It's not people like this one who went WAY over the line and violated the trust of the American people - it's the poor misguided fools out there who think this is OK somehow and that we should give him another chance. Here's a newsflash for you - he had the position of trust and when temptation arose he gave in shamelessly and the lies he's telling now don't make it acceptable.
I'm not suggesting that this fellow be prevented from living a "normal" life and holding a job - but the proposed job that this fellow is being considered for is one that would put in in the same position he was before when he (for some unexplained reason) failed to uphold the requirements of his position. This fellow is probably just morally challenged - but the people proposing him for this job are fools.
Really, folks - we'd never consider placing a child molester as an elementary school teacher. But this fellow would be in a position to cause serious harm to many, many more people. It's a horrible idea. And those who are offering apologetic platitudes for this fellow's past transgressions - what the heck are you fools thinking? This will cause you just as much harm as anyone else - wake up!
The history of software development is littered with the corpses of companies that trusted Microsoft to honor a license. Remember Stacker? Remember Netscape? They learned the hard way about doing deals with the devil in Redmond.
Forget the double-talk and corporate happy speak. What Microsoft intends for Open Source is not something that will benefit anyone but Microsoft. Remember "embrace, extend, extinguish?" They're talking like they've embraced open source and now they're starting to "extend" it. They're fighting a different sort of enemy than they have before - but they can't do anything other than fight - it's their corporate culture.
Microsoft is a sworn enemy of open source software - and no matter what they or their sock puppets say, this is not going to change. Microsoft sees open source as being the biggest threat to their continued growth and they'll attack with everything they've got - that they can plausibly get away with.
The cost of the extended warranty is sufficient to cover any expected repairs the item may need - and also provide a nice profit to the issuer of the warranty and the retailer that sells it.
Modern electronics are very reliable and the extended warranty industry has grown up to take advantage of this. You'll never hear from the 99.9% who have no trouble at all with their "widget" and that one that does will squeal loudly - and maybe collect on his warranty. Recently, the warranty companies have been trying to trim even that liability from their operations and consumers are finding that the warranty they bought has conditions and "gotchas" that prevent them from receiving the coverage they thought they bought.
If you're buying something that's known to be failure prone, then the warranty MIGHT be a good idea - just remember that the warranty company knows it's unreliable and has priced the coverage accordingly. It might prevent a large bill that surprises you - but in the long run you'd be much better off to just say NO to the coverage.
Here's my rule: if the extended warranty is important to your purchasing decision - you can't afford the item. You can either pay for the repairs, or you can pay for the repairs plus a nice fat profit for the retailer and warranty company. Does this sound like a good deal to you?
Something that keeps being overlooked in these discussions is the concept of "agency". IANAL, but I'll try to explain what this means.
Basically, when you are employed or contracted by a company and doing something on their behalf, the company is responsible for your actions (at least in the USA). So if (for example) a UPS truck runs down a child, UPS is responsible for what happened. The driver may be the one who caused this, but he was working for UPS so he's acting as their agent.
And this seems to apply here, too. Maybe it was "Chinese programmers" who stole someone else's code. But since they were working for Microsoft when they did it, they were acting as Microsoft's agents and this is Microsoft's problem. The Slashdot crowd can spin and argue this all they want - but I'd hope that they'd take a look at WHO BENEFITS FROM THIS CODE THEFT and understand that "plausible deniability" doesn't work in the real world.
Too many corporations these days try to parse the law very carefully and do whatever they can get away with. Maybe Microsoft wasn't the first, but they are the most commonly "caught" at going just a little too far. Can the PR people and the marketing people generate enough BS to make it OK? That's up to you but it doesn't work for me.
They've been doing this kind of thing for years. The history of personal computing is littered with the corpses of companies that invented something that Microsoft wanted and acquired by the expedient means of stealing it.
Anyone who wants to dispute this needs to review history first. And anyone who doubts this also needs to review history. Has Microsoft changed their ways? Maybe - but it doesn't look like it given stories like this.
In a free market like what the USA might still have - this kind of pricing discrimination is pure poison. Our system is strong enough to withstand the individual influence peddlers and shills - but if it becomes common commercial practice it will be a disaster.
This type of anti-competitive scam has been addressed by the law before; look up "pricing discrimination" or "redlining" for some background. The best possible result is that those with "influence" (read: money or power) buy cheap and can resell to the ESL crowd for slightly under their higher market price. Very handy little business opportunity and it transfers even more money to the pockets of those with "influence". A more likely result is that Mr. Important gets all he needs and Mr. Common Citizen can't get the product at all.
Microsoft operates by selling discs and boxes for hundreds of dollars. Their supply of product is essentially unlimited so they don't have to worry about the issues that businesses operating in the real world do. What they propose in this patent may be useful for their little piece of the market but it's bad in most cases.
Rather than try to find ways to charge users more for increased data transfers, AT&T needs to improve their infrastructure to support these needs. Those heavy users that they want to penalize are the vanguard of the future - everyone will be using more bandwidth as web pages get more complex and video / audio streaming becomes even more common.
Increasing fees per MB now will provide a short-term increase in revenue - but it'll also open a window of opportunity for their competitors. Does AT&T want to be part of the future or would they prefer to be a "has been" on the sidelines as progress marches on?
Do I want Google pawing through my DNS lookups to build a better profile of me? No, but I'd rather have that than Charter forcing a page of advertising instead of a NXDOMAIN response. They say you can opt out, but all that does is cause their system to send you a fake IE error page instead of a page of advertising. I switched to Google's DNS a couple of days ago and it's fast and reliable. All in all, it's a good solution.
From someone who's done it. The only hard thing about public speaking is overcoming your own fear. Don't worry about it, just do it. The better you know your material the better you'll do - and if you find yourself "lost" then focus on one person in the audience and talk to them.
Much BS has been written about public speaking but if you just do it you'll find it's no big deal. And once you get going and find your rhythm, you can look at all of the people who are hanging on every of your words and realize you're something special - for the moment. Really - it's no big deal. Just do it and it'll be OK.
Let's see now: Microsoft pays Murdoch - if he agrees to block Google (Microsoft's competitor) from indexing his site. Nothing illegal about that, is there?
If you actually use any of the "advanced" features of a Verizon phone you'll quickly discover that they've gone out of their way to cripple features and route the few things that still work through their own proxy servers and charge you a hefty fee for every button you push.
I remember when I got a Bluetooth phone from Verizon. The only Bluetooth function that worked was headset - all other profiles were locked out. It had a camera but there was only one way to get a picture off of the phone and onto a computer - attatch it to an email and send it to yourself through Verizon's proxy for $1.50 EACH. Things to remember: "Get It Now" means buy stuff from Verizon and download it to your phone now. "Free" almost always has a fee attached and "Unlimited" is never what it appears. And when you hear them talking about a potential feature as "we're studying it to make sure it's useful - or stable - or safe from viruses or hackers then what they're really saying is that that feature presents a "revenue leak" to Verizon and they'll never enable it unless they can keep you from working around any of their "pay per use" features.
Remember when there was a big fuss about Verizon breaking Bluetooth on their phones? They settled a class action over falsely claiming that their phones offered real Bluetooth. There were lots of press releases about how they were going to fix it - but if you check with Verizon today you'll find that the Bluetooth is still crippled on their phones - not just the ones they got sued over, but also the new ones they're offering today. The only thing they do different is to add some fine print to their advertisements that talks about "limited Bluetooth functionality".
So when you hear them talking about tethering in the future after they "study" it a bit, what they're really saying is that it's not going to happen. If you want their data service on your laptop, they'll sell you an adapter and service for your laptop IN ADDITION to your cell phone plan. If they allowed tethering, it would cut into that revenue stream - it's not going to happen unless they're forced to do it.
Something that isn't often mentioned when discussing cloud computing is a general problem with who has control over your data, where it resides, and what prevents others from accessing it. When you move to the cloud you need to be able to trust the service provider completely. This might not be a problem for unimportant things, but the government has privacy and secrecy obligations that it would not be able to fulfill by handing it sll over to a third party.
The listed corporations are largely those who make network transport / filtering equipment. If net neutrality becomes the rule, then they won't be able to sell those products.
And the arguments are the same old "if we can't have it our way, then it's going to cost you more" nonsense that they trot out every time things look like they won't be going their way. I strongly suspect that if the corporations had it their way, the internet would be just like television - 200 "channels" of crap that some corporate group decided that you wanted to view - without your input, of course.
The internet was built out at public expense, remember? The explosion of internet sites and small businesses was only possible because it was a level playing field. Now that some things have matured into real profit generating businesses, the corporations want to take over and lock everyone else out. Regardless of what stories they tell to get their way now, if they can they'll use every possible way to increase their profits - and blocking or throttling competing businesses would be the first but not the worst of what they'd do. The "piracy" or "counterfeiting" problems are what they use to give their arguments legitimacy.
The media corporations have distorted their areas of operation so badly already - if you think about what they've done to their own businesses you'd see that letting them run the internet would be a disaster. Think about it; let's take music as an example: There's the RIAA stomping around but they don't write or record any music and not one penny of what they "recover" goes to the people who do. The RIAA is just the record company's sock puppet - and those record companies don't write or perform any music either. The people who actually write and perform the music will be stuck paying back contracted expenses for the rest of their careers and thanks to some relatively new "work product" laws they don't have a voice anymore.
So let's just do independent productions and bypass that nonsense, right - nope, now we're talking about the specialty of the recording industry - distribution. They've enjoyed having this locked up tightly for years and now that this control is slipping they're fighting back in every and any way they can. Here's how it "works": suppose you and your friends wrote and recorded the perfect album and you want to take your place in the spotlight - if you want to avoid the RIAA members, you'll need to pay to have your album recorded, mastered, and duplicated. Now let's sell them - your local "record store" won't touch your album because they depend on having access to the catalog of music distributed by their distributor(s). If they put your disk on the shelf they might find that they can't get any stock on the next big hit from Hollywood. So let's see if we can get a distributor to handle it - nope. They depend on handling the output of the RIAA companies and if they handle your album they'd risk running into low or no stock problems on the RIAA products. It's not worth it, so they won't handle your album either. You might be able to sell your album at the local crafts fair but it won't be in the record store or on the radio - those distribution and promotional venues are closed to you.
There's quite a few "media moguls" who live very well on the fees they collect from their member companies and artists. If these artists or independent artists were able to promote and sell their albums independently, the media mogul's gravy train would jump the tracks. So here's this internet thing and it works great at getting music from the artist to the fan directly - this doesn't line their pocket at all so it MUST BE STOPPED.
The "sue everyone" plan isn't working out too well so they're going to move on to filtering and controlling the internet. What the media moguls want is simple - they want the same control and profit from music distribution as they've always had and the internet needs to pay its share, too. So will we let this happen - are you going to sit back and watch while it does, or are you going to get off your tail and get involved?
He's a competent attorney, and knows better than any of the laymen here what the risks are of the choices he makes. But there's something very special happening here; knowing the risks and facing a huge and implacable enemy he's sticking fairly closely to the path of truth - even though it may be expensive or uncomfortable to him.
He can see the true outlines of the questions being decided - and they're much more important than many of the commentators here may imagine. It's not solely about protecting some pirate from having to pay for their downloads - it's also about the music cartel and if they should be allowed to exert total control over the production and distribution of music. While we've been snoozing they've carved out a legal niche where they crouch and work out ways to take even more control for themselves.
Those cartel members are full of self-importance and those stories you hear about "pay per play" or putting independent outlets out of business aren't bedtime stories - these are things the cartel wants and they'll get them and more if nobody stands up to oppose them. Those who think that downloading a few more tunes will make a difference are fooling themselves; they're playing the cartel's game.
It's OK if most of the folks stick to their nice soft beds and don't get involved in important social problems like this one. But we need a few who will - NYCL is one, who else will stand up and fight for the truth?
If your hardware is suspect, then the output of any program running on that hardware would also be suspect. Keep that in mind when you run diagnostic software - if it says the system is good then it probably is but if the software reports errors then the reported error isn't necessarily accurate. I've also seen these programs detect failures in perfectly working systems. I've tested many of these "technician on a disk" programs over the years and Microscope is the best of a bad bunch.
A more productive diagnostic method is to "divide and conquer" - consider the various replaceable sub-assemblies and diagnose only to that level. Tips: most failures are memory related - bad RAM or it's not making good contact in its socket. If the system locks up immediately at boot or after running a short time, it's almost always memory. Bad power supplies are also a fairly common source of general flakiness and no diagnostic software will be able to diagnose those problems. Bad motherboards are rare and bad CPU chips are almost unheard of.
Here's a thought: if I own a Kindle and someone steals it - that creates an interesting situation for Amazon. If they use their remote control ability to brick the Kindle or provide its current location they are expending time and money - and there's opportunities for bad guys to social engineer some nuisances for Kindle owners. But if they refuse to do this - then it becomes a situation where your property has been stolen and the vendor could tell you where it is - but refuses to do so. That puts them in an awkward position; their actions (or failure to act) support the thief, not you. That's got some legal implications as well as customer service problems.
Those vendors would prefer that these questions never arise because they bought a lose / lose situation when they implemented tracking or remote control as part of their DRM.
If your company has any kind of fixed asset tracking then there's an asset number label on the machine. So just use that as the machine name and keep track of things in a database. Easy; the end user can look at the asset tag when the help desk wants to know which machine and you can spot them on the network easily.
You're going to have enough trouble keeping track of what machine was assigned to who without changing machine names at the drop of a hat. And this will reduce the number of places where information is mis-keyed or just blown off as too much trouble to one - the asset to user database.
If you encode user or location information into the machine name you'll have two things to update each time a machine is moved. And you'll discover that your end users swap machines and take "their" computer along when they're transferred to another location. Not to mention the department managers that see that the new machine one of their drones got is much better than theirs and swaps them. None of these people are going to call in with updated information so you're going to have to track that in a different way.
If you want to track locations, then how having multiple subnets on your network - each location is in a different subnet. That solves the mysterious moving machines problem because the machine will have an IP address that shows what location it's connected to the network in.
Unfortunately, you've fallen into the same trap that many other philosophers have. When you call humans "rational animals" you're conveniently ignoring the simple fact that we're animals - and as animals we have been well equipped by nature with various instincts and drives that cause us to act in specific ways. If you were more insightful, you might discover that much of your rationality is spent rationalizing things you've been compelled to do by your nature.
This is why your relationships are so full of trouble - your natural instincts compelled you to find a mate and made her look like a goddess. But once you've fulfilled your biological imperative you then get to see her for what she really is and disaster ensues.
If you understood these things you'd be able to choose a suitable mate before instinct chose one for you. And you'd be able to avoid the addictions before they took hold. But you're a subscriber to the "humans are perfectly rational beings" story and you'll suffer for your incorrect assumption for the rest of your life.
We're talking about the rootkit corporation. The one that had the people making mod chips arrested. The one that has fought against open standards long and hard for a lot of years. Don't think so? When was the first Sony portable music player released, and when was the first one that supported anything other than Sony's proprietary formats released?
Sony is an interesting corporation and they do turn out some useful devices (along with some turkeys) - but one thing they are absolutely not good at is "open standards" and anyone who believes their public relations BS on this subject is a fool.
What people outside of this issue don't see is that there's a lot of creative people out there who are shocked by what is going on and refuse to take part in it.
I've been writing music for quite a few years now and some of it is actually pretty damned good. But I don't release it any more - because the pirates will steal (yes, I know the word is wrong but from my point of view that's how it feels) my work. I won't deal with the record companies either because they're no different from the pirates - they'll steal my work and use it to further their own selfish goals.
That's the thing that nobody seems to be seeing: It doesn't matter if you side with the "pirates" or with the RIAA because in either case the artist gets screwed. Wake up! You've let them re-frame the discussion so that you're arguing on their terms. You don't have a clue what the people who actually create and perform the music want but you're so ready and willing to speak on their behalf. Why not put a little thought into the situation and follow the money? I can assure you that the artists that they claim to be protecting don't see any of it.
The RIAA has managed to corrupt our legal system and they're using it to destroy people's lives. Who are the artists that were harmed? What do they have to say about it? You don't know, do you? That's the saddest thing about this whole screwed up mess - they've managed to divert the public from the truth far enough that they can play their games unimpeded. Don't whine so much about abusive awards like this one - because it was people like you that allowed it to happen.
Do you want to do something about the people being abused - not just the "downloaders" but the artists too? Great - now quit talking about it and DO SOMETHING. Call or write your Senators and Congressmen. Speak of the people who create and perform the music, not the "rights" organizations. Talk to your local news people, tell your friends, write a book. DO SOMETHING other than whine about it on Slashdot.
If you can't do even this much, you're as much the problem as the RIAA is.
There's something about network connectivity that works well with data centers - take a look at any of the "map of the internet" graphics and you'll see that a huge number of major networks intersect in Silicon Valley. There aren't many places on earth better if what you need is bandwidth and low latency.
Unfortunately, the real estate costs are among the highest in the country and labor costs are correspondingly high. So the building and the drones who staff it are more expensive in Silicon Valley than almost anywhere else. What this has led to is many of the large corporations in the Silicon Valley area moving their data centers to less expensive locations that have more business-friendly politicians. Between that and the recent recession, there's lots of data center space available in Silicon Valley - along with lots of power and network connectivity. It's just that cost factor that makes it less attractive. Of course, the quality of employee you can hire in Silicon Valley is quite different than the quality of employee you can hire in Butt Scratch, TN.
It's usually not obvious - for example, when HP "merged" with Compaq they consolidated their data centers - at Compaq's TX location. Many other corporations have done the same thing over the last few years. It's an obvious choice for them - but taken as a whole, it's left a lot of data center space vacant and quite a few sysadmins and techs out of work.
While the developers were focused on their jobs being outsourced to some foreign country and any new jobs being taken by H1B employees, the folks that supported them also had their jobs on the line.
There's some other places in the country that had their IT business base disappear that are desperate to have some jobs. MA, VA and others are looking to move some business in and there's lots of space and they'll cut a deal on taxes or whatever it takes. Guess what - it's going to be the same damned thing all over again. You guys want too much money, we can get the same thing from those guys for less. Once the word gets out and everyone piles on, the cheap place gets expensive and the cycle repeats. Worried about your job being outsourced to India? Don't be - the Indians are all full up and are now outsourcing their jobs to where ever they can get it done for less.
It's just the same old crap - the corporation needs to make more profit each and every year. Labor is one of their biggest expenses, and even your typical mouth-breathing executive can see that the folks in Montana will work for a lot less money than the ones in New York will. So they'll move IT to Montana until they've hired every person there that can spell IT and the cost of labor starts to rise. Pay them more? Just for long enough to move things to Wyoming where the people are more reasonable.
Some day someone will realize that this can't keep on going like this - but that day isn't now, and it's not likely to come for a while.
The question is framed ambiguously. If you define IT as a highly paid career supporting Windows 95 computers then yes, those days are long gone. But if you look at how digital technology (IT at it's core) is moving into other fields then you'll see that there's still a demand for skilled workers. I like my niche, so I won't say what it is. But there's lots of things changing and any intelligent person with a background in technology should be able to see which way the wind is blowing.
I don't know how many of you have seen what passes for "IT" in many small medical offices - it's frighteningly insecure. I've seen more than one office where they were networked with cheap consumer wireless equipment - with the default passwords still in place and no encryption. Just pull up in the parking lot and turn on your notebook and they'll helpfully give you a DHCP address and access to their systems. I've gone through a few of these offices and locked things down better but they're still not exactly military grade security.
So how does the security of Google Apps compare with this? At least with the Google product the risks are well defined. Trusting the security of your doctor's network might not be a good idea - and the risks here are largely unknown. The people snooping on these offices are usually after credit card info, not medical records.
Think I'm kidding? Go check it out at your local multiple-physician office complex - then try to talk them into letting you secure their systems for them.
Are doomed. The tech roadways are littered with the corpses of companies that got involved in a deal with Microsoft.
Prediction: Yahoo! will suffer the same fate. Negotiations will continue until Microsoft has all the details on what Yahoo! does and how they do it - then the negotiations will fail and Microsoft will "innovate" the technology and claim it as their own. They've gotten away with this so many times already - and I'm sure someone will show up in this thread to list off the companies that made this mistake.
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I'm not suggesting that this fellow be prevented from living a "normal" life and holding a job - but the proposed job that this fellow is being considered for is one that would put in in the same position he was before when he (for some unexplained reason) failed to uphold the requirements of his position. This fellow is probably just morally challenged - but the people proposing him for this job are fools.
Really, folks - we'd never consider placing a child molester as an elementary school teacher. But this fellow would be in a position to cause serious harm to many, many more people. It's a horrible idea. And those who are offering apologetic platitudes for this fellow's past transgressions - what the heck are you fools thinking? This will cause you just as much harm as anyone else - wake up!
Forget the double-talk and corporate happy speak. What Microsoft intends for Open Source is not something that will benefit anyone but Microsoft. Remember "embrace, extend, extinguish?" They're talking like they've embraced open source and now they're starting to "extend" it. They're fighting a different sort of enemy than they have before - but they can't do anything other than fight - it's their corporate culture.
Microsoft is a sworn enemy of open source software - and no matter what they or their sock puppets say, this is not going to change. Microsoft sees open source as being the biggest threat to their continued growth and they'll attack with everything they've got - that they can plausibly get away with.
Modern electronics are very reliable and the extended warranty industry has grown up to take advantage of this. You'll never hear from the 99.9% who have no trouble at all with their "widget" and that one that does will squeal loudly - and maybe collect on his warranty. Recently, the warranty companies have been trying to trim even that liability from their operations and consumers are finding that the warranty they bought has conditions and "gotchas" that prevent them from receiving the coverage they thought they bought.
If you're buying something that's known to be failure prone, then the warranty MIGHT be a good idea - just remember that the warranty company knows it's unreliable and has priced the coverage accordingly. It might prevent a large bill that surprises you - but in the long run you'd be much better off to just say NO to the coverage.
Here's my rule: if the extended warranty is important to your purchasing decision - you can't afford the item. You can either pay for the repairs, or you can pay for the repairs plus a nice fat profit for the retailer and warranty company. Does this sound like a good deal to you?
Basically, when you are employed or contracted by a company and doing something on their behalf, the company is responsible for your actions (at least in the USA). So if (for example) a UPS truck runs down a child, UPS is responsible for what happened. The driver may be the one who caused this, but he was working for UPS so he's acting as their agent.
And this seems to apply here, too. Maybe it was "Chinese programmers" who stole someone else's code. But since they were working for Microsoft when they did it, they were acting as Microsoft's agents and this is Microsoft's problem. The Slashdot crowd can spin and argue this all they want - but I'd hope that they'd take a look at WHO BENEFITS FROM THIS CODE THEFT and understand that "plausible deniability" doesn't work in the real world.
Too many corporations these days try to parse the law very carefully and do whatever they can get away with. Maybe Microsoft wasn't the first, but they are the most commonly "caught" at going just a little too far. Can the PR people and the marketing people generate enough BS to make it OK? That's up to you but it doesn't work for me.
Anyone who wants to dispute this needs to review history first. And anyone who doubts this also needs to review history. Has Microsoft changed their ways? Maybe - but it doesn't look like it given stories like this.
This type of anti-competitive scam has been addressed by the law before; look up "pricing discrimination" or "redlining" for some background. The best possible result is that those with "influence" (read: money or power) buy cheap and can resell to the ESL crowd for slightly under their higher market price. Very handy little business opportunity and it transfers even more money to the pockets of those with "influence". A more likely result is that Mr. Important gets all he needs and Mr. Common Citizen can't get the product at all.
Microsoft operates by selling discs and boxes for hundreds of dollars. Their supply of product is essentially unlimited so they don't have to worry about the issues that businesses operating in the real world do. What they propose in this patent may be useful for their little piece of the market but it's bad in most cases.
Increasing fees per MB now will provide a short-term increase in revenue - but it'll also open a window of opportunity for their competitors. Does AT&T want to be part of the future or would they prefer to be a "has been" on the sidelines as progress marches on?
Do I want Google pawing through my DNS lookups to build a better profile of me? No, but I'd rather have that than Charter forcing a page of advertising instead of a NXDOMAIN response. They say you can opt out, but all that does is cause their system to send you a fake IE error page instead of a page of advertising. I switched to Google's DNS a couple of days ago and it's fast and reliable. All in all, it's a good solution.
Much BS has been written about public speaking but if you just do it you'll find it's no big deal. And once you get going and find your rhythm, you can look at all of the people who are hanging on every of your words and realize you're something special - for the moment. Really - it's no big deal. Just do it and it'll be OK.
Let's see now: Microsoft pays Murdoch - if he agrees to block Google (Microsoft's competitor) from indexing his site. Nothing illegal about that, is there?
I remember when I got a Bluetooth phone from Verizon. The only Bluetooth function that worked was headset - all other profiles were locked out. It had a camera but there was only one way to get a picture off of the phone and onto a computer - attatch it to an email and send it to yourself through Verizon's proxy for $1.50 EACH. Things to remember: "Get It Now" means buy stuff from Verizon and download it to your phone now. "Free" almost always has a fee attached and "Unlimited" is never what it appears. And when you hear them talking about a potential feature as "we're studying it to make sure it's useful - or stable - or safe from viruses or hackers then what they're really saying is that that feature presents a "revenue leak" to Verizon and they'll never enable it unless they can keep you from working around any of their "pay per use" features.
Remember when there was a big fuss about Verizon breaking Bluetooth on their phones? They settled a class action over falsely claiming that their phones offered real Bluetooth. There were lots of press releases about how they were going to fix it - but if you check with Verizon today you'll find that the Bluetooth is still crippled on their phones - not just the ones they got sued over, but also the new ones they're offering today. The only thing they do different is to add some fine print to their advertisements that talks about "limited Bluetooth functionality".
So when you hear them talking about tethering in the future after they "study" it a bit, what they're really saying is that it's not going to happen. If you want their data service on your laptop, they'll sell you an adapter and service for your laptop IN ADDITION to your cell phone plan. If they allowed tethering, it would cut into that revenue stream - it's not going to happen unless they're forced to do it.
Something that isn't often mentioned when discussing cloud computing is a general problem with who has control over your data, where it resides, and what prevents others from accessing it. When you move to the cloud you need to be able to trust the service provider completely. This might not be a problem for unimportant things, but the government has privacy and secrecy obligations that it would not be able to fulfill by handing it sll over to a third party.
And the arguments are the same old "if we can't have it our way, then it's going to cost you more" nonsense that they trot out every time things look like they won't be going their way. I strongly suspect that if the corporations had it their way, the internet would be just like television - 200 "channels" of crap that some corporate group decided that you wanted to view - without your input, of course.
The internet was built out at public expense, remember? The explosion of internet sites and small businesses was only possible because it was a level playing field. Now that some things have matured into real profit generating businesses, the corporations want to take over and lock everyone else out. Regardless of what stories they tell to get their way now, if they can they'll use every possible way to increase their profits - and blocking or throttling competing businesses would be the first but not the worst of what they'd do. The "piracy" or "counterfeiting" problems are what they use to give their arguments legitimacy.
The media corporations have distorted their areas of operation so badly already - if you think about what they've done to their own businesses you'd see that letting them run the internet would be a disaster. Think about it; let's take music as an example: There's the RIAA stomping around but they don't write or record any music and not one penny of what they "recover" goes to the people who do. The RIAA is just the record company's sock puppet - and those record companies don't write or perform any music either. The people who actually write and perform the music will be stuck paying back contracted expenses for the rest of their careers and thanks to some relatively new "work product" laws they don't have a voice anymore.
So let's just do independent productions and bypass that nonsense, right - nope, now we're talking about the specialty of the recording industry - distribution. They've enjoyed having this locked up tightly for years and now that this control is slipping they're fighting back in every and any way they can. Here's how it "works": suppose you and your friends wrote and recorded the perfect album and you want to take your place in the spotlight - if you want to avoid the RIAA members, you'll need to pay to have your album recorded, mastered, and duplicated. Now let's sell them - your local "record store" won't touch your album because they depend on having access to the catalog of music distributed by their distributor(s). If they put your disk on the shelf they might find that they can't get any stock on the next big hit from Hollywood. So let's see if we can get a distributor to handle it - nope. They depend on handling the output of the RIAA companies and if they handle your album they'd risk running into low or no stock problems on the RIAA products. It's not worth it, so they won't handle your album either. You might be able to sell your album at the local crafts fair but it won't be in the record store or on the radio - those distribution and promotional venues are closed to you.
There's quite a few "media moguls" who live very well on the fees they collect from their member companies and artists. If these artists or independent artists were able to promote and sell their albums independently, the media mogul's gravy train would jump the tracks. So here's this internet thing and it works great at getting music from the artist to the fan directly - this doesn't line their pocket at all so it MUST BE STOPPED.
The "sue everyone" plan isn't working out too well so they're going to move on to filtering and controlling the internet. What the media moguls want is simple - they want the same control and profit from music distribution as they've always had and the internet needs to pay its share, too. So will we let this happen - are you going to sit back and watch while it does, or are you going to get off your tail and get involved?
He can see the true outlines of the questions being decided - and they're much more important than many of the commentators here may imagine. It's not solely about protecting some pirate from having to pay for their downloads - it's also about the music cartel and if they should be allowed to exert total control over the production and distribution of music. While we've been snoozing they've carved out a legal niche where they crouch and work out ways to take even more control for themselves.
Those cartel members are full of self-importance and those stories you hear about "pay per play" or putting independent outlets out of business aren't bedtime stories - these are things the cartel wants and they'll get them and more if nobody stands up to oppose them. Those who think that downloading a few more tunes will make a difference are fooling themselves; they're playing the cartel's game.
It's OK if most of the folks stick to their nice soft beds and don't get involved in important social problems like this one. But we need a few who will - NYCL is one, who else will stand up and fight for the truth?
A more productive diagnostic method is to "divide and conquer" - consider the various replaceable sub-assemblies and diagnose only to that level. Tips: most failures are memory related - bad RAM or it's not making good contact in its socket. If the system locks up immediately at boot or after running a short time, it's almost always memory. Bad power supplies are also a fairly common source of general flakiness and no diagnostic software will be able to diagnose those problems. Bad motherboards are rare and bad CPU chips are almost unheard of.
Here's a thought: if I own a Kindle and someone steals it - that creates an interesting situation for Amazon. If they use their remote control ability to brick the Kindle or provide its current location they are expending time and money - and there's opportunities for bad guys to social engineer some nuisances for Kindle owners. But if they refuse to do this - then it becomes a situation where your property has been stolen and the vendor could tell you where it is - but refuses to do so. That puts them in an awkward position; their actions (or failure to act) support the thief, not you. That's got some legal implications as well as customer service problems.
Those vendors would prefer that these questions never arise because they bought a lose / lose situation when they implemented tracking or remote control as part of their DRM.
If your company has any kind of fixed asset tracking then there's an asset number label on the machine. So just use that as the machine name and keep track of things in a database. Easy; the end user can look at the asset tag when the help desk wants to know which machine and you can spot them on the network easily.
You're going to have enough trouble keeping track of what machine was assigned to who without changing machine names at the drop of a hat. And this will reduce the number of places where information is mis-keyed or just blown off as too much trouble to one - the asset to user database.
If you encode user or location information into the machine name you'll have two things to update each time a machine is moved. And you'll discover that your end users swap machines and take "their" computer along when they're transferred to another location. Not to mention the department managers that see that the new machine one of their drones got is much better than theirs and swaps them. None of these people are going to call in with updated information so you're going to have to track that in a different way.
If you want to track locations, then how having multiple subnets on your network - each location is in a different subnet. That solves the mysterious moving machines problem because the machine will have an IP address that shows what location it's connected to the network in.
Unfortunately, you've fallen into the same trap that many other philosophers have. When you call humans "rational animals" you're conveniently ignoring the simple fact that we're animals - and as animals we have been well equipped by nature with various instincts and drives that cause us to act in specific ways. If you were more insightful, you might discover that much of your rationality is spent rationalizing things you've been compelled to do by your nature.
This is why your relationships are so full of trouble - your natural instincts compelled you to find a mate and made her look like a goddess. But once you've fulfilled your biological imperative you then get to see her for what she really is and disaster ensues.
If you understood these things you'd be able to choose a suitable mate before instinct chose one for you. And you'd be able to avoid the addictions before they took hold. But you're a subscriber to the "humans are perfectly rational beings" story and you'll suffer for your incorrect assumption for the rest of your life.
My home telephone is a SIP phone and I don't have to play the AT&T game anymore. So how long until cell phone service is dirt cheap?
We're talking about the rootkit corporation. The one that had the people making mod chips arrested. The one that has fought against open standards long and hard for a lot of years. Don't think so? When was the first Sony portable music player released, and when was the first one that supported anything other than Sony's proprietary formats released?
Sony is an interesting corporation and they do turn out some useful devices (along with some turkeys) - but one thing they are absolutely not good at is "open standards" and anyone who believes their public relations BS on this subject is a fool.
What people outside of this issue don't see is that there's a lot of creative people out there who are shocked by what is going on and refuse to take part in it.
I've been writing music for quite a few years now and some of it is actually pretty damned good. But I don't release it any more - because the pirates will steal (yes, I know the word is wrong but from my point of view that's how it feels) my work. I won't deal with the record companies either because they're no different from the pirates - they'll steal my work and use it to further their own selfish goals.
That's the thing that nobody seems to be seeing: It doesn't matter if you side with the "pirates" or with the RIAA because in either case the artist gets screwed. Wake up! You've let them re-frame the discussion so that you're arguing on their terms. You don't have a clue what the people who actually create and perform the music want but you're so ready and willing to speak on their behalf. Why not put a little thought into the situation and follow the money? I can assure you that the artists that they claim to be protecting don't see any of it.
The RIAA has managed to corrupt our legal system and they're using it to destroy people's lives. Who are the artists that were harmed? What do they have to say about it? You don't know, do you? That's the saddest thing about this whole screwed up mess - they've managed to divert the public from the truth far enough that they can play their games unimpeded. Don't whine so much about abusive awards like this one - because it was people like you that allowed it to happen.
Do you want to do something about the people being abused - not just the "downloaders" but the artists too? Great - now quit talking about it and DO SOMETHING. Call or write your Senators and Congressmen. Speak of the people who create and perform the music, not the "rights" organizations. Talk to your local news people, tell your friends, write a book. DO SOMETHING other than whine about it on Slashdot.
If you can't do even this much, you're as much the problem as the RIAA is.
There's something about network connectivity that works well with data centers - take a look at any of the "map of the internet" graphics and you'll see that a huge number of major networks intersect in Silicon Valley. There aren't many places on earth better if what you need is bandwidth and low latency.
Unfortunately, the real estate costs are among the highest in the country and labor costs are correspondingly high. So the building and the drones who staff it are more expensive in Silicon Valley than almost anywhere else. What this has led to is many of the large corporations in the Silicon Valley area moving their data centers to less expensive locations that have more business-friendly politicians. Between that and the recent recession, there's lots of data center space available in Silicon Valley - along with lots of power and network connectivity. It's just that cost factor that makes it less attractive. Of course, the quality of employee you can hire in Silicon Valley is quite different than the quality of employee you can hire in Butt Scratch, TN.
It's usually not obvious - for example, when HP "merged" with Compaq they consolidated their data centers - at Compaq's TX location. Many other corporations have done the same thing over the last few years. It's an obvious choice for them - but taken as a whole, it's left a lot of data center space vacant and quite a few sysadmins and techs out of work.
While the developers were focused on their jobs being outsourced to some foreign country and any new jobs being taken by H1B employees, the folks that supported them also had their jobs on the line.
There's some other places in the country that had their IT business base disappear that are desperate to have some jobs. MA, VA and others are looking to move some business in and there's lots of space and they'll cut a deal on taxes or whatever it takes. Guess what - it's going to be the same damned thing all over again. You guys want too much money, we can get the same thing from those guys for less. Once the word gets out and everyone piles on, the cheap place gets expensive and the cycle repeats. Worried about your job being outsourced to India? Don't be - the Indians are all full up and are now outsourcing their jobs to where ever they can get it done for less.
It's just the same old crap - the corporation needs to make more profit each and every year. Labor is one of their biggest expenses, and even your typical mouth-breathing executive can see that the folks in Montana will work for a lot less money than the ones in New York will. So they'll move IT to Montana until they've hired every person there that can spell IT and the cost of labor starts to rise. Pay them more? Just for long enough to move things to Wyoming where the people are more reasonable.
Some day someone will realize that this can't keep on going like this - but that day isn't now, and it's not likely to come for a while.
The question is framed ambiguously. If you define IT as a highly paid career supporting Windows 95 computers then yes, those days are long gone. But if you look at how digital technology (IT at it's core) is moving into other fields then you'll see that there's still a demand for skilled workers. I like my niche, so I won't say what it is. But there's lots of things changing and any intelligent person with a background in technology should be able to see which way the wind is blowing.
I don't know how many of you have seen what passes for "IT" in many small medical offices - it's frighteningly insecure. I've seen more than one office where they were networked with cheap consumer wireless equipment - with the default passwords still in place and no encryption. Just pull up in the parking lot and turn on your notebook and they'll helpfully give you a DHCP address and access to their systems. I've gone through a few of these offices and locked things down better but they're still not exactly military grade security.
So how does the security of Google Apps compare with this? At least with the Google product the risks are well defined. Trusting the security of your doctor's network might not be a good idea - and the risks here are largely unknown. The people snooping on these offices are usually after credit card info, not medical records.
Think I'm kidding? Go check it out at your local multiple-physician office complex - then try to talk them into letting you secure their systems for them.
Are doomed. The tech roadways are littered with the corpses of companies that got involved in a deal with Microsoft.
Prediction: Yahoo! will suffer the same fate. Negotiations will continue until Microsoft has all the details on what Yahoo! does and how they do it - then the negotiations will fail and Microsoft will "innovate" the technology and claim it as their own. They've gotten away with this so many times already - and I'm sure someone will show up in this thread to list off the companies that made this mistake.