Well, I dont wanna start a debate, but the official website of GNU indicate that the “g” in GNU isn’t silent.

Yeah, but that’s wrong. It’s named after the animal, and the animal is pronounced without a G sound. I’m not going to mangle the pronunciation because they screwed up.

Hierarchical Officious Oracle

Yeah, they missed the best part.

GNU stands for GNU’s Not Unix, which is a recursive acronym. And, when pronounced properly (like the animal) the G is silent. The entire Linux ecosystem has words that start with G based on an acronym where G essentially comes from nowhere, and isn’t actually pronounced.

I’m pretty sure your job title isn’t “Mathematician” though. You’re a “risk analyst” or “quantitative analyst” or something. You’re also not doing pure math, you’re using somewhat advanced applied mathematical processes to model financial information. Just like how a rocket engineer isn’t a physicist but may have a background in physics.

I also think it’s hard to imagine that something that bad would happen to someone if they didn’t really do something wrong. It seems like an online death penalty punishment, and you’d think that for that they’d really have to have proof that you were doing something horrible. It’s hard to believe that they just make mistakes, and that having a human being review these cases costs them a few dollars, so they just let people’s lives get ruined to increase their profits by 0.000001%

Apple, like Microsoft, Google, and others has a real web of dependencies for all its software. Even if he did back up all his important data, unless it was in an open format with open metadata it probably still requires an Apple program to open, which will require his Apple ID to be working. And every one of these big monopolists makes it really hard to fully export your data and metadata in a useful, unencumbered format because keeping people locked into their ecosystem is part of their business plan.

We’re all doing the best we can to live in unregulatedcapitalismland while staying sane, keeping our data backed up, eating healthily, getting enough sleep, getting exercise, spending enough time with friends and family, and so on. Things eventually slip.

It’s their fault for being born into a world where antitrust laws stopped being enforced a quarter of a century ago. They should do better.

How many cases like this aren’t making the news? There are probably thousands of people who depend on Apple or Google or Dropbox and are suddenly locked out with no options.

Yes it does.

What specific crimes did the bankers commit?

the failures of the Obama bank bailouts, which set all of this into motion

I think it was more the temerity of Barack Obama for being born black that was a bigger issue.

As for the rest, of course Democrats will take back power if the right fractures. In a first-past-the-post system with only 2 parties that’s just what happens. It doesn’t matter how incompetently run the parties are, as soon as one leaves power, the other gains it. They may do nothing useful with that power, and it might just be a short time before it swings back the other direction, but they’ll have power when the GOP collapses.

The unfortunate thing is that democrats will most likely use the fracturing to cement their power. What would be much better is if it was used to get rid of first past the post voting, to put rules in place so that government institutions are non-political, make gerrymandering illegal, get rid of the electoral college, reform campaign financing to get the money out, etc. Instead the democrats are going to think “it’s our turn at the trough” and try to do everything possible to ensure they stay in power and get paid.

Far more than that.

I expect that when Trump dies the “movement” will shatter. One of the main things Trump has done is to make sure that nobody can follow him. Everybody who has stood up to him now either bows to him or is irrelevant: Desantis, Pence, Liz Cheney, Rubio, Cruz, Christie, etc. Nobody is going to follow Vance once Trump dies. Some fraction of Republicans still like Tucker, Oreilly, Candace Owens, etc. but some hate them with a passion. There’s no way that they’re going to unite behind them.

Aside from it being a decent icon, the original 3.5 inch floppy actually had amazing ergonomics.

Compare it to the things that came before and after:

• Punch Cards
• Magnetic tapes
• 8 and 5.25 inch floppies in flexible sleeves
• 3.5 inch diskettes
• CDs
• USB drives
• Memory Cards

Punch cards are fragile, even if you could somehow change them so they could hold gigabytes of data, cardstock is inherently not ideal. Magnetic tape can get dirty, it can stretch, etc. Flexible floppies have an open window so they can get scratched, get dust in them, etc.

Skip forward to CDs and you have something much more fragile that can easily get scratched. Then after that there are USB sticks that are pretty good, but because the part you plug in has to be able to make electrical contact with the USB port it can get dirty or bent or something. Often there’s a cap you have to take off then have to avoid losing. Or the plug part can be retracted, but that has to be done manually. They’re also all different sizes and shapes, so you can’t have a standard sized box to store them neatly. Plus there’s the notorious issue of trying to plug it in upside down. Finally memory cards. They’re small and easy to lose, they’re fairly fragile, and they also can be plugged in upside down.

3.5 inch floppies were a good size. They were big enough to be hard to lose, but small enough to be easily carried. They were nice and thin so you could have a stack of them. Because they were a standard size and shape you could have a storage box to contain a lot of them. They had a dust cover to protect the sensitive bits, and it moved aside automatically when you put the disk into the drive. They had a very obvious top side, so it was hard to put them in the wrong way, unless you had the drive mounted vertically which wasn’t that common.

I would hope that eventually if there’s another removable medium for storage, that it has a lot in common with those 3.5 inch diskettes.

I grew up calling those (save icon ones) hard disks to distinguish them from the floppy ones

This was just you. I’m also from the before-times, and was using cassettes as a storage medium before even seeing my first floppy drive. But, nobody called the ones with a sliding window “hard drives”. Diskettes, maybe, but more frequently just floppies, or 3.5 inch floppies to distinguish them from the bigger ones.

IBM PCs introduced computers with hard drives before they even switched to the 3.5 inch format. The earliest IBM PCs only had 5.25 inch floppies, often 2 drives. But the XT from 1983 came with a 10 MB drive by default, but still used 5.25 inch floppies. By the time IBM switched to 3.5 inch floppies, the hard drive was well established. That was in about 1987 with the PS/2 models.

The earliest Mac computers took a surprisingly long time to come with a hard drive. The earliest model Macs starting in 1984 came with 3.5 inch drives and no hard drive. It wasn’t until 1987 that Macs started coming with hard drives. So, I could maybe imagine someone who used macs not knowing what a hard drive was during that 3-year window. OTOH, someone who only used Macs wouldn’t have known about 5.25 inch drives because Macs never used those, so there wouldn’t have been a need to distinguish between 5.25 inch drives and 3.5 inch ones.

I just really hope that Amazon at least has it set up so that the really important stuff goes to actual, trained SREs. They could set it up so there are queues for things that aren’t business critical and have a very loose SLO that get assigned to the new grads. Or, the new grads get paged when the error rate for the service is 1% and if it gets above 3% someone who knows what they’re doing is woken up. If say all issues with Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service is shunted to new hires, AWS would be going down constantly.

Probably, it’s also why Google has 100 different chat clients.

Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month

That’s insane. Where I worked you had to spend about 6 months learning enough that they trusted you to be on call. For months you’d just learn the systems. When you and your team agreed you were probably ready to be on-call, you’d be the “shadow” on call. The primary would get paged and you’d get paged too. You wouldn’t actually do anything, but you’d watch while the primary tried to solve the problem and take notes. If that went well it would switch to reverse-shadow. Then you were on call but there was an experienced person who was paged and ready to step in if you needed help. Only if that went well could you proceed to full solo on-call status.

being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world

Where I worked there were 2 teams in 2 different time zones. But, you still were up late or early at times because there’s no perfectly-opposite time zone where team B is exactly 12 hours behind team A throughout the full year.

Also, if you recorded yourself doing on-call activities on YouTube or TikTok or something, you’d be fired. It would be the same thing as speaking to the press without authorization.