Hilarious. Reminds me of Pioneer CDJs as well, even on the flagship CDJ-3000 models. If you read the user manual it says:
> About using MP3 files
> This product has been licensed for nonprofit use. This product has not been licensed for commercial purposes (for profit-making use), […].
You need to acquire the corresponding licenses for such uses. For details, see […]
The format itself is patent-unencumbered. That doesn't mean I couldn't still write a non-free decoder and license it to Pioneer for use in their CDJs. Due to organizational inertia, I suspect that's what's going on here (e.g., they licensed a decoder from Fraunhofer or another commercial implementer twenty years ago, and have been using the same one since).
In this case, everyone at Pioneer knows their CDJs are used almost exclusively for commercial purposes, and perhaps they couldn't get away with lying about it in the fine print.
Agree on this. As a layman in Australia, i had a friend who was coming back from the USA and asked him to buy me an iPhone before its release in AU (late-2007 iirc, iPhone 3G launched in Australia in 2008) and promptly jailbroke it so i could get it on an Australian carrier.
When i whipped it out in public, take a photo at concerts, etc. random people would come up to me and ask me to play with it -- thats when i knew for sure Apple were on to something, a complete game changer that captured the attention of the public.
Not how Apple and others are doing. Internet access and cloud accounts are not a requirement to integration. You need standards and conventions. Now, eveyone is doing its own thing and company wants to control your devices to the point they can brick them within a few years.
Explaining this in sufficient detail would make a really long text, so I'll just give one very isolated point:
Bascially, the internet is a dark forest. A lot of things "ordinary" people do all the time is insanely privacy-violating (just to give one example: if you send a message to a person who is not insanely privacy-conscious and capable (meaning very knowledable about technology) of preserving your privacy, malicious entities can spy on you).
So, for the product/OS to be capable of keeping your privacy, it will have to prevent you from doing an insane amount of things against your reflexes, comfort and what you learned about politeness.
Indeed, this is a common vector for leaking PII and sensitive data. For example, what looks like an innocuous logging/print statement in an exception handler ends up leaking all sorts of data.
And it gets more messy when you start to ingest and warehouse data logs for on-call monitoring/analytics/etc, and now you have PII floating around in all sorts of data stores that need to be scrubbed.
In a previous job, we handled credit card numbers. We added PII detectors to logging libraries that would scrub anything that looked like a credit card number. We used client-side encryption where the credit card numbers are encrypted on the client before sending to the backend, so the backend systems never see the plain credit card numbers, except for the system that tokenizes them.
Short term contracts have pretty big downsides though. It's basically impossible to get a mortgage on a short term contract, or more generally any kind of loan. Even renting is difficult.
That's why many EU countries have pretty strict limitations on short term contracts, like how many you can do in a row. It results in a huge reliance on contractors.
Short term contracts are basically taking the entirety of the ‘shit’ end of the stick for someone else, and are way worse than the median tech job in the US conditions wise.
nope. you dont invest the same way in a 6 month contractor that you are not sure to renew down the road as you would for a full time employee. And this goes both ways. The contractor has not much incentive to perform well either.
> And this goes both ways. The contractor has not much incentive to perform well either.
Can you explain your thoughts here a bit further? The short term contract can be renewed or replaced with a full time contract. This should provide extra incentive to perform well compared to a full time employee (who doesn't have to worry about either), as long the as the company is a good employer.
>The short term contract can be renewed or replaced with a full time contract.
As someone in games, this is exactly the road to getting exploited. "If I work harder and really wow them with this feature, I could get full time work!" meanwhile, there were plans to not renew anyone at the end of the project and to lay off full time workers. But you get a convinient carrot to lure starry-eyed devs with
Your "as long as the company is a good employer" is doing Atlas levels of lifing here.
Burn too much good will and people will treat the contract as a contract. And not a hope to impress the boss for a ft role. Another short term exploitation that turns into long term cynicism.
I don't think that's happening in games or tech, but it's been widely observed that Gen Z is less invested in corporate than ever before (or from the boomer's POV: "nobody wants to work anymore").
Sadly, that's what happens when everything is treated as a resource in exchange for short-term gains. Employees, good will, any morals and ethics - all will be sacrificed on the altar of shareholder value.
Employment figures for Ireland or Germany aren't far from their US counterpart.
And on the other hand, the French government dramatically loosened the rules around layoffs in 2016 (you can let people go as soon as you have a decline in sales over a few month, a negative cash flow over the same period, if their are new competitors on your market, or even just if there's technological change in your sector that justifies getting rid of people). It was 8 years ago and it has had little to no impact on France's unemployment, which is still very high.
I'd rather go through a bigger hoop one time every 10 years or more than the current circus of being let go every 2-3 years and needing to re-interview. The latter just means I spend part of my free time worrying about the next job hop by studying trivia, instead of doing something I actually like to do.
My guess is it probably was a content update that tickled some lesser trodden path in the parser/loader code, or created a race condition in the code which lead to the BSOD.
Even if it’s ‘just’ a content update, it probably should follow the rules of a code update (canaries, pre-release channels, staged rollouts, etc).
I’m amazed there was no mention of LISA [0] — a space-based gravitational wave detector using 3 satellites flying in formation 2.5 million Km apart! Seriously cool engineering, planning to launch in 2035.
> ...Researchers are now working on several next-generation LIGO-type observatories, both on Earth and, in space, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna;...
> LISA was first proposed as a mission to ESA in the early 1990s.
I remember reading about LISA when I was a little kid. Back then it was projected to launch in the far future of 2015. Now I would be surprised if it actually launches in 2035.
The university I studied at had a Gravitational Wave center under the Physics dept, and all the professors would joke about how LISA had been "less than a decade away" for 20 years.
NXP runs a USB VID/PID Program [0] for small production designs (<10,000 units) that use their MCUs. They’ll give you 3 PIDs for free under one of their VIDs. I use this in my side projects (~200 units) and works pretty well!
