What an interesting article that definitely isn't pulling incredibly obvious red scare tactics. I'd be quite interested to know what damn article it was that was apparently so out of touch with reality that it left this author reeling in shock and horror.
Perhaps they neglected to mention what Wikipedia article it was, because they knew that if people were able to visit the page, look through its edit history, and inspect the content of its talk page, they would be able to come to their own conclusion that the author's claims are overstated, sensationalist fearmongering? In a time where the US federal government is trying its hardest to undermine the freedoms of its own people, I find any accusations of foreign actors to be laughable.
You know its funny, I think I'm less worried about people on the other side of the planet stealing my personal data and trying to influence the way I think than I am about the people in the same country as me. Since, you know, not only would it be easier for them to, since we are in the same country, but also they stand to gain a lot more from it as well!
Personally, I don't think I have much benefit in a new generation TI-84. I still own a TI-85, a model that was discontinued before I was born, and it is still an objectively superior tool for doing small calculations than any other alternative.
For instance, we compare the phone calculator. My phone fills a lot of really important roles besides being a calculator, ones that necessitate a password. So first I have to unlock my phone. Then I have to leave whatever app I had open before. Then I need to find the damn calculator app.
That's 5-6 seconds of friction, depending on how responsive my phone feels like being and how many times I fatfinger my password because the concept of "muscle memory" on a touch screen is practically an oxymoron. Not to mention, you cant just walk away from the desk for a moment with the calculator app left open on your phone, ready to come back at a moments notice, like you can with a dedicated calculator. Phones are just too important for that.
There's arguable pros and cons to using your PC over a calculator, but I think that discussion is a lot more nuanced. Either way, a PC is definitely less portable than your phone or a calculator.
Maybe I'll be convinced to upgrade at whatever point they add usb-c and a rechargeable battery to their lowest trim model. Not before that though.
So if I've got the right idea, the clearances harder to achieve for a fan vs a lego piece because you're not just concerned with the static tolerances of the shape of the fan, but also the dynamic forces that will make the blades flex and bend under load.
Clearance in this case is how far away the blades have to be at rest, such that the dynamic forces the blades experience under load won't flex them outwards to the point they scrape against the enclosure. Which I'd assume has far more to do with material properties than it does the raw geometry of the blade.
Now I wish I had a high-speed camera to be able to inspect the dynamic deformation of a noctua fan. I'm curious about how rigidly they behave under load.
The plastic will also shrink and grow depending on its temperature (yes this will have a significant impact over the normal temperature range of the inside of a computer).
Another part of the issue, as I can see it, is that paying your workers better is a prisoners dilemma:
If nobody pays their workers well: All companies suffer from a disaffected, burnt out workforce that is unable to consistently perform at the best of their ability. As well as many industries suffering from the fact that their products are non-essential. If you're paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by rent, you're not going to bother buying a new board game, pick up a book, get the latest and greatest console, or its overpriced games.
If some pay their workers well, and others don't, the companies that do will be at a disadvantage financially against their competitors. A healthier and happier employee almost certainly directly results in higher profits, but not to an extent that matches or outpaces the increase in wages required to reach that point.
If all of them pay their workers well, workers become less financially stressed. They do their job better, because they are healthier, less exhausted, etc. This also results in the exact opposite of the first case above: People have more money, they can spend more, you make more profit from people spending more across the board.
This is part of the reason that minimum wage laws are actually really important, and why the fact they have stagnated for so long is such an issue. It breaks the prisoners dilemma game by mandating that everyone together makes the group-optimal decision over the individual-optimal one.
Or, you know, we could also try UBI! Or help free up discretionary spending power by nationalizing the most essential goods and services (targeting the ones that are the least elastic). It's not like we aren't lacking in options that would work to alleviate the issue here.
Only if there are plenty of workers for all time. The economy isn't in great shape now (We sometimes call this recession but recession has a weird definition that we might not meet even though it looks like one when you wave hands), so there are plenty of workers and in turns you can get by with paying less because someone who needs money will accept something with a lower standard of living - at least they are living.
However the economy has always moved in cycles. When things are going well again there will be more jobs than workers and if you want to get employees to take advantage of the money coming in you will be forced to pay more - even just to retain the workers you have you will be forced to pay more.
Thus this is not prisoner's delemma. The situation over time is far too complex for that simple analysis.
You pay workers well and retain institutional knowledge it helps you 5+ years down the road. Who in 5+ years is going to run a study that shows retaining the people that created a system made it easier to maintain that system?
Like think about Jack Welch who ran GE into the ground but keep the stock afloat through financial craftsmanship. He spawns a ton of copy-cats because despite making poor decisions he was visibly successful for a long time.
It's not like the NFL where if you decide to fire all your receivers and play the running game you'll immediately start losing next week.
Based on the origins of Rust as a tool for writing the really thorny, defensive parsers of potentially actively hostile code for firefox, I have to imagine that another web browser is the most at-home place the language could ever be.
I feel like the lag-time of communication was an important component of older forms of communication that has been lost. That's not to say that fast communication isn't a boon to society, of course. Only that slower communication gives you more flexibility in how you respond, and more time to think about what your response should be.
When the main form of long distance communication was the postal system, and letters took days to travel from sender to receiver, you could easily wait days, if not weeks, to draft up your reply and mail it out. The recipient on the other end wouldn't even be able to discern the difference between your delay and the delay from the postal network itself. It had some in-built slack.
When the only phones were landlines, if someone called you and you knew you were in a bad mood, the kind of bad mood that would invariably make you say something stupid, you could just not pick up! There were plenty of common, understandable reasons someone wouldn't be available to answer their landline. Then they could leave you a message, and you could call back when you mood improved again. Again, there was slack built into the system.
Now there's this cultural expectation that puts far more attention on your reaction speed. A text message with no immediate response could just be them not seeing it immediately... But actually no! Now we have read receipts too! You can't even pretend to have not seen it yet while you think of your reply. Some platforms even have the little "currently typing" indicator tell them how long you've spent drafting and re-drafting whatever message you ended up sending. A panopticon of communication. Now there's no slack. Any person anywhere in the world could try and get a hold of you with the same expectation of immediacy that a face-to-face conversation would supply.
Now of course, not every single person I might text, call, or send an email to, will have the same expectations for what is an appropriate degree of responsiveness. But, (speaking from my personal experience) I am absolutely miserable at reading that from social clues. I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations, and that allowing myself to be lax may very well give them a terrible opinion of me. (Though, the degree to which their opinion of me actually matters is a different question entirely!)
> I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations
This is self-defeating. You have the option (and I recommend it) to intentionally adopt the opposite assumption:
Zero communication is urgent, unless explicitly described as such.
It might be appropriate to make exceptions for certain people. Parents, partners, children. Maybe some work people during a crunch. Maybe some friends going through difficult times.
And still, we apologised ('I hope this find you well' and so on). It's cruft, it's slack, and it's social. We need some anchors to hang our message on. We know when it's necessary and when it isn't, and by breaking conventions we relay intent ('sorry not sorry').
If imposition was something for this site to add, I'd recommend doing it through LaTeX with the pdfpages package[1]. You generate the pdf normally, then re-lay it out using a second latex file dedicated to just doing the imposition. It's how I've done all of my imposition so far, and its more than powerful enough to do the kind of simple page layout that you would want to do with a home printer.
Maybe more complex layout might be needed if you happened to have a printer that could handle like, A0 size paper, or continuous rolls, which would give more flexibility in terms of the number of ways you could fit your pages onto the stock material. for the hobbyist though? More than good enough.
yeah, same here, I was like "wow what an interesting side to their business, a whole operating system intended to serve public and academic libraries!"
I think parent poster was referring to an actual library, i.e. where you would borrow books.
That's also what I thought this was, and came to the comments expecting to see something neat about why libraries might need bespoke operating systems.
Ah right! Yeah, I did think that too..., like locked down so random patrons couldn't do this or that. I was thinking that was quite a pivot for MS though too...
I was in the market for a vinyl cutter/knife plotter a while back, and the fact I use linux on everything was my main reason for avoiding Cricut. Ended up finding out theres an open source inkscape plugin that interfaces with the silhouette brand of knife plotters.
Not having to use the proprietary jank software is so nice, its a value-add over the cricut just to not have to use their software.
Perhaps they neglected to mention what Wikipedia article it was, because they knew that if people were able to visit the page, look through its edit history, and inspect the content of its talk page, they would be able to come to their own conclusion that the author's claims are overstated, sensationalist fearmongering? In a time where the US federal government is trying its hardest to undermine the freedoms of its own people, I find any accusations of foreign actors to be laughable.
You know its funny, I think I'm less worried about people on the other side of the planet stealing my personal data and trying to influence the way I think than I am about the people in the same country as me. Since, you know, not only would it be easier for them to, since we are in the same country, but also they stand to gain a lot more from it as well!
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