Microsoft had a lot of big successes in the "dead" period - Xbox for example is pretty absent, as is Surface. They also had a lot of non-successes that were revolutionary in their own right - basically inventing the first major music streaming service.
Also, most of the key changes at Microsoft were underway before Nadella - most importantly getting business customers to agree to subscription service models and cloud migration.
If this really was a mistake the easiest way to deal with it would be to release people from their non disparagement agreements that were only signed by leaving employees under the duress of losing their vested equity.
It's really easy to make people whole for this, so whether that happens or not is the difference between the apologies being real or just them just backpedaling because employees got upset.
Edit: Looks like they're doing the right thing here:
> Altman’s initial statement was criticized for doing too little to make things right for former employees, but in an emailed statement, OpenAI told me that “we are identifying and reaching out to former employees who signed a standard exit agreement to make it clear that OpenAI has not and will not cancel their vested equity and releases them from nondisparagement obligations” — which goes much further toward fixing their mistake.
Solvespace has the benefit of being a single download/executable.
It also has a constraint solver which has been used in a couple of projects: CADsketcher as you noted, and Dune 3D: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d where the author noted:
>I ended up directly using solvespace's solver instead of the suggested wrapper code since it didn't expose all of the features I needed. I also had to patch the solver to make it sufficiently fast for the kinds of equations I was generating by symbolically solving equations where applicable.
It seems really interesting/promising, esp. the compleat history and editability (I'd love to see that history listed in a pane which could be opened/closed --- add a series of disclosure triangles which would allow hiding finished elements so that one could focus on the current task and it would be a dream come true for me --- if I can puzzle out the 3D stuff, so far I've crashed and burned on all the apps I've tried (BRL-CAD, FreeCAD, Solvespace, Alibre Atom...) --- the only thing I've been successful w/ is OpenSCAD and similar coding tools).
It always seemed like a reasonable, but still big, assumption that antimatter behaved the same way under gravity. Anti-particles have opposite charge, so maybe it could have made sense that they have opposite "gravitational charge"? But also gravity doesn't have "charge".
So yeah, agreed. A good thing to confirm, even if (especially if) they expected the result to be unexciting.
pdf2ps a.pdf # convert to postscript "a.ps"
vim a.ps # edit postscript by hand
ps2pdf a.ps # convert back to pdf
Some complex pdf (with embedded javascript, animations, etc) fail to work correctly after this back and forth. Yet for "plain" documents this works alright. You can easily remove watermarks, change some words and numbers, etc. Spacing is harder to modify. Of course you need to know some postscript.
I hadn't seen this new Libreboot policy. This is fantastic!
The FSF's criteria have become quite calcified and unprincipled at this point. Specifically I'm talking about how blobs loaded from flash are given a pass, while blobs on isolated coprocessors are verboten.
Principle requires that binary blobs in flash (or even ROM) are put in the same class as every other binary blob. And pragmatism for the modern world requires that we incorporate security relationships into our analysis of user freedom.
Back in 2016 I briefly worked at a old, large corporation that was still using CVS.
During that time management decided that company policy was now to be hip with the younger generation. One very senior manager actually used the expression "we must strive to be the Uber of [our industry]"
This also led to a mandate that we should switch to Git because it was new and shiny.
You can just imagine the how steep the learning curve was for all the old hands, especially as some of them joined the company in the previous century as COBOL programmers.
We were also pulled in to team building sessions where we were encouraged to "think outside of the box" and be "innovative". During one of those sessions I suggested that "you know, we should just use SVN instead" and was promptly shot down.
In the US, I have never seen a severence agreement that did not include confidentiality provisions. However (IMO) the inclusion of non-compete provisions has become more common across all levels of employment and all job categories. The vast majority of US workers will sign these agreements. That cultural trend makes it (a) easier for employers' legal counsel to manage any issues raised by the minority and (b) more difficult, if not impossible, for the minority to negotiate.
We have this kind of censorship in India as well, even the in weirdly innocous places. In James Bond movies, and I think Gone Girl as well, scenes were by zooming into character's faces or just straight cuts.
This is probably the only reason I maintain a US iTunes accounts (used to have to buy gift cards from sketchy sites online to keep this going, but I recently discovered that my Indian Amex card works fine with a US address).
Also trivia for those who are wondering how cuts are made, at least for cinema content: all video and audio assets are usually sent to theatres in full, but there's an XML file called the CPL (composition playlist) that specifies which file is played from which to which frame / timestamp in what sequence. Pure cuts or audio censorship can be handled by just adding an entry to skip the relevant frames or timestamp, or by specifying a censor beep as the audio track for a particular time range.
You’re so disconnected from reality. Ask yourself how many people are unable to work remotely. If you can’t think of enough examples to justify roads, go outside more.
Hope this asshole never needs to work again. He’s just cost all of his prior employers many, many thousands of dollars in legal review of every hiring committee he’s ever been a part of, and potentially millions of dollars in discrimination settlements, so he’s going to be radioactive to any company but those explicitly on the ideological far right.
So, disclosure policy is kinda an active discussion within the security community but there is a general move away from coordinated disclosure (aka responsible disclosure) where the vendor and reporter coordinated on disclosing the vulnerability, not publicly disclosing until the vendor okays it.
Coordinated disclosure puts a lot of power in the vendor to simply ignore or delay fixing issues, and frankly may not actually be the "responsible" course of action. Full disclosure, where the first warning anyone has about the issue is when all the details are dropped about it to the public _may_ result in a faster patch time but it also increases risk of it being weaponized during that in-between period. There is the chance it was being used in-the-wild without being known also, but releasing the information increases the risk of those in the-wild-attacks but reducing the overhead necessary to carry them out.
All that said, there is a newer option that has been pretty steadily gaining popularity over the last seven or so years. Deadline-based disclosure. This did exist before, but really gained popularity in recent years as Google's Project Zero adopted it as their disclosure policy. This is the idea where the reporter discloses a vulnerability which starts a countdown to the public disclosure (90 days is fairly common, but I've seen 30, 60, and 180 reasonably often also)
I think this deadline-based disclosure option strikes a good balance between the benefits of coordinated, and full disclosures.
Microsoft had a lot of big successes in the "dead" period - Xbox for example is pretty absent, as is Surface. They also had a lot of non-successes that were revolutionary in their own right - basically inventing the first major music streaming service.
Also, most of the key changes at Microsoft were underway before Nadella - most importantly getting business customers to agree to subscription service models and cloud migration.