karambahh

Orange is a big player on this market, probably thanks to the fact that (as another user mentioned) Alcatel is one of the largest manufacturer (both historical french companies).

You can follow Jean-Luc Vuillemin [0] on Twitter for very interesting pictures of ships laying cables around the world.

One of the largest undersea cables plant is Alcatel in Calais, France (Dover straits). The factory is linked to the port by huge tunnels under the city. Unfortunately the Wikipedia page is only available in french but contains nice pictures[1]

[0] https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin [1]https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel_Submarine_Networks

CO2 fraud has been uncovered in the EU VAT zone[0] 1.6 billion euros skimmed by a dozen people in France. Up to 10 billion for the EU as a whole.

Unfortunately I could only find sources in french or hebrew but the amounts amassed by this operation is staggering.

[0]https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraude_%C3%A0_la_TVA_sur_les...

I love reading the graphs of camelcamelcamel. It's sometimes entirely obvious that two pricing algorithms are fighting for the buy box.

You can also see when an item is reaching its long term date[0]: 180-days(or 365 on some markets now) in inventory point: sudden drop in the price. The margin can get negative because the long term fee is very hefty.

Say you sell SD cards or a similar low volume, low cost item: at a certain point in time, the storage fees will be larger than profit, selling them for 0€01 then makes sense...

[0]https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200684750?...

The rules are slightly more complicated.

You are only allowed to discount items already in stock a month before the start date[0] That's why the back of the shop is fully loaded by boxes a month before the sales period starts.

The rules seem silly because it's an open secret, all companies jack up the price and stock up just before... but you'd be hard pressed to find actual proof:

"I ordered 50k items to the supplier just 30 days before, I meant to buy only 50, fat finger mistake, so we had to discount them".

"Yes, the reference price is based on the highest price we had on record among our 500 stores. Yes, I know it was more than twice the median price, fat finger mistake but hey, who does not make mistakes, 14€99 is too similar to 5€50..."

[0]https://www.service-public.fr/professionnels-entreprises/vos...

>Lawyers are trained to spot those gotchas, much as developers can spot "off by one" errors in computer code instinctively.

That's absolutely true. The thought process is similar but we & they are trained differently, I really like your analogy.

And to those who are afraid of all legal aspects, don't be, it's very similar to debugging code.

Read a clause, test it with varying inputs, watch the output and so on.

I've actually had fun working with my lawyer debugging/mine-sweeping contracts. We tech people use very similar techniques.

Seriously, go for it, you'll see :)

In Lille, France, the automated guided «metro» public transport VAL206[0] is known to block openning of some cars brands.

As it's aerial, in some places it's above ground with, you guessed it, car parks below it.

The tow trucks make a killing with it because you (or your insurance...) pay a full towing charge but your car only need to be towed like 5m for it to open again.

Funnily enough, the RF interference does not prevent closing of the cars, only opening :)

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAL_206?wprov=sfla1

About 15 years ago, as a contractor, I did a field trip with the whole executive committee of a retail company, visiting several stores.

We entered/exited the store several times to check out the general store appearance.

After about ten exits/entrances, the clerks approached me to ask me to stop doing so as I was wrecking their purchase/visitor ratio.

If you pay attention in a mall, you'll see employees crounching to avoid triggering the sensors (they're usually at 1.5m height)

Yes but rogue femto cells for this purpose have been ruled illegal in France and, I believe, all EU countries.

Retailers rollbacked to IR sensors and now are slowly adopting counters on cameras with deep learning for disambiguation.

I can't tell if you're sitting on a gold mine or about to get very, very depressed very, very quickly.

I am, however, pretty sure there's no middle ground.

Wish you all the best but I would never trade my job for yours, I value my sanity way more than that.

Looking at the OP history, they only ever posted content related to meports.com.

Judging by the titles of the submissions and on content archived by the wayback machine, meports was originally intended to be a "life dashboard" (mood, workouts, etc..) and pivoted approximately a year ago towards its current form, a meta analysis of genome.

I do agree they are usually far from "Mission:Impossible" style security that OP seems to have in mind.

To be fair to OP, average regional DCs have better security than cell towers.

The customer expectations are much lower when shopping for a plane ticket. A painfully long experience is actually expected.

Friction is absent when buying anything from Amazon (because of webperf, UX, etc) so customer expectations standard is way higher. If something goes wrong on Target, Mediamarkt or Carrefour website, the sale is gone and off the customer goes to Amazon.

As a similar example, in France the main way to buy a train ticket was through the railway website, whose UX was poor (as were travel agencies). A small team went at it and built a competing booking website (Captaine Train) whose sole promise was a quick and easy to book a train ticket. They instantly removed the above mentioned friction and became a huge competitor almost overnight.

If you have a constant load, on premise is always cheaper. Scientific computation has, for a large enough organization, a 100%

If you have a variable load, cloud infrastructure may make sense if you can easily auto-scale.

In my experience, most business real world applications are multi tiered applications with variable loads hence are a good fit for cloud infrastructure.

However, attaining the required application flexibility and KPIs for efficient auto scaling is quite hard and require strong functional & technical expertise.

I'm all for a product in that space.

I've participated in a number of schemes aiming at sharing expertise in the past and would be glad to share and get some on your platform but, as others have stated, I think that to see traction, you'll need to specify a business model else everyone will be inclined to "if it's free, you're product" mentality.

I'm not distrusting your current statement of "no data sharing" and, if I may, "won't do evil" mentality but in this day and age, customers will need a clearer statement right on the product page for it to be trusted.

A quick and easy alternative would be "Currently in beta and free for all until December 31, 2018" would probably assuage some fears, with expectation of a coming bizmo, whatever that would be.

I guess you're referring to CPU Trigger led activity as defined by [0]?

As I said elsewhere, none of the (recent) servers I have access to, most of them Intel based, several distros, etc have anything else than LEDs defined for numlock/scrolllock under /sys/class/leds/, where I'd expect to find the CPU activity LED? What am I missing here?

[0]https://lwn.net/Articles/510986/

The project I mentionned above was started by someone who did not have such a led on their laptop

I just looked at several severs I have access to at several operators, different physical hardware and distros, none of them has a LED defined for anything other than scroll/numlock

Your comment got me curious: apparently Linux controls LEDs activity through /sys/class/led [0]

A cursory search led me to this project[1] that blinks the power led according to the disk activity, which is not far from your idea (replacing the disk activity by a composite of system load for instance?)

[0]https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/leds/leds-class.txt [1]https://github.com/fabio-d/block-led-trigger

They might actually know for much longer: if your spying devices suddenly stop communicating to you, that's likely you've been discovered.

If that story is true (and I personnaly think it has a high probability to be), what would a gov or a large org do? Investigate, confirm they have been compromised but then.... leave the hw in place and data flowing back to the alien mothership? Unlikely.

Sampling the EM profile of a large number of boards PHY signals could lead you to a deviation that indicate an anomaly Whetever that anomaly has to be forwarded to maintenance or to security can be discussed however: is the EM profile "wrong" because of tampering or because some capacitor is about to blow up?

Absolutely, assuming the laws don't change.

Wrt "externalizing to eveyrone who pays taxes", you'd be absolutely right if I hadn't omitted, for brievity, the reason why you get such large tax breaks and subsidies: you undertake to rent at preferential rates (roughly 20% under market price). In effect, you run a small scale public housing operation.

The subsidies are related to rennovation works you specifically agree to pay for, obviously at the start of the project. The largest tax breaks are in effect at the start of the project as well so the risks, while they do exist, are very limited.

The biggest risk is that you buy a run down property (which rennovation you agree to finance) in a run down part of a town. At the end of the ten years, you might have a reasonable property that's unsellable because the area has tanked even further.

Depending on the local regulations, you can turn a (long term) profit while a rent inferior to the mortgage repayments.

Can't get on the specifics as it varies country to country and even local regulations but as anecdotal evidence, I'm currently looking at a property in my hometown, with a mortgage of 80k€ (cost of mortgage 7k€, 10 years). This property would rent at 4000€/y, resulting in a yearly loss of roughly 4000€ (you read that right).

With local incentives and tax shelters, I would still net 18k€ in gain over 10 years. On a 80k€ property, that's a 21% ROI....

I don't know in which country your bank is but my anecdotal experience of banks in France are that monthly fees are common ?

They have boxes at every major ISP borders, but they're solely caching infrastructure.

They publicly advertise this under the "Netflix Open Connect" initiative:

https://openconnect.netflix.com

I don't understand why the comparison even makes any sense:

Let's say debt is equivalent to the mortgage on your house. You compare an individual exposure by their monthly repayment against their income, not income against mortgage amount! Why is it any different for this?

Usually in France, it's customary to allow this ratio to be 30%. With median income at 20k€, this leaves about 5k€/y, or 410€/month. At current rates, mortgage size of 100k€, total cost of 150k€. The "debt to GDP" is thus 150/20=750%.

Apples to oranges?

Issues with the new class of nuclear power station designed by EDF ("EPR") currently in the works in the UK, Finland, China and France have been spotted via xray as well.

The french plant (in Flamanville, Normandy) has a number of faulty parts, including the cover of the pressure chamber.

Latest article in english I could find is this http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Flamanville-EPR-weld-ch... but since, several other defects have been found.

EDF is currently lobbying for an OK from the nuclear safety regulator despite the faulty welds. Earlier this week I read that the deal would be something like a reduced lifespan for the cover with yearly inspections. Some even said that the alternative is basically to torn apart the power plant, remove all the machinery, redo it, re-deliver it and pray for quality welds this time.

The chinese ones are about 1 year behind schedule. The english one (Hinkley Point) is 15 months behind schedules, also because of quality issues. The finnish one (Olkiluoto) is almost ten years behind schedule. The french one (Flamanville) is 8 years behind schedule.

In most cases, EDF is liable for damages because of the large delays.

My positive experiences with QA were always when the QA team was strictly separated from the production team.

Ideally, no friendship whatsoever.

Doing QA is hard. Bouncing issues & QA reports between teams is hard. Bouncing issues between people that know each others too well or have a common manager leads to all sorts of issues.

In this specific instance, it could be as simple as the manager trying to balance things between teams and thus letting things slip past the due date or with sub-par quality.

My worst experience was when a married couple worked together on a project I was involved with: one on the sw team and the other in QA. Working together is hard, working on "antagonistic" teams is hell

Thanks for this, very nice find!!

(ninja edit, found their pricing) Their pricing seems decent https://www.solarisbank.com/content/partner/preis-_und_leist...

I've heard many horror stories about CA personal banking in France (bank transfer taking ages, random charges appearing/disappearing etc).

Their offer towards startups "Le Village By CA" seems, however, interesting.

Great find! Would love to find a similar company on the european market!