teacup50

Indeed; look how well that's worked for Manhattan. /s

Realistically, density doesn't seem to ever drive down housing prices in the long term. All it does is increase the value of land tremendously, and thus push local home ownership out of reach of everyone but the ultra-wealthy.

Sit-down restaurants won't go out of business just because a McDonalds opens across the street.

> Is an artist useful?

Are they a respected contributor in their field?

Can they afford to support themselves here?

In theory you can supply your own firmware.

At least for Broadcom (nee Cypress) WiFi chipsets used in a lot of these devices, the canonical MAC used by hardware is encoded in one of three places:

- Onboard SPROM: easily modified by a driver, but shouldn't be rewritten to achieve randomized MACs; you'll blow through your flash write cycles.

- Onboard OTP (one-time programmable memory): also easily modified, but it's one-time writable; you can only set bits to 1, never 0.

- External NVRAM / NVRAM image (e.g. supplied by the driver): totally controlled by the driver/host OS, can be set to whatever you want.

Changing this behavior would require changing the firmware image uploaded to the WiFi chipset by the driver.

"Our findings simply demonstrate that the pursuit of meritocracy at the workplace may be more difficult than it first appears"

That's not an indictment of pursuing a meritocracy.

> If there are disparities, what, if anything, do you think should be done to lessen the disparity in demographics?

Target inequality of opportunity, and do not assume that differences in outcome are prima facie evidence of differences in opportunity.

In other words, the pipeline is the place to solve this.

It's not a positive indicator of the health of Apple's engineering and business/engineering management that they couldn't keep someone in an extremely key technology position.

I'm reminded of their loss of both Avie Tevanian and Bertrand Serlet.

What manufacturers require internet activation? That's a non-starter for any product I purchase.

> The fact that's completely impossible to buy a dumb TV anymore

There's still a commercial/industrial market segment that manufacturers target (digital signage, hospitality/hospital TV systems, etc).

The TVs produced for those segments are either dumb, or give the owner control over the device.

Which has succeeded in spite of being a hot, churning mess.

Yes. Privacy should be the default.

They phone home (to Google Analytics) by default: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/docs/Analytics....

It's pretty ridiculous. They're giving Google a map of everything individual users install. The only reason it's "anonymous" is that they're relying on Google to throw away personally identifying data before Homebrew sees it.

In a world where 1) traditional gender roles and family units are the norm, 2) jobs are known to be a finite commodity, and 3) employers are expected to provide adequate wages and benefits such that employees can support their entire family, then it stands to reason that is a fairly straightforward example of benevolent sexism.

Well, sure, but isn't it rather obvious that using resources to engage in distracting non-work activities is detrimental to work efficiency?

I've got 6880x1440 worth of curved display on my desk, and obviously, watching Netflix, browsing Facebook, or otherwise distracting myself with one of them would be a net productivity loss.

There's something to be said for not trying to put everything into a single expensive physical connection standard that requires complex active cabling.

USB was already a lot of software (and hardware) complexity just to attach a low speed peripheral like a mouse or a keyboard.

Switching power delivery over to USB-C has meant the elimination of MagSafe connectors.

Replacing fixed solutions like Ethernet is a step back to AAUI/AUI and MAC dongles, except now, you have to put the entire ethernet controller and a USB or TBolt controller in an external dongle.

Doesn't sound like much of a controlled study. Selection bias may have played a part :P

Even just having a physically larger display that fills your FOV appears to improve spatial task and memory performance: http://research-srv.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/desney/pub...

From another study (http://pro.sagepub.com/content/56/1/1506.abstract) on actual satisfaction (not open access, so quoting some key bits):

First, they provide a good summary of previous findings:

"Previous research has demonstrated productivity increases for users performing tasks on larger or multiple screens. For instance, a 9% productivity increase was noted while using wider screens (15” flat panel vs. 46.5” curved screen) (Czerwinski, et al., 2003)."

"Similarly, a 3.1% increase was noted using dual screens over a single screen (Poder, Godbout, & Bellemare, 2007). Task success has been found to increase for tasks performed on 4 – 17” monitors vs. a single 17” monitor (Truemper, et al., 2008). Likewise, tasks were performed faster and with less workload while using 2 – 17” monitors over a single 17” monitor (Kang & Stasko, 2007)."

"Other studies have noted increased window interaction and open windows while using multi-monitor configurations (Hutchings, Smith, Meyers, Czerwinski, & Robertson, 2004)."

"Issues with single monitor use have been well documented. Generally, higher mental workload, more window switching, repositioning, resizing, inadvertent opening, and closing of files have been associated with single small monitor usage (Czerwinski, et al., 2003). Users generally perceive small single monitors as requiring more workload (Grudin, 2001; Hashizume, Kurosu, Kaneko, 2007)."

Second, their own findings:

"Participants felt more rushed, that they worked harder, and were more frustrated [with a single monitor configuration]."

"Participants spent more active time in the PDF reference document while completing tasks on the single monitor configurations"

"Participants were observed to leave the PDF reference document open and viewable (but not in focus) while working with other source documents when in the dual monitor configurations."

"Participants clicked less during tasks on the dual 22” monitors than the dual 17” monitors and single 17” and 22” monitors."

"Participants switched between windows more frequently during tasks on a single 17” and 22” monitors than the dual 22” monitors."

Which doesn't support the above description of firing women for the purpose of hiring a new younger crop at lower wages.

> That people get anything done at all on these little midget laptops is, quite frankly, amazing to me.

Simply lacking screen real estate reduces available working memory that would be used to focus on a coding task.

Given how this empirically impacts work quality, I'm pretty amazed how younger tech companies have pushed employees in this direction.

It's not all that different from the open office trend.

Studies show that it's true for the broad population, too. More screen real estate and faster processing directly and significantly impacts focus and working memory.

Perhaps your employees aren't perfectly rational actors whose incentive is to maximize the utility of their tools while at the office?

For example, there seems to be correlation between 1) wanting to keep git work local to a workstation and not push anywhere with public visibility, and 2) wanting to use a laptop so you can bring that local repository state with you.

Neither desires are necessarily aligned with what benefits the company (or the quality of work), but they do drive a laptop preference.

So they're still selling plenty? That's not exactly "nobody" then, is it?

Most people don't buy pickup trucks, but 1) people who buy them need them, and 2) it's a profitable market segment.

You're literally wasting money and your brain by forcing yourself to work on downsized hardware.

Studies are consistent here.

Time you spend waiting? Distracts you from your tasks, overall focus drops -- you're dumber.

Less screen real-estate? More working memory dedicated to what's not on screen -- you're dumber.

That fun "fact" claims a degree of nefarious plotting that requires at least a smidgen of evidence.

Unless you have lead walls, a ~1000 sq ft apartment should be fully covered by a single access point.

The problem in NYC is that there's just too much band crowding; adding more access points is only going to provide an improvement (if any at all) until everyone else does it, too, and then it's going to be worse for everyone.

We really need better solutions for extremely high-density deployment of competing WiFi networks.

> ... evolved with a 4100K light source at night

As others have noted, we sleep poorly under strong moonlight.

I live in a very rural wooded area, and I can leave my blinds open except when the moon is at its brightest -- I sleep very poorly if I don't use blackout curtains.

Perhaps the fittest humans were the ones who stayed the most awake and aware of nocturnal predators during the brightest nights of the month?

Seamless "filesystem integration" -- which includes the Finder badging -- was central to what made Dropbox a novel product.

It's also a very useful feature that served people well.

That last comment is ironic, given that Dropbox would literally not exist today without the runtime patching of the Finder.

There was no other way to do what they did. The only reason Apple added API was because Dropbox came up with an idea that demonstrated the need for such an API to exist.

Well, it is. They're the ones that push them through. It's classic bureaucratic maneuvering: it gives you a political hammer from which you can then further cement a position of authority by leveraging the threat of official censure.

See also the expansion of Title IX and the resulting chill on campus speech.

C++ isn't substantially different from C when it comes to systems programming concerns regarding stability.

The biggest issue is that it's a bit harder to maintain ABI compatibility. You have to carve out reserved vtable space, avoid exposing STL in your interface, etc, but it's doable.

As for Swift, it has heavy userspace dependencies that make it non-viable for kernel work. Rust does much better there.

javac, gcc, and clang all support some form of -std=<lang_level>, and ABI/source interop between code that uses different language versions.

The post-gcc 2.95 C++ ABI breakage was pretty suck, though.

[edit]

And please don't misinterpret my criticism as intentional FUD.

I work on $MAJOR_OS and am achingly tired of writing C, so I keep my eye on Rust as one possible salvation, once it's had time to mature.

It's just a very hard sell when there's no ABI stability, we're talking about code that's expected to last for decades, etc.