A good team of consultants is worth their weight in gold but, like everyone else, a good team is rare.
Agreed!
Readit Newsbalabaster commented on Do McKinsey and other consultants do anything useful? economist.com/leaders/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus
balabaster commented on Do McKinsey and other consultants do anything useful? economist.com/leaders/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus
Has anyone joined a project where Accenture developers are building a new solution that's gone well?
... asking for a friend.
I will tell you, having been approached by Accenture a number of times that the rates they offer their consultants are far below what a decent consultant expects to get paid. You get what you pay for. You're mileage may vary.
balabaster commented on Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia · Posted by u/bbarnett
You can return Amazon purchases without a printer. I've done it multiple times. You can either have them mail you a label (for $1) or take it to a UPS Store where they scan a barcode on your phone.
In the U.S. maybe those options work, but in Canada they don't. If by chance the goods were shipped via a courier that will scan the barcode to return, that works - UPS for instance, but 90% of the time you need to print a return label because the goods aren't returned via a carrier that supports that.
balabaster commented on Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia · Posted by u/bbarnett
I can't wrap my head around how the printer market has turned into this absolutely dispicable, foul state that it is in right now.
Decades of innovation that have been invested, not to make a better product, but mostly on how to extract more and more money from their victims, I mean "customers".
I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device that might, at the whim of the manufacturer, decide that the way I'm using it is not okay anymore, is probably designed to break after two years, requires me to sign up for a subscription service for ink, or whatever BS else the decision makers in this space come up with.
I haven't had a printer for the past 3 years and I refuse to buy one because of the disgusting economic and environmental practices of the ink mafia. Their behaviour has been beyond despicable for decades but somehow the world has just shrugged their shoulders and accepted it.
I have an iPad and downloaded PDF Expert and got an Apple Pencil to sign digital documents and I've only occasionally had issues I can't get around - Amazon return labels are the biggest pain in the ass.
If you're from Amazon, sort out a way we can ship returns without needing a printer!
balabaster commented on Clairnote: An alternative music notation system clairnote.org/... · Posted by u/agmand
At a glance, this is a neat concept, but doesn't seem to come at the problem from the perspective of the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians); rather, it appears to have been written by somebody who was frustrated by trying to learn to read music. For experienced musicians, the priorities are a) legibility for sight-reading and transcription (which this system, with indistinguishable sitting/hanging notes and pervasive ledger lines fails) and b) musical context for expressive decisions, such as information about key, mode, modulation and harmonic content as hinted at by the key signatures and accidentals (which this system downplays as unnecessary).
Well I can't speak for everyone else obviously, but I find traditional notation much easier to read than Clairnote's alternative. Even with the description, I find it harder to glance at the Clairnote notation and see what it means.
balabaster commented on A Gentle Introduction to SSR hire.jonasgalvez.com.br/2... · Posted by u/jgalvez
And the context of "Server-Side Rendering" defaults to JavaScript.. Like PHP, Django and Rails don't even exist
Along with a host of other server side "languages" - ASP, PERL/CGI... all this has been done before. Just as we've come full circle on infrastructure where we were trying to eke every ounce of performance out of memory and CPU cycles because supply was short, now we do so because we're charged by the cycle, memory overhead, bandwidth we're beginning to recycle concepts like server side rendering... which has been done since as long as PERL/CGI existed back in the 90s.
It's funny how we just keep reusing the same ideas and calling them new... it makes me wonder why the history of relevant technologies aren't taught in software development classes so we can actually forge a path forward instead of keep doing the same things over and over again...
balabaster commented on Is the DTS vs. Dolby war effectively over? whathifi.com/features/is-... · Posted by u/wooptoo
Yes, Dolby won. By being cheap to implement.
I used to work in this space and I've dealt with:
- Barco Auro 3D
- Frauenhofer MPEG-H
- Dolby Atoms
- DTS:X
The idea behind Auro3D is to just use a lot of discrete channels, which is great for cinemas with a static playback architecture, but there's no way to adjust the mixing based on the listener's speaker setup. So it is difficult to make sound great for home use unless you have lots of space to hang things on your ceiling. (5 top speakers needed)
MPEG-H can do everything but it's difficult to configure and was fully specified very late, after Dolby Atmos was already in production. That said, this is the agreed-upon default standard for broadcast, because it supports stuff like 200 language-independent 3D objects + 5 language-dependent voice actor tracks, all positioned in 3D. MPEG-H can also be converted easily to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.
Many professionals agree that DTS:X is the best quality consumer option. It also theoretically supports quite a lot of customization. But ASIC implementations tend to freeze those because otherwise it's too expensive. And it still is expensive.
Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters with delay modules in between. That means it's by far the lowest-tech solution on the list. And that means cheap ASIC implementations. I believe this is why Atmos won.
If I remember correctly, DTS:X is a $4 chip, Atmos is a $0.5 chip.
If I recall rightly, this is why VHS beat out the higher quality Betamax back in the day of video tapes - it was cheaper to produce using VHS so everything was on VHS. Because everything was on VHS, that was what people bought and the higher quality Betamax lost enough market to survive.
It's a shame that the higher quality product isn't always what wins and kind of says something about our Walmart approach to life.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. The most important in my mind is that the risk of the vehicle being hacked and carjacked remotely is always present.
With the presence of an automation kill-switch and manual human controls the driver can always take back control.
Without those, the driver is at the mercy of the hacker.
Vehicle automation falls under the SCADA sub-domain of cyber-security. SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and the cyber-security in SCADA systems is light-years behind. Pro-tip: going into cyber and want a good certification (if such a thing exists)..then get CISSP-SCADA.
Some relevant articles:
[1] https://physicsworld.com/a/how-to-hack-a-self-driving-car/
[2] https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-self-driving-cars-vulnera...
[3] https://blog.tesu.edu/should-we-be-worried-about-the-hacking...
Having spent half a decade working in Oil & Gas flow control systems directly, I can confirm that 10 years ago when I left that industry, cyber security was still not even a consideration. Light years behind wasn't an accurate statement - non-existent was more accurate.
Admittedly computer systems have come a long way in ten years, but given the attitudes and technical expertise of a lot of the people I worked alongside, I would say there's a reasonable chance the needle hasn't moved very far.
They're excruciatingly good at getting oil out of the ground and getting it to market, but they're not going to be winning capture the flag at Defcon or Blackhat any time soon...
A few comments on this from an Indian perspective. Apple products are quite expensive here too, when compared against U.S. prices (plus sales tax). It may seem as if this is because of customs duties, but that’s not the entire story.
Many companies tend to have geographically differentiated pricing to expand their market and make more money. Even if the prices aren’t completely matching the local currency equivalent (with respect to USD) and local conditions, they would have some compensation applied.
Apple has historically been against differentiated pricing, especially for its hardware. It also focuses heavily on retaining its 35% (approx.) profit margins. Only on a few services has Apple reduced pricing in the recent years in some countries (for example, in India, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+ and Apple Music are priced at nearly one fourth of the U.S. prices, but iCloud is priced the same as in the U.S.).
I’m not saying that all Apple hardware products are sold at the USD price plus local customs duties and taxes in other regions, but almost all of them are. What’s more ridiculous is that the prices don’t go down much even when Apple is assembling products locally and doesn’t have to pay as much in duties (a few iPhone models are assembled in India).
Since Apple has this business model, people in India who do know of someone coming from the U.S. or Dubai or another country/location where these are cheaper ask them to purchase those there and bring them down. There are several “Bring me this from there (BMTFT)” groups on social media to connect people.
For individual travelers the duty free limit (legal) plus duty evasion (not legal) in certain cases offer big incentives not to buy locally. I’m sure there’s plenty of organized smuggling also going on.
Whatever metrics Apple is tracking on sales by country get skewed by this, tilting heavily towards U.S. and other countries and making them seem larger than they are, while also making the countries with typically weaker currencies and higher duties seem as smaller markets than they are. (I know Apple can get country wise usage numbers from its telemetry in iOS, the App Store and other Apple apps)
I just had that request from my girlfriend in the Netherlands to bring back an iPad mini in this trip because they're $100 less for the 256GB model here in Canada than they work out to in the Netherlands once exchange rates and taxes are considered.
Living close to the U.S. border, it's quite easy for me to do a 24-48 hour jaunt down to the U.S. - long enough to qualify for the customs exemptions and bring cheap electronics back to Canada. The only down side is that if anything goes wrong with them, I have to cross the border back to the U.S. to deal with warranty issues.
Having an address in the Netherlands and parents in the UK also means that I have similar benefits in the opposite direction, sometimes stuff is way cheaper in the UK or Europe and if I need it I just pick it up there when I'm there. The down side there being that they're obviously cabled for European or UK plugs which means I either need to replace the cables or, thankfully, most stuff is rechargeable via USB-C now, so all I need are European, British and American USB-C charging units and everything carries on as normal.
1. Experts in their field often reach a point in their career where they've run into enough road blocks and solved enough major problems in their field that they can see some benefit in helping others avoid/solve said problems on fast track. [This is where I'm at]
2. Companies often have need for on-tap expertise to solve problems on fast track without being required to commit for the long haul.
And here is the intersection of consulting. I've solved about a million problems at this point in my career. Many of them solved the hard way - the way I'd like you not to have to solve them. I've spotted patterns that allow you to predict what kind of behaviours and working processes will cause what kinds of problems and I've formed patterns and processes that allow clients to sidestep issues before they become issues.
Wouldn't it be useful to benefit from that?
Many major consultancies, sadly, hire a ton of people that haven't put in the time and built the skills to be as effective as you may like - which is reflected by the fact that every time I've been approached by Accenture they've offered rates that only a junior or intermediate level consultant would go for.
This explains why a lot of customers part ways with consultancies with a bad taste in their mouth. This isn't the grade of "expertise" you expect when you hire a consultancy. You expect senior or principal level resources for the rates you pay - people who have done the time, solved the problems and come armed with the solutions; not juniors and intermediates who may be great bums in seats, but not what you hire big expensive consultancies to provide.