When I first starting using Ubuntu 10+ years ago, getting a new laptop was like going to battle. My patience has gone down for this stuff as I've gotten older, but fortunately it's gotten commensurately easier every year.
Just talked with a Sales person yesterday. Indeed, from the new models, only the XPS 13 runs Ubuntu, but the keyboard looks like a nightmare. The sales person did send a link to a Precision with Ubuntu option, but it was 2022 model (Precision 5570).
Will probably get XPS 15 and put Ubuntu on myself. Annoying to fork money over to Microsoft for nothing.
- first salesperson said: "We are anticipating the Newer XPS 15 laptops to be launched by Dec last week or by Mid Jan that comes with 14th Gen Processors and preinstalled Ubuntu OS on them".
- Second salesperson said they don't have an ETA yet.
- Third salesperson said "The product development is working on these 2 models, we are soon expecting them to launch in next 3 to 4 weeks [Nov 13-20] but the exact date of launch has not be shared with us ... the Precision models will have these options [Ubuntu] ... the XPS 15 will not have the Ubuntu options".
- Fourth salesperson said "by early 2025".
- Fifth salesperson said "we don't have a date"
- Sixth salesperson said "we dont have eccurate date, you may see it XPS laptop with 14th gen chip in the end of December ... and it may not come with unibuntu option ... You will see Precision laptops with Ubuntu option"
Oh and they do have a Precision from 2023 pre-installed with Ubuntu[1], somehow wasn't visible before.
Dell sales and support is pretty, so have to ask multiple times.
Be careful, and do your research when buying Windows XPS's. I had to send my last one (2019 I think) back because the fingerprint readers weren't supported and the Developer editions with Linux just omitted the fingerprint reader. No interest from Dell to get drivers made for them.
I have no idea if there are bits on the 2023 Windows edition that aren't supported. It might all be fine.
UpCodes cofounder here, couldn't agree more. We're fighting the Law Publishers for free, ungated access to the law. They think they own the laws, it's insane.
I think your beef here is with legislatures, not publishers like NFPA.
It takes a lot of work to write and maintain these codes. NFPA, a private organization, gets money to do this by charging for the code.
Maybe legislatures should be paying NFPA to develop these things, rather than paying nothing for them and leaving NFPA to figure out a way to fund them. Then legislatures could buy a license for them, or demand that they be put into the public domain.
But it's not fair to blame NFPA for charging for these things after they fronted the significant effort to develop them.
A significant misconception is about who writes the codes. I haven't looked closely at NFPA's model, but many of the Law Publishers actually have outside volunteers write the codes - government officials, industry professionals and interested third parties.
Another misconception is around where their revenue comes from. ICC for example (who we know the best given their 2 lawsuits against us), makes 80.0% of their revenue from program services, including consulting, certification, and training, which do not rely on profiting by limiting access to the law (see their last 990). These non-profit organizations are extremely lucrative and pay their executives many times the median non-profit executive salaries.
Right, my startup work on compliance tech for the construction industry. Pretty gritty work trying to simplify and automate regulations that are constantly changing.
And if someone did say that to me, I would pass them no apple, since that's how we use everyday language. And if I knew they were a programmer, I'd first ask them in which programming language they'd wish me to pass the apple.
Doing the reversal test, if programming languages had all been 1-indexed, then I doubt we'd hear much from people, in 2022, saying "I think the first element should be 0, and the second 1".
Marketing email from an account you chose to sign up for may well be unwanted, but it isn’t entirely unsolicited. And it’s not at all the same as spam from companies that you haven’t interacted with. There are problems with reporting any and all email you don’t want as spam, especially when you’ve done business with that company. That devalues the meaning of spam and it will cause email providers and spam filter providers to become less stringent on identifying spam, not more. It’s already happening to gmail.
The Report Spam button informs both the ISP (i.e. Gmail) and the ESP (sender, usually someone like Mailchip or Mailgun) that I do not want this message in a process known as a Feedback Loop [0]. This allows the ISP to ding the ESP a bit on the reputation of their IP address (assuming enough spam complaints). It also allows the ESP to tell their customer who is sending on their platform that they are sending badly, and potentially dial back their service or shut them off entirely.
If you are sending good mail to a double-opt-in, highly intentful marketing list, then you will receive minimal spam complaints. If you are sending to people who don't want it (they didn't check the opt-in button), it doesn't muddy the water because it is spam.
That being said, there are legal requirements (CANSPAM) [1] for mail senders around the unsubscribe link, but there are no legal requirements around the report spam button, so either kind of works.
While this is a reasonably accurate picture of what happens when you hit the report spam button, you’ve left open a somewhat false dichotomy that is quite central to the mis-categorizing of marketing email as spam. Checking in the opt-in button takes on several forms, an extremely common one of which is signing up for a service where the opt-in button is in the terms or other fine print, it is not always (or even usually) a default-off explicit and separate button click somewhere. There is often, and with most good companies, an explicit opt-out button somewhere. That is what should be used before reporting spam, if we want spam filtering to remain reasonably good.
You’ve described what happens when you report spam, but not what happens in the future when more people get upset over email and reflexively report all marketing email for accounts they chose to sign up for, and opted-in to marketing email for (by agreeing to the terms), and potentially still need transactional emails for. The average person doesn’t know the difference between transactional email and marketing email, and if you follow @Old_Thrashbarg’s advice to report any email you didn’t expect as spam before adjusting your settings, then eventually we might lose those settings as companies and providers all come to the conclusion that people can’t be bothered.
You’re also suggesting that there’s some broad segment of good marketing email that people don’t consider unsolicited or even spammy, which is by and large not true. There is practically no such thing as highly intentful ads that most people want, aside from the occasional short-lived viral campaign. By definition, marketing is a push initiated by the company to sell their wares, and most people would prefer not to watch ads given the choice.
Don’t forget that Mailchimp, Mailgun, Gmail, Hotmail, and almost every other service you can name here is actively making their income from email marketing. As much as we want to, it’s going to be difficult to block all marketing email, and they all have a vested interest in delivering email, especially from the people who are paying for the service.
We are our own ESP at work and I work on the email team. When we get a (few) FBL from you, we block you from receiving any of our email whatsoever. Forgot your password or want to contact support? Oh well, we won’t spam you again. There are unsubscribe links, use those unless it really is unsolicited spam.
What I find most interesting about email is how some people will mark email as spam literally months or years after we sent the original email. We send over a billion emails a month (not spam) and people’s behavior around email is fascinating.
> mark email as spam literally months or years after we sent the original email
When a persistently spammy company compels me to open the Rules page to filter their trash, you bet I’m also going to Select-All and Report As Junk in hopes of maximally dinging their reputation. No idea if it works, but there’s one explanation :)
