Fair market value is different from market value and appraised value.
FMV makes a lot of sense in things like insurance payouts and private equity, cuz the assets aren't liquid and have to be assessed. If the thing is already being bought and sold on public markets, like Tesla, FMV is less useful to talk about. Now you enter the realm of financial analysis (like some analyst's report about a publicly traded stock) and even financial audits and such, it's orthogonal.
Microsoft's early mover advantage in AI has run its course, and its shares have fallen by about 11% since their peak last October.
The company's quarterly results were disappointing, with capital expenditures coming in higher than expected, which led to a decline in shares in after-hours trading.
Microsoft is facing pressure to show a return on investment in AI, and its advantages in the industry are dwindling, with other companies like Google and Anthropic making significant progress.
That really, really depends what neighborhood you live in. Bakeries and especially butchers don't exist everywhere, and sometimes they (bakeries) suck. It's not Paris or Rome. And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn).
Some neighborhoods are both densely populated and a desert for quality, leaving only bodegas and overpriced artisanal boutiques.
I'm with the original poster here about Wegmans. In London you have Waitrose, which is 10,000 times better than Trader Joe's/Whole Foods and has fresh bread, alcohol, a butcher, etc etc and way more all in one place.
NYC is gar-bage when it comes to groceries.
If you spend a few minutes in the suburbs, even a rural exoburb outside of NYC, you'll drive to the supermarket and take a deep calming breath. You're not supposed to say driving could ever be better than a walkable city, but if time is precious to you and you value not hauling bags back and forth across multiple stores, you'll be way way happier.
Maybe if you only shop at the mass market chains in the gentrified central part of the city. Go to Flushing and tell me that or just go to a Western Beef.
I predicted someone would say something about that topic, though I didn't think someone would use the term gentrified anymore. That's why I qualified it as "And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn)".
That said Flushing is not only a long commute, I don't know if it would qualify as "pre-gentrified", would it?
I guess as a senior sysadmin before I got absorbed into cloud I'll say they're right! Legacy backup is found, I just discovered yesterday, in control panel I believe and it's called Windows 7 "File History and Restore".
Implying you're one thousand years old and using a legacy system if you don't use Onedrive.
Yes. Senior Citizens. Home users. Legacy backup is there, but MS both de-preference it, and use dark pattern labels on boxes to make it hard to stop one drive from nagging you about what MS want you to do.
And, if you did do a network attached install, your actual Document paths now lie UNDER the one drive anchor mount and so you have to un-do things, in order to be cleanly able to delete one drive: If you don't do this, your files can disappear because they are on local disk, under a one drive protected directory which will be wiped.
Oh, and it does registry edits to wire One drive into office, so there's all kinds of sneaky paths which make this visible. And these are >75yo, declining faculties people. It's hugely unfair.
(I volunteer for a local not-for-profit assisting seniors, older people, with their ICT burdens)
The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported:
Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”
Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?
The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.
Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.
> Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?
I think you're underestimating the QA burden for large parts of the company. When I worked in payments at MS, the ratio of QA to dev after the cuts was probably on the order of dozens to one, if not a hundred or more once you threw in Xbox/Windows/etc accessibility QA from across the organization and all the other people like lawyers involved in handling over a hundred jurisdictions. I was little more than a frontend line cook and even I had three QA people reporting directly to me; two of them helping write tests so they ostensibly should have been automating themselves out of a job.
There is a lot of manual testing when you have a complex system like that where not everything can be properly stubbed out, emulated, or replaced with a test API key. They also have to be kept around to help with painful bursty periods (for us it was supporting PSD2, SCA, or 3DS2, forgot which). Payments is obviously an outlier because there is a lot of legal compliance, but the people I knew in Cloud/Windows also had lots of QA per dev.
I wouldn't be surprised if the degradation in feature parity of newer Windows software was a result of this loss of QA. Without the QA, the developers have to be less ambitious in what they implement in order to meet release schedules, and since they don't have experienced QA they can't modify the older codebases at all to extend them.
Remember also, they were doing an enormous amount of testing with third-party devices and software*. Which is what seems to keep blowing up most spectacularly.
Even if something works on 99.9% of computers, with a billion installs that's a few million dissatisfied customers
In writing life critical systems like the Space Shuttle's operating system, effectively 99.9% of all work is QA.
MS had the dominant operating system in the world, and keeping its userbase and its ~monopoly dividend would have been more profitable as a business than doing... everything it's done in the past twenty years. Selling software that all the people use all the time just has a lot less opportunity for growth than making new software, according to Investor Brain.
The Windows ecosystem is insanely complex. And they supported it, because of the focus on QA and testing the company adopted 20 years ago after the Blaster worm.
I have a few pretty awesome teams stuck managing windows. They find bugs all of the time. The process of fixing them now practically requires a detachment of druids and Stonehenge to track where in the windows/lunar/solar cycles we are and how to deal with the bullshit & roadblocks the support and product teams throw up. If you fall for their tricks, you’ll miss the feature window… no fix for 18 months.
It used to be much easier as a customer in ye olden times, and I never felt that the counterparty at Microsoft was miserable or getting punished for doing their jobs. We feel that now as customers. You didn’t establish relationships with engineers like with other vendors, but there was a different vibe.
The focus of the company moved in to Azure, service ops, etc.
I particularly like the message in the recovery console, "Uninstall quality update". Yeah, if it was a quality update I wouldn't be in the recovery console trying to unbrick my PC would I?
I worked in the windows org around that time and the Dev/QA ratio there was closer to 1:1. QA did both manual testing and much of the automation, quality gates, and did regression testing against older versions of windows. Given the complexity of the product is is fairly easy for an inexpensive change to require an expensive test effort.
And honestly, that person deserves the same pay grade as a "normal" engineer. But sadly, most QA staff are underpaid and somewhat even an inferior class.
Instead, if the QA role was the dominant and better paid title, you'd immediately see an improvement in that partnership. I don't think that you need subordinate staff in the QA role at all.
And for what its worth, I'm that guy. I am a strong technical software developer, but I would much rather test and poke at code bases, finding problems, working with a "lead" developer, and showing them all their quality mistakes. If I could have that role at my pay grade, I'd be there.
In the chip design world, 2:1 for design verification to design is on the low end of normal.
Some organizations have gone as low as 1:1 but that is considered an emergency that must be fixed. It’s so important that designers will be intentionally underworked if there are not enough validation engineers on staff.
When you can’t fix bugs in the field, quality is important.
QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.
I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.
> QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all.
The classical joke is: (this variant from Brenan Keller[0])
A QA engineer walks into a bar.
- Orders a beer.
- Orders 0 beers.
- Orders 99999999999 beers.
- Orders a lizard.
- Orders -1 beers.
- Orders a ueicbksjdhd.
First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is.
I feel that not only should QA staff outnumber developers, but QA staff should have access to development time to design and improve QA tooling.
If you're doing an OS right, the quality is the product. I think MacOS prior to the launch of the iPhone would be the gold standard the kind of product design I'm talking about. At that time they were running circles around Windows XP/7 in terms of new features. They were actually selling the new OSes and folks were happy to pay for each roughly annual upgrade. Often the same hardware got faster with the newer OS.
Lately Microsoft and Apple are racing to the bottom, it seems.
I'm pretty sure that the recent shitshow (at least in iOS land) is the failure to have tentpole Apple Intelligence features, so scraping the bottom of the barrel and shipping things that were in no way finished (e.g. Liquid Glass UI/X).
1. SDETs (software design engineer in test) - same pay scale and hiring requirements as SDEs, they did mostly automated testing and wrote automated test harnesses.
2. STEs (software test engineer) - lower pay scale, manual testing, often vendors. MS used to have lots of STE ftes but they fired most of them in the early 2000s (before I joined in 2007).
An ideal ratio of SDETs to SDEs was 1 to 1, but then SDET teams would have STE vendors doing grunt work.
Having STEs as full time employees benefited MS greatly. They knew products from the end user and UI/UX perspective inside and out in ways even the SDETs didn't.
UI/UX quality in MS products dipped noticeably after the STE role was eliminated.
Imho, there are two key values that I've seen QA bring to software companies.
1. Deep user/product expertise. QA (and support) almost always knows more about how users (including expert users) actually use the product than dev.
2. Isolation of quality from dev leadership politics. It should be unsurprising that asking an org to measure and report the quality of its own work is fraught with peril. Even assuming good intentions, having the same person who has been developing and staring at a feature for months test it risks incomplete testing: devs have no way to forget all the insider things they know about a feature.
The best places I've worked were places where QA reported up an entirely different leadership chain than engineering, and where they got their own VP with equal power as the engineering VP, and their own seat at the same decision-making table.
When QA is subordinate to engineering, they become a mere rubber stamp.
A good question to ask when joining a software company is "Does QA have the power to block releases over the objection of engineering?" I have found companies who can answer YES to this put out much better products.
There was a real problem of QA becoming bloated and filled with less than qualified people. The really good engineered would transfers out to SDE orgs and so the senior ranks of QA tended to be either true believers are people who weren't good enough to move to SDE orgs.
Especially with QA outside of Microsoft at the time paying so much less, it was a wise long term career move to move to SDE as soon as possible.
The really good SDETs transitioned to SDE also because of social pressure. There were a large number of SDEs that would openly say unprofessional things like "well, if s/he were actually any good they'd be an SDE" to colleagues.
2 people doing QA per dev seems insane even if it’s a lot cheaper. M$ is hardly know for being obsessed with quality, they’d rather have 2 sales per dev (sales is even cheaper, basically pays for itself)
I waited til the absolute last minute to upgrade from Win 10 to 11. I use the machine just for Steam games and in particular the graphics-heavy stuff that came out in the last year or two.
Out of the blue, for months now, there's something causing the Shift key to remain magically stuck, and there's no way to troubleshoot it that I can tell. Everything is off - sticky keys, accessibility settings, all that garbagey Settings-not-Control-Panel that seems to move around all the time. If I mash shift a couple of times it returns to normal - almost as it Sticky Keys WAS active (and again all that stuff is disabled).
What's annoying about Windows is that There's Nowhere to Go to fix problem - nothing is transparent. I can google away and I'll get people also experiencing this and there's no answer.
With Linux and to a limited extent, MacOS, you can use unix tools and logs and playing around, even if it's hard you're empowered. With Windows you're a slave to Google searches.
Just had a great experience with this on Linux. One time in 20, when my X1 Carbon (Pop OS 22) resumes from sleep, Bluetooth doesn’t work. This kinda sucks because my mouse is Bluetooth.
After 10 minutes with Gemini, we found the incantation to completely reset the USB+HID stack. I put the commands in a script, and I could make the script auto-run on wake if I wanted.
I was so happy. Even after 8 years on Linux I didn’t expect this to work.
After a couple of Nvidia driver update occasions (@Arch Linux) the resume brought back a broken resolution. I didn't need any assistance to think that an xrandr command executed after each resume whould solve the problem. Now it might be already fixed but I don't bother to remove the line.
The speed is what I like, and the simplicity when I bought it. I hate 10,000 trim options with random prices like BMW and having to argue with a sales guy - just gimme the price!
I have a reservation for a Rivian R2. Assuming they can cross the mass-production threshold, it'll be an even better Tesla than Teslas are. Better fit/finish, also fast, similar cost, no Nazi leader.
I believe you're deluded into believing that 'we' are deluded. French and British TV news have little snippets of anecdotal dummy Americans being paraded around to make the entire country look stupid. It's not the entire country that's stupid - we DO have a socialized healthcare system called Medicare - it kicks in when you're retiree age. A Yougov poll from July 2025 showed:
59% of U.S. adult citizens support “Medicare for all” (27% oppose, 14% not sure)
So are "we" voting against our own interests? Have you considered that neither party, including the Democrats we're supposedly too foolish to vote for, support this. The political system is infiltrated with a large amount of money which we call "lobbying". This lobbying is illegal in the major democracies in Europe, leaving the impression that "Americans are voting against their own interests."
Hope I've made a better case than BBC or French TV5!
Exactly. The Democrats are the lesser of two evils, but they still carry water for the billionaires. Neither party represents what people really want (Medicare for all, at least as an option, lower defense spending, etc)
I have lived for many years on the border of the United States and Canada, have many friends on both sides of that border (probably more in the USA) and I don't watch French or British TV news.
Your 'socialized healthcare' is a very weak version of it, there is no other country where medical issues can spiral out of control financially in the way they do in the United States.
I know the political parties are as corrupt as they get but that is your problem to fix, even so Trump's talking points, that the USA has been financing the rest of the world are plain bullshit.
I've lived in a few countries including the UK and France, by the way. And I don't think any Canadian would compare their healthcare system to either of those countries, they'd rather use the U.S. insurance system than be given paracetamol while waiting a few weeks to get a CAT scan. In fact, according to Gemini googling 'Canadian healthcare wait times':
Key Figures & Trends (from Fraser Institute & CIHI reports, late 2025):
National Median Wait: ~28.6 weeks (down slightly from 30 weeks in 2024).
Longest Waits: New Brunswick (~60.9 weeks), PEI (~49.7 weeks).
Shortest Waits: Ontario (~19.2 weeks).
By Specialty: Neurosurgery (49.9 weeks), Orthopaedic Surgery (48.6 weeks) were longest; Oncology (Radiation 4.2, Medical 4.7 weeks) shortest.
Diagnostics: CT (8.8 weeks), MRI (18.1 weeks).
That's pretty bad. In the U.S. you wait one week for an MRI and it's paid for, minus copay, by your insurance if your insurance is good. The U.S. healthcare is pretty great if you a) work b) work in a place that gives you good healthcare or c) are old enough to qualify for Medicare. It also depends on which state you are in, since the state laws differ on healthcare (Texas and New York are not the same).
But I don't think your point is fact-finding, it's hating on the U.S. or provoking.
I know the political parties are as corrupt as they get but that is your problem to fix, even so Trump's talking points, that the USA has been financing the rest of the world are plain bullshit.
That's what a generic semi-forced opt in via JavaScript is for, as we learn from the cookie opt in nonsense of EU sites. It's compliance for compliance sake.
But what could an opt-in requirement for advertising possibly mean other than a compliance checkbox that 99% of users click through? It just seems like where you land if you start with the intuition that ad-supported platforms shouldn't be legal, realize that implementing that policy would ban all print media, and do your best to rescue it rather than abandon the idea as unworkable.
Fair market value is different from market value and appraised value.
FMV makes a lot of sense in things like insurance payouts and private equity, cuz the assets aren't liquid and have to be assessed. If the thing is already being bought and sold on public markets, like Tesla, FMV is less useful to talk about. Now you enter the realm of financial analysis (like some analyst's report about a publicly traded stock) and even financial audits and such, it's orthogonal.
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