This is a very smart strategic move on behalf of Microsoft that I would have never guessed (not because it doesn't make sense but simply out of corporate pride, considering they are the authors of the "Linux Facts" memorandum...).
I think it's smart because this will capture all those Linux people who aren't super comfortable administrating their own distro and even for those that are it's now giving them another option if they ever need to run things both in Windows and Linux at the same time or just run into some Linux issues and don't want to spend the time on them they can switch to Windows 10 WSL.
At this point the only thing that I still think it doesn't make much sense is Microsoft running/developing their own kernel. It's entirely possible for them to start running Linux and run all the WIN32 support, drivers, DirectX, etc as a separate sandbox (similar to the type of sandbox WSL runs). The performance overhead from doing that should be negligible on modern hardware.
EDIT: note that I only mean switching to Linux kernel for their desktop OS, there are plenty of usecases of Microsoft kernels where every bit of performance matters but I suspect those will continue to use their own kernel as part of Windows Server releases.
> If you sell your house, even in a sellers market like today, you will immediately become a buyer in a seller’s market, facing the same inflated costs to get back into a house.
Whether it's a seller's market, buyer's market or balanced market, as both a seller and buyer _in the same market_ you will experience things from both sides, I don't think the market situation really matters in that case.
But what does matter, especially in market of constantly increasing prices, is that already owning a house means your stake in the house is already following the general market pricing so you only need to pay some extra "if you move up" in the market or you cash in some money "if you downsize". This is vastly better than just being a first time buyer, in that type of market.
> If you can fully pay off the mortgage, you’ll immediately get more monthly income and this income can be applied towards actual investments that make you money. (But you could have done this instead of paying off the mortgage too, so it’s economy dependent)
Really depends on the mortgage interest rate, term (years that the interest is applied over) and the expected returns from those said investments. In other words, I find it hard to find enough motivation to pay off a 2% interest rate 10 years long mortgage loan. 2% is same as inflation, that mortgage is almost free.
Having to use something like Steam (Internet based DRM) to play games effortlessly on Linux seems to beat the purpose. At that point I'd rather just have a separate Windows 10 install where all I do is just gaming.
> - google can push chrome on people in their search results. and google pushed HARD. So hard they dominate the browser market and chrome is unfortunately not known for privacy.
I didn't pay Google $200 (Windows 10 Pro retaile I payed for recently) for the privilege to use their search, so they are free to push some advertising alongside it. When I will pay $200 to use their search then I don't want any advertising from Google either.
> - google pretty much makes it impossible to get away from chrome entirely in android. Example being that you MUST use chrome webview when using the google search app. Even though everything else uses firefox for me.
Funny, I have used InBrowser ever since I started using Android 10 years ago (which btw, makes it possible to read all those news articles without running into free article monthly limits because InBrowser doesn't store any state between sessions). Doesn't seem impossible to not use Chrome at all to me.
> - ms doesn't have search results. sure they try with bing but its not nearly as good or widespread. MS does have windows itself though, so they push where they can.
They are free to do whatever they want with their software but I don't find it acceptable to pay $200 for that and still get ads. If they were to give me Windows 10 Pro for free, then sure, go ahead and put a bunch of ads on my desktop.
1. Personally, working from home has been a mixed bag. When I'm allowed to focus on one single task, I can do pretty well. The comforts of having my own office room, high quality monitors, keyboard and speakers listening to music are very nice. The additional latency accessing my remote workstation not so great (and that is required, because of company rules not allowing source access outside of corp network). Also, anything that required a lot of human interaction has been pretty bad, video conferencing is a poor substitute, I've found (as someone who doesn't really enjoy socializing) and depending on where you are in the project (is the team already established, do they know each other IRL, the tasks are clear or are you just starting a new team for a new project, scoping up tasks and everything) it requires more or less interaction. At the beginning of a project there is a ton of little details that get missed in the initial plans which can be resolved very fast in person and which always seem to resolve slower remotely, no matter how good use we attempt to make of all the tools available (team chat, video conference, etc). As such, whenever my company asked in WFH surveys how I would rate my productivity, I always rated it lower than 100%, around 60%-70%. In terms of commute, it's a wash-off: yes, I don't spend time commuting now but the extra time I have I just spend it in longer videogame sessions at night (so not exactly the best/most healthy way to use that extra time) and when I was commuting to the office I'd often commute by bike (at about 100 miles biked per week) while now I barely bike a third of that because I force myself to get out on the bike every weekend to at least have some physical activity.
2. Company wide, based on the the surveys done, it seems most people have rated their productivity lower than when in office. As such, it is no surprise to me that the company is looking at an accelerated schedule to get people back in office.
> Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. I couldn't care less what the album art looks like when listening to music on Spotify or YouTube.
Do you listen to full albums or just mixes/random?
I see it much less important for the latter but significant for the former. For a lot of the albums I listen the cover art complements the music/message of the album. I really like it and it enhances my music listening experience.
I don't think I qualify for either introvert or extrovert (that is, I tend to be self-reflective about some things and outgoing about others).
There are plenty of other reasons too. It is much faster to communicate face to face (for me) and I tend to be much better at resolving micro-miscommunications that can blow up in hours of days of work delays when I'm face to face than when I'm remote. Compounded with the fact that I am not good at reading people in general (but much worse so remotely), in the WFH setup I end up having a lot more situations where I don't know exactly where a coworker and I stand on a certain issue, which even if it happened in the office it would be resolved in < 5 minutes face to face.
I think it's because in the office, interrupting someone with a quick question is a much lower barrier/less hassle than asking them to join you on a short video conference.
Because the discussion is only focused on Amazon. If instead all such articles and complains would be "Amazon, among many other companies, give workers incentives to pee in bottles" then I would pay a lot more attention to it.
Because when you say "<insert-bad-company-of-the-day> does <insert-bad-thing-of-the-day>" which is obviously to me not unique to that company then your message sounds like meant to provoke a certain feeling against a certain company, my "manipulation" alarms start ringing and, as a protection mechanism, I stop believing everything you say. By making at least an effort to make such reporting balanced, fair and accurate you have much higher chance to get me to care.
Agreed. I may not have agreed with most things Amazon twitter said but IMO it was definitely refreshing to see a company answering back instead of being just a punching bag mute for the politicians to score easy wins like "hey look how tough I am, I'm saying all these things about big bad <insert the latest company punch bag>, you should vote for me because of the emotional response you get from feeling less powerless" (although the latter part is rarely spoken).
Amazon is a big employer: what's the percentage of Amazon's employees engage in that? What's the percentage of employees of any other large employer, that directly competes with Amazon (so same market) that engage in similar activities?
Peeing in bottles sounds good as a click bait title but it's easy to not see the forest from the trees if you just focus on one example.
Which seems to apply to some of our politicians too. Like the reply from Elizabeth Warren saying that maybe Amazon should be split up because then maybe they wouldn't have time to criticize elected officials. Or otherwise "stop criticizing me or I'll make you hurt". Not very nice coming from a political figure in a democracy.
I did find Amazon's responses to be tone deaf at best (mostly just disagreeing with them) but her reply to be much worse.
I don't think having more wealth per capita is unreasonable, unexpected or unfair. In life you acquire things over time (capital, skills, experience, relationships), you get more of this the more time passes so it's to be expected that older generations just have more of everything (maybe except health and energy, can't really buy biology, not yet).
The numbers that we _should_ be looking at is not how much they have vs how many they are (ie the wealth per capita) but wealth per capita at different stages in their life vs same stages in other generation's lives. Compare how much wealth per capita boomers had in their mid twienties, mid thirdies, etc compared to younger generation. I feel those comparisons are much more fair and telling (and yes, AFAIK, there is a discrepancy that makes it seem unfair).
My wife liked it so much we bought a couple of new ones when the product was retired just to make sure we'll have at least one working for decades to come. Still using one every day.
Indeed I noticed the 2018 Macbook Pro became a much more useful machine for work and I was a lot more productive once I started using it clamshell-mode only with external keyboard/mouse/monitors.
I think it mostly boils down to business loss that they would otherwise incur if they set themselves against those companies and thought them tooth and nail (the actual lawsuit cost would be insignificant). Meaning, no Google/Youtube Music deals with Viacom and potentially other RIAA members.
> No, that's not correct. Google goes above and beyond what the DMCA requires in order to curry favor with the movie/TV/music studios. Presumably Content ID was a part of Google's bend-over-backwards settlement with Viacom when they sued.
Yes, Google won in the end, but there were times when it didn't (they won on appeal) and the cost of the lawsuit itself, the insecurity of its outcome and the potential impact that could have down the line to doing business with Viacom I think were enough to act.
I think it's smart because this will capture all those Linux people who aren't super comfortable administrating their own distro and even for those that are it's now giving them another option if they ever need to run things both in Windows and Linux at the same time or just run into some Linux issues and don't want to spend the time on them they can switch to Windows 10 WSL.
At this point the only thing that I still think it doesn't make much sense is Microsoft running/developing their own kernel. It's entirely possible for them to start running Linux and run all the WIN32 support, drivers, DirectX, etc as a separate sandbox (similar to the type of sandbox WSL runs). The performance overhead from doing that should be negligible on modern hardware.
EDIT: note that I only mean switching to Linux kernel for their desktop OS, there are plenty of usecases of Microsoft kernels where every bit of performance matters but I suspect those will continue to use their own kernel as part of Windows Server releases.