You didn't give a year of manufacture for the Dell - my Dell XPS L502X Core i7-2630QM was delivered 10/8/2011 and I'm still using it as my (only) daily driver. I've never had any kind of thermal limit problem with it until recently - I daresay it needs new thermal paste and a good clean after these 11+ years and umpteen overseas trips to Europe & Asia (oh god! >3kg!!). And that's only if I push the thing very hard (usually when web pages go crazy). I put Linux on it immediately after buying it. I was never able to get much out of the NVidia dGPU - which nowadays is turned off. Support from NVidia for that on Linux seems to have faded out and it's pretty feeble anyway. But I don't game and the CPU/iGPU is perfectly happy to play videos. It's not quite original as it's had at least 4 new battery packs (remember when those were easily replaceable?), a new charger. The 4Gb RAM was upgraded to 8Gb and the DVD R/W was replaced by a 256Gb SSD. The 500-Gb spinning rust drive is still there but generally turned off. A real old battleship of a laptop that gives no sign of giving up the ghost (touch wood).

Au contraire, mon ami! My experience is quite the opposite to yours - I've been using swaywm on fedora for the last 2 years and I've used nothing else. For video I use mpv and mythtv - they both work fine - and no tearing. Unlike X11/Xorg. No instability either. I also use vlc and ffplay occasionally, and have no problems whatever. I don't really need Xwayland any more - even emacs runs on wayland. I don't have UHD screens and fractional resolution but when do, I doubt X11/Xorg will support them but I expect Wayland will.

For those of us not in the SF coterie, 'SoMa' referes to "South of Market", a region of San Francisco. There, I saved you a google. You're welcome.

So we have a minimum wage of A$19.49/hour in Oz (about US$13.21). The problem is that employers have to pay double and triple time (by law) on Sundays and/or public holidays. The result is - good luck finding a restaurant open at the weekend!! Of course, there are exceptions for big business. Fast food chains don't have to pay so much, so it's just the small interesting restaurants that shutter their doors whenever people have time to use them. Yet another example of the (tortuous, berzerk and baroque) laws funneling people towards the big corporates. It was ever so. So to speak to the original thesis of this post, the Australian experience points to a direct and immediate relationship between increases in minimum wages and restaurants closing.

Excel won't work? try 'dc' (on any unix):

$ echo "_80538738812075974 3 ^ 80435758145817515 3 ^ + 12602123297335631 3 ^ + p" | dc
42

Would it be futile to expect that if I similarly flew into Canberra and requested an audience with George Brandis - as a citizen - I would be given equal access as Apple execs are likely getting - non-citizen representatives of a foreign corporation who have not the slightest interest in the welfare of Australians?

How about citizen representatives of a public interest group such as Linux Australia or FSF?

Silly me! We only exist to promote the interests of US corporations.

Agreed. As for setting a benchmark price, I recall the heady days of the high street video shop (sadly gone). Sure you could pay $5 for a recently released film but if you stock up on Cheap Tuesdays, you could get it for $2. Older films for $1. I used to rip them to disc, take them back the next day and watch and delete at leisure. So that's my benchmark - I would pay $2 for a new film, $1 for an old one, accept the costs of distribution myself (my ISP monthly fee) and expect the company to be able to make a healthy profit by not having the expense of high street rentals, staff etc Instead, at least here in Oz, we can't stream stuff legally for a reasonable fee. Heck, I'd even accept $5 for a new movie (I rarely watch 'em anyway) as long as I could watch the old stuff for $1 a go.

Estimate 4 weeks for the job. Then:

Finish in 3 weeks: "it was an easy project after all! Your estimate cheated us"

Finish in 5 weeks: "you're a crappy engineer! you cheated us by pretending you could do the job"

Finish in 4 weeks: "that's suspicious! you obviously finished early and then goofed off. You cheated us"

Moral: you can say how many or how long but never both! Or: it'll take between 2 weeks and 2 months, depending.

Methinks I sniff the odour of a payout. Mozilla would be a lot cheaper to persuade than Google.

There was something called apulse (https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse) which allowed skype to keep working with alsa when they made skype pulse-only Maybe it would work with firefox too? I'm also a pulse-hater - my sound use-case is very simple. A single simple speaker or headphones and a single mike. Alsa works just fine for that. Why mess it up with a huge pile of code like pulse? They always had it the wrong way around - pulse should have been left as an optional install for those with advanced/complex sound needs. Even better solution would have been a re-write and simplification of alsa's arcane and baroque configuration logic.

tl;dr; = short term gain, long term pain and shareholders should beware - it's not cost cutting, it's cutting off your right hand

capgemini, accenture etc etc all have a similar outdated business model. They offer to replace a $100k first world engineer with a third world engineer for $50k. In the short term this looks good for the CEO - he's a bottom-line hero, just saved the company $50k x # engineers per year.

Long term, it's a mess.

The outsourcing company only pays the third world engineer $10k and pockets the $40k. This was fine a few years ago as there was a huge number of talented engineers in eg India, Philippines etc who really could do the job. Today it's not so easy. The cream of them have already emigrated to the first world on the back of their talents. The local job market has risen so that really talented people can't be found for $10k any more, so the bottoms landing on the empty chairs are attached to increasingly mediocre talent. The better ones move on quickly.

Add to that the difficulties of working with the time zone difference, the language problems, the cultural disconnect and the profound impossibility of communicating the intricacies of a mature IT infrastructure - and you get a project that is quickly going nowhere.

My direct experience of these changes (I've seen a few) is that the organisation keeps going on momentum alone for a few years - the existing old IT systems soldier on with only minor maintenance work being done, just enough to lurch from week to week.

No major development is possible because the talent that put the system together has been sacrificed - so the company fails to respond to new challenges and does not innovate. Unless the enterprise's business is completely unchanging, it's a slow glide path to oblivion - but the ground is just as hard for all that.

Now the really important thing is that by the time the shareholders realise the dirty deed they've been dealt, the genius CEO who gave them that short term gain has moved on to more triumphs elsewhere, no doubt at ever higher remunerations.

Neophyte! SLS (Soft Landing Systems) from 1992. 2 boxes of 30+ 1.2Mb floppy discs, one for Linux and one box for X. Gentle Touchdowns for DOS Bailouts -- wef

Some shameless self-promotion: http://bhepple.freeshell.org/o... The scripts are here: http://bhepple.freeshell.org/o...