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Comment Re:They know it's a bad Bill (Score 1) 129

It's not meant to be a useful law it's meant to be a trap during the midterm campaigns. Anyone who votes against it is going to get a bunch of ads about how they put children in danger dun dun duuuun!

You got a lot of bad laws like this because voters are dumb and they don't pay a lot of attention to politics and we don't teach them things like this.

As a Californian, I definitely would NOT have voted for this had I been given the opportunity.

And yeah, we LITERALLY have campaign ads running now to the extent of, "Pedophile murderers are being released to the streets ... and Candidate X voted for it THREE TIMES!!!!"

Comment Re:The ending of Covenant was exploitatively stupi (Score 1) 23

Someone said that Ridley can create movies if the script is great but it not...

That one was yet another case of Ridley having a script, deciding it was good enough to start building sets and working on effects, and then constantly changing the script all the way up through editing. Whole subplots got dropped, characters who appeared in promo material just never showed up in the movie, character motivations stopped making sense, plot points were retroactively changed, etc. Prometheus suffered from the same problem, if not to an even greater degree. It's like those movies where everybody cries "studio interference!" ... only in Ridley's case, he's the one who interferes constantly with his own movies.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 56

From TFS:

The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. It also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels.

Comment Re:I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score 2) 126

If he worked with a steady supply of actual instrumentalists, people that spend years developing their skills and produce music regularly, he'd understand why so many musicians dislike AI.

He has. For a long time. The problem is, apparently he doesn't like to pay them, and they're not aware of that before the fact.

Comment Re:Wait (Score 2) 98

Regardless, most students at Berkeley don't need Calculus 1. And if students do need it, but aren't ready, then send them to the next class down until they are ready.

Calculus 1 pretty much is the lowest-level math class at Berkeley. There's a math fundamentals refresher class, which is for people who are pretty much at pre-calculus level. But if they're saying students really don't understand fractions, it's a mystery how they even got into Berkeley. California has an amazing community college system that will teach you all the way down to basic algebra if you need it, and once you spend a couple of years there, there are easy avenues to transfer to the many high-quality California four-year schools. I sense the op-ed author has an axe of some kind to grind, because even without the SAT, it's not like admissions to Berkeley aren't competitive.

Comment Re:Proprietary software is obsolete (Score 2) 47

MMmmm, I understand the sentiment. But I think you'll find that's not true. The Oracle database, alone, has a long history of engineering behind it that has not truly been replicated by other products. Of course, this is really only relevant for corner cases, but these exist, and they're usually folks who have big budgets (like governments, or large enterprises). And at that level, what they're paying for is not the technology as-shipped, but the support ... which means you have a "throat to choke" in terms of lawsuits, but could also mean building something that's proprietary for your business.

Comment Re:Reimplementation costs (Score 1) 66

Not to say it's still not worth it. It could be. But the larger the org, the greater the inertia, and the longer you live with both ecosystems.

Microsoft has done a pretty thorough job of locking companies in like this, particularly through authentication and authorization systems (Active Directory) and the locked-down IT management infrastructure around them.

Operating Systems

Ask Slashdot: What are the Costs of Switching Between Windows, MacOS, and Chrome? 66

UI changes, lost productivity, untransferrable knowledge... Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the folly of switching to an unfamiliar new environment to be "more productive"... Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in the new unfamiliar environment because it's 'more productive', a conclusion often shaped by conventional wisdom or their 'gut' feeling. Decision makers may also mistake their own 'light-user experience' for universal experience and believe all platforms are fungible.

And while it's one thing for a business to delay their delivery dates and increase costs of by introducing a switch in computing environments that's of unquantified and possibly dubious value, how about when a switch in computing environments is made that affects schoolchildren's ability to learn for a period of time?

While a MacBook Neo is indeed cute, what might be the possible consequences of a decision to move 25,000 students off Windows and onto MacBook Neos...? Or even the impact on a single kid who moves from a MacBook school to a Windows or Chrome school (or whose home computing environment isn't aligned with their school). Or students whose teachers decide learning in their classrooms should now additionally require an understanding of the Minecraft computing platform/UI (used in over 40,000 school systems.). Learning Management Systems and now various AI Edtech tools used by schoolkids are also subject to change.

"Even if students and schools eventually benefit from a new platform, one wonders how much learning is lost during the switch," theodp asks, "and what the financial and educational ROI and payback period look like." Are there bigger problems than we realize? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.

What are the costs of switching between Windows, MacOS, and Chrome?

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