[HN Gopher] Amazon's $195 thin clients are repurposed Fire TV Cubes
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon's $195 thin clients are repurposed Fire TV Cubes
Author : rbanffy
Score : 47 points
Date : 2023-11-27 21:05 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| nerdo wrote:
| Sounds like a line from Office Space 2: 'My computer is a FireTV
| cube'
| lock-the-spock wrote:
| > As many as 70 percent of laptops sent from companies to remote
| workers are never seen by companies again, Muneer Mirza, AWS'
| end-user compute general manager, claimed to The Register.
|
| This seems quite an absurd claim. I can't find any counter data
| but this number is so high it can't possibly be true.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| That has not matched my experience at all, either.
|
| Sure, some laptops never seem to make it back, but generally,
| their last paycheck isn't released until the gear is back and
| checked.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That's illegal in the US [1] and it's just the same in
| Europe. You can't go and withhold payment for work done -
| what you can do is file a claim in small claims or civil
| court, depending on the worth of the laptop.
|
| [1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-
| samples/hr-...
| browningstreet wrote:
| Yes, that's illegal, but a good chunk of my lay-off
| severance pay -- which was about 45 days later -- was
| subject to me sending my laptop back.
|
| They didn't ask for my monitor or my polycom though.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Beyond returning your laptop, severance pay has a few
| more strings attached, like waiving your right to sue.
| But, everything is negotiable.
| codys wrote:
| Severance pay is not last-paycheck pay. Paycheck pay is
| for work already performed. Severance is (in the US)
| generally down to agreement between an employer and
| employee (and the employer normally dictates the terms
| because the employee in most cases lacks a bargaining
| position) or as a way to comply with laws mandating
| notice periods for layoffs.
| wnevets wrote:
| > That's illegal in the US [1] and it's just the same in
| Europe.
|
| Wage theft is illegal in the US but is extremely popular,
| profitable and largely goes unpunished.
|
| https://www.epi.org/press/wage-theft-costs-american-
| workers-...
| entropie wrote:
| My partner just got a new thinkpad for her part-time job in
| germany at a fairly big science institute and was told that
| she can keep it when her job is done. I was suprised too.
| charia wrote:
| 'As many as', suggests there might have been one particular
| case where that happened, probably due to a complex situation,
| (small company, pandemic, company going out of business, lack
| of strong oversight, policies on returning equipment not set in
| place at the time of layoffs, ect).
|
| Using that one particular statistic to make this point seems
| like an obvious use of bad statistics. The average or median is
| probably much more normal, and probably a huge number of
| computers worth a good chunk of money, but it doesn't sound
| that eyecatching so they choose to go with this particular
| number.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Something like 80% of all stats are made up on the spot
| scottyah wrote:
| 84.2% of stats are more likely to be believed if they include
| a decimal point
| llIIllIIllIIl wrote:
| 84.27% of stats are even more credible with double digit
| decimal point.
| allendoerfer wrote:
| Except if they contain rounding errors.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| 84.2% of the time, this is true every time.
| baz00 wrote:
| Especially vendor statistics about how useful their product
| is, how much money it's going save you and what the
| performance is.
|
| I usually ask for proof of such claims. That makes the first
| vendor call interesting.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Even if it were true though, look at Amazon Workspaces prices.
| 4 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, 10GB of user storage and 80GB of root
| volume storage, $876/yr.
|
| I think you can get a 4-core laptop with 16GB of RAM for $876 +
| $195 for the client, and afford to lose it at these prices;
| unless somehow your turnover rate is obscene; or you are an
| industry with extremely high security needs.
| shrubble wrote:
| Costco has a Lenovo IdeaPad 1, 4gb RAM, decent low end CPU,
| 1080p screen and 128GB MMC onboard for $149.99.
|
| If you void the warranty by opening the back, you can
| supposedly add an 8GB DIMM and M2 drive of your choice. Aside
| from GPU heavy work that you won't get with the Amazon
| solution either, would hardly cost much more.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| My initial reflex reaction is to think the same: however, when
| I consider what the process would be, I can see a lot of large
| businesses just not seeing it being worth it to track down and
| retrieve company hardware from an employee who left under
| negative circumstances. Most laptops, especially issued to
| lower rungs of employees, aren't new, and even when they were,
| weren't high-end machines to begin with: they're probably the
| bottom tier really, whatever Dell or HP were selling at
| clearance prices when IT had extra budget.
|
| So let's pick a number out of a hat and say a laptop was $500
| new, and for the sake of argument, let's say it was brand new
| when issued to a problematic remote employee several states
| away. This employee eventually gets canned for bad performance
| and doesn't ever ship back the computer: now what? Well, you
| have to spool up your legal division and arrange for a
| certified mail letter to let the employee know of their
| obligation, and see that it's delivered so the employee can't
| claim later they were never told. Then, you'd probably have to
| arrange for some company representative to actually go there
| and attempt to recover it in person, for similar reasons. If
| that doesn't work (and IANAL so this is just theory) you'd end
| up either involving their local law enforcement and probably
| your own to recover stolen property, OR going to small claims
| court against the employee. You'd have to have paper work in
| order showing when the laptop was purchased, what it's worth
| now to recover, and it's probably an open and shut case really
| to get it done, but then... you get a laptop back, or the cash
| value of it which is probably nowhere near what the company
| paid for it, and if it was sold off or junked or otherwise
| ruined and you DO get a cash settlement from court, well, now
| you have to COLLECT that which is it's own can of worms,
| especially if this employee is really pissed off with your
| organization.
|
| Every step along this involves your legal team, which consists
| at least partially of lawyers, who are expensive to have work
| on it. This will be labor intensive, not step by step but over
| the long haul: instead of a big job, it's tons and tons of
| little small annoying ones.
|
| AND: If the employee wants and I can't think of why they
| wouldn't, they could easily go to the media and vilify you for
| shit-canning them and then suing them. And sure, the facts of
| that would be obviously vindicating, but how many people read
| past headlines? Corporations fucking over working people is
| (rightly) hot news lately.
|
| So like, yeah that sounds high, I wouldn't be shocked if it
| wasn't that high. But also I wouldn't be shocked if faced with
| all the fuckabout to get a shitty laptop back from an ex-call
| center worker or whatever, most companies just don't give a
| fuck and write it off like they would any other lost asset.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Agree. An unreturned laptop that's more than a couple of
| years old is not worth the effort to chase down (unless maybe
| it was something _very_ high-spec). The bigger worry would be
| any remote access to company resources that is configured on
| the laptop, but hopefully you 've been smart enough to be
| able to revoke that without access to the remote device.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| And even with a high end machine... it's still dubious.
| It's much, much easier to just write it off like you would
| any other property lost/damaged/destroyed in the process of
| doing the job, and it's an aspect of business that more or
| less every company will already have processes setup for.
| ska wrote:
| You've probably already depreciated most of it on your
| books, so the write off is pretty small.
|
| After 3 (tax) years a 2k laptop is likely only worth a
| few hundred dollars to you anyway, and you'd have to pay
| shipping (50 ish?) so not much there to get worried
| about.
|
| Put it another way, to the company losing that laptop is
| likely less of a problem than paying out a owed vacation
| day with ambiguous records.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Well, the effort required to get a laptop back from a different
| country is in almost all cases more expensive than what the
| thing is worth. Even MacBook Pro's are barely worth half the
| original price after 2-3 years (particularly with Apple's pace
| of innovation), and most Windows laptops literally fall apart
| at the hinges at that point so they're worthless anyway.
|
| Yes, you can theoretically go and iCloud-lock the thing to make
| it worth even less, but the machine still has value for its
| (non-serialed) parts.
| hummusFiend wrote:
| Agreed, "As many as" is doing some heavy lifting. The only
| anecdotal evidence I have in support of this claim is how some
| companies included the employee's laptops as part of severance
| packages throughout the "forced RTO" layoffs in the past year.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| My partner works for a company that uses thin clients to aws
| instances and they get about half of the hardware back. They
| don't even attempt to get the monitors back.
| graphe wrote:
| I know two people issued remote computers; a desktop and a
| laptop. They were not asked for them back and one was a MacBook
| Pro.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I got a MBP from Goldman Sachs and when I left they refused to
| pay for mailing it back, which was irritating because it's also
| activation locked to their IT systems and is therefore useless
| to everyone. I would say that not all companies want their
| obsolete client systems returned to inventory.
| dylan604 wrote:
| in that locked condition, does it hold value as a trade in?
| jeffbee wrote:
| No it's worthless. If you trade in a computer to Apple and
| it's enrolled in any kind of locked thing (like Find My)
| they'll send it back to you.
| baz00 wrote:
| Yes. And if that's internal AWS statistics then I am moving my
| stuff out of AWS very quickly.
| wirelesspotat wrote:
| I think the preceding sentence has some important context.
|
| They're specifically talking about businesses with high
| employee turnover, like call centers:
|
| > Amazon said its thin client targets businesses with high
| employee turnover, such as call and payment processing centers,
| where AWS customers say it can be hard to recover expensive,
| work-issued devices.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I would be willing to believe it, but only with the caveat that
| the companies tell employees to just keep the hardware.
|
| I've known of at least one company that would tell devs to keep
| their old equipment that cycled out as a perk. I've also known
| quite a few IT teams that basically don't care about a 3-4 year
| old Dell/HP/whatever and are just as happy to have you keep it
| as they are to ship it back, wipe it, and recycle it.
| ugh123 wrote:
| I'm actually a bit disappointed they didn't implement this as a
| laptop (or plan to?).
|
| I think one interesting aspect of VR is the possibility of it
| being a thin client to general purpose office computing. And also
| a great (terrible) way for companies to keep track of remote
| worker attention.
| danans wrote:
| > I'm actually a bit disappointed they didn't implement this as
| a laptop (or plan to?).
|
| It sounds like the idea behind it is to reduce the incentives
| for theft. Making it a laptop would do the opposite.
| throwboatyface wrote:
| Companies are willing to pay more money to rent a computer from
| AWS than to send a computer to their employee, because of the
| risk the employee won't send it back. It doesn't actually make
| economic sense but it tickles their sense of "fairness" that
| these workers shouldn't get any more than absolutely necessary.
| nickff wrote:
| There are a number of advantages you get by deploying cloud
| computers instead of physical ones (like laptops), and most
| have nothing to do with fairness. The ability to control what
| gets installed on them gives you obvious security and
| performance advantages, as well as allowing you to quickly and
| easily 'service' the computers (restore them to working order
| by loading a known good image). Disallowing employees from
| downloading data to devices in their possession also reduces
| 'leaks' of sensitive corporate information due to carelessness.
|
| I've never heard of anyone making a 'fairness' argument about
| sending out laptops, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone
| somewhere has made it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The ability to control what gets installed on them gives
| you obvious security and performance advantage
|
| On my work machine (a normal Windows 10 laptop), the company
| has complete control over what gets installed. If I install
| something the company has forbidden, they notice, forcibly
| remove the software remotely, and then send someone to scold
| me.
| wincy wrote:
| Ah yeah that happened to me at my first professional job
| (i.e more than ten devs at the whole company) I needed my
| 802.11x keys transferred to a new laptop. So rather than
| ask, I just, you know, downloaded metasploit to rip the
| private auth keys with mimikatz so I'd be able to copy
| them! About ten seconds later my laptop mysteriously logged
| me out...
|
| It's the only time in my career I've literally been yelled
| at. Somehow avoided getting fired. To make it worse they
| were doing red team pentesting that day so I totally looked
| like I was hacking the Gibson.
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| most companies send employees laptops with mdm, recorded serial
| numbers, etc. sure, an employee that decides to fafo with
| laptop theft is going to cause a hassle, but it should be much
| more of a hassle for the former employee.
|
| this has nothing to do with hardware, in fact that's the point.
| this little cube is useless outside of a single use case. go
| ahead and take it, it's just hardware, and will likely be no
| more than that once stolen.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Nah, they don't care about that. In my experience it's more
| about ease of administration and data loss prevention.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I work in an industry where an extreme amount of effort is
| expended in ensuring the employees do not walk out with data.
| Effort is spent keeping production network separate from
| corporate network to the point that checking email is done
| through a remote connection. USB devices are filled with epoxy,
| and the USB drivers are removed from the OS.
|
| Putting everything in the cloud would be the next logical step
| in preventing all of the thiefs, er, employees from being able
| to remove data from the building. Now, just to convince all of
| the clients that their data is actually safer in the cloud than
| on-prem.
| baz00 wrote:
| It doesn't make sense at all. You can take screenshots of your
| shitty terminal with your phone.
|
| This is rent seeking dressed up in security paranoia.
| delecti wrote:
| Seems like a pretty cool option. Towards the end of my time there
| (6 years ago this month) we had moved our development
| environments from local RHEL VMs to hosted Amazon Linux VMs (or
| you could just get a macbook and do it all on there), and I
| thought it was a net-positive change. I think it's a good idea to
| expand the system more broadly, and sell an integrated
| hardware/software product to make it easier to use as a less
| technical user.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 2GB and a wimpy CPU! For the same price you can buy a NUC 11
| Essential. Seems like a terrible deal.
| ska wrote:
| Point is they don't have to buy them, they already made too
| many.
| baz00 wrote:
| I couldn't think of a worse end user experience than using
| Workspaces/AppStream on a daily basis. I'd rather go work in
| McDonalds flipping burgers than live that life.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You sound like someone not fit for upper management IT. You
| clearly care about your end users.
| baz00 wrote:
| This is the greatest compliment a person could receive. Thank
| you.
| supertrope wrote:
| This seems penny wise and pound foolish. Having employees wait on
| their computer instead of the computer wait on the employee only
| makes sense if computers are expensive in comparison to labor.
| This box is literally slower than a Raspberry Pi 5.
| danans wrote:
| The article specifically mentions that these are intended for
| work environments with high rates of computer equipment theft.
| That would only happen at significant magnitude if labor rates
| are very low.
|
| The US national minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, and usually
| jobs that pay that have very high turnover, so there's a strong
| incentive to steal equipment, especially if it has any resale
| value, like a $500 PC would.
|
| If these things can be remotely bricked once they are reported
| as stolen, that goes pretty far to killing any black market for
| them.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Price is outrageous for the junk they are trying to sell. It's
| outright insulting. I don't really understand the mentality of
| these scammers. Will they not do anything (to others) for money?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-27 23:01 UTC)