- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
The highlighted part is TRWTF. The car can't do wifi "to the world" when it's more than a couple of hundred feet from a known base station, obviously, so no matter how much he's paying for wifi, that won't help him when he's halfway to the office.
Well, unless he's one of those people who think that "wifi" is the same thing as "internet access"... Which is also TRWTF.
Admin
If he is driving and working on charts at the same time, the problem will go away soon.
Admin
He probably has a chauffeur.
Admin
Always a huge issue, the "biggest client" that the company is so afraid of losing that they will bend over backward instead of treating them like anybody else. See also the "CEO's request is #1 priority," which even MORE companies have.
Admin
Which is why there've been reports that Meta is training a Zuckbot chatbot. I don't think anybody else wants more Zuckerberg, but Zuck 100% does. When your CEO becomes your #1 customer, your company is in a sad state. Of course, a corollary to "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is that "a company can shamble along toxically longer than your career can."
Admin
We definitely had this at my company. We do digital flyers/circulars/ads. Eight years ago, that meant we got PDFs from retailers and turned them into digital content. One huge retailer (hundreds of stores) wanted a dynamically created flyer that would have up-to-date pricing twice a day. We didn't have time to build out a full digital solution (which would have made sense), so instead we spent six months banging together a solution with spit and duct tape which baked out hundreds of PDFs every morning and afternoon. This one retailer was responsible for about 40% of our processing power.
We're finally getting somewhat closer to phasing this out, but "it worked" for this long...
Admin
The other big danger with whales is when they do pull out. Three times I've worked on multi-billion-dollar megaprojects, employing countless thousands of people, that were cancelled with a week's notice. I found other work pretty quickly, but it's pretty uncomfortable and others had it much worse. You definitely need to manage your exposure.
Admin
Can't be worse than the ultimate whale(r), the US Navy... having a single customer than can do things with impunity (including to you) is beyond painful.
Admin
Yep, I've been there. Worked for a company that was building a component of a high-profile weapons platform for one of the major military suppliers. We had taken over the project from another company that was under-performing, so we were already behind schedule from the minute the contract was signed. Of course this company saw fit to treat us more as a subsidiary than a subcontractor. Including, for a time, sending one of their own managers to sit in our lab and observe (read: babysit) us. On Saturdays. Then they demanded we start working shifts to make more use of the lab equipment, and I got the bad draw: 3 AM - noon. Never mind that I had just gotten married (they actually called to tell me this while I was on vacation the week after my wedding) and would like to actually spend some time with my wife...
That experience soured me on the whole military-industrial complex for a long time. To this day I still get headhunters pinging me to work for that megacorp; I just chuckle and delete their messages.
Admin
This kind of guy almost definitely has a Tesla plus complete and total confidence in 'full self driving'
Admin
Yet another way that monopolies are always a problem, regardless of what form they show up in. There are cases where they are unavailable or where the alternatives are worse, but that doesn't make it them less of a problem.
Honestly, that's likely the only unqualified option I have on any secular topic.
Admin
I think I once came dangerously close to hiring "Sploink, Dink, and Twangle, Attorneys at Law."
Admin
Oooooohhhhh...N.I.H. grant chasing was our undoing, lo 15-or-so years ago. 10 people, this company had, 5 doing research or adjacent work to chase a NIH grant for pie-in-the-sky devices, chasing down suppliers and massaging data like it was supposed to [kick field goals or throw touchdowns metaphorically]. Every time we lost a grant round, people got cut. Salary was down 25% for 6 months before I left, and in the last 4 weeks, my hours were cut by half. Two people remained--working on the same old junk that paid the bills up 'til then.
Admin
It happened to Motorola - back in the PowerPC days, Apple was one of those whale customers for Motorola's chips. Apple would routinely purchase most of the production capacity of the high end chips that Motorola just could not produce sufficient quantities of. Motorola was unhappy about it - they made slower PowerPC chips that Apple wasn't interested in. It forced Apple to turn to IBM who promised they could have their excess production which is where the G5 came from. But then again, IBM's excess capacity wasn't enough and waiting lists exploded for high end chips.
It's why Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel. People wanted AMD chips, but AMD also had problems supplying high end chips to hobbyists so it was obvious Apple was unlikely to repeat the same experience a third time. Intel was able to fulfill Apple's desires for chips. Intel only faded from glory because PCs started taking fiddle to smartphones and tablets and ARM processors started pulling ahead in speed and power consumption. Intel simply could not provide Apple with a competitive low power chip.
A company I worked at had two whales. First was hosting a huge smartphone development office that was basically off limits to normal employees - they had demanded separate networks and isolation from the corporate network and all that. It lasted a few years then up and died just before the iPhone came out. The second whale was more recent and involved a European automotive company that you wouldn't have heard of that had most of us working on its infotainment system. Well, that ended a few years ago, and the people on the team were mostly laid off since then and the office had undergone a huge makeover so it's basically a shell of what it was.
Admin
Or he's old school and delegates driving to a human driver, fully focusing on his underperforming "wifi" connection...
Admin
You could in theory modify WiFi hardware, but you would need to have amateur radio certification.
Admin
I remember those PowerPC days from the IBM side. I never had access to financials, but the understanding was that Apple was a high volume, but low margin customer compared with the larger PowerPC systems that IBM sold. But they had different system design priorities and drove on-chip requirements to support their idiosyncratic software. Not everyone was sad when they swam away.
Admin
So will the revenue, probably.
Admin
That might be part of the reason but the main problem was that IBM weren't interested in(or capable?) of keeping up with the performance of Intel's chips, particularly for laptop applications. I remember purchasing my first intel MacBook Pro and being completely amazed at how much faster it was than my previous G4 Powerbook.