When the error favours the company, it's an error and it gets fixed, apologies are issued and everything goes back to normal.
When the error favours the customer, accusations of fraud are floated and the small guy is threatened into returning the money, plus a lifetime NDA with stiff penalties.
It's not just about competition. There are alternatives, thanks to DSL deregulation, but since they all go through Bell's nodes at some point, they get throttled too. This concept has been a point of failure for the CRTC, which failed to penalize Bell for anti-competitive practices. One well-reputed "small" ISP affected by this is TekSavvy. They provide alternate connectivity with generous monthly caps and lower fees than Bell itself, but a year or two ago, Bell started throttling/shaping them at the DSLAM. Even though it is not Bell's bandwidth, and it is not oversold at that level, Bell specifically interferes with the connection and they get away with it.
Even if we had a thousand ISPs covering every inch of land, if the big goons who own the last mile are allowed to tamper with the packets, competition remains irrelevant.
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but your argument is based on ignorance. It is perfectly feasible to have your torrent running at near-full speed, AND your VoIP call go smoothly without dropouts, by prioritizing the VoIP packets. This facility is built in to TCP/IP, there is a flag in each and every packet that says whether this content is bulk (low priority), normal, or interactive (high priority). Most non-crap residential routers honor this flag and prioritize traffic accordingly, some even offer fine-grained control based on port numbers or L7 packet inspection.
Think of it as a busy club with a long lineup. VIPs cut to the front of the line. On your network, VoIP is that VIP and it jumps to the front of the line, ahead of your torrent traffic. You shouldn't have to pause your torrent, the router should be smart enough to prioritize real-time data if it is flagged as such.
Practically all ISPs already perform this sort of packet rescheduling network-wide, and that's perfectly fine. In practice, they could leave it at that and users would enjoy smooth, unencumbered connectivity without the need for draconian throttling. Let the network manage itself based on simple rules, like it always has. The problem, and what pisses off most power users and even not-so-power users, is when ISPs make political decisions on which data goes first on "their" network, and of course that almost always favors their 1st-party add-on services at the expense of competitors, even though the network is supposed to be for everyone.
The biggest disconnect stems from the notion that these networks, the very backbones of residential internet access, are privately owned, but to many people they are seen as a public good. It's kind of like having a Ford-sponsored road, where Ford drivers are welcome but Nissan drivers get pelted with gravel. Well we don't think of roads like that because roads are a government-owned shared resource. Well then, what is the internet, if not a series of interconnected digital "roads" ?
It's not the bandwidth that's expensive, it's the line to get it to your home/office.
In a datacenter (not in Ottawa) I pay a whoppping $4/mbit for low-volume, or $2.40/mbit for high-volume. That is dedicated bandwidth, not 95% percentile bullshit. I pay a flat rate, and they give me a flat pipe. If I don't use it, they don't oversell it to someone else. I can spit out four terabytes of data a month, for less than what I pay for shared throttled 3rd-world-supported cable.
Don't focus on the supposed ethical justification behind throttling, that's what the ISPs want you to whine about. The real issue, which has not changed in over a decade, is that they are selling a service they cannot realistically deliver: "unlimited" internet access.
If you walked into an all-you-can-eat buffet, and found out there were three chicken balls to split between 40 hungry patrons, would you not tear the restaurant owner a new asshole ? Isn't it reasonable to expect that if the deal was "all you can eat", you should be able to stuff your face until sated ? That's the problem with broadband today, except the ISPs try to hide their lack of substance by forcibly slowing consumption down to a trickle. That's akin to the waiter enforcing a "one bite per hour" rule. In the end, they're still covering up the fact that there isn't enough product to satisfy everyone.
I've been having it even worse as of late, since my idiotic ISP (Rogers) decided to bump up the middle tier from 7mbps to 10mbps, solely because Bell also upped their theoretical speeds (but it's DSL...morons!). The backend is no faster, so in reality they're just putting more pressure on an already-overtaxed network.
Net neutrality won't matter if this continues. Soon even first-party VoIP will drop packets because there isn't enough bandwidth to go around. If I had to propose any sort of legislation, it would be to limit overselling and enforce more honesty in telecom advertising. Torrents aside, any sort of telecom tyranny, in this day and age, is a direct barrier to technological progress, and in my not-so-humble opinion that should be considered an act of treason and punished as such.
Sure, you can RAID a bunch of drives in an external chassis and pipe the combined throughput over FC, but how many people do you know with an FC HBA in their gaming rig or media workstation ? Even ignoring the minor detail that an entry-level HBA costs more than most people's entire PCs, you simply cannot compare external vs internal storage solutions. Some of us just don't want another big noisy box under our desks. It's fine for a datacenter but certainly not for SOHO.
What manufacturer is going to make SATA SSD's that can saturate the fastest SATA port?
The same idiot manufacturers who deliver super-high sequential reads at the expense of everything else. There's a jumble of drives running off a particular J-Micron controller (or two:P), that deliver faster sequential reads than the Intel X25-E, but have random access times in the 50ms range (average). That's five times slower than a cheap 5400rpm notebook drive! They still sell like hotcakes because they're cheap, and we all know how much America loves cheap garbage. You could stick a SATA port out the side of a fresh turd, and if you price it low enough, some dumb fuck will buy it.
SATA 6G is too slow, yes, but the companies involved seem to be interested in controlling their steady income by keeping everyone on an upgrade treadmill. If they had given us 6G at the very start, they would not have been able to milk the industry over the last six years with these minor upgrades and feature enhancements. Look at Firewire, ignoring Apple's idiocy, it was a very fast external bus that was far ahead of its competitors in terms of performance, reliability and ease of use. It was so good that even the 800mbit upgrade is considered redundant, the old standard is "fast enough" for most uses.
Better get used to it though, SATA is the new bottleneck, and it will be for years to come. There's just no way around it. It took this long for people to finally ditch IDE, even if there were a new contender to leave SATA's generationally-challenged performance in the dust, the industry simply is not ready to change interfaces again.
I looked at the Fusion-io cards a while ago, the speed is mind-blowing but the fact that it needs a driver made it an immediate no-go. Bootability is not the issue, it's all about compatibility. Why they can't make it appear as a plain old SATA or SCSI controller, I do not know, but more importantly I don't care, especially when you consider the asking price for these things. Even the cheapo Gigabyte I-Drive pretended to be a SATA disk (it literally had a SATA output connector). I'd be happy if this thing posed as a pair of SATA disks to be RAID-0'ed. In its current form it just seems like a half-baked idea. I'm really hoping they will clean it up in the next incarnation.
It seems they're releasing a "cheaper" version for so-called gamers, 80gb for ~$900. Four times the cost of an SSD, but four times the speed. I have to admit, at that price I might be willing to try one and see for myself if their drivers are worth a damn. I work with smallish high-churn databases, the kind of workload that eats spinning platters for breakfast. Something like this would be a godsend, as long as it's server-class reliable.
That's SOP for viruses these days, it's really just a matter of copy/pasting the relevant bits of code, and/or shoving the EXE through an obfuscator. Writing viruses only requires a modicum of C knowledge these days, everything else is automated with tools by real hackers.
The fact that we can "sneak" 100-200kb viruses certainly helps. Back in the day, you had to cram your attack into a 512-byte boot sector or hide it in the stack segment without increasing the file size... today's virus writers probably don't even know in which direction the stack grows:P
You can't force clients to do anything, but much like the upstream vendor, if there is a serious threat to their bottom line, clients will do backflips on command if you can make the gaping hole go away.
There is also a rather broad culture of vendor-managed or reseller-managed equipment. For example, if a vulnerability is discovered in any of the software I've build and sold to my clients, it is a simple matter for me to log into each box and patch every single one of them, and email the fix to the remaining few whose installations I don't manage. For those who don't enjoy such a strong vendor-client relationship, there is often an auto-update mechanism built into off-the-shelf apps, all you have to do is click it and reboot.
It's not blackmail, just potentially embarrassing.
If some guy threatens to out your extramarital affair, or the fact you've been defrauding your employer, or any other thing you'd rather keep secret, and they want money to keep quiet... that's blackmail.
If someone outs your ill affairs for free because you're an irresponsible prick, that's justly deserved. Disclosure of found exploits falls under this umbrella, not blackmail.
As I have also recently learned, a dashboard is just that: a bunch of charts, graphs and maybe a few summary tables. To literate folks like you and I, it is a huge waste of time and space, but to the average bean counter with half a brain, it is supposedly a tangible vulgarisation of otherwise indigestible data.
The good thing about this gov't dashboard is it seems to have good drill-downs, I was able to click through 3-4 levels deep to find out more and more details. They show you how they calculate a project's rating, and while it is a very simple and potentially misleading metric, at least they lay it out for you (how many deadlines were missed, how often did it go overbudget, etc). They even show a picture of the asshole in charge of each project, too bad you can't click the asshole and have it sort and rate HIS "specific concerns", but they're probably afraid of all the little McVeigh wannabes out there who would love to thin the herd...
Dashboards suck, but this is one of the better ones I've seen. I wouldn't call it worthy of an standing ovation, but I'm just a prick that way. Why don't we ask the old Harvard Graphics folks if they ever got a standing ovation for drawing pie charts, hmm ?
They want to discourage full disclosure, because it means they won't get to abuse undisclosed vulnerabilities as freely as they currently do.
Let me put it to you in more immediate terms: If the BH presentation on ATM exploits goes through, it will trigger a much more rapid response to patch the problem, which means the true exploiters have less time to plunder. Now this is just one example... There are hundreds of high-risk exploits discovered every day, some of which were obviously used to hack into ImageShack. These kiddies are scared that full disclosure will take away their "toys".
more interesting feature of this malware... is that it creates a direct connection between the infected Microsoft Windows system and the attackers
I find it hilarious that basic TCP/IP networking stuff gets labeled as "interesting". Any idiot can initiate a connection to a host on the internet.
What's "interesting" is that the victim's machine was not firewalled to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the first place. Properly controlling outgoing traffic is of crucial importance, particularly when dealing with such sensitive information. A locked down network should be able to contain unknown connections from within, just as well as those from the great wide internet.
In my opinion, it's not the invader that cost Kentucky $415,000. The fault rests entirely on their network administrator(s).
Without these asinine rules and the unions that forced them to be written, bosses would be forced to make real judgment calls about whether an employee is decent and honest. Of course, employees would also be expected to behave in a decent and honest manner. Integrity is dead, plain and simple. We have Gen X and Y to thank for that.
If we fired all the lazy abusive assholes and kicked them back to the shit jobs they deserve, maybe the world would be a better place. I certainly enjoy working in a small company where everything is casual and problems are addressed with face-time and sincere two-way communication. If the boss proposes something ridiculous, I tell him exactly what I think, and he takes my opinion into consideration. That easygoing attitude works both ways: if I need something special (like time off or budget for gear), I ask for it and usually get it. If the company needs something extra from me (late/early service call, weekend emergency), they ask for it and usually get it. It's simple, it works, and I don't need to give 5% of my paycheque to a mob^H^H^Hunion.
I'm not up to speed with U.S. tax laws and credits, but that's probably where your answer lies. If it weren't "cheaper" on paper somewhere, outsourcing would not exist at all.
The interpretation of "sick and disgusting" is a highly subjective concept. I'm sure there are plenty of people who think I do sick and disgusting things every day, without having anything to do with Miley Cyrus or any other stupid little spoiled whore. I'm sure I could find someone who finds thai food "sick and disgusting", I could probably even draw some bogus correlation between thai lovers and people who suck at math.
The reality is that law should be firm. It needs to be cut-and-dried, you're either guilty or you're not. To achieve this, we need to define the intent of the law, not the loosely-coupled description of contravening acts. Child porn is illegal because it is considered child abuse, right ? So here's the question we should be answering:
Did Miley suffer abuse as a direct effect or consequence of this man's photo editing activities ?
If what you want is data security, you have a desktop system with just a handful of disks, and you're worried about an unreleased operating system trashing your files, what you want is not RAID, you want a backup strategy. RAID is for fault tolerance. It protects against hard drive failure and nothing else. It will not save your butt after an OOPS moment, or when your shiny new beta OS decides to write zeros all over your filesystem's critical structures.
If you really want a safe, reliable backup system, build a dedicated backup NAS, use RAID on *that*, and dump all your important files on it via a mapped drive or FTP. If you're really paranoid about your data, you can have the NAS run a nightly task to tar/zip and rsync the whole thing to a remote server or Amazon S3.
Not trusting RAID is the smart thing to do, because it is not about trust, it is about making a sysadmin's life easier by adding a little tolerance to the least-reliable hardware in a server. Trust/security is not a piece of software, it is a methodology.
The way I see it, cloud computing, at least in its current form, is a business model. It is a buzzword that helps print more money, in lieu of actual innovation. It's the internet's idea of a make-work project.
Open source cliques don't give a flying fuck about business models. Linux wasn't created to satisfy some whiney douchebag on CNet, it was created because it served the needs of a small niche of hackers, and it snowballed from there. The way things are right now, real geeks don't care so much about cloud computing, they see it as a fad that doesn't bring tangible improvements to the computing experience. Most providers' cloud stuff is just fully-automated VM provisioning anyway. What's the big deal ? Who cares if a server is really a VM sitting in some big-label datacenter ? There's nothing revolutionary about it. Frankly you could build a buzzword-compliant cloud using the Xen API and some ugly-ass python scripts. You don't need anything fancy, in fact the fanciest thing about Amazon's cloud is the front-end and billing system, IMHO.
If and when a legitimate need is identified, some kind geek will take the time to do it right. It smells like an Apache project to me... but without a clearly defined need, there is no motivation, and without motivation there is no open source project.
Imagine millions of frustrated internet users clogging the phone lines and yelling at support agents until they go postal and murder their entire team.
Depends who you ask. The person most commonly blamed for the Amiga's failure is Jack Tramiel, same guy who couldn't make up his mind about (the original) Atari, and drove that one into the ground too.
Bad management ? Certainly. Willful destruction ? Possibly. Tramiel was a tempermental, jealous and stubbornly competitive owner. He just wouldn't leave things alone.
But this has nothing to do with TPB's buyout. Bad management won't matter here, it's already headed for the grave. If they wanted to keep it going strong, they should have kept mum on the whole sale and pretend like nothing had changed.
Slashdot Mirror
And writing a 3-line AJAX proxy script is too difficult ?
CURL page
strip garbage
output to client
How hard was that ?
Simple explanation:
When the error favours the company, it's an error and it gets fixed, apologies are issued and everything goes back to normal.
When the error favours the customer, accusations of fraud are floated and the small guy is threatened into returning the money, plus a lifetime NDA with stiff penalties.
It's all about PR.
It's not just about competition. There are alternatives, thanks to DSL deregulation, but since they all go through Bell's nodes at some point, they get throttled too. This concept has been a point of failure for the CRTC, which failed to penalize Bell for anti-competitive practices. One well-reputed "small" ISP affected by this is TekSavvy. They provide alternate connectivity with generous monthly caps and lower fees than Bell itself, but a year or two ago, Bell started throttling/shaping them at the DSLAM. Even though it is not Bell's bandwidth, and it is not oversold at that level, Bell specifically interferes with the connection and they get away with it.
Even if we had a thousand ISPs covering every inch of land, if the big goons who own the last mile are allowed to tamper with the packets, competition remains irrelevant.
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but your argument is based on ignorance. It is perfectly feasible to have your torrent running at near-full speed, AND your VoIP call go smoothly without dropouts, by prioritizing the VoIP packets. This facility is built in to TCP/IP, there is a flag in each and every packet that says whether this content is bulk (low priority), normal, or interactive (high priority). Most non-crap residential routers honor this flag and prioritize traffic accordingly, some even offer fine-grained control based on port numbers or L7 packet inspection.
Think of it as a busy club with a long lineup. VIPs cut to the front of the line. On your network, VoIP is that VIP and it jumps to the front of the line, ahead of your torrent traffic. You shouldn't have to pause your torrent, the router should be smart enough to prioritize real-time data if it is flagged as such.
Practically all ISPs already perform this sort of packet rescheduling network-wide, and that's perfectly fine. In practice, they could leave it at that and users would enjoy smooth, unencumbered connectivity without the need for draconian throttling. Let the network manage itself based on simple rules, like it always has. The problem, and what pisses off most power users and even not-so-power users, is when ISPs make political decisions on which data goes first on "their" network, and of course that almost always favors their 1st-party add-on services at the expense of competitors, even though the network is supposed to be for everyone.
The biggest disconnect stems from the notion that these networks, the very backbones of residential internet access, are privately owned, but to many people they are seen as a public good. It's kind of like having a Ford-sponsored road, where Ford drivers are welcome but Nissan drivers get pelted with gravel. Well we don't think of roads like that because roads are a government-owned shared resource. Well then, what is the internet, if not a series of interconnected digital "roads" ?
It's not the bandwidth that's expensive, it's the line to get it to your home/office.
In a datacenter (not in Ottawa) I pay a whoppping $4/mbit for low-volume, or $2.40/mbit for high-volume. That is dedicated bandwidth, not 95% percentile bullshit. I pay a flat rate, and they give me a flat pipe. If I don't use it, they don't oversell it to someone else. I can spit out four terabytes of data a month, for less than what I pay for shared throttled 3rd-world-supported cable.
Don't focus on the supposed ethical justification behind throttling, that's what the ISPs want you to whine about. The real issue, which has not changed in over a decade, is that they are selling a service they cannot realistically deliver: "unlimited" internet access.
If you walked into an all-you-can-eat buffet, and found out there were three chicken balls to split between 40 hungry patrons, would you not tear the restaurant owner a new asshole ? Isn't it reasonable to expect that if the deal was "all you can eat", you should be able to stuff your face until sated ? That's the problem with broadband today, except the ISPs try to hide their lack of substance by forcibly slowing consumption down to a trickle. That's akin to the waiter enforcing a "one bite per hour" rule. In the end, they're still covering up the fact that there isn't enough product to satisfy everyone.
I've been having it even worse as of late, since my idiotic ISP (Rogers) decided to bump up the middle tier from 7mbps to 10mbps, solely because Bell also upped their theoretical speeds (but it's DSL...morons!). The backend is no faster, so in reality they're just putting more pressure on an already-overtaxed network.
Net neutrality won't matter if this continues. Soon even first-party VoIP will drop packets because there isn't enough bandwidth to go around. If I had to propose any sort of legislation, it would be to limit overselling and enforce more honesty in telecom advertising. Torrents aside, any sort of telecom tyranny, in this day and age, is a direct barrier to technological progress, and in my not-so-humble opinion that should be considered an act of treason and punished as such.
As a hard drive interconnect ?
Sure, you can RAID a bunch of drives in an external chassis and pipe the combined throughput over FC, but how many people do you know with an FC HBA in their gaming rig or media workstation ? Even ignoring the minor detail that an entry-level HBA costs more than most people's entire PCs, you simply cannot compare external vs internal storage solutions. Some of us just don't want another big noisy box under our desks. It's fine for a datacenter but certainly not for SOHO.
What manufacturer is going to make SATA SSD's that can saturate the fastest SATA port?
The same idiot manufacturers who deliver super-high sequential reads at the expense of everything else. There's a jumble of drives running off a particular J-Micron controller (or two :P), that deliver faster sequential reads than the Intel X25-E, but have random access times in the 50ms range (average). That's five times slower than a cheap 5400rpm notebook drive! They still sell like hotcakes because they're cheap, and we all know how much America loves cheap garbage. You could stick a SATA port out the side of a fresh turd, and if you price it low enough, some dumb fuck will buy it.
SATA 6G is too slow, yes, but the companies involved seem to be interested in controlling their steady income by keeping everyone on an upgrade treadmill. If they had given us 6G at the very start, they would not have been able to milk the industry over the last six years with these minor upgrades and feature enhancements. Look at Firewire, ignoring Apple's idiocy, it was a very fast external bus that was far ahead of its competitors in terms of performance, reliability and ease of use. It was so good that even the 800mbit upgrade is considered redundant, the old standard is "fast enough" for most uses.
Better get used to it though, SATA is the new bottleneck, and it will be for years to come. There's just no way around it. It took this long for people to finally ditch IDE, even if there were a new contender to leave SATA's generationally-challenged performance in the dust, the industry simply is not ready to change interfaces again.
I looked at the Fusion-io cards a while ago, the speed is mind-blowing but the fact that it needs a driver made it an immediate no-go. Bootability is not the issue, it's all about compatibility. Why they can't make it appear as a plain old SATA or SCSI controller, I do not know, but more importantly I don't care, especially when you consider the asking price for these things. Even the cheapo Gigabyte I-Drive pretended to be a SATA disk (it literally had a SATA output connector). I'd be happy if this thing posed as a pair of SATA disks to be RAID-0'ed. In its current form it just seems like a half-baked idea. I'm really hoping they will clean it up in the next incarnation.
It seems they're releasing a "cheaper" version for so-called gamers, 80gb for ~$900. Four times the cost of an SSD, but four times the speed. I have to admit, at that price I might be willing to try one and see for myself if their drivers are worth a damn. I work with smallish high-churn databases, the kind of workload that eats spinning platters for breakfast. Something like this would be a godsend, as long as it's server-class reliable.
That's SOP for viruses these days, it's really just a matter of copy/pasting the relevant bits of code, and/or shoving the EXE through an obfuscator. Writing viruses only requires a modicum of C knowledge these days, everything else is automated with tools by real hackers.
The fact that we can "sneak" 100-200kb viruses certainly helps. Back in the day, you had to cram your attack into a 512-byte boot sector or hide it in the stack segment without increasing the file size... today's virus writers probably don't even know in which direction the stack grows :P
You can't force clients to do anything, but much like the upstream vendor, if there is a serious threat to their bottom line, clients will do backflips on command if you can make the gaping hole go away.
There is also a rather broad culture of vendor-managed or reseller-managed equipment. For example, if a vulnerability is discovered in any of the software I've build and sold to my clients, it is a simple matter for me to log into each box and patch every single one of them, and email the fix to the remaining few whose installations I don't manage. For those who don't enjoy such a strong vendor-client relationship, there is often an auto-update mechanism built into off-the-shelf apps, all you have to do is click it and reboot.
It's not blackmail, just potentially embarrassing.
If some guy threatens to out your extramarital affair, or the fact you've been defrauding your employer, or any other thing you'd rather keep secret, and they want money to keep quiet... that's blackmail.
If someone outs your ill affairs for free because you're an irresponsible prick, that's justly deserved. Disclosure of found exploits falls under this umbrella, not blackmail.
As I have also recently learned, a dashboard is just that: a bunch of charts, graphs and maybe a few summary tables. To literate folks like you and I, it is a huge waste of time and space, but to the average bean counter with half a brain, it is supposedly a tangible vulgarisation of otherwise indigestible data.
The good thing about this gov't dashboard is it seems to have good drill-downs, I was able to click through 3-4 levels deep to find out more and more details. They show you how they calculate a project's rating, and while it is a very simple and potentially misleading metric, at least they lay it out for you (how many deadlines were missed, how often did it go overbudget, etc). They even show a picture of the asshole in charge of each project, too bad you can't click the asshole and have it sort and rate HIS "specific concerns", but they're probably afraid of all the little McVeigh wannabes out there who would love to thin the herd...
Dashboards suck, but this is one of the better ones I've seen. I wouldn't call it worthy of an standing ovation, but I'm just a prick that way. Why don't we ask the old Harvard Graphics folks if they ever got a standing ovation for drawing pie charts, hmm ?
They want to discourage full disclosure, because it means they won't get to abuse undisclosed vulnerabilities as freely as they currently do.
Let me put it to you in more immediate terms: If the BH presentation on ATM exploits goes through, it will trigger a much more rapid response to patch the problem, which means the true exploiters have less time to plunder. Now this is just one example... There are hundreds of high-risk exploits discovered every day, some of which were obviously used to hack into ImageShack. These kiddies are scared that full disclosure will take away their "toys".
I find it hilarious that basic TCP/IP networking stuff gets labeled as "interesting". Any idiot can initiate a connection to a host on the internet.
What's "interesting" is that the victim's machine was not firewalled to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the first place. Properly controlling outgoing traffic is of crucial importance, particularly when dealing with such sensitive information. A locked down network should be able to contain unknown connections from within, just as well as those from the great wide internet.
In my opinion, it's not the invader that cost Kentucky $415,000. The fault rests entirely on their network administrator(s).
Without these asinine rules and the unions that forced them to be written, bosses would be forced to make real judgment calls about whether an employee is decent and honest. Of course, employees would also be expected to behave in a decent and honest manner. Integrity is dead, plain and simple. We have Gen X and Y to thank for that.
If we fired all the lazy abusive assholes and kicked them back to the shit jobs they deserve, maybe the world would be a better place. I certainly enjoy working in a small company where everything is casual and problems are addressed with face-time and sincere two-way communication. If the boss proposes something ridiculous, I tell him exactly what I think, and he takes my opinion into consideration. That easygoing attitude works both ways: if I need something special (like time off or budget for gear), I ask for it and usually get it. If the company needs something extra from me (late/early service call, weekend emergency), they ask for it and usually get it. It's simple, it works, and I don't need to give 5% of my paycheque to a mob^H^H^Hunion.
I'm not up to speed with U.S. tax laws and credits, but that's probably where your answer lies. If it weren't "cheaper" on paper somewhere, outsourcing would not exist at all.
Common sense usually doesn't apply to the law, or so the past decade of litigious bullshit would lead us to believe.
I guess there's a first time for everything. *ba-dum-CRASH*
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal!
The interpretation of "sick and disgusting" is a highly subjective concept. I'm sure there are plenty of people who think I do sick and disgusting things every day, without having anything to do with Miley Cyrus or any other stupid little spoiled whore. I'm sure I could find someone who finds thai food "sick and disgusting", I could probably even draw some bogus correlation between thai lovers and people who suck at math.
The reality is that law should be firm. It needs to be cut-and-dried, you're either guilty or you're not. To achieve this, we need to define the intent of the law, not the loosely-coupled description of contravening acts. Child porn is illegal because it is considered child abuse, right ? So here's the question we should be answering:
Did Miley suffer abuse as a direct effect or consequence of this man's photo editing activities ?
I rest my case, your stupor.
If what you want is data security, you have a desktop system with just a handful of disks, and you're worried about an unreleased operating system trashing your files, what you want is not RAID, you want a backup strategy. RAID is for fault tolerance. It protects against hard drive failure and nothing else. It will not save your butt after an OOPS moment, or when your shiny new beta OS decides to write zeros all over your filesystem's critical structures.
If you really want a safe, reliable backup system, build a dedicated backup NAS, use RAID on *that*, and dump all your important files on it via a mapped drive or FTP. If you're really paranoid about your data, you can have the NAS run a nightly task to tar/zip and rsync the whole thing to a remote server or Amazon S3.
Not trusting RAID is the smart thing to do, because it is not about trust, it is about making a sysadmin's life easier by adding a little tolerance to the least-reliable hardware in a server. Trust/security is not a piece of software, it is a methodology.
The way I see it, cloud computing, at least in its current form, is a business model. It is a buzzword that helps print more money, in lieu of actual innovation. It's the internet's idea of a make-work project.
Open source cliques don't give a flying fuck about business models. Linux wasn't created to satisfy some whiney douchebag on CNet, it was created because it served the needs of a small niche of hackers, and it snowballed from there. The way things are right now, real geeks don't care so much about cloud computing, they see it as a fad that doesn't bring tangible improvements to the computing experience. Most providers' cloud stuff is just fully-automated VM provisioning anyway. What's the big deal ? Who cares if a server is really a VM sitting in some big-label datacenter ? There's nothing revolutionary about it. Frankly you could build a buzzword-compliant cloud using the Xen API and some ugly-ass python scripts. You don't need anything fancy, in fact the fanciest thing about Amazon's cloud is the front-end and billing system, IMHO.
If and when a legitimate need is identified, some kind geek will take the time to do it right. It smells like an Apache project to me... but without a clearly defined need, there is no motivation, and without motivation there is no open source project.
Douchebags ? On my Wikipedia ?
SURELY YOU JEST!
Imagine millions of frustrated internet users clogging the phone lines and yelling at support agents until they go postal and murder their entire team.
Depends who you ask. The person most commonly blamed for the Amiga's failure is Jack Tramiel, same guy who couldn't make up his mind about (the original) Atari, and drove that one into the ground too.
Bad management ? Certainly. Willful destruction ? Possibly. Tramiel was a tempermental, jealous and stubbornly competitive owner. He just wouldn't leave things alone.
But this has nothing to do with TPB's buyout. Bad management won't matter here, it's already headed for the grave. If they wanted to keep it going strong, they should have kept mum on the whole sale and pretend like nothing had changed.