Traveled there for work over the years and checked out the computer stores while I was down there. Everything was more expensive by a fair margin, enough to put me in shock. Not just computers either, food, clothes, household goods etc.
Talking to the locals they got in the habit of buying from the US and hoping the warranty wasn't needed. Massive problem and I'm surprised they are finally doing something about it.
I still want a Ute though. Was very disappointed when Pontiac got axed right before they were going to import 500 of them....
I believe that is the point. Without nuclear weapons WW3 would HG Ave been fought between the west and eastern blocs decades ago. Going by the death counts from the previous world wars and their use of weapons of mass destruction WW3 would have had a body count in the tens of millions, possibly 100 plus million. Like them or not nuclear weapons have done more for peace than anything else in history. There's good reason they used to call them 'peacemakers'.
Considering nuclear weapons gave us MAD which gave us a period of relative calm that didn't involve something called WW3 I'm inclined to call your comment hyperbole.
Crap argument. Leasing is like leasing and companies already do it. I am not leasing macs for work I am buying them. Apple is intentionally making their products environmentally unfriendly in the name of profits.
It is reasonable to upgrade and service, and sell your equipment. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Notice that recycle is the last thing that should be done in any products lifecycle.
Be responsible and hold apple accountable. Quit apologizing for unethical behavior because your shiny fruit company is doing something that anyone else would be vilified for.
You made an apples to oranges comparison instead of an apples to well, apples comparison. What apple has done is equivalent to an auto manufacturer deciding to weld the hood shut of a brand new car with all of the components for the engine inside/also/ welded onto the block.
It is really inexcusable and only the most die hard of Apple apologists can defend such epically bad environmentally bad behavior. When almost every other product from every other vendor on the market can be upgraded or have components replaced by the lay person your argument is shown to be hollow.
On your point of car thieves simply using tow trucks, I couldn't agree more. After all why bother picking locks when you can just tow the whole car? I would imagine most car theft is done this way anymore. My point was on the car keys being used as an excuse to deny claims, and that the issue was starting to get forced into the open.
The car manufactures risk being held liable for people stealing their cars through remote exploits. For years now insurance claims have been denied for certain auto theft claims based on the theory that certain types of keys couldn't be replicated. During the interim of course hackers had figured out how hack the key systems and started stealing the cars without the keys.
Sooner or later the inevitable happened and they got caught on video doing so. I believe there was a story over the UK a few weeks ago about this. Now that the evidence is ironclad the issue has to be acknowledged and Intel is simply targeting a market that is newly available. There is no reason that other companies can't target this same market to provide security services either. To be frank I'm surprised nobodies 'stolen' a car at defcon or black hat yet for one of the demo's.
They do, which is what makes this so damn irritating. They know better! This decision is coming from the top, not from the rank and file. This debacle with refusing to allowing the enterprise to boot directly to the desktop is a/really/ big deal and they have been repeatedly told this.
They have simply ignored the input because their upper management is deathly afraid that they are going to lose the future of computing to the likes of the ipad. The issue is not the metro interface, the issue is that it is forced on you whether you want it or not! If I'm running 75,000 seats I'm not going to have people booting bloodying f******g metro!
Point well made - something I wish more utilities would do. I would rather have a stable and secure PDF tool than a feature rich one constantly needs updated and patched.
They just best the company that the future of computing is the tablet and not the desktop. They then did everything they could to force the enterprise to stop treating desktops like desktops (no you may/not/ shortcut your way into the desktop) and to start treating them like tablets wither they wanted to or not.
What do you mean you think you know you to manage tens of thousands of your users better than we do? The enterprise has made very clear they don't want metro forced on them and Microsoft has made very clear they are going to ram it down their throat anyways. It's the biggest corporate bet in the history of business. Who blinks first?
/I really wish people would quit copy Apple all the bloody time just because they are Apple.
They could prove we installed over 5000 licenses with the audit. What we had to do was prove that we never/used/ more than 5000 licenses concurrently. To do that we took a series of SQL database backups and used those to show that over time we never exceeded 4700 licenses.
That was done with the raw data from our application metering software which monitored application usage. If it wasn't for the application metering software that provided the raw data we would have had no way to argue in good faith that we complied with the license. Morals of the story. Buy application metering software. Keep backups of your SQL database, this isn't a one off experience for me.
That just isn't how court orders arrive unless they come attached to a criminal case. In the real world the cops don't bust down your doors pointing guns at everyone yelling for you to get down on the ground for civil matters.
Civil matters operate under a subpoena and you typically have to limit the scope of the subpoena to the a particular thing. You can't simply go fishing for anything and everything that might be interesting. What's far more likely is an order would arrive that would say "give me all of your engineering emails from the date of blah through blah by the date of blah". As long as you produce everything by the date of blah you are will be fine.
If a subpoena is overly broad your lawyer would just go back to the court and claim that it was over reaching. There would be a risk of a delay and additional legal fees or having the judge throw out their request altogether. The idea that you would have to produce/everything/ and wouldn't be able to have any copies for yourself only happens in criminal cases or if you fail to comply with the subpoena in a timely manner.
If the judge thinks you blew the subpoena off didn't take it seriously thank you risk physical seizure and having things turned over to someone like Ontrack for a third party search. As a matter of course as long as your timely and produce the exact data without alternation you should never have to worry about being without operational data.
I'll give a real world example of a time that a company I was doing work for got sued for about $8 million for license non-compliance. The company 15,000 seats and only had 5000 licenses of a product that they were using. The company demanded an audit and discovered that were 8000 installations of their software on site. Sound pretty open and shut, write a check, true up the licenses and somebody get's fired, right?
The data had to preserved/exactly/ as it was for the date of the audit. I performed both a back up of the database as well as a physical copy of the database. This was performed for an agreed upon date for the audit. I then preserved it on a separate database instance on a distinct SQL server owned by the legal department. I made sure that I did not 'clean up' or otherwise make the data look nice or presentable.
For those wanting to learn from this I was able to kill the lawsuit dead in it's tracks. When I talked with corporate legal counsel I asked them a simple question. Did the license say 'concurrent' or 'seat' in the fine print? Legal counsel came back to me an hour later to let me know that the license said "concurrent" and not seat. The fact that we had 8000 installations was meaningless/if/ I could prove that we never exceeded 5000 concurrent users.
I was able to do this by going back to multiple back up copies of the SQL database. I made copies of those database backups and put those on the legal teams SQL server. I then looked at the application metering data for the previous two years and was able to prove that we never exceeded 4700 'concurrent' licenses at a given time. This data was provided to their legal counsel in raw form.
To answer your question it boils down to this. You can keep your data as long as they can see your data (as necessarily redacted) in a/timely/ manner and without alteration. Speed is critical and you absolutely have to be able to show how you got your results and have to be able to replicate your work. In other words the other guys IT people have to take your raw data, write their own report and still get your results.
I think people should really be designing for a more plausible and real world scenario that happens far more often. The man made scenario known as a court order. Companies like Ontrack do far more business recovering data for court order subpoenas than they do for floods or fires.
Seriously, you can put your data on RAID 6 arrays to mitigate against disk failure. You can back up your data to mitigate against a disaster at a site. You can distribute your data to multiple sites to mitigate your risk from flood or hurricane or similar disaster.
Can you comply with a court order seizure of your data, hand over everything that is required and still operate? If you can do this than you have a pretty good disaster recovery plan. If you can't do this than you don't have a good disaster recovery plan and it's the one disaster than in the real world strikes businesses more often than just about anything else.
Yes, I have been involved with this kind of thing more than once, and you really don't want to mess about a court order.
Only a simpleton would think that is okay to attack the fundamental fabric of diplomacy and international law while simultaneously demanding it's full protection. You are an idiot.
I watch with great amusement how many people here are willing to defend the sanctity of diplomatic embassies while cheering the man who publicly burned the sanctity of diplomatic communications. The sheer hypocrisy on this ought to be enough kick start fusion....
These words have been a mantra of mine for years. I suspect that many other people share this worldview. The death of flash cannot come soon enough for many, many good reasons.
I'll light the bonfire, who's bringing the beer? Is killing flash the best thing Steve Jobs ever did?
Sad to say, but your superior skill set is worthless. There was a time when it had value, but that time has come and gone by at least a decade now. At this point it is all about skills that can't be outsourced. Any skill that you think you have can be replicated in (at least on paper) by someone in another country at a cheaper price. The managers at the outsource firms will only look on paper and will most likely never bother to interview you in person.
I have worked with the likes of IBM, DELL and HP as they swoop in and took over IT of one enterprise after another. I've seen experienced people who thought they had superior skill sets lose their job time and time again. I was a consultant out in the field for years and believe me your superior skills aren't worth the paper their written on. I saw everyone from architects to programmers to dba's to level 3's with 25 years experience get the axe. They all had high levels of technical skills that on paper could be replaced elsewhere.
The dba's got replaced by people in Argentina. The programmers got replaced by people in India, the level 3's with 25 years experience got replaced by help-desk monkeys with 2 years experience in the Philippines.
You know who didn't get outsourced? People with security clearances that worked in positions where the government required a US citizen. People who had consultancy skills that could become direct hire consultants and the rare person who was really, really good at what they did.
I'll give you a hint, I was brought in as a replacement for a team of six people. If you can't replace six people you aren't of the caliber that they will keep and you will be outsourced. That is their standard.
The better question is where can I relocate and survive outsourcing? Outsourcing is the number one threat to job stability no matter what country you are in. When I was younger I thought it was a problem with job being outsourced from more expensive northern states to cheaper southern states - it was. As I grew older I learned that was just the tip of the iceberg and that outsourcing meant you were competing against people all over the world. Outsourcing means that your job can be sent all over the world.
It doesn't matter where you go, you will face the same problems. Not only that you will also face all of the challenges of being an immigrant. Over the years I have talked with IT people from places like India and even there they outsource their jobs to other firms.
The bottom line is that you have to find a job that is difficult to outsource. There are ways to do this, for example find a job that can't be outsourced out of the country for national security reasons. Find a job that involves working directly with people and requires face to face interaction as a consultant. Find a job that requires your presence and not your skills.
You can be replaced, and companies will spend a fortune to do do it because in the long run they/perceive/ that they will save an even larger fortune by doing so.
Sony, your users are not the enemy! I promise you that many other companies do just fine in life by embracing their users as customers instead of enemies. You can even make money off of them. Drop the hostile attitude and remember your roots. People aren't buying your products because they are perceived as bad for customers to own.
It's not about technology or usability. Why is this so hard to understand? How many billions of dollars do you have to lose before you/get/ this?
Set up a RAID 6 array at a friends or relatives house. Do an initial dump of all of your data to it before you bring it over to them. Offer to pay their Internet bill in exchange. Set up a VPN and run rsync between your place and theirs.
That has got to be about the cheapest and simplest off site back up you can possible have. You can even write off the cost of their Internet as a necessary business expense if you can get a receipt (since you are a photographer for a living and not a hobby).
Drug cartels have long moved into using violence for crimes outside drugs. Mexico, Columbia, Somalia, Italy and on and on. Drug cartels expand to fill other vacuums they perceive as needing met. Extortion and kidnapping are two of their favorite vacuums and result in the murders of so many people that armored vehicles are routinely more popular in places like Columbia than Iraq.
The idea that legalizing drugs would somehow get rid of the violence from the drug cartels runs smack into the reality of a lot of very violent non-drug related crime. Look at places like Mexico and you will see that people are routinely murdered in large quantities by drug cartels for things that have nothing to do with drugs. The cartels have learned a life of crime and violence and will continue that life until a significant outside change forces them to change.
Slashdot Mirror
Traveled there for work over the years and checked out the computer stores while I was down there. Everything was more expensive by a fair margin, enough to put me in shock. Not just computers either, food, clothes, household goods etc.
Talking to the locals they got in the habit of buying from the US and hoping the warranty wasn't needed. Massive problem and I'm surprised they are finally doing something about it.
I still want a Ute though. Was very disappointed when Pontiac got axed right before they were going to import 500 of them....
I believe that is the point. Without nuclear weapons WW3 would HG Ave been fought between the west and eastern blocs decades ago. Going by the death counts from the previous world wars and their use of weapons of mass destruction WW3 would have had a body count in the tens of millions, possibly 100 plus million. Like them or not nuclear weapons have done more for peace than anything else in history. There's good reason they used to call them 'peacemakers'.
Considering nuclear weapons gave us MAD which gave us a period of relative calm that didn't involve something called WW3 I'm inclined to call your comment hyperbole.
Crap argument. Leasing is like leasing and companies already do it. I am not leasing macs for work I am buying them. Apple is intentionally making their products environmentally unfriendly in the name of profits.
It is reasonable to upgrade and service, and sell your equipment. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Notice that recycle is the last thing that should be done in any products lifecycle.
Be responsible and hold apple accountable. Quit apologizing for unethical behavior because your shiny fruit company is doing something that anyone else would be vilified for.
You made an apples to oranges comparison instead of an apples to well, apples comparison. What apple has done is equivalent to an auto manufacturer deciding to weld the hood shut of a brand new car with all of the components for the engine inside /also/ welded onto the block.
It is really inexcusable and only the most die hard of Apple apologists can defend such epically bad environmentally bad behavior. When almost every other product from every other vendor on the market can be upgraded or have components replaced by the lay person your argument is shown to be hollow.
Additional citations:
http://www.mcsalaw.com/html/SIU_CR.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/carkey.html
In fact I found an entire earlier slashdot disussion about this very issue.
http://slashdot.org/story/06/07/31/1549238/rfid-enabled-vehicles-pinch-my-ride
On your point of car thieves simply using tow trucks, I couldn't agree more. After all why bother picking locks when you can just tow the whole car? I would imagine most car theft is done this way anymore. My point was on the car keys being used as an excuse to deny claims, and that the issue was starting to get forced into the open.
Here is a video of such a car theft in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DshK4ZXPU9o
Citations
http://www.wsoctv.com/news/news/action-9-insurer-denies-stolen-car-claim-because-m/nGTHX/
http://www.leftlanenews.com/gone-in-20-minutes-using-laptops-to-steal-cars.html
The car manufactures risk being held liable for people stealing their cars through remote exploits. For years now insurance claims have been denied for certain auto theft claims based on the theory that certain types of keys couldn't be replicated. During the interim of course hackers had figured out how hack the key systems and started stealing the cars without the keys.
Sooner or later the inevitable happened and they got caught on video doing so. I believe there was a story over the UK a few weeks ago about this. Now that the evidence is ironclad the issue has to be acknowledged and Intel is simply targeting a market that is newly available. There is no reason that other companies can't target this same market to provide security services either. To be frank I'm surprised nobodies 'stolen' a car at defcon or black hat yet for one of the demo's.
They do, which is what makes this so damn irritating. They know better! This decision is coming from the top, not from the rank and file. This debacle with refusing to allowing the enterprise to boot directly to the desktop is a /really/ big deal and they have been repeatedly told this.
They have simply ignored the input because their upper management is deathly afraid that they are going to lose the future of computing to the likes of the ipad. The issue is not the metro interface, the issue is that it is forced on you whether you want it or not! If I'm running 75,000 seats I'm not going to have people booting bloodying f******g metro!
Point well made - something I wish more utilities would do. I would rather have a stable and secure PDF tool than a feature rich one constantly needs updated and patched.
They just best the company that the future of computing is the tablet and not the desktop. They then did everything they could to force the enterprise to stop treating desktops like desktops (no you may /not/ shortcut your way into the desktop) and to start treating them like tablets wither they wanted to or not.
What do you mean you think you know you to manage tens of thousands of your users better than we do? The enterprise has made very clear they don't want metro forced on them and Microsoft has made very clear they are going to ram it down their throat anyways. It's the biggest corporate bet in the history of business. Who blinks first?
/I really wish people would quit copy Apple all the bloody time just because they are Apple.
They could prove we installed over 5000 licenses with the audit. What we had to do was prove that we never /used/ more than 5000 licenses concurrently. To do that we took a series of SQL database backups and used those to show that over time we never exceeded 4700 licenses.
That was done with the raw data from our application metering software which monitored application usage. If it wasn't for the application metering software that provided the raw data we would have had no way to argue in good faith that we complied with the license. Morals of the story. Buy application metering software. Keep backups of your SQL database, this isn't a one off experience for me.
That just isn't how court orders arrive unless they come attached to a criminal case. In the real world the cops don't bust down your doors pointing guns at everyone yelling for you to get down on the ground for civil matters.
Civil matters operate under a subpoena and you typically have to limit the scope of the subpoena to the a particular thing. You can't simply go fishing for anything and everything that might be interesting. What's far more likely is an order would arrive that would say "give me all of your engineering emails from the date of blah through blah by the date of blah". As long as you produce everything by the date of blah you are will be fine.
If a subpoena is overly broad your lawyer would just go back to the court and claim that it was over reaching. There would be a risk of a delay and additional legal fees or having the judge throw out their request altogether. The idea that you would have to produce /everything/ and wouldn't be able to have any copies for yourself only happens in criminal cases or if you fail to comply with the subpoena in a timely manner.
If the judge thinks you blew the subpoena off didn't take it seriously thank you risk physical seizure and having things turned over to someone like Ontrack for a third party search. As a matter of course as long as your timely and produce the exact data without alternation you should never have to worry about being without operational data.
I'll give a real world example of a time that a company I was doing work for got sued for about $8 million for license non-compliance. The company 15,000 seats and only had 5000 licenses of a product that they were using. The company demanded an audit and discovered that were 8000 installations of their software on site. Sound pretty open and shut, write a check, true up the licenses and somebody get's fired, right?
The data had to preserved /exactly/ as it was for the date of the audit. I performed both a back up of the database as well as a physical copy of the database. This was performed for an agreed upon date for the audit. I then preserved it on a separate database instance on a distinct SQL server owned by the legal department. I made sure that I did not 'clean up' or otherwise make the data look nice or presentable.
For those wanting to learn from this I was able to kill the lawsuit dead in it's tracks. When I talked with corporate legal counsel I asked them a simple question. Did the license say 'concurrent' or 'seat' in the fine print? Legal counsel came back to me an hour later to let me know that the license said "concurrent" and not seat. The fact that we had 8000 installations was meaningless /if/ I could prove that we never exceeded 5000 concurrent users.
I was able to do this by going back to multiple back up copies of the SQL database. I made copies of those database backups and put those on the legal teams SQL server. I then looked at the application metering data for the previous two years and was able to prove that we never exceeded 4700 'concurrent' licenses at a given time. This data was provided to their legal counsel in raw form.
To answer your question it boils down to this. You can keep your data as long as they can see your data (as necessarily redacted) in a /timely/ manner and without alteration. Speed is critical and you absolutely have to be able to show how you got your results and have to be able to replicate your work. In other words the other guys IT people have to take your raw data, write their own report and still get your results.
I think people should really be designing for a more plausible and real world scenario that happens far more often. The man made scenario known as a court order. Companies like Ontrack do far more business recovering data for court order subpoenas than they do for floods or fires.
Seriously, you can put your data on RAID 6 arrays to mitigate against disk failure. You can back up your data to mitigate against a disaster at a site. You can distribute your data to multiple sites to mitigate your risk from flood or hurricane or similar disaster.
Can you comply with a court order seizure of your data, hand over everything that is required and still operate? If you can do this than you have a pretty good disaster recovery plan. If you can't do this than you don't have a good disaster recovery plan and it's the one disaster than in the real world strikes businesses more often than just about anything else.
Yes, I have been involved with this kind of thing more than once, and you really don't want to mess about a court order.
Especially when the person you had it with didn't consent....
Only a simpleton would think that is okay to attack the fundamental fabric of diplomacy and international law while simultaneously demanding it's full protection. You are an idiot.
I watch with great amusement how many people here are willing to defend the sanctity of diplomatic embassies while cheering the man who publicly burned the sanctity of diplomatic communications. The sheer hypocrisy on this ought to be enough kick start fusion....
These words have been a mantra of mine for years. I suspect that many other people share this worldview. The death of flash cannot come soon enough for many, many good reasons.
I'll light the bonfire, who's bringing the beer? Is killing flash the best thing Steve Jobs ever did?
Sad to say, but your superior skill set is worthless. There was a time when it had value, but that time has come and gone by at least a decade now. At this point it is all about skills that can't be outsourced. Any skill that you think you have can be replicated in (at least on paper) by someone in another country at a cheaper price. The managers at the outsource firms will only look on paper and will most likely never bother to interview you in person.
I have worked with the likes of IBM, DELL and HP as they swoop in and took over IT of one enterprise after another. I've seen experienced people who thought they had superior skill sets lose their job time and time again. I was a consultant out in the field for years and believe me your superior skills aren't worth the paper their written on. I saw everyone from architects to programmers to dba's to level 3's with 25 years experience get the axe. They all had high levels of technical skills that on paper could be replaced elsewhere.
The dba's got replaced by people in Argentina. The programmers got replaced by people in India, the level 3's with 25 years experience got replaced by help-desk monkeys with 2 years experience in the Philippines.
You know who didn't get outsourced? People with security clearances that worked in positions where the government required a US citizen. People who had consultancy skills that could become direct hire consultants and the rare person who was really, really good at what they did.
I'll give you a hint, I was brought in as a replacement for a team of six people. If you can't replace six people you aren't of the caliber that they will keep and you will be outsourced. That is their standard.
The better question is where can I relocate and survive outsourcing? Outsourcing is the number one threat to job stability no matter what country you are in. When I was younger I thought it was a problem with job being outsourced from more expensive northern states to cheaper southern states - it was. As I grew older I learned that was just the tip of the iceberg and that outsourcing meant you were competing against people all over the world. Outsourcing means that your job can be sent all over the world.
It doesn't matter where you go, you will face the same problems. Not only that you will also face all of the challenges of being an immigrant. Over the years I have talked with IT people from places like India and even there they outsource their jobs to other firms.
The bottom line is that you have to find a job that is difficult to outsource. There are ways to do this, for example find a job that can't be outsourced out of the country for national security reasons. Find a job that involves working directly with people and requires face to face interaction as a consultant. Find a job that requires your presence and not your skills.
You can be replaced, and companies will spend a fortune to do do it because in the long run they /perceive/ that they will save an even larger fortune by doing so.
Sony, your users are not the enemy! I promise you that many other companies do just fine in life by embracing their users as customers instead of enemies. You can even make money off of them. Drop the hostile attitude and remember your roots. People aren't buying your products because they are perceived as bad for customers to own.
It's not about technology or usability. Why is this so hard to understand? How many billions of dollars do you have to lose before you /get/ this?
Set up a RAID 6 array at a friends or relatives house. Do an initial dump of all of your data to it before you bring it over to them. Offer to pay their Internet bill in exchange. Set up a VPN and run rsync between your place and theirs.
That has got to be about the cheapest and simplest off site back up you can possible have. You can even write off the cost of their Internet as a necessary business expense if you can get a receipt (since you are a photographer for a living and not a hobby).
I just ran out of mod points or you would have gotten +1 insightful.
Drug cartels have long moved into using violence for crimes outside drugs. Mexico, Columbia, Somalia, Italy and on and on. Drug cartels expand to fill other vacuums they perceive as needing met. Extortion and kidnapping are two of their favorite vacuums and result in the murders of so many people that armored vehicles are routinely more popular in places like Columbia than Iraq.
The idea that legalizing drugs would somehow get rid of the violence from the drug cartels runs smack into the reality of a lot of very violent non-drug related crime. Look at places like Mexico and you will see that people are routinely murdered in large quantities by drug cartels for things that have nothing to do with drugs. The cartels have learned a life of crime and violence and will continue that life until a significant outside change forces them to change.