Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reporter. https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...
what kind of keyboard is that?
That's a bloomberg terminal keyboard.
What Happened with Supermicro?
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: What Happened with Supermicro?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best photo I could find: http://meritage-partners.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2016/05... I love that old school Silicon Valley aesthetic.
That reminds me of newspaper ads for someone selling beige box PCs.
Remember the old catalogs that were phone book sized of all of the mail order PC parts vendors? er, what's a phone book you ask? My first PC was built from one of these. It was a 486 after the Pentium line was introduced.
Re: What Happened with Supermicro?
#53Somewhat unrelated: we used to do a lot of business with supermicro. In a meeting one time I asked one of their guys why their billboards are so weird looking (anyone who’s driven down 880 past their building knows what I’m taking about). They have these billboards that have weird slogans and super amateur looking graphics that look like they were made in MS paint. So I asked the guy about them cause I thought it was…
The best photo I could find: http://meritage-partners.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2016/05... I love that old school Silicon Valley aesthetic.
Oh wow, that does give me mid-90s PC Magazine flashbacks.
Re: What Happened with Supermicro?
#54There's an ongoing PR push to paint anything from China as unsecure, cheap or untrustworthy. Now I see regular pieces on Bloomberg or popular sites like theVerge, and all those pieces have no substantial facts in them. I know reporters are hungry for stories, and they would eat up a semi-prepared file with all the "facts" easily laid out for them. This is not new. There was something very similar in the late 80s and…
Japan did make giant leaps... but perhaps their own success (rising wages) and failures (Sony is a shadow of its former self) got in the way. We can’t use it as a model for how it’ll work out for China, with a totally different government structure that so far has been very effective and competent.
To me, the old Sony electronics was way ahead of anything US. Sony Beta/Betacam, cameras, etc. Also JVC's VHS. After RCA or Ampex, the US had really been left behind in the video/TV forefront.
Re: What Happened with Supermicro?
#55Huh. so shortly after the story broke, I bought a bunch of SMCI. (It's actually the first OTC stock I've ever bought. It was easier than I thought, too... I had to call vanguard to enable OTC trading, but after that? super easy.) I sold it months later, at a pretty good profit, mostly 'cause while I think the bloomburg accusations are clearly false, there are huge accounting irregularities surrounding supermicro; get…
Likewise, it's been good until the recent tariff war news. I made similar money in the 2008 crash betting that certain banks would not fail.
After 9/11, American Airlines took a beating. I was in my 20s and had no clue about stocks. I went to my IRA guy, and asked to buy AA stock. I was told because it was down in the penny stocks they could not sell it. I had no idea of how else to buy stocks, and let it go. Regret that every time I think about it.
Re: What Happened with Supermicro?
#56I just found it hilarious many HN dudes so conclusively believed it at first glance. Maybe programmers arent any better at analytical thinking anyway
Hilariously enough it was proven as plausible and a proof of concept was built.
Re: What Happened with Supermicro?
#57I just found it hilarious many HN dudes so conclusively believed it at first glance. Maybe programmers arent any better at analytical thinking anyway
Critical, not analytical. The former is an emotional state of mind enabling the beginning of the analytical thought process.
Re: What Happened with Supermicro?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it's not that expensive to just take some hi-res X-ray photos of old and new boards of the same make, and compare the trace paths near each component. Maybe you can even take a visual diff of the X-ray negatives, if you can get everything lined up tightly enough. You can parallelize this search, because the people doing it don't need to know much about what they're looking for—they're just hunting for visual…
> Unless/until one of them actually finds anything different ... at that point, all hell also breaks loose Boards bought weeks or months apart might have lots of differences in traces and components due to engineering modifications and normal changes in suppliers. Do you really think that all hell would break loose if you showed that there were differences between a Supermicro board made in March 2018 and one made in…
Is that really true? Granted I'm working on low volume stuff (1000's of units) in a niche B2B setting, but the times for rolling out a new rev of a board can sometimes be measured in quarters. Changing traces/components can have unforeseen effects for even fairly minor things, you can't just have a Tier1/2 CM tool up without a round of DVT. I doubt boards with the same PN change very often if at all, but I'd be curious to know if i'm wrong.
Re: What Happened with Supermicro?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those look like mobile/manufactured, so in the $400-600k range.
Well, around $200-300K, based on checking prices on Zillow for what sure appear to be spaces in that mobile home park (around Oakland Road in San Jose, ZIP code 95131). I don't think I've ever seen a mobile home listed for a half-million even in this area, although I've seen ones the mid-$300s. (Granted, this is still nuts, given that in Sacramento or Tampa, the other places I've idly priced homes, these would be und…
What's amazing to me is that people are willing to pay high prices for a manufactured home in Silicon Valley even though the likelihood of the mobile home park's land being sold to developers is higher than anywhere else.
This has already happened in a few places in the area. In Sunnyvale there are massive developments of million-dollar condos literally next door to mobile home parks. How much longer can those places survive?
One would think that the risk would make people less likely to buy. There aren't very many places in the area for people to move their homes to if the land they are sitting on gets sold.
Re: What Happened with Supermicro?
#60There's an ongoing PR push to paint anything from China as unsecure, cheap or untrustworthy. Now I see regular pieces on Bloomberg or popular sites like theVerge, and all those pieces have no substantial facts in them. I know reporters are hungry for stories, and they would eat up a semi-prepared file with all the "facts" easily laid out for them. This is not new. There was something very similar in the late 80s and…
Japan did make giant leaps... but perhaps their own success (rising wages) and failures (Sony is a shadow of its former self) got in the way. We can’t use it as a model for how it’ll work out for China, with a totally different government structure that so far has been very effective and competent.
> a totally different government structure that so far has been very effective and competent.
Authoritarian regimes can look appealing (from the outside, anyway) until circumstances change. Then they falls apart spectacularly because the commercial and governmental institutions are either absent, very weak, or are unable to adapt to the change. For example, the Soviet Union.