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Comment Exactly (Score 1) 58

What I'm hearing is "But, I'm a highly-compensated professional! Not like all the plebes we spy on constantly to compensate me."

I do agree that they should stand up for themselves, and they have my support, once I'm done supporting causes I consider more important, like toe lint eradication.

Facebook headhunters used to bug me constantly. I put up an autoresponder telling them what I thought of their business model, leadership and general behavior, and that I would wash dishes for a living before working for a degrading, anti-human shithole like FB. Eventually they got the message.

I ended up in a fairly heated argument with some FB employees several years back when I mentioned that. It was obvious they felt stung by someone rejecting the choices they made and kept leaning in to, "but I make more money than you". Which was I was happy to concede, it was true. Suggesting that my self-esteem costs more than theirs didn't seem to be what they wanted to hear..

I wonder if those folks are still there, protesting about their workplace privacy.

Comment Re:Slipped a decimal point? (Score 1) 33

Yes but there is initial required capital to start the process of a leveraged buyout. An average person like me cannot start a LBO. It seems like no one is willing to do that in this case. Generally the purchased company gets the debt while the investors sell off the company piece by piece to enrich themselves. In this case what assets does eBay have that can be sold? Maybe some real estate property but not a lot.

Sears is a classic example of how companies are ruined by LBOs. Sears owned most of the land their stores resided. It was sold to the investors, and the land was leased back to the stores at huge rent rates. Sears owned multiple consumer brands like Kenmore and Craftsman. Those were sold to other companies, and the new owners got those proceeds. Eventually the stores failed, customers and employees being hurt in the end when the company goes bankrupt.

Comment Re:Just Getting Gamestop in the Headlines (Score 1) 33

I don’t think that getting GameStop in the news was the reason. It seems more the CEO is trying a crazy idea because he has no other ideas. An ulterior motive might be CEO bonuses and plain capitalistic greed. Many good companies have been ruined when purchased in deals like leveraged buyouts. But the investors who did the deals made lots of money running companies into the ground. The customers and employees do not matter to them.

Comment Re:But the real cost is increased service prices (Score 1) 72

Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

Comment Re:That makes sense. (Score 4, Interesting) 73

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

Comment Re:Second sourcing, multiple suppliers, etc. (Score 1) 28

Maybe a little ironic, but I would imagine current Apple modem designs are different from the ones they bought from Intel. From what I can tell, it took Apple many years and revisions to get modems to work they wanted. One of the main reasons Apple bought the business from Intel was the patents. Qualcomm is very litigious, but they would have an uphill battle if they never sued Intel for the same technology even if Apple had improved upon the design.

Comment Re:No (Score 1) 91

There is no purge. People forget this is an announcement of plans for a future kernel. Current versions are not affected. Current installations are not affected. All prior versions are still available for download. I would imagine there are few things in newer versions of the kernel that would greatly benefit 30 year old hardware for someone to stop using a working kernel.

Comment Re:nope. not again. (Score 1) 30

It's the original founder at least, Kevin Rose. I had a look at the relaunched I-can't-believe-it's-not-Reddit version and it was...ok'ish. But yes, they were unprepared for the bots in the main forums and unfortunately the place never got big enough to have any traffic in the smaller ones.

It's ironic - I looked at Reddit before The Great Migration following Dig...err...3? whatever the fiasco revision was. Like many others, I moved when that version of Digg appeared. I was interested when Digg said they were coming back, because Reddit has become a bit tiresome other than the smaller, subject-specialised subs. Alas though, never took off.

Comment My suspicion (Score 2) 73

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Comment Re:So? (Score 2) 46

When CUDA started taking off we had ATI hardware, to support their open source pledge, and looked into ROCm.

Just getting the drivers to build on EL-anything was an extreme effort, and it wasn't my first rodeo.

Without betraying confidences, I was told second-hand that there were only ten people on the GPU driver team across all platforms and that they were doing their best and not sleeping enough as it was, with Compute way behind gaming bugs on the priority list.

I couldn't independently verify of course but the theory fit the data.

I immediately empathized with the suffering of the devs and went out and bought nVidia cards, annoying binary drivers and all.

Since then I've felt like that some bean counter at AMD wrote nVidia a trillion dollar check.

If you're not a tiny company *overstaff* your engineering departments so you don't miss new opportunities as they arise. The opportunity costs exceed the opex costs.

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