kensey

Vault's client-based pricing was (is) the worst thing about selling it. When I was there, nobody in sales liked it except the SEs and account reps dealing with the largest customers (and those customers loved it because it actually saved them a substantial amount of money over other vendors' models like per-use or per-secret). All the customers except those very largest ones hated it. The repeated response from those who believed in the client-based pricing model, to those of us pointing out the issues with it, was essentially "if your customers don't like it, they must not understand it because you aren't doing a good enough job explaining it".

What I thought we really needed was a "starter/enterprise" dual-model pricing structure, so that smaller customers could get pricing in some unit they could understand and budget for, that would naturally and predictably grow as they grew, to a point where it would actually be beneficial to them to switch to client-based pricing -- but there seemed to be a general reluctance to have anything but a single pricing model for any of our products.

One of the reasons I left when I did was that it was starting to get really obvious that an acquisition was likely and I desperately did not want my work e-mail address to end in oracle.com.

* Red Hat wasn't ever "in financial trouble" -- their revenue line was up-and-to-the-right for a ridiculous number of consecutive quarters. Even when they missed overall earnings estimates, it was rarely by much and they still usually beat EPS estimates for the quarter.

* IBM had little to do with Red Hat's maneuvers around CentOS (I worked at Red Hat for several years and still have friends there, and nothing anybody there said publicly about CentOS in 2020 or 2023 was materially different from things people there were saying about it internally in 2012). Some people have tried to blame IBM for a general culture shift but as far as I've seen, every bit of the CentOS debacle was laid squarely at the feet of Red Hat staff by most in this industry -- as it should have been, since most of those involved were employed there well before IBM bought the company.

IBM's reputation as an aging dinosaur was well-earned long before it bought Red Hat, and continues to be earned outside it. That earned reputation was why they bought RHT in the first place: IBM Cloud market share was (and still is) declining and they wanted a jumpstart in both revenue and engineering credibility from OpenShift in particular.

What are you talking about? The December 2021 IPO price was $80.

It's a little more complicated than that.

First of all your percentage of ownership is unrealistic. I joined in November 2019 and got a grant of a few thousand RSUs that fully vested before I left, and that I still have most of, plus I bought some shares in a few rounds of our ESPP when that became available -- as of today I have just under 5,000 shares. HashiCorp has nearly 200 million shares issued, so I own a hair over .0025% of the company. Really early employees got relatively big blocks of options but nobody I knew well there, even employees there long enough to be in that category (and there were very few of them still around by December 2021), was looking at "fuck-you money" just from the IPO.

Second, the current price isn't the whole story for employees. I had RSUs because of when I joined so the story might have been different for earlier employees who had options, but I don't think it differs in ways that matter for this discussion. As background for others:

* On IPO day in December 2021, 10% of our vested RSUs were "unlocked" -- a bit of an unusual deal where we could sell those shares immediately (or at any later time). Note "vested" there -- if you had joined the day before the IPO and not vested any RSUs yet, nothing unlocked for you. (Most of the time, as I understand it, you don't have any unlocked shares as an employee when your company IPOs -- you get to watch the stock price do whatever it does, usually go down a lot, for six months to a year.) * At a later date, if some criteria were met (which were both a report of quarterly earnings coming out and some specific financial metrics I forget), an additional tranche of vested shares (I think an additional 15%) unlocked -- I believe this was targeted at June 2022 and did happen on schedule. * After 1 year, everything vested unlocked.

At the moment of the IPO the price was $80, but it initially climbed into the $90's pretty fast. At one point, during intraday trading, it actually (very briefly) broke just above $100.

So, if you were aware ahead of time that the normal trajectory of stock post-IPO is down, and if you put in the right kind and size of limit orders, and if you were lucky enough to not overestimate the limit and end up not selling anything at all, then you could sell enough shares while it was up to cover the taxes on all of it and potentially make a little money over that. I was that lucky, and managed to hit all of those conditions while selling almost all of my unlocked shares (I even managed to sell a small block of shares at $100), plus my entire first post-IPO vesting block, and ended up with enough to cover the taxes on the whole ball of already-vested shares, plus a few grand left over. Since then, I haven't sold any shares except for what was automatically sold at each of my RSU vesting events.

For RSUs not yet vested at the IPO, the IPO price didn't matter because they sold a tranche of each new vesting block at market price to cover the taxes on them when they vested -- you could end up owing additional taxes but only, as I understand it, if the share price rose between vesting and sale of the remaining shares in the block, so you would inherently have the funds to pay the taxes on the difference. (And if the price fell in that time, you could correspondingly claim a loss to reduce your taxes owed.)

There were a fair number of people who held onto all their shares till it was way down, though, and had to sell a lot to cover their tax bill in early 2022 -- I think if you waited that long you had to sell pretty much all your unlocked shares because the price was well down by tax time (it bottomed out under $30 in early March 2022, then rose for awhile till it was back up over $55 right before tax day, so again, if you were lucky and bet on the timing right, you didn't end up too bad off, but waiting till the day before April 15 was not something I bet a lot of people felt comfortable doing while they were watching the price slide below $50 in late February). I even warned one of the sales reps I worked with, while the price was still up, about the big tax bill he should prepare for, and he was certain I was wrong and that he would only be taxed when he sold, and only on the sale price. (He was of course wrong, but I tried...)

The June unlock was pretty much irrelevant for me because by that point the share price was down under $30 -- it spent the whole month of June after the first week under $35. The highest it went between June 30, 2022 and today, was $44.34. The entire last year it's only made it above $35 on three days, and only closed above $35 on one of them. I figured long-term the company was likely to eventually either become profitable, or get bought, and in either case the price would bump back up.

I was thinking about cutting my losses and cashing out entirely when it dropped below $30 after the June layoffs, and again in November when it was below $20, and then yet again when I left the company in January of this year, but the analyst consensus seemed to be around $32-34 through all of that so I held on -- kinda glad I did now instead of selling at the bottom.

For me the smelliest part of this is the timestamps. The C&D is dated April 3. The InfoWorld article is timestamped 8:49 AM PDT, the same day, and the files called out in both places are the exact same five. There is no way I can see that the article wasn't just a rehash of a draft C&D provided to Matt Asay before it was even delivered to the OpenTofu project, and without either HashiCorp or Asay giving OpenTofu a chance to respond. Even if the C&D were 100% justified (and it's clearly not), that is extremely dirty pool.

Who is your direct manager? If it's not one of these PMs, get them involved in this conversation with both. If it is, that's whose tasks get priority. If it's "both" but one is a dotted-line report, the dotted-line PM is second fiddle. If it's "both" and both lines are solid instead of one being dotted, then your organization is dysfunctional and your best bet is to try to get one to assign tasks to you by way of the other.

I've been in this situation before as a consultant, except in my case it was PMs repeatedly scheduling me for multiple on-site visits on conflicting dates. I didn't have the power to tell either one "no", but what I did have was the power to say "I have a conflicting assignment during that time, if you want me to do this one instead, you need to get [my manager] to reassign my priorities."

Unfortunately the fact that I could make them talk to somebody else never actually solved the underlying problem of each one insisting they had the right to schedule 100% of my time, but at least when those conflicts happened, I didn't have to resolve them myself.

If your direct manager isn't willing to referee this (up to and including telling those PMs to only assign you tasks through them if they can't get their act together between them), or you don't have a single direct manager to act as referee, or you're still being held responsible for the results of both projects by managers above yours, that's your cue that it's time to look for a new position, either internally or externally.

Small consultancies also tend to fall into the trap of having one client (often their first client) that they utterly depend on the money from... but who doesn't depend on them to be able to survive. That customer almost always knows the relationship is unbalanced in their favor (sometimes they went into the relationship specifically because they knew it would be that way) and they will run you ragged with unreasonable requests, burning out your staff and ruining your relationships with other clients because you have to keep them happy so they keep writing checks (and then you're even more dependent on them, as a rancid little bonus).

The only way out is to either gut your way through it till you grow enough to be able to push back without risking your existence; detect that things are going that way early and fire them as a customer before it ever gets to that point... or keep burning out staff till you can't find fresh faces, then close up shop.

That was my first recollection -- after CoreOS' Flannel, I think the next two (or at least two of the earliest) overlay networks available for Kubernetes were Weave Net and Calico (whose core maintainers started Tigera). Flannel is still around and under active development despite CoreOS being long gone; hopefully the tools Weave employees maintained can keep healthy communities going around them.

With my browser full-screened and set at 133% zoom for the sake of my eyes, literally 100% of the screen real estate is either ad content (the largest section of which appears to be trying to load a broken image or video, so it's just a huge black rectangle with a tiny missing-image icon in the center) or the navbar, header banner and section header. I can't see any of the actual article without scrolling down.

This is a big reason I became disillusioned very quickly with US federal contracting and have distanced myself firmly from anything to do with it for the past several years. To a contractor the idea of saving the taxpayer money by accomplishing the contract goals early and/or under-budget is ludicrous — I was told in so many words by my management “the contract allows for up to X option years for a total of up to Y dollars, and we intend to get as many of those years and dollars as we can up to the full value, not leave them lying on the table. And our customer wants the same thing, because they need to fully spend their allocated budget.”

Basically large parts of US federal contracting run indistinguishably from a make-work program for contract firms and the COTRs and other contract-management staff working with them. It’s a major reason I’m certain that “modern IT” efforts like 18F or USDS or “groundbreaking” reforms like FITARA will never be allowed to amount to much (absent a Truman-style “integrate the military and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about it” mandate) — there’s too much money and too many staff wrapped up in the way things currently work, which is how they’ve worked longer than most of the people now in the system have been alive. None of the modernization or reforms will ever be completely terminated or repealed, because they’re too useful to point to as evidence that “see, we are aware of the problem and we are doing something about it”. Just as long as “something” never has any significant long-term impact on anybody’s budget, allocated FTEs, or revenue.

I have one of those little “binary clocks” (it technically displays in BCD, but it’s still “binary”, right?). When I first set it up, it was running really fast —- like it was gaining hours over the course of a day.

Turns out it had a button combo for “switch between 50Hz and 60Hz mode” that was similar to its combo for (what I thought I was setting) “switch between 12- and 24-hour mode”. (I think the 12/24 switch was “hold the hour button down while plugging in” and the 50/60 switch was “hold both buttons down while plugging in”.)

You can easily grow so large that you hit a limit of what a given cloud provider will allow (e.g. API calls or IOPS) at a price that fits into your budget for a task, even if you're not actually especially large. (AWS will give you all the IOPS you can ever use... as long as you have the money to pay.) In that case, being able to pivot to another cloud provider quickly can save your burn rate.

(Flashback to my ITIL instructor in 2008 talking about Service Catalogs and how they are meant to include even discontinued products. "Will Microsoft support Windows 3.1 for you today? YES! Bring money.")

This is different from how Internet standards have always developed how, again?

When article says “plus or minus $500”, it’s not talking about the bid/ask spread on a given exchange, but the price difference from one exchange to the next, which is exactly what your own second link shows.

And sure, you can cash out, and see a number in a balance statement. How hard is it to get that cash out of Bitfinex into a real bank though? (I’m not even going to address the inherent hilarity of citing Bitfinex as proof that things are A-OK in Bitcoinia.)

I think a large part of the point in that part of the article is that the price gap between exchanges is much wider than it is for just about any security trading on an established stock or commodity exchange (because the time and fees involved in exploiting that gap for Bitcoin make arbitrage hard to pull off, so the gap-tightening effects of it don’t kick in). You aren’t going to see inter-exchange differences of several percentage points in the price of a share, because savvy traders/trading bots would instantly jump on it and the gap would tighten up again.

Even then, if Coca-Cola goes out of business, and the stock is delisted (so the price is effectively zero or close to it), you still own 1 millionth or whatever of the company, and the company has actual tangible and intangible assets (including its name, which in Coca-Cola’s case would be one of its most valuable) that can be liquidated to recoup value to the owners. If Bitcoin goes to zero, there’s no backing store of value to sell — you own a number whose entire value in other monetary units is based on people wanting to buy it, not on any asset or guarantee backing it.

How recently is “recently”? It seems (to me as an outside observer) that it’s gotten notably harder to get national-currency money out of exchanges in the last, say, 6 months, because (I’m guessing) as the price goes on an upward run, more people who bought low are trying to sell to realize those gains, which triggers higher transaction volume, which suddenly prompts correspondent banks to look at exactly what all this money moving around is — at which point AML/KYC processes kick in and some banks decide the relationship with the exchange is too risky.

Didn’t one of the major crypto exchanges recently lose all its correspondents for awhile and then picked up a single one again?

Disappointing to see a co-founder of Wired pushing the "real names fix things" meme. We had that discussion with G+ how many years ago? It did nothing but generate negative press for Google until they quietly half-buried it long after it was possible to salvage any goodwill from doing so.

Facebook actually has a real-names policy, but they enforce it very spottily, and there's a reason why.

The only truly workable real-name policy is the jwz one:

"1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect that the name they are using is not their legal name. 2. There is no step 2."

> On-demand (Netflix, Hulu, HBO's online thingy, iPlayer, what have you) has been the most effective way to actually recover rights-holder revenues.

And yet those same rights-holders seem hell-bent on squandering the opportunity they were given, by splintering their offerings among their own pay services instead of offering them multiple places. I already pay for Netflix. I'm considering paying for Hulu. But there's no way I'm going to pay Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, Google, CBS, HBO, Showtime, etc., etc., et-frigging-cetera just to get access to content I care marginally less and less about. (Sorry, CBS, I'm not paying your monthly fee just for Star Trek Discovery no matter how much you think that show is worth it.)

You have the content. People want the content. Offer it on your own services if you really feel that degree of vanity about it, but also offer it on enough other major services that any mix of two or three has one that has your stuff on it. You'll make more money, they'll make more money, and I'll get to watch everything I want.

The reality though is it may be the employer who has caused the employee to fall behind/out of relevance. Quick example: while working on a federal contract I had a co-worker who was in charge of the contract's Altiris infrastructure. That was all he was allowed to charge time for on that contract and it was the only contract he was on. To learn something new he either 1) had to carve it out of his personal time, 2) commit federal timesheet fraud or 3) take a pay cut. Meanwhile others of us were being sent off to learn new products like vSphere. Speculation was that our management was deliberately monopolizing his time on this one thing because it was getting hard to find people to do Altiris and they didn't want to pay for teaching him something more relevant and have him use it to get a new job elsewhere.

Eventually, he did find another job and moved on, and I got a steady stream of recruiters who saw Altiris on my resume because it had been a big part of my duties at that and my previous employer. Nope, I already know where that trapdoor goes, thanks but no thanks.

Now if your employer does offer continuing-ed/tech-training and you don't take full advantage of it, that's on you, although even that can be hard since some employers offer it only if it's job-relevant -- e.g. only the Windows tech staff can take Microsoft training, only the Linux staff can take Red Hat courses, only the networking staff can take Cisco courses, etc.

Have a look at /coreos on GitHub -- flannel, dex and prometheus-operator all use vendoring, just looking at what's pinned. matchbox does also.

Sure, OSI has an official doctrine, and Perens has (or had) kind of a unique point of view within that, about the two terms being fully synonymous -- but he partly walked back that view later, and Stallman and FSF's has historically been very different:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

And especially:

"The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.... Most discussion of 'open source' pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success..."

And of course OSI officially wrote "We realized it was time to dump the confrontational attitude that has been associated with 'free software' in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape." (http://web.archive.org/web/19981206185148/http://www.opensou...)

In other words, "open source" was about depoliticizing "free software" to make it more commercially palatable. (And arguably, it worked.)

"back before free software was renamed to open source in 1998"

That's an interesting reading of history, and one that the creators of the terms "free software" and "open source" would probably both vigorously dispute.

I remember in 1993-1994 playing Cosmic Osmo on a Mac. All the old pre-Myst Cyan games (Manhole, Osmo, Spelunx) were basically HyperCard stacks, which didn't directly allow for any but the crudest animation. But Cyan had integrated MacroMind VideoWorks, which later became Macromedia Director, into Osmo. The effect over other HyperCard stacks was striking. You could actually play little minigames in the Osmo world.

Then I went off to college the next year and found out about the whole "web" thing, and again everything was flat and mostly static. Then Macromedia Shockwave and Flash and Java came along, and it was just like Osmo vs. Manhole, only more so. For a long time, your browser install wasn't complete till you had Java, RealPlayer, Shockwave and Flash installed (and later, QuickTime).

(For nostalgia purposes, Steam has all the Cyan games from Manhole on up as a bundle; you can also play the original Manhole/Osmo/Spelunx in the SheepShaver emulator if you can get hold of firmware plus OS and game discs.)

The great thing about reading this comment thread is that I basically already read it a couple of weeks ago, because a friend of mine (David Gerard, of Wikipedia, RationalWiki and Rocknerd Internet fame) let me preview his forthcoming e-book _Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain_. There's a whole section in there about smart contracts, Ethereum, and The DAO that goes over much of what commenters here have mentioned ("non-reversibility, till it's our money at stake", the requirement that everyone write and read code perfectly, the problems with the very idea of immutability in contracts, etc.)

If people are interested, it's on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2trOjJS (I have no financial interest in it, but I bet a lot of people in this thread would enjoy reading it and/or writing long diatribes on why he is wrong about everything in it.)

"ZIP codes were arbitrarily delineated and covered a range of neighborhood types; in most small and midsized cities, one ZIP code can cover urban, suburban and rural neighborhoods with highly variable socioeconomic characteristics."

My own ZIP code is a perfect example of this. We're in the ZIP code of Town A, but Town B is actually the closest incorporated town to us. The Town A ZIP code extends between the state line and a river, up the eastern edge of our county. That covers our large development, which has people from very poor to very wealthy, four smallish unincorporated communities that are mostly poor-to-median, an incorporated town of about 1,000 bordering Town A, and the actual Town A which is a National Historical Park and consequently is mostly shops and museums catering to tourists and actually has very few residents (about 300 out of about 13000 that live in the ZIP code).

This is great if all your DNS is done via cloud providers like Dyn and Route53, but can I use this to manage zones in traditional DNS instances? I don't see a BIND/dnsmasq/djbdns provider or any code referencing those or other traditional name servers.