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Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

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Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#131

Post by simion314 »

Retric wrote: post #81
mancerayder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All well and good -- solid arguments except when you consider things like: Apple's Mac Pro (the big tower) had upgradeable RAM and video, and the newer versions (the little black shiny pretty cylinder) were soldered on. That's less about lawsuits and support costs -- it's memory for God's sake and everyone else lets the consumer physically upgrade it, even many laptops. It's about going through the cartel to get the…

Playing devils advocate. RAM is the #1 cause if computers crashes largely because people think cheap or overclocked RAM is fine. Windows would have a vastly better reputation if it was always paired up with good hardware.

>RAM is the #1 cause if computers crashes

Can you source this or is an opinion? I don't have facts by I think drivers are #1 issues for hard crashes.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#132

Post by geofft »

sokoloff wrote: post #122
dpkonofa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really depends on what your definition of "flourish" is. The United States is really the only country that has "flourished" under a capitalist system and that's only if you define that through the definition of capitalism which is to say that there is more capital in the US than in other nations. Attributing that to capitalism, though, and not to years and years of industrial progress, human slavery, and, arguab…

The contemporary competitors to the US with different economic fundamentals (China and the USSR primarily) also experienced/inflicted slavery, immoral behavior, and industrial progress, yet they didn't see nearly the same level of economic or societal development for the overwhelmingly vast majority of their population over their time of heavy-handed central planning economics. If you knew you'd be assigned at birth…

How much of this is simply that capitalism is more efficient at producing weapons of war, and the US was able to force the USSR and China to spend significant resources on defense?

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#134

Post by tw04 »

vkou wrote: post #126
tw04 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tesla to bail out SolarCity so that SpaceX bond holdings doesn't go bust? Right... so SpaceX doesn't go bust. Not "so he can personally enrich himself". Nothing I've seen thus far from Elon indicates to me that his decision making is based entirely on his personal net-worth. In fact most of his moves show the exact OPPOSITE - that he doesn't care at all about his personal wealth and he cares about changing the world…

Elon is a majority shareholder in SpaceX.

>Elon is a majority shareholder in SpaceX.

And you think the reason Space-x exists is to make Elon richer? Or you think it's because he wants to see humans colonize the universe?

The entirety of Oracle's existence is to make Larry rich.

While I think Elon needs to get off twitter and never post another message there again, I think his reasons for founding Space-X and Tesla go far, far beyond personal wealth. There are a million other investments he could've gone in on to enrich himself without risking everything.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#135

Post by geodel »

sys_64738 wrote: post #39
tsomctl wrote: post #5

"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's ve…

Whenever I read this and the java guy Gosling they are incredibly negative about Oracle. One wonders if there is something behind all this as it appears they were figures of respect and authority at their previous company. But upon being consumed by Oracle was that still the case? I get the impression that there is underlying bitterness and resentment festering here due to something like that.

Well Java guy got his picnic canceled by Oracle as he detailed on his blog. If I had been dreaming of eating hot dogs at picnic for months and it got canceled at last minute I wouldn't be happy either.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#136

Post by apercu »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #83
mancerayder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All well and good -- solid arguments except when you consider things like: Apple's Mac Pro (the big tower) had upgradeable RAM and video, and the newer versions (the little black shiny pretty cylinder) were soldered on. That's less about lawsuits and support costs -- it's memory for God's sake and everyone else lets the consumer physically upgrade it, even many laptops. It's about going through the cartel to get the…

The trashbin Mac Pro can also be upgraded - RAM, SSD, GPU and even the CPU. The problem is that the SSD and GPU use weird form factors and thus are hard to find and expensive. It's the laptops where everything is soldered on.

Not just. I have a 2015 iMac. It was running out of memory so I went to upgrade it. Nope, soldered in. Ended up buying a new computer. Doesn't make me happy.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#137

Post by nindalf »

sanderjd wrote: post #82
warent wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually the first I've heard the speech, so to me personally it added value at least.

Yep, I've stopped being annoyed by seemingly repetitive comments. On any given topic there is always both a gtirloni who has heard it a million times and a warent who never has.

Oh I love repetitive comments.

Top comment on every article about an advertising company -> "remember! you're not the customer! you're the product!" followed by a bunch of folks praising this profound insight.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#138

Post by blackoil »

dpkonofa wrote: post #112
sokoloff wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely it has some benefit for the society that lives under it? It does seem that societies with generally capitalist systems flourish to a much greater degree than societies that are organized under any other dominant economic system.

That really depends on what your definition of "flourish" is. The United States is really the only country that has "flourished" under a capitalist system and that's only if you define that through the definition of capitalism which is to say that there is more capital in the US than in other nations. Attributing that to capitalism, though, and not to years and years of industrial progress, human slavery, and, arguab…

As per `Homo Sapiens` Slavery was a direct result of capitalism. Humans like all other resource were optimized for maximum o/p and profit, and if not for Hitler to have taken racism to home and to extreme. People may not have seen error in the way. Its how as society we don't rise against treatment of cows in factory farming.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#139

Post by bcantrill »

throwaway765456 wrote: post #72
tsomctl wrote: post #5

"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's ve…

I've always wondered how Mr. Cantrill felt when in 2015, after years of hearing his vitriol about Oracle, more than a few of his Joyent team left him to follow Mark Cavage to Oracle including Node.js frontman TJ. This would have been a substantial hit to the tight US development team. Has Mr. Cantrill spoken on how he processed that?

I hit on some of this in the Reddit AMA that happened in 2015[1], but that AMA was asking the more general question about losing people, not the more specific question about losing people to Oracle. The answer is that it was of course gutting and surprising, and it took a while to process -- it was hard to not read it as a personal rebuke! But of course, people don't generally alter their career trajectory to spite others (that is, you don't hear "Yeah, my new job is a terrible team solving an uninteresting problem within an awful company -- but boy did I ever stick it to my former boss!"), but rather to seek their own opportunity.

So I came to accept that each of them (and there were quite a few!) left for the opportunity they saw at Oracle. As for why Oracle: at the time, they were building a de novo cloud, and they were doing it by hiring engineers away from other cloud providers, with a sharp focus on compensation. And in particular: for the ex-AWS'ers at Joyent, one of their former senior colleagues at AWS (Don Johnson) had gone to Oracle to take a leadership position[2]; I think it's fair to say that those who went to Oracle saw themselves as joining Don as much (if not more) than they were joining Oracle.

Of course, none of this made it any easier for me or for the team to swallow -- and it has been of little solace that those who left for Oracle have (of course!) discovered that Oracle is what it is, with several of them having now left Oracle for other opportunities[3]. They may have learned about themselves what Oracle taught me about myself: that in addition to the team I'm on and the problem I'm solving, the company's larger mission is, in fact, important to me -- and that Oracle's emptiness in this regard can be crushingly soul-depleting.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_o...

[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2014/oracle-hire-100-engineers-seat...

[3] https://twitter.com/mcavage/status/969762887530037248

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#140

Post by vkou »

tw04 wrote: post #134
vkou wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is a majority shareholder in SpaceX.

>Elon is a majority shareholder in SpaceX. And you think the reason Space-x exists is to make Elon richer? Or you think it's because he wants to see humans colonize the universe? The entirety of Oracle's existence is to make Larry rich. While I think Elon needs to get off twitter and never post another message there again, I think his reasons for founding Space-X and Tesla go far, far beyond personal wealth. There ar…

It doesn't matter what I think it's purpose is. As a TSLA officer, his job is to use TSLA resources to produce value for TSLA shareholders, not to bail out unrelated companies, especially ones that have a big friggin conflict of interest attached to them.

It doesn't matter if SpaceX's stated mission is a vanity Mars project, or something easier, and actually useful, like eradicating malaria, or stopping AGW, or bringing about the Worker's Paradise to Earth. You don't pilfer a publically traded company to fund it.

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