Well, life isn't that good - I work for a huge company with 10k+ engineers on a single complex. Since early March our site started to go crazy, and this isn't just our campus, but most of the huge companies work like this:

- Everybody has to wear facial masks to enter anywhere indoor.
- They pulled out half of the chairs in the cafeteria. No chatting while eating; there are people carrying signs to remind people to stay silent. Instead lunch is served for 2 hours and we are given time slots when we can go to the cafeteria.
- There are temperature-sensing cameras everywhere, hand sanitizers everywhere
- No meeting with more than 5 people; large meetings are done by distributing people in smaller groups and then setting up videoconference; meeting organizers have to make sure everybody is assigned to a meeting room and ensure there are only five people per room. This has a benefit that we have less of those useless meetings. :)
- So far we have no shortage / hoarding / anything except facial masks. I get all the groceries I want (although we intentionally go fro groceries when there are less people) but most of the people I know just use delivery services.
- No school. Kids have to stay at home for weeks. Not good.

So far, everything seems to be sorta working... except the uncomfortable facial masks... and stressed-out parents (and kids) due to having no school. :(

I got a Ph.d. a couple of years ago. Although it wasn't a perfect match (I hated reading and writing papers soooooo much) I still consider myself to be extremely lucky. My advisor was somebody that I have great respect to, who always treated the students with respect. Adequate funding so that I could roughly break even and still start a family. Met a lot of interesting people who I still have close contact with. Long work hours, but at least I had a choice not do work long hours, it wasn't like anybody was forcing me to do so.

The thing is, you really have to be aware of what you are jumping into. If you are applying without knowing who you are working with, what kind of research topic you need to handle, it is very possible that you are going to enter one of those abusive environments. Yes, track records help. For example, how long did people take to finish their degree, how many of them ended up dropping out, etc.

When I signed up, one of the big no-no indicators were to avoid research groups that had little or zero students from that university's undergrad students. If none of the students from the better informed group bothered applying, it usually means there is something wrong.

One last thing - even after starting, if you see something is wrong, run. Personally I dont think a degree is worth being abused for years anymore.

I second this. I work for a big company designing high-tech products. Never did I see anybody get fired because they made a fatal mistake which cost the company massive loss. I believe this is perfectly normal in this industry - we learn from the mistake, figure out how to prevent that in the future, and move on.

Actually, you might be grateful if you are fired. What usually happens after a royal screw-up is that the person usually will need to take some responsibility and will be the person who will do all the work to make it right. Not only to jump in and fix the problem, but also participate in all sorts of investigations, inquiries, report-writing, etc. I already feel pretty sorry about that operator since he will get interviews/meetings/questioning with all sorts of three-leter agency investigators who will be disappointed and would want to go through every single action that person took that day, having him/her go through all the horror that he experienced again and again.

That alone is already a deterrent painful enough to make people think twice before doing something risky.

It isn't all that different. It really depends on the child but you can just give it to your child and see how he will break it.

Actually, Windows 10 isn't that bad unless you have some legacy Windows thing you still need to use. Microsoft Edge is good enough for most uses. You can always install Chrome, too, but I didn't even bother installing Chrome since Edge just works on the websites I visit. The default Antivirus and Firewall apps are decent enough. For school, he/she will get enough help from the school anyway, so he/she will figure out.

Just be prepared to reimage occasionally especially if your child has an habit of installing things in random - probably he/she will notice first as the games will get sluggish (usually laptops comes with some recovery image built-in so it won't be hard). One way is to keep all personal documents (e.g., homework) on an external drive so that the whole thing can be nuked quickly. However, with good hygiene habits (e.g., don't install suspicious-looking or pirated software, don't open every suspicious email, especially attachments) you won't even need to reimage at all. I have two Windows 10 laptops but didn't need to reimage it since I first bought it.

I guess the hard part of parenting has nothing to do with the OS. How will you prevent him/her showing hostile behavior on the net e.g., trolling, harassing? How will you deal with it if he/she ends up being a victim of such behavior? How will you prevent him/her from visiting websites that he/she is not supposed to visit? These things... I think you should make it clear what kind of behavior is unacceptable, since no software will able to solve the 'user' problem anyway.

2001? The summary clearly says it was from 2011. So, basically less than a single hard drive.

BTW, we had 40~80GB hard drives on 2001 so it would have been somewhere around a dozen rather than 30.

I am more of a half-hardware, half-software person, and was involved in very different projects, each with their own ways of doing it. Here are examples which did work:
- ClearQuest (ugh) with very draconian rulesets. This is for a team that has a long history of doing things, and with at least 100+ people developing something and there always are some people who won't do the right thing. Not much tight synchronization between contributors required.
- One gigantic e-mail thread where one person summarizes open issues every week, and closes them when the right code shows up on the master branch of the git repository. This involved roughly 4 people writing the code, writing test suites, writing build systems, and dealing with customer crisis. We agreed that any overhead to setup/maintain a proper bug tracking system wasn't worth the effort given the expertise of the people involved (Verilog hardware designers). Need quite a bit of tight face-to-face synchronization, but that was fine for everybody.
- Simple Bugzilla.
- JIRA with very lax policies (anybody can create, reassign, close tickets. Basically no admin/manager at all)
- Gigantic Excel table maintained by a manager/moderator.

What I learned was that
- A tool is just a tool - what actually matters is the people. Claiming a human problem to be a methodology/workflow problem isn't going to make anything work.
- Start simple - any workflow that tries to anticipate all the possible things that can go wrong will end up being overbloated, and the methodology itself will be ignored because (again) the people doesn't wholeheartedly agree with it. Start with something bare minimal and build up as you (and everybody else) understand the culture of the team.

In this case the original submitter seems to be concerned of seeing duplicates... I'd recommend one person volunteering to be the 'duplicate cleanup' agent for a while, and let that person try doing it manually for a week or two, and observe where/how dupes get created and what the cleanup job consists of. Or, just live with the duplicates and close them as they appear, if the amount of duplicates isn't that much.

I started reading them around 2001 and went through the three books, a little bit at a time. Went through most of the exercises with 30+ difficulty, but couldn't really solve all of them.

A lot changed to myself - back then, I was a newbie undergrad programmer with undergrad-level math skills. Fast forward 15 years, I went through grad school and then couple of years of industry experience. My main programming languages moved from C++/Java to VHDL, then moved on to SystemC and SystemVerilog, and back to C++ with a bunch of bash scripts.

So, did I get to use the knowledge that I gained from reading it? Not much, I didn't even have to write a single data structure or algorithm because there are perfectly good (or at least, good enough) libraries for most of the issues that I had to deal with. Neither did I have a good usage of the math courses I learned (remember things like Laplace transformation or L-U decomposition?), nor did most of the non-engineering courses I took helped much. Still, all of them helped shape myself on understanding the world and helped gaining problem-solving skills.

Would I recommend it to other people? Depends, if you find your data structure and algorithm textbook easy enough and you want more challenging stuff, TAOCP is a perfectly good motivator to train yourself to solve complex problems. However, I think there are other ways to train complex problem-solving - e.g., a lot of advanced math/physics textbooks. However, for people who tend to fall asleep once they see those weird characters (and would rather live with pseudo-assembly code) TAOCP is a much better solution.

If you want to learn practical programming skills, then don't bother reading.

I can imagine a situation where they keep it LOCKED for their "business" customers and unlock for everyone else... IT will love it if they have a better way to lockdown their hardware and prevent somebody doing something stupid (or too clever) and increase their maintainence cost.

I lived in Seoul for most of my life, and the only time I took taxis were either when I had a lot of luggage, or on late nights when there is no public transport. On daytimes the traffic situation is so bad that anything other than public transportation is just horrible. So horrible that I didn't even consider buying a car.

Buses are on a better situation since they get to use bus only lanes(which are on pretty much every busy road), which are enforced using dash-cams on the buses themselves.

Now I live on the outskirts of Seoul... and going any place on public transportation takes roughly 3x longer than driving. Ahh.. I miss Seoul.

Except that in this case they will be quickly out of business if they actually tried to build a fab, which is a 10 billion dollar investment which will go obsolete in 2~3 years.

The fundamental problem is that there isn't enough demand for discrete GPUs, so they are getting a hard time hitting the economy of scale. What I see is that mobile chips are getting the latest and greatest process technologies these days - I believe the market size of mobile processors is order of magnitudes larger than discrete GPUs, so good luck outbidding them.

Did you actually try using Windows 8.1 under 2GB of RAM? I do use it on my 3 year old tablet (Samsung Series 7) which was Windows 7 preinstalled.

I actually use it for light development work - virtualbox with Ubuntu(configured to use 512MB of RAM), tens of gvim, both Chrome and IE11, and still no big issues. RAM was rarely a problem.

Oh, and I even keep Microsoft Security Essentials on. Annoying some times, but usually a CPU issue.

However, storage is a big problem - with only 64GB, and Windows eating up roughly more than half of it, this left only a very small amount of diskspace for user data. Which means I have to heavily rely on external storage, which is just inconvenient for a tablet form factor. Hopefully MS will come up with a special 'low-disk-space' version of Windows for this cheap laptop.

This may be nitpicking, but the title itself seems to be incorrect: this isn't a court ruling.

This is a guideline released by the government authority who is in charge of telecommunication policy. It's an agreement between the agency, three biggest carriers (SKT, KT, U+), three Korean phone manufactures (Samsung, LG, Pantech, etc.), and Google (Curious why Apple is missing). Probably not legally enforceable (How can you define "bloatware" in a legal term?) but at least it's a good starting point.

Yes, I RTFA'd, and I can read the press release written in Korean. :)

Even the Korean media doesn't seem to care so much. Tooday's headline :

- Tomorrow, the president will make an announcement on its new real estate policy.
- Washington Post thinks NK is ridiculous
- The Korean baseball leage starts

I'm a native Korean, Samsung Electronics employee for the last couple of years, although the following text does not represent my employer.

Actually the reason behind this seems to be twofold - health (you can't expect somebody who drunk heavily to perform adequately next day), cultural (Samsung isn't simply a Korean company anymore), and probably legal (the company is liable if drinking was part of the routine job, and it didn't do anything about it).

Decades ago, the only people working for Samsung (and probably most Korean companies) were mostly male Koreans aged somewhere around 30 to 50. (In the eighties, Korean women had a difficult time getting jobs on large corporates (except as secretaries or factory production workers) and were routinely fired for getting married) The only thing that they could do in common was drinking. Considering that Asian people have a blurry boundary between personal and professional issues, drinking (and for executives, playing glof) was a very essential task for successful working. Actually, companies even had "drinking VP"s who's job was to drink with business contacts every night, and nothing else.

Fast forward to 2012. Samsung now has some 300k employees, and more than half of those people are non-Koreans. Many employees have their spouse also working, which means somebody has to take care of their kids if they have to drink late. There are many non-Korean people everywhere, even on the Korean campuses. Business contacts are no longer limited to Asian countries. Suddenly, it doesn't make much sense to socialize by drinking heavily. You can't expect to be able to socialize with other people if they don't drink much, or don't drink at all.

The problem was that this "heavy drinking" thing was a sort of a "tradition". Many people, especially junior/senior management people who were working for Korean companies for decades, found themselves uncomfortable to socialize with other people without excessive soju or whisky or whatever. So, corporate policy kicks in, and tries to change the culture. Not only by simply banning "drinking", but by trying to suggest alternative methods (e.g., sports activities or doing charity work).