rincebrain

As with any large company, I think it's going to vary, even within the same jurisdictions.

Something a lot of people are bad at is the gradations of "no" that might be allowed in a situation, and learning how to communicate that can ripple up and down.

If upper management tells you "I want 1 million ponies by tomorrow", but what they really mean is "I want to see how far you can get at delivering those ponies by tomorrow", that can be the difference between making a plan for coordinating that transport and going home on time or being up at 2 am calling around to find someone who won't call you expletives for waking them to ask about ponies at 2 am.

I assume they typoed reflinking, a way of doing CoW-based copying of file contents.

The WRT54G community tried this for a while.

Red Hat most memorably has tried it with "technically you are legally permitted to distribute these things we are giving you under contract but we will terminate your contract if you do."

Normalization of deviance, soft power, and the fact that managing up and managing down are not the same skillset.

Delegating authority is a velocity/democracy tradeoff. Polling 100k people about where to get lunch doesn't work.

So over time, any time someone does something that might be seen as unjust, if it's within the error bars for "unusual but not a hard line", shifts the line more and more, especially if the people in question are good at controlling what the people above them hear, or calling in favors to shield themselves, until you wind up with sentences like "well of course they got fired, they were working on $THAT_PROJECT, and everyone knows $MANAGER hates $THAT_PROJECT".

Some nicer boards have redundant copies of the BIOS so if you fuck up the update, it boots the old one.

Various enterprise boards with BMCs can flash the BIOS from the BMC even if the BIOS is fucked.

You might even be able to do that with Intel AMT, but I've never had occasion to try.

My understanding is that you can usually flash the BIOS from the BMC even if the BIOS is fucked, though it's a paid feature upgrade (though I think someone might have cracked the algorithm on older boards).

At least, it has been the case on several boards of mine, including an X10SDV which bricked itself, as far as I can tell, just from bad luck somehow.

I don't think that's necessarily true.

You can be cashflow positive and still benefit from having a larger pool of cash to throw around, particularly in any situation involving hardware manufacturing.

If you tell your investors "our limiting factor is how fast we can spend to deliver on additional requirements for these new customers", then it can both be true that you're not going to miss payroll for 5 years no matter what happens tomorrow and more cash would be beneficial.

Many people who have ever had to deal with the long tail of insanities in physical hosting, like "the ceiling burst and dumped water on a rack", "the RAID controller's capacitors exploded and now you need to figure out what still works", or "for some reason three of the servers won't talk to this switch but talk to anything else using the same cables, and the switch ports work for other devices", would happily pay a premium to only deal with SaaS logistics.

(Those were all firsthand examples; I'm not saying everyone needs cloud providers, but there are reasons beyond "really good salespeople" that people opt for offloading those logistics.)

I would imagine that it's plug and play until you start adding nonsense like customizable scripting on buttons or more than a certain button count as is standard on specialized gamer mice, but sure, fair enough.

"This is a platform you can build on", software and hardware specs included, is still a much nicer thing to iterate on than "it's commodity parts to slap together" for someone without familiarity with the processes involved at scale, and going from "this is an opaque piece of hardware that responds on guaranteed timing" to "this responds on guaranteed timing but also has more complex features" is still a substantial jump, since "building software that meets realtime timing requirements" is not a thing in a lot of people's wheelhouse.

I think the point is less to add features and more to lower the barrier to entry for people making mice, since, as you said, in large part keyboards and mice are appliances to the degree that it should rapidly converge to a stable set of features.

Plus, on a human level, I wouldn't be surprised if the teams working on mouse development were annoyed they couldn't show their past work in the same way...

Because at scale, that doesn't work, I think, even money no object, because it's a task that requires a lot of domain knowledge, but also is monotonous and offers little in the way of satisfaction or looking good on your resume, so the candidates you're trying to hire aren't very junior, and also are not going to like the work.

I have to imagine the answer was either "dedicated MSCC servers and EEE" depending on your level of cynicism or "it was just a tech demo that escaped".

The government is in a bad position to be that kind of paternal - any sort of large machine is the worst possible judge of the difference between "shit happened" and "I am systemically making incorrect life choices".

I agree that what you need here is someone(s) with leverage and respect in your life to interfere with systemic bad behaviors if they exist, but that takes community, government merely gets leverage, and churches are often not a welcoming place to many people's eyes, rightly or wrongly, around the US.

As I get older, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the best you can do is unconditional support from the government (because it's the only kind you can rely on no humans in the chain acting in bad faith to condition), and well funded local support structures for people to subsist while fucking up their lives and also help them get out of that spiral if they want to.

Not because I believe in some fundamental good in man or something, but because I think that's the only way you can design this that isn't subject to people's bad faith manipulation, and I've personally seen too many cases go wildly differently for "objective" criteria where the main difference seemed to be whether the person reading it went into it assuming you were lying or not.

"The court said these are X" and "it is a fact that these are X" are distinct claims, and a lot of journalistic manners is pretending you never state as fact things that could be disputed.

Of course, since there are lots of ways to describe things in bad faith without ever breaking that rule, it can ring hollow once you lose trust...