Posts by a_yank_lurker 4137 posts • joined 16 Nov 2013
To make chips at scale and at a reasonable price is not cheap nor technically easy. Also, some of the chemicals used are fairly dangerous. One noted that HF is used which has an interesting habit of penetrating skin and attacking bone (I am originally a chemist); a rather nasty and hard to treat injury. I am fairly certain there are many more issues that prevent most from even attempting to make chips in their garden; I certainly would not bother to try.
Congress critters seem to always moan about the current retail behemoth. I can remember when Wally World was a favorite target, today its Amazon. From the way the bill is written I have my doubts the courts will let it stand anyway. There are antitrust laws on the books and I wonder way they could not be used; but then it would DOJ that would get the credit not America's Native Criminal Class.
Living in tornado country one learns very quickly tornadoes are very unpredictable and potentially deadly. There have been many well built structures utterly destroyed by a direct hit from a tornado including schools with children present (Moore, OK a few years ago). Unfortunately some of these hits have resulted in deaths of people trying to shelter in place. This seems to be Congress critters bloviating about something they no nothing about, don't really care about the victims and their families, and frankly could not do much about anyway.
Attacking a facility in another (presumably neutral) country is an 'act of war'. Depending who they attacked they might face an more powerful alliance than they bargained for; an alliance that once fully deployed could trash the Chinese military rather quickly.
Also, attacking another country would be long-term economic suicide for China. Moving manufacturing will not be cheap or easy short term but long term is probably necessary to stabilize worldwide supply chains.
The moneybags are getting worried that is not a good sign for the mangelment. While it technically has not been proven there is systemic discrimination at Itsy Bitsy Morons the sheer number of lawsuits alleging discrimination, illegally withholding commissions, etc. point to some serious ethical issues within manglement. The fact that many have been settled by manglement without even going anywhere near a trial probably bothers the moneybags. If these issues are allowed to fester much more they could take the company down in a rather spectacularly with the moneybags taking a bath.
Manglement is relying on a person not taking the shyterly NDA to a legal beagle who would probably point out all the illegal and unenforceable terms in it.
My group writes custom, internal code to serve our customers. It is one our competitive features that we can do some fairly serious custom code to support our clients. Leisure Suit Larry and the fraudsters Gartner ignore the fact off the shelf software has limited utility for many business critical applications. Many businesses need custom code to be competitive and often the custom code is what gives the business an advantage.
The nearest devices I have to IoT are some recent model cameras and lens from well known manufacturers. Every so often there are updates issued by these manufacturers which are DOWNLOADED to a computer then manually installed to the device. A bit old school but the updates are infrequent. More importantly, if any of the manufacturers does die the gear will still work as none are dependent on talking to server.
I remember the pre IBM PC days with an Apple IIe. Fond memories of that beast. I was one of the first to write a MS thesis on a computer (I was a STEM major at an engineering school). Spectrums were not easy to find over here but we had plenty that were roughly equivalent at the time.
Also, some of us try to limit what leakage there is from our smartphones and will not install an app just because someone says so. I am not very trusting of your average bureaucrat's ethics as they are basically failed politicians. And depending on who they involve in the project I would be extremely wary of what the app does.
My aging gear (one exception), at least one laptop about 7 or 8 years old all run the current, fully patched Linux Mint reasonably well with no complaints from Mint about hardware compatibility. The exception is an aging iMac I inherited and it runs the current MacOS with no issues. While I hope to slowly upgrade my kit this year, I am not under any specific pressure to do so because the 'latest and greatest' will not run on my current kit. My current kit, while old, is still fully functional and I probably can get a few more years out of it if I had to.
The Rejects of Redmond are beyond clueless. Most users are not really stressing their kit out so what runs Bloatware 10 is more than adequate. I think I will take the hint and not get Bloatware 11 ever.
When I hear some manglement moron say their cube farm must be filled I have a bad feeling about the company. My impression is Intel manglement wants to be able to more effectively harass the peasants which is easier to do in the office.
WFH does has advantages for the both sides. Employees are not commuting any significant distance (bed to desk is not very far). Lunch is much easy to take care of, just raid the fridge. Thus commuting costs are much lower. There is no office space to be owned/rented for the employee and less resources required onsite such as cafeteria, desks, chairs, etc. Also, what space is available can be used for activities such as manufacturing that require onsite presence. Another benefit is that having to work a few extra hours is not as painful for the employee.
Somewhere there are ledgers which have all the available cash/credit available to someone. The ledgers that can easily be turned into cash will still register withdrawals against the account. The cash then is not easily traced in principle but using large amounts will get unwanted attention; try buying a car with actual cash.
The grey hairs bring experience to the table. Experience can help in understanding many issues such has how a technology developed, operational issues, customer issues, etc. Understanding the issue is the first step to solving the issues. The experience can be valuable even if it is not strictly IT as it might give an understanding on how a process will actually work. Experience is only gained by facing issues as they come. Firing the grey hairs and replacing them with diapers is idiotic as there will be no institutional memory.
While different package managers can be a headache to work with it does create an interesting security side effect. To install malware, you have somehow get the correct package type to the user for their distro. And then convince someone to sideload an obscure package onto their system. It's not impossible but more tedious to do.
In real life, most Linux users probably use 1 or 2 distros so they are very familiar with the package managers these distros use. So the existence or non-existence of the other package managers is irrelevant.
Two issues involved. The OS is a shorthand for the software ecosystem available for the it. Most are familiar with Bloatware as a Disservice and the fruity ecosystems. Linux not so much. Here inertia rules, most will go with something that has familiar software available. The other is relatively little hardware comes with Linux preinstalled. You can find gear with Linux on Amazon but it takes some deliberate searching. So for most it is install Linux on a computer. A task that is not terribly difficult but scares non-technical users. Here again inertia rules.
While I am not happy with war in Ukraine, malicious destruction of files, etc. on someone's computer is beyond the pale. From what I have heard there are some anti-war protests in Russia so the war is not universally popular there. You could be destroying someone's computer who actually is on the side of peace.
This reminds me of the Imbecile Explorer days when you had to have 2 versions of your website. One for Imbecile Explorer and the other for everybody else (e.g. Netscape); or it felt like that. Issues with browser rendering badly have been an issue ever since there has been more than 1 browser available. Part of it is with the browser and part of it is poorly coded/tested websites. I have seen browsers within the same family handle sites differently even now.
When a company places important functions in a country outside of its home country the managlement makes key parts of the company vulnerable to international affairs. While a US or EU company placing key functions within those countries has relatively low risk of disruption because of a war, placing key functions in semi-hostile country or fairly unstable country puts the company at serious risk when things go sideways. Corsair complaining they cannot work with their Russian office deserves the world's smallest violin.
The issue of raw materials will to some extent be problematic as the geographic distribution of some ores is highly localized to only a few places. I was surprised about the need for Palladium for chip manufacture but that is more about I am not overly familiar with all that is required.
Many have found they can work efficiently from home and rarely need to darken the door of an office. The manglement at Chocolate Factory has to justify the money spent on real estate and buildings. Buildings that are too large for the staff that needs to be onsite. This points to a bigger problem for many Silly Valley companies with expensive real estate they own.
In my case, one of the major onsite groups actually expanded into the cube farm my group was located. We had to pack up stuff into boxes and I have not seen my boxes since I packed them up. We have not heard any chatter about going into the office as many of us do not anywhere to sit. The site is rented.
If they waived a large enough chunk of change there will be a settlement. What most plaintiffs want is to made financially whole not necessarily to win a lawsuit. Now these chunks of change will begin to add up and also I suspect a very good lawyer would use the evidence of these settlements a civil suit as an indication of a pattern. Manglement needs settlements to avoid discovery when their hands are dirty.
While Gartner has a well deserved reputation for publishing useless drivel, I expect supply chain issues to all areas to persist for at least a year. With the possibility of a widening war, it may even get worse. What I have seen is erratic availability of products in many areas I pay attention to. So to expect networking gear not have these issues is rather stupid; I just do not know how bad it will really be and what options might be available.
Mark Twain observed that 'Congress is America's native criminal class'. So they can be bribed, (small bills in many brown envelopes works best). All he needs to do is grease enough of the palms of the Congress critters aka native criminal class to change the law. He must relatively or stupid.
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