Been listening to No Agenda since episode 1. Cranky Geeks and Silicon Spin before that. And the occasional appearance on Computer Chronicles long ago. I always loved your passion for technology and your take on the world. You will surely be missed.
Unfortunately, the 14 layers of management are also responsible for deciding how the 14 layers will get cut. It's likely that all or most all of the middle management will survive but the ICs doing the real work will be the ones that take the hit.
I saw the same thing happen at Amazon. They claimed to be reducing layers of management in 2024/25, yet all that happened was a shuffling of the boxes on the org chart a bit and cuts to the ICs. Managers that had too many reports were forced to give some up for managers with too few, but most managers stayed in place.
Sometimes you need capacity and you have to choose where the capacity is not where you would like it to be. Unfortunately, the days of cloud bursting, and thinking of the cloud as an unlimited resource where you can spin up and spin down machines at will is vanishing. Power availability and supply chain lead times combined with unprecedented demand are the reason for this. That's why you see all the hyperscalers recently reporting on their "backlog" in their earnings reports.
The needless processes / bloat still burn electricity though. I'd have to guess that given the millions of installed macOS machines it's a non-trivial amount of wasted electricity. Long gone are the days of ruthlessly optimizing software for the limited hardware.
Such sad news. As a kid growing up in RI I used to love watching Computer Chronicles on our local PBS station each weekend. Stuart and Gary were the best. RIP to a legend
That's a great point. Sometimes we look for architecture or technology solutions for a problem that could be easily solved at the sales level by negotiating a PPA (Private Pricing Addendum) with AWS.
For a workload of that size you would be able to negotiate private pricing with AWS or any cloud provider, not just CloudFlare. You can get a private pricing deal on S3 with as little as half a PB. Not saying that your overall expenses would be cheaper w/a CSP than DIY, but its not exactly an apples to apples comparison of taking full retail prices for the CSPs against eBayed equipment and free labor (minus the cost of the pizza).
Yes, the lottery has rules and governance. It's a much safer bet. Startups can decide to devalue their employees' shares. I'd venture that the odds are at least stated on the back of the ticket with the lottery. Employees of privately held startups are often sold a dream of future riches that rarely happens. Even where there is an exit, often even founding employees get taken for a ride.
I do the same thing at AWS, except use a 100, 200, 300, 400 level scale. I am just looking to see what the candidate thinks they are strongest on and weakest. If the candidate says they have never heard of AI/ML topics, there's no point in quizzing them on it. Not everyone can know everything, it wouldn't be fair to judge someone based on not being able to answer questions for a domain they don't claim to have any experience in. Or worse yet, waste valuable / limited interview minutes on fruitless questions.
Hadn’t rented from Hertz in many years until last week. Made sure to fill the tank back up as high as it would go just in case. Get thru security at the airport and already had a $26 charge for fuel. Still working on getting this fixed. Funny how they can charge within 5-7 minutes but they take 5-7 business days to process a refund.
After having worked in retail for 20+ yrs, both in the field and in IT, what I saw as the largest cause of shrink was always just simple accounting errors.
For example, I saw all the time a store would receive a case of merchandise from a vendor containing 100 toothbrushes, the computer says it's a qty of 100 for $2.99, but the receiver scans in the barcode for the whole case instead of the individual toothbrush and puts in a qty of 100 received. Now the retailer thinks they should have 10k instead of 100 brushes on hand, which gets picked up as a loss. I've seen similar things where the case pack sizes or prices were fat fingered by the corporate buyer and wrong in the system causing massive perceived shortages.
I've always heard that as "scheduled uptime" or "unscheduled outages". When I worked in a mainframe shop, they used to IPL (reboot) the mainframe every Sunday morning. That down time was never considered as part of the SLA.
I have a similar experience here in MA. Our town owns the power company as a non-profit and we have amazing service. We never lose power unless someone crashes into a pole or something, and even then it's only out for a short amount of time. When we have a big winter storm and all the surrounding communities on the large providers tend to be dark for days or longer, whereas here any outages are fixed quickly. They actually go around and trim trees off the lines to prevent future outages.
I always thought there were license restrictions from Nvidia preventing the use of their consumer grade GPUs in datacenters / cloud environments. Is this not the case?
Is there any decent tool to determine areas where symmetric broadband coverage in a given area is available? From what I can see on the FCC map it just using their "broadband" definition of 25down/3up which is akin to dial-up for most of the folks on HN.
I agree. Not sure why all the hate. I’ve used SpinRite to recover some bad drives of mine and friends/family over the years and it’s worked quite well. Had one Windows box that was failing to boot before the login screen, ran SpinRite and it found / fixed some issues. Rebooted and the machine was fine. At least fine enough to copy everything to a new drive and ditch the old one. Haven’t tried it on an SSD though.
This is not a comprehensive checklist per se, but a minimum set of security controls to implement to help secure your AWS account and workloads running on AWS within your account.
This article is spot on. I am not even a fan of how the manufacturers switched from sliders and knobs on the HVAC controls to up/down buttons with a digital temperature reading. Does it really matter if you set the heat to 78 or 79? Most people I venture would be happy with all the way low, all the way high, and the midpoint. It's so much quicker and less distracting to be able to turn a knob for temperature to your desired level without even taking your eyes off the road. Up/down arrows with a readout require you to look at the current reading, then press the correct button a number of times, sometimes 20+ times to get your desired setting.
As someone who just traded in their 2019 Mazda CX-5, this doesn't surprise me at all. I couldn't wait for my lease to end. The car was great, but the infotainment system was horrible. It would take 5+ minutes to boot up from a cold start during which time you couldn't change the volume, mute the radio, change inputs, or even change the station. I learned quickly to always change the station off Howard Stern when exiting the car in case my daughter was a passenger on the next trip. On long trips you would have to three finger reset the head-unit because it would just stop responding, play at full volume, only play out of one channel after a GPS announcement, and other random oddities. I brought it back to the dealer multiple times to get firmware updates only to be told "Yeah that's how it was designed".
Except we aren't tracking names, addresses, and SSNs of the holder of each ETH wallet, which is required for the IRS reporting under this proposed amendment to the statute.
However, the Supreme Court decided to punt and leave the moratorium in place since it is set to expire at the end of the month (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/29/1003268497/the-supreme-court-...) but warned that further extensions would need to go through Congress.
Good memories. My first job at age 14 was working on Xenix boxes (386es) with a bunch of Wyse terminals connected to serial port multiplex cards customizing and configuring medical/dental software for local practitioners. Created my muscle memory for vi on Xenix as well. It was mind-blowing how well it ran on such limited horsepower back in the day.