That reads differently to me. The company is doing the letting go. Like letting loose. Or letting fly. It's agency on the part of the company. Letting them see. All of these will have euphemistic overtones as no company will want to say that they axed 10,000 people.
In Britain we have quite strong employment laws and a bit less of a ruthless corporate culture, so in many sectors it's fairly uncommon for people to be terminated for poor performance, so I suspect "misconduct" is a higher percentage of overall firings here.
Yeah for sure. Unfortunately in the US it’s not uncommon for companies to find “a pattern of behavior” or “less than stellar work” that is enough to justify not giving you your severance, but also not too severe that they can’t be blamed for never bringing it up and putting you on a PIP (performance improvement plan, not sure if that’s a term in other countries).
Data is the plural of datum so using the verb in the plural is arguably not wrong. I wouldn't use it like that but I think in certain Englishes it's acceptable (British?). Some mass singular nouns in British English idiomatically take plural verbs as well, e.g. the police are.
It was arguably correct when we had such a small quantity of data that it made sense to _count_ it rather than _measure_ it. But those days are long gone.
If no one had ever seen more than a dozen grains of sand, it would makes sense to count them and say things like "Sue just showed me her awesome gem collection; she has a diamond, two rubies, and three sands!" But when you are ordering sand by the truck load, that starts sounding really stupid, and you need to shift to measuring it ("sixteen tons of sand") and not counting it ("four million trillion sands").
Mass nouns are measured by giving a quantifier and a unit (three bytes, 64 kilobytes) and do not partake of the singular/plural distinction, which only applies to count nouns.
The British / American distinction is actually easier to explain by saying that they don't partake in the "unitary collective" shorthand; the British parliament are a (countable) collection of politicians, while the US Congress is an undifferentiated mass of...something. The Jury is (are) still out which of these best captures the semantic situation, whereas with code and data we are well past the point where talking about an individual code or datum sounds about like talking about a water or an air.
The actual problem as explained in the first two paragraphs of TFA and shown in the first picture, is that the light and dark blue sides of the Finder icon have swapped sides. For the first time in its existence of many decades, the dark side is now on the right instead of the left. This is the problem.
This is sad... I've been using Synology for a very long time (over 15 years?) and have been pretty happy with my experience. The one time I needed their tech support also left me with a good impression...
This however is a deal breaker for me as I'd hate to be locked in to their drives for all the reasons in TFA but also as a matter of principle.
Yeah, same. I have had three Synology boxes over the last 20 or so years, and they have been super reliable, easy to use, and easy to update. The last one is important to me because I would, over time, add more disks and, when the drive bays were all full, replace smaller disks with larger ones.
The first one I bought is still in service at my parents' place, silently and reliably backing up their cloud files and laptops.
I was fully expecting to buy more in the future, but this is a dealbreaker. If a disk goes bad, I want to go to the local store, pick one up, and have the problem fixed half an hour later. I do not want to figure out where I can get approved disks, what sizes are available, how long it will take to ship them, etc.
I've recently installed Unraid on an old PC, and the experience has been surprisingly good. It's not as nice as a Synology, but it's not difficult, either. It's just a bit more work. I've also heard that HexOS plans to support heterogeneous disks, and I plan to check it out once that is available.
Every six years is enough for apple and other companies who have other sources of revenue and have staked out this high quality niche. But androids, as an example, are more of an average 3 year lifespan if I'm not mistaken, which is closer to what Synology would probably want to achieve but cannot.
The comparison to phones is shaky here. Phones bring substantial performance and feature improvements over 6 years, HW and SW. Synology on the other hand still uses a 5-6 year old CPU and 1Gbps connectivity in their home "plus" line. The OS development is mostly security updates with substantial feature releases few and far between. I expect this from a NAS but it's not at all comparable to a phone.
Forcing their drives is a tax on top of an already existing tax. Synology already charges a premium for lower end specs than the competition. If that's not enough to compensate for the longer upgrade cycles, and they want a hand in every cookie jar it's just going to be a hard pass for me.
I upgraded my Synology box every few years and this is exactly the time I was looking to go to the next model. And I'd pull the trigger and buy a current model before they implement the policy but the problem is now I don't trust that they won't retroactively issue an update that cripples existing models somehow. QNAP or the many alternative HW manufacturers that support an arbitrary OS are starting to be that much more attractive.
I don't think mobile is the right comparison. Those ecosystems are explicitly operating on the assumption that they will profit through the software ecosystem (app store revenue).
Synology seems to have gone entirely the other direction here. Most of their software is given away for free, but the hardware is being monetized.
Additionally - the hardware has different operating constraints. I think the big deal for Synology is that they probably assumed that storage need growth would equate to sales growth.
EX - Synology may have assumed that if I need to store 1TB in 2010, and 5TB in 2015, that would equate to me buying additional NAS hardware.
But often, HDD size increases mean that I can keep the same number of bays and just bump drive size.
Which... is great for me as a user, but bad for Synology (this almost single handedly explains this move, as an aside - I just think it's a bad play).
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I'd rather they just charged for the software products they're blowing all their money on, or directly tie upgrades to the software products to upgrading hardware.
"Thanks for your patience in waiting for this article! After publishing my piece on EgyptAir 804 in December, I moved half way across the country in a long, messy relocation process fraught with other struggles along the way. But here I am, and here it is. Thank you!"
