essentially be required to force this on everyone. Windows' strength is its backwards compatibility and the size and robustness of its 3rd party ecosystem. Windows isn't open-source of course, but it IS still a very open development platform.
So, no. Will not happen anytime in the foreseeable future. There's plenty of other stupid shit that MS is doing with Windows (like you mentioned) without worrying about stuff like this.
I heard a rather heated argument the other day at work. It was heated because the devs were up against a deadline, and the debate was (from what I gathered) whether to push a fix forward or not for the next release. Not once did I hear any rudeness toward other team members by those in the debate. Any swearing and most of the frustration was directed at the code and process, not other people.
More to the point, such a culture is set by the guys at the top. Our boss isn't the type to rant or yell at others, and in turn, everyone understands that such behavior doesn't belong at our company. Simple as that.
It's entirely possible to remain civil with fellow employees at all times, even when you're frustrated or tense. It's not exactly *necessary* for a company to behave that way to be successful, but all in all, I'm going to prefer working at a company in which people are expected to remain civil with each other.
Besides, we already have all the technology we need to keep our data private. It's just that current law won't *allow* us to keep it private. As such, the *laws* need fixing, not the technology.
The mice infiltrating my house were driving me crazy, which led me to acquiring a cat from the local shelter. Rodent problem solved. So, sure, maybe you could phrase it that way.
Also, have they solved the rampant security issues with IoT shit yet? If not, WTF? Thanks for adding to the botnet problem, San Diego. Can't wait to hear about how your entire IoT net has been hacked, and is now under the control of some unknown third party.
THREE THOUSAND BUCKS. THREE FUCKING THOUSAND BUCKS.
Um, that's pocket change for a company wanting to do some early prototyping or experimental work. Do you really think a company is going to balk at a device that costs less than a week's salary for one of their programmers? These kinds of things take years to develop anyhow. The display tech will change, but it's definitely not too early to start establishing early designs and best practices, and getting familiar with the APIs and dev environment. Those are not likely to change all that much.
BTW, in the game industry, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than what one normally pays for console dev kits before the consoles launch. I recall hearing numbers around $10-20K per kit for the last several generations. And you have to be established industry players to even get the privilege of buying them. So, this isn't all that unusual.
He's already Uncle Dinosaur. He doesn't need to elevate that to Uncle Tinfoil. If anything, Snapchat is far better than Facebook due to the ephemeral nature of the chats.
Actually, if I had to speculate, I'd wager MS has realized that the tech needs to take a pretty significant leap before it can be considered remotely usable, and so this announcement reflects that consideration. It's likely that version 2 was only a moderate improvement, but had many of the same limitations of version 1. I haven't worn the headset myself, but the near-universal feedback seems to be that while the tech itself is impressive, the experience is like looking through a mail slot, and the headset is uncomfortable to wear. Improving the viewing angle and shrinking the device should be easier in the future as both processing power and battery tech improve.
The women who posted the blog has plenty of documentation about these interactions, but it's probably illegal for her to post that documentation. It could likely only be used in a lawsuit. What I meant is that there's no way for us to obtain any of that documentation. As such, all we have is our personal judgement as to whether the woman was telling the truth in her blog or not. There's no real possibility of ever getting any proof.
Do I believe the woman? Her story sounds plausible to me, yes, but that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge that she could be making up parts of or all of the story. She's not filing a lawsuit, so I don't see the motivation for doing that. Revenge maybe? Possible, but given the way she claims she was treated, I'd probably do the same thing. Overreactions on her part? No, she's pretty clear about the events that transpired, and there's very little room for interpretation there. This feels very different than other angry, whiny, self-entitled "safe space violation" type complaints I've seen before.
I freely admit I have no proof beyond her story, but then again, my personal judgement carries no weight beyond whether or not I'd do business with Uber (maybe), or whether I'd consider working there (no way in hell). I'm not advocating anything. Whatever happens beyond this is up to her and Uber. It sounds like she's gotten on with her life, and that Uber is going into PR damage control mode (nothing will change).
Yep, agreed. But consider what the first cell phones looked like both in form factor and feature set when compared to modern smartphones, and you can see some pretty amazing potential. At some point in the future, it's likely they'll be able to shrink the form factor down to a lightweight set of glasses, which will be a pretty amazing experience. That's probably the point at which this will stop being a niche product. There are a ton of really cool potential uses for ubiquitous AR glasses you can wear around. But no one wants to walk around with a Spaceman Spiff helmet on their heads while doing so.
1. Apparently the boss did not make sex a condition of continued employment.
HR flat-out stated she'd have negative reviews if she chose to stay in the same group with him, and that there was nothing they could do about it. She could "choose" to transfer out of his group. I can't imagine a reasonable person believing this is not sexual harassment, dictionary definition aside.
Bosses "holding her back" so that she couldn't get promoted and would be stuck in their department - which is a pretty standard thing to do to exceptional workers.
I'd like to think that's only "standard" if you work in a toxic, shithole environment. Not to mention she believed he was holding her back from transfer specifically because it made his department look good to have more women in it. That's even a slightly deeper level of shithole, along with the fake poor reviews (which they wouldn't disclose to her) made behind her back meant to block her transfer.
Anyhow, ignore the click-bait Slashdot title, because the sexism was only a part of the problem. Or rather, I'd call it symptomatic of a much larger problem. The woman's blog post was eye-opening and face-palming at the same time. The part about the leather jackets was... just amazing. I'd give it a read if you haven't yet (second link in the summary).
This forum is not a criminal court of law. I'm personally under no obligation to treat a corporation with a history of slimy behavior as "innocent until proven guilty." How exactly would any of us "prove" this anyhow? There's almost no possible way to do that. That raises the bar so high that no reports like these could ever see the light of day. This is someone exercising her freedom of speech to let the world know about some shitty corporate behavior.
And what exactly do you think people are "crusading for justice" for? A few have wished Uber to be successfully sued by the woman, but beyond that I haven't noticed any "crusades", other than a reasonable desire for workplaces to be not be as toxic as this one.
If I was in an office not only do I rarely if ever get uninterrupted coding sessions and distractions, but that 2pm basically would be my end of day.
I can easily work eight hours in a day, but doing it all in a big stretch is a lot harder for me than breaking it up into several parts, often interrupted by some mental downtime or even a nap. I worked on my own software for a few years, interrupted by some remote work. It's amazingly liberating to be able to do this. At the moment, I'm doing some on-site contract work, and it's amazing how distracted and tired I am at the end of the work day, compared to when I work at home.
That being said, it's not for everyone. Some people don't have a distraction-free environment or room to work in, while others would end up distracting themselves. You need a reasonable amount of self-discipline and self-motivation to be able to make it work.
The Echo animates a bright blue light rimming the top of the device when it hears the trigger keyword and begins recording. The required Alexa app contains a complete history of everything recorded right on the home screen, and what it thought you said, allowing you to give feedback on each item. Given this, I'd wager that most people that own one have a pretty clear idea of what its doing. Granted, Amazon could modify this behavior at any time, but given that it would be possible for a security researcher to sniff this behavior out, I suspect they have a pretty strong financial incentive NOT to pull a Lenovo and sabotage their own product and company reputation. Well, I guess we'll see.
At the moment, I feel that the more significant danger of IoT devices is not malicious behavior on the part of the manufacturers, but terrible security practices. This makes those devices potential attack vectors for true malicious actors, turning those devices on their owners or against the internet as nodes of a botnet. I'd wager that Amazon has taken reasonable precautions and implemented good security practices with their devices. I'd also wager that the odds of any random IoT device being secure, like an internet-connected doll, would be rather low in comparison.