Nelson69

I'm not trying to pass premature judgment on anything here but the article spans several broad categories. There is various verbal harassment mentioned, age discrimination is mentioned, perhaps some missing overtime pay or a misunderstanding about exempt employment, some cut backs on certain office benefits that a struggling company might normally do and then there is the "piece de resistance," outright financial fraud. Harassment is bad, period, I don't know what the girl running in her underwear had to do with anything, but it doesn't sound like something you want circulating in your workplace, these sound like really valid beefs.

So this company was bought and presumably some audits happened and there was some due diligence. From my personal experience, people who tend to get really wound up about not being paid overtime tend not to be the most knowledgeable about this sort of fraud. I might be wrong, but I think maybe some upset folks had some real complaints and they may have mixed in some rumors. If the fraud is remotely true, there is tons of missing money, companies tend to notice that.

What city is this in? There are other tech jobs, right? You had no 401k or anything?

I hope things turn up for you soon.

Isn't it simply guaranteed by the government? Private banks put up the money and the government only steps in to pay if there is a default. Isn't it a profitable business for the banks?

HEIF is also part of the MPEG-H standard.

There are some licensing issues with it, but if you have HEVC hardware and a license, then you can probably use it.

What about all the ISPs in between? They don't get an opportunity to charge you and Netflix...

What crown jewels are these? Windows? Office? Edge?

They're trying, they see the writing on the wall, it's foolish to not see that they're trying. I think it would be equally foolish to just whitewash away the sins of the past.

Odroid N1 is getting close.

A service that does recognition based analytics on images or video from your homw security camera seems like a multi-billion dollar idea to me.

Half the houses in my neighborhood have some sort of camera system that you can see, there are probably more that you can't. People are scared of things, there is a market there.

It's freaky 1984ish stuff to think about but normal type people have these cameras, it's only natural for there to be private databases used for analytical purposes.

While visiting a Chinese division of an American company I worked for about 8 years ago they had Dell desktops, in a tower configuration and they had a metal (steel) super structure around them. A case within a case.

You could unlock it, plug in USB, monitors, ethernet, etc. route the cables out through a slot and then lock it. You couldn't reach the the different ports and sockets when it was locked. It was all relatively stout too.

Interestingly, they did have internet in the building but you had to have management permission and go to the security office to access it. If you wanted to download something, it was a fairly involved procedure. They were paranoid about people stealing their stuff and then also very paranoid about misappropriating something they shouldn't and creating legal problems in Europe or North America. They didn't seem to be all that concerned about stealing other people's IT but they wanted to control everything such that it didn't contaminate anything they wanted to sell where it mattered.

I nearly created a situation when I pulled out my phone to take a picture of an "engrish" sign they had on the wall.

It'll be interesting to see how the security culture in the US changes or doesn't, a lot of younger developers would be put off if you attempted to somehow restrict their access to the internet from work computers or restricted your ability to plug a phone or some arbitrary device in for charging of whatever. At every job I've had this century it has been fairly trivial to download nearly all of their source code and take it home if you wanted to. Trying to take the politics out of it, we're very much engaged in a cyber cold war with a number of nations that absolutely want to take our secrets; I won't speculate on the real impact but the Russians did meddle in our election.

Well, it can read your schedule, tell you your location and then there is the homekit stuff. It could potentially disable certain security features you might have installed at your house, it could possible perform a very expensive modification to your HVAC configuration, in an extreme case that could maybe be fatal (disable heating in the winter at an older person's home or something like that.) It can also read your messages which are used for MFA in some situations. My wife and I have our accounts hooked together and I can ask Siri where she is and it uses find my friends, it can also kick off find my iPhone which shows my wife's presumed location on a map.

I think it can do Apple Pay actions too.

Degrees of dangerous. I don't have a homepod but presumably it couldn't do anything with Apple pay or your messages. Having Alexa or Siri control home automation stuff seems like something you might want to think about a little, leaving the lights on all day and burning some energy is a very different thing than re-configuring your HVAC or a security camera.

If only it were that simple...

Not filing or, worse, making an error in your filing makes it a really really nasty game. No recommended.

I'll even break my own rule: "Not filing considered harmful"

They've been in the business, probably are experts at cost reduction engineering. Their business is selling this information to other auto companies so they must be right enough that they can get paid for it.

There are potential reasons why the mentioned flange might be oversized, I'm having a hard time imagining how they tested frequency resonance and decided to just fix it by leaving a little extra material near where the welds go though. Or likewise deciding that the extra material in the weld zone increases safety by some margin. Those possibilities seem like they'd require and extremely nuanced and subtle understanding of the car and the whole process, It's possible, I guess. What's far more likely is that they just haven't done a round of cost reduction as they're just struggling to get the initial manufacturing done for the pre-orders.

I had a client get quite uppity because we bought their domain name through GoDaddy (i had a guy that went with one of the cheapest, spent their money like it was our own.. etc.) and GoDaddy had just presented risque ad during the Super Bowl. They weren't particularly upset about GoDaddy itself so much as what if someone found out they patronized them. For that particular business, I'd swag a guess that the extra price in switching to Network Solutions plus our time in undoing the damage and "returning" the domain to Go Daddy will be less than what they'd make from the customers they will have had lost that simply will not patronize companies that buy domains from GoDaddy. I don't know. I don't think most users click on the pad lock, let alone explore the certificate chain, let alone do a lot of advanced whois stuff.

I think this poor guy is going to have a rough go of it. Maybe a contracting firm can help provide some insulation. I'll also admit, hearing that it's a bit of a sex crime involving youths (highschoolers are still 'youth') combined with the heightened awareness in the currently climate about sexual harassment and such, it seems a bit scary to take a risk on someone like this. I'd think contracting off site might be the way to go.

It seems like they have a few firewalls to burn through before a dramatic xeon price cut. They could just start churning out xeon-d parts that are already fairly affordable and designed to basically compete with most of these server arm parts.

It's hard to overstate how good Intel is at what they do. It sucks that they haven't been radically increasing performance like they used to, but they had been doing it for 40 years. It also sucks that they do seem to slow play things a little and enjoy the margins. Do they still own an ARM license? Could they make their own ARM parts again if they wanted?

Or Equifax.

FB is a giant company that has produced billions of dollars in value.. to complete the cliche, it was literally started in a college dorm room. Congress and the Senate want to look good, but they don't want to hurt the company. (Quite the opposite, the company's story is the stuff of American legends and there isn't a single elected rep or senator that wouldn't ask FB to consider their state if there was some sort of FB "HQ2" project.) More to the point, they have no idea how to "fix" the situation. Facebook does what it does and users freely give them tons and tons of valuable information. Equifax and company do what they do and it's all behind the scenes, it's not even possible to opt out and it would be devastating to your credit if you could. Facebook helped some electioneers target ads better and maybe moved the needle in an election, that shit has been happening since there have been elections. Equifax and company have cost countless people billions or even trillions of dollars in extra payments because their proprietary credit algorithm says they're a higher risk and we have no idea if it's a valid algorithm or not, but banks trust it.

It's really up to if the investors felt she defrauded them all. Some clearly do but others? It's not so clear to me. For whatever the reasons, she seems to be loved by at least a few investors, enough so that it puts dorks here on HN off.

Unicorn funding makes it a little different but I've worked with multiple CEOs that lost investors millions of dollars, had companies fail and then had the same investors bank roll them again. So long as the investors feel like they're running things the right way and communicating with them the right way, they appear to think a 40% hit ratio is stellar. Greed has a very limited memory. She'll take a break, probably get some sort of sweetheart deal either as a CEO or C-level officer of some small existing company in a different space (ad analytics or something, who knows?) and if they knock that out of the park, she'll be a champion again ready to get funding for whatever hot idea turns up. I also wouldn't be surprised to see her working at a VC firm.

If the DOJ swoops in and has charged, that would make things different.

I used a mighty mouse with it as the last mouse. I've been using a magic trackpad lately. Definitely not the most ergonomic option but I like the hand gestures.

Took maybe 3 days to get used to the movement between them mouse and the keyboard. I think it would be more uncomfortable to have one in the middle space in the keyboard, your hands sort of naturally fall away to the side but they have to reach in to the middle space.

I'm a longtime Kinesis user and I had the pedals about 15 years back but I never made much use of them.

I don't know if the Kinesis reduces the finger movement between rows, but your hands definitely sit in a much more relaxed way. The thumb has quite a bit more responsibility too and you don't do any stretch moves like using the pinky for the twiddle or a lot of control pressing. Love the keyboards.

As for the pedals, they are programmable and the general thinking was control/option/alt type configurations for them. I just never got in to heal-toe typing, the pedals got dusty and I never really used them much. Had I actually had CT or something, I think I might have been more motivated to make use of them.

SEI gets ~$1.8B/year from DHS. I doubt that's all for CERT.

I guarantee that "X" wasn't defined when the contract was signed. Not defined as something that could be implemented. It was a problem solving mission.

I also want to clarify, I'm not saying IBM plotted X to Y in the most efficient way or that they did it when others could not in my last sentence. I was saying that now that Canada is a $billion deep. They have 3 choices: 1) kill it all and be $billion poorer and have no solution. 2) Somehow beat IBM in to a better deal and get a solution for like $1.2billion, I think news like this is part of the beating. or 3) Probably spend more than like $1.2b to get someone else to get it across the finish line or start over from scratch. Presumably they need something and at this point IBM is probably the closest to the finish line; change horses midstream and you usually get wet. Hey and let's throw out the other condition, IBM might own the product so switching vendors might be a defacto start from scratch.

Didn't IBM effectively give them that guidance?

It seems kind of simple in a way, if IBM was hired to build X and failed to do so, then there will be a law suit or some form of arbitration and some money will be recovered or something. It's pretty standard breach of contract type stuff. You can audit everything too, maybe IBM was billing for stuff they shouldn't have; I kind of doubt it but maybe there was something really amiss.

On the other hand if IBM was hired to build X, then it changed in to X' and then X'' and 10,000 changes later it turns our, Canada really wanted Y from the start, isn't IBM guiding them along their process to figure that out? It's an insanely expensive way to build and buy stuff.

Is there supposed to be some sort of internal customer's advocate that looks at the project and says "hmm, this is a payroll system, it shouldn't cost a $billion typically, or this was a $100m contract that is already up to $300m, something must be wrong..." Don't get me wrong, in most sales driven organizations, they're high-fiving whoever inked that contract and trying to get invited to the parties he throws on his yacht. The catastrophic failure sucks for everybody, it's hard to see someone else finishing the job more inexpensively that getting IBM to do it though.

Why not? It seems like a pretty solid option for a subscription model and they already ask you for money donations when you pay at Petsmart and Petco...

I agree with you. Amazon, like Walmart, is sort of in this grey zone for me. They smell and feel a little funny.

Both are relentless in their customer focus, they drive prices down, they both continue to add more and more services and offerings that seem to be what consumers want and might even be good. There isn't any particular thing I can point to and say with any definitive backing that they are doing and it's bad. I like small indie stores, but Walmart and Amazon beat them on prices and win the market; that's capitalism. Truthfully, I don't see either of them really doing stuff that is bad for the market, they're just better than the competition. Worse, if you go to a small town after a Walmart is built (are there many of these left?) it seems like the locals are almost in a hurry to put the local businesses out of their misery, the Walmart parking lot will be full.

It's more of just a concern about the immense power these businesses have and an innate distrust I have of giving that much power to a business. There will be an Amazon backlash, there are already lot's of people that at least claim to not shop at Walmart for various reason, I expect the same will come true with Amazon. Not sure it will amount to much but it's coming. Nobody has made a move to break up Walmart, it's hard to say that anyone will for Amazon.

And their stock is up a a couple bucks today. Go figure.

Giant difference between skiing and making skiing movies...

We do seem to have a bit of an energy drink inspired progression fetish with certain sports. Warren's movies always seemed magical in that you'd see some people just having fun, there would definitely be some more extreme parts and you might see guys hucking off some giant cliff but there was always a constant thread of just skiing for joy. At least that's how it always looked to me and the parts of the movies I seem to remember the most. One of his last movies showed a bunch of footage from a privatized resort and Warren brought his old friends, like it was 50+ year olds skiing sick powder all by themselves, just old dudes skiing the best powder ever... It might have been the Yellowstone Club, I don't remember.

He made a brand and developed a loyal following, I think in today's world a lot feel that doing some crazy stuff is the easiest way to get the views, and it's all about the views. As for skiing itself, it's very much a family oriented activity in most places. The big resorts all have terrain parks now and some fairly extreme terrain that they've opened up but that vast majority of most mountains is designed to just be fun and relatively safe.

Which is exactly why I think that we're a front-runner. Just like the winter Olympics all over again...

The south Denver/Tech Center area was imagined with something like this in mind, maybe a big chunk of land out east along the southern part of e-470.. It's really all the other stuff that kind of stinks, all the extra traffic, all the extra people on the ski slopes, etc..

It seems more fundamental to me.

Credit firm customers aren't the victims.

The generalized GOP party line is that this kind of thing is better left to private enterprise and the federal government shouldn't spend time and money coming up with some sort of identification strategy.

So what business has the motivation to spend that kind of effort? Google or Facebook?

It's kind of a perfect storm of sorts, there isn't any pressure to fix it, anywhere. The public has even lost interest in it, for the most part.

You usually need credit to rent a car.

I'm guessing that at the prices the parent listed, the person isn't buying a $70k luxury car for $1000+ a month, but has bad credit and can't put any money down on the car so they're going to radically overspend. I'm really hoping that it's a late model Honda or Toyota that will go 300,000 miles and not something that was salvaged.

I will echo this. I absolutely knew I was a software engineer pre-Slashdot but it shaped what and where and how I do that. And I also have had a very good run so far. So thank you for that impact on my life.

I did a book review on there, way back when, and I meet Rob and Hemos at the Atlanta Linux Showcase (I guess it was 1997 or 1998) as I took part in the "Loki Hack" (they might have brought food, I don't fully remember.) I don't know how to fully describe it but I was a fresh out of school engineer at IBM, generally introverted and shy, and I somehow felt like I needed "permission" to take part in opensource and the community. Not permission from work, that was actually very very easy, but more like "where do you start" and I didn't want to look like a fool. Someone else was running a project and I had some ideas and had no idea if my ideas meshed with their mission. It's just easy to stand on the sideline and talk about stuff, but you sort of have to take a risk and put yourself out there to take part, and maybe I needed "permission" to do that. The slashhdot guys were particularly down to earth, and laid back and totally welcoming, Hemos even told me that they could probably send me more books to review if I was up to it, just made me feel totally welcome for my fairly trivial contribution. I think it's really easy to turn away newbs with a bad experience and these guys didn't do that. A big website and a business are some neat things to be a part of and to have created, but to be really early members of a new community and to do that well and welcome people and grow it and nurture it is a major accomplishment.

This is the perfect place to "confess" to something that happened to me, fresh out of college, at my first full time real job at IBM... 1996ish

I got paid for 2 weeks on my first pay check but I was technically on the job for 3 days. I thought about it, biggest paycheck I had ever had in my entire life at that point, and I decided to do the honest thing and tell my manager. He thanked me, made some calls, did whatever he did and 2 or 3 days later just told me to keep the money and not tell anyone. The effort to "fix" the problem was worth more than the problem.

So take that IBM, I got 11 days free pay from you. Enjoy that Canada!

The C3 project, someone else mentioned, is a fascinating project on payroll. It's an odd problem space, it's complex, no denying it. I've built a lot of software and have a hard time comprehending how it could take a payroll cycle to calculate payroll, I believe that the guys that worked on it were all highly intelligent though. There is this odd desire to say "oh, I could do that better" It's also staggering to think that these companies and agencies are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, re-implementing this highly complex business logic rather than somehow streamlining the payroll processes.. even with unions, it's just hard to comprehend it all.