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> - bring on the 5G iPhones now, perhaps this makes Samsung the biggest loser out of this as apple is now ready for the nextgen cell service and Qualcomm is no longer negotiation from a position of weakness

Funny you mention Samsung, because just a few days ago I read a blogger with contacts in S. Korea claimed that Apple asked Samsung to supply 5G for iPhones. But Samsung answered no as they are unable to meet the volume requirement as they are already busy with existing orders. Completely unsubstantiated and could just be some random rumor, but I find it interesting this news comes out days after that rumor.

No. :)

I heard one possible reason for underestimating the damage was due to the move of a NASA (or the contractor?) lab/facility that dealt with this kind of issues, from California to a cheaper place such as Alabama/Florida(?).

The move was done as a cost saving measure. Quite a few of the engineers chose not to relocate with the office. When the space shuttle launched and the image was being reviewed, many of the experienced engineers (who could possibly have predicted it correctly) were no long with the team.

I remember reading above bit years ago while reading about the incident.

> Even more curious is that IT culture is basically that if you want to get paid what you're worth, you have to quit and go to another company.

From what I've noticed, companies really want to avoid raising salary of an employee in a meaningful way, because it means they will have to increase pay of others also

So 10% increase of salary of 1 employee would eventually equal 10% in crease for the whole team or company, which gets expensive.

This seems to be why they really really hate giving out meaningful raise. They'd rather lose an employee and suffer the consequences, than give 10% raise to one and inevitably end up raising salary for the entire team/company.

And yet, they want to higher senior devs, who obviously left old company to seek higher pay.

In California, weeks before an election each voter gets mailed a booklet listing each proposition (proposed law that citizen or groups got on ballot) with argument from groups advocating both yay and nay. Quite handy to view.

And you can get the value each group advocating yah/nay also.

Same with candidates for elected positions.

No average voter can read all proposed laws and hope to understand it. And most definitely no news articles can help anyone to do so imho.

I have been reading news (news on real paper) since I could barely understand what I was reading about. I read news often just for reading.

But I have also stopped reading/watching/hearing news. When election time comes, I will read the laws being proposed, do some google search and pick a candidate or yay/nay a proposition (I live in California).

Just step back and reconsider what 'news' is trying to tell you from a 3rd person view. Ultimately you are being manipulated, imho. To vote for a candidate and/or clicks so that ads can be sold.

Just check this book out. Or at least read reviews of the book.

> How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society Paperback – March 17, 1999 by C. John Sommerville (Author)

True in some cases. But we've also seen plenty of public companies who are profitable but still lay off people for improved cash flow/stock price, which means more bonus for the few at top.

> But congratulations, you're in a significant minority, and this advice is aimed at the rest of the working populace who aren't in that situation.

Wait, so you are saying people who can least afford to spend on daily luxury to spend more money? That is basically like a secret business plan of financial and credit companies, who basically get majority of their profit from overdraft, interest charges and fees.

I'm surprised above comment hasn't been downvoted to oblivion. It can come across as cold/racist/nationalistic, but it is something that needs to be debated out in open.

I've never been a manager or had any role in laying someone off. But I've been laid off myself and know plenty people who get laid off and suffer the consequences, some quite severe.

So I sometimes wonder, how do these managers who lay off people sleep at night? I mean they are just doing their job so that THEY themselves don't get laid off. And next I wonder, who are these rich rich people who want more money so that they hire people to lay off other people?

But I guess that's life.

> I've seen companies not using source control with no staging environments and no local development environments where all changes are being made directly on the production server via SFTP on a basic VPS.

Omg. And here I am feeling ashamed to tell others about my small small personal website with separate dev, qa, production environments on same server (via VirtualHost), code checked into github, deployed via Jenkins self hosted on another VPS, which was initially spun up with Ansible and shell scripts. All done by me for self training purpose. All because I thought businesses would have something more sophisticated with bells and whistles.

And then I hear there are businesses that make changes directly on live production servers...

But I'm not surprised by such stories as I have seen some bad workflow in real businesses that deal with tens of millions of dollars a year.

Years ago, I worked in the NOC of a company that's top in the small niche. They have dozens of employees, and been around for years.

Part of the job responsibility was rolling out patches to production servers. The kicker was the production servers were all Windows servers, running various versions, covering practically all Windows versions ever released by Microsoft. You can see where this is headed.

Rolling out a patch was all done manually, 1 Windows server at a time. Everything was manually done.

The instruction for deploying a change was easily multiple lines long, each with different style of writing/instruction. Often in plain text file format. We would print them out so we could check them off as we went down the list.

The CTO is still there, but everyone IT person under him has left or been let go. Working in the IT there is a struggle because lack of automation and old old stuff, but the CTO just blames bad employees and keeps churning them in/out. When the real issue is the decade or 2 worth of old legacy stuff that need to be cleaned up and/or thrown out, which can only be done by the direction of the CTO. But he knows he won't get that kind of budget from higher-ups so he will just keep hiring/firing employees and/or bring in some H1B workers who's basically trapped once they join. And of the few H1B workers I met there, they were truly completely non-technical. One did not want to learn how to use keyboard shortcuts to do common tasks... Good guy though.

Good to know. The rubber mallet in aircraft production in analog era was more for pounding ill fitting part into submission and into place.

Haha very true. However using rubber mallet on stealthy aircraft would be strictly prohibited as just a small imperfection on skin of aircraft would make it show up prominently in radar.

My gut reaction is they would like to, but they realize enough of the information is already out due to carelessness, spying, etc. So they just decide to release some information, with some FUD mixed in.

Fun trivia I learned while ago.

So before computer assisted drafting/manufacturing showed up, it was quite common to see Rubber Mallet in use on the production floor of the expensive planes. Workers literally had to beat certain parts of the plane into place using Rubber Mallets.

Pentagon is planning to keep B-52 in service for another 40(?) years. That's 100 years since it was first introduced. Grandkids of first pilots/mechanics who worked with B-52 will work on the same planes in year 2059.

If you'd like to read how the towed decoys are used in real life (F16 in this case), be sure to check out book "Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat" by Dan Hampton.

The desc of the book includes: 151 combat missions, 21 hard kills on surface-to-air-missile sites, 4 Distinguished Flying Crosses with Valor, 1 Purple Heart.

I've been into historical aspects of war/plane/ship/weapon so I've read lots of books and viewed many pics/videos related. However I had never heard of towed decoys off of a modern fighter jet like F16 until reading above book.

The book is awesome to read if you are into that kind of stuff.

I remember reading in the book where he talks about getting into a fight with the towed decoy deployed. When he was out of the fight and tried to tow in the decoy, it was gone. Meaning it had done its job and sacrificed itself and therefore saved the F16 itself.

Btw, there's been lots of discussion of MCAS on Boeing 737 MAX and how some are uneasy that software HAS to be involved for 737 MAX to stay airborne at certain times. I believe F16 was first production fighter jet where computer has to be involved in controlling every moment it's airborne. If computers on it stopped working, F16 will supposedly stop being a flying object almost immediately.

Main stream media made it sound like 40 seconds is way too short of a time to troubleshoot the issue. But now that you state it that way, I gotta agree with you it's not Only Boeings fault. Sure they are big significant part of the issue. But not the only part.

LA Times recently started detecting incognito mode of Chrome/Firefox and blocks you from viewing the article.

So I just clear cache/coookies of Safari (which I use for that purpose) to read the article, if I really want to.

Years ago my old work's Senior programmer got an expensive motorized standup desk, in a private room. And I was stuck in an exposed cubicle with extra narrow desk space, with no hope of getting that kind of treatment.

I thankfully work remote now. I dont have separate room but just a corner of our bedroom, with a standup desk. I hope I never have to go back to working in a normal office.

Someone told me the product with best margin that Costco sells is ... Kirkland toilet paper.

They drove down the cost to absolute minimum simply by opening their own factory.

No body/tank is getting through the ironically named Demilitarized Zone dividing South and North Korea, without getting lit up with fast moving pieces of metal hitting with high kinetic energy.

Hence the tunnels.

North Korean government's long standing, highest priority goal is conquest of South Korea through any means, including military invasion.

South Korean government is not against anti-nuclear. It's CURRENT administration of South Korean govt is. Once the president and his cabinet members leave in due time, anything can change.

Pros and cons of a democratic government I guess.

>I know lots of people that regret not learning a 2nd language earlier in life.

I was watching an interview on youtube of a family sailing around the world in a sailboat and one of the parents said college is good, but learning a 2nd languages is really equivalent to getting a college degree.

And I completely agree.

Based on what I have experienced in corporate America, this is completely expected behavior.

In Vietnam conflict, tons and tons of iron bombs were dropped by expensive jets piloted by pilots whose training was very expensive, all to kill a few enemy with ak47 rifles with not much ammunition.

"Reserved Instances" is a poison that every AWS user must be aware of.

Figuring out how/if it's used is really convoluted. And getting out early is a pain.

Reminds me of reading how US Armed forces in Iraq being forced to buy NEW printers because their procurement system didn't allow buying toners to replace used up toners in practically new printers.

MBAs/Accountants...

I think VMware has expensive licensing. At least for me when I was just trying to set up home linux lab environment. And than I discovered Xen Project.

I played around with that, and than AWS/DO came along.

AWS is really expensive. Even for running a small personal websites. I thought I could gain AWS experience AND run a few personal websites on them. What a mistake.

I've moved off all (well like 2) my personal sites to other VPS provider, that starts at $5/month for 512MB VPS.

The worst annoyance is 'Reserved instances'. You are basically signing up for a long term contract that you can't get out of easily.