Your approach to pay is really refreshing and attractive as an engineer, and also seems like the exact type of thing most VC or larger tech firms would really hate. That alone feels like evidence of your conviction
Ha! Well, I think our investors think we're very idiosyncratic -- but they also can't help but admire the results: a singular team, drawn in part by not having to worry about the Game of Thrones that is most corporate comp structures. ;)
Smaller teams will always win the communication overhead comparison even without thinking about organizational trees and therefore indirections too much. Communication is one of the biggest problems in organizations and the society, so more direct and therefore clearer communication can make the organization more efficient and keep the spirits high. It also doesn't hurt to have a team made only of extremely senior engineers or other professionals in their field. Even better, if those engineers are great personalities too. There is only one culprit: you have to have a very capable driver to put this powerful engine to good use so to say. If you drive the powerful engine in the wrong direction, you are actually putting more, not less distance between the destination and your current position. It seems, the goal for Oxide Computer is clear and I wholeheartedly wish you the best of luck.
I hope you are able to keep the investors convinced and stick with it! I'm a Swedish-American that's mostly lived in the US, but has been working back in Sweden for the last 4 years. I'm culturally mostly Californian, but the work atmosphere in Sweden is just less cut throat and much nicer. You pay with salary sure, but it's definitely worth it. Your descriptions on the website feel a bit similar.
I presume you wouldn't consider European remote given your PST timezone requirement, but I guess I'll consider your company one of those dream places to work were I to make my return to the US!
If you're in this thread "I built a PC, all my stuff has RGB, it's fine but I don't get it", try setting them all to the same color - you might be surprised how nice it looks. I set everything to white, but my roommate has a nice shade of purple he uses for everything. My real golden rule is absolutely no motion. Can't stand cycling rainbows or whatever.
I normally never have any RGB components in my personal builds but I was asked to build my niece a gaming rig for Christmas, figuring a kid would probably like a bit more of a blinged out system I sprung for RGB fans, RAM, water-cooler, and PSU and set them all to a light pink (the case is mint green, her other favorite color) and I have to say it turned me around on RGB lighting. It looked super clean and minimal once I tuned the brightness and color.
The only downsides I encountered were color matching among different components, it was a bit tedious. The other was the control software (gigabyte fusion 2.0) was very touchy, at one point I had to do a hard reset and wait for the caps to drain before I could get the LEDs functional again.
Not positive this does it, but I learnt this trick from some greybeards. Hit the rocker switch on the PSU, then attempt to power on the computer. Caps will be discharged from the attempted boot. It might not be perfect though. Just something I picked up.
This is the trick. If you get all of the lights set to the same color, plus maybe one that changes based on CPU temperature or something, and you make sure none of the colors clash, you can get a very nice/clean look.
Some games like Factorio have nice contextual cues for certain key bindings. I'm sure there's extensions available for most editors to do the same thing.
I let my CPU fan do its default color changing rainbow, buuuut only because it's under my desk where I can't see it. If nothing else, I can quickly glance down there and see if the computer is powered on.
AMD ships them standard with their Ryzen processors, I guess the market for enthusiast range parts has decided that we want RGB hardware.
Personally I think case aesthetics peaked around the Antec P180 which looked like brushed metal fridge and was one of the first cases to care about sound isolation. No window panel, so nobody cares how much of a mess my wiring is, and I can buy the RAM that's on sale instead of the one with color coordinated heatspreaders.
But if other people are into that, power to them.
Someday I'd like to do a "desktop literally built into the desk top" build and ditch the suspended computer mount completely, assuming I still even want to have a full desktop computer 10 years from now.
> Someday I'd like to do a "desktop literally built into the desk top"
For 7 years my desktop has been literally just a motherboard sitting on a cut-up yoga mat on my bookshelf. [1] The SSDs are piled next to it. My work PC is zip-tied to a milk crate. Don't let people fool you, you can be pretty creative with your definition of "case".
My old i5-2500K based build was like that for many, many years. It sat on my desk on top of an anti-static bag (that the motherboard came in). The new graphics card I had, which was a gtx 480 maybe, wouldn't fit in the old case I had.
It took me at least 5 years to get a new case, much to my wife's annoyance.
No idea, at the very least it didn't seem to build up a static charge, and it's worked fine for me for a long time. I imagine it probably depends on the specific yoga mat.
I used to just have it directly on the wood, which was fine too, but then I put it on top of an upside-down, powder-coated-metal IKEA drawer thing (so I could put the power supply underneath for more shelf space). My fiancee was worried it might get scratched and conduct at some point, so we added the yoga mat.
You could just bolt a 1U rackmount server to the underside of a desktop. Or get a desk that's 1.75 inches thick, cut a hole of the appropriate size, and recess the server into it. There are lots of under the desk computer mounts, but I haven't seen a recessed one.
Except without the glass top. Or perhaps glass with a very dark tint so that it looks black, but with sufficiently bright internal lighting you can see through it.
The easier and more likely version would be to make the computer fit in a normal desk drawer. Prefer that to a 1U on account of fan size as another commenter mentioned, but being off to one side instead of the whole desk surface has the benefit of not making the whole desk chunkier.
Biggest issue I find with using a 1u case for a client is fan noise - short of some clever modification to the side panels to fit larger fans transverse, it's near impossible to get acceptably quiet 1u fans.
Might be nice to have the fan color change with the cpu temp, but otherwise it always seems gaudy. I like things having function in addition to form.
Then again, I also gave up on desktops roughly 8 years ago. If it isn't my laptop it is a NUC or similar small form factor thing that can be mounted on the back of the monitor or otherwise hidden away.
I was used to always getting an aftermarket cooler for previous Intel builds to replace the stock one with the whiny little fan, but the included Ryzen 7 cooler is comparatively great (unnecessary bling aside).
Be careful aiming for sound isolation, it can be counterproductive.
Generally speaking "sound isolation" means reducing where sound can escape from the case, and putting some noise absorbing foam where you can to dampen the noise.
The counterproductive part is that having a lot of airflow would be the opposite of "sound isolating" -- anywhere air flows freely sound does as well. So by definition a sound isolating case has poor airflow. Poor airflow could require you to run your fans at higher RPMs to compensate, which is then introducing more noise than you would have had with a more open case that could run low RPM fans.
Back when the P180 was new, its silicone grommets for HDD mounting and the thicker multi-layer side panels (instead of flimsy pieces of sheet metal) were highly unusual features.
I'd say they had reasonable airflow, with 2 120mm fans on the front (one in the main compartment, one in the lower compartment with the PSU and HDD). Though the intake fans were behind a door with vertical vent strips up the sides. I'm sure that restricted airflow a bit, but it was dramatically quieter than any case I'd had before.
My personal one was the slightly revised P182, but I'd previously built some computers at my job that we put in P180s.
No idea - I remember spending a lot of time browsing Silent PC Review on previous builds to make sure I got an appropriately quiet power supply and everything else, but it stopped doing any meaningful testing years ago, and the current incarnation basically looks like affiliate link blogspam.
My problem with that is that while it looks nice, I find it visually very frustrating if it's in your field of view. Those points of light that go in and out as your hands move over them are an annoyance for me.
If you don't touchtype and need to see your keyboard to type effectively then being able to configure the color and intensity is nice, but for me all the intensity I need is 0. At night I'll just have some gentle ambient light in my room.
I use an expensive Moonlander keyboard that comes with RGB lighting and I tried to give it a fair chance but I always end up finding it distracting and useless.
When I was younger lights didn't fill my vision like they do now. Blue LED's in the dark become impossible to ignore. If the RGB LED's are really low then it's not bad, but it is still distracting on something like a mouse.
I have a red led mechanical keyboard and that one doesn't bug me at all. But the white ones do.
After someone gave me mouse with RGB decorations I thought it would be nice to have CPU and RAM usage encoded into it. (in practice it isn't very useful, as it is usually obscured by hand) (https://gist.github.com/Milek7/f5669c00cf660c3984becb031c2ec...)
Agreed yea. I recently shifted mine to all a single color and like the look a lot more. It makes the open Thermaltake Core P3 case look quite striking.
In terms of the "why" for this kind of thing, I guess if I'm going to be staring at a computer screen and computer all day, I want it to look interesting. The P3 case is open with a large glass plate on the front (look it up), and I've got it mounted directly on my wall. It does nothing for my computer's performance, but it makes my time at the computer more pleasant.
Another cool usage is to light up specific keys based on the current application. This is quite useful in things like games or editors. You can have green for movement, white for actions, etc.
I never got that one. Who is it for? When you're playing a game, you're not looking at the keyboard. And with just the few buttons available covered by your hands, it's not really for others... Why is the game-layout lighting a thing?
Its mostly aesthetics. It could be useful if you come back to a game after a break and you forget some of the keys. I can see its use as a training mode too.
I've always been about the red because I game so much in the dark. I set mine to pulse on/off gradually, almost like breathing and don't find it distracting at all.
ooo and dim them if there's an disturbance, like ramped up cpu, gpu, or a key pressed on the keyboard would dim that key and radiating decreasing dimming from "disturbance"
What I love about RGB is the flexibility: I have a white case (Lian Li 011-D) with a custom waterloop. I run 9 cheap chinese RGB fans (EZDIY-FAB) and two custom rgb strips at top and bottom, which emit light against two white radiators. [1] The white allows the light to reflect from basically every surface in the case. They come with a custom rf remote, and I setup everything so I can control the strips and the fans separately. Currently, the fans are all white, with the strips being red at top and bottom.
But if I want to, I can go all unicorn... - or turn everything off.
Doing this in Linux seems like a lot more time/trouble than just putting the side of the case on (and not getting one of those silly cases with a window in it).
When I went to build a PC recently, I was disappointed to find out that the most cost effective cases that otherwise met my requirements all had those silly windows, and that some RGB components were actually cheaper than non-RGB. So I ended up with a window and RGB, despite having no desire for either!
I had to hunt around for the correct software to disable the stuff. Little did I know that this project existed at the time :)
I'm not sure what you're price range was but a lot of Fractal Design cases have solid side panels. I have their Meshify C case and the temps are great with a Noctua cooler.
Because you might use it in an app that you are not going to distribute via the public application stores. It's also possible that the reviewer made a mistake.
I don't buy this - if you add a feature to software you know it's going to get used - if they needed it for internal stuff they could add it in some private library.
And, if it's something people want so bad that you'd allow it for non-published applications then you clearly need to solve it by enabling or offering some sort of replacement for published applications.
The underlying API is a decade or so older than the current version of the human interface guidelines. It's entirely possible that if they were writing the API today, they'd leave that capability out.
That's so interesting! I think the fact that they nail the tech so well makes it intuitively surprising that it didn't come first. Not pixar but similarly, when I saw the siggraph talk where Disney Animation showed off how they do snow rendering in Frozen I wondered whether the tech came first
That's also a case where the tech came a while after the story. Our early snow tests on Frozen looked pretty terrible until the MPM simulator [1] came online later.
Did the MPM simulator get used in practice for Frozen? I talked to a few sim TDs (or whatever the equivalent Disney title is) and they said it was too slow at the start for practical use!
(The latter especially for a first instance, though if you've got repeat instances, I'd look first to management, then to staff, for cause.)
Another bad sign is if the cause for the stress is internal, and a pass sign is if it's either management or a major (or the only) client.
If you cannot find ways to eliminate internal causes of stress, or buffer those created by the commercial environment in which you exist, it's going to be somewhere on the continuum between toxic and fatal to me.
I'd be hard-pressed to name any notably bad days at work in the last 6 months, and it's definitely not because every day is stressful. I'm not even sure why you think that's unusual unless you've had jobs exclusively in very unpleasant workplaces.
"Firing the responsible" may be an overly-strong comment -- putting pressure on the line rather than improving line management is the upshot of what I'm getting at.
Though truly boring can be a good sign if it's the result of good planning, drilling, practices, and rewarding competence. If it's from complacency, failure to recognise problems, or the ability to push fault or failure off on others (clients, customers, vendors, suppliers, other departments), not so much.
The good sign then is understanding why and how they got to boring.
> People who want to get away from the ~big cities~ small towns and live a different kind of life with different priorities (and different legislative interests), shouldn't be totally shut out, should they? Even though I live in a ~giant urban area~ rural area, I wouldn't want to feel pressured to due so due to lack of political stake if I move elsewhere.
who's to say one direction is more important than the other? At least if we ditch the electoral college, individual voices always have the same volume
To reinforce this idea, my city has 3x the population of Wyoming.
I grew up rural, but I long ago moved to an urban life. Politicians — and to be honest rural folk themselves — often try to enforce the idea that rural life is somehow more genuine. You’ll hear this as “Real America”, or how city folks don’t understand how “the Real World works”, or are some how “out of touch”. Which is fundamentally a completely bizarre idea when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life. While there are unique and legitimate concerns that may need to be addressed for rural life, they are not mainstream concerns. Similarly, allowing rural politics and social mores to dominate national politics is as absurd as saying the Sentinelese[0] should dominate world culture because they’re more in touch with the land or something.
> when the majority of Americans (and I believe the world in general now) live an urban life.
I think you're underestimating the figures. 80.7% of Americans lived in urban areas according to the 2010 census. Estimates for the entire world are over 50% for over a decade now (since 2007, to be more accurate). It increases slowly but steadily, so we were at about 55.27% in 2018. It's going to be about 68% by 2050 and about 85% by 2100.
The Census's definition of "urban area" doesn't quite match what most people think of, I don't think. It's any area of over 50k people. If you reverse sort the list provided on Wikipedia[0], you'll find a lot of places that aren't top of mind when people think about "urban life:" Grand Island, NE; Hazleton, PA; Albany, OR.
Edit: I'm not disputing the larger point. I just think the number is probably a little lower than that if you adjusted for being "truly" urban.
Yeah, I was thinking about adding that there's some talk about what constitutes as "urban area", but thought it wasn't relevant enough for the context of my comment.
I don't agree with the assessment that betamax was superior. Sure it had more advanced technology, but it was too expensive and much more complicated - it fit the business requirements of a home video system poorly
