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Google Pixel's Camera Lead Quits After the Failure of the Pixel 4 (arstechnica.com) 121

According to The Information, two top executives left Google's Pixel team following the poor reception of the Pixel 4 and "rare internal criticism" of the phone. Ars Technica reports: Pixel general manager Mario Queiroz and "the mastermind behind Google's Pixel camera," Marc Levoy, have both left the Pixel team in the past year. Both Queiroz and Levoy have been visible members of the Pixel team at launch events, where they usually give lengthy presentations about the new features. Levoy, in particular, is cause for concern, since the Pixel's camera has been one of the major bright spots of the phone line. The Pixel 4 has not been a huge success. It has sold less than the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a in its first two quarters. Osterloh was not confident about the device in the leadup to launch, either. The report says that "ahead of the [Pixel 4] October launch in New York," Osterloh called an all-hands meeting and shared his misgivings about the phone. He reportedly "did not agree with some of the decisions made about the phone" and that "in particular, he was disappointed in its battery power." Osterloh runs the Pixel team, so this reporting gives some insight into his management style. For a Steve Jobs type, approving these kinds of broad directions would be a big part of his day-to-day decision making. Osterloh, apparently, is more of a hands-off delegator.

The report says that, following "sluggish sales and tepid reviews" for the Pixel 4, "the company's hardware division needs to maintain favor and funding as Google's top brass look to rein in costs because of a recent slowdown in advertising revenue." Seeing Google Hardware in the same sentence as Google's cost-cutting efforts is a bit scary -- Google has been aggressively killing products that don't regularly pull in millions of users, and it's hard to make an argument that the Pixel line has been doing well or is even getting better over its four years of existence. We've already seen some branches of Google Hardware get the ax: Osterloh has admitted the team has quit the tablet business after poor performance from the Pixel Slate.

Comment LastPass's Response (Score 5, Informative) 146

Here's the response from LastPass:
https://lastpass.com/support.p...
(I think this link should be in the main summary for balance)

As for Google Chrome, LastPass asks that you star Issue 39511 for extension infobars outside the DOM. Specifically here's LastPass asking for improvement in Chrome January 12th, 2012:
https://code.google.com/p/chro...

I am NOT affiliated with LastPass.

Comment Re: Ancillary titles to TFA (Score 1) 327

No. This is what is wrong with PowerPoint. This is what makes PP dumb.

What should be presented is a cohesive narrative. Drop the stupid rules, tell a story. Make a simple annotated illustration that is information dense and comprehensible. Forget about the slide. It's obsolete.

Now this does not mean put a million things in a view at once just to create the illusion of information density. It means think like Google Maps: information rich, quantitative, and easy to understand.

If you absolutely need a rule, the better answer is 0 or 1. Zero bullet points. One narrative.

Comment Re:Time for a change? (Score 1) 234

I am not sure I would called mentoring the absolute worst act for a high achieving kid. It depends completely on who they are teaching. Tasking them with mentoring remedial students who have no interest in learning material is a waste of time. However, teaching other motivated students can have plenty of rewards. Mentees challenge the mentor with all kinds of questions forcing the mentor to have a firm grasp of the topic while also seeding new ideas.

Having advanced scholars teach less advanced scholars is essentially the framework for higher education. Ad Adstra likely has established this sort of environment at a grade school level.

I think the key is not to impose this model on everyone. Education overall should be more diverse and should span the breadth between completely vocational to the abstract. Compulsory education for everyone does not make sense either. It just creates a large pool of unwilling participants. The one-size fits all model of public education does not make any sense.

Comment Re:What is systemd exactly? (Score 2) 765

It depends how well you know Windows or Mac OS X.

systemd is roughly equivalent to Window's svchost / Services [1] or Mac OS X's launchd [2]. Maybe if you remember DOS, it's kind of like autoexec.bat / config.sys (shudder). systemd is meant to replace the init system in Linux.

Right after your computer boots and loads the hardware interface (the kernel), systemd or init is the first program that starts that is meant to start all the other programs. Traditional UNIX philosophy is to keep things extremely modular and simple. Each piece of software should do a single job and do it well. Furthermore, it should easily work with other modular programs. The controversy is that systemd has a tendency to expand in scope. While it has various subsystems and modules internally, it is trying to do "everything".

The motivation for systemd is that modern systems have many services which need to interoperate, particularly at boot time. The old init system would start each service sequentially, one right after another. Modern systems now have multiple-cores and it would be advantageous in time to start services in parallel to take advantage of multiprocessor systems. In order to do this, there is a dependency graph problem where you have figure out which processes can start in parallel and which one depends on the others. For example, before you start a web server, you probably want to make sure that that the Internet connection is up. This problem has been solved and part of the solution was retrofitted onto init. Systemd, however, also wants to supervise services as they are running and possibly respond to events. These features are more important to laptops which boot frequently and change environment. Servers, however, boot infrequently and exist in relatively static environments where the additional complexity of systemd might cause an issue.

Windows and Mac OS X have embraced solutions similar to systemd earlier to take advantage of tighter integration and also partly due to development being centralized. Linux development is more distributed and many would prefer it to be more modular and simple. The fight over systemd is a philosophical debate about whether the core services in Linux should be centralized and integrated or highly modular and simple.

The dichotomy is false, however, as what is really needed is specialized configurations for different situations. What people are squabbling over is whether generalized solutions should lean towards supporting their specialized application (stable servers vs flexible laptops). The distributions which package software have been leaning towards systemd to support both, but those interested in servers see little advantage, greater complexity, and more security issues in systemd than in the previous init system.

In summary, systemd is a replacement for the first process that starts in Linux that is supposed to provide core services. At the cost of simplicity, systemd integrates many services internally. The disagreements over this are philosophical and are about people fighting over the direction of generalized solutions rather than working towards optimal solutions for their specific needs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Comment Emacs/SystemD (Score 1) 471

It almost seems like we are just missing the userland tools for SystemD, but I know a great selection of tools: Emacs. Once they merge Emacsd, we're set!

I cannot wait until I can go from GummiBoot to Emacs in less than a second.

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