What’s more, upon termination Muilenburg can walk away with another $30 to $40 million. And his supplementary executive pension is worth another $11 million, according to these statements.
Welcome to the corporatocracy of America, where you can fail badly enough as CEO to get fired — but not be held legally culpable — and then be handed tens of millions of dollars to get lost.
Then you get to go sit on the boards of several other public companies, and get millions a year from each one to show up to a few meetings and rubber stamp corporate documents.
It truly is a good-old-boy’s club. Hey, it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
So I already wrote about trying to get my old router to support my new internet speed, with no success. What I didn’t write about was that, in my frustration, I had placed an order for another, different new router (than I wrote about), which I was sure would be capable of gigabit speeds. It arrived today, and even though I had ordered an upgrade of my old router’s hardware, I couldn’t help myself, but to try it out.
Based on the enormous success I’ve had with using quite a bit of Ubiquity gear at my church, I bought an EdgeRouter Lite. I am already familiar with using these things. We had a similar model for awhile, powering our wifi, until the big upgrade with the new building. Also, I was used to running Vyatta-based routers back in my DataCave, coho-admin days. So I was sure I could get it working.
I ordered it from Amazon, with the “free, 2-day shipping” available with Prime. Except that, even though it was “Prime,” it was coming from some goofy 3rd-party, and took 3 days to arrive. Not only that, but when I got it powered up and logged into it, I saw that the firmware was six years out of date. I’m making a mental note here.
NEVER EVER ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON THAT’S NOT FULFILLED BY AMAZON, OR BEING SOLD DIRECTLY BY THE MANUFACTURER!
I should have just bought it directly from Ubiquity. I can almost guarantee that a unit bought straight from their site wouldn’t be 6 years old. It’s not that the new firmware doesn’t work. (And I really admire Ubiquity for the support.) But there may or may not have been hardware bump I’ve missed out on because of this, and it’s not worth the hassle to send back and reorder.
Besides, it’s the principle of the thing. I’m trying to not buy anything from Amazon if I don’t have to. I was there, and saw “Prime,” and if I don’t do my homework, it always bites me in the rear end. ALWAYS. Why should I have to work so hard to make sure I’m getting something in the 2 days I’m paying for? I’m just going to start spending that energy creating an account with the manufacturer’s storefront from now on.
Anyway. It took me longer to get the configuration going than I had hoped, but I think it’s finally up and running. I’m finally at a point where I can test it. Drum roll…
So far, so good. Guess I’ll try to cancel the order of the upgraded single-board computer hardware.
Here’s how my Christmas Day went, after a lovely morning of opening presents with the family.
I just upgraded to Comcast — I mean, Xfiniti — gigabit internet service, and got rid of all TV service. (I’m going to try streaming everything now, and I’m sure that will be fodder for another post in the future.) Unfortunately, I discovered that my nifty, little, fanless, single-board-computer router, running Linux, can’t seem to push any more than about 300 mbps on its ethernet ports, no matter what I try. So I fell back to using my Linksys Velop mesh wifi as my router, and then continued to try to figure out if I could get gigabit speeds out of my little computer’s NIC’s.
I had already looked at several things in Linux. All the basics checked out. Yes, before I even got the service activated, I upgraded to a DOCSIS 3.1-compliant cable modem. Yes, the kernel thinks it should be running at 1000 mpbs. Yes, it’s set to full-duplex. So I started to get serious, and I…
turned off everything.
cleared the kernel iptables rules
turned off the firewall completely
upgraded the NIC driver using a supplemental driver in the Ubuntu repos
upgraded Ubuntu from LTS to current
After all of this produced no change, I noticed that the board had a firmware update available. In for a penny, right? So I…
failed at using their utility to create a bootable firmware update USB stick on my Mac
did it on my work PC
used it to boot the SBC, but found I couldn’t get a console
tried different baud rates and serial programs, to no avail
tried and failed to create a new bootable image, using a different program on my Mac
tried to create new bootable image on Windows using the different program
noticed that my work laptop automatically deleted the firmware image as soon as I copied it over
tried to create the new bootable image on Windows under Parallels
hassled with which “machine” has control over the USB stick
found I couldn’t copy-and-paste between host and guest
upgraded all of Parallels, and Parallels Toolbox, on both guess and host
finally created new bootable image, which alsodid not boot
finally tried a different USB stick, which worked the first time
I finally, finally, finally got the router’s firmware updated, and, of course, there is literally no difference in the throughput. I’ll leave it to the reader to take a guess at how long this took me.
I also discovered tuned, which I was really hopeful for, but it also does not do anything for me.
So, like a sucker, I’ve now ordered the upgraded version of this board, which should fit in the same case I already have. I’m holding my breath…
I’ve been playing through Far Cry 4 again, just because it’s one of my favorite games ever, and I need a break from RDR2 and Witcher 3. I had to stop and note how funny it can be.
In one of the convoy escort missions, you’re supposedly protecting a truck full of books, bound for a library. When you accept the mission, Ajay says, “The pen is mightier than the sword, right?” And the person giving you the mission says, “Sure, but not as mighty as a rocket launcher. Now…” Then, when you meet the truck and driver, she says, “Hurry up, we have places to be, and people to shoot.” She also asks Ajay if he’s read Sun Tzu’s Art of War, among other books, and then concludes that it’s fine, as long as he’s reading. Along the route, she keeps saying things, like, “Knowledge is power, and knowing is half the battle.” The whole thing had me cracking up.
Also, right before this, I opened a loot chest, and got a “user manual” as the treasure, so I was already laughing.
And don’t even get me started about Hurk in Far Cry 5.
Here's a fake news merchant telling me how it actually works.
It's so important to de-mystify this kind of thing. Instead of seeing them as all-powerful threats to democracy, a lot of people doing it are actually just using spammy online marketing techniques. pic.twitter.com/dF8aWMd7OL
This is a clip from a report by the BBC that creating, boosting, and then selling fake content has become a real job in other countries. This particular report has an interview with a man from Kosovo, and (thanks to the last election) the work in Russia is now well understood, but I remain convinced there’s an entire industry for it in China. The US is the fake-news chew toy for the rest of the world, and Facebook is ground zero. The election next year is going to be a mess.
A few weeks ago, U.S. Attorney General William Barr joined his counterparts from the U.K. and Australia to publish an open letter addressed to Facebook. The Barr letter represents the latest salvo …
Source: Can end-to-end encrypted systems detect child sexual abuse imagery?
I’ve argued that FAANG companies can continuously scan their networks for garbage, but won’t because it’s expensive. Meanwhile, they’re sitting on figurative mountains of cash. A well-respected cryptologist dove into the details of whether or not you could do automatic image recognition in the face of end-to-end cryptology. While that’s an intriguing complication that I’m glad to see people working out, I don’t care about that part. What I do care about is how expensive of a computer process it is. He summarizes thus:
Despite the relatively small size of these problem instances, the overhead of using MPC turns out to be pretty spectacular. Each classification requires several seconds to minutes of actual computation time on a reasonably powerful machine — not a trivial cost, when you consider how many images most providers transmit every second.
So, yes, this can be done. Heck, Facebook does facial recognition all the time on uploaded phots, and suggests peoples’ names to you to check their work, and this is just a subset of the larger problem. Admittedly, the memory sizes to convolute the image into a digital fingerprint surprises me, but, again, it’s simply not beyond the wit of man to do it; it’s a lack of will to spend the money. So they continue to use a small army of meat-space computers to do this, subjecting them to the absolute utter depravity of man, and catching only a fraction of the illegal filth.
“Historic.” “Compromise.” “Space Force.” $738 BILLION. I wish more people on the Right would ask, “BuT hOw WiLl We PaY fOr It?!” when it comes to military spending.
But one of the strangest things was that while it was ostensibly a story about the company, the actual story felt almost entirely like a hit on Korey, personally. No other executive’s Slack messages were quoted as evidence of the perceived cultural problems.
The amount of land impacted by an oil spill in North Dakota is almost 10 times larger than initially reported, officials say. The disclosure comes about a month after the Keystone 1 Pipeline leaked about 383,040 gallons of oil.
So I see the oil industry has learned the IT industry’s trick of initially underreporting the severity of breaches. Including the part about doing it by orders of magnitude.
Or maybe they both learned it from the government, which always over-reports economic growth, and under-reports joblessness.
Looks like Berhinger has done it again. This board looks like it would be even more of a pleasure to run than the Allen & Heath D-Live, has at least as much capability and capacity, and it’s still less than $4,000.
They reference “mid/side” recording a couple of times. I looked that up. Very interesting. I want to find an excuse to try that out.
Even Behringer’s own video, above, has a lot of technical difficulties, and several sections where the audio from the 2 cameras overlapped. I should have watched this Sweetwater video. Everything they do is awesome.
I was born at the perfect time to pursue a career in full-stack software development. I grew up programming 8-bit computers, then learned Unix in college. I entered the workforce at the emergence of Windows for Workgroups and Linux, and I'll be retiring right about the time the AI's make me redundant. Also, the year Social Security goes broke.
Months and months of planning by lots and lots of middle management can save literally hours of programming.
Me
Give a man a program, and you'll frustrate him for a day. Teach a man to program, and you'll frustrate him for a lifetime.
Unknown
I have a mental illness that makes me think that people will change their minds if I present the correct arguments with the appropriate facts and data.
@xxclusionary, on Twitter
I've put all of my skill points into arguing with blinking lights.
Me
But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a new piece of Apple gear, to lust after it, hath committed purchase of it already in his heart.
Me
Don't say you're easy on me; you're about as easy as a nuclear war.
Duran Duran, Is There Something I Should Know
I sold the Renoir and the TV set; don't wanna be around when this gets out.
