Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.
Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in. Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.
For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc
If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.
i7 CPUs have been used for all sorts of PC configurations. Your standard library at a university or college, the office worker desktop who does nothing but use web based applications for their job, and so on.
The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.
At a certain scale, the relative complexity (both in terms of inventory management and dealing with upgrade requests / approvals / etc) tends itself towards picking a baseline spec that can work for the overwhelming majority of your fleet.
I remember my parents working for a company in the 90s and the mailroom was one the most common places things went missing… aka theft. I recall my mom had her purse stolen at her cube… theft from within similar to security exploits from within seem to be the most real security vulnerability to be focused on. That sshd that can only be accessed from a few specific ips with the right port knocking is not how you get hacked… at least not normally
I'm fairly sure you need to at least be a Permanent Resident to get hired, which makes you a US Person (it's a distinct legal definition). Permanent residents are also able to join the military and have been able to do so for a long time. There's enough of them that during the peak of the Iraq War they even held in-country citizenship ceremonies at major bases for people who had filed and completed their citizenship paperwork.
US person is a tax definition, folks without permanent residency that meet the substantial presence test are also US people. For immigration purposes you use resident alien / nonresident alien.
For the same reason that foreign nationals can join the military, including the Coast Guard that has an overlapping mission: it's a nation of immigrants and for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.
> for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.
You forgot to mention that, for those centuries, US immigration was effectively whites-only, until the 1965 Hart-Celler act (that politicians promised wouldn't change this!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart-Celler_Act
Lol no. For almost the entire 20th century, until 1992, Filipinos could just join the Navy or Coast Guard at foreign recruiting posts, without even being American residents, then get fast-tracked for citizenship.
I've heard of some people on the lam who wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, a military that gives a no-questions-asked grant of citizenship at the end.
Because white westerners tend to assimilate into the culture into which they immigrate, whereas non-whites tend to retain their native culture and prejudices when they immigrate.
Bro since when is just naked racism and xenophobia cool enough that people feel comfortable enough to post nasty shit like this on hn even. Can't we have an auto-ban no tolerance policy for this???
This is ahistorical nonsense. White immigrants are perfectly capable of retaining native prejudices. Localized tensions among Eastern European immigrants in the earlier 20th century have been documented.
And any immigrant group regardless of race will align with American culture a few generations in.
If by not fitting in you mean that they will continue to look different and retain some links to their ancestral culture then sure.
If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.
The border guys are there are really aggressive too. I canoed the st croix up around there and you are warned not to paddle north of the halfway line in the middle of the river… agents will literally pop out of the woods and start reproaching you
And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc?
My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer.
The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".
Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.
Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.
And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.
Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.
Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in. Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.
Was this explanation given with a wink and a nod, or did your neighbor always have 16MB of RAM?
Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.
Bured lede: i7 CPUs for border patrol.. why?
For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc
If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.
i7 CPUs have been used for all sorts of PC configurations. Your standard library at a university or college, the office worker desktop who does nothing but use web based applications for their job, and so on.
The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.
At a certain scale, the relative complexity (both in terms of inventory management and dealing with upgrade requests / approvals / etc) tends itself towards picking a baseline spec that can work for the overwhelming majority of your fleet.
Because it runs Windows hehe
It's just a typical enterprise PC configuration. Probably because nobody writes efficient software these days.
I remember my parents working for a company in the 90s and the mailroom was one the most common places things went missing… aka theft. I recall my mom had her purse stolen at her cube… theft from within similar to security exploits from within seem to be the most real security vulnerability to be focused on. That sshd that can only be accessed from a few specific ips with the right port knocking is not how you get hacked… at least not normally
Robin Hood?
Why in the world is U.S. Customs and Border Protection hiring foreign nationals?
I'm fairly sure you need to at least be a Permanent Resident to get hired, which makes you a US Person (it's a distinct legal definition). Permanent residents are also able to join the military and have been able to do so for a long time. There's enough of them that during the peak of the Iraq War they even held in-country citizenship ceremonies at major bases for people who had filed and completed their citizenship paperwork.
US person is a tax definition, folks without permanent residency that meet the substantial presence test are also US people. For immigration purposes you use resident alien / nonresident alien.
For the same reason that foreign nationals can join the military, including the Coast Guard that has an overlapping mission: it's a nation of immigrants and for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.
> for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.
You forgot to mention that, for those centuries, US immigration was effectively whites-only, until the 1965 Hart-Celler act (that politicians promised wouldn't change this!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart-Celler_Act
And in the same era in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Immigration_Act,_1923
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_head_tax
Lol no. For almost the entire 20th century, until 1992, Filipinos could just join the Navy or Coast Guard at foreign recruiting posts, without even being American residents, then get fast-tracked for citizenship.
I remember learning about that from Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, back in the day.
It’s not even a US-specific thing. Many countries recruit foreigners to their militaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_militaries_that_recrui...
I've heard of some people on the lam who wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, a military that gives a no-questions-asked grant of citizenship at the end.
Why is this so important to mention here?
Correcting jeffbee's misrepresentation of history is important for the same reason they felt the need to misrepresent it in the first place.
Because white westerners tend to assimilate into the culture into which they immigrate, whereas non-whites tend to retain their native culture and prejudices when they immigrate.
Bro since when is just naked racism and xenophobia cool enough that people feel comfortable enough to post nasty shit like this on hn even. Can't we have an auto-ban no tolerance policy for this???
That rock got lifted up 10 years ago and they are now comfortable sunning themselves. Overton Window has shifted hard right.
This is ahistorical nonsense. White immigrants are perfectly capable of retaining native prejudices. Localized tensions among Eastern European immigrants in the earlier 20th century have been documented. And any immigrant group regardless of race will align with American culture a few generations in.
If by not fitting in you mean that they will continue to look different and retain some links to their ancestral culture then sure.
If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.
The border guys are there are really aggressive too. I canoed the st croix up around there and you are warned not to paddle north of the halfway line in the middle of the river… agents will literally pop out of the woods and start reproaching you
And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc?
My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer.
The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".
It’s obviously not about the cost of the parts, there just can’t be any tolerance for criminal conduct in government agency employees.
Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.
Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.
And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.