bt3

> But I was able to get a job in SF with a single cold email and zero connections.

Care to share anything more about this, purely out of intrigue? My own experiences have shown me that folks aren't as quick to respond, especially when you have limited value (experience) to show, even if you're just looking for mentorship.

It's not clear to me from the article that Garmin did in fact get the decryption key. There's enough verbiage suggesting they didn't pay the ransom, so are we to assume they had other means?

It also took Garmin quite awhile to acknowledge the ongoing situation formally (their outage page has been accurate with red lights across the board). Could it be that Garmin just started to spin up more hardware and began a migration of their last backups? (I'm so far removed from how their service operates so apologies if this sounds impractical)

Let me see if I can address some of this. Trying to be respectful in my response as well.

Source: work for large tech consulting company, don't classify myself as a "good" programmer, just somewhat of one.

"Don't pay very well" - not necessarily true. Comparable to FAANG? Sure, but industry? I'm not as confident. Think of the internal IT group of your favorite retailer, bank, insurance company, whatever. That junior staff doesn't have nearly the income potential a junior consultant does. Not everyone has the opportunity or the "credentials" to get in front of FAANG, NSA, SpaceX, etc.

"Work is generally boring but tedious" - I suppose this is how you define boring. Is working on social security and benefits systems glamorous? Maybe not. Banking infrastructure? IT Governance systems? Payroll? Project planning? Financial management? Reporting? I know people who obsess over some of these systems. People build careers on working with Oracle/ SAP; I'd hope they don't view their own work as boring. I'd rarely describe large scale implementation/ strategy work as tedious. There are some monster projects out there, no doubt, but most projects have well defined guidelines, milestones, etc. In almost all of the companies I've consulted with, our team is moving 3x as fast as the client because usually our projects are scoped as thinly as possible to win bids (cheaper seems to win a lot, unfortunately), and we simply don't have the luxury to work slowly. Time and materials may be an exception to this, but those are not as common as you may think.

"Corporate cultures are not known for attracting top talent" - this is a tough one to answer because I think it depends on how you define "top talent". If you're using undergrad as a benchmark, then sure, big tech consulting firms don't usually pull Harvard or Stanford grads (though they are in our ranks). Consulting work is a balance between being an effective conduit between your client and internal/ outsourced engineering teams. I'd argue a "10x programmer" may not be very effective in a client-facing position discussing strategy, etc. This is not to say the engineer isn't valuable, but let me take another stance: "top talent" programmers want to work on bleeding edge things, and Fortune 500 doesn't have much of that to go around, because it's a risk. I can't tell you the number of clients I've worked with who still use a mainframe with a COBOL developer. Even doing simple things like data interoperability between systems can be a nightmare because enterprise systems may not have native API's, so you end up hacking together these weird FTP-then-scrape type solutions to move data around. Is it the way it should be? No, but you aren't there to rip up their whole ecosystem of tools because you want to use a REST API instead of SOAP.

Regarding your options: 1. Listed earlier, but not everyone is lucky enough to get to interview with FAANG. Speaking from experience, my background didn't get me in the door out of undergrad. 2. Doable, sure. You're a bit location bound here... statistically speaking, most startups are in the Bay Area. Maybe NY too. So if you aren't already in those areas, you're not around a lot of seed companies that you can get in front of. Some folks also may not be willing to take the risk that a startup entails. Would you take $50k + options in a 5 person company versus $100k + bonus from a big company right out of school? Not saying one is right, but there's only a subset of folks that would/ can consider this route. 3. Research/ research-like work. Just a prohibitive as 1 I'd say. It's unfortunate that college is such a "gate" for many of these opportunities. Trying to join a company/ institution that doesn't actively have a presence on your college campus is an uphill battle. Doable, yes, but the odds aren't in your favor. Particularly if you don't know anyone and it's just a cold application.

Would love to continue the conversation. As a closing note - consulting is seen as a great short-term gig. Everyday I get to see how the world's largest companies operate, I can be industry-agnostic, and work in a variety of roles from strategy through execution of IT projects. I would argue a consulting background is an excellent launchpad to the "next" thing, which could very well be any of your three above.

From the FAQ's:

  The API delivers EOD / End of Day historical exchange rates, which become available at 00:05am GMT for the previous day and are time stamped at one second before midnight.

The Surface Book line is more akin to a tablet than a laptop as the guts of that machine are still in the screen, much like the Surface Pro. I don't think it's unreasonable that there isn't in the way of repairability given its tablet form factor.

Don't get me wrong, I'm disappointed myself in this product, but it doesn't take away from the successes elsewhere in the Surface product line.

  For any serious development I stick with React.

Isn't this a bit disingenuous given Vue's usage in true, scalable production capacities? I'm not the expert but companies like Netflix, Adobe, and GitLab have Vue deployed at scale. Since when was "quick" synonymous with "not sufficient for serious development"?

The original wasn't really a scam either. The about page isn't live anymore (sure it's cached somewhere), but if I remember the story, the guy was trying to fund college/ university and he set this up a bit on a whim hoping to get a few bucks out of it. It took off after a few initial sales by friends and family.

This "sequel" bears no similarities to the original in intent.

What I find interesting is that there's a handful of small pixel chunks on their that amount to something like "Paid" or "Reserved", so they don't have valid URLs at all. Feel like those folks missed out on tons of eyeballs a decade back.

Also wonder if there's any study on ongoing advertising impact on these links. For example, a number of links on their don't resolve anymore - are those domains worth anything more than a usual registar price?

My take: Zoom is very approachable outside of enterprise. Skype (although historically has its roots with regular folks), is mostly used in a "Skype for Business" config. MS Teams is much the same way.

Good PR helps too, I suppose.

I work at a large professional services firm (think Big 4), so the risk of any single breach in our network is taken pretty seriously. Our IT department added an Outlook plugin years ago that you can use to immediately reporting phishing attempts to them. As a bonus, they'll sometimes send these "tests" and if you select to "Report Phishing", you'll get a atta-boy type notification. I would assume at a macro level, they have stats on everyone and know who the "riskier" employees are. I have no idea if this is done inhouse at other large companies.

Sidenote/ question for you: some of the "test" attacks my company sends are very specific to the work we're doing and can sometimes sound very convincing. Do you have a catalogue of "attacks" based on industry or department (procurement might fall for something completely different than sales or marketing)? I'm sure with enough tests, you could measure the effectiveness of attacks (or maybe the difficulty of detection)... then you can start rating organizations not just based on what percentage of folks fell for it, but what specifically they fell for, or what was more likely to get them to bite. Almost like targeted training?

Cool idea overall and wish you guys the best.

This what you're looking for? https://www.adafruit.com/product/73

My point was moreso that NameCheap appears willfully ignorant to abuses on their platform. As I am a nobody, I don't have the leverage to get them to solve these problems. Whereas Facebook suing them might introduce pressure on NameCheap to address abuse of their domains.

As much as I despise Facebook, it's great to have this kind of pressure put on NameCheap. When I first setup my own website many years back, I made the mistake of listing my email in plain text right on the main page. Fast forward years later and I think I've been added to every spam list possible. If it wasn't for exceptionally-aggressive email filters, I'd get 500+ spam emails a day.

In various times throughout the years, I'll run a WHOIS lookup on the last 1000 emails to have (attempted) to send me spam email. In 99% of cases, they resolve to a proxied NameCheap domain. I have submitted somewhere in the ballpark of ~800 domains throughout the years to NameCheap's abuse department. While they are timely in their "investigation", only about half of them are shuttered, and it's not clear to me if NameCheap is actually attempting to solve the problem as I strongly suspect there's a limited number of individuals behind the mass of nonsense domains used to spam me and likely countless others.

Small anecdote: many years ago I tracked down a working Dreamcast and acquired Sonic Adventure 2, arguably one of the best SEGA games ever created. At the time, I remember spending $40 for a used copy of the game that was now a decade old. After just scanning eBay, it looks like SA2 for Dreamcast is still selling for between $20-$70/ each. Incredible.

Other side note: one flaw of the original Dreamcast was that the circuit board that houses the controller ports had a capacitor that would occasionally fail. To the uninitiated, the console would become a brick since you can't play without a controller. I used to buy large sets of "broken" Dreamcasts, and could usually fix more than half of them by simply swapping internal components. I miss the days of this level of modding. Though the OG Xbox was pretty fun too in this hacking space.

Not withstanding the grandeur of the truck, its unique look, and specs; I love Elon's composure following the somewhat failed glass test that broke both windows on the vehicle during the live unveiling.

A fair warning. Wouldn't any engaged legal group understand that if I had registered the .com first, then a company was offering to sell me a .org, etc. after my purchase, that is more extortionist than me trying to recoup the registration fees of a domain name I no longer need?

Agree if I want to keep the domain, I'd be careful not to lead anyone on - scammer or otherwise.

Through the years I've bought domains for hobby projects and such that ultimately I'll let expire. Usually after receiving tons of emails, such as you've described, it's followed by a "we now own your domain, pay up" threat.

I've even had firms purchase other extensions for my domain (particularly a .org, .net, or .co), then email me asking to buy it from them. I usually respond and tell them I'm selling the .com domain myself and they can purchase it directly from me for half of the price they're offering to sell me the other extensions.

No one has ever taken me up on my offer.

As someone that recently consulted for a F500 client and had to make recommendations regarding their Grafana instance (among other things), we noted they were curating too many metrics (somewhere in the thousands). Our belief being that if you're providing stakeholders with so many metrics, you're forcing them to make their own decisions regarding what's valuable to track and what's not - rather than allowing leadership to provide direction as to how they're measuring performance, etc.

I can't imagine what it'd be like (as a stakeholder), using a Grafana instance that, in total, has >500k metrics. Would assume many of those are depreciated/ do not provide any value/ or do not spur any action by stakeholders.

Check out Cmder[1]. Best terminal replacement I've used on Windows.

1: https://cmder.net/

As someone who travels almost every week for work, our company has a policy (as do many others to my knowledge), that prevents us from booking Airbnb's, regardless.

With that being said, something that makes Marriott/ Hyatt/ Hilton properties so popular with business travelers are their loyalty programs and the perks associated with top-tier memberships and hordes of virtual points which usually can be used to fund family vacations for the foreseeable future. I don't see Airbnb ever being able to be competitive in this sense.

Metro station are typically underground as well. So even a very precise triangulation could place you logically in a building above ground.

> Nobody every gets fired for hiring Accenture/Deloitte/PwC. What usually happens in the non trivial niches is that these big shops sleeve the boutiques through them to get things done...

To provide a prospective as someone who works for a consulting firm like the ones you've mentioned... Hiring the "big" firms versus boutiques is a lot about a perception of risk, maintaining partnerships (procurement with new vendors is a nightmare everywhere), and leveraging experiences across other F500. For big implementations, think any ERP, our consulting teams can number 100+. Overkill? Probably, but there are few boutiques that have those kind of resources. And each of those 100 have more experience doing implementation work across a range of companies. It's a bit of a vicious cycle for boutiques where they will ultimately struggle to be competitive in these types of bids without seriously underpricing their services, which ends up meaning fewer resources or a less comprehensive scope.

As a side note, when projects go south, the company CIO isn't getting fired, but I've know many leaders (from the consulting side) getting let go for botching multi million dollar contracts.

"And it appears as though it will be compatible with other controllers. (Probably not the Chromecast version, though.)"

May I ask how you arrived at this conclusion?

Hmm. Does this mean that the controller is the "brains", and after sending and receiving the game play data, then needs to beam it to your device? Or do the two devices (controller + screen) work together to handle some of this?

I fear for the latency in general.

Can someone explain the tech here? Obviously the brains of this is a Google data center beaming the game through a Chromecast to your TV (or in-app on your Pixel/ whatever). Is there any tech in the controller? What "costs" $129 if there's a subscription model attached to this?

If the controller is indeed "dumb" (just sending inputs), why wouldn't there be compatibility with Xbox or PS4 controllers?

If the history of non-main consoles has taught us anything (Nvidia Shield, Ouya, etc), you have to have games and a controller. Seems Google has games covered, but why try and reinvent the wheel with a new controller?

Shortly after WiFi hotspots via mobile phones (or those stand alone devices) became a thing, I found that airports usually had the best collection of ad-hoc WiFi networks.

A usual citing on my network list was "Yell Penis for Password".

I've also had people, more deviously change their network name to "Galaxy Note 7" while in the airport or in-flight to stir frenzy after they were banned at airports.

Yep this was it.

Thanks to all for your concerns of my potentially malware-infected PC, alas, it was just an ad-blocker.

I think what I found particularly beautiful about this was the first ~330k characters of ad-related CSS injected into the header presumably through Github hosting or otherwise. I had to scroll about 85% of the way down the page before I hit the <h1> tag!

Nice to see a new Mac Pro, but no one has mentioned price. The "entry level" Mac Pro from 2006 was $2199 and $2999 in 2013 (the last update). Even the top-of-the-line "trashcan" Mac Pro was ~$6500 with 12 cores.

I don't doubt the hardware is top-notch again, but an 8-core machine (I get it's Xeon), with a 256GB SSD and 32GB of RAM with a nice graphics card for $6000 is ludicrous. Is the new case and a "revive" worth the 100% price increase for a base model? Or has Apple come to revelation that pro's will pay any price?

Sidenote - 6k monitor is beautiful but $5000? The live stream I'm following jokingly mentioned the stand is $1000 extra (is that true?). Have we truly moved into $1/ pixel territory?

Location: US

Remote: If needed

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Technologies: SQL, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML/CSS, PHP, Vue.js

Resume: http://static.bentumbleson.com/btumbleson_resume.pdf

Website: http://bentumbleson.com

Email: btumbleson3 (at) "google" mail.com

Client facing technology consulting professional who specializes in translating business requirements into technology-enabled solutions for Fortune 500 clients through implementation expertise. Additional entrepreneurial experience including raising funds and launching an MVP of a paper-trading investment platform while in college. Seeking to leverage my professional, academic, and entrepreneurial experiences into a product management position to further industry-disrupting technology solutions.