Yes, and that's the cost of living a proprietary life focusing on lock-in instead of embracing standards. Winning battles is hard when you're one against many.

If you're the first on the market, it is the most logical strategy to go that route, focusing on users captive of your own ecosystem to maximize your revenue. The obvious counter to that strategy is having everyone else (who weren't the first) team up to lower costs, and define interoperability and standards. [The exact same situation happens on EVs btw, where Tesla is leading, with its proprietary plug and charging network, where everyone else is standardizing.]

It can work for a long time and make serious money, but it is a strenuous situation as more and more contenders team up against you ... and you'll disappear the moment you fail to adapt to change coming from the outside (which is tempting to reject because you know better, right?). Ask RIM/Blackberry.

Yeah that's BS. There might be a real noise issue, but then you don't need special laws for Crypto, just regular noise regulation that applies to everything.

True, but security updates matter and those get eventually dropped as well after some time. What we need is a way for customers to install the latest android if they want to, just like you can install the latest Windows (and Linux!) on any PC, provided the HW specs match the minimum requirements.

This is just not true. The price of the phone does have an impact on OS updates, but most phones (even those at $200) get updates.

Now what's true is the lack of guarantees, i.e. when you buy a new phone, you can't choose it because it comes with updates guarantees. I've never seen that written anywhere (e.g. guaranteed update to latest Android for X years). That would probably require some equivalent contract between Google and the vendor, but it would still make for a huge added value. And of course, the pricier the phone, the longer you can expect its hardware specs to match the minimum requirements for Android, and the longer you'd expect the guaranteed updates to be.

And vendors aren't even consistent. I had two 8" tablets: a Samsung Galaxy Tab S and an Nvidia Shield tablet. The Samsung tablet is amazing: even recent tablets don't have the same OLED display resolution. The CPU is great as well, but they decided to stop updates very, very early. That was extremely disappointing from Samsung for such a great product. Meanwhile, the NVIDIA Shield (which was cheaper and older) got Android updates years after Samsung stopped. I was really surprised to see such an old device run the latest Android.

What you get from Apple (so far) is a consistent long term update. It's probably not guaranteed, and they could decide to make that time shrink gradually the next time the company faces headwinds. But so far they've been better than the Android competition, starting with Samsung. Good for them as it has a real value for customers. I don't want to throw away my phones/tablets every 5 years.

Same. I can certainly see how things could go wrong if my manager was trying to make my life miserable, but on the other hand, I found "no/unlimited time off" to work great for me. You no longer have to wonder if you're taking half a day off, a full day off, or even whether you have enough days left to take your christmas week off at the end of the year. You just work when you can, being reasonable. Similarly to when you're sick, you just inform others in your team that you'll do the best you can considering your personal/health circumstances and there is no bean counting.

Some years you'll have lots of friends visiting and you'll need more days off, some years you won't, overall it's one less thing to care about.

But certainly, it also means you won't take those extra days you are entitled to and may lose if you don't take them. Which means usually, overall you take less days off. During Covid, nobody was taking any vacation (what would you do, you're stranded at home anyway) and that was starting to be a problem as managers felt employees started to be tired.

So it's all well in a world where companies need employees more than the reverse, in other words, Silicon Valley and similar. Translate that to a situation where it's the opposite and it quickly becomes "no time off if we're short on delays", e.g. consulting companies.

So in a sane company, deny a PTO request should be a very rare thing, so that employees should be able to easily report an abusive manager, who whould need to justify why he denies PTO requests much more frequently than other managers.

I think (hope) that most programmers should not have to worry about security. Actually if you rely on your hundreds of programmers being security aware, you can be sure there will be plenty of security issues.

Systems should be architected in a way that security is handled by a very small amount of code and people who focus on it. The rest of the code can be full of bugs without compromising security. So, architect things so that they are silo-ed, run tools to enforce programmers didn't open backdoors (e.g. forbid the use of some functions) and used the common secure methods if they need to perform e.g. communication, and have the security team review the code if needed. Don't hand over your security to masses of developers who just don't have the capacity to fathom what a security issue could be, or simply don't have the time to think about complex cases.

Or simply bad air quality is a serious issue for such cities and there is a lot of work to make it better. Like, in pretty much every city in the world nowadays.

The fact embassies installed air quality sensors was because it was really bad in the first place. In other words, correlation not due to causation, but due to a third hidden factor: "air quality was bad".

Large patches need days for review and discussions, while small patches can be done within minutes. So you would close the window a week in advance to give enough time to review the large patches? That would be inefficient, as it would unnecessarily prevent small patches from being submitted late.

I like the approach of asking people to improve their level of maturity rather than leveling by the bottom. If you have a large patch, make sure you submit it at the beginning of the merge window to give plenty of time for review.

What I find surprising is why Linus isn't simply pushing those patches to the next version. Basically, the earlier you submit, the more likely your patch will make it. Last minute submission should be trivial fixes only.

That is not how central banks work. Facepalm.

Please educate me. Germany has been pushing for a strong neoliberalism stance, against deficit and money creation in the Euro zone. That is screwed in many ways, but more importantly, benefits Germany so there is little reason for saying anything different.

An Economy is not working in isolation. Either all work well, or none is. Dumbass.

Yeah, like Germany is so much better at managing its economy and that's why it's doing great when Greece and others aren't. Nice internal propaganda, but the reality is more complex. Yes, Germany is doing great in terms of exports and that's not something I'm questioning. And obviously there is the world economy. But the EUR market is working in isolation. If you have Euros and you want to invest them somewhere, but Greek companies are in danger of going down due to a trust panic which Germany refuses to mitigate for political reasons, you're going to invest in German companies which are safe.

Sure, there were reasons for the trust erosion in Greece. But Germany decided to made the crisis worse, until Greece had no chance but to accept whatever condition Germany imposed. All in all, what I meant was that Germany is making itself looking better than it really is, just because it is currently in pretty good shape, and pretending anyone following its model would do as good. Except a singificant part of its success is not because of its inherent value but because of the demise of other EU countries.

Just like NL and IR are playing a tax game, sucking money from other countries, they can always blame southern states for their sloppy management, but their success is also in large part thanks to those countries. There are winners and losers within the Euro zone and the EU is not doing enough to make sure the countries fates are tied so that your "Either all work well or none is" is true. It's not. Smartass.

According to all Greeks I've talked to, Greece is worse than other countries in the EU in that regard. The 2008 crisis (and blame) actually had a positive effect on the country, and COVID helped as well, as it gave the government the power to force the population to sanitize their accounting if they wanted any government help.

That's why you can pay pretty much everywhere with a credit card now in Greece which was not the case just a decade ago, where all the cash would be unaccounted for to avoid paying taxes. Also, unfinished buildings (with a few metal rods on the roof) was a norm in the past to avoid paying housing taxes; now they pay taxes as soon as they've got electricity and water.

All that being said, I'm 100% with you on the German/Greece situation in 2008 where German banks benefited from the crisis as all EUR investments shifted from Greece (and Italy, Spain, Portugal) to Germany and other north countries. Germany has been dictating the European Central Bank policy for a long time to suit their needs, putting the economies of south European countries in trouble, then blaming them for basically not having the same needs. But it's a winner-loser game: Germany's economy works well also because the economy of other European countries don't. So instead of helping southern countries improving develop their economy, Germany is often burying them even further.

As much as I appreciate seeing more solar, I'm not sure it proves much.

Greece is not a large country and its over-production of electricity can probably be absorbed easily by the EU, it won't put the grid in danger. It doesn't mean Germany or France could do the same (not considering the solar factor).

We don't have a path to a clean energy future, at least not just building solar and windmills. We're still far from having proven that they can cover our needs, even just talking about electricity.

In terms of area, solar/wind just doesn't scale enough to be able to cover our needs. The best path I've seen so far is the solar-on-all-roofs approach because it is area that is already claimed by housing (not extra area we would claim for energy generation), plus it has the power to be coupled to electric cars, to reduce gasoline dependency, but more importantly, to act as buffer during peak consumption hours, to reduce the high/low amplitude of the solar production/electricity need ratio.

In other words: use houses for housing+solar generation, and use car batteries for transports + energy smoothing. Both double-usages which pay for themselves (i.e. people will be happy to pay for them as they will be quickly amortized).

And even with all of that, I'm not sure it would be enough to even reach the order of magnitude of current electricity needs in the average country...

I wouldn't even consider the EU a "protectionist bloc" compared to most other regions in the world, including the US. Most US companies sell very well in the EU competing only on price with EU companies, even when that price is artificially low given the R&D has been paid by government contracts.

On the other hand, in the US, a non US-based company has little chance of winning any bid which is even remotely funded by government agencies.

Only on low end, e.g. A22. High end also don't have them.

That's why I bought a Zenfone 8. That was the only high-end phone with both a good camera, good screen, reasonable screen size ... and an audio jack.

On top of this, >30% efficiency seems to be nothing new so indeed the question is all about price and feasibility.

When I see an article starting with "The achievement will [...] reduce our dependence on fossil fuels" I know I'm not going to learn a lot and it has a high chance of being some PR by a random organization trying to get some funding, surfing on the climate wave.

If that's real though, great.

I think you're making an interesting point here: instead of burning natural gas in cars with the implied hazards, burning it in plants to produce electricity might be more efficient; so that everything converges to electric: gas, solar, nuclear, ...

That said, I also don't see some parts of the world massively convert to EVs in the near future. I wouldn't actually have cited India since India has a very dynamic economy and the ability to move pretty quickly, but I'd agree Maghreb/South America are still far from being there.