Friedduck

Committed FF user after finding you can stop auto playing HTML5 videos without the need for an extension.

Plus: Google’s auto-login debacle which precipitated the move.

I don’t know if my experience in the mid-2000s is unique. A company I worked for laid off thousands of American workers and replaced them with H-1B and off-shore labor.

Many (most?) of the H-1B workers were utterly unqualified. Right out of school, inexperienced, and some just hopeless. The impact beyond the obvious was anyone pursuing a tech career at that company found alternate work.

The lesson was not lost. They learned that they could be replaced at any time by much cheaper global labor.

So I wonder if some of the scarcity in the tech labor market isn’t due to this perception.

Google has increasingly moved away from strictly honoring advanced search terms. Excluding terms (-) or using the exact phrase search no longer returns the desired result. Frustrating.

We’re fortunate enough to have a Warby Parker retail store nearby. $95 all-in for glasses. This is 15-25% of what I’ve spent elsewhere.

It’s considerably more if you have progressive lenses. Nearly $300. Still far off the norm.

I was curious and checked the specs for my bike computer: “Supported Satellites: GPS, GLONASS, BEIDOU Galileo, and QZSS.”

This is in a $250 unit so clearly neither cost nor geopolitics seem to be obstacles.

To OP: your easiest path is to try to make contact with someone in a chosen company that is NOT HR. HR won’t look beyond your resume if you have a requirement unchecked.

Leverage your network. If you don’t have one start building it. I personally think it’s easier to identify companies that you’d like to work for and focus on those vs. a shotgun approach.

I share in the hate. It’s the worst keyboard I’ve used in memory. The trackpad is first rate however.

The touchbar is so much less functional than the keys it replaces. Some key combinations now require serious acrobatics, and you can’t touch type as easily.

We’re not buying any more macs until it improves.

Seems the new normal is to wipe your devices of anything you don’t want made public regardless of country.

I give pause when pondering international business travel. I can’t very well wipe my laptop, nor could I hand it over given what’s on it. Put everything on a VM and move it off the device for border crossings?

Has everyone forgotten that these people are all convicted of a crime and serving their sentences?

For all the issues that exist (gouging for common services, violence, the judicial process, etc.) complaining about the terms of their punishment is absurd.

To be sure there should be rehabilitation, and a component of that is incentives. There should be no expectation, though, that those incentives should correlate to what they may receive in the free market.

I personally wouldn’t use their services for fear insurance companies obtain the data. Not just now but at any point in your life (through bankruptcy, change of ownership , etc.)

I’m at the point where I still greatly prefer MacOS, but Windows hardware.

Unless things have changed dramatically, my 2017 MBP will be my last when it’s time for a replacement. Hundreds of dollars in add-ons to make it functional and a terrible keyboard are too much to live with.

I know someone who took Effexor, who went through one of the most harrowing experiences of her life trying to quit. Her doctor seemed vested in keeping her taking the drug (I personally suspect some kind of incentive to sell the drug but don’t have evidence to back that up.)

I can’t emphasize enough how serious these drugs are, and what a prison they can become.

Imagine what the MPAA will do if they find this as another means of disincenting piracy.

I fully expect to see that someone’s figures it out from micro vibrations, or preferred aperture, when comparing it to clearly credited photos.

I’m amazed what human ingenuity is capable of in situations like this.

Related: when I used to travel with a film camera inevitably I would recall taking a photo someone else took credit for as well. Something about seeing a scene in your mind’s eye, recalling exactly that moment, leads one to believe they pushed the button.

I’ve held off on High Sierra until the issues subside which doesn’t seem to be soon.

The keyboard is second-rate on my 2017 MBP compared to previous models, and had I known what a nightmare USB-C would be I wouldn’t have bought it—full stop. The touch bar has occasionally been unresponsive, or outright crashes forcing a reboot. (I’ve seen learned how to restart it. A sentence I should never have to type.)

The problem is Apple has become so much worse just as the competition has finally started to produce compelling options. They still have the lead (?) but it’s no longer a foregone conclusion that they’ll offer the best OS/hardware combination.

How is this an improvement over VR headsets already on the market?

Downvote. Pocketnow redirects to a scam site.

Face ID is an answer to a question no one asked. I’m sure I’d acclimate but the fingerprint reader works brilliantly.

It’s a perfect storm. Kill net neutrality and then restrictions preventing local media monopolies.

People have been manipulated by their chosen media like no other time in history, and I can’t see where we go from here.

Enterprises will have the singular ability to control what vast swaths of the populace hears and believes. At best it’s a continuance of recent trends, and at worst the failure of the republic.

Disney has reversed its LA Times ban after backlash by other media outlets. Apologies if this was updated before and I missed it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/business/disney-la-times....

After a month or so of owning a brand-new 15” MBP my regret is that I didn’t buy one of the holdover 2015s. The charger is absurdly large and I have a growing collection of dongles that need to accompany me depending on the task.

I’m currently using a Rube Goldberg two-dongle solution to get photos off of an SD card.

Moreover I still can’t find what I need for my home office in USB-C.

I won’t even get into how much less functional the touchbar is than the hard keys they replace. Terrible user experience.

UltraEdit does column editing so much better than ST. I think I prefer ST overall but that one feature, when it's needed, is wonderful.

The $1k price might be easier to stomach if iPhone managed content as well as it used to. I've stopped using the apple ecosystem for photo + music management, and now find it isn't managing contacts well across devices any longer.

For all the truly amazing capabilities the basics are lacking.

@xenadu02,

I feel the same way as a client. Everything I've used that they've purchased has turned out for the worse. Be it neglect or price increases the promises always exceed what's actually delivered.

Moreover they're transparent about their desire to lock you in and then press that to their advantage.

I actively avoid few companies but they're at the top of the list.

I came her to reminisce about the beauty of Solaris from a long time ago and your comment struck a nerve.

Every story I've ever read about PayPal is a cautionary tale not to ever use or rely upon PayPal.

Of course like others I use it for eBay but never, ever, for anything important.

@ericseppanen,

I agree, that there seem to be two distinct practices. I experienced the latter, where a company performed wholesale off-shoring of several thousand jobs.

I don't understand how the stewards of that program approve such visas when they're clearly being used to replace existing workers (i.e., the argument that you can't find qualified locals is demonstrably false.)

My other hard-won conclusion: the companies that do this don't recognize the long-term impacts. They're less capable, less competitive, and their outsourcing partners can become their overlords. The outsourcers gain considerable negotiating leverage, and any attempt to unseat them becomes economically impossible.

What can we do about it? Look at the policies that make American employment unappetizing. The cost of benefits (principally health care.) Regulations that make it difficult to fire poor performers.

Finally, there's a feedback mechanism here. I saw many leave technology because they perceived that the opportunities were all moving off-shore.

I don't think I'm alone in saying I'm disappointed by the new MBPs, and also haven't found a reasonable alternative. I buy for a small office (<100 people) and it's a constant challenge to find decent quality and performance.

In a city of 5mm I also can't find a brick & mortar store where I could even evaluate what's on offer. Any place selling laptops these days are all targeting home users, and sifting through online offerings isn't much better.

Maybe my expectations are unrealistic, but I'm convinced we've taken a step backward in the last year or so.

I've seen firsthand how difficult and time-consuming the buildout is of Google and AT&T fiber is in Atlanta. Idle fiber runs just 100 yards from my house, where it's been sitting for months. Just for this single run it's required dozens of people, traffic permits, closed roads, sidewalk repair, new access panels embedded in sidewalk, let alone pulling the fiber itself.

At the phone poles there are large devices (repeaters?) and I assume more equipment at the nearest colo.

This is all on a street that already had a lot of infrastructure and easy access. I haven't seen a single run through people's backyards in a hilly, densely populated neighborhood. It's going to be difficult.

I'm in awe of what this woman and others like her have done.

We were stopped by a TSA agent, who took great care to inspect our Cards Against Humanity deck, and ask lots of questions. Where'd you buy them? What is this? She revealed in the course of the conversation that she'd been banned from shopping on Amazon.

I posit that someone who's banned from shopping at AMZN is more dangerous than someone who plays card games with a dark sense of humor. How does that even happen?

^This. Had Apple gone this direction instead of the OLED bar I'd be placing an order.

The people who disagree with the post are ignoring the argument because it may not apply to their specific circumstance. It is a real setback to those of us who rely on those keys (features, really) but more worryingly a design direction that offers a net decrease in usability.

All MacBooks already have a touch surface that currently performs the functions shown in the touch bar demo. While I can see the appeal of some scenarios where it accelerates what might otherwise require lengthy finger travel on the touchpad, that doesn't come anywhere close to offsetting the loss of the function keys.

Virtually all of the MacBooks we buy we set up with Parallels or Fusion, and the F keys are absolutely necessary for Windows functionality. Having to break concentration to look at where the keys are, or their state, is a profound productivity drag.

Doubt that I'm right? Use an iPad instead of your physical keyboard for a week and let us know the results.

On a sidebar this reminds me a lot of the move to touch screens in cars, and the resulting challenges. Touch surfaces are great but not the answer to everything.