Posts by Willie T

Really depends on the code generated, doesn't it?

If the answer you get back is a copy of something fed to the learning algorithm then it could be a violation of the license terms, depending on what those terms are. But if it is a solution based on the aggregate learning of ingesting multiple similar solutions then I don't see the problem - but then again I'm not a copyright lawyer.

How is this different from what every developer does in the age of the Internet: you get assigned to create a new function, you don't have it in your pre-existing library, you search the Internet for examples and then write something similar using what you find as a guide. Of course you can't copy/paste the found code into a commercial application - unless the license says you can.

Typical conservative “victim”

…assuming only their comments are being moderated by those liberal (yeah, right) social media companies. If they only knew how many times my comments suggesting they do something unnatural to their own bodies were blocked by automatic moderation!

Free lunch?

Why does everyone on the Internet insist on services they get being free? You all realize that even with free services the company providing them is getting something in return from you.

Yahoo mail is my “junk mail”, it is my oldest mailbox (dating back to mid 90s) and I use it exclusively for things that require an email address and I don’t want to give out one of my other ones. Still, I pay $20 a year for the “ad free” version so I can read it from my favorite email client.

Same as paying for an annual O365 family subscription - I’d rather give someone a small amount of $ and know what the cost is vs. getting something for free and wondering what I gave up in the terms of service.

The New Normal

With a few exceptions, I don't think business will ever be back to 2019 "normal". Although working from home was getting to be more and more acceptable before COVID, this has really opened up a lot of eyes on the topic. Also, I will say what others have said: If you have an employee who is slacking off at home, probably they were slacking off in the office too. Easier to measure quantity & quality of work rather than how much time you spend sitting in a cubicle (or spare bedroom).

As for me, my work for 8 years before COVID consisted of traveling nearly every week of the year to a customer site Sunday evening and flying back home Thursday evening. It was considered impossible to do my job without sitting next to the customer in a conference room. Now, 2 years later, we are not even planning to include travel budgets in new contracts, unless the customer absolutely insists on it. Most are happy to save the $ now that they see we can accomplish the same work for less expense.

Seriously?

Total rubbish. Talk about taking a grain of sand and polishing it into a pearl - well done Reg!

I have worked in corporate IT for over 35 years, in all of those roles I did extensive travel and filled out numerous expense reports. I’ve seen the spectrum from reasonably efficient to utterly infuriating.

The last 10 years I have been with Microsoft in a role where I have expenses to claim almost every week. I have never used an expense system that is easier to use, simpler or more efficient use of my time to satisfy the requirements for accurate reporting.

Of course once a year you come upon an edge case where you need to ask a few questions to get it right, so maybe that was the situation that prompted the original post. But then again, the poster even admitted this is just not a strength of theirs.

Oh well, should have expected nothing less from you on a slow news day. :)

Bring on the Sniper Bots!

I'm all for autonomous sniper robots, if we can have them directed by a bot net that only targets ransomware operators.

(joking... well, mostly)

This is news?

Must be a slow news day? This has been the standard for electronic documents for years now. As a tech guy in my 50s I was taught typing with 2 spaces following end of sentence. It has been many years since I was rudely corrected by a millennial editing my docs that I was hopelessly behind the curve. And I believe Word has been flagging my accidental double-spaces as typos for some time now.

But don't let this discourage the MS haters from piling on - enjoy yourselves :-)

"Microsoft wants to be Google and Apple"

You realize that on the consumer side Google & Apple have been eating Microsoft's lunch with integrated and locked down ecosystems? The Windows Store is the response to the Apple Store. Your Microsoft Account is so you can sync data across all apps - just like your Google Account. Of course it is going to be integrated into everything else Microsoft, that is the power of an ecosystem. And if it doesn't also have hooks into open standards and support use with competing platforms it will die. This is reality today whether you get your app from Apple, Google or Microsoft. And that independent app you love will get bought out by one of them if gets too popular and they can't code a better version. Welcome to 2019!

"for the Rolex wearers" - spot on my friend! Both require you to pay much more than something is actually worth to get a product that is good but not nearly as good as it's reputation and can be beat by less expensive competitors. In other words, people who care more about appearance than practicality.

I say this having recently switched to an iPhone 7 myself (US carrier had a buy-one-get-one promotion) and I am thoroughly unimpressed. I finally joined the cult to get a device where all apps are available & full featured, plus it works with everything I want to integrate it with. This is much more due to the popularity of the phone than it is to any design or feature advantage. I'll keep using mine until it dies, gets dropped or stolen. No interest in the X, even at half the price.

My experience has been the same

I will qualify by saying nothing is true 100% of the time. I have worked with very competent folks here on H1b visas. And I have worked with citizens who are recent college graduates that couldn't pass the basic HW/SW A+ certification. That said...

I can give you the names of 6 college graduates from the last 3 years (relatives & children of friends) with IT degrees that were very competent, just lacking experience. Searching for months, applying everywhere, no offers. Forced to take a non-tech job to pay the bills.

In the same time period I have worked with 3 times that many H1b workers who don't have an effing clue. You are literally teaching them Computers 101 concepts in trying to work with them. I know they graduated from some sort of technical training in their home country to qualify for the job but there is no way they have the same level of education as a 4 year degree from most American universities. And I have seen the legally required postings showing that a job is being granted to a H1b visa with the requisite language showing the salary and stating it is customary for the title and area -- even though it is 70% or less what the job would normally pay.

I have absolutely no objection to a qualified foreign worker coming to the U.S. to do a job. In fact let all the migrants come across our southern border and do jobs for minimum wage that no American is willing to do for that pay. No worries. But stop lying to us and saying you need to bring in skilled people to do IT jobs because not enough Americans have the skills required. If you really need these people so badly then don't saddle them with the "slave" conditions of H1b -- let them come over and do whatever job they want, no restrictions or company lock-in. That should quickly get their wages up to a proper level and put an end to this nonsense.

Perplexing

How many of the folks posting here have an actual IT career? At a company of more than a dozen employees or so? And do they actual read and/or comprehend the article or do they just see "Microsoft" and go off with their clubs to begin the bashing?

Nothing suggests that the new "social" features in Office will be the same as Facebook, Twitter or any other time wasting social network. Other than the click bait title the article makes it clear that the concept is to allow users to "socialize" work efforts. In other words, if I am about to begin work on a new project I can scan the internal social sites or put out a query to see if anyone else has done something similar. If I remember seeing something about a recent document in a past email I can search for it easier even if it was not shared with me.

Are people really that daft that they believed the new Office features were going to allow us to follow the personal lives of our co-workers? Really? It is a productivity enhancement. The managers that buy into these enhancements aren't quite as stupid as you think they are. The goal is to bring the concept of social networks to work, not the silliness. Sheesh.