Actually I installed a dual boot of OSX and Ubuntu on my later model iMac. Not only does Ubuntu run flawlessly it's really fast. I was surprised to see that everything worked right out of the box, including the webcam, sound and wifi. Sometimes I have to test my software on a native Linux distribution so it helps to have the dual boot option. Sure I could run it in a VM but this is a bit more of a pure solution.
I worked in Minneapolis one winter. Never been so fucking cold in all my life. At least they have heated bridges connecting the buildings downtown. But still...those kinds of temps are inhuman to me. Nice city and nice people but no way would I ever live in a place that cold.
The US is very much a have/have not society. If you are on the right side of that equation it's a fantastic place to live. Crime here tends to be very, very concentrated. If you live in a big city the crime areas are well known and easily avoided for the most part. Still, there is a lot of racism here. Much more than my native Canada. It's kind of sneaky and below the surface but not far below. Far too many guns here but, again, most of the violent crime is inner city. The social safety net leaves something to be desired but in the US it's sort of a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps kind of mentality. If you have some ambition and drive you can do very well here indeed.
The Indian government has also announced that their astronauts will work for 1/4 the salary of an American astronaut. They will also sleep 9 to a capsule instead of the customary 3. Americans will coordinate the mission and handle the tactical details which will be sent off-shore (and I mean really off-shore) to their Indian counterparts in space. The Americans are expecting numerous mistakes and misunderstandings but, hey, they work cheap and we can always clean it up after the fact. Mission management is thrilled at the cost savings and predicts a tremendous success. Veteran American astronauts are quietly preparing the rescue capsule secure in the knowledge that the so called cost savings are folly at best. But for now the bean counters are gleefully exchanging high 5's at mission control.
Exactly. It's just another excuse for the government to further intrude into our private affairs. How many of these so called drug dealers do they expect to apprehend? And of that, how many of them are just selling bag of weed to one of their friends? For this, every cellphone user in America has to give up their right to privacy? Same goes for data privacy. The latest flavor of the month is the war on "terror", whatever the hell that is. Homeland Security maintains something called the "no-fly list". You can end up on it for no reason whatsoever. You won't get any notification that you're on the list, nor any reason why. The only way you'll even know you're on it is if you go to an airport and discover that boarding a plane is even more of a pain in the ass than it used to be. So you have to send a letter to some bureaucrat in Washington who researches it and clears you. Then you get a letter from said bureaucrat absolving you of all wrongdoing at which point they give you something called a "redress number". So you put the redress number in your airline profile and DHS leaves you alone once again. Naturally the letter contains no details on why the hell you ended up on it in the first place, why you were "cleared", or how to avoid it in the future. Basically you are convicted of a crime you didn't commit, without a trial or representation or even just cause for the accusation. Then you are effectively given parole (the redress number) that goes with you like a ball and chain for the rest of your life. Yeah...way to fight the "war on terror", boys. Thanks for nothing.
Bill Gates has a lot of critics, myself included, but I think he deserves at least some credit for trying to improve the lives of the world's poorest people. Much of the famine and disease in Africa is caused by lack of water, both drinking and irrigation. It seems to me that if someone can come up with a waterless toilet it would be helpful. Perhaps the end product can be used to fertilize crops? Gates represents a new breed of philanthropists. The old way was to just write a big check to some charity and trust that they spend the money efficiently and in the way you want it spent. I have worked for non-profits and I can say that the ones I worked for were very inefficient...along the lines of government agencies (yes, I've worked for them too). They mean well and have noble causes but there is a lot of waste. Gates wants a direct hand in the money he donates so that it will get spent in the way he wants and the recipients will be made to show some progress. Frankly, I don't see a problem with that, given the vast amounts of money he has pledged. Some of the ideas will work and others will not but nobody will know unless they try.
It's boom times in Western Canada but housing prices are extremely high and winters are very cold and very long. Unless you're in Vancouver. Lovely city but very expensive as well and in the winter it rains all the time. Very good for outdoor activities though since you have the ocean and mountains. Northeast US? I lived there for a few years. Lots of history, beaches, fall colors but very expensive cost of living and very high taxes. It's also very provincial, meaning that if you weren't born there you will always be an outsider. Horrible traffic, especially in the bigger cities. Personally I loved the Carolinas. Great weather, good job market, reasonable housing, nice people. I ended up settling in Arizona. I tell people that it's California at 1/4 the price. Housing and taxes are very affordable. The weather is outstanding, outside of 3 months of blistering hot summers. Lots of outdoor activities. The problem is that for the most part the schools are lousy so if you have kids you'll probably want to look at private schools. Crime is very low here, outside of the inner city corridor. Job market is reasonably good.
You may recall that individual airports did have an opportunity to do something about it. They had the choice to opt out...until the federal government realized that many airports were ready to do just that and the opt out option disappeared. As much and I'd like to boycott the airlines I have to fly as part of my job. Trains and automobiles are not a viable option for me. I'm in airports 2-3 times a month, sometimes more. I have logged a lot of miles before and after 9/11 and my observations are not merely empty rants. I'm a frequent flyer. I speak with some authority on this. The fact that I have to take off my shoes, and watch, and empty my pockets, and take off my belt and put my laptop in a separate gray bin from everything else does nothing, absolutely nothing, to make me feel any safer than I did before 9/11. Who came up with the 3.4 oz limit on liquids? That was not a standard bottle size. 4.2 oz was. So an entire industry had to retool their assembly lines because some idiot in Washington decided that 3.4 oz is a safe size to carry on planes. Do you realize that if you bring a 5 oz container that is half empty they won't let you bring it through? They are using full body scanners. Why the hell does everyone have to take off their shoes and belt? Can't the thing see through it?
If you do business consulting, like I do, it's not just about the coding. Coding is my favorite part of the job but I also spend a fair amount of time in meetings. So I have to be good at business process analysis, requirements gathering and have at least passable people skills. Many of the people I work with have almost no technical skills at all (known as Functional consultants in the vernacular) but are very good at the things I mentioned above. Others are very good technically but we wouldn't dare put them in front of a client. Those guys (and in my experience it has been exclusively guys) have no people skills at all but they are very, very good coders so they are valuable to the team. We are used to working with women so I don't see much of the alpha dog thing.
Sure, until wealthy people get tired of it and decide to take their money, and the jobs it creates, with them to somewhere else. We're seeing this happening in France already. It's happening here in the USA where we are seeing migrations of wealthy people from the northeast to places like florida, texas and nevada. What's the common thread there? No state income tax. Coincidently, job growth in Texas has soared in the past few years. I used to live in the northeast and I moved. You know why? I got tired of paying $12,000 a year in property taxes. This idea of lets just raise a little more money and everything will be ok is bunk. Politicians will spend every dime they get and when they run out they will borrow the rest. The only way to reign in the deficit is to control BOTH spending and revenue and both have to be done in a way the spreads it out evenly.
Might as well get used to it folks. The TSA is never going away. Already it has absorbed several other agencies along the way (coast guard, etc.). As Rham Emmanuel once famous said "never let a good crisis go to waste". The creation of TSA was a direct result of 9/11 and it's continued existence is playing upon people's fears of some vague "terrorist" threat somewhere in the distance. Remember in the airports they always used to announce that the threat alert was "orange"? Never yellow, never red. Always orange. If it was yellow people might question if we even need the TSA. It was never red because they never actually caught anyone doing anything that could justify setting it to that. So basically it was just a charade. Remember how the govt told us how they were going to replace those rent-a-cops that the airlines used to hire for security? Looks to me like the same drones that were there before. The only difference is that it costs more and the lines are longer. I don't feel one bit safer. Oh, and the screenings are more invasive and we have given up (or had taken away more accurately) more of our civil rights. If someone wanted to blow up a plane they could do it TODAY, with or without the TSA. I'm not suggesting that we don't need screening in airports I just don't want the government in charge of it.
You're half right. We do need to raise taxes. Our governments - Republican and Democrat both - have been spending like drunken sailors for years and it's caught up to us. But we also need to curb services and that means spending cuts. Simpson-Bowles got it right but their recommendations were completely ignored by Obama and he was the one that appointed them in the first place to look at this mess. Why? Because they were politically impossible for Obama to embrace. "Let's make the rich pay" sure sounds nice but the numbers just don't add up. That alone is not going to fix the deficit. The top 10% are already paying about 70% of all income taxes so there isn't much left to squeeze. The problem is that when you start talking about reducing services everyone starts flipping out because now it effects ME and not some nameless, faceless rich dude. Health care reform faces the same hurdles. The only way it can be economically viable for the insurance companies is if everyone pays into the system - healthy, unhealthy, rich, poor...everyone. But health care reform got passed without the individual mandate so it's going to end up costing a fortune.
It's pretty clear that the Democrats are going with a "make the rich pay" sort of campaign. They will do everything they can to demonize Romney and his wealth while conveniently ignoring several very wealthy Democrats (Pelosi, Kerry, pick a Kennedy any Kennedy, John Edwards, etc.). The clear message being that it's ok to be rich if you're a Democrat but if you're a rich Republican then you're a prick. Say what you want about Romney's money, at least he worked for it. Sure, venture capitalism has questionable ethics at times but show me a single really rich person - Republican or Democrat - that hasn't broken a few rules on the way up. His father was of modest means and he earned his way to success. John Kerry got his money the old fashioned way. He married some rich old broad with a trust fund. John Edwards was an ambulance chasing lawyer that made hundreds of millions of dollars in asbestos lawsuits. The Kennedys got their money the real old fashioned way - they stole it. Not only that, they have their family fortune squirreled away in tax havens such as the Isle of Man and Fiji where they don't pay one red cent of tax on a family fortune estimated by some to be several hundred million dollars. Isn't this exactly what the Democrats are going after Romney for? For having a Swiss bank account? He is alleged to have had $3 million in that Swiss account and it was closed in 2010. Why do people put money in Swiss banks? To avoid taxes of course. See a pattern emerging here? Republican or Democrat, if they are rich they are all doing this sort of thing to some degree or other. So let's just stop with these silly games shall we. Would someone please wake me up when the mud slinging is finished and we actually start talking in an honest way about the real issues that face America and what to do about them?
Some people get a false sense of security from using Time Machine (has it been rebranded as Time Capsule now?). Yes, it's built in and it works quite well but I also use Carbon Copy Cloner. That does a full, bootable disk image of the hard drive. In the event of a hard drive failure I can simply plug in my external drive (that I do the image backup on) and start up from that. Everything is exactly as it was on your original drive - wallpaper, bookmarks, settings, etc. Anything that you have missed since the last backup can be copied back from the Time Machine backup. The problem with most backup solutions is that, yes, they back up your data but if the drive fails you have to reload the OS and all of your application software and then do all of the OS updates. Assuming you have the disks and license codes handy it will still take you a good 4 hours or more to get back up to speed.
Well, I think that depends largely on where your skills lie. If you do IT support, or you're a web developer, or an Exchange administrator you are competing against lots and lots of other people with similar skills. OTOH, if you have skills in a niche area where it is highly specialized and there is a steady demand you are competing against far fewer people. The odds are now in your favor. Yes, there are a lot of bottom feeder recruiters out there. In my experience, most of them are. I have a simple rule for that - if you're a recruiter and you contact me and I don't know you and you come without a referral it will be a very short conversation. I only deal with people that have integrity and know the market and don't try to jack me around. They know what I'm worth, I know what I'm worth so let's not play games.
Yup, spot on. Once you've been around this business for a while you know how to spot the good from the great. If you're really good then your accomplishments, references and reputation will show it. Word gets around...people start calling you...opportunities present themselves. Once you arrive at that level you'll just know it. There is no big ceremony, no parade. You just wake up one day and say to yourself...damn I'm pretty good at this stuff and I don't have to work for any of those bottom feeder sweatshops any longer. YOU decide what a fair wage is, not the employer. If they don't like it...tough, I'll find someone that does. And if you're good there will be people willing to pay for your expertise. Simple as that.
Yes but it's not just about the resolution. Contrast and color depth are very important for some tasks. My iMac has an external display and, when seen side by side, it's obvious which one is better. Even putting the same background wallpaper and comparing them shows that the iMac screen has truer colors. The sky looks like a real sky. Grass looks like real grass. By the way, the second monitor is an AOC LED 21 inch model. It's a decent monitor but try as I might I can't get the display to look as lifelike as the iMac does. Now if you go and spend $500-600 on a monitor that's a different argument.
That's a very good point. On my iMac at home I have an external monitor. It's a decent monitor but the display on the iMac is vastly superior. I'd go as far as to say that the iMac has the best display I've ever used. I'm sure there are monitors that rival it but they are not your $100 Fry's specials. Apple makes extremely good displays, both on the iMac and the MacBook.
Despite the somewhat rosy job numbers there is a sobering reality in today's job market. If you are very experienced and have good contacts there are lots of jobs right now in IT. I get emails from recruiters every week it seems. But if you are just out of school or are not highly specialized then your options are much more limited because now you are competing against cheap foreign labor for programming jobs. Many times I have sat in meetings where we are looking at the resume of a recent grad and quickly realize that we could hire someone from India for 1/3 the price. Of course the quality of the work from the people in India is often sub par (at least in my experience) but to the people that control the money it looks like a no brainer. They hire the person from India. It's only when you gain more experience and skills that are very hard to find that the India option is no longer viable. At that point you have more control over how much you can charge for your services and potential employers have a vastly smaller pool of people to choose from. The challenge for the new grads is how to bridge that gap and it's a vexing problem. Gone are the days when IBM would hire you out of college and give you lots of training and a job for life. Now they expect you to already have the skills and you're only one bad quarter from getting laid off.
My understanding is that TN's defense was that they were downloading material from Oracle's website on behalf of their (TN's) client. If the customer were an Oracle customer then it's all well and good for that customer to log on to Oracle's support site and download whatever they want. It's part of the agreement you have with them. But in this case the support was being provided by TN. So what TN was alleged to have done was log in as the customer and download copy written materials from Oracle's web site to support the customer. That's a no no. It was a pretty open and shut case. SAP didn't do much to dispute the theft but did fight the amount awarded initially. Looks like they were successful in getting a Billion knocked off it so they should be happy about that. SAP moved pretty quickly to disavow itself from TN by initially putting someone in place to watch over the CEO and then, once it was clear there was wrongdoing, they ousted him and dissolved TN altogether. Personally I think that the Rimini St. case will be more interesting because Rimini is not charged with stealing anything like TN was. Oracle is challenging the validity of third party support in general.
TomorrowNow was guilty of downloading copy written materials from Oracle's corporate website without permission and got caught. It was always a very much arms length relationship with SAP. Back when PeopleSoft was an independent company it was one of the leaders in the ERP market, along with Oracle and SAP. When PeopleSoft got swallowed up by Oracle (and Siebel not long after) SAP saw an opportunity to woo PeopleSoft customers away from Oracle. So they bought up TomorrowNow, which at the time was supplying third party support for PeopleSoft customers, in the hope that TN could bring some customers SAP's way. But SAP more or less left TN alone to do their business and was unaware of the wrongdoing that was going on.
Now that Oracle has won this case they have their sights on Rimini Street, another third party support provider. What these companies do is provide support for enterprise software products at basically 1/2 the price that Oracle charges. Typical support prices are 17% of the purchase price yearly. So if you dropped a million on an ERP system (not at all uncommon) you could be looking at 170K per year in support costs. A lot of customers feel that is an outrageous amount so they go shopping for alternatives. Oracle wants to end third party support full stop because it's a major cash cow for them and they will use the courts to do it. There is already a pending case against Rimini Street and I suspect that Oracle's strategy will be to sue them out of existence. Personally I'm pulling for Rimini on this one. I think it's good that customers have alternatives. Well, that and Larry is an asshole.
I remember when I was a kid I used to love watching the Olympics. Then all the doping scandals started, then all the professionals started competing, then they started adding all these stupid new sports...and I lost interest. I mean, beach volleyball in the Olympics? Really? The older I get the less interest I have in jocks of any kind - Olympic or otherwise.
Right. They used the same strategy with the XBox to great effect. Remember that Sony and Nintendo basically owned the gaming market before MS came out with the XBox. It took them a while, and they lost a lot of money before they made any, but now it's a great success. I think that with the Slate they're simply going to have to sell it for less than the iPad. What MS needs to do it to get it in as many hands as possible even if it means taking a loss in the short term. They are also going to have to do something to woo developers. Perhaps give them a bigger cut from their app store or other such enticement. Without great apps it's just going to end up like another TouchPad - great OS but weak on apps and intimately unsatisfying.
Couldn't agree with you more, jbolden. Certainly Windows PC's can be locked down sufficiently but the average user has no idea how to do it. In the office, often the PC is very locked down...to the point that it's not enjoyable to use. The Dell ads were very good but were pulled unfortunately. Dell, like Microsoft, seems content to sell most of their stuff to corporate customers. Your point about Windows Phone is well taken. Apple and Android have a tremendous amount of momentum which is going to be really difficult for anyone to stop, even if their platform is superior. Frankly, I don't see a lot of developers ready to embrace a third platform either. Zune could have been a lot more than it was. The hardware was very good and it had some features that the iPod didn't. However, the brown color was not a good choice and the lack of integration was it's real downfall. But at least Microsoft has shown that it can design good hardware. Their mice and keyboards are terrific so maybe the Slate has a chance. Time will tell.
But they can't be Apple. If Microsoft's plan is to simply copy everything Apple does it will fail. Microsoft has never really been much of an innovator. Now before everyone jumps all over me, Apple has copied a fair amount of stuff as well. The difference is that Apple knows how to design hardware and, more importantly, they know how to market it. MS is so used to just selling stuff to corporate clients they forgot how to sell things to consumers. Remember those disastrous Seinfeld ads? Compare that to the "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" ads. Brilliant and very successful as well. What's sad about it is that MS actually has some pretty good stuff. Windows Phone is good, XBox is good, the Zune was really good, the Slate looks promising. But when it comes time to actually sell anything to consumers MS falls flat on it's face. Android is cool, Apple is hip, Microsoft is stodgy and yesterday's news. MS will still be able to sell things to corporations for a long, long time but their consumer strategy is doomed. Balmer has to go.
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Actually I installed a dual boot of OSX and Ubuntu on my later model iMac. Not only does Ubuntu run flawlessly it's really fast. I was surprised to see that everything worked right out of the box, including the webcam, sound and wifi. Sometimes I have to test my software on a native Linux distribution so it helps to have the dual boot option. Sure I could run it in a VM but this is a bit more of a pure solution.
I worked in Minneapolis one winter. Never been so fucking cold in all my life. At least they have heated bridges connecting the buildings downtown. But still...those kinds of temps are inhuman to me. Nice city and nice people but no way would I ever live in a place that cold.
The US is very much a have/have not society. If you are on the right side of that equation it's a fantastic place to live. Crime here tends to be very, very concentrated. If you live in a big city the crime areas are well known and easily avoided for the most part. Still, there is a lot of racism here. Much more than my native Canada. It's kind of sneaky and below the surface but not far below. Far too many guns here but, again, most of the violent crime is inner city. The social safety net leaves something to be desired but in the US it's sort of a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps kind of mentality. If you have some ambition and drive you can do very well here indeed.
The Indian government has also announced that their astronauts will work for 1/4 the salary of an American astronaut. They will also sleep 9 to a capsule instead of the customary 3. Americans will coordinate the mission and handle the tactical details which will be sent off-shore (and I mean really off-shore) to their Indian counterparts in space. The Americans are expecting numerous mistakes and misunderstandings but, hey, they work cheap and we can always clean it up after the fact. Mission management is thrilled at the cost savings and predicts a tremendous success. Veteran American astronauts are quietly preparing the rescue capsule secure in the knowledge that the so called cost savings are folly at best. But for now the bean counters are gleefully exchanging high 5's at mission control.
Exactly. It's just another excuse for the government to further intrude into our private affairs. How many of these so called drug dealers do they expect to apprehend? And of that, how many of them are just selling bag of weed to one of their friends? For this, every cellphone user in America has to give up their right to privacy? Same goes for data privacy. The latest flavor of the month is the war on "terror", whatever the hell that is. Homeland Security maintains something called the "no-fly list". You can end up on it for no reason whatsoever. You won't get any notification that you're on the list, nor any reason why. The only way you'll even know you're on it is if you go to an airport and discover that boarding a plane is even more of a pain in the ass than it used to be. So you have to send a letter to some bureaucrat in Washington who researches it and clears you. Then you get a letter from said bureaucrat absolving you of all wrongdoing at which point they give you something called a "redress number". So you put the redress number in your airline profile and DHS leaves you alone once again. Naturally the letter contains no details on why the hell you ended up on it in the first place, why you were "cleared", or how to avoid it in the future. Basically you are convicted of a crime you didn't commit, without a trial or representation or even just cause for the accusation. Then you are effectively given parole (the redress number) that goes with you like a ball and chain for the rest of your life. Yeah...way to fight the "war on terror", boys. Thanks for nothing.
Bill Gates has a lot of critics, myself included, but I think he deserves at least some credit for trying to improve the lives of the world's poorest people. Much of the famine and disease in Africa is caused by lack of water, both drinking and irrigation. It seems to me that if someone can come up with a waterless toilet it would be helpful. Perhaps the end product can be used to fertilize crops? Gates represents a new breed of philanthropists. The old way was to just write a big check to some charity and trust that they spend the money efficiently and in the way you want it spent. I have worked for non-profits and I can say that the ones I worked for were very inefficient...along the lines of government agencies (yes, I've worked for them too). They mean well and have noble causes but there is a lot of waste. Gates wants a direct hand in the money he donates so that it will get spent in the way he wants and the recipients will be made to show some progress. Frankly, I don't see a problem with that, given the vast amounts of money he has pledged. Some of the ideas will work and others will not but nobody will know unless they try.
It's boom times in Western Canada but housing prices are extremely high and winters are very cold and very long. Unless you're in Vancouver. Lovely city but very expensive as well and in the winter it rains all the time. Very good for outdoor activities though since you have the ocean and mountains. Northeast US? I lived there for a few years. Lots of history, beaches, fall colors but very expensive cost of living and very high taxes. It's also very provincial, meaning that if you weren't born there you will always be an outsider. Horrible traffic, especially in the bigger cities. Personally I loved the Carolinas. Great weather, good job market, reasonable housing, nice people. I ended up settling in Arizona. I tell people that it's California at 1/4 the price. Housing and taxes are very affordable. The weather is outstanding, outside of 3 months of blistering hot summers. Lots of outdoor activities. The problem is that for the most part the schools are lousy so if you have kids you'll probably want to look at private schools. Crime is very low here, outside of the inner city corridor. Job market is reasonably good.
You may recall that individual airports did have an opportunity to do something about it. They had the choice to opt out...until the federal government realized that many airports were ready to do just that and the opt out option disappeared. As much and I'd like to boycott the airlines I have to fly as part of my job. Trains and automobiles are not a viable option for me. I'm in airports 2-3 times a month, sometimes more. I have logged a lot of miles before and after 9/11 and my observations are not merely empty rants. I'm a frequent flyer. I speak with some authority on this. The fact that I have to take off my shoes, and watch, and empty my pockets, and take off my belt and put my laptop in a separate gray bin from everything else does nothing, absolutely nothing, to make me feel any safer than I did before 9/11. Who came up with the 3.4 oz limit on liquids? That was not a standard bottle size. 4.2 oz was. So an entire industry had to retool their assembly lines because some idiot in Washington decided that 3.4 oz is a safe size to carry on planes. Do you realize that if you bring a 5 oz container that is half empty they won't let you bring it through? They are using full body scanners. Why the hell does everyone have to take off their shoes and belt? Can't the thing see through it?
If you do business consulting, like I do, it's not just about the coding. Coding is my favorite part of the job but I also spend a fair amount of time in meetings. So I have to be good at business process analysis, requirements gathering and have at least passable people skills. Many of the people I work with have almost no technical skills at all (known as Functional consultants in the vernacular) but are very good at the things I mentioned above. Others are very good technically but we wouldn't dare put them in front of a client. Those guys (and in my experience it has been exclusively guys) have no people skills at all but they are very, very good coders so they are valuable to the team. We are used to working with women so I don't see much of the alpha dog thing.
Sure, until wealthy people get tired of it and decide to take their money, and the jobs it creates, with them to somewhere else. We're seeing this happening in France already. It's happening here in the USA where we are seeing migrations of wealthy people from the northeast to places like florida, texas and nevada. What's the common thread there? No state income tax. Coincidently, job growth in Texas has soared in the past few years. I used to live in the northeast and I moved. You know why? I got tired of paying $12,000 a year in property taxes. This idea of lets just raise a little more money and everything will be ok is bunk. Politicians will spend every dime they get and when they run out they will borrow the rest. The only way to reign in the deficit is to control BOTH spending and revenue and both have to be done in a way the spreads it out evenly.
Might as well get used to it folks. The TSA is never going away. Already it has absorbed several other agencies along the way (coast guard, etc.). As Rham Emmanuel once famous said "never let a good crisis go to waste". The creation of TSA was a direct result of 9/11 and it's continued existence is playing upon people's fears of some vague "terrorist" threat somewhere in the distance. Remember in the airports they always used to announce that the threat alert was "orange"? Never yellow, never red. Always orange. If it was yellow people might question if we even need the TSA. It was never red because they never actually caught anyone doing anything that could justify setting it to that. So basically it was just a charade. Remember how the govt told us how they were going to replace those rent-a-cops that the airlines used to hire for security? Looks to me like the same drones that were there before. The only difference is that it costs more and the lines are longer. I don't feel one bit safer. Oh, and the screenings are more invasive and we have given up (or had taken away more accurately) more of our civil rights. If someone wanted to blow up a plane they could do it TODAY, with or without the TSA. I'm not suggesting that we don't need screening in airports I just don't want the government in charge of it.
You're half right. We do need to raise taxes. Our governments - Republican and Democrat both - have been spending like drunken sailors for years and it's caught up to us. But we also need to curb services and that means spending cuts. Simpson-Bowles got it right but their recommendations were completely ignored by Obama and he was the one that appointed them in the first place to look at this mess. Why? Because they were politically impossible for Obama to embrace. "Let's make the rich pay" sure sounds nice but the numbers just don't add up. That alone is not going to fix the deficit. The top 10% are already paying about 70% of all income taxes so there isn't much left to squeeze. The problem is that when you start talking about reducing services everyone starts flipping out because now it effects ME and not some nameless, faceless rich dude. Health care reform faces the same hurdles. The only way it can be economically viable for the insurance companies is if everyone pays into the system - healthy, unhealthy, rich, poor...everyone. But health care reform got passed without the individual mandate so it's going to end up costing a fortune.
It's pretty clear that the Democrats are going with a "make the rich pay" sort of campaign. They will do everything they can to demonize Romney and his wealth while conveniently ignoring several very wealthy Democrats (Pelosi, Kerry, pick a Kennedy any Kennedy, John Edwards, etc.). The clear message being that it's ok to be rich if you're a Democrat but if you're a rich Republican then you're a prick. Say what you want about Romney's money, at least he worked for it. Sure, venture capitalism has questionable ethics at times but show me a single really rich person - Republican or Democrat - that hasn't broken a few rules on the way up. His father was of modest means and he earned his way to success. John Kerry got his money the old fashioned way. He married some rich old broad with a trust fund. John Edwards was an ambulance chasing lawyer that made hundreds of millions of dollars in asbestos lawsuits. The Kennedys got their money the real old fashioned way - they stole it. Not only that, they have their family fortune squirreled away in tax havens such as the Isle of Man and Fiji where they don't pay one red cent of tax on a family fortune estimated by some to be several hundred million dollars. Isn't this exactly what the Democrats are going after Romney for? For having a Swiss bank account? He is alleged to have had $3 million in that Swiss account and it was closed in 2010. Why do people put money in Swiss banks? To avoid taxes of course. See a pattern emerging here? Republican or Democrat, if they are rich they are all doing this sort of thing to some degree or other. So let's just stop with these silly games shall we. Would someone please wake me up when the mud slinging is finished and we actually start talking in an honest way about the real issues that face America and what to do about them?
Some people get a false sense of security from using Time Machine (has it been rebranded as Time Capsule now?). Yes, it's built in and it works quite well but I also use Carbon Copy Cloner. That does a full, bootable disk image of the hard drive. In the event of a hard drive failure I can simply plug in my external drive (that I do the image backup on) and start up from that. Everything is exactly as it was on your original drive - wallpaper, bookmarks, settings, etc. Anything that you have missed since the last backup can be copied back from the Time Machine backup. The problem with most backup solutions is that, yes, they back up your data but if the drive fails you have to reload the OS and all of your application software and then do all of the OS updates. Assuming you have the disks and license codes handy it will still take you a good 4 hours or more to get back up to speed.
Well, I think that depends largely on where your skills lie. If you do IT support, or you're a web developer, or an Exchange administrator you are competing against lots and lots of other people with similar skills. OTOH, if you have skills in a niche area where it is highly specialized and there is a steady demand you are competing against far fewer people. The odds are now in your favor. Yes, there are a lot of bottom feeder recruiters out there. In my experience, most of them are. I have a simple rule for that - if you're a recruiter and you contact me and I don't know you and you come without a referral it will be a very short conversation. I only deal with people that have integrity and know the market and don't try to jack me around. They know what I'm worth, I know what I'm worth so let's not play games.
Yup, spot on. Once you've been around this business for a while you know how to spot the good from the great. If you're really good then your accomplishments, references and reputation will show it. Word gets around...people start calling you...opportunities present themselves. Once you arrive at that level you'll just know it. There is no big ceremony, no parade. You just wake up one day and say to yourself...damn I'm pretty good at this stuff and I don't have to work for any of those bottom feeder sweatshops any longer. YOU decide what a fair wage is, not the employer. If they don't like it...tough, I'll find someone that does. And if you're good there will be people willing to pay for your expertise. Simple as that.
Yes but it's not just about the resolution. Contrast and color depth are very important for some tasks. My iMac has an external display and, when seen side by side, it's obvious which one is better. Even putting the same background wallpaper and comparing them shows that the iMac screen has truer colors. The sky looks like a real sky. Grass looks like real grass. By the way, the second monitor is an AOC LED 21 inch model. It's a decent monitor but try as I might I can't get the display to look as lifelike as the iMac does. Now if you go and spend $500-600 on a monitor that's a different argument.
That's a very good point. On my iMac at home I have an external monitor. It's a decent monitor but the display on the iMac is vastly superior. I'd go as far as to say that the iMac has the best display I've ever used. I'm sure there are monitors that rival it but they are not your $100 Fry's specials. Apple makes extremely good displays, both on the iMac and the MacBook.
Despite the somewhat rosy job numbers there is a sobering reality in today's job market. If you are very experienced and have good contacts there are lots of jobs right now in IT. I get emails from recruiters every week it seems. But if you are just out of school or are not highly specialized then your options are much more limited because now you are competing against cheap foreign labor for programming jobs. Many times I have sat in meetings where we are looking at the resume of a recent grad and quickly realize that we could hire someone from India for 1/3 the price. Of course the quality of the work from the people in India is often sub par (at least in my experience) but to the people that control the money it looks like a no brainer. They hire the person from India. It's only when you gain more experience and skills that are very hard to find that the India option is no longer viable. At that point you have more control over how much you can charge for your services and potential employers have a vastly smaller pool of people to choose from. The challenge for the new grads is how to bridge that gap and it's a vexing problem. Gone are the days when IBM would hire you out of college and give you lots of training and a job for life. Now they expect you to already have the skills and you're only one bad quarter from getting laid off.
My understanding is that TN's defense was that they were downloading material from Oracle's website on behalf of their (TN's) client. If the customer were an Oracle customer then it's all well and good for that customer to log on to Oracle's support site and download whatever they want. It's part of the agreement you have with them. But in this case the support was being provided by TN. So what TN was alleged to have done was log in as the customer and download copy written materials from Oracle's web site to support the customer. That's a no no. It was a pretty open and shut case. SAP didn't do much to dispute the theft but did fight the amount awarded initially. Looks like they were successful in getting a Billion knocked off it so they should be happy about that. SAP moved pretty quickly to disavow itself from TN by initially putting someone in place to watch over the CEO and then, once it was clear there was wrongdoing, they ousted him and dissolved TN altogether. Personally I think that the Rimini St. case will be more interesting because Rimini is not charged with stealing anything like TN was. Oracle is challenging the validity of third party support in general.
TomorrowNow was guilty of downloading copy written materials from Oracle's corporate website without permission and got caught. It was always a very much arms length relationship with SAP. Back when PeopleSoft was an independent company it was one of the leaders in the ERP market, along with Oracle and SAP. When PeopleSoft got swallowed up by Oracle (and Siebel not long after) SAP saw an opportunity to woo PeopleSoft customers away from Oracle. So they bought up TomorrowNow, which at the time was supplying third party support for PeopleSoft customers, in the hope that TN could bring some customers SAP's way. But SAP more or less left TN alone to do their business and was unaware of the wrongdoing that was going on. Now that Oracle has won this case they have their sights on Rimini Street, another third party support provider. What these companies do is provide support for enterprise software products at basically 1/2 the price that Oracle charges. Typical support prices are 17% of the purchase price yearly. So if you dropped a million on an ERP system (not at all uncommon) you could be looking at 170K per year in support costs. A lot of customers feel that is an outrageous amount so they go shopping for alternatives. Oracle wants to end third party support full stop because it's a major cash cow for them and they will use the courts to do it. There is already a pending case against Rimini Street and I suspect that Oracle's strategy will be to sue them out of existence. Personally I'm pulling for Rimini on this one. I think it's good that customers have alternatives. Well, that and Larry is an asshole.
I remember when I was a kid I used to love watching the Olympics. Then all the doping scandals started, then all the professionals started competing, then they started adding all these stupid new sports...and I lost interest. I mean, beach volleyball in the Olympics? Really? The older I get the less interest I have in jocks of any kind - Olympic or otherwise.
Right. They used the same strategy with the XBox to great effect. Remember that Sony and Nintendo basically owned the gaming market before MS came out with the XBox. It took them a while, and they lost a lot of money before they made any, but now it's a great success. I think that with the Slate they're simply going to have to sell it for less than the iPad. What MS needs to do it to get it in as many hands as possible even if it means taking a loss in the short term. They are also going to have to do something to woo developers. Perhaps give them a bigger cut from their app store or other such enticement. Without great apps it's just going to end up like another TouchPad - great OS but weak on apps and intimately unsatisfying.
Couldn't agree with you more, jbolden. Certainly Windows PC's can be locked down sufficiently but the average user has no idea how to do it. In the office, often the PC is very locked down...to the point that it's not enjoyable to use. The Dell ads were very good but were pulled unfortunately. Dell, like Microsoft, seems content to sell most of their stuff to corporate customers. Your point about Windows Phone is well taken. Apple and Android have a tremendous amount of momentum which is going to be really difficult for anyone to stop, even if their platform is superior. Frankly, I don't see a lot of developers ready to embrace a third platform either. Zune could have been a lot more than it was. The hardware was very good and it had some features that the iPod didn't. However, the brown color was not a good choice and the lack of integration was it's real downfall. But at least Microsoft has shown that it can design good hardware. Their mice and keyboards are terrific so maybe the Slate has a chance. Time will tell.
But they can't be Apple. If Microsoft's plan is to simply copy everything Apple does it will fail. Microsoft has never really been much of an innovator. Now before everyone jumps all over me, Apple has copied a fair amount of stuff as well. The difference is that Apple knows how to design hardware and, more importantly, they know how to market it. MS is so used to just selling stuff to corporate clients they forgot how to sell things to consumers. Remember those disastrous Seinfeld ads? Compare that to the "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" ads. Brilliant and very successful as well. What's sad about it is that MS actually has some pretty good stuff. Windows Phone is good, XBox is good, the Zune was really good, the Slate looks promising. But when it comes time to actually sell anything to consumers MS falls flat on it's face. Android is cool, Apple is hip, Microsoft is stodgy and yesterday's news. MS will still be able to sell things to corporations for a long, long time but their consumer strategy is doomed. Balmer has to go.