> Sudden layoffs can also help maintain labor discipline, which a lot of business leaders felt was getting away from them.
We saw this theatre at my employer. A mandatory all-company meeting called with a few hours notice, lots of stern faces and vague ominous talk, followed by "you will be notified in the next moments if you are being made redundant".
They are a huge company whose name you would almost certainly recognize. We found out later that the total number of people let go was....5. That's how many people we hired in our group alone the previous month. It was just a show.
QGIS is fantastic and that team deserves a lot of praise for their work over the years. However, the article calls out using KML as a data source and unfortunately QGIS does not have the best support for KML. One of the reasons KML is still around despite it's faults is because a KML author can easily design a UI for their data in Google Earth, organizing data by folders with descriptions, including pre-defined views and image overlays among other things (a basic example here: https://kmzview.com/5qBGblENff4w0RkQf89J). Then, anybody who opens that KML in Google Earth gets that same UI. There are a lot of casual consumers of this type of data and this experience is powerful for them. I think QGIS could really broaden their appeal to this casual user base by supporting these well-loved KML features.
Shapefiles are no more proper than KML, I'd even say KML is a better format, since it's a single file and doesn't have the archaic name limitations of SHP.
KMLs do not have a spatial index. Reading a properly constructed shapefile with 2m points is fine, and running a SQL query on it is also fine. Trying to do that with an xml based file is not fine. Each of the major GIS packages spends quite a bit of effort to convert kml to an in memory spatially indexed dataset on ingestion. Shapefile conversely does not have to sit entirely in memory to still be reasonably quick.
Shapefiles do have the anyone field name length limit, among a few other things, but alternate formats that recognise that issue have existed and been popular for well over 20 years.
In other news, geopackage is based upon sqllite, supports long field names, a good assortment of data types, and is finding good adoption among many facets of spatial products from desktop to scripting, etc.
use PostGIS with proper spatial indices, and properly tuned if you have to take the QGIS way. and remember that spatial SQL is always better than using python-based analysis. particularly with newer versions of Postgre where there is chance that the queries be parallelized.
The current "tech" job interview process is engineered to select for people that are both competent and secretly insecure about their skills, and to do this with little or no false positives. Competent employees are, well, competent and secretly insecure employees tend to have a need to impress. Both of these traits works to employers benefit.
A large amount of false negatives, like candidates that would otherwise be great employees but maybe just suck at whiteboard coding, is considered acceptable by most employers because research shows the cost of bad hires is much much higher than missing out on many good hires. Employers know the current process is miserable and leaves a lot of good people behind.
I know the title sounds like a political piece, but it's not. The subheading is "A team of computer scientists sifted through records of unusual Web traffic in search of answers. A set of cryptic data has inspired a years-long argument over its meaning."
You could say that Google Fiber was a response to Comcast's announcement of its intent to acquire NBC in December 2009.
Google makes no money if they can't show ads to people, and at the time Comcast and friends controlled Google's access to a majority of US audiences that Google's customers (advertisers) wanted their ads in front of. Advertising in the US was more than half of Google's revenue then. Comcast had the only network nationally capable of reliably delivering video and video ads, which was prioritized for growth within Google around then.
I think there was a real fear within Google about the leverage Comcast and other national ISP's had over them. TLS wasn't common, and advertisers weren't nearly as interested in mobile audiences in 2010: wireless data use was a fraction of what it is now. A well-capitalized Comcast without the regulatory restrictions of AT&T or Verizon could create existential trouble for Google if they really wanted to. Google Fiber could have been Google's way of showing they'd be willing to play hardball if it came to that. Any positive PR that came from it was a great bonus, but they almost certainly never made money from Google Fiber.
> Google makes no money if they can't show ads to people
I'm really, really hoping that changes drastically in the next decade. It would be really nice if Google started making the majority of their money from compute cloud offerings (a little out there, but that sector is growing much faster than their general business). I think it's essential if Google's ever going to gain some independence from the perverse incentives they've set themselves up for, and I think that's essential for Google (and society in general) as we move forward.
I'm not sure what to do with Facebook. I don't see people paying for that. Then again, with the amount of time people spend glued to Facebook, they could probably make a tidy business offloading general computing tasks to their users through JS. The concept has been brought up before, generally in the discussion of blockchain mining through websites, but at Facebook's scale and usage it's an entirely different story. I imagine Facebook could have the largest weather supercomputer in the world (by many factors) next week if they really wanted to.
I wonder if Facebook has a department whose job it is to look into developing more parallelizable algorithms for common workloads...
Fundamentally, both Google and Facebook live by questionable morals: Google is a surveillance company trying to branch out, while Facebook is a surveillance and behavioral manipulation company doubling down. Google has some smart engineers, who could maybe make a viable version of the 60s mainframe business when the ad bubble pops. Facebook... I'd pay a couple bucks a month to keep up with acquaintances in a way that's easier than an email list or private Usenet group. But I see them taking the dark path and e.g. selling "consumer profiles" that aren't "credit reports," because "credit reports" are governed by laws.
Amazon could only benefit from having multiple state and municipal governments in competition within any general metro area that they are seriously considering. I think it's a bit telling that Washington, D.C., Montgomery County in Maryland and "Northern Virginia" are all on the list, as well as both Newark and New York City.
The place is dangerous and violent but remote, and authorities keep their distance. It feels strange to think that a place like this exists an hours drive from Disney World.
Can you talk more about the lawless hunting club-ruled area? Or provide a name for more research - it's hard to tell exactly which feature is being pointed to on the map you linked.
It's called River Ranch Acres and on the map it's the area south of Highway 60/Hesperides Rd and east of Highway 630 E with the dirt roads throughout. The Triple Canopy Ranch to the west mostly surrounded by a canal (moat?) is not part of it. I believe there is a book titled "Redneck Riviera" written by a man who inherits some land there and attempts to take possession of it.
The original slogan always had a convenient loophole. It's about not being evil, but not necessarily not doing evil. If you accept that something can do evil without being evil, it all works out to justify most anything.
