Uh? And what's the difference between what you said and what he said? I mean it's expected that, if they refuse, they'd have to pay a fine. Otherwise nobody would go
Sure okay, let's be serious. The fittest and strongest Swiss woman is fitter and stronger than the least fit and weakest Swiss man. How much overlap does there need to be before it's a serious concern?
Hopefully diet and health today are much better than in the past - probably there's a huge overlap between the tail of women who are not in top decile today, and men who were fit enough to join a century ago. To the extent that there's not, since woman ore exclude, there probably could be with a small amount of training. If a person of a certain strength a century ago was capable of serving their country, why isn't an equivalently strong person today capable?
Moreover, there's many duties in the army that don't directly require top decile strength. Naturally, some of these will need to be done by people who are recovering (since, having recovered, perhaps they will be top decile again). But the amount of technical skill in modern warfare is considerable. A woman could control a drone strike fair easier than a man in recovery.
Aside from snide comments, do you have any reason to think half an army is better than a whole one?
Fortunately, we don't have to faff about with probablies and suppositions. We have the distributions measured, and political factors aside, it is settled.
Anybody that can get through the training and meet the standards ought to be able to serve. Putting people that can't perform in combat is going to get them, and others, killed though.
This isn't an honesty thing. Many cultures (both in terms of social culture and work culture) have a strong aversion to saying no. Some languages barely have a word for it.
Even when those aren't issues yes/no questions rarely have the precision that you want, often you can phrase a question to seem like it only has a binary answer, but the real answer is way more complicated. Basic project management principles come into play here. As other posters have commented, asking what someone will be working on first, setting up tracking tasks etc.
If you ask an American "How are you?", they will respond "Fine, how are you?".
If you ask a German "How are you?", they will tell you they caught a flu and they bumped their toe on the way to the bathroom.
As a German, it's hard work for me to respond appropriately to the American question. But I understand that I don't blame the American for being dishonest.
It's even harder for me to work with the Indian "yes", but I understand they don't mean to be dishonest.
I'm just a lowly eastern-European contractor banking on real estate prices in Silicon Valley remaining ridiculous on one side, and Indian contractors[0] remaining unreliable on the other.
[0] Those of them who have lower rates of course. Reliable Indian contractors have proper rates - and good for them.
That is your problem: You have not taken the time to understand other cultures.
You believe they are not being honest but they ARE!!
If they can not do the work, they tell you, but in their own language, not directly but in subtle ways.
They are expressing it, and in their mind you understand them, because they are actually saying it. It is just that you are deaf to their language, you are not looking to the nuances, and just ignore those signals they are emitting.
People with enough internet smarts to have an ad blocker aren't the target demographic for the ol' "your computer are hackered u are ded without u give us muney" JS dialog.
Thanks. Not sure how I missed that. Regardless, the point still stands. Non-profit just means profit isn't its primary goal, but rather generally some mission. A non-profit can make oodles of money, but if it closes up shop, it can't be distributed to the "owners." It has to go to another non-profit.
The NFL had a specific exemption added to the tax code just for it, so it really isn't a good example anyway. Nobody else could form such a "non-profit" without a literal act of Congress.
I didn't realize how broken Windows 10 is, until I tried it on someone else's computer... At this point, it's unsuitable for any computer without a SSD: M$ has made a huge amount of background system update & housekeeping activities as integral parts of the system and they will continuously SEEK your disk to death, it doesn't need to be 20 MB/s, just 2 MB/s random seeking will render it useless for doing any actual work at any time. It's laughable that high-end commercial laptops are still being sold with those 5,400 RPM, 1 TB HDDs, totally unusable.
You'll never see this kind of bullshit disk access on *nix (as long as you turned off your desktop search index service), or, for this matter, Windows XP...
A clean install of Windows 10 is close to literally unusable on my 11-inch Dell AMD A9-9420e laptop, with 16GB (lol) RAM and SATA SSD.
Basically, the "Windows Antimalware Executable" and various other Windows processes keep one of the two CPU cores more or less constantly pegged. Everything takes ages. The only way to really use this damn thing is to disable Windows' realtime virus protection, which, well.... ouch. And it's still barely tolerable just for playing music files and the most basic of web browsing.
Granted, that's a cheap and hugely underpowered laptop.
But this was disappointing to me because I had a 1.3GHZ Core Solo based machine with 4GB and a primitive SSD running Windows 7 circa 2009/2010 and it was plenty usable.
Pretty sure. I physically removed the HDD that shipped with the laptop, put an SSD in, and did a fresh Windows 10 install. 16GB RAM, too.
(Yes, part of my reason for buying this refurb'd Dell is because I thought it would be hilarious to put 16GB of RAM and a huge SSD into a crap netbook hahaha)
I haven't dug too deeply into it, but in dozens of hours of use and casual observation... it seems to me that if Windows Defender's realtime protection is enabled, then any disk access causes Windows Defender AV to be invoked which in turn leads to high CPU usage.
Dropbox was an absolute killer while it did its initial several GB of file syncing over the LAN. Dropbox pegged one CPU core, while Windows' antimalware pegged another. Same with iTunes while I was downloading my music collection from iTunes in the Cloud.
Now, both of those examples involved network traffic as well as disk I/O. So, I'm not exactly sure what Windows' antimalware was fretting about.
(Also keep in mind that the CPU we're talking about here, is a very low power dual-core AMD A9 chip. I don't see this problem on my desktop machine. On that, the antimalware CPU usage is low enough that I just don't care)
Yeah, a lot of stuff should be more rigorously tested on single and dual-core environments.
Especially when it relates to OS-handling (specifically: Windows), I feel like we've papered over a huge number of poorly sequenced, blocking calls with "more cores!"
A lot of modern software is unfortunately following this trend. As companies outfit developers with higher end systems including NVME SSDs, performance issues from inefficient I/O patterns are hidden during development.
This! In my hobby projects I start the development usually with Raspberry Pi as backend, even for db, as it forces to use resources efficiently and reveals problems fast. Only building/compiling is good to be done on fast machine.
You can use the cpu cgroup controller to starve your program of CPU time. Use the cpu.cfs_quota_us and cpu.cfs_period_us knobs.
Now if only there was a way to use the blkio controller to emulate the performance characteristics of spinning rust (reasonable sequential IO performance but with a big penalty for random access...)
I guess that explains why Win10 runs like a dog on my partner's computer which, whilst not brilliantly-specced, isn't absolutely awful either, but is disc-based.
I guess it's the same with Mac OS. Some years back, migrating Mail data would always fail on my Mac Mini, but would succeed quite happily on my MacBook Air. I always suspected the HDDs. Moved to SSDs and everything was better.
Yeah, since the APFS transition in particular, macOS is unbearable on an HDD. And Apple still sells the base iMac with a 5400rpm drive. Ought to be criminal.
Well, HP at least used to sell their laptops with a powersupply that could not power the laptop enough to run at the speed it said in the specs. For getting full speed you had to buy a bigger powersupply from them. Saw this on a computer that someone donated to the sportsclub because they bought a new computer to replace the old slow thing. Turns out all that was needed was a bigger powersupply.
When I didn't have an SSD, I spent a lot of time configuring the system so it wouldn't do as much IO in the background. Lots of services, as you say, do that by default, and it's unbearable. You'd be using the computer normally and all of a sudden it would start crawling for no apparent reason.
Remember that you aren't their focus group. Their focus group are people with little to no knowledge of computers, and these services actually help.
That being said, how often is system update happening for you that its really a problem? It's a point that I see being repeated over and over, but I don't think I've had any interruption at all from system updates, beyond windows doing the occasional update before power down.
And also about the housekeeping activities -- Why would it continuously seek? Beyond fragmenting, indexing or defender scanning your files that shouldn't be happening, and I don't think I've ever had that be a problem...
"People with little or no knowledge of computers" would actually benefit the most from a LTS-like version of the OS, with security updates _only_, and flexible feature upgrades every two years or so. That you can't get with Windows 10 (as an individual user), but can totally get with e.g. Debian Stable, and without paying a dime. Isn't that a bit ironic?
In my experience people annoyed by updates are mac users who are starting Windows VM once in a few months which will obviously download tons of updates and will ask to restart almost immediately. And, yes, as Windows did not have enough time to do its housekeeping, it'll do it, slowing down the whole experience.
I'm using only Windows in the last few years and it was never a problem for me. Windows asked me to reboot exactly once. Other times I just had "power off and install updates" menu item instead of "power off". That said, I'm powering off my PC every day, may be it matters.
It's especially fun when you are just about to run out the door, trying to pack down your work laptop and all the options you get is "Update and shutdown". Perfect if the computer will be spending the next four hours in a closed backpack and the car/bus/train/boat/plane is leaving NOW. If the laptop is older than two years you can't trust the battery to keep long enough for the update to finish and besides, how hot will it get in the backpack?
I haven't been using Windows a lot in the last years (as you said, updates annoy me a few times a year, but I still take the time to do them), however, a lot of Windows users have told me and others in our hackerspace that the first thing they do is to disable Windows Update when they install Microsoft Windows, so I suppose that they are really annoyed by updates.
I think most of them cling to the idea of a computer that doesn't need any kind of maintenance (except on the hardware side), which is something I can totally understand, but is not currently doable, at least if you want to keep connected to the rest of the world.
(Of course, we do tell them that if they want their computer to be connected to the outside world in any way, updates should not be disabled, and that maintenance is necessary).
Which is exactly what I was trying to convey in my original comment. I feel like the base that has a problem with the updates are a small vocal minority, which seem to be present any time Windows is mentioned on any HN thread. I have met plenty of people who develop/work on windows every day and don't have that problem.
There is another, silent, group : the ones that don't have any problem with the updates, because they disabled them, or because the local computer expert who installed their computer disabled them. They are also not vocal at all, since they "don't have any problem". (And this is also not only a problem on Windows).
> Windows XP running on the hardware of the time was much more responsive[] than 10 running on modern hardware.
That very much depends on when in XP's time line you're commenting from.
When XP was first released it had literally double the hardware requirements as Windows 2000 and XP didn't really add much functionality despite that bump in requirements (to me, it felt mostly due to themes). Granted XP was quicker booting if you had a large font folder but it wasn't until SP2 when XP really became an obvious upgrade to 2000. By which point XP was 3 yeas old and even budget hardware was now higher than recommended specifications of XP.
IIRC correctly, XP brought the 1-way firewall, native USB support and media codecs. Hence the doubling of requirements. The firewall may have come in SP2. Prior to SP2, XP was pretty buggy/useless.
That's cool because it means you can actually do that if your manager is bad. In some countries there are no jobs so all you can do about having a bad manager is... nothing.
That is true in the US for a lot of people, and it was especially true during the recession. The fact that we've been in a situation where most skilled workers can easily job hop for that last 5 or so years is an aberration, not the norm! And frankly, we should probably take advantage of the situation while we still can.
> The fact that we've been in a situation where most skilled workers can easily job hop for that last 5 or so years is an aberration, not the norm
Are you talking about workers in general, or software development in particular?
In software development, I don't remember a time in the last three decades where a skilled dev couldn't find other employment with relatively little trouble. Of course, in some periods it was easier than in others.
I was a dishwasher/line cook in my 20's, I could hop jobs on a dime. Got fired one Friday, and had a better paying job Monday and that was in 2008. I wasn't even that good.
That's what I was thinking. This guy is one of the most reputable software developers in the world, bearing the weight of the Windows Shell on his shoulders, with a career that spans decades... and he bought... an alarm clock with wifi? Was he drunk that day?
I'd be fine with a clock with a wi-fi chip, provided that it have a hardware firewall that blocks everything but Network Time Protocol, and include a USB port for business such as updating firmware, updating zoneinfo, or changing IP addresses.
Also, it might have been a gift from a well-meaning friend or family member.
Agreed. My phone already has an alarm clock app that sounds an alarm through the phone speaker. If someone tries to sell me a separate alarm clock hardware device that requires a smartphone app to accomplish basic functionality that is already available on the phone itself, I am liable to become very hostile and recount unflattering anecdotes about the salesperson's mother.
It's a GDMF clock. We already have well-established user interface paradigms for clock-setting that require only two binary input buttons, in devices that cost less than $0.05 to manufacture.
The use case for a network-connected clock is to never have to set the time manually, or update it for daylight savings. That is a feature you add to a clock that is already completely functional without a network. You can add a wifi password with just two buttons and a 16-segment LCD, if you are patient enough.
"You can add a wifi password with just two buttons"
Reminds me that I bought a printer with wifi, which I didn't really want, but it didn't come with a cable, so then I found out you had to enter passwords by hitting an up or down button to scroll through all possible characters.
Eventually I found a USB cable that worked with it.
It's a head shaker. My guess would be that people sincerely and carefully design one particular consumer-facing item put so much effort into that design that they expect other consumer-facing items to also be worthwhile. I wonder if the people who actually design this crap would buy it?
Having borne witness to the multitude of compromises and suboptimal design decisions that are required to bring a product to market with a bare-bones team at two hardware manufacturers now, I assume that everything described on the box will be shoddy, glitchy, and not work at all as described.
I am neither as brilliant, nor my career at Microsoft nearly as long as Raymond's, but I am in no position to cast that first stone. My list of "should've known better" stretches temporally long, and quite wide in it's breadth of categories of bad purchases. Yes, some of them were alcohol-fueled. Sadly, most of them were not, thereby removing any excuse.
I'm a little older than Raymond (I think), and I am probably just now reaching the point where I consistently think to myself, "nooo, you know full well how this is going to end." when faced with a bad potential purchase.
