Viewing profile — fensterblick

Heard a talk by their CEO and I was impressed by his focus on technology as a differentiator and competitive advantage. I will also say that technology is more than just the websit…

Recently, I've heard of several companies folding up SRE and moving individuals to their SWE teams. Rumors are that LinkedIn, Adobe, and Robinhood have done this. This made me thin…

Questions for the founding team, and others: What books or resources did you helpful in understanding the plumbing of the US banking system?

That the IRS is not overwhelmingly prosecuting this type of crime. What's the basis for the converse? What numbers don't add up?

This has been true for decades. When my dad ran a gas station, the profit came from selling goods like food and cigarettes, or repair services. But he stopped selling cigarettes in…

That may be the case for some gas stations but it is hardly the case for the vast majority of them. The majority of them are run by law abiding citizens who want to follow the law.…

My father sold gas back in the day. He told me a story of an incident where he accidentally sold water instead of gas. When the supply tanker was filling up the underground reserve…

I want to like GnuCash but I just can't. I have found the UI to be confusing. I still use a freeware, abandoned version of Microsoft Money: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download…

I just started looking at Pinterest as a company to work for. From the outside, the way they treat their employees looks amazing. Things like KnitCon (an internal conference for em…

Amazon is still up almost 10x from its peak!

Regarding Mumbai, it depends on how you define "foreigner". The native population of Marathis only totals 22% in Mumbai. For some in India, these inter-Indian distinctions matter g…

That doesn't sound normal. Many alcohol stills use copper (wikipedia has this bit of information: "(a copper still) removes sulfur-based compounds from the alcohol that would make …

I have much disdain for GM's corporate culture. It is a company culture that knowingly allowed dangerous vehicles be sold for a decade until a Georgia litigator connected the dots …

The Ford family controls the stock with its supervoting shares. Their opinions are what matter. Otherwise, I agree with your comment.

I have been a Ford investor for several years. This is a big surprise for me. Ford has said they expect to have a fully autonomous vehicles by 2021 (link: https://corporate.ford.co…

With IBM, one can't help but feel this is a tactic to force layoffs without having to actually do a layoff. I believe they tried similar tactics in their Global Business Services d…

It's already happening. Several examples come to mind, but for now I'll use one that is relevant to Cisco: Palo Alto Networks offers several subscription based services for its sec…

I was convinced to install an ad blocker solely for the safety reasons. It is the new antivirus.

The article says: "Transferring four petabytes of data, it turned out, took about a day." Quite a feat - How did they manage to get 4 PB from S3 in a day, over the internet?

But Amazon wasn't the first. The Sun Grid was first (launched in March 2006).

"Talking your book" == putting money where your mouth is. Bill Gross, especially when he was at PIMCO running the world's largest bond fund, had to invest in what he believed in. T…

If they can do this right, they will get a lot more customers. Right now we use Lync/Skype for communication, which I loathe almost as much as Lotus Notes. This sentiment is shared…

This reminds me of the NYTimes Amazon story a few months ago. There were several people who wrote that their experiences were nothing like what the story portrayed. It was possible…

I thought it was creative, entertaining and different than the usual boring charts. It's not perfect but I still liked it!