it is an advertising platform focused on collecting personal information. Whether they realize it consciously or not, they are instinctively gravitating to "Not-Microsoft".

Naming Microsoft AI something else might have helped. There is a reason that GitHub and LinkedIn have kept their independent branding.

Given Microsoft's ability to ram their products down our throats, this is a pretty abject failure.

I shouldn't be surprised but I can be disappointed.

My guess is that if a company like Logitech lands a Chinese product at a United States port, they are unable to separate out the 10% destined for the Canadian market and we wind up paying the Trump Tax like the Americans.

Can somebody knowledgeable explain how this normally works? Does product destined for Canada need to be bonded when it lands? And did it need to be bonded before Trumps tarrifs?

OP writes "The problematic update, QTS 5.2.2.2950 build 20241114, was released last week before being partially withdrawn " (my emphasis) but according to QNAP, the fixed version has the SAME BUILD IDENTIFIER:

For the love of all that is good and proper, you don't re-use a build number!

The release notes for this build make no mention of the latest fix. This is sloppy sloppy sloppy release management. It may not be as globally disastrous as CrowdStrike but it demonstrates just as much negligence on the part of the vendor.

I'm waiting for the next release and am going to let it soak out in the wild before I apply it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

At least my wife is happy when I give her flowers.

For a Canadian perspective, our Canada's federal sales tax is 5%. That revenue constitutes nearly 6% of all federal revenue and as much as people whine about taxes, we all benefit from those tax dollars. The 2-4% charged by Visa and Mastercard is utterly lost.

So next time the sales tax bothers you, complain to your member of parliament about Visa and Mastercard first. Oh, and bank fees too.

You make a fair point, albeit with a rather jaundiced view.

I think we also have to admit that not all businesses, or roles within businesses are suitable, even if all we do is sit in front of our computer 90% of the time. And 100% WFH may not be viable. (That's why I'm flying across the ocean to meet my team in person in a couple of weeks; sometimes you just need to be able to scribble on a whiteboard and wave your hands.)

But I think my point stands: if the business case is there to support a WFH culture, then businesses which ignore it will lose a competitive advantage. Poorly run businesses seldom last. It may take a decade or more for the transition from a "traditional" office environment to one more accepting of WFH. But I believe it will happen.

"Executives are increasingly resigned to a world where employees don't come in every day"

I'm not sure "resigned" is the best word here. I think that in addition to improved employee satisfaction and, often, improved productivity, they're realizing that they can reduce the cost of their office space leases. That can be quite significant.

With several years of experience now available, it is possible for employers to make some quantitative assessments of today's enhanced work-from-home culture.

Regardless of any moral suasion, at the end of the day employers are going to make these sorts of decisions based on business imperatives.

It's incredible how misleading this headline is. Technical terminology confuses the lay public once again.

This TIOBE index relies on web queries for each programming language. Frankly, C programmers don't need to ask questions about the language itself since it is so simple.

I'm not questioning the popularity of the various languages but it seems to me that this metric favours the more complex languages.

Finally, in the embedded real-time space, there is still no real substitute for C.

HFS may be thirty years old but we still have major headaches transferring files between Macs and other machines. I truly believe that Apple would be better served if they invested in a open filesystem format.

And the fact that this is now a Disney product makes me even less likely to reconsider.

I strongly recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It will shed a lot of light on the nature of language and help you understand that it cannot be constructed by fiat.

To summarize Pinker's thesis succinctly, language is created by each individual by instinct and at a young age . There are a couple of fascinating examples from recent history that demonstrate the process. One is in a deaf community in Nicaragua: after the Sandinista war when a semblence of calm returned to the country, the authorities were able to create schools for the deaf. Initially, the students were teenagers collected from various villages. They had lived in isolation with their families and no education in sign language. "Instinctively", each had created their own sign language. When they were brought together, the students merged their separate sign languages into a pidgin. The interesting bit is what happened when younger children subsequently joined the school: since their language instinct was still creating language, they were able to adapt the nascent pidgin into a more more coherent sign language complete with grammatical rules; the result was much more expressive and coherent - and completely independent of other established sign languages. Today, it is a recognized sign language.

It is constructive to think of language as something created by each individual; everybody has their own language and they evolve separately and over time, driven by social imperatives.

On the topic of redundancy: it is a necessary part of all languages. It would be a huge mistake to try to design a more efficientlanguage. This is in part because languages must be able to evolve. They are never static.

Regarding rules: one of the reasons that English has been so successful is its forgiving nature and its willingness to absorb shamelessly from other languages.

In short, I think you will find it more enjoyable and fruitful to channel your interest into other aspects of language. Over the past decade there have been huge advances in language recognition and translation; you might like to start with those fields since they are current, topical, and valuable.

You might also wish to check out another one of my favourite books: The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. Both of these books are targeted at the layman and are very enjoyable reads.

I completely misconstrued the title of this post. I interpreted it to refer to IT end-users who are resigned to interminable frustration and poor service. That speaks volumes about the business. How depressing.

Of course but (a) it's no longer an interesting learning exercise, (b) I have 6 devices, and (c) I shouldn't have to. I've been hacking for about 35 years but I've got to the point where I'd rather my hacks were a more productive use of my time.

I've been waiting for Lollipop, especially for my 2012 Nexus 7 which continues to be slow despite clearing the cache partition. I am also still waiting for an update on my Nexus 4, my daughter's Nexus 4, and my other three family members Moto Gs.

My understanding is that 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 both have serious bugs. One of them is especially bad if you are using Canadian French settings. Since I am located in Canada, I wonder if they are slowing down the rollout here out of an abundance of caution.

I wouldn't mind the wait nearly so much if Google was more forthcoming with explanations. Their consumer support leaves much to be desired.

In the meantime, 4.4.4 continues to work perfectly for me.