• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 25th, 2023
  • BlackAura@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Spotify vs. Anna's ArchiveEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

    Ooohhh I did that test when I got a new speaker / amp setup at my PC and as a musician I thought “I got this”. Plus I was trying to decide if Tidal was worth upgrading to from Spotify.

    I did slightly better than average. Like just slightly. I might have the results somewhere.

    I ended up doing Tidal’s free trial. I couldn’t tell a difference. Went back to Spotify. (though now my group of people are on an Apple Music family plan).

  • BlackAura@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•Microsoft Teams Starts Telling Your Company If You’re Not At Work
    2·
    2 months ago

    Yeah I work at MSFT on a completely different team.

    Teams recently asked if I wanted this and I was like… “sure!”

    Now when I’m in the office and people check my status it tells people my desk location and when I’m WFH or elsewhere it tells people I’m not in the building. I don’t get people asking “hey are you in today?”

    A lot of people in this thread are taking the headline literally like it’s “are you online or away?”. No. This is more of "are you at your desk in the office or working from a different building or from outside the facilities.

  • BlackAura@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•Canadian citizen dies while in U.S. ICE custody in Florida
    12·
    6 months ago

    My parents used to go down to Arizona. They sold their trailer back in 2018 (so just before Covid which was very lucky). They’ve done the odd trip down to the US (they sold because they wanted to go to different places) but plan to go out to Vancouver Island and other places more often now.

    Family friends with a house in Palm Desert sold their place after Trump joked about Canada being the 51st state and plan to never go back down again. At least for as long as he is president.

  • BlackAura@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Can someone get through college on GNU Linux?
    4·
    7 months ago

    Software engineering in Canada in the 2000s. Most of the labs in my university ran Linux, at least in the engineering, math, and science areas of campus.

    Personally I ran, depending on the year, LFS (Linux from Scratch), Slackware, or Gentoo (which still lives on that laptop today but also it hasn’t been booted or connected to a network in like 10 years).

    I think there was only one lab with Windows. We also had a lab of Solaris machines but I bet those are gone now.

    No idea what Law, Nursing, and other faculties in the other side of campus used.

  • BlackAura@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*English
    1·
    9 months ago

    Oh absolutely having an aggressive manager and skip will help you with bonuses and promotions. But they don’t force managers to give people low scores anymore.

    While the management tool had a weird slider and score system (you could give a number between 0 and 1000 IIRC), the general terminology was you could get between 0 and 200, indicative of how you compared to the average person at your level. 100 meaning you did average per-say or completed about 100% of the work an average person could complete.

    While not unheard of it was basically impossible to get 200% (required at least your skip/M2 and maybe your M3 to agree).

    Last I heard (keep in mind this was 2023 or so) managers got around 105% or 110% of their bonus allocated for their team. Generally that meant you could give everyone “100” if you wanted, but practically it never worked out that way.

    Also there were strict rules you couldn’t take from a more junior budget to give a more senior person a higher bonus. You could however take from a more senior budget and give it to a junior.

    I. E. I couldn’t give two SWE1s 80 to give a SWE2 a 120. The reverse was allowed though.

    Layoffs are generally done algorithmically. I’m not kidding. They don’t want to be sued. They follow all the legal rules otherwise (can’t layoff a US citizen without laying off a Visa employee first, etc).

    Source: I worked there for 11 years, I was an IC but have many friends who are managers who would tell me how the system works, and have been laid off twice. The first time I found another position within MSFT but the most recent time, in December, I opted to take some time off and find something else.

    Edit/addendum: when the managers get in the room for people discussions a lot of that is around promotions. Very little is bonuses. Bonuses are determined by your manager, then go up the chain. So your manager sets and signs off on your score. Then your M2 checks it and either sends it back if they don’t agree or signs off and sends it up. Then your M3. At the M3 and higher levels I suspect they don’t look too close but just make sure everything makes sense and the budgets balance.