Re: MetaFail
Well, as long as they're buying what you're selliing, who cares why they're doing it?
12086 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
To be fair, he has a point: lots of executive compensation is in the form of deferred share options. This can indeed lead to incentives regarding lower or higher share prices: you might want lower prices when you can buy them and higher ones, once they've vested. And there's no doubt that some earnings reports do correlate reasonably with such incentives. But it's a difficult trick to pull off frequently. Instead earnings calls like this tend to like to bury the bad news.
Personally, I've never been that convinced by Facebook's promise of incredibly granular demographic data for advertisers. But others obviously are, as you can see from the pricing strategy. However, while I think there is more commercial promise in the content-based marketing of, say, Instagram and TikTok (you already have the AI of AIDA), there's no doubt the demographic and sentiment data, which you get from all the nowtrage, also sells well, just to different buyers.
And also let's not forget that, whatever they say, advertisers know there a bundle of us who are pretty resistant to their wiles. They build this in to their calcualtions and focus on those more easily swayed leaving us marks open to other approaches.
I don't think that's what the numbers say, just that there is little or no growth. Facebook thrives on controversy. It could be vaccinations, guns, racism, religion, etc. But there are more competitors and also other markets where they're less successful (ie. whatever TikTok is doing).
The two are completely unrelated in terms of the laws involved but there is no reason to think why they shouldn't. The recently overturned fine was imposed by the European Commission as part of its remit in the Single Market and appeals are built in. GDPR decisions have the full force of the law, with the ECJ already having opined that informed consent cannot be assumed.
Nevertheless, even in its "failure" the action against Intel did help change the market.
Apart from the practical difficulties of the switch, your chemistry is way off. While scrubbing removes a lot, it doesn't remove everything. Otherwise you'd have nothing left "to seed" those rain clouds in your argument. CO2 is not particularly hydrophilic so won't do any seeding, but water vapour is a normal byproduct of burning hydrocarbons. Not that releasing more of it into the atmosphere will do anything to cool things down: clouds trap infrared energy and are both cause and effect of global warming and those warm clouds will help warm up the oceans…
Wordle is basically a hangman variant, of which there must be many versions in almost every programming language out there – in Haiku you can even play hangman in the kernel debugger! But the NYT has bought the brand and copyright, and that's what will be the target of any enforcement actions.
SPAC-driven deals have become popular in recent years partly as a defense against market volatility…
This is not about volatility but avoiding scrutiny, regulation and costs. IPOs must provide detailed company information and answer questions; SPACs don't and mean the VCs don't have to share any cash with the banks. But SPACs are also a cat in the bag, with the "special purpose" only a label. Basing the company in the Cayman Islands is another clue about the noble intentions…
Google Cloud is only a division within Alphabet so any profits or loss are entirely notional and have no effect on the parent company's situation. Indeed, classic conglomerates favour loss-making companies in high growth areas: the cash cows bankroll the supposed businesses of the future. And, of course, the accountants get to move profits and losses around the world for the most favourable tax treatment.
As did Apple, GM and a host of other companies. Blame Jack Welch and the cult of shareholder value that has convinced too many that trilemmas (good, fast, cheap) don't exist. But also blame loose monetary policy for favouring fiancial engineering over the real stuff.
Intel has a great track record, but the market now is much more challenging because it's both more technologically and geographically diverse. Not only is future growth in x86 limited, but TSMC, Samsung, et al. have been really busy developing their our process and engineering IP, with the Chinese catching up fast. This means you can't just buy the competition or poach the best chip designers.
I'm not curation is really required. What you do need is a more extensive corpus of data so that co-factors can be spotted more easily. Simple statistical analysis should indicate areas worth investigation and testing.Unfortunately, medical staff have neither time, skills or equipment to do the work. And, the industry doesn't help by wanting to keep all the data for itself for future commercial products and services.
FWIW the delivery of the dialogue is similar that of Jackson Lamb in the Mick Herron series about "Slough House"; though Lamb swears more and makes overt threats. How does it go? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Hm, maybe Jackson Lamb could make a guest appearance in an episode…
I think that all subsequent tokomaks (and similar developments) have discovered new problems (and new solutions) since then, particularly about just how difficult it actually is to try and control large volumes of plasma, which is why things like laser containment have been tried in the first place.
And, while it's clear we're still a long way from any kind of commercial power plant, we do now understand a lot more about the whole area: fewer unknown unknowns, if you like.
ITER is aiming to be ready by the end of 2025, and while the timeframe might slip, the things we learn when things don't (quite) work as expected, do bring us forward.
What kind of a person Lynch isn't under discussion, I'm sure the same could be said for a heap of "captains of industry", especially in IT. What is under discussion if whether he and others committed fraud despite the apparent due diligence by HP and its auditors and whether they should be extradited to the US to stand trial despite an ongoing civil case in the US.
If you look at the history of mergers and acquisitions you will see that the majority of the big ones are written down at some point afterwards, because apparently not all the facts were disclosed. In reality, this is just usually some shareholders profiting at the expense of others. I mean, is this deal substantially different to Microsoft's purchase of Nokia Phones sans IP?
I'm trying to think of when they have added stuff to the OS that people really need and can't remember much since Windows NT 3.51. Since then, Windows seems to have been the vehicle to drive sales of MS Office and the Exchange server landscape.
The risk MS faces is being displaced at some point by Android. However, Google seems to have decided not to pursue the desktop space, concentrating on its cloudy offerings, leaving convergence to manufacturers to try out.
You're right. But then again, this is also yet another instance of stricter security being bypassed for convenience for certain privileged services, in this case Apple's cloud storage which is quite clearly bypassing ACL security which should not allow the remote user to change the executable status of any files on my system. This used to be called download poisoning and is one of the reasons for sandboxing all file transfers.
3G / 4G largely use the same spectrum, just different networking protcols. Anyway, in Germany UMTS was switched off last year and the sky has yet to fall in!
While technically shit, Windows 95 was "good enough" to keep customers with Microsoft. Previously, Microsoft had added disk compression, better memory management and proprietary extensions to DOS to stop customers jumping ship to things like DR-DOS. Windows 3.11 including enough working networking for small customers. All this, and the work on NT, gave Microsoft to stop working on OS/2, forcing IBM to do the work itself and finally fix some annoying if trivial restrictions (single-threaded Presentation Manager) but took too long to do so. By making OS/2 "the better DOS than DOS, the better Windows than Windows", IBM had allowed companies to keep investing in DOS and Windows software rather buying OS/2 specific versions. This kept the market small and deterred developers from the considerable work of porting GUI applications to a completely different OS. We still see this in OS markets today with a not inconsiderable amount of MacOS only software alongside the mountain of Windows only stuff. In fact, only by adding support for Android to Windows is this changing.
The main difference is the release schedule. Firefox and Chrome have predictable release dates and established procedures for bug fixes. They also have long term releases to make life easier for corporates. Year on and Apple still does not have predictable release dates and a history of bug fixes breaking things. Could the two be connected?
Totally agree that DRM doesn't protect content, it's just about tying users to services and devices.
I never managed to get the plugins to strip the DRM from my books propery, so I do it with Epubor and then stick them in Calibre. The interface is a bit clunky but the plugins are great: I have a Kobo so it's great that the additional features are magically supported.
I've also used the editor to break down some omnibuses into more manageable sizes.
Sexual abuse of children has been going on for thousands of years and perpetrators have relied on something far stronger than end-to-end encryption for protection: fear, guilt and shame. Encryption might help some of them share pictures and videos but again, this was something they tended to manage fine before the internet. But focussing on the technology deliberately misses the point: the abuse is generally carried out within families or by people of trust. And if that's not evil enough, many institutions have deliberately colluded to prevent any kind of investigation let alone justice.
I would say a lot different: it looks and feels very much more like MS Office and uses OOXML as the default file format.
I first came across it the other day when someone submitted a bug report on my library regarding styles. The bug, however, was with OnlyOffice but has, apparently since been fixed. So I'd take that 100% compatible with MS Office with a grain of salt, then again, it is nearly impossible to get that anyway.
Presumably you live in a region where there is a relative abundance of IPv4 addresses: Europe or the US. This is definitely not the case in Asia where sometimes multiple NATs are required and these bring their own problems.
You can do a lot with IPv4 but you can't do everything, which is why IPv6 solves more than just the address space problem. That it's not 100% backwards compatible lies in the nature of the thing. It's not perfect but it is better and it is here. Fortunately, in the decades since it was approved, many of the problems of integration have been ironed out so that, indeed, most users neither know nor care. FWIW my ISP went IPv6 for all new customers for a couple of years now. But, unless I run things like traceroute6 www.theregister.com, I never notice.
FWIW I live about 5 km from a reasonably busy airport runway and many WiFi 5GHz channels are routinely disabled on my router at the behest of the airport following the DFS protocol. If necessary, this is easy enough to replicate for 5G services. The only problem here being that my Apple devices don't cope well with the enforced switching, so I have to used fixed channels or LAN cables.
The article doesn't go into any great deal about how conclusions were reached, but I thought it was long established that various biomarkers (concentration, memory recall, fat cells, cortisol, etc.) associated with long term conditions can consistently be measured with increased workload over time. I don't think there are hard and fast limits, but nearly everyone has them and most of us find out too late what they are.
The court system is bound by the presumption of innocence with an obligation to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt. This is why things can grind on for years. Oh, and siding with a lower court against the High Court is rarely a good idea.
There is also nothing stopping the US court from trying the case in absentia, this happens often enough.
That's what I mean. If everyone is supposed to be in the office from Tuesday to Thursday, you can't downsize. I know of a couple of companies that are offering people split-working but only if they're prepared to desk share, though obviously not in a WeWork way.
Cue next property crisis if the idea really catches on: loose monetary policy has led to an awful lot of pricey office building.
So how is it that nearly every firm has found exactly the same answer?
What if, as many of us know, they haven't. First of all, lots and lots of people don't have the option of working from home. Secondly, cost-savings can only be achieved by not having everyone in the office at the same time.
As for which approach works best: while some people work best on their own, many don't. Then, throw into the mix things like data security and confidentiality – it may well be against contracts for documents to be processed outside the office – and then health and safety and working from home is no longer as simple as many gurus like to make out.
So, all in all, an article of Mr Pesce's usual quality…