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Best Buy to Outsource IT to Accenture

  Best Buy reassesses IT Needs

1. trenchmice could improve its game by letting companies submit their save files.
   1. Currently things aren't this way.
      1. Real world recreation counterpart in virtual competition: Some Utah cafes where people go to get a bight to eat and socialize. One in Seattle has an xbox and there is a highly probable possibility that other places do as well. There's a price shock: visitors get the opportunity to game the valuing system and difficultly make appraisals on chow. Spending a billion dollars on a bagel is a lowly probable possibility.

Propounding an idea: it'd be a great for Trenchmice to encourage dumpster diving to find confidential company records to find out if companies have ball and crane tactics for getting and managing an inventory of ahrkmm cough*scrap*cough workers. Besides that, Trenchmice could consult microsoft for advise on how to display statements on corporate condition and values they have for employees. [Even though Microsoft's personal agenda sucks, I respect their decent side projects--such as live search, xbox, and working with bungie--and would consider considering (I'm in no position to make such decisions myself) microsoft for the job]

Steinbach Credit Union is my home bank, so it was interesting to hear how they set this up back in 2003.

SCU has a second branch located in Winnipeg. Data is constantly synchronized between the two sites providing a physical disaster recovery solution and a convenience for customers, as loan information, etc is always up-to-date so it doesn't matter which branch you visit. (People from Steinbach often visit Winnipeg for shopping and movies). As opposed to paying $70,000 per month for 3rd party leased lines, or $1 million to lay their own fibre, SCU found the cost-effective solution to create their own private wireless network. SCU also uses the direct link for email, VoIP, and streaming security cameras which provides additional bandwidth and long-distance savings.

The towers are full-duplex and shoot a narrow microwave beam which is almost impossible to intercept 100 feet above ground and data is encrypted "2^48 power" and apparently not affected by the weather. <<insert Canadian weather joke>>

SCU won the silver medal in the SearchStorage.com Spring 2003 Storage Innovator awards competition for their innovative wireless SAN setup.

Here are more article links with details and diagrams of the setup and equipment used.

> Sure, the cards might have been resold, but they are branded cisco items bearing the entire cisco interface and functionality - somehow I doubt outright fake chipsets and devices like this can be produced by anyone other than cisco themselves.

The article manages to totally skip highlighting a single specific case of fake hardware, the nearest being a raid on a hardware repair centre where officials from a group of agencies pounced.

Okay, how about this one? http://www.varbusiness.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsess ionid=VY3ZV2L4EFUAWQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=1 92600455&queryText=cisco+counterfeit

This outfit tried to sell some Catalyst switches to Northrop, and by extension, the Navy. Now they're out half a million, with a grunch of unsellable switches on their hands, what status they had with Cisco has been revoked, and they're suing their supplier (who is countersuing). As an added bonus, the Navy is doing a criminal investigation.

HP claims its Nominating and Governance Committee hired independent lawyers to review the conduct used in the investigation and those lawyers concluded that the company had hired an experienced firm. The firm retained another party, which obtained information about calls to and from HP directors, the company stated in the filing.

"I am an engineer. Among many other things," I could a few other things to your lit of things that you are.

Bully to you for using Mac to do your work or what ever.

Blah, Blah, Blah, Let me guess your whom ever you want to be on-line it seems to be how it goes around here especialy when there is a load of "'s" in the rant. Blah, Blah, Blah!

"Who has Apple killed in the open source community?"
your wrong about what I was saying here it's not the open source community who is being wronged by there business pratices it is the resellers who stuck with them even when sales where small and more work than it was worth (limmited income ability).
http://www.varbusiness.com/showArticle.jhtml?artic leID=56700060
http://www.varbusiness.com/showArticle.jhtml?artic leID=159901019
just 2 easy articles.

as for the GPL paying large bills with big bags of change is bull shit yes it's legal tender but it's done as an insult / retrabution / and just not polite. releasing bulk code on a community who only asks for changes to the original code is like paying large bills with big bags of change and Bull Shit!

and as for your personal coment about me well I'll concider the source.

Move along elvis has left the building nothing to see here!

"I am an engineer. Among many other things," I could a few other things to your lit of things that you are.

Bully to you for using Mac to do your work or what ever.

Blah, Blah, Blah, Let me guess your whom ever you want to be on-line it seems to be how it goes around here especialy when there is a load of "'s" in the rant. Blah, Blah, Blah!

"Who has Apple killed in the open source community?"
your wrong about what I was saying here it's not the open source community who is being wronged by there business pratices it is the resellers who stuck with them even when sales where small and more work than it was worth (limmited income ability).
http://www.varbusiness.com/showArticle.jhtml?artic leID=56700060
http://www.varbusiness.com/showArticle.jhtml?artic leID=159901019
just 2 easy articles.

as for the GPL paying large bills with big bags of change is bull shit yes it's legal tender but it's done as an insult / retrabution / and just not polite. releasing bulk code on a community who only asks for changes to the original code is like paying large bills with big bags of change and Bull Shit!

and as for your personal coment about me well I'll concider the source.

Move along elvis has left the building nothing to see here!

Although most /. readers probably won't care, dual core CPU's are already on the market in the form of the UltraSPARC IV CPU from Sun Microsystems. Sun also happen to be sporting the most ambitious multi-core project going in the form of Niagara, which although initially an 8-core system has apparently been seen running Solaris 9 with 32 independent CPU cores.

In addition to this, the POWER 5 CPU is also available with multiple cores, fully supporting Linux.

Also of note is that the Opteron dual-core CPU's from AMD are apparently going to be pin-compatible with the current Opteron processors (by current,I mean, the latest socket 939 (I think) systems, not the original Opteron 2xx or whatever).

This is really of most use for the data center right now, but as more applications wrap their heads around paralelizing themselves, multi-core CPU's on the desktop will become more popular.

That said, developers really have no excuses for not having blazing fast "dual-core aware" apps... a multi-processor system purchased today provides about as much performance as a dual core system... so it's not like a wild new technology where application developers have to wait for SDK's or test hardware. Multiple cores, HyperThreading CPU's or multiple physical processors are all just additional CPU's from the operating systems perspective, and are developed for using the same tried and true thread libraries (pthreads, etc).

Multi-thread those apps people! There are so many instances, especially when writing GUI apps, where an extra thread or two thrown in the right direction can really improve the user experience.

Of course, a big problem is just how developers learn to program. Everyone learns their "Hello World!", then goes from there... but this is all very linear in approach. Finding good programmers who can think of an application in terms of what many parallel threads should (or shouldn't) be doing isn't easy... but I digress.

Well, if Linus ever changes his mind about MS, Steve Ballmer said that they'd hire him.

Ouch, this is so much a troll... Read here, or here for the original...

Reminds me of SCO's spin on a VARBusiness article back in October. Here's SCO's version. Now check out the original article. SCO did indeed rate in the top four. Out of five.

What's his latest toy?

A Sony Electronics Inc. Vaio, Japanese edition. It's a handheld PC that has a 4-GB hard disk, 64 MB of RAM and a Pentium MMX 266-MHz processor. It weighs in at just 2.6 pounds and runs both Linux and Windows. "It's cute as hell." Oh, and it has a built-in camera.

Now imagine Billy-boy using Linux (maybe just to give it a test-run) and talking publicly about it. That would never happen because of the expected PR backlash.

Linus, on the other hand can be as frank as he wants to, without an axe hanging over his head.

Interesting, though nothing earth-shattering. Open-source also supports Freedom.

Even Steve Ballmer says that Microsoft can't compete with the total cost of ownership of Linux.

From http://www.varbusiness.com/sections/News/breakingn ews.asp?ArticleID=36355
"One issue we have now, a unique competitor, is Linux. We haven't figured out how to be lower priced than Linux. For us as a company, we're going through a whole new world of thinking."

If Microsoft can't undercut the cost of Free Software, how in the world would anybody else be able to? It seems to me like somebody bought the FUD campaign.

I think it's more interesting to hear Ballmer acknowledging this too.

He also addressed the licensing changes that the company put in place over the last year, calling them an important part of a long-term simplification strategy.

So what happened? Predictable: businesses stopped buying upgrades!

Coupled with this, it turns out that the consumer market is largely saturated. In other words: most people that would tend to want a computer at home (at least in their current form-factor) already have one.

The result? Predictable: people stopped buying new computers!

Now add to this mix the dot-bomb and other economy-slowing incidents of late.

All of this, of course, would have a tremendous impact on Microsoft's bottom line. MS depends on the never-ending upgrade cycle and new consumers for cash flow. What to do? What to do? Ah! I have it! Force customers into a "you don't buy it, you rent it" licensing scheme, thereby insuring steady cash flow!

This is why Microsoft changed their licensing scheme, pure and simple. I'm not fooled. Anybody that understands MS, MS' structure and the computer business isn't fooled. My boss wasn't fooled, and that's why we're actively working to move away from Microsoft and MS-based solutions toward Sun Solaris, Linux and, perhaps, Mac OS X.

ZDNet also noted that Red Hats High Availability Server also "lacks content replication support", a critical feature for Web server appliances in Web farms.

Linux offers no reliability framework to enhance system reliability.

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An NVIDIA programmer, in the course of developing a driver for one of its products, used a portion of code from a freely available video driver. The developer failed to realize the code was licensed under the GPL and would therefore require NVIDIA to release the source code for its entire driver. Because NVIDIA did not want to release the source code to its commercial software, the company incurred substantial cost to develop a new driver that did not contain the GPL code.

Linux uses clear text for authentication, does not allow the configurations of individual permissions to the file level and does native support standard encryption technologies such as Kerberos version 5.0.

1. Linux supports many kinds of authentication via PAM. The only uses of clear text authentication I can think of are telnet, ftp and r*. Any OS supporting these legacy protocols must necessarily allow clear text authentication.
2. I think the complaint about "configurations of individual permissions" refers to some additional refinement of permissions in Windows. In reality, the Unix permissions scheme adapts fairly well to real-world issues, providing good security without too much inconvenience. The Windows permission scheme, in contrast, appears over-complicated, poorly understood by Windows admins, and frequently ignored/bypassed.
3. Any encryption natively supported by Windows, except for the simplest symmetric cipher implementations, is highly suspect. Not being subject to peer review, it could contain accidental or deliberate weaknesses that reduce the entropy of keys of leak portions of key material. It is well known that the NSA puts pressure on commercial vendors to introduce back doors - they did so with Crypto AG and Gretag.

Here's a rundown of the latest on Microsoft licensing issues. "Many partners were incensed with the loss of flexibility in making software purchases and upgrades, as well as the complexity of the new licensing model, which has put resellers in a pinch."

IBM's 'Peace, Love, Linux' ads on the trains in the NYC area tout Linux as 'born in a dormroom' and now 'no other OS can keep up.'
It was surprising that they'd take a swing at AIX, but they've clearly decided Linux is the way to go. At last January's e-business expo, COO Sam Palmisammo said they'd spend $1 billion on Linux this year.

Here's a somewhat amusing 'top 10' dig Scott did a while ago:
(taken from a VAR Business article)
Sure it's sophomoric, but Bones can't help but get a good chuckle every time Sun CEO Scott McNealy comes out with a top 10 list about Microsoft. He had the 800 or so attendees howling at Sun's annual reseller shindig last week at the Marriott Palm Desert near Palm Springs, Calif. É Drum roll É The Top 10 signs your pacemaker is running Windows:
10. When you wake up in post-op, Intel Inside is stamped on your chest.
9. Every year, you need an upgrade operation.
8. Every few minutes, without warning, your heart reboots.
7. Your heart works, but you can't get that loving feeling anymore.
6. Your wife starts calling you Micro Soft.
5. You discover that Pacemaker 98 doesn't scale past sleepwalking or four holes of golf.
4. Your head nurse looks suspiciously like Janet Reno.
3. Y2K scares you to death.
2. You realize it isn't only the hospital gown that leaves your rear exposed.
1. You're dead.

... Red Hat and Caldera offer 24-hour Linux support. Also see LinuxCare, VA Research, and Penguin Computing.
You say those companies aren't REAL WORLD enough for you? Try this one:
IBM Gets Behind Linux
Worldwide 24-hour telephone support from IBM. That's about as REAL WORLD as it gets.