Even if it's another entity besides NASA that builds a heavy lift rocket, they are going to need somewhere to launch it from.
NASA are the only entity likely to build a heavy lift rocket in the near future because it makes no financial sense. And even if SpaceX did build one, they'd be unlikely to pay for NASA infrastructure to launch it.
How heavy is "heavy lift"? SpaceX has the Falcon Heavy on the roadmap. Supposed to lift over double the capacity of the Shuttle. Will launch from the Cape on a Nasa pad. According to their website, only the Saturn V delivered more mass to orbit. According to my recollection a couple of Soviet rockets were bigger too.
It looks like the Alliant/Boeing SLS could do double the work of the Falcon Heavy, if it ever gets built. Projected costs for SLS are even more massive than its payload - at least when compared to SpaceX numbers. They are quoting $138 million to GTO, while current estimates place the cost of a base model SLS at $1.6 billion (not including program development costs or launch costs). So if the SLS is what defines "heavy lift" then I suppose you are right. Only a government would shell out that kind of dough. (a quick look at wikipedia says that NASA estimates total program costs through the first 4 launches at $41 billion - so nearly 10x the cost of launching with SpaceX. - of course you do get that extra 25% more payload for the cost)
Sure there is. You simply do nothing. You chose a random cohort from among a larger population and administer placebo treatments. Another random cohort is not treated but is measured in the same way as the placebo cohort after the trial.
Easiest to do on something like gunshot wounds or ebola infections. That way you have a nice, easy to measure endpoint (death). Probably have a hard time getting that one through the committee though.
The 14th amendment has been held to incorporate the rights under the constitution to the states as well, including the 2nd amendment. I'd assume that's what he was referring to. Prior to the 14th, the states were free to set their own constitutional powers usurping the rights of individuals as they see fit - most dramatically including slavery.
This view of the 14th amendment does sound a bit odd when you apply the 10th amendment. Perhaps that is why the court has been routinely ignoring the 10th amendment for many generations.
Well, that was certainly a snarky reply for someone who doesn't understand the point Sycraft-fu was trying to make. He was talking about the TCO calculations and why "you can get full disk encryption for free with Fedora" isn't really applicable in a corporate environment. Not complaining that "it's really hard and a complete drain on IT resources".
The article includes these costs in their TCO calculations, and indicates that the largest expense is in lost user time due to slower boot times, sleep times and most importantly - lost productivity due to lost passwords. Sycraft-fu's example is perfect for this scenario as the laptop with the key-codes for the door was inaccessible for some period of time. Likely a few hours, since she probably futzed around trying to remember the password for a while before getting over to IT for help. Then she had to wait for the authorized manager to recover her password and sync to the AD. He said you have to factor in user mistakes (like forgetting the password) as a cost of full disk encryption. He's right.
Your straw man about a "giant conspiracy to drain valuable IT resources" is just plain silly.
Interestingly, although the big bang, photon decoupling and the notion that most stars predate our sun are 20th century discoveries, these details fit the Genesys narrative better than the notions of the creation of the earth that were in vogue prior to the 20th century.
let there be light - big bang separated light from darkness - photon decoupling create firmament of heaven and separate firmament of earth and divide the waters of heaven and earth - planetary disc creation and planet formation
doesn't really match the "the sky was cloudy on the earth until 'let there be light'" theory, but hey, if you are going to play "pattern recognition" with 8,000 year old oral traditions you should at least get as much leeway as they give Nostradamus.
Yeah, just keep on fighting in court. After spending the last few years fighting in court. Teams of attorneys don't cost all that much. And it doesn't take that much time and effort to keep going to court and prepping for depositions and revisiting ancient history every time some new accuser shows up.
Not that it means he did or didn't do anything, but I found the USADA spokesman's assertion that Armstrong's decision to quit fighting in court was an admission of guilt to be absurd and offensive.
At least this mess is all under the aegis of a private organization set up by the USOC. It is perfectly reasonable for sports leagues, amateur or pro, to set rules and police themselves. That they do it poorly is not really surprising. Just look at the NCAA. What I really don't understand is our government's fascination with sports cheating. The debacle of congress dragging a bunch of current and former athletes before their committees in order to humiliate them and set them up for perjury traps was truly appalling.
Socially liberal? What, because he "evolved" to a position of tolerance on gay marriage? Exactly what socially liberal policies does this government have?
He claimed he was going to roll back the drug war - and promptly ramped up raids on medical marijuana dispensaries. Is he better on civil asset forfeiture? No, decidedly not. What about warrantless wiretaps? Not really, no. How about the whole stupid USA Patriot Act? How about undeclared wars? Not so great there. How about due process - that's a pretty basic civil liberty. Yet this government has declared for the first time that the President has the authority to issue a death warrant for an American citizen without charges, trial, defense... just on the say-so of one man they can target and kill an American citizen. That's really socially liberal....
Don't listen to the rhetoric, watch the actions. Other than the soaring rhetoric and excellent image-making, exactly how much different is this "socially liberal" president from the previous "paleo-conservative" president on civil liberties? His position on Roe v. Wade vis-a-vis supreme court nominations? I suppose that's a difference. Hardly enough to warrant a label of "socially liberal" in my book, but hey, opinions differ.
Would you call it socialist, capitalist, or fascist or some other term?
Corporatist. That's the word you were looking for. Both parties are heavily statist and deeply invested in corporatism. When these guys trumpet new regulations that are going to "punish the bad guys and clean this industry up", just bet that there is some big, entrenched interest that is getting its nest feathered. Creating barriers to entry and protecting the incumbent works for the politicians and it works even better for the corporations.
Not to mention that reverse engineering isn't something most people think about or specialize in.
Nope, not something people think about... not so much. Except Kapersky. Yeah, Kapersky labs - that's pretty much what they think about and specialize in. Reverse engineering malware and viruses, that is. That's pretty much exactly what their core expertise involves. So maybe suggesting that they use reverse engineering is a little silly. Particularly when the accompanying article states that they reverse engineered the program and gives details as to exactly what it is doing based on this reverse engineering.
Let's see, who are we talking about anyway? Hmm... Eugene Kapersky is the top guy over there. It seems he was involved with building AVP back in the early 90's before founding Kapersky labs in the late 90's. He also "graduated from the Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications and Computer Science, where he studied mathematics, cryptography and computer technology, majoring in mathematical engineering." - so he's got the training. Yup, I'd say advising this guy that executing the code in a virtualized environment might solve his problem just might be enough to make you look a tiny bit ridiculous.
Sounds a little like Penn Jillette's rant on Hannity's show recently. Mr. Right-wing claimed he was throwing his vote away on libertarians like Gary Johnson and asked if we could ever elect a third party. Penn tells him the same thing you hinted at - if the people decide they want something different from the red/blue gruel they are being served, they'll change the government tomorrow.
Penn schooled him on libertarian politics to the point that Hannity admitted "I think I just got trounced in that debate!"
Like the year of the linux desktop, the year of the libertarian candidate is upon us!
You are totally wrong. Team Red/Blue is so much more evil than team Blue/Red! We have to stop team Blue/Red by electing Red/Blue! Everyone must passionately care about Team Red/Blue and follow as the evils of Blue/Red are chronicled on Fox/MSNBC! Only Blue/Red robots watch MSNBC/Fox! Smart and informed people watch Fox/MSNBC! Eleventy!
Yeah, the "kingmaker" minority party is an amazing force for good and for ill. One could imagine the Green Party or the Libertarians gaining 10% of the congress and being able to dictate policy on any controversial issues that team blue and team red couldn't agree on. It would be fantastically fun to watch... but in reality you'd probably end up with the Nazi party demanding a seat in the cabinet as Commerce Secretary instead of some cool freedom enhancer from another fringe group.
No, you tow the lion. That's the idiom. Lines are for toeing. Even though one could imagine lines of rope being used differently, a single malapropism might be confused with simple ignorance, and ipso facto fails the funny test. Double malapropism - now that's funny!
The same thing goes for explaining the joke. Just explaining it spoils the humor. But spending a paragraph over-analyzing and reparsing the joke - that goes all the way around past droll and becomes funny again.
The only exception to the above are jobs that people do because they love them.
This is very insightful. There are certain jobs that attract more people than there are positions available, depressing wages. Like "artist" or "musician" or "actor". There's lots of unbelievably talented and hard-working musicians out there who can't make a decent living at it (most of them are doing something other than music because of this fact). I mention this because there are a lot of other jobs like that. Biology graduates generally make less than someone with a high school degree and 4 years work experience. There must be a lot of people who really enjoyed biology, at least relative to the number of paying jobs available.
When I changed from biology (after 5 years running the central laboratory for a multicenter clinical trial for a cancer treatment) to entry-level computer tech I was able to demand a 50% increase in salary (with no relevant work history) and doubled my salary in less than a year. This despite going from being responsible for an 8.5 million dollar budget to being responsible for building and deploying $1,000 PC's.
In response to the GP, I have indeed spent time working at minimum wage, and I have personally experienced market forces that depressed wages below what would seem reasonable, and raised wages in seemingly irrational ways. Irrational if viewed from the perspective of "your salary is directly related to your value as a person". When viewed from a simple supply-and-demand, what-the-market-will-bear point of view it all makes perfect sense.
That doesn't mean that I didn't feel somewhat resentful of the workers at Caterpillar who went on strike rejecting a $19/hr plant-wide minimum wage as too low. This for entry-level unskilled laborers at a time when my transgenic mouse with a human hemoglobin transgene sporting a site-directed mutation to act as an animal model for sickle cell anemia garnered me an offer at $18k/year to run the affor-mentioned study. I held out for $22k though.:)
I hope we aren't arguing that "living wage" includes the right to live in your own home by yourself and not have to live frugally. It seems to me that I was living just fine when sharing an apartment with 3 other guys in my early 20's. Sure, Ramen wasn't a kitschy nostalgia item, and "all you can eat" buffets were a chance to eat 3 meals for the price of one, but we lived OK. Not knowing anything different might have helped.
Oh, and $ 350 for an apartment is crazy cheap. My family left Huntsville when I was pretty young, but I lived in Birmingham for grad school and was only able to come up with a place for $450/month - 25 years ago. And I considered that to be awfully cheap.
I'll see your "poorly informed" and raise you a "you don't know what you are talking about". Everything he says is accurate in most any job market. The only thing correct about your point is that there are certain jobs that won't ever lead to full-time employment for that employer at a high wage. Well, duh. Like a part-time helper at a chocolate store. (who in your example is actually making a little over minimum, go figure)
However, if you are a good employee with a good work ethic you'll be able to find a job elsewhere for more than minimum wage once you've built a bit of work history. Heck, even fast food pays more than minimum wage, and that's a job primarily aimed at entry-level teen workers. I've hired a couple-hundred people over the years, and none have been for minimum wage - even a position as a clerk who just put stuff away where it belonged was able to demand $12 an hour over 15 years ago. Believe it or not, there are a lot of jobs that are not worth what it would take to pay someone "a living wage". Like mowing my yard. I'm not going to pay you $40 an hour to cut my grass. Heck, I won't even pay $20. That's why I do it myself. (well, and I enjoy the time in the yard) Make minimum wage $25 an hour and most lawn services will go out of business - only really wealthy folks would be able to afford it. The same goes for a lot of service jobs. How much would you pay to have your nails done? I wouldn't pay anything, 'cause I'm a dude, but still... $85? $100? I doubt it. Prices rise above some magic number and then the customers just evaporate - taking the jobs with them.
The "just raise the minimum wage" argument is silly. You can't declare jobs worth more than they actually are by fiat. All that happens is a temporary boon to people on the lowest rung of the career ladder who manage to hold on to their jobs. Meanwhile, the market adjusts and eventually a new equilibrium is reached via inflation or job losses. No matter what you declare the "minimum living wage" to be, you'll be back complaining that it is too low in a few years. Even if you index it to some inflation measure, you'll just introduce other distortions into the market, like increasing unemployment and depressing all wages. The answer to low wages is labor mobility. There are far too many people who are tied down to a given geographic location and employer for reasons real and imagined. If they were able to access all of the jobs that are available and readily relocate to a new job, there'd be much less of an issue with people working a lifetime for minimum wage. Of course, there's still a lot of knuckleheads who can't be bothered to show up on time or give a decent day's work. There's no market fix for that.
I see loads of comments that I agree with about vm best practices, but I'll add this generalization:
It sounds like you have a small-ish setup. Virtualization is a little different when you get below a certain size, because you don't have the budget to throw at it. My last project took some 150 servers into 15 physical machines. Lots and lots of purpose-specific servers running some little app or service alongside the normal big servers handling file serving, print serving and enterprise apps. The 15 machines were beefy, but they were the cheap part. The storage was the thing. We blew over a quarter million on a nice SAN to go with the two we already had. With high-end storage you can do just about anything you want with virtualization. In fact, lots of things will suddenly perform much better due to the time-sharing of better hardware. Well, and the network. It turns out you need a lot of fast and well managed ports to run a VMware farm.
We got huge benefits from virtualizing DEV, QA and Staging environments. They were always way, way underpowered and cramped before virtualization. Also, we were able to rip off copies of anything we needed to experiment with in seconds. Huge, huge benefit there. And not just from the server virtualization - there's a lot of network hardware that we never would have been able to afford that just gets virtualized. In DEV and QA we routinely ripped off copies of a whole suite of related servers and stuck them in their own private network just to try something out - something you could never do with physical hardware.
Anyway, if you can afford the hardware you need for servers and storage and network - virtualize everything that doesn't have a good reason not to be virtualized. Ideally set up server farms in two locations and use SAN and VMware features to keep instant-on copies of everything in two locations. It takes a bit of work and more than a tiny bit of cash, but you'll be bulletproof when you are finished. Actually, I don't want to underplay the work involved in full redundancy - it isn't just VMware, there's work to be done at every level, particularly at the network level. But once it is set up correctly, your workload drops precipitously. A VM farm will be much, much less work to maintain than the physical servers - and your users will perceive a noticeable uptick in reliability. With a correctly sized and architected farm you'll never have downtime due to hardware problems again. This is a powerful argument for forcing everything you can possibly justify into virtualization.
We had a few reluctant business units and a couple of vendors that wouldn't certify their stuff on VMware (this was 2005-2008 era), so we kept the old hardware server updated and ready to go as a bailout plan and virtualized them one at a time. Never had a problem, everything worked better on VMware. The desktop project on the other hand... well, don't get me started...
A long time ago in a career far, far away I proposed an information management solution to the administration of the hospital I worked for. They responded by posting a position for a person to head up the project. The requirements? 5 years experience as an Oracle DBA and 10 years experience as a degreed Medical Technologist working in a human leukocyte antigen laboratory. This was in 1994 or thereabouts. An oracle DBA with 5 years experience commanded at least $65k. An HLA med-tech with 10 years experience was able to command around $45-50k. To my knowledge there was only one person on the planet sporting qualifications close to this (with only 3 years as an oracle DBA), and he was pulling in over $90k. They posted the position as an hourly-salaried position at $15k per year. Unsurprisingly they got zero applications.
Somehow I don't think they were serious about filling that position. They did end up handing a $6 million contract to write an oracle-based solution very similar to the one I proposed to a consulting company. Although the solution was never deployed, the technology director did manage to land a big job with the consulting company. I don't think any of those things were related though....
Don't know about features, but it looks pretty interesting, thanks for the link! As for your question "What does Exchange do that Scalable OpenGroupware does not?", the answer seems to be in the release notes. For the past year every release notes that it is focused on "improved stability".
Despite having a history of being mind-numbingly stupidly designed - particularly in the versions that used the Jet engine for the data store - Exchange has been quite stable in recent years, at least in my experience. And if there's one thing you want in a "scalable groupware" it would be stability. There are very few cases where "thousands of users" and "stability issues" are acceptable bedfellows.
Can this ridiculous debt be wiped out in bankruptcy, or is it exempted from bankruptcy proceedings? Even having to deal with a bankruptcy on your credit report for 7 years is pretty harsh for the violation he's found guilty of, but having your wages garnished for life is beyond the pale. Of course, that's what they were hoping for. They needed a poster-boy so nobody would ever reject a settlement offer and go to trial again. Spreading fear was their mission.
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Even if it's another entity besides NASA that builds a heavy lift rocket, they are going to need somewhere to launch it from.
NASA are the only entity likely to build a heavy lift rocket in the near future because it makes no financial sense. And even if SpaceX did build one, they'd be unlikely to pay for NASA infrastructure to launch it.
How heavy is "heavy lift"? SpaceX has the Falcon Heavy on the roadmap. Supposed to lift over double the capacity of the Shuttle. Will launch from the Cape on a Nasa pad. According to their website, only the Saturn V delivered more mass to orbit. According to my recollection a couple of Soviet rockets were bigger too.
It looks like the Alliant/Boeing SLS could do double the work of the Falcon Heavy, if it ever gets built. Projected costs for SLS are even more massive than its payload - at least when compared to SpaceX numbers. They are quoting $138 million to GTO, while current estimates place the cost of a base model SLS at $1.6 billion (not including program development costs or launch costs). So if the SLS is what defines "heavy lift" then I suppose you are right. Only a government would shell out that kind of dough. (a quick look at wikipedia says that NASA estimates total program costs through the first 4 launches at $41 billion - so nearly 10x the cost of launching with SpaceX. - of course you do get that extra 25% more payload for the cost)
Sure there is. You simply do nothing. You chose a random cohort from among a larger population and administer placebo treatments. Another random cohort is not treated but is measured in the same way as the placebo cohort after the trial.
Easiest to do on something like gunshot wounds or ebola infections. That way you have a nice, easy to measure endpoint (death). Probably have a hard time getting that one through the committee though.
The 14th amendment has been held to incorporate the rights under the constitution to the states as well, including the 2nd amendment. I'd assume that's what he was referring to. Prior to the 14th, the states were free to set their own constitutional powers usurping the rights of individuals as they see fit - most dramatically including slavery.
This view of the 14th amendment does sound a bit odd when you apply the 10th amendment. Perhaps that is why the court has been routinely ignoring the 10th amendment for many generations.
Well, that was certainly a snarky reply for someone who doesn't understand the point Sycraft-fu was trying to make. He was talking about the TCO calculations and why "you can get full disk encryption for free with Fedora" isn't really applicable in a corporate environment. Not complaining that "it's really hard and a complete drain on IT resources".
The article includes these costs in their TCO calculations, and indicates that the largest expense is in lost user time due to slower boot times, sleep times and most importantly - lost productivity due to lost passwords. Sycraft-fu's example is perfect for this scenario as the laptop with the key-codes for the door was inaccessible for some period of time. Likely a few hours, since she probably futzed around trying to remember the password for a while before getting over to IT for help. Then she had to wait for the authorized manager to recover her password and sync to the AD. He said you have to factor in user mistakes (like forgetting the password) as a cost of full disk encryption. He's right.
Your straw man about a "giant conspiracy to drain valuable IT resources" is just plain silly.
Interestingly, although the big bang, photon decoupling and the notion that most stars predate our sun are 20th century discoveries, these details fit the Genesys narrative better than the notions of the creation of the earth that were in vogue prior to the 20th century.
let there be light - big bang
separated light from darkness - photon decoupling
create firmament of heaven and separate firmament of earth and divide the waters of heaven and earth - planetary disc creation and planet formation
doesn't really match the "the sky was cloudy on the earth until 'let there be light'" theory, but hey, if you are going to play "pattern recognition" with 8,000 year old oral traditions you should at least get as much leeway as they give Nostradamus.
Yeah, just keep on fighting in court. After spending the last few years fighting in court. Teams of attorneys don't cost all that much. And it doesn't take that much time and effort to keep going to court and prepping for depositions and revisiting ancient history every time some new accuser shows up.
Not that it means he did or didn't do anything, but I found the USADA spokesman's assertion that Armstrong's decision to quit fighting in court was an admission of guilt to be absurd and offensive.
At least this mess is all under the aegis of a private organization set up by the USOC. It is perfectly reasonable for sports leagues, amateur or pro, to set rules and police themselves. That they do it poorly is not really surprising. Just look at the NCAA. What I really don't understand is our government's fascination with sports cheating. The debacle of congress dragging a bunch of current and former athletes before their committees in order to humiliate them and set them up for perjury traps was truly appalling.
Socially liberal? What, because he "evolved" to a position of tolerance on gay marriage? Exactly what socially liberal policies does this government have?
He claimed he was going to roll back the drug war - and promptly ramped up raids on medical marijuana dispensaries. Is he better on civil asset forfeiture? No, decidedly not. What about warrantless wiretaps? Not really, no. How about the whole stupid USA Patriot Act? How about undeclared wars? Not so great there. How about due process - that's a pretty basic civil liberty. Yet this government has declared for the first time that the President has the authority to issue a death warrant for an American citizen without charges, trial, defense... just on the say-so of one man they can target and kill an American citizen. That's really socially liberal....
Don't listen to the rhetoric, watch the actions. Other than the soaring rhetoric and excellent image-making, exactly how much different is this "socially liberal" president from the previous "paleo-conservative" president on civil liberties? His position on Roe v. Wade vis-a-vis supreme court nominations? I suppose that's a difference. Hardly enough to warrant a label of "socially liberal" in my book, but hey, opinions differ.
Would you call it socialist, capitalist, or fascist or some other term?
Corporatist. That's the word you were looking for. Both parties are heavily statist and deeply invested in corporatism. When these guys trumpet new regulations that are going to "punish the bad guys and clean this industry up", just bet that there is some big, entrenched interest that is getting its nest feathered. Creating barriers to entry and protecting the incumbent works for the politicians and it works even better for the corporations.
Not to mention that reverse engineering isn't something most people think about or specialize in.
Nope, not something people think about... not so much. Except Kapersky. Yeah, Kapersky labs - that's pretty much what they think about and specialize in. Reverse engineering malware and viruses, that is. That's pretty much exactly what their core expertise involves. So maybe suggesting that they use reverse engineering is a little silly. Particularly when the accompanying article states that they reverse engineered the program and gives details as to exactly what it is doing based on this reverse engineering.
Let's see, who are we talking about anyway? Hmm... Eugene Kapersky is the top guy over there. It seems he was involved with building AVP back in the early 90's before founding Kapersky labs in the late 90's. He also "graduated from the Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications and Computer Science, where he studied mathematics, cryptography and computer technology, majoring in mathematical engineering." - so he's got the training. Yup, I'd say advising this guy that executing the code in a virtualized environment might solve his problem just might be enough to make you look a tiny bit ridiculous.
Sounds a little like Penn Jillette's rant on Hannity's show recently. Mr. Right-wing claimed he was throwing his vote away on libertarians like Gary Johnson and asked if we could ever elect a third party. Penn tells him the same thing you hinted at - if the people decide they want something different from the red/blue gruel they are being served, they'll change the government tomorrow.
Penn schooled him on libertarian politics to the point that Hannity admitted "I think I just got trounced in that debate!"
Like the year of the linux desktop, the year of the libertarian candidate is upon us!
You are totally wrong. Team Red/Blue is so much more evil than team Blue/Red! We have to stop team Blue/Red by electing Red/Blue! Everyone must passionately care about Team Red/Blue and follow as the evils of Blue/Red are chronicled on Fox/MSNBC! Only Blue/Red robots watch MSNBC/Fox! Smart and informed people watch Fox/MSNBC! Eleventy!
Yeah, the "kingmaker" minority party is an amazing force for good and for ill. One could imagine the Green Party or the Libertarians gaining 10% of the congress and being able to dictate policy on any controversial issues that team blue and team red couldn't agree on. It would be fantastically fun to watch... but in reality you'd probably end up with the Nazi party demanding a seat in the cabinet as Commerce Secretary instead of some cool freedom enhancer from another fringe group.
Yeah - being an object of ridicule is the VP's raison d'etre. Many a competent politician has disappeared down that rabbit hole.
No, you tow the lion. That's the idiom. Lines are for toeing. Even though one could imagine lines of rope being used differently, a single malapropism might be confused with simple ignorance, and ipso facto fails the funny test. Double malapropism - now that's funny!
The same thing goes for explaining the joke. Just explaining it spoils the humor. But spending a paragraph over-analyzing and reparsing the joke - that goes all the way around past droll and becomes funny again.
The only exception to the above are jobs that people do because they love them.
This is very insightful. There are certain jobs that attract more people than there are positions available, depressing wages. Like "artist" or "musician" or "actor". There's lots of unbelievably talented and hard-working musicians out there who can't make a decent living at it (most of them are doing something other than music because of this fact). I mention this because there are a lot of other jobs like that. Biology graduates generally make less than someone with a high school degree and 4 years work experience. There must be a lot of people who really enjoyed biology, at least relative to the number of paying jobs available.
When I changed from biology (after 5 years running the central laboratory for a multicenter clinical trial for a cancer treatment) to entry-level computer tech I was able to demand a 50% increase in salary (with no relevant work history) and doubled my salary in less than a year. This despite going from being responsible for an 8.5 million dollar budget to being responsible for building and deploying $1,000 PC's.
In response to the GP, I have indeed spent time working at minimum wage, and I have personally experienced market forces that depressed wages below what would seem reasonable, and raised wages in seemingly irrational ways. Irrational if viewed from the perspective of "your salary is directly related to your value as a person". When viewed from a simple supply-and-demand, what-the-market-will-bear point of view it all makes perfect sense.
That doesn't mean that I didn't feel somewhat resentful of the workers at Caterpillar who went on strike rejecting a $19/hr plant-wide minimum wage as too low. This for entry-level unskilled laborers at a time when my transgenic mouse with a human hemoglobin transgene sporting a site-directed mutation to act as an animal model for sickle cell anemia garnered me an offer at $18k/year to run the affor-mentioned study. I held out for $22k though. :)
I hope we aren't arguing that "living wage" includes the right to live in your own home by yourself and not have to live frugally. It seems to me that I was living just fine when sharing an apartment with 3 other guys in my early 20's. Sure, Ramen wasn't a kitschy nostalgia item, and "all you can eat" buffets were a chance to eat 3 meals for the price of one, but we lived OK. Not knowing anything different might have helped.
Oh, and $ 350 for an apartment is crazy cheap. My family left Huntsville when I was pretty young, but I lived in Birmingham for grad school and was only able to come up with a place for $450/month - 25 years ago. And I considered that to be awfully cheap.
I'll see your "poorly informed" and raise you a "you don't know what you are talking about". Everything he says is accurate in most any job market. The only thing correct about your point is that there are certain jobs that won't ever lead to full-time employment for that employer at a high wage. Well, duh. Like a part-time helper at a chocolate store. (who in your example is actually making a little over minimum, go figure)
However, if you are a good employee with a good work ethic you'll be able to find a job elsewhere for more than minimum wage once you've built a bit of work history. Heck, even fast food pays more than minimum wage, and that's a job primarily aimed at entry-level teen workers. I've hired a couple-hundred people over the years, and none have been for minimum wage - even a position as a clerk who just put stuff away where it belonged was able to demand $12 an hour over 15 years ago. Believe it or not, there are a lot of jobs that are not worth what it would take to pay someone "a living wage". Like mowing my yard. I'm not going to pay you $40 an hour to cut my grass. Heck, I won't even pay $20. That's why I do it myself. (well, and I enjoy the time in the yard) Make minimum wage $25 an hour and most lawn services will go out of business - only really wealthy folks would be able to afford it. The same goes for a lot of service jobs. How much would you pay to have your nails done? I wouldn't pay anything, 'cause I'm a dude, but still... $85? $100? I doubt it. Prices rise above some magic number and then the customers just evaporate - taking the jobs with them.
The "just raise the minimum wage" argument is silly. You can't declare jobs worth more than they actually are by fiat. All that happens is a temporary boon to people on the lowest rung of the career ladder who manage to hold on to their jobs. Meanwhile, the market adjusts and eventually a new equilibrium is reached via inflation or job losses. No matter what you declare the "minimum living wage" to be, you'll be back complaining that it is too low in a few years. Even if you index it to some inflation measure, you'll just introduce other distortions into the market, like increasing unemployment and depressing all wages. The answer to low wages is labor mobility. There are far too many people who are tied down to a given geographic location and employer for reasons real and imagined. If they were able to access all of the jobs that are available and readily relocate to a new job, there'd be much less of an issue with people working a lifetime for minimum wage. Of course, there's still a lot of knuckleheads who can't be bothered to show up on time or give a decent day's work. There's no market fix for that.
I see loads of comments that I agree with about vm best practices, but I'll add this generalization:
It sounds like you have a small-ish setup. Virtualization is a little different when you get below a certain size, because you don't have the budget to throw at it. My last project took some 150 servers into 15 physical machines. Lots and lots of purpose-specific servers running some little app or service alongside the normal big servers handling file serving, print serving and enterprise apps. The 15 machines were beefy, but they were the cheap part. The storage was the thing. We blew over a quarter million on a nice SAN to go with the two we already had. With high-end storage you can do just about anything you want with virtualization. In fact, lots of things will suddenly perform much better due to the time-sharing of better hardware. Well, and the network. It turns out you need a lot of fast and well managed ports to run a VMware farm.
We got huge benefits from virtualizing DEV, QA and Staging environments. They were always way, way underpowered and cramped before virtualization. Also, we were able to rip off copies of anything we needed to experiment with in seconds. Huge, huge benefit there. And not just from the server virtualization - there's a lot of network hardware that we never would have been able to afford that just gets virtualized. In DEV and QA we routinely ripped off copies of a whole suite of related servers and stuck them in their own private network just to try something out - something you could never do with physical hardware.
Anyway, if you can afford the hardware you need for servers and storage and network - virtualize everything that doesn't have a good reason not to be virtualized. Ideally set up server farms in two locations and use SAN and VMware features to keep instant-on copies of everything in two locations. It takes a bit of work and more than a tiny bit of cash, but you'll be bulletproof when you are finished. Actually, I don't want to underplay the work involved in full redundancy - it isn't just VMware, there's work to be done at every level, particularly at the network level. But once it is set up correctly, your workload drops precipitously. A VM farm will be much, much less work to maintain than the physical servers - and your users will perceive a noticeable uptick in reliability. With a correctly sized and architected farm you'll never have downtime due to hardware problems again. This is a powerful argument for forcing everything you can possibly justify into virtualization.
We had a few reluctant business units and a couple of vendors that wouldn't certify their stuff on VMware (this was 2005-2008 era), so we kept the old hardware server updated and ready to go as a bailout plan and virtualized them one at a time. Never had a problem, everything worked better on VMware. The desktop project on the other hand... well, don't get me started...
A long time ago in a career far, far away I proposed an information management solution to the administration of the hospital I worked for. They responded by posting a position for a person to head up the project. The requirements? 5 years experience as an Oracle DBA and 10 years experience as a degreed Medical Technologist working in a human leukocyte antigen laboratory. This was in 1994 or thereabouts. An oracle DBA with 5 years experience commanded at least $65k. An HLA med-tech with 10 years experience was able to command around $45-50k. To my knowledge there was only one person on the planet sporting qualifications close to this (with only 3 years as an oracle DBA), and he was pulling in over $90k. They posted the position as an hourly-salaried position at $15k per year. Unsurprisingly they got zero applications.
Somehow I don't think they were serious about filling that position. They did end up handing a $6 million contract to write an oracle-based solution very similar to the one I proposed to a consulting company. Although the solution was never deployed, the technology director did manage to land a big job with the consulting company. I don't think any of those things were related though....
I was going to release my comments under "creative commons" license, but now I'm holding the copyrights close just so your comment remains valid.
That was my first thought as well. Pretty simple solution to a problem.
What does Exchange do that Scalable OpenGroupware does not? SOGo:
Don't know about features, but it looks pretty interesting, thanks for the link! As for your question "What does Exchange do that Scalable OpenGroupware does not?", the answer seems to be in the release notes. For the past year every release notes that it is focused on "improved stability".
Despite having a history of being mind-numbingly stupidly designed - particularly in the versions that used the Jet engine for the data store - Exchange has been quite stable in recent years, at least in my experience. And if there's one thing you want in a "scalable groupware" it would be stability. There are very few cases where "thousands of users" and "stability issues" are acceptable bedfellows.
so then, how is it you know these people published anonymously...and exactly what it was they had published? seems it wasn't so anonymous.
Because they won.
The pipes in the walls are the radiator he's referring to.
Can this ridiculous debt be wiped out in bankruptcy, or is it exempted from bankruptcy proceedings? Even having to deal with a bankruptcy on your credit report for 7 years is pretty harsh for the violation he's found guilty of, but having your wages garnished for life is beyond the pale. Of course, that's what they were hoping for. They needed a poster-boy so nobody would ever reject a settlement offer and go to trial again. Spreading fear was their mission.