partial_accumen

Although hotpatching has been available for the longest time for Windows Server Datacenter: Azure Edition, and it will continue without charge, these security updates for Windows Server 2025 users will cost $1.50 per CPU core per month. Yes, you read that right, per core.

So its not being charged for everyone, only those not running on Azure (which is a huge number of folks). However, Microsoft giving preferential terms to MS software running in Azure instead of elsewhere isn’t new. They’ve been doing this for Windows and MS SQL server for years though Azure Hybrid Benefit.

Yet, instead of helping, all you people do is remind us over and over.

Its not their job. Its ours to fix this.

I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.

You’re proving my original point. Staying at a single employer for years, and you’ll get minuscule raises irrespective of the level of your efforts. Further, you get a sham of job security. When tough times come (as I’ve seen three cycles in IT), layoffs can come and take your job anyway. Without having built up a war chest of savings to live on, your living situation and that of your family is at risk.

Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.

You’re trying to fix employers. You’re welcome to go that route. In the original article Doctorow posited that “vocational awe” was the reason IT people put up with such conditions. Apparently that’s true for some. However, I also know it was not true of others who preferred to make the money they needed to eventually stop working for someone else.

It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization).

If an org, under union influence, would do 15% to 400% salary increases year over year for their entire company/department, they’d likely go bankrupt. Yet that was possible on an individual level without a union in place. I didn’t really mention it before but employers that treated their workers poorly were many times an asset to this method. That bad behavior drove away workers, meaning the bad employers would have to increase their salary offerings much higher to attract a worker to join even with the bad behaving employer. It also meant that the IT worker, who may not have been entirely qualified, would would have a shot at getting the position (and become qualified on the job). Once that that worker is qualified (after the year or two), they can take that knowledge and experience and jump ship to a good quality employer, gaining yet another with a big raise. The worker also just collapsed 5 to 10 years of slow career growth into 1 or 2 years.

I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.

I’m guessing those quotes are about salary gains across a the entire company/department. This was nearly mercenary-mindset IT work. As in:

• Get in with the raise
• Learn the next thing you need
• Work the thing for a bit until you know it and have the experience and expertise at that employer
• Get out

Rinse repeat.

None of that is assisted with a collectivist union mindset or union implemented rules. Please correct me if I get any of the following union benefit bullet points wrong. As I understand it, the union would do everything to undo that situation. They’d:

• work to normalize pay across workers fairly.
• emphasize a proper work/life balance
• enforce conflict resolution with strong worker advocacy
• encourage/provide training across the company/department for continued competency among everyone
• establish rigid rules for promotion

IT has been a raging river, but if you were able to navigate it, you’d get to the end very quickly. You’d certainly come out with some cuts and bruises though. If getting to the end (comfortable money in our case) is what you were looking for, then it was the fastest way to it.

Shhh! We’re releasing that accuracy update in the next version of the product. We need to sell through our existing inventory of the less accurate ones.

I have a competing technology that is nearly as accurate. For only $50 I’ll send you this device that you will have unlimited license usage rights to. While not 53% accurate like my competitor, its proven by scientific studies to be 50% accurate. I also offer volume discounts if you buy 10 the price drops to only $45 per device. Sign up now!

You’re mixing other ideas now, muddying the waters if we’re talking about present day events. I’m not arguing about structures of marriage of history long ago. Yes, marriage has historically been a subjection of women where they had few rights and even those usually flowed through the relationship with a wife’s husband. Same sex marriage wasn’t legal in any form back then. I’m not talking about then.

I’m talking about modern marriage. I’m talking about, lets say, the last 50 years. Birth control existed, women could vote and open bank accounts. The Civil Rights act barring discrimination based on sex (1964) being in full effect etc. Further, I’m talking post-Obergefell supreme court where same sex marriage is legal. All of the points I made in my prior post are in reference to modern day marriage.

We’ve had one global pandemic yes, but what about second global pandemic?

My main point was that the actual reasons for both owning and using guns are not related to the reasoning of the 2nd amendment eventhough it is the law that makes all of this possible. And how could they be related - that reasoning is centuries old and simply nomlonger valid due to the way power is exercised in the 21st century.

I’ll agree with that.

Interestingly, you can hunt or go to a shooting range in most other developed countries and the fact they don’t have an extensive right to bear arms enshrined in their constitution doesn’t seem to be limiting that entertainment value.

Is this true? A very common type of visitor to USA gun ranges are tourists from other developed countries. I wouldn’t expect this if these were equally accessible in other countries.

Culture and ideology are the primary words here, I think. As the epistemological crisis deepens, I fear ideological violence will continue to rise, and guns will be a very combustible ingredient in that dynamic.

I certainly agree this is a real risk. We’ve seen isolated events of this already with teenager Kyle Rittenhouse traveling across state lines to another city to put himself in a position to wield his semi-automatic rifle in a highly charged situation leading to him shooting and killing two people. There was no home defense there, no “well regulated militia”, there was a young man that wanted to be in a probable place where circumstances would arise he’d shoot someone and be protected by the law.

Thats a bit different. There isn’t a mandate to do those things which is where OP was going. Many private companies may engage in the same behavior but there isn’t a legal requirement they do so. There are companies that don’t just look one quarter ahead and run their businesses for the long term customer satisfaction. I’ll admit they are getting more rare though.

Thats certainly possible, but there’s no legal requirement they do so. With publicly traded companies the CEOs have a legal fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value.

I think you’ve got it a bit backwards. Those things aren’t written into law to make marriage more attractive, marriage is just an easy litmus test that you like your partner enough that you’d want them to have those things. As I said, the State will let you replicate a number of those things with legal instruments, but the State also says, if you trust this person enough to be legally bound to them (and responsible for their marital debts too) then we know you would also trust them with these other things so you get them without asking for them.

There’s some technical pieces I’m missing about the European implementation. Do you have a link to the system you’re looking at or the name? I’m happy to learn more.

I’m a bit proponent of solar. Get it in whatever form you can. Balcony solar is a great concept, so if thats what’s available to you, I’d say go for it. As for grid stability, you’re one person. You have no ability to affect operations at the grid level. The regulators in your region will have to account for people like you and your electricity needs and put in place solutions for future stability.

Any reduction in electricity from fossil fuels is a win. Get solar.

Theres a few pretty critical things you get with marriage that you simply can’t with long term committed dating (in the USA at least). Such as:

• being the legal authority over health decisions for your incapacitated partner
• smooth transfer of assets upon death of one partner to the other
• legal protection from one partner being compelled to testify against the other
• certain insurance benefits only apply to married partners

You can get some of these things or versions of them with complicated legal instruments like Medical PoA and trusts, but many times they are a pale imitation and some things simply have no replacement. If you’ve decided to make your life with your partner these are important.

CEOs are mandated by law to increase shareholder value as much as possible

One slight correction, this applies to publicly traded companies that appear on stock markets, yes. This isn’t a requirement in privately held companies.

Its not in place yet. I’m seeing it take shape. I don’t see how it can be successful on its own and will either lead to user teams adding their own Shadow IT or the skeleton IT Operations group balloon into a giant Shared Services outfit.

However, I thought I’d mention it as its the same mindset that lead to Devops, which was just a business reaction to finding a way to hire and maintain fewer IT roles. Its interesting to see the IT roles being pushed directly onto the users now.

If your users are external to the org then this probably doesn’t apply. However, if your users are internal, you give them a repo of their own and grant them access to publish to the pipeline.

Devops for sure. (“Why have IT people when we can just make developers do it?” Fucking brilliant ☹️)

I’m not sure if you’re tracking Enterprise IT trends these days, but its evolving yet again with “Why have Devops people when we can just make the USERS do it?”

Suffice to say, those of us that know how to clean up messes (or realistically become Shadow IT) will have gainful employment for the foreseeable future.

I get why you say that, but keep reading the thread for the discussion as to why I shouldn’t (and am not going to).

instead of big solar farm, it’s more € 4 000 system with a bit more than a 1.5 KW of balcony solar,

…and…

It cannot allow for off-the-grid living but it does keep the grid safe and decentralizes energy generation. With the possibility of a call to share in case there is a catastrophic event.

Those do the opposite actually. Those are some of the small scale versions of the problem that @ms_lane@lemmy.world was referring to.

Those are “grid following” devices. So where they can contribute to a cascade failure is if there is a slight sag in the grid voltage or frequency (supplied by the “big spinny things” of utility grade generators that poster was referring to), the solar system would turn itself off to protect itself. This would enable full passthrough of your households electrical demand to pull from the grid directly instead. Where the balcony solar would be offsetting a nice chunk of demand, suddenly that demand is pulled from the grid instead in a fraction of a second. Now imagine ALL the houses doing that at once. The sudden spike in demand from all those households can cause utility grade solar/wind operators to pull their supply as well, further spiking the need for more electricity at that moment. Then you get brownouts or blackouts because the only supply of electricity was the grid scale generator with the big spinny generators (which form the grid), and the demand is beyond the ability of the generator to supply. So breakers are thrown cutting off electricity customers to protect the electrical infrastructure.

Because balcony solar are “grid following”, they cannot be called on to share in the case of a catastrophic event. They need a healthy grid in place before they can come online.

and decentralizes energy generation.

This point is true though during the good times. Any reduction in grid demand (which these balcony solar setups do) is a net positive. However, they don’t help in catastrophic situations because they depend on the grid being up and healthy. I wish more of the world allowed them. We aren’t allowed to do that in the USA, as an example. Putting up any amount of solar that connects to the grid at all, even solar that doesn’t feed power back (called “zero export” here) require detailed engineering plans and permits before you can install them. This increases the cost and complexity for any residential solar installation.