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Comment Re:A life of 8500 hours? (Score 1) 33

TFS didn't claim it was 8500 hours of direct sunlight.

As someone else pointed out, this was an accelerated life test where 1000 hours of light is thought to model a year of real exposure, bit going from 1.5 to 8.5 years of life still means it's a pretty short lifetime.

And that's 5.6 times as long, not 5.6 times longer.

Comment Re:Shocked (Score 1) 32

Yeah, as if we needed any more reason to consider this bloated "security" software to be malware. I really don't understand why anyone in their right minds would install it or allow it to be installed on their systems. Giving some third-party company complete control over what software can run on your machines basically screams "I don't understand anything about security" better any almost anything else you could possibly do as a system administrator, IMO, short of posting the shared-across-all-machines root password on USENET.

For most IT administrators, having complete control over what users can run is the idea. There's no need for your work PC to be able to run anything and everything - most work can be done using a limited set of applications. If your job involves doing nothing but paperwork and filing stuff all day, you generally only need access to an office package and a web browser for the online components. You don't need them running things like music players or chat apps beyond the company required one.

Having control is very different from allowing a third-party company to send down arbitrary definitions at any time that suddenly render arbitrary software nonfunctional. The whole concept of Crowdstrike can be summarized as "McAfee Antivirus on steroids". I mean, this sums it up.

Comment Re:Of course... (Score 1) 71

The 'explanation' is that the demo triggered all the devices within earshot because apparently a device designed to perform possibly-sensitive actions on your behalf was assigned a model line wide, public audio trigger in order to make it feel more 'natural' or something; rather than some prosaic but functional solution like a trigger button/capacitive touch point/whatever; and that the device just silently fails stupid, no even informative feedback, in the even of server unresponsiveness or network issues. Both of these seem...less than totally fine...for something explicitly marketed for public use in crowded environments on what we euphemistically refer to as 'edge' network connectivity.

This. The "someone says 'Hey Siri/Okay Google' on TV/radio/loudspeaker" problem is a well-known failure mode, and if they don't have reasonable mitigation in place by now, they don't know what they're doing, and their product shouldn't be taken seriously. Whether that mitigation is blocking it during meetings, doing handshaking to limit commands to the nearest device when multiple nearby devices detect the hot word at exactly the same time, making it recognize your voice and not other random people's voices, or any of dozens of other strategies for coping, having some mechanism in place to handle this should be considered a base requirement for any voice-based assistant.

Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 148

It's perfectly reasonable a new OS version has higher system requirements. It's just in this case MS is pushing them to ensure manufacturers create PCs that can support certain security features. For example I understand TPM can help enforce boot security and disk encryption key storage. Good stuff to keep secure.

It is possible for Microsoft to do both, you know.

  • OEM version: Requires a higher minimum level of hardware support for a premium experience
  • Retail version (more expensive): Supports a wider range of hardware to the extent that it can

Then they just have to make sure the price difference is high enough to destroy any profit benefit from cutting corners on the hardware.

Comment Re:Shocked (Score 1) 32

Yeah, as if we needed any more reason to consider this bloated "security" software to be malware. I really don't understand why anyone in their right minds would install it or allow it to be installed on their systems. Giving some third-party company complete control over what software can run on your machines basically screams "I don't understand anything about security" better any almost anything else you could possibly do as a system administrator, IMO, short of posting the shared-across-all-machines root password on USENET.

Comment Re: This should stop the abuse of H1-B (Score 1) 229

fill a 100k job with an h1-b worker and only pay them 50k, it's still back to profit after 2 years

That one is actually illegal. The minimum on a H-1B salary is $60,000. But there is an additional requirement that the salary has to be at or higher than the prevailing wage for the job in question.

Government: So I see that your H-1B jobs are all for "Computer Programmer (I)" and your U.S. hires are all for "Software Engineer (III)" or "(IV)".
Company: Yes. We haven't had much luck in hiring level one programmers here in the U.S. We put the jobs out there, but nobody is applying.

Prevailing wage for the job doesn't mean what you think it does. A bunch of sleazy outsourcing firms made sure of that.

Comment Re:Misleading headline (Score 1) 115

Ten tiny companies, ten meters.

So instead of paying higher prices for power they'll spend tons of money maintaining an incredibly inefficient system?

Surprisingly little money. As soon as the extra cost exceeds the cost of hiring one person to maintain workarounds, it is cheaper to do the workarounds. Tricks like that might ostensibly work for individuals, but they fail badly every time when you're talking about big corporations.

Comment Re:Can you imagine needing government permission (Score 1) 105

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

Comment Re:Misleading headline (Score 1) 115

If the gov't (yeah, i know) mandated a sliding cost scale, with highest prices for the biggest users, things would change rather quickly

I've said this before. That won't work. Business, unlike homeowners, have the ability to create shell companies. The effort required to avoid rules like that is negligible for businesses. All that does is massively increase the billing hassle for the power companies.

Comment Re:Wrong Model (Score 1) 115

If it's the same as here, then there is simply no market incentive for localized storage even though there is a massive need. For market to drive distributed storage, you need extremely local pricing.

In California, they have messed with the cost structure enough that solar without storage is usually not worth doing beyond your peak usage, because your excess power production won't net you nearly as much as you pay to buy that power back later in the afternoon.

Comment Re: 200 million angry, single disaffected young m (Score 1) 105

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

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