Back in the day, there was a bunch of engineers to wrote a TCP stack for VAX/VMS. The company TGV (Three Guys and VAX) had the engineers cycle through taking tech support calls to get an understanding of what problems customers were seeing with the software. It was a very literal port of the TCP/IP stack and tools. Anyone familiar with UNIX would have no problem using it.

In contrast, DEC came out with their own version and it was very hard to use. The interface and command line was very VMS-like requiring anyone familiar with the UNIX to learn DEC's way of doing things.

I've always marveled at the two different approaches. I doubt DEC did any customer focus on their product. That happened a lot at DEC--engineers deciding they knew what the end-user needed. There was a common phrase in the VMS engineer's News group--See Figure One. Which was engineering's response to customer reported bugs and complaints. It was a ASCII art picture of Mickey Mouse flipping the finger.

It's true that the engineering staff didn't sign up to deliver food. But sitting with a Customer Service person for a day, listening to their calls might be a good learning experience in fixing process problems or help them design stuff to make CS people's life easier and able to take more calls.

But no, that's not what they signed up for. Delivering food might expose them to COVID and the company to liability. I can see that. But doing other things to make them better at their job? Yeah, maybe your time at DoorDash is over. Try Uber.

When I "bought" a free app from the Amazon app store for my Android phone, I kept getting push notifications from the Android App about all sorts of "deals". I uninstalled the Amazon store from my phone and the apps stopped working. So I ripped those out too. Same with the Mac version of their App store.

I only interact with Amazon via the web. They can take their browser extensions and shove them. I buy books for the Kindle if I can't get them anywhere else without DRM.

The fact that Amazon is late with their Android 12 support doesn't surprise me.

Intuit moved much of their infrastructure to Kubernetes (they were the poster child for AWS' EKS) then fired the data center and programmers that did the transition. It could have been worse. Google treated my friend much worse.

I was witness to a startup being bought by a larger company, but only on the outside as a contractor. The employees were bought by the larger company but the assets were left to the shell that was the startup. It worked for a while.

Intuit dumped Quicken (it's now it's own company) because selling the software and supporting existing customers became a loss leader. I won't upgrade my "on-prem" version of Quicken even though they shut off syncing with my bank. I don't use any of the other features like stock tracking so I might just switch to Checkbook Pro or See Finance or even GnuCash.

Most of the email list SPAM I get is from SENDGRID. I only recall 1 or 2 emails from Mailchimp and that's it. Marketing people seem to like SENDGRID since they're much more lax about Opt-In. I get at least 2 or 3 a week out of 10-15 SPAM emails. Otherwise, Gmail seems to catch most of it unless the spammer is using Google Forms (grrr).

Back in the 80s, I worked for DEC. They offered a special monthly location stipend for software specialists to live in Manhattan. These were people who's services they sold to banks and large companies to do software projects. I got a car stipend because my car fell within their criteria rather than get a leased company car. I was expected to use the car to travel to customer sites to perform work for the company. I can't say for certain, but I would guess that a software engineer living and commuting to a DEC facility in MA would get about the same as the one living in Albuquerque doing firmware for VT2xx terminals. Neither of them got the car stipend because they weren't customer facing.

In my field as a sysadmin/devOps person, working for them doesn't really translate to something that's marketable at other jobs. They use their own internally written tools and have processes and standards in place that other companies would find a PITA and a hindrance to getting work done. Recruiters are silent when I tell them I won't work for Google (or Facebook). Then they just hang up.

I've told non-local recruiters with roles that require 8am-5pm Eastern time to focus on sourcing people in that time zone. They're wasting their time trying get me to get up at 5am.

They're also wasting their time offering pay that below market for my area.

Those two point mean I won't hear from them again, which is fine with me. It means they're focusing on filling a role rather than finding someone a job. It's the old recruiting model that I miss.

Google isn't the only one that does this although it's become more visible here in the US with pandemic. Oracle Engineers doing the same job in other countries were paid in their countries currency but the conversion rates didn't match up the pay rates. In this way, Oracle could get cheaper Indian Engineers working there rather than paying them US wages. Yes, the cost of living is higher in the US, so they were getting comparably to their US equivalent. Oracle might think it was just good business but I thought it was slimy.

So did my manager who fought to get a very good India-based team member paid at US wage rates. He won probably because she was a key holder of the "institutional memory" of the project. They'd fired most of the others in a RIF because the project was EOL'ed and ramping down.

I've been away from that project for 18mo, so I don't know what happened. If she left, the transition would have taken at least a year longer. The manager isn't there any more and I hope he failed to convince her to move to the US.

Arg. in a great deal a net gain of ATP

My Biochem 101 professor described the glycolysis pathway (converting glucose to CO2, water, and in great detail. We had to know what carbon came off of the intermediates and the names of the enzymes for each step. The first enzyme, hexokinase, is highly regulated by the body. The next intermediate is fructose-6-phosphate which can be gotten directly from fructose by an enzyme that's not regulated as much as hexokinase. I think that's why fructose gives you that quick boost. It feeds into the cycle without regulation. The fact that there are also physiologic changes to increase the ability to store fat seems like further confirmation of this.

I don't use Apple as my mail provider exactly because they can do this sort of thing. And supposedly they did, at some point, block delivery of email that contained certain keywords. If mail is encrypted with the key on the user's phone or computer, then Apple shouldn't be able to do this. End-to-End encryption both traveling and in place for email, chat, video, etc should be the default. The fact they don't do that tells me to not use their service. And law enforcement can subpoena user account information and Apple can provide access to calendars, messages, files, and emails stored on their servers because it's not encrypted at rest. Or you have to go to Snoden-level operational security and boot Tails off a USB stick to access mail and keep files encrypted end-to-end. Most don't care and just use Apple or Google ecosystem.

When I was working at a chip startup, there was a requirement to bind a group of machines together to do a simulation. They all had to have their clocks synchronized to within 50ns of each other. Making sure NTP was running on all the systems was enough as it corrected for transmission and drift amongst the various machines. We had a hole in the firewall to connect to stratum 2 time servers and that worked just fine.

I've heard that some large installations have NTP synch-ed to a stratum 1 server (either directly to an atomic clock the size of a paperback book or NIST's time server through radio). Usually, it's the big router doing this rather than one of the servers.

Having a couple servers on each subnet in a datacenter doing stuff like DNS, NTP, LDAP, monitoring, and other housekeeping is what I'd do.

I'm surprised "Amazon wouldn't take it back". I've had that with a Seagate drive I bought and finally brought into service 90d after I bought it. It was DOA and didn't even show up as a device. By then, Amazon's return policy lapsed and I had to go through Seagate to get it replaced. It took 90 days. Ultimately, I'll never buy another Seagate drive, but that's another story. Anything within 14 days usually Amazon will take back quite painlessly for a variety of reasons. I print out the QAR code, take it to my nearest Whole Foods, and my credit card is refunded within a day. This goes for crappy eBooks too. Although I think you have to return it fairly quickly.