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johnkizer

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From what I can tell, HOA experiences - like politics - are highly dependent on the folks who would make good decision-makers actually being interested in, and attaining, the level of power in the association to make those decisions.

I've seen both - folks who are good stewards of the community's money and add to its energy, and folks who can't manage money and exhaust the community's energy on trivialities.

Go to Customize Toolbar, check "Title Bar" at the bottom - that gives a Plasma-native title bar with window controls.

Maybe - but if it's not handled by the school, then there's going to be some sort of access problem for some kids. Transportation, time to do it, financial for the parents, etc.

The whole thing feels very "old school Internet" in a way - a bunch of misfits with a manifesto and an intentionally simple website.

It sounds like they were never able to bridge the gap of turning the casual interest of folks expressing their counter-culture into enough money to survive. To their credit, it's much better to recognize when they did that the utopian experiment wasn't a viable business, than to try to drag more funds out of folks to keep it on life-support.

Disappointing that a website that touts itself for, among other things, "Open Source News", is missing the core definition issue in that headline: what is at issue here has zero to do with how open or closed the source code is. It's only related to how free/libre the license is.

That's a big deal to some, no doubt, but it's important to be precise about language in cases like this, especially since folks will undoubtedly assume that this means secret user-hostile things will now be embedded in the source code, sight-unseen.

What % of those sysadmins are then going to turn around and script something to auto-approve those updates, once they realize that they are A) requested at inconvenient times and B) are related to security?

Who's going to take the risk of appearing to have sat on an important update, while the org they support is ravaged by ThreatOfTheDay, because they thought they knew better than a multi-billion dollar, tops-in-their-field company?

(I'm not necessarily saying that's actually objectively correct, but I can't imagine that many folks are willing to risk the downside)

GRC SpinRite 2 years ago

The in-depth information on the website appears to be this link:

https://www.grc.com/files/technote.pdf

Which, while not directly dated in the content of the document, references a "screaming Pentium II 333 MHz", which would theoretically put it ~1998. Is the claim that operating at a "low level" on hard drives in 1998 is the same as in 2024?

GRC SpinRite 2 years ago

This article didn't read like character assassination to me, personally - most of the time spent on GRC/SpinRite (after the overall topic of disk recovery is introduced) seems to be either observations about Gibson's style with which I think many would agree - e.g.

"It doesn't help that Steve Gibson's writing is pervaded by a certain sort of... hucksterism. A sort of ceaseless self-promotion that internet users associate mostly with travel influencers selling courses about how to make money as a travel influencer."

Or substantive critical points about the software, e.g.:

"This gives the flavor of the central problem with SpinRite: it claims to perform sophisticated analysis at a very low level of the drive's operation, but it claims to do that with hard drives that intentionally abstract away all of their low level details."

And I think it's fair to ask someone who is selling a piece of software for $89 to provide some backing for their claims beyond ones that would only pertain to largely-obsolete hardware.

Calculus Made Easy 2 years ago

IMO "made easy" would involve connecting everything single concept in calculus immediately to the whole reason it exists - physics.

I made the mistake of taking algebra-based physics, then calculus, and only after the calculus course did I realize how much harder I made my life by not starting with calculus (and learning it as the mathematical language of physics).

I understand the argument for national security. Having said that...where's the accountability if what they build is terrible? Where's the return to the investor (the public) if they succeed?

I'm not saying the government should just take over businesses...but if the government is going to essentially be an investor in a business, it should be at least as rigorous as a private investor would be.

Improving OKRs 2 years ago

Agreed, the only time I ever saw OKRs work in my professional life was a (sadly) brief ~6 month period during which cascading OKRs were strictly enforced from CEO down.

I suspect folks don't like that because it forces middle management to actually decide, for real, who is doing what, rather than allowing multiple different teams to fragment off chunks of what should be a whole (which then lets them both claim personal victory and deflect blame for the whole actually failing)

I could see desktop Linux being higher than ChromeOS if what's being tracked is activity at websites that ChromeOS' target audience wouldn't often visit - which to your point, leads to the question of what the denominator is (all "desktop computing" form factor devices, all devices that browse the internet, are devices restricted to an intranet included, etc.)

The savegame situation was part of what made me less interested in my Switch over time - I just didn't want to invest much time in any long-term games where I couldn't actually back up the savegames in any direct way. Now it gets pulled out every now and then when the kids want to play Club House Games or Mario Party.