If you're Google and have to deal with BS like this, take it a step further and just shut off access to all google services in Brazil until the government gives in. All those politicians have to go home and listen to their kids whine about how they can't watch honey boo boo on youtube, I give it a day until Brazil backs down.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. If you don't run it above the drop ceiling, where do you run it? Any building built-out for you should have conduit stubbed from wall boxes to the plenum space which makes running cable easy. If not, it's a fairly simple matter to snake the cable down the wall using a cable snake or pull stick. If a commercial installer wanted to rip out walls to run cabling, I'd really question them unless there was a hard ceiling or some other architectural detail that made it impractical to access the plenum space.
I've run my own cable in a new building above drop ceiling - we rented a scissor lift and did it before the ceiling grid was installed. No problems. But, I never suggested to the OP that he should run his own cable, all I said was that there's no compelling reason to pay someone more to run cat6 as opposed to cat5e unless he has a specific requirement that calls for cat6. Maybe 10gig needs it, I don't know. But I know the building I'm in now was wired in 95 with cat5 and GigE + PoE works fine on all 150 or so drops.
GigE runs perfectly fine on Cat5E. There's really no reason to bother with Cat6 unless you have a specific requirement that calls for it. Why would you need to rip out walls to put in fiber? You can run it above a drop ceiling just like you can run copper ethernet.
I'm not familiar with Battlestar, but at least in Star Trek, they have subspace which is FTL communication. Otherwise, you would not be able to communicate with a ship moving away from you at warp speed, which they do frequently. Similarly, if sensor readings were constrained by the speed of light, a ship moving at warp speed would not be able to get sensor readings from an object behind them, which they also do. So the assumption by the OP of information moving at the speed of light may be flawed.
Had a job I liked with people I enjoyed working with but was grossly underpaid. Got an offer for a lot more money at another company and when I went to tender my resignation I told them it was nothing personal and I was leaving for a better opportunity, so they asked what it would take for me to stay and ended up giving me the same pay I was being offered at the other company.
Some folks will say to never accept a counteroffer, but I think as long as you have a good relationship with the company and make it clear that you enjoy the job and the only reason you're leaving is money they may just bump you up. A 10% increase is a lot less than what I ended up getting.
If you're doing work for anyone you don't trust 110%, you want to be incorporated or have some other type of limited liability. Otherwise, they can sue you and put all of your personal assets in jeopardy. Incorporating is incredibly simple (at least here in Florida). You just fill out the online form with the state, pay them about $100, register with the IRS and you're done. Put everything in the company's name, if you sign any contracts, make sure the corporation's name appears next to your signature. Do all your business related banking in a separate account in the corporation's name.
The only real difference is you need to keep business and personal finances separate, and you'll have to file a tax return for the corporation. An accountant can help you with this.
Actually, that's not true at all. You can sue Bill Gates and you can even sue Steve Jobs even though he's dead and has nothing to do with Microsoft. What you meant to say is that the suit against those individuals will be dropped upon examination because they have no liability.
If you've got enough compute resources to have your own data center, it's probably cheaper for you to have your own data center instead of paying someone else to do it for you. So then, you build your own data center, and you decide on compromising on certain things like power bus redundancy, because in any given data center environment there are a million things that can fail, but you have to prioritize the systems you make redundant by looking at their failure probability and expected failure impact. You can't make everything redundant. That would be foolish because you'd spend so much money on redundancy that you'd have no money left for functionality. You probably want redundancy for routers, switches, servers, storage, etc because that's all stuff that's likely to fail, but I'd bet most single tenant datacenters probably don't have power grid redundancy because that's really expensive, and not as likely to fail. You would probably be better served by staying on a single power grid and putting the money to bring another power connection in on a generator instead.
The point I'm trying to make is that there is a level at which you have to say something is "redundant enough". I think that call that the point of diminishing returns. I would say an overheating power bus is probably an acceptable failure because I would've considered that as something that has a pretty low failure risk, so I wouldn't have spent the money to have two of them.
Remember I'm talking about a single tenant, privately owned datacenter for a small entity here. I.E. a municipality that probably has somewhere between 100-500 servers. Naturally if you're a company that is in the business of doing business online, or a huge company, then this isn't the right path for you. At the end of the day, a municipality offers online services as a convenience for its residents. When the DC blows up, you can still write a check and drop it in the mailbox to pay your water bill.
When you figure out your critical services, you separate them and define another SLA which applies only to them. And from the article, it sounds like that is exactly what they did - they kept the critical life safety systems running and took down the convenience systems for an acceptable period of time. So what's all the fuss about?
I don't like it. Because I fall under it and would definitely not consider myself a Linux professional.
But I suspect that a lot of folks got into Linux the way I did. Back in the early 90s I attached my dial-up modem to a slackware box and used ipchains to turn an old 486 into a router to provide net access to my home LAN.
The OP has the wrong idea. If you didn't do anything wrong, why are you taking it upon yourself to disappear? Instead of that, I would immediately notify as many people in as large a geographic area as possible about the situation. Disseminating this information will make it difficult for the government to vanish you because many people will ask questions.
OTOH, if you fear for your safety or that of your family, after doing what I recommended above, then you may indeed need to disappear because most countries frown on the practice of citizens using lethal force against police/government officials to protect themselves, even when they are justified in doing so.
If you're building a spacecraft that's going to live 350 million miles away, wouldn't you have redundant EVERYTHING on it? I.E. the entire command and control system should be duplicated. That way you update the standby system and have some predefined self check the thing can do after the update's done, and if it doesn't pass the self check, then that system stays in standby mode so the operation of the system as a whole isn't impacted. You'd also probably have some sort of OOB access to the failed system via the primary system so you can go in and try to repair it.
These questions pop up a couple times a year, and the ultimate answer for cost effectiveness and minimal complexity is always the same.
Buy storage in groups of two or three (I'll explain the different options shortly) drives at a time. So let's say your 8 TB can be covered by three 3TB USB HDDs. So you buy a set of three 3 TB HDDs and that's your master copy that you keep at home and work from. Now duplicate that exact same setup and that's your backup copy. This gives you protection against human error (accidental deletion, overwriting, etc), hardware failure and filesystem corruption. Now buy a third set of drives. This is your offsite backup which could live in a safe deposit box, a friends house, etc. This gives you protection against events such as fire, flood, power surge, theft, etc which cause both the primary and onsite backup sets to be lost. The onsite and offsite backups should never be at your house at the same time. Periodically (you can detemine the best schedule for your situation) you should take the onsite backup and move that offsite, and conversely bring the offsite backup onsite. The schedule at which you do this would determine your RPO (amount of data you would lose if your house burned down).
The initial sync will be painful, but afterward you can use just about any sync software (there are many freebies, as well as many commercial) to keep the two backup sets in sync with the primary storage. Just let it run overnight while you're not using the system.
If you get to a point where you need to add a 4th drive, buy three identical drives (one for each storage set). Periodically you'll want to refresh the drives to stay current with technology and minimize the risk of hardware failure.
As mentioned, this approach does have the drawback of a slow initial backup, but EVERY solution is going to have that and HDD to HDD backup is likely going to be the fastest and least suck method of doing it. This is also just about the cheapest solution, and doesn't rely on any special hardware or software.
Surprised nobody has suggested this...save yourself the hassle of trying to pick a storage device that will still be compatible in 25 years and just get something with a network interface, I.E. a NAS. If you want to bank on something still being easily available in 25 years, bank on HTTP. It's been around for a very long time and isn't going anywhere. Just get yourself a NAS that supports IPv4 and IPv6 with an integrated webserver and you're golden for probably the next 50 years. Make sure it has a ethernet port, you should definitely be able to find ethernet enabled gear or at least some sort of ethernet adapter in 25 years. Also, most NAS boxes will also have USB and potentially firewire, Thunderbolt, etc. Those don't hurt, the more connectivity options the better. Make sure you have the data you want to save on several drives in case one goes bad.
"If NY state isn't using these options, it's deliberate fraud."
Really? So, you're saying that by not enabling a disabled by default option, NY state is actively conspiring to commit fraud? Extending that logic, are you also saying that by keeping PIN logging disabled by default, RIM is encouraging companies to commit fraud? It's far more likely that 1) they didn't know they could enable PIN logging (many admins don't), 2) they don't want to deal with storage and archival of logfiles, 3) they did the sensible thing and elected to not retain any more records than what the law requires (as most entities would choose to do). A legal department's answer when it comes to records retention will always be to get rid of anything that you're not required to keep so it's not subject to discovery. Employees are instructed to keep anything they think they may need and everything else is purged.
I was wondering the same thing. BES even logs text messages if you tell it to. We caught an employee doing bad things a while back using that...they assumed that since text messages were sent via the carrier network and not our servers they would not be logged.
The 500 trillion watts thing made me think and do some math about how much power the US actually uses at any given moment. According to the EIA, in 2010 the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 11,496 kWh. So doing some math, that's only about.21 watts per second, and based on an estimated 115 million houses in the US, that's only just over 24.1 million watts per second. Of course this doesn't take into account commercial power use which is likely a lot higher, but I found it surprising that in a given second, the nation's households only consume 24.1 million watts.
Everyone in IT starts out with a spring in their step. I'm 31 and have been in corporate IT since I was 18, and I can tell you I am a fair bit more likely to return something in favor of a simpler product or farm stuff out to vendors than I was even 5 years ago. I used to spend 2-3 hours every evening doing work from home because I found I could get a lot of things accomplished due to the reduced distractions, but there comes a time in everyone's life when they no longer enjoy having to juggle 10-20 projects at any given time, and want to be able to go home at a decent hour and spend time with their family. So...short answer, the guys you work with were probably just like you at one point, and on one hand they should be keeping up with the new developments in technology, but on the other hand the shine their job once had has worn off and they just want to get things done without having to put extra effort in.
Yes...this. It's exactly what EC2 is about. Everything about what they give you in terms of docs makes you think instances are designed to be basically disposable. If it gets hosed, don't spend time trying to fix it, just spin up another one. And if that instance happens to be in a completely separate AZ, the system doesn't care. There are a multitude of ways to gracefully recover from a datacenter outage in a straightforward manner if you plan for it and know what to do before you need to do it. It may not be a seamless recovery, you may have 10 minutes of downtime, but unless you're Facebook you can live with that. The beauty of the "cloud" is that anyone can achieve this level of uptime without having to worry about buying generators and batteries, etc. Don't spend crazy money on redundancy, just make sure you've got your ducks in a row so when something like this happens you can easily spin back up or ramp up in another DC..
I've been using AWS for almost a year and have been impacted by one outage so far. That's why they, you know, recommend you put things in multiple regions / availability zones, kind of just like you would before the cloud came to be.
They've had VM import for quite a while and just released VM export so you can take your EC2 instances and easily convert them into VMware images that you can download and run where ever you want.
They can certainly decide to raise their prices, but there is absolutely something stopping them from doing so: competition. In a free market you won't survive long if you are providing the same service as everyone else and charging more for it.
And as far as programmers who know what they're doing...I can see you haven't spent much time with the AWS docs or SDK. If you had, it would be obvious that they have some scary smart folks working there.
First, getting everything into a VM environment is a huge win as far as manageability as it buys you hardware agnosticism.
The product description for VMware HA is exactly what you are talking about, but you do need a license to use it. I think you can get a barebones license for about $2k, which is expensive for a small shop, but it does buy you automated failover.
There are plenty of desktop class machines out there that are compatible with VMware, so assuming your hardware requirements aren't too high you could buy two of them and a license and some shared storage and still be under $5k, which IMO is very reasonable for a small business wanting failover. Just keep in mind that your shared storage then becomes a SPOF so you don't want to go with openfiler running on an old PC with a single SATA drive.
Another option could potentially be putting the server in the cloud, assuming you are not bandwidth constrained and your Internet connection is stable. In the cloud you just pay for the server and let them worry about uptime. On the back end, they have massive redundancy and your VM would recover from a failure inside 10-15 minutes.
I downloaded the app and tried to see if I could pull data from any of my cards. I opened the app and didn't see any buttons that needed to be pressed to enable scanning, but the app's in a language I don't speak (German I assume). I ran it over a card with a chip and nothing popped up, I ran it over my entire wallet and nothing. I'm pretty sure I've got at least one card that is NFC-capable, and I know my phone is.
The company I work for just had a bid led by our MS developers to start issuing Windows phones to employees. They ordered some demo units and gave them out and the next day when people started coming to IT and asking "how do I download skype?", "how can I get pandora?" the fact that apps make or break a phone platform finally sunk in.
Yes. The visitor is one of those few trek stories that can make you want to cry. I would also add DS9: Far Beyond the Stars to this list, although to fully appreciate it you need to have the DS9 backstory because parts of aren't fully understandable without it.
The Siege of AR-558 and the Vic Fontaine stories are also good, as is most anything with Quark, who I think is one of the best trek actors of all time.
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If you're Google and have to deal with BS like this, take it a step further and just shut off access to all google services in Brazil until the government gives in. All those politicians have to go home and listen to their kids whine about how they can't watch honey boo boo on youtube, I give it a day until Brazil backs down.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. If you don't run it above the drop ceiling, where do you run it? Any building built-out for you should have conduit stubbed from wall boxes to the plenum space which makes running cable easy. If not, it's a fairly simple matter to snake the cable down the wall using a cable snake or pull stick. If a commercial installer wanted to rip out walls to run cabling, I'd really question them unless there was a hard ceiling or some other architectural detail that made it impractical to access the plenum space.
I've run my own cable in a new building above drop ceiling - we rented a scissor lift and did it before the ceiling grid was installed. No problems. But, I never suggested to the OP that he should run his own cable, all I said was that there's no compelling reason to pay someone more to run cat6 as opposed to cat5e unless he has a specific requirement that calls for cat6. Maybe 10gig needs it, I don't know. But I know the building I'm in now was wired in 95 with cat5 and GigE + PoE works fine on all 150 or so drops.
GigE runs perfectly fine on Cat5E. There's really no reason to bother with Cat6 unless you have a specific requirement that calls for it. Why would you need to rip out walls to put in fiber? You can run it above a drop ceiling just like you can run copper ethernet.
I'm not familiar with Battlestar, but at least in Star Trek, they have subspace which is FTL communication. Otherwise, you would not be able to communicate with a ship moving away from you at warp speed, which they do frequently. Similarly, if sensor readings were constrained by the speed of light, a ship moving at warp speed would not be able to get sensor readings from an object behind them, which they also do. So the assumption by the OP of information moving at the speed of light may be flawed.
Either move or get a set of noise cancelling headphones.
Had a job I liked with people I enjoyed working with but was grossly underpaid. Got an offer for a lot more money at another company and when I went to tender my resignation I told them it was nothing personal and I was leaving for a better opportunity, so they asked what it would take for me to stay and ended up giving me the same pay I was being offered at the other company.
Some folks will say to never accept a counteroffer, but I think as long as you have a good relationship with the company and make it clear that you enjoy the job and the only reason you're leaving is money they may just bump you up. A 10% increase is a lot less than what I ended up getting.
If you're doing work for anyone you don't trust 110%, you want to be incorporated or have some other type of limited liability. Otherwise, they can sue you and put all of your personal assets in jeopardy. Incorporating is incredibly simple (at least here in Florida). You just fill out the online form with the state, pay them about $100, register with the IRS and you're done. Put everything in the company's name, if you sign any contracts, make sure the corporation's name appears next to your signature. Do all your business related banking in a separate account in the corporation's name.
The only real difference is you need to keep business and personal finances separate, and you'll have to file a tax return for the corporation. An accountant can help you with this.
Actually, that's not true at all. You can sue Bill Gates and you can even sue Steve Jobs even though he's dead and has nothing to do with Microsoft. What you meant to say is that the suit against those individuals will be dropped upon examination because they have no liability.
If you've got enough compute resources to have your own data center, it's probably cheaper for you to have your own data center instead of paying someone else to do it for you. So then, you build your own data center, and you decide on compromising on certain things like power bus redundancy, because in any given data center environment there are a million things that can fail, but you have to prioritize the systems you make redundant by looking at their failure probability and expected failure impact. You can't make everything redundant. That would be foolish because you'd spend so much money on redundancy that you'd have no money left for functionality. You probably want redundancy for routers, switches, servers, storage, etc because that's all stuff that's likely to fail, but I'd bet most single tenant datacenters probably don't have power grid redundancy because that's really expensive, and not as likely to fail. You would probably be better served by staying on a single power grid and putting the money to bring another power connection in on a generator instead.
The point I'm trying to make is that there is a level at which you have to say something is "redundant enough". I think that call that the point of diminishing returns. I would say an overheating power bus is probably an acceptable failure because I would've considered that as something that has a pretty low failure risk, so I wouldn't have spent the money to have two of them.
Remember I'm talking about a single tenant, privately owned datacenter for a small entity here. I.E. a municipality that probably has somewhere between 100-500 servers. Naturally if you're a company that is in the business of doing business online, or a huge company, then this isn't the right path for you. At the end of the day, a municipality offers online services as a convenience for its residents. When the DC blows up, you can still write a check and drop it in the mailbox to pay your water bill.
When you figure out your critical services, you separate them and define another SLA which applies only to them. And from the article, it sounds like that is exactly what they did - they kept the critical life safety systems running and took down the convenience systems for an acceptable period of time. So what's all the fuss about?
I don't like it. Because I fall under it and would definitely not consider myself a Linux professional.
But I suspect that a lot of folks got into Linux the way I did. Back in the early 90s I attached my dial-up modem to a slackware box and used ipchains to turn an old 486 into a router to provide net access to my home LAN.
The OP has the wrong idea. If you didn't do anything wrong, why are you taking it upon yourself to disappear? Instead of that, I would immediately notify as many people in as large a geographic area as possible about the situation. Disseminating this information will make it difficult for the government to vanish you because many people will ask questions.
OTOH, if you fear for your safety or that of your family, after doing what I recommended above, then you may indeed need to disappear because most countries frown on the practice of citizens using lethal force against police/government officials to protect themselves, even when they are justified in doing so.
If you're building a spacecraft that's going to live 350 million miles away, wouldn't you have redundant EVERYTHING on it? I.E. the entire command and control system should be duplicated. That way you update the standby system and have some predefined self check the thing can do after the update's done, and if it doesn't pass the self check, then that system stays in standby mode so the operation of the system as a whole isn't impacted. You'd also probably have some sort of OOB access to the failed system via the primary system so you can go in and try to repair it.
Backup Exec does exactly what you are asking for. Free 30 day trial.
These questions pop up a couple times a year, and the ultimate answer for cost effectiveness and minimal complexity is always the same.
Buy storage in groups of two or three (I'll explain the different options shortly) drives at a time. So let's say your 8 TB can be covered by three 3TB USB HDDs. So you buy a set of three 3 TB HDDs and that's your master copy that you keep at home and work from. Now duplicate that exact same setup and that's your backup copy. This gives you protection against human error (accidental deletion, overwriting, etc), hardware failure and filesystem corruption. Now buy a third set of drives. This is your offsite backup which could live in a safe deposit box, a friends house, etc. This gives you protection against events such as fire, flood, power surge, theft, etc which cause both the primary and onsite backup sets to be lost. The onsite and offsite backups should never be at your house at the same time. Periodically (you can detemine the best schedule for your situation) you should take the onsite backup and move that offsite, and conversely bring the offsite backup onsite. The schedule at which you do this would determine your RPO (amount of data you would lose if your house burned down).
The initial sync will be painful, but afterward you can use just about any sync software (there are many freebies, as well as many commercial) to keep the two backup sets in sync with the primary storage. Just let it run overnight while you're not using the system.
If you get to a point where you need to add a 4th drive, buy three identical drives (one for each storage set). Periodically you'll want to refresh the drives to stay current with technology and minimize the risk of hardware failure.
As mentioned, this approach does have the drawback of a slow initial backup, but EVERY solution is going to have that and HDD to HDD backup is likely going to be the fastest and least suck method of doing it. This is also just about the cheapest solution, and doesn't rely on any special hardware or software.
Surprised nobody has suggested this...save yourself the hassle of trying to pick a storage device that will still be compatible in 25 years and just get something with a network interface, I.E. a NAS. If you want to bank on something still being easily available in 25 years, bank on HTTP. It's been around for a very long time and isn't going anywhere. Just get yourself a NAS that supports IPv4 and IPv6 with an integrated webserver and you're golden for probably the next 50 years. Make sure it has a ethernet port, you should definitely be able to find ethernet enabled gear or at least some sort of ethernet adapter in 25 years. Also, most NAS boxes will also have USB and potentially firewire, Thunderbolt, etc. Those don't hurt, the more connectivity options the better. Make sure you have the data you want to save on several drives in case one goes bad.
"If NY state isn't using these options, it's deliberate fraud." Really? So, you're saying that by not enabling a disabled by default option, NY state is actively conspiring to commit fraud? Extending that logic, are you also saying that by keeping PIN logging disabled by default, RIM is encouraging companies to commit fraud? It's far more likely that 1) they didn't know they could enable PIN logging (many admins don't), 2) they don't want to deal with storage and archival of logfiles, 3) they did the sensible thing and elected to not retain any more records than what the law requires (as most entities would choose to do). A legal department's answer when it comes to records retention will always be to get rid of anything that you're not required to keep so it's not subject to discovery. Employees are instructed to keep anything they think they may need and everything else is purged.
I was wondering the same thing. BES even logs text messages if you tell it to. We caught an employee doing bad things a while back using that...they assumed that since text messages were sent via the carrier network and not our servers they would not be logged.
The 500 trillion watts thing made me think and do some math about how much power the US actually uses at any given moment. According to the EIA, in 2010 the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 11,496 kWh. So doing some math, that's only about .21 watts per second, and based on an estimated 115 million houses in the US, that's only just over 24.1 million watts per second. Of course this doesn't take into account commercial power use which is likely a lot higher, but I found it surprising that in a given second, the nation's households only consume 24.1 million watts.
Everyone in IT starts out with a spring in their step. I'm 31 and have been in corporate IT since I was 18, and I can tell you I am a fair bit more likely to return something in favor of a simpler product or farm stuff out to vendors than I was even 5 years ago. I used to spend 2-3 hours every evening doing work from home because I found I could get a lot of things accomplished due to the reduced distractions, but there comes a time in everyone's life when they no longer enjoy having to juggle 10-20 projects at any given time, and want to be able to go home at a decent hour and spend time with their family. So...short answer, the guys you work with were probably just like you at one point, and on one hand they should be keeping up with the new developments in technology, but on the other hand the shine their job once had has worn off and they just want to get things done without having to put extra effort in.
Yes...this. It's exactly what EC2 is about. Everything about what they give you in terms of docs makes you think instances are designed to be basically disposable. If it gets hosed, don't spend time trying to fix it, just spin up another one. And if that instance happens to be in a completely separate AZ, the system doesn't care. There are a multitude of ways to gracefully recover from a datacenter outage in a straightforward manner if you plan for it and know what to do before you need to do it. It may not be a seamless recovery, you may have 10 minutes of downtime, but unless you're Facebook you can live with that. The beauty of the "cloud" is that anyone can achieve this level of uptime without having to worry about buying generators and batteries, etc. Don't spend crazy money on redundancy, just make sure you've got your ducks in a row so when something like this happens you can easily spin back up or ramp up in another DC..
I've been using AWS for almost a year and have been impacted by one outage so far. That's why they, you know, recommend you put things in multiple regions / availability zones, kind of just like you would before the cloud came to be.
They've had VM import for quite a while and just released VM export so you can take your EC2 instances and easily convert them into VMware images that you can download and run where ever you want.
They can certainly decide to raise their prices, but there is absolutely something stopping them from doing so: competition. In a free market you won't survive long if you are providing the same service as everyone else and charging more for it.
And as far as programmers who know what they're doing...I can see you haven't spent much time with the AWS docs or SDK. If you had, it would be obvious that they have some scary smart folks working there.
First, getting everything into a VM environment is a huge win as far as manageability as it buys you hardware agnosticism.
The product description for VMware HA is exactly what you are talking about, but you do need a license to use it. I think you can get a barebones license for about $2k, which is expensive for a small shop, but it does buy you automated failover.
There are plenty of desktop class machines out there that are compatible with VMware, so assuming your hardware requirements aren't too high you could buy two of them and a license and some shared storage and still be under $5k, which IMO is very reasonable for a small business wanting failover. Just keep in mind that your shared storage then becomes a SPOF so you don't want to go with openfiler running on an old PC with a single SATA drive.
Another option could potentially be putting the server in the cloud, assuming you are not bandwidth constrained and your Internet connection is stable. In the cloud you just pay for the server and let them worry about uptime. On the back end, they have massive redundancy and your VM would recover from a failure inside 10-15 minutes.
I downloaded the app and tried to see if I could pull data from any of my cards. I opened the app and didn't see any buttons that needed to be pressed to enable scanning, but the app's in a language I don't speak (German I assume). I ran it over a card with a chip and nothing popped up, I ran it over my entire wallet and nothing. I'm pretty sure I've got at least one card that is NFC-capable, and I know my phone is.
The company I work for just had a bid led by our MS developers to start issuing Windows phones to employees. They ordered some demo units and gave them out and the next day when people started coming to IT and asking "how do I download skype?", "how can I get pandora?" the fact that apps make or break a phone platform finally sunk in.
Yes. The visitor is one of those few trek stories that can make you want to cry. I would also add DS9: Far Beyond the Stars to this list, although to fully appreciate it you need to have the DS9 backstory because parts of aren't fully understandable without it.
The Siege of AR-558 and the Vic Fontaine stories are also good, as is most anything with Quark, who I think is one of the best trek actors of all time.