Re: The spots never changed
Just a better polished turd is all the Rejects of Redmond are these days.
4138 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2013
WFH with the option of being on premise when needed is probably the best overall option for many. Most of the time you are except when you need to do something at/near the office. This will take some time to occur but many have successfully been WFH for several months now.
WFH will have several knock on effects.
Commercial real estate will be underutilized and companies will reducing their commercial foot print as they need much less physical space. Many office buildings will be empty with rents dropping. Also, this will have an effect on local businesses around the offices that depended on the staff for business.
A side benefit of not commuting is less pollution and wear and tear on the car, this will help stretch vehicle lifespans and might reduce the overall number of cars per family. Less driving will mean less demand for oil and fewer cars being sold every year. It might make electric vehicles a more viable option for many more people accelerating the demand.
There will be shift in the types of computer equipment sold, more laptops vs desktops. But I do not see a long sales boom but more likely the more will stabilize around the current levels with a possible modest increase in the yearly volume. This would change if remote education becomes more common at the lower grades as this would require more computers for the family. But here again it would probably create a modest increase in yearly volume (kids do not need a new computer every year).
Business travel will be another area hit, as people get use to online meetings they will perceive less need to travel for meetings. There will always be some face-to-face meetings but fewer. This will hit the hospitality industry and airlines hard as leisure travel is not likely to make up for the loss.
General retail will not be affected that much though segments may have to switch their mix. Restaurants will hit or miss. Many that cater to the office workers will hit hard but those that cater to shoppers and local residents will probably recover somewhat. The problem they face is with the time needed to commute it is easier to cook at home. Also, food delivery services might do very well for the lunch trade. Food trucks will probably be hard hit.
What gray haired staff have over the diaper brigade is life and professional experience. How many fads have you seen if are over 40 that flamed out, the answer is many. Also, anyone who is beyond wearing diapers realizes there is more to life the working around the clock, there is such a thing as burnout and work-life balance. In the professional area, they are aware of the history of the development of something. This is often overlooked as people who were not around do not know what was like to work in an office 25 to 40 years ago. Look at any technology and the gray hairs can tell what using the predecessor was like and often give a good idea how it developed. And sometimes they might have an example of the previous technology around in the attic.
What a work force needs is a balance between gray hairs for their knowledge and wisdom and youth for their enthusiasm and curiosity (asking questions is always good). But Silly Valley does not realize (or the diaper wearing leaders do not know) is how technology and markets develop. A gray hair will have seen products come and go, companies come and go, and might have idea of what makes a product a long term success (e.g. it has to solve a real pain point for people that is not being solved with current products).
Spreadsheets are the original malware as they are very difficult to verify once the size or complexity is beyond dead simple. They are useful for certain tasks but because of they appear to require minimal training to be competent using they have an allure that makes them 'femme fatale' of the office suite. You can do more damage with a buggy spreadsheet than with any other office program. Worse it is often not easily noticed.
Pasteur was an Alsatian (e.g. from the civilized area of France) which is beer drinking region, Alsatians being civilized. Pasteurization was developed to prevent beer spoilage and later used on milk. I would have thought English beer was Pasteurized but then I am on other side of the Pond. What are the British requirements on beer Pasteurization?
My relationship with Bloat 10 (company computer) is pure hatred of the evil abomination. My hope would be the Rejects from Redmond would ditch Bloat in favor something that is stabler and generally works. Until the Rejects get their act together I will try to avoid their trash whenever possible.
It seems there are 2 extremely common ways to leak data. Misconfiguring the database (many have mentioned) seems to be very popular. Also, the misconfigured cloud service (AWS is often mentioned) is also popular. It would seem the first items to check would be the database configuration and website/cloud security
Taking your example of a hoe and context, you might have a set of perfectly fine gardening tools and just needed a new rake. Or you might need some more tools but obviously not a rake. Or it was a gift. It is hard to tell without the context behind the specific purchase.
To me targeted ads are a scam. They are allegedly based on information about my interests as expressed by searches, purchases, etc. But the information used has one glaring weakness, no context as to reason for the search, purchase, etc. That makes 'targeted ads' nothing more than are a roll of the dice. A more sensible ad campaign would take into account the nature of the site and the likely readership and target that general demographic. While the conversion rate might not be great it will be about as effective as radio or TV advertising.
Another issue overlooked is a good bit of advertising is not so much about a specific product but more about 'brand' awareness. The store, product, etc. exists and if one has need for x you have some idea who might provide it.
So if half of the total ad spend is wasted and half of the good ad spend is siphoned off then only a quarter of the add spend is actually doing any good.
It seems that many sites have failed to understand they might need to more aggressively seek ads themselves rather than relying on an ad agency to be generous. It used to be that most newspapers ran mostly local ads for the bulk of their advertising. I do not see this being done much these days.
Adobe's target audience has been companies that do image manipulation not the home/hobbyist. A market that has to convince a purchasing agent to buy not necessarily the person using the software.
Open source, too succeed, just needs to have a viable funding model (even if all the time and money is donated) that fits the scale of the project. Open source by existing creates pressure on the excessively greedy scum like Adobe and Slurp to watch what they do. A noisy few percent of the market not supporting the greedy scums' wares is a problem as there is an alternative to peruse. If the greedy scum get to nasty there are alternatives to bolt to.
Joe Christina has series of YouTube videos on ditching Adobe for photographers and the like. He has a lengthy list of options for Adobe for all OSes. This was triggered by Adobe's scumminess and the frustration of many photographers with their shakedown tactics.
Oh, how the arcane rules trip up the unwary and uninitiated. One point about trademarks is they are used to protect the brand from con artists and other assorted low lifes. So the question is 'Booking.com' a brand that needs protection so some slime could not try to confuse the public. I think that can be argued both ways in which case I would say grant the trademark. Now the USPTO rules say this can be a trademark but me thinks the dim bulbs there have not thought through the rules completely but that's what mindless bureaucrats do best.
There is the issue of 'booking.co.ca' and the like and how would they be treated as a trademark as they would very similar to 'booking.com' itself. This is an interesting thicket as .com is often US based while .co.xx is based in another country. I do not what the various treaties say about trademarks and infringement and if they actually even cover this situation.
Good systemic security is a balance of convenience and restrictions. A common mistake is to assume you need access to your bank on your phone when access through a desktop or laptop might be all you really need for monitoring and paying bills. A related mistake is not to use a 100% wired connection whenever possible for financial and commercial activities from your desktop. Are both inconvenient, to a degree yes, but both are much more secure.
The 2 space 'rule' for typewriters came about because there was no way to properly space sentences on a typewriter. So 2 spaces became the rule as the actual spacing used in books is about 1.5 spaces back then and now. This was the rule in the US since at least the mid 50s. It may have been different earlier and in other places.
With the current situation, Slurp could have announced a more sensible downgrade policy with new Bloat10 spyware releases. A once year major update with monthly security patches and bug fixes with biennial feature update release. Annual update would concentrate on implementing new specs such as the latest USB spec. Feature updates would add new features. Alas, the chief idiot did not see the opportunity make Slurp do something somewhat reasonable.
Getting it right the first time is always a good procedure for the medium to long term code stability. What is usually overlooked in half-assing the code and pushing it out is that the code will usually be used for a long time, conceivably a couple decades or more. Half-arsed code is more time consuming to update and maintain than well written code. This is language independent.
The explanation that the demand drop is due to certain virus is not very good. There were reports that laptops were being scarfed up which should have juiced the numbers. I suspect the actually decline is mostly due to underlying fundamental problems in the market not a certain virus.
Twain observed Congress is America's native criminal class. They haven't changed in over 100 years. The only question is whether Congress critter stock sales are exempted from insider trader, the critters are notorious for exempting themselves for the laws they inflict on us peasants.
If Chocolate Factory is using snap shots from Instagram and the like they are truly the idiots. Most people do not know how to operate a camera and thus use whatever settings the camera/phone selects. Also most do not use a quality camera that has very good resolution and lens ever. Up to point image quality is affected by the quality of the device (sensor size, lens, etc.) as well as the skill of the user. I have not addressed lighting conditions and how to try to compensate for them.
To properly 'train' the artificial idiocy system you need high quality portraits taken from different angles of a large number of people. This costs real money. The reason they sort of get away with it on lighter skinned people is there is naturally better contrast in the face than with darker skinned people. Basically they got lucky. But the poor quality of the original images means more error in the system. Depending on what you need the system to do, the error could be unacceptable.