Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26130 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
>very embarrassing for an Ivy League university that has a business school churning out MBAs.
If she had done this the clever way, redirecting all the orders through a company her partner owns and marking stuff up 200% 'cos it's enterprise grade' then regularly retiring kit, selling it for pennies to another company her partner owns and replacing it.
If she had done this properly she would be getting donation requests and being put on committees
Why would you be stupid enough to give your money to a venture capital fund with no idea what they are going to invest in? Those poor people who backed Sequoia and A16Z and Kleiner-Perkins must be dumb.
Fortunately the SEC only allows rich people to invest in VC funds because its job is to protect poor stupid people.
There is a bandwagon and most of the people jumping on it are crooks, same could be said for selling shares in these new-fangled joint stock companies which allow the 'investors' to walk away with no liability !
But doing a traditional IPO is also a pain in the posterior. You find a merchant bank that will take 5-8% of your company as a fee and another 20-30% of your company that will be sold at a steep discount to their chums. You then spend a year tarting yourself around investors instead of building your business. Every little thing you say in this year, to anybody, is going to be jumped on later by some lawyer to either get part of your company if it does well, or to get money back if it doesn't.
On the IPO day, if you are lucky, the price zooms up beyond what your bank (that took 5+% to advise you) estimated, and all their chums cash out - you are locked in until all the excitement is over. At the end of the day, if you are lucky, the bank will make 2x what the founders make.
The SPAC alternative from your point of view is that a man turns up at your door with a very large cheque and you have a free choice.
The post-SPAC alternative is that a man from Google/Facebook/Samsung turns up with a smaller cheque and a threat to buy a competitor and put you out of business if you don't accept.
For an investor, you have the choice to give Mark Cuban your $$$$ in the hope that they will make a good investment, without you knowing what it is. Investing in an IPO you are hoping that you can buy in from the insider bank selling, and make a profit !
So far it seems Tesla software security is pretty good (unlike their ability to detect tunnels painted on walls)
Probably cos Tesla is staffed by silicon valley type programmers rather than traditional automotive eng types = why would my car's internal canbus need security ?
It's not RF (well not deliberately) - RF would work! Doing bluetooth or zigbee or similar to a charger 1m away with all the authentication and error correction and channel management built into the radio protocol would be good.
Instead the electrical engineers started with power and voltage specs, and connectors that were different for all the makers, and nobody thought about data - why does a power plug need data ?
The home standards came up with a simple bodge with an extra 1Khz low voltage signal on top of the charge and it just detects, connected, can take more current, I'm full.
The commercial ones somebody realised that they might want to charge money as well as batteries. They invented a big fancy standard, which was in xml (because it was a big fancy standard) but everybody already had the expensive wires and connectors in place. So they bodged a low voltage modem signal on top of the DC. It at least has some data verification, which is why this attack works, if you add enough noise to scramble the data it shuts off rather than self destructs.
At least with the standard here in the former colonies, the car locks the connector for home level 1/2 chargers but you can unplug the biggest fast chargers.
Whether this was a safety feature to unplug a smoking car or so parking lot owners can tow somebody overstaying, or just an oversight on the plug design
PS there are a couple of sense pins so it can kill the current quickly when you disconnect
I think the issue is that that data link is a low voltage AC on top of the DC power cable. Either the original connector standard didn't include data and this was a bodge or they were trying to save on pins/use standard industrial cable.
It's difficult to RF shield the thick DC power cable while keeping it flexible, and would mean you would need special expensive cable.
>Unless they were wearing uniforms, it would be legitimate to simply have shot the bot farmers, rather than arrest them.
This was in a Ukrainian city, staffed by presumably Ukrainian nationals - albeit paid by Moscow.
You can't go shooting your own citizens/politicians for spreading political message paid for by Russia - unfortunately
>The likes of BT & ARM should always have some domestic majority
By which logic no other country should risk using ARM.
Going to be tricky to do computers if everybody is only going to be allowed to use domestic architectures, made in domestic fabs and running domestic apps on domestic OSs. It's going to be good for innovation when we have 192 competing computer designs again.
The highland haggis uniquely has unequal length legs for stability on steep mountain slopes.
There are two sub-species left/right side short legs. These can face either left or right around the mountain, for obvious reasons these two populations cannot inter-breed.
Sadly they do not do well in captivity since they immediately fall over on a flat floor
>Nowadays renting a pet seems to have become a thing,
It went from :
That's stupid - who would ever do that
We could do that to make money
That's a terrible idea
California bans it
Every other sane state follows with it's own bans
in only a few years
It did stop me stealing a VW polo.
Neither me, nor the owner of the same colour car parked on the same dark street bothered to lock the door.
Spent a long time trying to get the key to work before realising that there was a different selection of crap in the back of this car
> assumed the reference to $300K profit above was a typo of $300M.
Probably not, they lost $400M last year
Although these days profit is whatever you tell the accountants you want it to be.
ARM are in a tricky market, the low end stuff they can only charge 0.00000000001 % royalty on.
The high end customers all have architecture licenses where the customer does all the innovation, but doesn't pay ARM anything.
In the middle ARM has to pay lots of clever buggers to do all the clever stuff but the customer will switch to another architecture if ARM try and charge 1c more the switch would cost.
The problem is normally you IPO when your startup first begins to make money, and needs money to expand to make more money.
So paying 100x annual sales at IPO for Tesla /Apple /Microsoft would have you made you $$$$$.
Paying 100x annual sales for a 30year old company in a mature market that was public, now private and wants to go public again and whose message is 'we are culling staff to save money to make a profit" - doesn't sound quite as convincing
>but actually hired a load of 20 somethings.
I suspect not, no 20 something with permission to work in the USA and a choice went to IBM
They might have hired some 20 something H1s or some overseas contract labour - but nobody that recognises a keyboard would choose to work for IBM at this point
>IBM got caught and should be raked over the coals.
IBM have already effectively destroyed themselves, they will live on as a government legacy platform and then finally as a patent troll - but IBM as a computer company is dead
