Posts by ckm5

Apple warns 'extremely sophisticated attack' may be targeting iThings

Re: "A physical attack may disable USB Restricted Mode on a locked device"

You mean like plugging your phone into a public charging port?

Amazon CEO wants his staff back in the office full time

Re: Here we go

I've worked remotely for 20+ years. IMHE across a dozen companies, it's the absolute best way to recruit top talent and have people who are committed to the business.

This attitude of "you must be in the office" is, quite frankly, hugely counterproductive. It costs enormous amounts of $$$ to maintain real estate, money which would be better invested in the business.

And you never get more than maybe 4 hours of work/day from in office people. They are tired from commutes, take time to catch up/recover, take off for coffee/lunch breaks, spend time on the phone trying to coordinate home stuff during business hours because that's when things are open and then signoff completely at the end of the day. Never mind the constant interruptions from people "stopping to chat".

Unless, that is, you are willing to pay enough money to have them living close to work. In Silicon Valley/SF Bay Area, that's at least $300k/year, so your overall workforce cost just went through the roof. If you add that to real estate overhead, it's just stupid money.

Re: Sorry, but I cant agree with you... :)

Maybe, sometimes, someone's job IS talking to people.....

Re: WFH is a laugh

Yet another cluesless manager.

Good.

It just means I can hire your best people to work remotely and you're stuck with the ones that just can't or won't leave.

Except you're wrong. Every single study has shown that people that WFH work MORE than those in the office. That's because there is zero seperation between work & home, so you wind up working all hours.

In office, there are a million distractions, most of which managers just ignore as they are just looking at buts in seats. It's a huge red flag that a company is unable to figure out who is productive and who is not and has to rely on the "buts in seats" metric....

But, as the OP pointed out, this is about workforce reduction without having to layoff people and pay out compensation for doing so.....

Privacy expert put away for 9 years after 'grotesque' cyberstalking campaign

Really lucky he didn't wind up being severly beat up...

... while resisting arrest or otherwise visited by friends of the victim.

HR expert says biz leaders scared RTO mandates lead to staff attrition

Re: Ain't nothing going on but the rent

It means you have to live within commuting distance of the office. If you moved somewhere else that you can actually afford when you were WFH fulltime, IMHO your employer needs to pay a living wage for you to live within commuting distance......

Re: And HR make up the rules!

Should have just quit on the spot when they told you that.

‘How not to hire a North Korean plant posing as a techie’ guide updated by US and South Korean authorities

Re: College Professor...

It's a requirement in companies that do work for the Federal Government. This is because a lot of that type of work requires a clearance and rather than segmenting the workforce they just blanket test everyone.

Not just they US, pretty much anywhere in the world requires drug testing to work in certain environments.

It's also required in pretty much any logistics company because most employees drive trucks.

Come work at HQ... or find a new job, Roblox CEO tells staff

Re: Return

Brilliant, thanks for that, had a good laugh.

Re: The struggle is real

Give me a break. I run a tech company, not a large as Roblox but not 2 bros in a basement either. We're fully remote and have zero issues onboarding or mentoring new staff. All lot of them tell me "it's the best place I've ever worked" and I'm always asking for the negative side of things. The average age is probably around 25, so most people are relatively new.

It's about have a culture & processes that work for a remote workforce and not favoring in person over remote employees. No one uses Zoom because we all hate Zoom, most work revolves around Slack. And we have in-person gettogethers twice a year so people can meet & sync. Some people have made it clear they don't want to attend, which is fine.

I'm not sure how you can describe this as a "modest step". There is zero difference between 3 or 5 days a week, you still HAVE to live in the same generally uber-expensive area and uproot your family and yourself from whereever you are now.

It's just a shitty, unjustified and underwater way of getting rid of people or a commentary on a useless executive team who doesn't trust their employees. Either way, it speaks volumes.

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

BMW has forced all third parties to remove any service information for modern vehicles off their platforms, which makes it incredibly more difficult (exponentially?) to get service instructions. That means that independent shops can't use services like AllData or Mitchells to get any sort of legal access to service info.

The only way is to pay BMW a lot of money (it's around $15k/yr min) - a model most car companies are moving towards, not just BMW but they have been leaders in this. Or download potentially sketchy software from the internets, which may brick your car.

Silicon supply chain players plot exodus from China in wake of ASML's exit

Re: Oh, great

Difference is that the US is not in denial about it's past, present or future.

Intel's top-spec Raptor Canyon NUC can double as a 700+W space heater

Re: I too use my PC's as heaters

I used to have a Compaq 6U rackmount in my house with 4x (? don't remember exactly) Pentium Pros. I calculated that it cost me $70/month just to keep it running....

Re: Where are the Low Power PC's/NUC's ?

I recently built an AMD Ryzen 4xxx SFF PC around a Gigabyte Brix. Cost about $400 for 32g RAM, 2tb ssd and the box/mb/cpu combo I did look at some NUCs in the same small footprint but they were at least 2x the price....

Larry Ellison fought internal battle to kill Oracle's first-generation cloud

Re: Why would you want to do business with Oracle?

In my experience, you would be on your own if you tried that.... A lot of ISVs with Oracle specific software lean on Oracle services for tech depth support....

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

Re: Can't be right.

Not only that, but he also has a speech impediment.....

Re: Easing of Visa requirements for Indian travellers?

Isn't that pretty much why Liz Truss became PM? Because she's white as the driven snow and all the old foggies who were conned into voting for Brexit & Boris didn't want any brown people mucking up the English country(side)?

WTF? Value of Finnish open-source-as-a-service startup Aiven jumps $1.2bn in 7 months

Alternative to Redhat

This is basically an alternative to paying RedHat for CYA contracts. Now that they are IBM, everyone is looking for a alternative.

The splitting image: Sufferer of hurty wrist pain? Logitech's K860 a potential answer

Re: MS Sculpt, anyone?

Logitech makes the MS keyboards & mice, so not surprising... It would be surprising if they didn't design them as well...

VC's paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let's have a look at that

CapEx is peanuts compared to the cost of people

The reality is that it takes fewer people to run cloud infrastructure than on-prem. And that alone will blow away any on-prem cost savings. I've heard this argument alot in the last 10 years from a variety of B-series startup people but it never includes the TCO, just capex vs cloud opex.

My guess is that A16Z will shortly announce a 9 figure investment in an 'on prem cloud' startup.....

Penguin takeover: We tried running some GUI Linux apps on Windows the official way – and nothing exploded

Re: Why?

A huge amount of developers work in either Windows or MacOS as there are a lot of tools that only work on those platforms. Whether that is good or bad is largely a religous debate, the reality is that it is a fact of life.

The result is a lot of people write code on Win/Mac that eventually runs on Linux - Python, Java, Node, Go, etc are all x-platform and not Linux specific.

Re: Comparisons please? Benefits please?

Tons of people work like this - it is a major use-case for using MacOS (e.g. unix underneath).

The only people that don't recognize this are hermits in caves....

SpaceX's Starlink: Overhyped and underpowered to meet broadband needs of Rural America, say analysts

Re: They will be competing with fixed 5G, not 1.5 Mb rural DSL

There was a footnote in one of the analyst reports that the peer networking between LEO satellites is significantly faster than fiber over long distances, so much so that it is competitve vs dedicated fiber for high-frequency trading.

Given how much traders spend on fast links, I suspect there is a pretty good profit for Starlink catering to that crowd....

Re: What's the problem?

There are TONS of people moving out of cities right now with more than enough money to afford $99/mo to work remotely.... This has been going on since March 2020

Re: And the point is?

Note - downtown SF has terrible broadband, way worse than Starlink for many people. In fact, that is true for most of Slicon Valley as well - at best people have OK cable as their only provider. I would not use anywhere in the SF Bay Area as a benchmark for broadbad.

Most of the decent (aka fibre) infrastructure is in new-ish large subdivisions, most of which are not even in California....

Outsourced techie gets 2-year sentence after trashing system of former client: 1,200 Office 365 accounts zapped

Only 2 years?

Some random drug dealer on the street would get more than that. He affected at least 1000 people, never mind the citizens who couldn't get or missed services....

Should have been way more.

OVH flames scorched cloud customers with pledge to build data centre fire simulation lab

Re: The backup is on top of the cabinet ...

Depends on the risk assessment. If you are in a place with mass-scale events like earthquakes, then 25 miles is too close. At a previous employer, our US West Coast systems are backed up by systems in the middle of the country.

IMHE this is realatively easy & cheap to do with fully-cloud native applications & infrastructure. In our case, we had a complete replicate of our infrastructure on "cold standby" replicated for less than $500/mo with continous data backups to a distributed infrastructure and daily full snapshots. And, yes, we tested it 2x/year - took 15 min to spin up the replica.

So, bye-bye mighty nerd haven Fry’s, took Silicon to the Valley... and now you must die

You have more patience than me - I'd never wait, esp since 1/2 the stuff was repackged returns and generally retail-ish price. When it became possible to order stuff and get in a few days, I stopped buying there and just stop there to kill time.

i'm not surprised. Ive also heard that the crazy decor was done by a family member (wife?) of one of the founders who wanted to be a set designer....

There was a time when Fry's had everything & then some, even the kitchen sink. With the rise of e-commerce, they started having sourcing issues and that was the death knell.

I used to stop by the Palo Alto store a lot, but I haven't been there in a while, didn't know it was closed.... Wonder what I'll do if we ever have in person meetings again and I have time to kill....

P.S. The only MicroCenter in Silly Valley closed about 10 (?) years ago....

Chill out, lockdown ain't over yet – perhaps FUZIX on the Pi Pico could feature in your weekend shed projects

Re: Young people these days...

I actually have one of these.....

What's CNAME of your game? This DNS-based tracking defies your browser privacy defenses

Re: We've just upgraded your internet to default security AAA+ at no extra charge!

A lot of ISPs sell DNS data to advertisers, some of them also inject ads into the pages you request.

Not sure that any ISP is your friend.

Re: Smug bastard is smug.

A lot of sites no longer rely on cookies as they are unreliable. There are tons of other ways of tracking browsers whether you allow it or not:

- Browser Fingerprinting

- IndexDB

- Local Storage

- DNS Queries

Some of these methods may or may not work depending on a wide variety of factors, not all of which are under your control....

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

Re: Not a backdoor

The are not usually updated as places like what the OP is describing consider all electronics vulnerable and isolate them completely from pretty much everything.

If you're a WhatsApp user, you'll have to share your personal data with Facebook's empire from next month – or stop using the chat app

Good thing I deleted WhatsApp years ago....

Still have people asking to use it .... I'm sure the founders are rolling over on their piles of money....

Google told BGP to forget its Euro-cloud – after first writing bad access control lists

Re: Clouds are great!

Great, now with your hybrid, no one can be accountable and you have twice the expense with 4x the complexity. That's a wonderful solution, if you work for Accenture....

Having built a couple of DCs for F500s in a previous life, I'd much rather use one or more cloud providers. Easier to deploy, more secure, way more reliable, easier to expand & update and far cheaper.

But hey, whatever. I don't have to live with what you build, thankfully....

Re: Resilience

Every single one of your internal systems relies on the internet to function. Unless you air-gap everything (thus making it useless in the modern world) your arguement is falacious.

Re: Clouds are great!

I ran ops for $23b of projects and was the CTO of the Linux Foundation. I can safely say that unless you are one of the tech giants, your arguement for security is an illusion. The big cloud vendors have 10x more people working on security than every F500 company put together and they are fighting off nation-state resource-level attacks (and mostly winning) every minute.

And if you think that rolling your own systems isn't complex, you are fooling yourself. Just look at the number of packages on your Linux distro and show me a code trace of all the contributors. And that is just _one_ system with _one_ piece of software..... And that's assuming anyone on your staff is even capable of understand how things work.

Re: Clouds are great!

@anonymous (yeah, I know) What you are very effectively pointing out is that a lot of people (including you) don't understand the first thing about making cloud deployments reliable. As @doublelayer & @xamol are both trying to explain to you, it is quite easy to make cloud deployments far more reliable than anything on-prem.

The main issue is that people like you keep thinking that on-prem is the ultimate in reliablity when it clearly is not when compared to a correctly architected cloud deployment. At least not for anything but the very largest organizations (cf DCs in > 2 geos + competent staff to maintain 24/7/365 + significant opex budgets)

The fact is that cloud failures are public events with subsequent investigations of root causes, hence data availability for reliability is (relatively) public. With on-prem, you and I have no idea and there is no accountability.

Re: Resilience

This - it is VERY easy to build redundancy in cloud implementations. I've done it in 4 companies and several startups. The cost isn't particularly high unless you are doing active-active, easily less than $4k/month and as low as a few hundred.

Really, there is no excuse not to do this other than either laziness or just being clueless about how cloud infrastructure works.

Fundamentally, despite what all the haters believe (and it is only belief), it's far easier to build a secure, scalable & redundant system in the cloud that it is on-premise.

Re: Clouds are great!

Because failures NEVER happen when you are running things out of your basement.....

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

I use Firefox with uBlock and it seems to catch most of the ads. For YouTube, I have uBlock with AdBlock for Youtube....

Works well enough - and I use 1.1.1.1 for DNS

Re: A simple answer

That's been happening for well over a decade. Click-fraud is a real thing, which is why a lot of advertisers only pay per click....

Re: The rise of Facebook and the slow death of journalism is due to online ads

Touche - I read it for enterainment, although the comments are often a good indicator of what the right-wing conservative hive mind is thinking....

Re: Counter productive

You'd think that ad-blocking would actually improve CPMs as it is a signal that the user is not interested in the ad, further segmenting the audience....

Re: "server-side tagging"

That's the whole point, AFAIK. If you are adding tracking tags at the server side then they can't be blocked. It also lessens the load on the browser massively.

Here is a pretty good explaination - https://www.internetrix.com.au/blog/the-benefits-and-limitations-of-server-side-tagging-in-google-tag-manager-gtm/

Re: Keep on AdBlocking

Mozilla still makes over $400m/year - if that is not enough to keep a browser going, there is something wrong....

Re: Nothing wrong with ads ...

I use Ublock Origin and AdBlock for YouTube on my desktop - haven't seen an ad in years other than some homepage banner style ads. On my iPad, I'm always shocked at the quantity of ads and how disruptive they are to the user experience....

HPE to move HQ from Silicon Valley to Texas, says Lone Star State is 'attractive' for recruitment, retaining staff

Re: A clever way to turn over the older workforce

Anyone with 1/2 a brain is not working for HPE anyway - like someone said upthread, no one in Silicon Valley wants to work for them, so they pretty much had to move.