Honestly, I think he overpaid...

Clippy as was, is, and ever shall be.

There is naught in Microsoft but Clippy.

No one who actually cares about their privacy is using Chrome anyway.

You've missed the entire ball of wax. People care about privacy, but they get systematically priced out of the conversation.

People who "actually" care is just doublespeak for those who are too stubborn to allow themselves to get priced out of the conversation.

I've been immersed in the software profession since the 1970s. I once won a math prize. I even won a writing prize. I spent much of the 1990s reading Applied Cryptography for light entertainment. I understood that there ought to be side channels in the time domain concerning caches and speculation long before these began to emerge. (Peter Wright's book from 1988 had already impressed upon me that exploitation of side-channels was a going concern.) I figured that smarter people than me must have poked into this, so it probably wasn't as bad as it appeared to be. I was wrong. If anything, it was even worse than I intuitively suspected.

In summary, I have all the cognitive tools in the world, and security still makes my head hurt. To "actually" care is a Sisyphean standard in the modern IT landscape.

"Just" install Firefox. Seriously. That's the full cure?

If you can even do that much. I have family members who work for the government. They are only allowed to use Edge, which just Chrome with an additional layer of sheepskin, draped over top of a wolf with twice as many teeth. So they drive Edge for 35–45 hours per week at the office (only one of my four family members lucked into the nearly mythical short government work day) and then they come home to drive something completely different, just to show that the "actually" care about their privacy.

If greater society actually cared about people actually caring, then the government IT environment would permit the use of alternative browsers, at least within reason. Greater society does not actually care about people caring, so this is entirely verboten.

Unless this: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice — 18 November 2021

How long did that last in Munich, at the other end of Germany?

LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to migrate from Windows to a desktop infrastructure of its own, based on Linux. By 2012, the city had already migrated 12,600 of the total of 15,500 desktops, until in November 2017, the Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.

The LiMux lead on Wikipedia used to also include this sentence:

The city reports in addition to gaining freedom in software decisions and increased security, it has also saved Euros 11.7 million (US$16 million).

Now you can only find it burried deep in a ==Timeline== section, as a single line item:

23 November 2012 — Savings from LiMux environment over 10 million euros.

Ironically, there's a copy edit flag on the entire section stating that "this section is in list format but may read better as prose".

Am I going to sign up for the apparently Sisyphean task of keeping that comment about security and privacy and savings prominently displayed in the LiMux article lead, where it belongs? No, I'm not. Because I "actually" don't care, according to your doublespeak usage of the word "actually". Because to "actually" care is to have infinite resources in all directions and no concern whatsoever over painting yourself thin.

Intelligence is a dumb word. I prefer cognition. Cognition is modular. Intelligence is an attribute of the whole system. Cognition is an engineering domain. Intelligence is a judgement domain.

So, three minutes of exercise a month is better for your health than zero minutes a month.

See this comment that explains exactly what happened: https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

give the user something to do while loading in the background

Something more productive than minesweeper?

Is this principle oriented toward true productivity, the cult of merely looking busy, or the need for constant distraction felt by those living lives of quiet desperation?

Here's the first AUDIT question from GDS 2021 Global Report

How often do you have a drink containing alcohol?
* Never
* Monthly or less
* 2 to 4 times a month
* 2 to 3 times a week
* 4 or more times a week

Approximating a year as 52 weeks divided in 12 months and converting to milli-drinks per day, the available ranges are:
* 0
* (0,33]
* [66,132]
* [286,429]
* [571,infinity)

THREE large discontinuities.

Doh!
Double doh!
Triple doh!

It's not even specifying standard drink volumes. If you drink from an old-fashioned jug balanced on a bent elbow, "one" drink could be as much as an entire gallon.

I'm Tired

No kidding. Those are completely standard markup rates for retail. This amounts to "Amazon marks up third party products enough to make a profit", which is a complete non-story. Amazon may well have exploitative business practices with its third party sellers, but you wouldn't learn it from this article.

The only legitimate complaint I saw was over the MFN clause of the Fair Pricing Policy which I agree is an antitrust concern in many if not most cases.

" 'I hate saving money,' said no one ever. Microsoft Edge is the best browser for online shopping."

Don't know if this is exactly current, because nothing on the internet has a reliable publication date any more (recentism is the latest stupid fad).

Sean Chittenden is an Engineering Manager at HashiCorp. He is a long-time participant of the FreeBSD and PostgreSQL communities and a 15+ year veteran of large scale web infrastructure.

At HashiCorp Sean is focused on the enterprise delivery of HashiCorp's tools (i.e. Consul, Nomad, Terraform, and Vault) and making the world of operations a better place.

Prior to HashiCorp Sean's notable recent projects include designing and building Groupon's internal Database-as-a-Service offering.

Oops. The T x argument is fatuous.

Some people hate the ternary operator in C/C++. If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, then these people can welcome themselves to the PHP fan club for life.

In a sane language:

a = cond0 ? value0
  : cond1 ? value 1
  : cond2 ? value 2
  : value3;

Lemme translate that for the anti-ternary bigots:

T my_data_switch (T x,
          bool cond0, bool cond1, bool cond2,
          T value0, T value1, T value2, T value3) {
  switch (max3(cond0<<2, cond1<<1, cond2<<0)) {
    case 4: return value0;
    case 2: return value1;
    case 1: return value2;
    default: return value3;
  }
}

For brevity, I assume cond values are all 0/1 without adding any double bangs (aka !!).

What PHP actually thinks you wrote:

a = ((cond0 ? value0 : cond1) ? value1 : cond2) ? value2 : value3;

But, no, if you had actually meant this, it would be more like:

a = ((metametacond ? metacond0 : metacond1) ? cond0 : cond1) ? value0 : value1;

Now that's a damn hard thing to actually mean, but it was the default parse in PHP during the horrible years I actually used this language, and I doubt it has changed since. Even if you did intent to mean that, you'd be better off using Boolean operators.

At the time that PHP was invented, the ?: operator had been around since the early C language in the mid-1970s. Should they defer to greybeard expertise and use the long established parse? Of course not! This is the glorious 1990s, boys and girls. Bricks and mortar and the common sense used to compound mortar are all totally passe, gone and done with.

What I'm not entirely certain about is cause and effect. Is the ternary so widely despised because of PHP or even without PHP's ineffable contribution?

The nested data switch is hardly difficult to read if properly formatted on the page. Put parens around your conditionals if they contain anything other than a simple variable name. (I've been known to write (0) or (1) just to maintain this rule when I substitute constants in during a debug run.) Anyone familiar with a data first language like APL or Erlang or R or nearly any functional language would have any trouble reading a nested ?: data switch.

I almost made my brain hurt to have to write down what PHP thinks you mean with its totally non-standard FUBAR horrible terrible very bad no good parse.

PHP.net recommends avoiding stacking ternary operators. "Is [sic] is recommended that you avoid 'stacking' ternary expressions. PHP's behaviour when using more than one ternary operator within a single statement is non-obvious."

Reformatted so that "stacking"was not inside an already "-quoted string. (So PHP it makes my head spin.)

Imagine for a moment that C started out the same way as PHP.

int a = b * c + d * e;

"Dennis Ritchie recommends you avoid 'stacking' arithmetic operators" would have soon circulated in mimeograph.

I've always been partial to APL's evaluation rule: right to left, no exceptions. You get Horner's rule with no parens and many other goodies as a direct result.

In APL, you also get alternating sums for free.

-\1 2 3 4

Translates to the vector result (commas added for readability):

1 , 1-2 , 1-2-3 , 1-2-3-4

Translates to:

1 , 1-2 , 1-(2-3)) , 1-(2-(3-4)))

by the strict right to left rule.

APL is glorious. It's like living on planet Vulcan. Once you've received the Vulcan mind-meld, you can never entirely return to plain old planet Earth again. God forbid a true Vulcan ever visits planet PHP. Shudder. Unfortunately, I'm half human, so I'm not allowed to partake in the ritual of the Vulcan brain bleach, and my short experience with PHP continues to persist in the smoldering ruins of my once-pristine memory banks.

Question 9:

The Omicron variant was found in 4 fully vaccinated individuals. You should:

(A) Keep looking.
(B) Do nothing, it will all end well.
(C) Keep repeating this number out loud until something interesting happens.
(D) Blame the government.