Posts by ckm5 418 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Aug 2013
I can travel to Paris from Marseille (400 miles!!) for 25, in just under 3 hours.
IF the system works, which these days seems hopelessly broken. I visit my mom every few years. She lives near Dole.
In the past, it was pretty easy to get a TGV from Paris to Dole in the afternoon and the cost was roughly 75 euros each way. Travel time was about 1.5 hrs.
The last time I went, there were no afternoon trains and the only evening TGV running was fully booked. Via a combination of other trains, it cost me > 100 euros and took ~6 hours. Which was awesome after a 17 hour flight.....
The French train system used to be great, these days, not so much. It's shockingly expensive, more expensive in many cases than air travel in the US, and so many trains have been cancelled that getting from A to B is nigh impossible unless you book six weeks in advance (which negates elegant convenience of train travel...).
And when I was in Paris last fall, a Metro ticket was 2.50 euros, not 1.10.....
It's easy to laugh, but for people like me a phone is a business expense and I don't really pay for it. And as a primary computing device, I don't mind spending $1000 on it - that's 1/2 of what I would have spent on a laptop 5 years ago. Having a larger screen in a smaller form factor is a huge plus when working in the field. Never mind that most people will just buy it on credit for ~$35/mo.
Is the price point outrageous? Not really. Not when you consider a Palm Treo was ~$600 in 2004 (about $800 today) and Blackberries were $800 15 years ago. Even a modern top-of-the-line phones are $700-$800, this is only $200 more. If $200 is an issue for you, then you should be rethinking your priorities and buy a much cheaper or second hand phone.
I think these will sell out easily - Apple will be laughing all the way and walking away with all the profits....
And they have already decided that "intelligence agencies" should put cameras & microphones in every single house in the country for "national security" reasons. /s
Short of a revolution, nothing is going to change if the two representatives from the most liberal place in the country are all for surveillance....
* representative is a word to be used only loosely, it's been a long time since either party has actually represented anyone not giving them $$$
And it started with selling off Agilent and ended with missing out on cloud by not capitalizing on all the work they did for Amazon.
The eccentric, engineering focused company from this old commercial is no more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3XwTq_BPKM
Well, as someone who has been hiring engineers for 10+ years, I can tell you for sure there just are not enough engineers in the US. More than once I have advertised for a position at a competitive salary (in several markets) and could not fill it. And I'm not particularly picky, just need someone capable of doing X job, regardless of background/education/etc.
Also, the stats for H1Bs pretty much show otherwise https://qz.com/1041506/new-data-on-h-1b-visas-show-how-it-outsourcers-are-short-changing-workers/ - despite the clickbait title, the average salary for an H1B is $91k/year, which is $20k higher than the average IT salary in the US (around $78k - http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Information_Technology_(IT)_Services/Salary).
Not saying that certain H1B abusers aren't awful sweatshops, but the data speaks to a much murkier picture than 'H1B depress US salaries' which is simply not born out by the data.
That may be so, but having lived in 1/2 those in your list plus another 3-4 not mentioned, I can def. say that the startup ecosystem in Silly Valley is unique and very, very hard to replicate. If you believe in the startup myth and you want to follow that route, few other places in the world will do.
This might change with the sunset of American influence/power/money, but for the moment, it's still where it's at. Anyone saying otherwise is just wishful thinking.
Probably not. "Tech giants" are paying way over market rate for talent and also subsidizing housing & transportation for employees*. Yelp, for example, pays interns $9000/month here in Silly Valley. Starting salaries at most tech companies are well into the six figures and retention bonuses can be completely insane.
If you are underpaid or underemployed there are probably a few of reasons:
1. Wrong geography - where you live has a huge impact on salary & opportunity
2. Wrong skillset - modern & rare tech skills pay a lot more, typically
3. Bad presentation - BTDT, getting professional help for resumes & linkedin profiles is a huge help
4. Not represented - sounds crazy, but having a recruiter represent you can be a big help in finding stuff
5. Not networking - only 30-40% of tech jobs are advertised, if you don't network with your peers, you'll never know about good opportunities
6. Public visibility - being active in meetups, in industry specific forums and on Github leads to a lot more people contacting you about jobs (see 5 above as well).
Make no mistake, all this is a lot of work, but, having been on both sides of the fence (looking for work and looking for people to hire), it's frustrating all around.
* if you look at this list https://qz.com/1041506/new-data-on-h-1b-visas-show-how-it-outsourcers-are-short-changing-workers/ it's clear that the H1B program is being abused by outsourcing companies providing cheap labor, not tech giants.
Most of what you want is already the case.
1. It's already the case an H1B can only be allocated if you can't find local talent
2. More people were deported under Obama than any previous president
3. Kinda like 5 year planning? That worked so well for the Soviet Union..... Besides, that actually already exists, it's called either an H2A or H2B.
That said, I agree that an H1B should be independent of the employer and should require some sort of realistic salary calculation - Silly Valley is full of dorm-like housing that caters to low-wage H1B workers. But nowhere in this discussion do people point out that there is a real skills shortage in tech, something which needs to be solved if we want to continue to grow the tech sector....
Yeah, that's what Adobe thought too, so did Nokia and Motorola.
I'm sure that their shareholders will cheer when markets knock billions off their valuation.... IMHO, we've just seen peak Qualcomm, esp. with the Feds largely agreeing with Apple.
Everyone in the industry hates Qualcomm, they've been dicks for years, and would be happy to see them taken out.
Taiwanese != Chinese (at least not in the vernacular sense)
"Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., trading as Foxconn Technology Group, is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturing company headquartered in New Taipei City, Taiwan." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn
The penalties for breach of copyright are statutory and are per violation. And they are far worse than breach of contract. If I were Hancom, I would be very cautious about try to turn this in to a copyright case. Give the potential value of that and the potential criminal liability, it could be the end of a company (c.f. MegaUpload)....
"American corporations generally) base much of their business models (and cost of business) on stealing other company's inventions" - show us some stats or it's just pure 'bash 'Mercains cause that gets the masses to rise up (or upvote as the case may be)' - e.g. bullshit - or more likely someone who works for the aggrieved company....
Maybe it's because fast-growing, real world global scale businesses don't give two sh*ts about artificial benchmarks or pay-to-play shills like Gartner. Call us back when Netflix moves from AWS to Oracle cloud. Oh, yeah, they tried that old skool vertical scaling and declared in 2014 (!) "it doesn't work" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH8T7JMzloM
All the comments here are very correct that modern businesses don't need Oracle at all. Google, Netflix, Apple, Uber, AirBnB have all figured out how to achieve huge scale with globally distributed, redundant and scalable databases. And, by-in-large, they have made those tools cheaply or freely accessible to everyone. And no one who is serious about large scale systems will ever run anything bare metal ;-)
Hmm, the two places with the highest number of wiretaps as a percent of the population are the Netherlands and Italy. http://www.npr.org/2013/07/28/206231873/who-spies-more-the-united-states-or-europe
It's nice that the EU governments are so much better a propaganda than the US, but that doesn't they are any better - probably much worse, actually.
I've been presented with contracts attempting to own everything I do or have done in the past and have always refused. I have also refused to license software I created on my own time, before I was employed by a company, to said company for free with expansive re-licensing terms.
Sometimes just saying no is the best thing - if they really want you to work for them, then will modify the terms. If not, perhaps they are not an employer you want to work for....
Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what most SV/West Coast companies do. Maybe, instead of being so heavy handed, you should actually trust your employees and give them even more responsibility with even more aggressive targets.....
But, hey, what do I know, I only work for 'West Coast' companies.
It's rarely the CEO that decides the level of security needed. Typically, there is either an internal threat assessment team or the assessment is done by an outside consultant. Often this is mandated by either the board or clauses in key man insurance, but not always.
Rarely does the CEO actually have much input in how much or how security is provided for him. Yes, as CEO they can approve or refuse security, but in my experience, most security teams/consultants will do their best to present the worst possible credible scenario and rarely get refused. Typically, kidnapping is the biggest worry, even if it's exceedingly rare in Western countries.
For years Mark Z. had no security, I actually ran into once in downtown Palo Alto - he was getting coffee for a bunch of people in his team (this was when FB had it's offices downtown). I guess the threats have become greater since then.
I can't speak for Swift, but I've written a bunch of stuff in Go. It's very fast (running speed and compile wize), portable across platforms, the syntax is sane and it's very easy to learn.
But it's biggest 'party trick' is built in concurrent processing. Until you've used this, it's hard to explain just how useful this is in modern mobile/web applications.
I evaluated a bunch of 'new' languages for a project a few years ago. Among them Go, D, C#, Closure, Node (not a language but still), Scala, Erlang (and it's derivatives) as well as more traditional languages like Python.
Go was easily the easiest to learn and had the most useful optimizations. It's pretty obvious that whoever was the driving force behind it had modern async, massive scale internet-based applications in mind. Def. my favorite language now, although I wish it had better dictionary/list/array handling as it not as simple to build complex multi-dimensional data structures compared to some other languages.
If you are doing anything on a large scale (mobile, web, big data, etc), then Go is a fantastic language.
To be fair, the CFO is probably the one guy you need to stick around if you are going Ch 11.... I'm guessing that was a upfront payment for his services as he is unlikely to get his salary or bonus after filing....
(edit - someone else wrote a similar comment, but didn't reply to this thread....)
I've got a NetGear Arlo and am surprised it doesn't get more attention. The key feature is that the cameras don't need any wires at all, they are battery powered.
I've had a bunch of other IP cameras, but really this is the best solution as you can just stick them anywhere.
Well, I hire people and have P&L responsibility, I can say categorically that your assumption is false, at least in high-tech. We used to have an overseas team in a 'low cost' location. We fired all of them and hired local staff at almost 10x the cost.
Why? Because the talent we needed was not overseas and the overhead of managing different cultural expectations was killing us. I've seen this over and over again in tech, both in the financial & pure tech sectors.
If you are trying to actually build something, hiring 'the worlds least capable resource' is a sure fire way of going out of business.
I live in Silly Valley, where we have insane salaries for anyone in tech (eg. interns getting $9k/month) and enormous demand. I'm also responsible for tech hiring in my company and we have an office in the EU (not UK). I'm not sure what upside down world the thread starter lives in, but salaries in tech are def. not going down anywhere we are recruiting.
They are actually going up in unaffordable ways for small companies like ours. Not just in SV, but also in our EU location. Competition for candidates is fierce, with salaries going up double digit percentages in just the past few years.
So, my reaction when I here 'my tech job is being outsourced' or 'I haven't gotten a raise in years' is to wonder what that person has done to keep their skills current or why they are stuck in their current position. Because the only jobs I see being outsourced are things like tech support and non-critical operational roles. Critical devops, developer, UX/UI designer/builder and data-centric jobs are in HUGE demand, but you must keep your skills relatively current.
Everywhere I look and every single statistic I read say there is a huge shortage at every level of tech, so something just doesn't sound right. Yes, I know, the hiring process sucks (it's no better on the inside) but there really is tons of work out there.
From my point of view, Brexit looks like a disaster all around for any tech company in the UK. The best thing to do would to move to an EU country, like Ireland or the Netherlands, which both have pretty good tech scenes. I also think there will be a massive move of financial firms to the continent if the UK really adopts a hard line. There is literally no reason for these business to stay - another poster pretty much nailed it with the three reason outline.
A few years ago I rented a car in France with lane departure correction (e.g. it steers to stay in white lines) and traffic sign recognition w/cruise control. While not in any way autonomous, it did just fine staying between the lines and at the speed limit on most roads while in cruise control mode.
I suspect that, since Tesla's European assembly is in the Netherlands, what you saw was actually a test vehicle, not a normal driver.... Probably testing the car's ability to switch sides.
Edit: or a customer test drive as stated above....
Seriously, is anyone still interested in Windows Phone? It just looks like MSFT abandonware....
I was hopeful it might be an alternative to the duopoly, but at this point it's just a dead end. I guess it's nice that they are doing an update, but one wonders why they even bother expending engineering resources on this...
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