Is that really true? Many of the layoffs I've seen over the past year have been legitimately "removing layers", purging loads of fat in middle management.

Companies constantly go through cycles where they stretch to a very vertical structure with a manager for every three employees (exaggerating, but only slightly), and then there's the periodic flattening where they prune it out.

It makes things so frustrating. My boss insists on using VOIP on his cell phone because according to him having a data only plan and using VOIP is cheaper than getting a regular mobile plan.

Most of the time I talk to him it's just constantly cutting out and the call quality just isn't the same. Even when it's behaving reasonably well it just has weird behaviours and often times you have to call two or three times before it really works.

I keep on telling him he needs to switch it out, but he's really stubborn about this.

I've never had a monitor that required specific drivers. Even the old EDTV that I have works just fine with no special drivers. Runs at a weird 1440x900 resolution.

I have the Office 365 family plan and I think it's a great deal $109 CAD a year is a pretty good deal considering I get 1 TB of cloud space for each family member. Even if you don't count MS Office, it's cheaper than any other cloud storage service. Plus it's really nice to have MS Office available on my computer. Nothing else comes close to Excel.

They want 35% of the phone to be produced locally. Does any modern phone meet this criteria?

It's not just developing nations. They have low-wait delivery services in Europe too.

This is the biggest problem. They are adding so much stuff that people never asked for. Cars aren't affordable because they just keep on adding on features. Some of it is is mandated for "safety" or for "efficiency" like mandatory backup cameras or tire pressure sensors.

But people can use their mirrors or turn their head. They can check their tire pressure with a $20 gauge. There's no need to complicate cars so much and make them inaccessible to regular people. Unless this is all the end goal to make it so nobody can afford a car to reduce overall ownership and cut down on pollution.

I wonder what kind of hardware they run it on

Probably just modern hardware running virtual machines so that they have reliable hardware while staying compatible with older software.

It either needed to be cheaper or offer way more in terms of functionality. For $3500 it needs to be able to plug directly into a PC to be used for gaming and other applications that can't run directly on the headset.

It has screen mirroring, but that's pretty limited and can't be used for applications that need low latency such as gaming.

It seems the main selling point was to be able to use it for productivity. Set up a bunch of windows and work with them in virtual space. But for $3500 you could just get a bunch of monitors and some arms and have a much better experience.

You couldn't even take the headset off without all your windows disappearing and having to go through the entire process of setting everything up again, which could be annoying if you have a lot of applications open. Sure it has pass through so you can just continue to wear it, but sometimes you just need a break and want to take it off your head. Having everything reset when you take it off is just unbearable.

Programming was a good career choice for our generation though, and there are plenty of industries that need programmers with musical knowledge.

Hope you could at least keep up music as a hobby.

I think the tech just came along a little bit too early and people got too excited.

True. We kind of needed an intermediate medium. We went from approx 1MB floppies to hundreds of MB on a CD. Nobody had any idea how to fill all that space. But floppies were really suffering from being too small. The likes of Wing Commander and The Secret Of Monkey Island 2 each took around a dozen disks.

I was browsing around AliExpress the other day and found a whole marketplace full of various devices that you rest your mouse on to simulate mouse movement.It operates without needing any software so you can't detect it by looking at the running tasks. You'd have to analyze the mouse movements and somehow determine if it's actually doing anything useful.

It is a very suspicious correlation.

The problem really is that it's high risk - those who can lose will have diverse assets which will cushion the loss whereas if they get caught, they'll lose everything. And the benefits are somewhat limited. We already know what Boeing did.

This would punish people who did nothing wrong except hold shares in a company where someone on the board or management broke the law, but completely let off the members of the board or management who broke the law but have since left.

A "company" is an abstraction. It doesn't make decisions. It can't go to jail.

At some point, there was a person who actually made these decisions. A person who may not even work for Boeing or own any stock in the company any more. Prosecute them!