Poor Article Wording

This article popped up on my Google News feed and the first thing that caught my eye was the fact the headline mentions they were sacked, but the subheading says “affected due to layoffs”

Laying someone off is not the same as sacking them. As someone at work explained: sacking someone is when you keep the role but do away with the person; layoff is when you do away with the role, but (sometimes) keep the person. These workers were laid off since they also got severance pay. Something you’d never get if you were fired.

In fact, this article may get the writer and the publication in trouble. Being fired has a far more negative impact on your career than being laid off so anyone of those 140 workers trying to get jobs elsewhere may find it harder to get a new job if their prospective employers do a basic internet search and find this article that implies (incorrectly) that they got sacked.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/github-sacks-entire-india-engineering-team-around-140-of-them-2352591-2023-03-28

The Rise of Open Source Software

There’s a nice CNBC documentary talking about OSS and how it’s pretty much taken over the world. Proof if it was needed that open source is better than closed source in pretty much every scenario.

I say “pretty much” since there are definitely certain scenarios where open source is not the best option, such as proprietary encryption algorithms or something that is company-confidential.

Google to buy FitBit

Well, this is a bit of a surprise, but not too much a surprise.

Regular readers will know I’m a FitBit user and have been for a few years.

You’ll also know that I’m an Android user, and Linux user.

So I just read this article, about Google acquiring FitBit. I’m curious to see how they incorporate FitBit and whether improve it or destroy it….

https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/01/google-buys-fitbit/

And a Press Release has just been found in my inbox:

https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/press-release-details/2019/Fitbit-to-Be-Acquired-by-Google/default.aspx

Google’s Catch-22

Not often I post on problems at Google, but this is actually an interesting situation.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1518703

Google had an outage the other week, and it knocked out several websites GitLab, Shopify and impacted others. Gsuite, Gmail, YouTube were affected, but not down.

There are some interesting lines in this article:

for an entire afternoon and into the night, the Internet was stuck in a crippling ouroboros: Google couldn’t fix its cloud, because Google’s cloud was broken.

Google says its engineers were aware of the problem within two minutes. And yet! “Debugging the problem was significantly hampered by failure of tools competing over use of the now-congested network,”

In short, Google Cloud broke due to congestion, Google couldn’t fix the problem because their tools required using the network that was now congested

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