thoraway1010

A couple of notes.

You may not have identified the product / market fit in terms of what McKinsey or others is actually selling. It really may not be the best product / best solution you are so intent on forcing them to sell. Sometimes it literally is political cover for mgmt to do something they (or sometimes even the board) WANTS to do. There is so much secondary level stuff here in terms of politics, job skilling or deskilling etc. I was part of a $10M deal (as the user unfortunately) which was SOO horrendous I became convinced it was just to spend out a govt budget line so a bunch of folks in govt got to go to some fancy training conferences. Truly ancient tech - you had to pin older OS / IE / Java versions to use the solution (no upgrades), but the buzzword bingo slides were amazing, and the agency using them liked them (at the top) so they were selling to the right audience (not actual users).

The big mgmt co's have been very successful in moving the middle class out (focus is on creating a bunch of generally super highly paid execs, and then a bunch of "do what we tell you" workers who are generally poorly paid). So that "do what we tell you" ethos is there (and has resulted in $8B+ annual revenue!). The idea though is to lower the skill level of workers. IT / automation is now going to play a bigger and bigger part of that - so lots of additional growth opportunities for these folks.

Middle class used to include the long tenured employees with experience and some levels of delegated decision making and corresponding pay (basically managers of various forms). Mailroom to boardroom days are over.

"Production workers did not escape the whirlwind, as companies—again with help from consultants— stripped them of their residual management functions and the benefits that these sustained."

You might find this interesting.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckins...

If you really think you can outdo these consulting co's go for it, it's a ruthless horrible game (lots of nice folks burn out trying to play it).

Some big.little's have very good interconnect / memory access. Some systems have remote NUMA memory - you are going off one board over an internconnect to another board to memory there.

The headline is so misleading. I could wire together a ton of machines over 10mbs, and yes, I could get NUMA going on it and a high core count, but the performance would be horrendous. Maybe you could even run super NUMA over DB9 9 bit serial ports with remote memory access latency in hours?

And in this case it was a good thing. These are just normal machines (4 socket?) tied together with an interconnect.

So the rule works surprisingly well!

No kidding. Despite the HN posters saying it's "factual" this is likely just 4 socket systems tied together with an interconnect.

If intel is really going to market these type of systems, they need to be a LOT LOT more transparent on interconnect latency / memory management issues etc.

These headlines are almost always clickbait when you try to run high contention workloads on these supposedly massive systems.

What is the name of the interconnect approach being used here? That's what I want to know.

if you are good at market research / product market fit / good engineering and solving actual problems you will be EXTREMELY successful both with the big mgmt co's and working as a consultant yourself.

Successful projects breads success and great word of mouth which I've found is the best way to get high margin business - word of mouth deals are generally not being shopped, the customer comes to you and wants to hire you. At at a big management co, if you are bringing in the deals - you are the god.

I have however seen folks who are hired to do X, who then feel it's critical they disagree about Y, Z and Q. That is NO FUN for anyone because the right thing is sometimes to do what you were paid to do. For most managers when staff go on tangents it can be pretty tiring to focus them on actually delivering on even the imperfect solution that for whatever reason a client wants (not uncommon).

Uh - you realize they charge a PREMIUM and have some of the highest margins because they are FAR FAR more trusted than most android and other phone mfgs? You realize samsung is pumping ads directly to your handset - and these other folks never update their old devices.

So interesting to read the HN folks trashing apple relative to their competitors even though they are almost certainly a leader on almost every trust based metric that matters to the average user.

Except it is very user friendly.

Try to cancel your newspaper subscription - you have to call in and jump through hoops.

Try to cancel your cable or internet, you didn't realize the rate you got was a "promo" rate that required a two year contract?

I guarantee that if apple used the approaches others use, subscription revenue would be a LOT higher.

They send you an email saying, here's what will be renewing soon, click here to cancel. I end up canceling about 80% of what would auto renew.

And I hate the developers who are not upfront with the subscription price. If there is a free trial, what does it cost after. Even NY Times did this ($1/month in big print - fine print said something like $54/month after 1 month or maybe it was just in a link burried etc).

If you make $10B/year on revenue of $20B/year (great margin at that scale) you keep quiet I think for good reason :)

Small anecdote, but good experience with DARPA and SBIR both. One thing I liked - they seemed pretty low overhead / low hassle and outcome / objective focused.

That contrasts VERY strong with most govt contracting which is under allowable cost or cost reimbursement setups where the absolute most important criteria is to bill enough costs to draw contract in the right cost buckets (which can be super annoying if local agencies require super complicated budget mod processes).

In the cost based contracts, the focus really focuses on the accounting for the costs and other compliance related items. Ie, did you send someone to a conference with govt money, how can you prove you didn't use the govt money in this way or that way etc etc. Bam, welcome to personal activity reports with fund codes that no one understands (ie, major universities have an insane number of codes), and all the nightmares that follow including a fair bit of rule pending that even normally ethical folks find themselves being asked to to get through the paperwork.

Seriously, you deliver the product at 50% of cost? You will get a nasty note from the head of your agency saying make sure you draw full contract because agency budget depends on the indirect portion of this award (ie, 30% to overhead) and even the govt agency supervising (who also budgeted based on a cut of full contract) AND other folks for whom leftover money makes life difficult (harder to close contract etc) AND because a lot of govt funding is on the repeat what we did last year model so drawing down everything avoids a cut next year when you may really need it.

You determine it would be cheaper to do x vs y and that required a budget mod? Wait 1-2 months for commission approval if you even bother trying to fight it through (changes < 10% often ignored thankfully).

I don't know how the accounting for SBIRs etc work, but somehow those projects always seemed more results oriented (so a LOT more fun to work on, focus is on getting a solution going).

No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily.

The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.

They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.

I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.

We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - Office was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda works!

And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.

Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

I'd keep it, I hate working on boxes and when I move left outside box I go back. THAT is the annoyance especially if I'm doing entry work. I'd always wondered WHY this happened.

If you have an older house homekit can add a lot without a re-wire. Ie, you have a lamp but no switch wired for that socket etc. You want to do a ceiling light in your kids bedroom but since it's temp are using an extension cord for the hanging light and want it switchable.

What's funny is if you go sailing on the ocean for extended periods (months) you realize that sat data / phone costs are RIDICULOUS in this age. $3 - $5/MB. So your 4 GB movie is $20,000. You'd think, why would anyone pay this, but there can be a lot of pressure these days to be able to send videos etc so you sometimes get jammed up with these types of costs (ie, if you do a telemedicine call the DR may want a video of joint movement etc etc, recreational trips people want to post videos and don't realize their phone records at pretty large file sizes etc etc).

So if they can do better just on COST then this it would be wonderful.

Exactly - this is the #1 issue we need to address economically to my mind.

Lots of potential uses:

Imagine Amazon was bidding on a big Department of Defense contract ($ in billion). DoD let's say wants to send drones / UAV's whatever to do big sensor passes out in far off areas / imagery, wideband radio etc). There is NO fast internet for the TB's generated. You pop this out of the drone, put it on the next resupply mail flight out, and ingest into Amazon cloud on far side for analytics.

Let's stay a store wants to collect 30 days of customer video related to all traffic in their 100 stores to do some sort of AI analysis on how folks use the stores. Again, some poorly paid store staff person can unplug this after a week and ship it off.

Let's say I generate data but instead of wanting to do a snowmobile every year, I want to do more granular moves. Again, I could do a weekly or whatever ship, and again from maybe a few locations.

I think especially in places with lower high speed internet penetration (africa, china etc) there is room for something "snackable" like this.

Let's say I distribute movies to movie theatres. Again, do a weekly ship in/out.

It's $60/job. Not bad. No data IN fees.

Let's be 100% clear.

Based on a complaint from china regarding non-Chinese citizens with non-china accounts, zoom cancelled the non-china accounts.

Full stop. Let that sink in.

If you are wondering who zoom will accommodate you have your answer. This is a fact. This is what we are calling "racism"?

HSM's properly implemented do not result in clearext backups of these highly important keys. You can do backups without that.

Not really a total basket case. They had a long and fantastic history actually of institution building, including credible tax services etc.

It was really the Zuma years that messed things up and the new folks don't seem interested in any cleanup (the ANC has had a lock on power a long time). They are still a great country relatively speaking in Africa, with incredible potential.

And not the first government run entity in SA to have funds stolen from it.

Transnet/PRASA (railways)

Eskom (electricity)

SAA (airline)

All have had just totally monumental theft often at the top levels. It all seems to be pretty consequence free. Meanwhile, the hawks open immediate investigations and charge people almost immediately who are trying to expose things - which is kind of funny - 10 years to investigate totally obvious theft, 7 days to charge folks who are exposing it :)!

I do this with my elderly parents. Doubles as a "powers gone out - are they freezing" alert.

Verizon is fine - the stories saying verizon and ATT down are basically totally garbage.

I filled up with gas literally at the closest station (.1 mile away? You could see the lot from station). BOOM, charged for an empty tank. No worries, I'd actually kept my receipt from the gas station showing exactly when I'd refilled (2 minutes before dropping car).

It was an endless headache and run around to try to get them to cancel out the charge. That kind of run around should be illegal.

I normally used National (because you can pick any car on their 'aisle') and never had that issue with them.

Copy is great! I do a few hundred million row DB reload in a script. No real time pressure, but I did wonder, couldn't this be faster? COPY is really much nicer, I'm pretty sure I'm down to essentially disk read / network / disk write limits vs processing limits.

Still so annoying. I wish browsers at least might do something like skip quick redirects in history?

Actually - Apple drove the smartphone market with ARM.

Seriously, there are help desk techs and IT techs in ohio and idaho who would think $1.2 million per year was fine money. These are NOT poorly compensated folks. They may be badly treated though - I could believe that.

Couple of quick things.

Can you even use venmo to send money to people to write checks on behalf of third parties? I thought there was lots of restrictions on that type of activity in general and limits in these person to person platforms in particular.

Are these folks setup as approved businesses with venmo / paypal / stripe etc? I've had good luck moving large volumes if you are a legit large business not violating TOS. Note that accepting money to write checks for third parties is almost always a violation.

Poor pay? Amazon has created tons and tons of millionaires. If you work 15 years at your local retail job - you are lucky to own a house. If you worked 15 years at amazon as an engineer - you can retire in a very nice house. The stock performance has been very good over 15 years.

"At Amazon, a Seattle operations engineer on an $840k salary had his/her renewal application denied in February."

"a level III program manager in Seattle earning a salary of $1.3m"

The article was mixing up compensation elements, but people are paid well above US average wage at Amazon.

https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/3003798/highest-pay...

Google's ad network provides a lot of support to these "free" content options. Google is not bad at creating own content, the amount of data for example they can slurp up from phones running google maps is pretty darn high.

Our local govt has traffic sensors for the highways - huge bucks to install / maintain etc. I can get more granular traffic that is more current from google for free. If you are going to compete with google in a data management / collection business, you are going to be playing with firm with pretty deep ability to ingest and process data.

Be interesting to see if some cloud players start migrating workload to ARM as well in the future. Apple has a knack for pricking up on trends a bit early or creating them. I think iOS really kicked of ARM / smartphone market share.