jeffwilcox

Their standard employee agreement must include a set of clauses relating to conflict of interest.

What if the demoralizing answer is... yes, just one dinner!

The speedy providers are all jumping over each other to compete, now that the "gentlemen's agreement" between providers is no longer a thing... but they are cherry picking from people willing to pay and easily providing the service.

Seems like maybe 3 years ago when all the cable companies were able to compete without exclusivity by block?

In my condo building of 200+ units we have 5 providers now: - Wave broadband cable - Comcast cable - Wave G (10Gbps connection to the building) - Webpass Google Fiber (microwave to the building) - CenturyLink (DSL maybe?)

The bummer is outside the high-rise towers, there is not much competition in the neighborhoods and single family homes it seems.

Yes! This has been driving me insane. I spent an hour on support with Apple, was sent to Best Buy, but do to COVID-19, cannot get an "appointment" for a replacement for 2 months... I should have opted for a mailed replacement. :/

It sounds like beyond MoPop and some of the brain research work, the legacy was not to be operating his projects, but rather giving away his fortune for causes.

I wish Cinerama was self-sustaining... and LCM is a huge loss... but I suppose they aren't 100-year institutions as they were created by Paul, but rather, showing us what is posible.

As a former engineer on the Silverlight team, this is enjoyably fun...

With Apple Pay your name shows up often as "VALUED CUSTOMER". So that's your privacy name!

Quality is all great, but options, configurations, even engine choices vary.

In Europe they are much more a la carte - cloth seats, etc., available, making them the standard cars in many ways at any price point.

In the US and other "luxury" targeted markets, the country only offers certain premium configurations or bundles, such as how nearly all BMWNA cars have the "premium package", etc., significantly raising the MSRP to hit those premium luxury categories.

90 seconds as measured by non-realistic volunteers in Toulouse and/or Everett who aren't actually afraid for their lives :(

Agreed. I also enjoyed this short summary write-up about part of the book... https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/09/08/how-to-steal-bi...

For an interesting read, check out the 1MDB scandal - the book "The Billion Dollar Whale" is quite a read.

There's a reason that it's so important to save those recovery codes... that's your opportunity of last resort to recover access.

Permits, load studies, switchgear components for 3-phase systems (breakers etc.) cost more, engineering costs drive this up, etc. The grid and city permitting processes weren't designed for broad "consumer" scenarios, at least basing it off of the current Seattle experience, where even Level 2 charging can be difficult.

I used to feel this way, too - and I live in Belltown - but over the years the random stabbings have added up, like the couple killed after a Sounder's game a while back, of the 3 random people stabbed a few days ago outside Nordstrom... it's scary, but not in the "late night walking alone" way.

Agree it's a relatively safe place for sure.

Sorry for any confusion! I originally intended this as an update to a previous post (years before we acquired GitHub) that had the title "From 20 to 2,000 engineers on GitHub: Azure, GitHub and our Open Source Portal", so was attempting to go for a good side-by-side comparison.

Post from 2015: https://jeffwilcox.blog/2015/11/azure-on-github/

I do realize it's probably very unlikely anyone here read that post. Happy to see if the OP wants to clarify better.

I think our cities are learning from what Scandinavia has been doing for ages. This is exciting news. Smart streets keep everyone safer and raise awareness to pedestrians and people with mobility issues, too.

I enjoyed the Adam Ruins Everything segment on Luxottica... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAeHuDcy_bY

Modern American tech firms only offer insurance while you work for them, it is not a lifetime benefit. As a result, you stop working, you need to go hunting and paying for your own healthcare.

Riding the Link Light Rail is super depressing when it stops at all the streets on Rainier Ave, just waiting to T-bone another left-turning car that isn't paying attention to how things work...

The appetite for large-scale transit outside highway lanes in America is downright depressing. I'm still under the influence of a recent trip to Japan, and a trip before that to Germany, while reading about high-speed trains in China, and essentially the rest of the world is not only willing to fully invest in smart rail tech for their cities, but they are willing to go the whole way with high-speed rail, too. Cargo trains and the car industry controls too much!

Apple gets a cut of the intercharge fees that the banks charge (much higher in the US than overseas), but it is not an additional fee to the merchant last I researched.

A lot of the NFC issues were either competing tech, payment networks not being ready, people not understanding their system configuration, _or_ intercharge fees being different for that whole category of fees (not specifically Apple Pay).

Fiber hotels are in all the big cities, Westin Building Exchange on 5th Ave in Seattle is where a ton of peering also happens.

Congrats to Avalara on their recent IPO, pretty good timing... this is a Seattle-area firm that does local/state/etc. tax calculations. In the end, it's a huge tax on infrastructure.

If your utility lets you do this... in many areas, increasing your service amperage is expensive if you don't use a majority of that additional capacity.

I've seen this especially in the power charger category... Apple power chargers I end up always just having to go to the Apple Store for now. Sigh. I want to use Amazon, but have had so many sketchy "Apple" products sent my way.

Sigh, so true. My first job out of college here in Seattle was by a major company that provided 100% coverage for all healthcare, $0 copay; at the time, that included doctors straight to your home, anytime. It was only after we were pushed to HSA plans that I started learning about billing, and that apparently it's basically unheard of to have physicians come to the home. Still feel whiplashed by the change...

Fair points, appreciate the insight. I think living in a tech bubble city clouds my thinking a bit much.

The only real example I have good knowledge of (1 of 1 cases) is a tech friend who worked for a firm acquired by a company wanting to build out data centers, and in the end everyone left after their acquisition stock awards vested, before really adding value to the corporation and delivering on the promise, because the company did not have a "tech r&d" comp plan in place to keep the subject matter experts employed. In the end the project and the DC expansion fell short.

Data centers aren't cheap, so unless you have the economies of scale to offer R&D investment and stock-based compensation to your employees to build a modern cloud DC, good luck with that... done right you can save operating expenses, but it'll take a huge investment that would not scale for others.

BMW already has a major precedent here... after 3 years of owning one today, you pay:

$100/year for real-time advanced traffic in the nav system $100/year for BMW Connected (send addresses and info to your car, unlock, locate etc. from your phone)

Sadly this feels like the latest attempt to increase subscription service revenue to help justify those network access fees and monetize in the serviceworld. :/

For buildings (offices, condos, apartments), air fiber solutions are way better and often faster than fiber pulls. 60 GHz microwave, building-to-building if needed, all are in the big cities... why waste time fighting rights to run fiber in dense urban cores?

Our condo building in Seattle is one of the first to land a landmark experience... we have 3x coax cable providers in our building; per unit, we can select and move between the providers.

They are all playing in this space because they want the customers and revenue, but it took a long time for the gentlemen's agreements between the firms to start.

The installers for Comcast (the most recent to enter our building) were super professional, friendly and did a great job.

Hope other cities are able to fight down the exclusive contracts etc.