- Leadership:
i. Eliminate multiple layers of middle management
ii. Get rid of senior executives who are more interested in their fiefdoms vs. the company well being
iii. Put competent, diverse and industry specific leadership on your board instead of stacking it with multiple CEOs. (Intel's current board is terrible)

- Employees:
i. Incentivize rank and file who perform well. "We didn't meet targets as a company so nobody gets anything" is completely unacceptable.
ii. Stop the constant layoffs for "underperforming" - nothing kills a company faster.
iii. Promote an engineering first culture that fosters teamwork and collaboration to accomplish goals, without requiring a 996 set of working hours. True dead weight gets pushed out in a hurry in such a culture.

- Company Turnaround:
i. Get rid of lines of business that do not contribute to core company. IT consulting services - seriously? One of many examples
ii. Build your brand up again. You've lost it to the competition steadily over the past 20 years. Hire an all star marketing team and pay them significantly more than what they are worth.
iii. Reestablish internal trust companywide. THAT alone comes from the CEO.


I'll collect my multi-million dollar consulting fee later.

Communications on these phones, verbal or written, would not be subject to any laws that normally apply to a governor and executives within a company. A court order would be required to obtain access to the phones, which are owned by a third-party who has no knowledge of the phones once they are distributed. Something got deleted/destroyed while a court order was attempting to be served? Oopsies! However did we know that was going to happen given we have no knowledge of the phones after they are distributed?

This isn't a new play from the playbook. Plenty of illegal or suspicious activities have done this for years. Why is the governor of California suddenly interested in this vs. using official public means of communication which goes into public record? That's the real question.

This was due to the underlying Lua scripting engine used in those games, which was single-threaded. If you had a processor that scored well on a single thread rating - end of turn goes much faster. If you had with a poor single thread rating, you'll be waiting forever.

2012 Core i7 - 2071 single thread rating - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/c...
2022 7900x - 4261 single thread rating - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/c...

I hope they improve their scripting engine in Civ7.

I'll bite here. The NYPost is known to be a right leaning (but not far right) news source. They are going to be biased. If we are going to have a conversation about the SVB board, let's focus on their lack of qualifications, not the narrative the media is trying to sell. Kudos to linking to the 2022 proxy, I'll offer a link to the 2023 proxy: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfr.... pg. 14 offers the diversity numbers of the board members. pg. 15 begins their bios. I'll focus on their bios.

Board member #1, director since 2011: SVP CEO
Board member #2, director since 2005: Ex-CEO of 3Com, currently part of investment firm
Board member #3, director since 2021: Interim CEO of Rite Aid
Board member #4, director since 2020: Ex-CIO of Kaiser Permanente
Board member #5, director since 2020: Blockchain investor
Board member #6: director since 2004: Ex-President of Accenture
Board member #7: director since 2022: Ex-CEO of Barclays
Board member #8: director since 2012: CEO of online education company
Board member #9: director since 2022: Leadership positions at Ernst & Young
Board member #10: director since 2015: Ex-Under Secretary for US Government Department of Treasury
Board member #11: director since 2010: Partner of Venture Capital Firm
Board member #12: director since 2011: Vineyard owner, served on various other boards

What is missing from the board (IMHO):
- Member from academia
- Member from nonprofit / NGO
- Tech leader who has been through the startup phase / understands risk while growing
- CEO from non-banking/non-tech, but high risk industry
- As parent commented, leaders from finance/banking in a similar business as SVB.


What I find the most interesting is many of these board members have been around for awhile. The low interest rates during COVID followed by higher interest rates post-COVID was basic economics 201. Having been on the board for some time and knowing the business, there should have been clear strategic changes within the company to adjust the business model. Going to be interested to see what further investigations uncover over time. Was this truly incompetence, or, actual maleficence?

This. We own a decent sized chunk of land in North Carolina and installed a geothermal system when we built our house. We calculated a 7 year ROI before we would see the system pay for itself. We've been here 10+ years now. Net result, a 4500 sq. ft home maintains 68 (heat) and 74 (cool) set of temperatures year round for ~$250 average per month. Similar to your experience, pay upfront, spread the tax credits over multiple years.

I am highly interested in solar and keep watching falling prices. Back of our roof is southward facing and offers ~1000 sq ft. to work with. At the time when we built the house, we calculated a 15 year ROI for solar. Now, its roughly an 11 year ROI (https://www.energysage.com/solar/calculator-results/). Thanks but no thanks. Costs need to drop further to consider it vs. a number of other house projects we'd prioritize before solar.

I own a modular home - built a little over 10 years ago. 2800 sq ft. downstairs, 1900 sq. ft unfinished upstairs. Total cost at the time - about $250k. This includes nicer hardwood floors, quartz countertops, geothermal HVAC, good insulation, etc. comparable amenities to stick-built homes. The manufacturer did start out with lower end amenities such as carpeted floor, laminate countertops, but we said no thanks and coordinated our own upgrades. Our estimate of an equivalent stick built home was roughly $350k-$375k. So its about 1/3 cheaper.

The cost savings comes from building it indoors. There are no weather delays. There are typically no material shortages or delays because its all there onsite and simply has to be moved from one warehouse to another, rather than transported onsite. The labor specialties (carpenter, plumber, electrical, etc.) are all dedicated to a single employer vs. being split across multiple homeowner sites across town. The only part of the operation which is "costly" to the builder is getting a mini-crane scheduled onsite day of home delivery. Everything else is fairly efficiently coordinated. All of this is what offers the cost savings.

I applaud further initiatives to improve upon this process. The electrical and plumbing improvements being described alone would have saved us a bit of headaches over the past few years as we've wanted to modify parts of the home. The material improvements I'm skeptical about, but, they are at least thinking in the right direction. Curious what their end results will look like.

Consumers don't. Samsung does for repairs. It saves them a significant amount of money to only have to send a technician on a single trip vs. multiple trips if the diagnosis is already uploaded to Samsung.

The "Smart Home" branding is an excellent job by marketing to hide that fact.

Three big problems with this for residential use in the US:
- Cost - as you mentioned. Federal tax breaks are still available but may lapse again. State tax breaks vary.
- Land - you need at least an acre for a decent sized private system.
- ROI - varies by household, average American moves 11.7 times in their lifetime - so by the time you get an ROI out of the system, you'll move

Disclaimer: I own a geothermal heat pump + love it. Received both federal+tax breaks, have the land for it, calculated my ROI to be 7 years + have no intention on moving for the remainder of my lifetime. But its definitely not for everybody.

Can you expand on the specifics of this? Which GPOs are not working as expected? I'm running Win10 Professional not on a domain and settings under Computer Policy > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update still work as expected.

Asking because I don't want to be caught by surprise either at a particularly inconvenient moment.

For folks near/around North Carolina - look up the Durham Performing Arts Center
- Legend of Zelda Symphony came through in September
- Danny Elfman music - next week
- Star Trek Symphony is coming in Feb. 2016

Actually, several enterprise web applications use it. Parent mentioned SharePoint, there are more than a few applications on J2EE servers which utilize it as well. One of the areas of the product I work on just released a new application to replace an older application which was dependent on NPAPI.

Customers have 1 of 3 choices at this point:
1) Downgrade Chrome - IT Security won't allow that, too risky
2) Upgrade the server code / install new application - IT Management won't allow that, too risky
3) Use something other than Chrome until #2 can happen - most likely choice in the short term

However I am in agreement the NPAPI needed to die. Google gave more than enough warning this was coming - TWO YEARS - so companies were given the opportunity to fix their code. Those that haven't - shame on you.

Oblig. Married with Children reference - Church of NO MA'AM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

No - you need an experienced team with more than one person who is willing to play devil's advocate. That's called constructive criticism and produces higher quality code in the long-term. If you need something done short-term and don't care about the long-term consequences, yes, that asshole may be what you need.

Pro-tip: In a global team with several hundred people working on a software project - assholes aren't tolerated. We can/will replace you with somebody else.

THIS. I legally own many DOS games. I have repurchased most of them on GOG.com for the very reason of NOT having to tinker with DosBox settings on a per game basis. No more scouring internet forums to figure out the right clock speeds, irq channels, etc. Just double-click, install and go. AND, in the event you do find a legitimate issue (as I did with Planescape Torment on large HDDs), they have support forums to report bugs and get them fixed.

OK, for those who have no idea what this is (the internets is a big place):
http://www.homestarrunner.com/

From Wikipedia:
"Homestar Runner is a Flash-animated Internet cartoon series. It mixes surreal humor with references to retro pop culture, video games, classic television, and popular music. [....] The site is one of the most-visited sites with collections of Flash cartoons on the Internet and is notable for its refusal to sell advertising space (the creators pay for everything through merchandise sales, which includes a line of T-shirts)."

Try this cartoon to understand a bit of the site's humor:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/...