"What you have failed to realize is that the "App Store Lock-In", and even the "iOS Development Licensing" are actually there to benefit USERS"
Wow. Koolaid drinking taken to 11. Then again with a username like macs4all what else can be expected?
No, App Store lock-in benefits Apple as much or more than it does the users. Why just yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine about how to get our iOS devices to use a VPN connection to one of our servers, and we realized that in order to get that operational we'd have to jailbreak all the devices in question to get the OpenVPN client from Cydia. Why? Because Apple won't bless any of the existing implementations of OpenVPN, nor will they release the APIs to implement it so it can get the AppStore(TM) seal of approval, despite repeated promises that "it's coming". So in order to use our devices securely on our internal networks we have to jailbreak our devices. Nice.
This isn't an isolated incident either, there are tons of stories about app devs having their apps pulled from the App store for non-malware related reasons, a favorite of Apple's being that they don't want any app that "duplicates core functionality of the idevice"? Afraid of being shown up, are they? Or there are other stories about app developers spending months and thousands of dollars in development costs only to have apps rejected without a clear explanation of what caused the rejection, only being told to "make changes and submit it again". Or in some cases, the app developers resubmit it, get a different examiner and the exact same app now goes live in the app store. That's a broken system no matter how you look at it.
Hopefully future breakthroughs will be able to use organs from other sources or even artificial organs instead of relying on human donors. After all, we don't want to get into a situation like that Larry Niven short story where the demand for organs to extend peoples lives got so strong they started using convicted criminals as spare parts. And then to satisfy further demand, redefined what constituted a capital crime. Like jaywalking and littering...
David Weber's Harrington series solve the speed of light issue with an unobtainium-based drive system for missiles coupled with a very real Reagan-Star-Wars approach to generating x-ray laser fire by using a nuclear explosion as a source of energetic photons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur.
Basically you strap a bunch of lasing rods around a nuke, point the rods where you want the beams to go, and set the nuke off. During the first couple of microseconds of the nuke's explosion you'll get some unbelievably powerful beams coming off the lasing rods before they melt another few microseconds later. So in the Harrington books, the missiles close to a range where the speed of light issue ceases to be a problem, and explode, releasing a (very brief) storm of x-ray laser bursts pointed at the target ship.
Actually, it would be better to simply get rid of algo trading by adding a $0.001 "tax" to each share traded. That would affect "real" trades very little, but would completely obliterate the profitability of algorithmic extreme-transaction-volume trading. To be absolutely clear we are not talking about your ability to trade stocks yourself through something like E-Trade, we're talking about brokerage houses doing hundreds of thousands of transactions per day trying to carve additional profit for themselves. Have a look at this TED Talk on the matter that was posted to/. a while back for some further perspective. http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html The relevant bit starts at around 2:45.
I don't think you understand how this works. The high frequency trading is literally placing thousands of orders milliseconds apart and 98% of the orders don't get filled or get rescinded, basically it's like spam. Algorithmic trading causes values to adjust outside of normal market forces, and there's strong suspicion that it was the cause of the 2010 Flash Crash.
How about this counter? I pay ~$40 a month for my cable TV portion of the TV/internet bill. Everything you list with the exception of Game of Thrones has passed over my coax cable in the last 7 years, so in a manner of speaking I've already paid for access to it once. I see the economics as $40/month is what I am willing to pay for my television needs. I watch maybe 1-2 hours of TV a day, if that, but for round numbers let's pick 2 hours a day. For a TV show to appeal to me economically, it has to be cheaper than 66 cents per hour, because that's what it "costs" me currently based on my usage. That's why I will NEVER pay $2 for a 22 minute TV episode on iTunes. Never. Won't pay $3 for a 44 minute episode either. Prices have to come down for these kinds of shows before it makes financial sense. Everyone and their dog seems to be getting a PVR these days, which makes access to these shows even easier at the consumer's convenience, which makes the prospect of paying $2-3 an episode even less likely for a lot of people.
Anyone who builds a company or a product that is critically dependent on another company providing data FREELY out of the goodness of their hearts who doesn't expect that the day may come when they pay for that data is an idiot. No different than if I had a plot of land on a street and wasn't doing anything with it and allowed the local farmers to set up stands there on the weekend to sell fruit and veg. Over time the wear and tear on the land might require me to have some maintenance done so when that comes to pass, the farmers shouldn't be all put out when I pass a hat looking for $10 or $20 every weekend to defray costs.
As it stands, the way Google went about monetizing that service is very forgiving. First 25,000 access requests per day are free? They could have easily said 1,000 or even just 100 instead.
"with this attack you MUST be the next person to use the card's credentials." "the cries that people have thrown up that someone could scan an entire room full of people at once are totally off-base"
Because it's impossible to build a rig that fits in a briefcase or backpack that scans cards within a meter or two of the holder and automatically runs scripted transactions as soon as a card is detected in range, right?
Just because it's not AS bad a picture as the doomsayers are painting as a worst-case scenario doesn't mean it isn't ripe for exploitation.
"It's hard to imagine the little twit being worse than big Kim."
Unfortunately rumors would suggest that the little twit was the one who was behind the last couple of military incidents with South Korea, specifically the sinking of that SK ship and the shelling of that island. The rumors suggest he (Kim Jong Un) acted in those incidents to try and build legitimacy in his role as the successor to his father since many in the military aren't all that impressed with Un's abilities. It makes me wonder if he might try a few more "incidents" to show the local brass that he is in charge.
But reducing loiter time destroys the primary appeal of drones. One of the major reasons they're used in Afghanistan and elsewhere is that despite having a relatively low (200mph or less) top speed, once they reach station they can loiter for 12 hours or more before having to RTB. Drones aren't being used for frontline combat (yet), but rather for surveillance and calling down the occasional strike as a target of opportunity presents itself.
I'm sure that inevitably drones will be designed for strike missions and even air combat eventually, the economics of 20 drones vs 1 top of the line jet fighter just make too much sense, but they're not at that stage yet.
If possible, yes, but manned jets have the extra payload for HARMs or even send in a Wild Weasel flight first. A drone can only carry a handful of ordinance and AGM-88 HARM missiles weigh a lot more than the Hellfires they usually carry so you'd reduce their payload significantly (or entirely in some cases). That's why I figured it'd just make more sense to flush the Hellfires instead.
Yes, that's generally what one is engaged in when flying ARMED drones in a given airspace. The drone in the story was an unarmed surveillance drone however. I was just speculating on a useful protocol for discouraging jamming of a drone's control signals during said war.
"you stupid Americans"
Presumptive, aren't we? I'll give you a hint: I live in a NATO country that actually provides health care for all.
People have built hobby quadcopters with built-in GPS that autonomously travel from one place to the next. How difficult could it possibly be to give a drone an instruction that says "in the event of loss of contact with the base station, ascend to altitude and return to base".
Or if you wanted to discourage jammers, "in the event of a loss of contact with the base station, lock hellfire missiles onto the nearest potential targets and fire, then RTB" Then we could have the "scumbag jammers" meme. Scumbag jammers: Jam drone to prevent possible attack. Jamming causes attack.
Depends on the complexity level required also. Stuff like Tomato and DDWRT are pretty straightforward to configure, whereas playing with Cisco IOS can be daunting. So that might be a hidden cost.
Then tell us exactly how fucked that company would be if some weird little problem with compatibility crept into a CHEMICAL MANUFACTURER's blending system.
You might think it's stupid to proceed slowly in these matters, but then again I don't think you've ever had to clean up the problems that a weird incompatibility can cause. Some places I've worked still to this day have DOS systems in place running specific applications. Because they work, and the cost of them NOT working for even 10 minutes is very bad.
"But when you're still providing us with Windows XP in 2011, you are doing it wrong."
Sigh. So, you have personally checked out all software the enterprise runs under Windows 7 and will be willing to bet your job that it all works perfectly with no hidden issues have you? Here's a hypothetical situation for you:
A company has a software package that they run on 70% of their desktops called DerpMaster 2002. This is an important software package as almost half of the company's business is recorded in it. It works fine under Windows XP. In late 2010, the company decides it's time to upgrade their desktops to Windows 7 as the company president uses it at home and wants to "move with the times". The CTO doesn't see any business reason to move the company to Windows 7 as all of the company operations work well under Windows XP and Windows 2000 Server as they have been the last several years. At the president's insistence, the migration proceeds.
After a month's operation, end users and the IT department are starting to notice that there is random corruption of records in DerpMaster 2002. The first couple of times it was encountered the corruption was considered a random happening or disk fault on the fileserver and the affected record was restored from a previous backup. But now it's happening with a frightening frequency. A random sampling of the DerpMaster database of 300,000 customer records is taken and it's determined that up to 5% of random sample shows some form of corruption. That means there could be as many as 15,000 records corrputed. A series of calls to the makers or DerpMaster 2002 reveal that on small databases their own testing of Windows 7 showed no adverse issues, but they were able to scale up testing and show in-house that on a database of the size and activity level of the company's, there does indeed seem to be a problem with the application. Of course, DerpMaster 2002 is NOT certified for use in Windows 7, but DerpMaster 2011 is, and lucky them! They're willing to provide upgrade licensing for only $500 per seat!
So that sorts out the cause of the problem, but now the company has a database where 15,000 records out of 300,000 are potentially damaged. Rollback to a database backup prior to the migration is out of the question due to the thousands of transactions per day entered into the system. The only course of action is to spend enormous manpower manually checking and correcting if needed all 300,000 records. The system has to remain operational while this check is done, and further corruption has to be prevented. DerpMaster 2011 is a brand new product, based on an entirely new database platform and as such the CTO has difficulty believing it to be a safe upgrade until its track record is proven. To address the problem of corruption, all desktops are given a Windows XP virtual machine image, to run DerpMaster 2002 in. Over the next two weeks (with the IT staff pulling an average of 3 hours of overtime a night) the corruption in the database is eliminated and operations return to relatively normal. Except now the users have another level of complexity on their desktops accessing an application through a VM interface.
Oh and by hypothetical I mean it actually happened. So that's why IT departments get annoyed when someone tells them that switching from a proven platform that works for all company functions to a new platform because an end user thinks they should get with the times or they're "doing it wrong".
That mirrors the experience in my circle of acquaintances. It's like it's accepted that if someone's going to run a hacked Xbox, then no online is part of the price one pays to do that. And many of them do have 2 Xboxes. I actually got a sweet deal on some Xbox 360 hardware a couple of years ago because of the Xbox live ban thing. I wanted to buy a couple of extra controllers and another Rock Band guitar for my 360 and I see some guy who was selling his 360 on Craigslist with a full set of rock band instruments and 2 controllers for $175. I wondered why so cheap so I called him up and apparently he was in a fit of pique because he went to work the day before and his wife accidentally went on XBL without turning on or off some software doodad and got the console banned. So before he could start thinking about what the hardware was actually worth I ran over and bought it off him. So I got my controllers, the extra guitar, re-sold the extra drums for $40, upgraded my Xbox's 20 GB HDD to a 120GB off the new machine, and got basically a free Xbox 360 that sits in my office out of the deal.
Not sure what to say about that Sony ranking. Sony (across several companies I've been at) has become a byword for "pay too much and watch it break in less than a year".
And as a countervailing anecdotal data point I've been running IT departments for 20 years and can tell you that Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo and (recently) Asus laptops have been among the more solid devices for reliability in my experience. HP and Dell are in the mid-tier, Acer is on the lower end, and Sony is a definite NOT buy. In my experience. We've had Apple laptops at most of the companies I've been at and I would say in my experience they have a slightly better reliability rate than the Toshiba devices, but not enough of an edge to warrant their price premium.
Looking at his posting history doesn't say corporate astroturfer to me. Particularly not the unfocused obscenity filled posts. Sounds more to me like he just likes AMD and he happened to post some factual data and got flamed under the old tactic of "if you can't discredit the message, discredit the messenger".
Besides, having AMD around is a good thing, unless you want to start going back to paying $750 for a midrange desktop processor. I remember those days, and not fondly.
And this is why Slashdot's traffic is dying. First time I've come here in almost a month and the second most prominent thread on this article is some guy pointing out some supercomputer orders (which I recalled reading about on another site) and then someone else immediately starting a flamewar with him on 3 points, 2 of which are personal attacks. Then the pile-on comes. Nice.
The new employer's flexibility is actually a good "sniff test". Unless they have a really compelling reason like the OP is being hired to start a new critical project that has to be on time, most places would be willing to be flexible. If they aren't and the OP can't figure out a reasonable explanation for their inflexibility then that could be a sign of how the new company is going to be to deal with in general.
That's a very different circumstance. In your cases you weren't being loyal to a company but to a person who reciprocates, which is just good networking.
Slashdot Mirror
"What you have failed to realize is that the "App Store Lock-In", and even the "iOS Development Licensing" are actually there to benefit USERS"
Wow. Koolaid drinking taken to 11. Then again with a username like macs4all what else can be expected?
No, App Store lock-in benefits Apple as much or more than it does the users. Why just yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine about how to get our iOS devices to use a VPN connection to one of our servers, and we realized that in order to get that operational we'd have to jailbreak all the devices in question to get the OpenVPN client from Cydia. Why? Because Apple won't bless any of the existing implementations of OpenVPN, nor will they release the APIs to implement it so it can get the AppStore(TM) seal of approval, despite repeated promises that "it's coming". So in order to use our devices securely on our internal networks we have to jailbreak our devices. Nice.
This isn't an isolated incident either, there are tons of stories about app devs having their apps pulled from the App store for non-malware related reasons, a favorite of Apple's being that they don't want any app that "duplicates core functionality of the idevice"? Afraid of being shown up, are they? Or there are other stories about app developers spending months and thousands of dollars in development costs only to have apps rejected without a clear explanation of what caused the rejection, only being told to "make changes and submit it again". Or in some cases, the app developers resubmit it, get a different examiner and the exact same app now goes live in the app store. That's a broken system no matter how you look at it.
Hopefully future breakthroughs will be able to use organs from other sources or even artificial organs instead of relying on human donors. After all, we don't want to get into a situation like that Larry Niven short story where the demand for organs to extend peoples lives got so strong they started using convicted criminals as spare parts. And then to satisfy further demand, redefined what constituted a capital crime. Like jaywalking and littering...
David Weber's Harrington series solve the speed of light issue with an unobtainium-based drive system for missiles coupled with a very real Reagan-Star-Wars approach to generating x-ray laser fire by using a nuclear explosion as a source of energetic photons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur.
Basically you strap a bunch of lasing rods around a nuke, point the rods where you want the beams to go, and set the nuke off. During the first couple of microseconds of the nuke's explosion you'll get some unbelievably powerful beams coming off the lasing rods before they melt another few microseconds later. So in the Harrington books, the missiles close to a range where the speed of light issue ceases to be a problem, and explode, releasing a (very brief) storm of x-ray laser bursts pointed at the target ship.
Actually, it would be better to simply get rid of algo trading by adding a $0.001 "tax" to each share traded. That would affect "real" trades very little, but would completely obliterate the profitability of algorithmic extreme-transaction-volume trading. To be absolutely clear we are not talking about your ability to trade stocks yourself through something like E-Trade, we're talking about brokerage houses doing hundreds of thousands of transactions per day trying to carve additional profit for themselves. Have a look at this TED Talk on the matter that was posted to /. a while back for some further perspective.
http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html
The relevant bit starts at around 2:45.
I don't think you understand how this works. The high frequency trading is literally placing thousands of orders milliseconds apart and 98% of the orders don't get filled or get rescinded, basically it's like spam. Algorithmic trading causes values to adjust outside of normal market forces, and there's strong suspicion that it was the cause of the 2010 Flash Crash.
How about this counter? I pay ~$40 a month for my cable TV portion of the TV/internet bill. Everything you list with the exception of Game of Thrones has passed over my coax cable in the last 7 years, so in a manner of speaking I've already paid for access to it once. I see the economics as $40/month is what I am willing to pay for my television needs. I watch maybe 1-2 hours of TV a day, if that, but for round numbers let's pick 2 hours a day. For a TV show to appeal to me economically, it has to be cheaper than 66 cents per hour, because that's what it "costs" me currently based on my usage. That's why I will NEVER pay $2 for a 22 minute TV episode on iTunes. Never. Won't pay $3 for a 44 minute episode either. Prices have to come down for these kinds of shows before it makes financial sense. Everyone and their dog seems to be getting a PVR these days, which makes access to these shows even easier at the consumer's convenience, which makes the prospect of paying $2-3 an episode even less likely for a lot of people.
Anyone who builds a company or a product that is critically dependent on another company providing data FREELY out of the goodness of their hearts who doesn't expect that the day may come when they pay for that data is an idiot. No different than if I had a plot of land on a street and wasn't doing anything with it and allowed the local farmers to set up stands there on the weekend to sell fruit and veg. Over time the wear and tear on the land might require me to have some maintenance done so when that comes to pass, the farmers shouldn't be all put out when I pass a hat looking for $10 or $20 every weekend to defray costs.
As it stands, the way Google went about monetizing that service is very forgiving. First 25,000 access requests per day are free? They could have easily said 1,000 or even just 100 instead.
"with this attack you MUST be the next person to use the card's credentials." "the cries that people have thrown up that someone could scan an entire room full of people at once are totally off-base"
Because it's impossible to build a rig that fits in a briefcase or backpack that scans cards within a meter or two of the holder and automatically runs scripted transactions as soon as a card is detected in range, right?
Just because it's not AS bad a picture as the doomsayers are painting as a worst-case scenario doesn't mean it isn't ripe for exploitation.
"It's hard to imagine the little twit being worse than big Kim."
Unfortunately rumors would suggest that the little twit was the one who was behind the last couple of military incidents with South Korea, specifically the sinking of that SK ship and the shelling of that island. The rumors suggest he (Kim Jong Un) acted in those incidents to try and build legitimacy in his role as the successor to his father since many in the military aren't all that impressed with Un's abilities. It makes me wonder if he might try a few more "incidents" to show the local brass that he is in charge.
But reducing loiter time destroys the primary appeal of drones. One of the major reasons they're used in Afghanistan and elsewhere is that despite having a relatively low (200mph or less) top speed, once they reach station they can loiter for 12 hours or more before having to RTB. Drones aren't being used for frontline combat (yet), but rather for surveillance and calling down the occasional strike as a target of opportunity presents itself.
I'm sure that inevitably drones will be designed for strike missions and even air combat eventually, the economics of 20 drones vs 1 top of the line jet fighter just make too much sense, but they're not at that stage yet.
If possible, yes, but manned jets have the extra payload for HARMs or even send in a Wild Weasel flight first. A drone can only carry a handful of ordinance and AGM-88 HARM missiles weigh a lot more than the Hellfires they usually carry so you'd reduce their payload significantly (or entirely in some cases). That's why I figured it'd just make more sense to flush the Hellfires instead.
"That's called an act of war"
Yes, that's generally what one is engaged in when flying ARMED drones in a given airspace. The drone in the story was an unarmed surveillance drone however. I was just speculating on a useful protocol for discouraging jamming of a drone's control signals during said war.
"you stupid Americans"
Presumptive, aren't we? I'll give you a hint: I live in a NATO country that actually provides health care for all.
People have built hobby quadcopters with built-in GPS that autonomously travel from one place to the next. How difficult could it possibly be to give a drone an instruction that says "in the event of loss of contact with the base station, ascend to altitude and return to base".
Or if you wanted to discourage jammers, "in the event of a loss of contact with the base station, lock hellfire missiles onto the nearest potential targets and fire, then RTB" Then we could have the "scumbag jammers" meme. Scumbag jammers: Jam drone to prevent possible attack. Jamming causes attack.
Of course not, he said "thriving".
Depends on the complexity level required also. Stuff like Tomato and DDWRT are pretty straightforward to configure, whereas playing with Cisco IOS can be daunting. So that might be a hidden cost.
This sounds like you had a shitty IT department in an organization with poor interdepartmental communication. Not all are like that.
See my other comment
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2545868&cid=38187110
Then tell us exactly how fucked that company would be if some weird little problem with compatibility crept into a CHEMICAL MANUFACTURER's blending system.
You might think it's stupid to proceed slowly in these matters, but then again I don't think you've ever had to clean up the problems that a weird incompatibility can cause. Some places I've worked still to this day have DOS systems in place running specific applications. Because they work, and the cost of them NOT working for even 10 minutes is very bad.
"But when you're still providing us with Windows XP in 2011, you are doing it wrong."
Sigh. So, you have personally checked out all software the enterprise runs under Windows 7 and will be willing to bet your job that it all works perfectly with no hidden issues have you? Here's a hypothetical situation for you:
A company has a software package that they run on 70% of their desktops called DerpMaster 2002. This is an important software package as almost half of the company's business is recorded in it. It works fine under Windows XP. In late 2010, the company decides it's time to upgrade their desktops to Windows 7 as the company president uses it at home and wants to "move with the times". The CTO doesn't see any business reason to move the company to Windows 7 as all of the company operations work well under Windows XP and Windows 2000 Server as they have been the last several years. At the president's insistence, the migration proceeds.
After a month's operation, end users and the IT department are starting to notice that there is random corruption of records in DerpMaster 2002. The first couple of times it was encountered the corruption was considered a random happening or disk fault on the fileserver and the affected record was restored from a previous backup. But now it's happening with a frightening frequency. A random sampling of the DerpMaster database of 300,000 customer records is taken and it's determined that up to 5% of random sample shows some form of corruption. That means there could be as many as 15,000 records corrputed. A series of calls to the makers or DerpMaster 2002 reveal that on small databases their own testing of Windows 7 showed no adverse issues, but they were able to scale up testing and show in-house that on a database of the size and activity level of the company's, there does indeed seem to be a problem with the application. Of course, DerpMaster 2002 is NOT certified for use in Windows 7, but DerpMaster 2011 is, and lucky them! They're willing to provide upgrade licensing for only $500 per seat!
So that sorts out the cause of the problem, but now the company has a database where 15,000 records out of 300,000 are potentially damaged. Rollback to a database backup prior to the migration is out of the question due to the thousands of transactions per day entered into the system. The only course of action is to spend enormous manpower manually checking and correcting if needed all 300,000 records. The system has to remain operational while this check is done, and further corruption has to be prevented. DerpMaster 2011 is a brand new product, based on an entirely new database platform and as such the CTO has difficulty believing it to be a safe upgrade until its track record is proven. To address the problem of corruption, all desktops are given a Windows XP virtual machine image, to run DerpMaster 2002 in. Over the next two weeks (with the IT staff pulling an average of 3 hours of overtime a night) the corruption in the database is eliminated and operations return to relatively normal. Except now the users have another level of complexity on their desktops accessing an application through a VM interface.
Oh and by hypothetical I mean it actually happened. So that's why IT departments get annoyed when someone tells them that switching from a proven platform that works for all company functions to a new platform because an end user thinks they should get with the times or they're "doing it wrong".
That mirrors the experience in my circle of acquaintances. It's like it's accepted that if someone's going to run a hacked Xbox, then no online is part of the price one pays to do that. And many of them do have 2 Xboxes. I actually got a sweet deal on some Xbox 360 hardware a couple of years ago because of the Xbox live ban thing. I wanted to buy a couple of extra controllers and another Rock Band guitar for my 360 and I see some guy who was selling his 360 on Craigslist with a full set of rock band instruments and 2 controllers for $175. I wondered why so cheap so I called him up and apparently he was in a fit of pique because he went to work the day before and his wife accidentally went on XBL without turning on or off some software doodad and got the console banned. So before he could start thinking about what the hardware was actually worth I ran over and bought it off him. So I got my controllers, the extra guitar, re-sold the extra drums for $40, upgraded my Xbox's 20 GB HDD to a 120GB off the new machine, and got basically a free Xbox 360 that sits in my office out of the deal.
Not sure what to say about that Sony ranking. Sony (across several companies I've been at) has become a byword for "pay too much and watch it break in less than a year".
And as a countervailing anecdotal data point I've been running IT departments for 20 years and can tell you that Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo and (recently) Asus laptops have been among the more solid devices for reliability in my experience. HP and Dell are in the mid-tier, Acer is on the lower end, and Sony is a definite NOT buy. In my experience. We've had Apple laptops at most of the companies I've been at and I would say in my experience they have a slightly better reliability rate than the Toshiba devices, but not enough of an edge to warrant their price premium.
Looking at his posting history doesn't say corporate astroturfer to me. Particularly not the unfocused obscenity filled posts. Sounds more to me like he just likes AMD and he happened to post some factual data and got flamed under the old tactic of "if you can't discredit the message, discredit the messenger".
Besides, having AMD around is a good thing, unless you want to start going back to paying $750 for a midrange desktop processor. I remember those days, and not fondly.
And this is why Slashdot's traffic is dying. First time I've come here in almost a month and the second most prominent thread on this article is some guy pointing out some supercomputer orders (which I recalled reading about on another site) and then someone else immediately starting a flamewar with him on 3 points, 2 of which are personal attacks. Then the pile-on comes. Nice.
The new employer's flexibility is actually a good "sniff test". Unless they have a really compelling reason like the OP is being hired to start a new critical project that has to be on time, most places would be willing to be flexible. If they aren't and the OP can't figure out a reasonable explanation for their inflexibility then that could be a sign of how the new company is going to be to deal with in general.
That's a very different circumstance. In your cases you weren't being loyal to a company but to a person who reciprocates, which is just good networking.