It all kind of depends on how rationally the mullahs operate.
I'm pretty sure that the concept has been communicated to the Iranians, either semi-directly through back channels or through other third parties that any use of a nuclear weapon against the US or its "close allies" will result in overwhelming nuclear retaliation, the kind that might cause one to question the future of Persian culture centered around Iranian geography.
It's long been rumored that the Israelis have indirectly communicated that any NBC attack will result in nuclear retaliation against all Arab capitals and major Islamic religious sites, allowing for a certain group restraint among Arab countries not wishing to see their capital vaporized should a neighbor's anti-Israeli action get too heated.
And don't think for a second that the Soviets or the Chinese would say a word -- poking a stick at the US via Iran is valuable to the Soviets and the Chinese, but it's not worth trading nuclear strikes with the US.
One would think that Iranian leaders would take this into account when doing the calculus on nuclear weapons. Are they even worth having, outside of defensive use within their own immediate political theater? Would the cost of development be better spent on something else -- a home-grown cruise missile, long-range missile, some other expenditure?
That being said, the mullahs may not be rational -- they may be given to magical thinking and have some kind of literal belief in religion that might cause them to not care. We've certainly seen enough rank-and-file religious nuts blow themselves up.
I can't imagine what kind of deliverable they can actually provide -- it's not credible to claim they've prevented all terrorism, and unfortunately where maybe they have, I'm sure the FBI/NSA/CIA wants it kept totally quiet so they can do whatever counter-terrorism investigation they do, keeping the TSA from taking any kind of credit.
What they need to do is have credible claims for effectiveness AND be as totally invisible as possible. You should "go through security" at the airport with less impact than going through the drivethru at a fast food restaurant.
My unvarnished take on it is that when the USSR dissolved, Russia went from a totalitarian socialism to a kind of weak Democratic capitalism, dominated by organized crime and "the oligarchs". Most of the "backbone" Russian institutions like the KGB and the military (in particular) were significantly weakened, and all manner of social ills began to rear their ugly head.
Putin kind of stepped in and with something of an iron fist in a velvet glove began to kind of re-invigorate the institutions of Russia. A number of oligarchs who wouldn't toe his line (whether politically, financially, or both) were essentially stripped of their wealth, imprisoned and some even killed (cf. Kordokovsky, who ran Lukoil, is still in jail and Litvenenko was poisoned with Polonium, although he was ex-KGB/FSB, not an oligarch).
Publicly, Putin sort of created a new "strong" Russian image and with high oil prices was sort of able to create an improved economic climate and tamp down the chaos of Russian civil life.
That being said, Democracy took a back seat if not being reduced to a mere performance. Lots of suppression of the press, the opposition. He moved from President to Prime Minister, appointing a puppet President (they traded jobs in the most recent and probably rigged election).
My guess is that the global economic downturn has taken the shine off of living in his dictatorship (along with the corruption and everyday difficulties).
You would think he would either guide a more democratic transition and fade away to private life, but I think he's going to hold on to power until he gets clipped. I think too much of the top end of Russian politics is run like organized crime for anyone to get on top and stay on top to just say "game over, I'm done".
What certainly contributed to the death of Laserdiscs was the lack of S-Video inputs on most TVs, thus limiting you to a picture that wasn't that much better than a commercial VHS tape on a 'better' TV that even had a composite video input.
IIRC, S-Video (aka Y/C) inputs didn't become really all that common until the late 80s and even then only on high end TVs. 'Better' TVs might have had composite and bargain ones only RF.
And how many people still watched VHS on channel 3/4 on TVs with only RF inputs? That was a non-starter for Laserdisc.
A friend had a Pioneer circa 1990 and I don't remember the disc flipping being that big of a deal, probably because his player was double sided and you could get about 60 minutes per side on a CAA disc, and most movies fit in that time limit.
I think in the end it was probably cost, limited title selection and whatever picture quality improvements probably only really made sense if you had a projection TV.
I got a folding pleather case for my iPad 1 on clearance for $5. It functions as a stand, too. Bluetooth keyboards aren't hard to find on clearance, either, but I happened to get one of the Apple ones from work when they rolled out Macs with better USB keyboards.
A spare battery hasn't been necessary, even when traveling & watching movies the battery really lasts. I don't charge it more than once every couple of days and it gets used quite a bit.
Outside of that, I haven't found much of a need for anything else. Even the keyboard is kind of more headache than it's worth, except when traveling.
The only other accessory I wish worked with it is a bluetooth mouse, and only then for using RDP sessions, and only then probably when traveling and needing to interact with a PC intensively. Apple's decided not to support this, but even if they did I already own a BT mouse.
If they do, I want them to know that there were a couple of times I wanted to buy a Sony digital camera, based on some feature or other it had.
But then I realized the camera only worked with a more expensive Sony-proprietary memory card, so I bought another camera from a competitor that used industry standard memory cards that cost less money.
Outside of mainframe systems, I think x86 systems have historically had a model where you were either the super user, or you weren't, and there was little room in between if you wanted to get something done.
To this day, I run into shops that have disabled the Windows administrator account and use a different account for administrative tasks. Occasionally things break in strange ways because the software (and with Windows, UAC) doesn't work right without administrative privileges.
And then there's adding audit software into the mix, getting it working right, etc, and then justifying the cost if its not some kind of manditory/checkbox for achieving some industry or audit certification. Many places just won't pay for it, can't get it implemented due to the changes required to support it, etc.
I think newer/better/bigger database applications have internal audit trails that show who did what with what information and in a way that's complicated to erase or change, but many do not, especially outside the tier of expensive/large apps.
We've had two Slashdot threads in the past couple of days about email systems failing to keep up with growth -- that's about the most basic system service IT can provide, if management can't resource plan for that, how is audit/security going to fit in that mix?
My guess is that a legalized market in the U.S. for marijuana alone exceeds the entire illegal drug market now.
The cartels face enormous operating costs in terms of bribes, delivery infrastructure, security and manufacturing. These costs would be trivial in legal market.
They already have the means and ability to produce a product -- why wouldn't you want to decrease the costs (not to mention the fairly high loss of life risk) for access to a market 5-10 times as large?
Plus, history suggests that the end of alcohol prohibition didn't make whisky production stop, so there's a fairly good reason to believe that there's still big money to made.
I'm 45 and work at a consulting company. I'm fortunate enough to have a senior position here, but I'm also married, with a 1st grade son, a house and all the trappings that go with it.
I feel a lot of competition with the junior guys -- I was talking to one of them and he was griping about making a 4:30 PM help desk appointment but that once he got home about 7 PM he was going to really dive into whatever it was he was also working on. A couple of days later he was yakking about some work he was doing at 11:30 at night.
I just don't have that kind of free time. For one, there's shit to be done at home in terms of childcare and parenting, the wife doesn't want to work full time and do it all herself.
I think my advantage, though, is that I work a lot smarter -- I don't brute force solutions, take stupid risks or buy into a lot of technology BS that amounts to lots of work and little payoff. My clients tend to be more stable and have fewer glitches. I get grief from time-to-time for not deploying every gee-whiz feature, but not by the clients, by sales people.
It makes you wonder if NPR could survive without tax dollars.
One of the superb ironies during the "cut NPR funding" kerfuffle of a couple of years ago was hearing the head of Minnesota Public Radio, Bill Kling, on a talk radio station being asked about this.
The caller said "Every time there is a pledge week you tell us government funding is only a fraction of your revenue and you desperately need our donations. Why is it when you are about to lose government support you claim it will drive you into the ground? Which claim is true and which one is at best an exaggeration and at worst an outright fabrication?"
It was hilarious. The guy really had no substantive answer. His nuanced answer was probably right, which was "well, if we lost all government money at once, we'd have to make some not insubstantial cutbacks."
Who knows what the REALLY means -- cashiering half the workforce, ending programming, cutting broadcast hours and shuttering facilities? Or does it mean something more subtle, like no more goodies at staff meetings?
Go ahead and form a union, lots of people will keep making it work and getting your management's money.
FWIW, I have Exchange 2010 running in VMware. The host is only a Q6600 quad 2.4Ghz with 8 gigs of RAM. The Exchange VM is 3 cores + 3 GB RAM. Tiny. But it seems to serve 4 iOS devices and 2-4 Outlook clients simultaneously without any issues. The host itself runs 4-5 other VMs.
It's admittedly dog-slow to startup and even console logins are slow to process and launching the Exchange GUI is agonizing, but it does work, and this is all in a memory footprint way smaller than recommended.
Given the resources, is there any reason they couldn't scale this right? I only pretend to know anything about Exchange, but this seems kind of strange.
I'm sure that resource limitations -- server CPU, disk, etc -- are the source of this, but you'd think a high profile customer like this would be able to get MS involved before the story becomes "iPads crash Exchange" or "consumer tablet bests high dollar PC server."
I think the ultimate answer is statistical -- what percent of disposable income to people spend on entertainment? If that number stays the same or goes up, then piracy isn't affecting how much people spend on it. They consume more, but they spend the same (or more).
You'd have to do a study of some kind to prove it, but there's probably some reason to believe piracy may cause increases in spending as people are able to find new interests without risk. Restriction on copying/sharing actually suppresses sales because people are unwilling to assume more risk on quality; when you reduce the risk by allowing them to sample for free, they are more willing to spend.
The producers aren't arguing the real-world economics of it, though, they are arguing that they are entitled to control the sale and distribution of their product and that someone consuming it without paying for it is "costing them money."
They aren't really incurring a cost (presuming you don't physically steal the media or download it from their servers), though, but they are not getting paid and it does violate their legal rights.
Most personal computer didn't have protected memory and multitasking was a completely pointless operating system feature on a system that barely had enough RAM for one program..
To read the descriptions of the early systems UNIX ran on, 640k sounds like a lot of memory, especially when combined with one of those beefy 10 mb early hard disks.
Or was the 8086 really that crippled? I seem to remember some kind of UNIX-alike OS running on it, but maybe it was on better 80286 CPUs or even 386s.
And I'm sure that it corporate data centers everywhere they will just be fine with bare NAPA batteries on the floor with no charge status or load status, especially the kinds of places that have installed generators.
None of them will be interested in enclosures for those batteries that ensure they don't leak, overcharge, get shorted or do anything else nasty, or do something useful like supply some AC power for other devices or enable monitoring and alarming.
And APC won't want to be in that business.
I get your beef, APC is in the overpriced battery business. But batteries plus and the like have been selling batteries that work fine in APC systems forever, you certainly have not had a gun to your head to buy their batteries.
AFAICT, the big improvement isn't the quad-core performance, its the lightweight 5th core which runs slower but sips power.
I'm guessing you'd use the 5th core to do anything background-ish that didn't have an impact on a foreground or interactive task. Check email, etc.
What I don't know is how apps that might want to run in the background would work with reduced CPU power or what it would do to them to switch CPU cores.
Why would APC care? They are primarily in the business of selling backup power systems to handle the loss of utility power, which will probably stay AC for the foreseeable future.
Even if there was some mass migration to DC power distribution for data centers or even in large office buildings (building managers sometimes make rules about data centers in their buildings to keep building operation costs low), why would APC not want to be involved in that business as well?
You still have a risk of loss of utility power and need some kind of backup power system, and while the old parallel lead acid battery is fine for stone-axe simple systems like radios or alarm panels, I doubt anyone will be willing to "just" hardwire a battery array the size of fridge to their data center without any kind of monitoring, switching or charge maintenance system associated with it.
Back in the 80s when I got my Mac Plus and Rodime 20MB external hard disk, I remember trying to make something out of Hypercard and found it entirely frustrating. It wasn't programmer-friendly enough to create anything like an application, and it was kind of putzy to work with what it could do.
And didn't doing anything "cool" (animation, sound, etc) require some kind of plug-in/add-on module written in a real programming language?
I would assume the drive observes usage patterns. I'd also guess that its probably the best method, since it can operate at the block level.
I'd guess that any manual optimization would be less beneficial unless you factored in the most common blocks you actually used, since what you think you want optimized may not be what you actually use.
My guess is that a standard JetDirect card doesn't have enough horsepower to run a meaningfully hacked firmware image AND still function as a working printer interface.
I'm also wondering if there's not some value to a physically hacked JetDirect card -- whether you hack it totally and replace the PCB with some kind of single board computer that can draw power from the printer and just "looks" like a JetDirect card when installed, or do some kind of hackery to increase memory or flash.
I wonder if its possible to become so invisible that you really do get forgotten about -- the guy who exists on the payroll DB, gets a paycheck, but doesn't exist otherwise.
So, he's opted to remove the ability for employees to have a time delay for communication.
My guess is that some of this is driven by mid-senior managers who complain that they don't get "timely" (aka immediate) responses to their emails and are irritated that they aren't getting the kind of instant gratification from their reports they believe their managerial position is entitled to.
In other words, they believe their level of aristocratic privilege is not being respected.
Slashdot Mirror
It all kind of depends on how rationally the mullahs operate.
I'm pretty sure that the concept has been communicated to the Iranians, either semi-directly through back channels or through other third parties that any use of a nuclear weapon against the US or its "close allies" will result in overwhelming nuclear retaliation, the kind that might cause one to question the future of Persian culture centered around Iranian geography.
It's long been rumored that the Israelis have indirectly communicated that any NBC attack will result in nuclear retaliation against all Arab capitals and major Islamic religious sites, allowing for a certain group restraint among Arab countries not wishing to see their capital vaporized should a neighbor's anti-Israeli action get too heated.
And don't think for a second that the Soviets or the Chinese would say a word -- poking a stick at the US via Iran is valuable to the Soviets and the Chinese, but it's not worth trading nuclear strikes with the US.
One would think that Iranian leaders would take this into account when doing the calculus on nuclear weapons. Are they even worth having, outside of defensive use within their own immediate political theater? Would the cost of development be better spent on something else -- a home-grown cruise missile, long-range missile, some other expenditure?
That being said, the mullahs may not be rational -- they may be given to magical thinking and have some kind of literal belief in religion that might cause them to not care. We've certainly seen enough rank-and-file religious nuts blow themselves up.
I can't imagine what kind of deliverable they can actually provide -- it's not credible to claim they've prevented all terrorism, and unfortunately where maybe they have, I'm sure the FBI/NSA/CIA wants it kept totally quiet so they can do whatever counter-terrorism investigation they do, keeping the TSA from taking any kind of credit.
What they need to do is have credible claims for effectiveness AND be as totally invisible as possible. You should "go through security" at the airport with less impact than going through the drivethru at a fast food restaurant.
My unvarnished take on it is that when the USSR dissolved, Russia went from a totalitarian socialism to a kind of weak Democratic capitalism, dominated by organized crime and "the oligarchs". Most of the "backbone" Russian institutions like the KGB and the military (in particular) were significantly weakened, and all manner of social ills began to rear their ugly head.
Putin kind of stepped in and with something of an iron fist in a velvet glove began to kind of re-invigorate the institutions of Russia. A number of oligarchs who wouldn't toe his line (whether politically, financially, or both) were essentially stripped of their wealth, imprisoned and some even killed (cf. Kordokovsky, who ran Lukoil, is still in jail and Litvenenko was poisoned with Polonium, although he was ex-KGB/FSB, not an oligarch).
Publicly, Putin sort of created a new "strong" Russian image and with high oil prices was sort of able to create an improved economic climate and tamp down the chaos of Russian civil life.
That being said, Democracy took a back seat if not being reduced to a mere performance. Lots of suppression of the press, the opposition. He moved from President to Prime Minister, appointing a puppet President (they traded jobs in the most recent and probably rigged election).
My guess is that the global economic downturn has taken the shine off of living in his dictatorship (along with the corruption and everyday difficulties).
You would think he would either guide a more democratic transition and fade away to private life, but I think he's going to hold on to power until he gets clipped. I think too much of the top end of Russian politics is run like organized crime for anyone to get on top and stay on top to just say "game over, I'm done".
What certainly contributed to the death of Laserdiscs was the lack of S-Video inputs on most TVs, thus limiting you to a picture that wasn't that much better than a commercial VHS tape on a 'better' TV that even had a composite video input.
IIRC, S-Video (aka Y/C) inputs didn't become really all that common until the late 80s and even then only on high end TVs. 'Better' TVs might have had composite and bargain ones only RF.
And how many people still watched VHS on channel 3/4 on TVs with only RF inputs? That was a non-starter for Laserdisc.
A friend had a Pioneer circa 1990 and I don't remember the disc flipping being that big of a deal, probably because his player was double sided and you could get about 60 minutes per side on a CAA disc, and most movies fit in that time limit.
I think in the end it was probably cost, limited title selection and whatever picture quality improvements probably only really made sense if you had a projection TV.
I got a folding pleather case for my iPad 1 on clearance for $5. It functions as a stand, too. Bluetooth keyboards aren't hard to find on clearance, either, but I happened to get one of the Apple ones from work when they rolled out Macs with better USB keyboards.
A spare battery hasn't been necessary, even when traveling & watching movies the battery really lasts. I don't charge it more than once every couple of days and it gets used quite a bit.
Outside of that, I haven't found much of a need for anything else. Even the keyboard is kind of more headache than it's worth, except when traveling.
The only other accessory I wish worked with it is a bluetooth mouse, and only then for using RDP sessions, and only then probably when traveling and needing to interact with a PC intensively. Apple's decided not to support this, but even if they did I already own a BT mouse.
If they do, I want them to know that there were a couple of times I wanted to buy a Sony digital camera, based on some feature or other it had.
But then I realized the camera only worked with a more expensive Sony-proprietary memory card, so I bought another camera from a competitor that used industry standard memory cards that cost less money.
Guess what I won't be buying?
Outside of mainframe systems, I think x86 systems have historically had a model where you were either the super user, or you weren't, and there was little room in between if you wanted to get something done.
To this day, I run into shops that have disabled the Windows administrator account and use a different account for administrative tasks. Occasionally things break in strange ways because the software (and with Windows, UAC) doesn't work right without administrative privileges.
And then there's adding audit software into the mix, getting it working right, etc, and then justifying the cost if its not some kind of manditory/checkbox for achieving some industry or audit certification. Many places just won't pay for it, can't get it implemented due to the changes required to support it, etc.
I think newer/better/bigger database applications have internal audit trails that show who did what with what information and in a way that's complicated to erase or change, but many do not, especially outside the tier of expensive/large apps.
We've had two Slashdot threads in the past couple of days about email systems failing to keep up with growth -- that's about the most basic system service IT can provide, if management can't resource plan for that, how is audit/security going to fit in that mix?
My guess is that a legalized market in the U.S. for marijuana alone exceeds the entire illegal drug market now.
The cartels face enormous operating costs in terms of bribes, delivery infrastructure, security and manufacturing. These costs would be trivial in legal market.
They already have the means and ability to produce a product -- why wouldn't you want to decrease the costs (not to mention the fairly high loss of life risk) for access to a market 5-10 times as large?
Plus, history suggests that the end of alcohol prohibition didn't make whisky production stop, so there's a fairly good reason to believe that there's still big money to made.
I'm 45 and work at a consulting company. I'm fortunate enough to have a senior position here, but I'm also married, with a 1st grade son, a house and all the trappings that go with it.
I feel a lot of competition with the junior guys -- I was talking to one of them and he was griping about making a 4:30 PM help desk appointment but that once he got home about 7 PM he was going to really dive into whatever it was he was also working on. A couple of days later he was yakking about some work he was doing at 11:30 at night.
I just don't have that kind of free time. For one, there's shit to be done at home in terms of childcare and parenting, the wife doesn't want to work full time and do it all herself.
I think my advantage, though, is that I work a lot smarter -- I don't brute force solutions, take stupid risks or buy into a lot of technology BS that amounts to lots of work and little payoff. My clients tend to be more stable and have fewer glitches. I get grief from time-to-time for not deploying every gee-whiz feature, but not by the clients, by sales people.
It makes you wonder if NPR could survive without tax dollars.
One of the superb ironies during the "cut NPR funding" kerfuffle of a couple of years ago was hearing the head of Minnesota Public Radio, Bill Kling, on a talk radio station being asked about this.
The caller said "Every time there is a pledge week you tell us government funding is only a fraction of your revenue and you desperately need our donations. Why is it when you are about to lose government support you claim it will drive you into the ground? Which claim is true and which one is at best an exaggeration and at worst an outright fabrication?"
It was hilarious. The guy really had no substantive answer. His nuanced answer was probably right, which was "well, if we lost all government money at once, we'd have to make some not insubstantial cutbacks."
Who knows what the REALLY means -- cashiering half the workforce, ending programming, cutting broadcast hours and shuttering facilities? Or does it mean something more subtle, like no more goodies at staff meetings?
Go ahead and form a union, lots of people will keep making it work and getting your management's money.
FWIW, I have Exchange 2010 running in VMware. The host is only a Q6600 quad 2.4Ghz with 8 gigs of RAM. The Exchange VM is 3 cores + 3 GB RAM. Tiny. But it seems to serve 4 iOS devices and 2-4 Outlook clients simultaneously without any issues. The host itself runs 4-5 other VMs.
It's admittedly dog-slow to startup and even console logins are slow to process and launching the Exchange GUI is agonizing, but it does work, and this is all in a memory footprint way smaller than recommended.
Given the resources, is there any reason they couldn't scale this right? I only pretend to know anything about Exchange, but this seems kind of strange.
I'm sure that resource limitations -- server CPU, disk, etc -- are the source of this, but you'd think a high profile customer like this would be able to get MS involved before the story becomes "iPads crash Exchange" or "consumer tablet bests high dollar PC server."
I think the ultimate answer is statistical -- what percent of disposable income to people spend on entertainment? If that number stays the same or goes up, then piracy isn't affecting how much people spend on it. They consume more, but they spend the same (or more).
You'd have to do a study of some kind to prove it, but there's probably some reason to believe piracy may cause increases in spending as people are able to find new interests without risk. Restriction on copying/sharing actually suppresses sales because people are unwilling to assume more risk on quality; when you reduce the risk by allowing them to sample for free, they are more willing to spend.
The producers aren't arguing the real-world economics of it, though, they are arguing that they are entitled to control the sale and distribution of their product and that someone consuming it without paying for it is "costing them money."
They aren't really incurring a cost (presuming you don't physically steal the media or download it from their servers), though, but they are not getting paid and it does violate their legal rights.
My overall sense is its time for a new model.
Most personal computer didn't have protected memory and multitasking was a completely pointless operating system feature on a system that barely had enough RAM for one program. .
To read the descriptions of the early systems UNIX ran on, 640k sounds like a lot of memory, especially when combined with one of those beefy 10 mb early hard disks.
Or was the 8086 really that crippled? I seem to remember some kind of UNIX-alike OS running on it, but maybe it was on better 80286 CPUs or even 386s.
Usually you get both in one package!
I like your attitude.
I learned an expression which I was told was popular in Soviet Russia, which I think is entirely appropriate for any place or era:
"They can never pay me less than I can work."
And I'm sure that it corporate data centers everywhere they will just be fine with bare NAPA batteries on the floor with no charge status or load status, especially the kinds of places that have installed generators.
None of them will be interested in enclosures for those batteries that ensure they don't leak, overcharge, get shorted or do anything else nasty, or do something useful like supply some AC power for other devices or enable monitoring and alarming.
And APC won't want to be in that business.
I get your beef, APC is in the overpriced battery business. But batteries plus and the like have been selling batteries that work fine in APC systems forever, you certainly have not had a gun to your head to buy their batteries.
AFAICT, the big improvement isn't the quad-core performance, its the lightweight 5th core which runs slower but sips power.
I'm guessing you'd use the 5th core to do anything background-ish that didn't have an impact on a foreground or interactive task. Check email, etc.
What I don't know is how apps that might want to run in the background would work with reduced CPU power or what it would do to them to switch CPU cores.
Why would APC care? They are primarily in the business of selling backup power systems to handle the loss of utility power, which will probably stay AC for the foreseeable future.
Even if there was some mass migration to DC power distribution for data centers or even in large office buildings (building managers sometimes make rules about data centers in their buildings to keep building operation costs low), why would APC not want to be involved in that business as well?
You still have a risk of loss of utility power and need some kind of backup power system, and while the old parallel lead acid battery is fine for stone-axe simple systems like radios or alarm panels, I doubt anyone will be willing to "just" hardwire a battery array the size of fridge to their data center without any kind of monitoring, switching or charge maintenance system associated with it.
Back in the 80s when I got my Mac Plus and Rodime 20MB external hard disk, I remember trying to make something out of Hypercard and found it entirely frustrating. It wasn't programmer-friendly enough to create anything like an application, and it was kind of putzy to work with what it could do.
And didn't doing anything "cool" (animation, sound, etc) require some kind of plug-in/add-on module written in a real programming language?
I would assume the drive observes usage patterns. I'd also guess that its probably the best method, since it can operate at the block level.
I'd guess that any manual optimization would be less beneficial unless you factored in the most common blocks you actually used, since what you think you want optimized may not be what you actually use.
My guess is that a standard JetDirect card doesn't have enough horsepower to run a meaningfully hacked firmware image AND still function as a working printer interface.
I'm also wondering if there's not some value to a physically hacked JetDirect card -- whether you hack it totally and replace the PCB with some kind of single board computer that can draw power from the printer and just "looks" like a JetDirect card when installed, or do some kind of hackery to increase memory or flash.
Some of the larger LaserJets supported two JetDirect cards. If you could make a JetDirect card run an OS, I can see a scenario like:
1) Go to company X as printer tech on fake service call
2) Install hacked JetDirect card as secondary device, connect to network
3) ????
4) Profit!
I wonder if its possible to become so invisible that you really do get forgotten about -- the guy who exists on the payroll DB, gets a paycheck, but doesn't exist otherwise.
So, he's opted to remove the ability for employees to have a time delay for communication.
My guess is that some of this is driven by mid-senior managers who complain that they don't get "timely" (aka immediate) responses to their emails and are irritated that they aren't getting the kind of instant gratification from their reports they believe their managerial position is entitled to.
In other words, they believe their level of aristocratic privilege is not being respected.