It wouldn't have been such a problem if they'd kept calling things Linksys, and not put the Cisco Systems logo all over everything. Then releasing all the Linksys kit as Cisco SMB - that was just crazy.
A route to disaster?
Try issuing the Windows command "route/print" and see.
Handguns wreak havoc on a suppressor. Look at Iraq. You cannot win a war with a handgun but a sizable portion of the population will make life living hell for any kind of government if the government decide to play against the rules.
Actually, when I look at Iraq, I see more suicide bombers and IEDs than handguns.
You act like the government army can attack its own country the same way it attacks others.
You can't nuke your own land, it makes it worthless for you too.
You can't carpet bomb your own cities, it makes them worthless for you too.
Our military depends on machines to destroy other countries before we actually start fighting because we don't actually want what they have. That military can't knock out the militia's command and control or supply lines without effectively wiping out its own as well.
The result is a more typical ground war, in which case all the gadgets the military has aren't all that useful. Sure, better rifles, but... assuming the entire population is against you (hint, we've not seen that type of war in anyones current lifetime) the war is drastically different. Even in the middle east, most of the population wasn't/isn't against us. They may be for a while due to fear of their local enemies like the Taliban, but after we roll past they generally are on our side. Well, on our side probably isn't right, they just mostly want left the fuck alone.
America's army attacking America would be a fight every single second of its campaign. At no point would they have any allies. Everything they did would be a struggle, and while we can't pour our own cannons, we'd damn sure steal them from defactors who are on our side. Do some history research, look at the civil war.
What, then are the goals that your hypothetical army are striving for? Not all wars are intended to end with any more civilian population than it takes to provide slaves for agriculture, mining, manufacturing and so forth. If a sufficiently deranged Pol Pot is in control, not even a nuclear option can be ruled out. For lesser carnage you can employ non-nuclear devices such as daisy-cutter bombs. Who cares if the cities are demolished? Put everyone in FEMA trailers! Isn't that part of the grand fantasy anyway?
America's greatest strength isn't in a bunch of guys running around with guns and maybe a few defectors, it's that we've built up a culture that says we don't let things get that far. Even people like Nixon folded rather than risk damaging the democratic traditions and processes of the USA.
The greatest danger to liberty isn't armed conflict, it's when the people allow themselves to be enslaved. And if they wait until it takes armed conflict to resist, it's already too late.
The 2nd amendment exists to guarantee the people of the united states retain the capability to wage war against the government.
Tell that to the people at Ruby Ridge.
Try acquiring your own Predator drone. Assert your right to keep and bear personal thermonuclear weapons. You might be able to buy a tank if you have the cash, but chances are it would be thoroughly gelded.
In 1776, a well-regulated militia could band together and cast its own cannons, bore its own rifles and pretty well put itself on an equal footing with a unit of the British Army.
These days you can't even come close. A lot of military technology isn't buildable by any single person or small group. But even when it is, it's often illegal to acquire it. There are more and more places where even the most basic weaponry is forbidden. Try asserting your Second Amendment Rights at an airport or courthouse.
The stereotype of the brave Patriot brandishing his gun at the US Government is a cartoon. A pitiful, pathetic joke. The reality is a mouse waving around a toothpick at a horde of cats.
So pardon if I laugh at the brave heroes. Our primary defenses against an unjust government lie in other areas these days. Including the fact that we've brought up the children who become members of the nation's armed forces to believe that the protection of the nation is more important than the protection of the government.
It's just as well that we don't have real 2nd Amendment rights, however. We live in a highly-leveraged age. It no longer takes an army to wipe out a city, just a suitably deranged well-armed individual. Four people can take down a skyscraper and they don't even need to buy or build weapons. And we get frequent reminders that there's no shortage of suitably-deranged individuals.
I used to maintain that there were 4 communications rights, only one of which enjoys support at a fundamental constitutional level...
Actually, any of these four can be asserted at the constitutional level, as rights retained by the people under the 9th Amendment.
True. What I was saying was that only one has explicit support. As you noted, implicit support is available. The main difference is the amount of wiggle room allowed the lawyers. Either way they'll wiggle, though. The judicially-sanctioned existence of the abomination called the "Free Speech Zone" is ample proof of that.
This month's Forbes also claims "Job Growth is Overrated" - because apparently all those unemployed people are going to flock to buy more-efficiently-produced products with the paychecks they're not receiving. And chortles that "Suckers are beneficial to society. They cover the overhead".
I used to maintain that there were 4 communications rights, only one of which enjoys support at a fundamental constitutional level:
1. The right to speak. 2. The right to listen. 3. The right to remain silent. 4. The right not to listen.
Then I realized there are 2 more:
5. The right to be heard. 6. The right not to hear.
The right to speak is meaningless if the speakers are all corralled into "Free Speech Zones" so that people whose obligation is to listen can avoid hearing. The right not to hear is what we want when it comes to telemarketers, spammers and the Westboro Baptist Church.
Obviously there is a certain conflict between these different rights, but for certain times and places, each right has its place.
As a rallying cry, Bush's declaration was as close to resembling a real leader as he ever got.
Unfortunately, unscrupulous people then took it and applied it to every dodgy political action they could get away with. Don't support Guantanamo? You must be a terrorist sympathizer! Alarmed by the Patriot Act? Why do you hate America? Don't want to wear a flag pin? You traitor, you hate our Freedoms!
The actual fracturing of the USA into polarized factions, I consider to go further back than 9/11 - back to at least the Reagan administration when "liberal" became a 4-letter word instead of just the group of wrong-headed idiots on the other side. However, post-9/11, polarization progressed to the point where it has become practically a religion. Our representatives spend more time attempting to sabotage "the Enemy" than they do in supporting their country.
I'm sincerely hoping the submitter was being sarcastic about that. Because civil liberties shouldn't be a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue, it should be an every-wing issue. It's the fundamental idea of modern democracy, and should never be negotiable.
The modern-day USA suffers from bipolar illness. Absolutely nothing is safe from "with-us-or-against-us", even if it's only which end of an egg to crack open.
This is the free market in action. Would you rather the White House block the sale?
Of course not. That would be Socialism. And everyone knows that Socialism is just another name for Communism and Communism is Evil and we shouldn't allow Communists to infiltrate our red-blooded 'Merican business!
Well, at my company, if someone is sick they could lose a $100,000 contract by missing a meeting with a customer so nobody gives a damn if you're sick, lol.
Because infecting a customer with a loathsome disease is such a great way of doing business.
I have been an investor for a long time. Here's a secret: It takes money to make money. If you start out with $5000 and you double it, you have $10,000. If you start out with $500,000 and double it, you have $1 million.
Here's another secret. If you're working at MacDonald's, you won't have a whole lot left over to buy shares with at the end of the week compared to the person whose paycheck is $150K/year. And it's not just in raw dollars. The $150K guy doesn't need to buy 10 times as much in the way of daily necessities as the $15K McDonald's guy. So percentage-wise, the bigger the salary, the bigger percentage of income is investible. Oh, and then there's the tax rules that favor investment income over paycheck (ask Mitt Romney).
And while we're on the topic of investing, don't expect to double your investment every year. Some people will, but some people hit the lottery, too. You're going to be doing exceptionally well if you get 10% per year in appreciation. You can boost the yield, but that requires riskier investments. The ones promising a really high yield are either scamming or doing something that they will shortly get caught and prosecuted for.
So, in sum, you can feather a nest with investments, but unless you're really good at playing markets as a full-time job, you won't get rich off it unless you have a lot of money to play with. The people working on Wall Street make the really big bucks by making small taps into large sums of money as it flows by from one place to another (0.01% of a hundred million or so isn't chicken feed).
OK. so how about becoming an executive? Well, much as we like to sneer, executives do have to have certain talents. They need to be "people persons", because that's what executives do, is direct people. Not a good fit for your typical anti-social computer geek.
People skills are essential, but even more essential if you want to get into the Executive Suite is connections. The C-level jobs and corporate directorates form a mutual back-scratching society. They help each other. Outsiders, not so much. If you went to the right schools, came from the right family and/or have/make the right friends, the way will be greased. If you're just some guy nobody knows, you'd better be bringing something with tangible value to the table.
I could also enumerate out why we're not all becoming rich by founding our our own business and becoming entrepreneurs, but enough. If it was easy to become wealthy in a capitalist society, we'd all be doing it. As it is, the only really easy way is to pick the right parents. All the other ways require work, persistence, the right kind of talent, and luck.
It wasn't that long ago that encryption was classified as a munition by the US Government. Meaning that merely having a secure browser on your laptop would likely put you in violation.
Yes, and the more that the farmers have to pay for communications, the more they'll have to charge you for food.
The Internet is not a luxury for farmers these days any more than it is for any other business. We're constantly being bombarded with news stories about how, by virtue of various data services farmers make themselves more productive.
One way or another, however, you - the farm products consumer - end up footing the bill for it. The question is, do you want farmers to have to pay for their data services at retail rates, one farm at a time, or wholesale rates, through some sort of organization?
I should add that selection based on culture (love, pre-arranged weddings etc) rather than fitness also does not help evolution.
Your definition of "fitness" is not the Darwinian definition. It sounds, in fact, more like the pseudo-Darwinian conceit that "fitness" means the ability to kill or resist being killed. When Darwin said "survival", he didn't mean "last person on the island", he meant that the species in question had found a niche where its population would be stable.
Survivability comes in many forms. Some, like tigers are primarily solitary. Some, like herd animals, depend on the group. We have ample evidence these days that in many cases, survivability (in the Darwinian sense), can come even from relatives who never directly contribute DNA to the continuation of the species.
Love as a primarily positive evolutionary trait can be debated, although certainly being unlovable isn't going to afford many non-violent ways to swim in the gene pool. Pre-arranged weddings, on the other hand, can make the difference between a tribe being exterminated or being able to ally itself with other tribes. Systems of laws and mores can ensure that the unlovable whose sole means of propagation is rape will be taken out of circulation relatively quickly.
Social structures as evolutionary forces are not unique to the human race. But they are a powerful contributor. If we went strictly on kill or be killed based on physical fitness, we probably wouldn't have produced a Stephen Hawking.
My condolences on your choice of (DRM'ed) printers. But duplex printers (and scanners) frequently spit the paper almost completely out and suck it back in again, even when they're laser printers and hence have no wet ink to dry.
Yes, but you are talking about servers, and I am talking about office user workstation support. My comment was strictly concerning workstations for the common office user in a large enterprise. User support is a completely different beast than server support.
None of the resources I mentioned are exclusive to server configurations. They are part of all of the Red Hat family distros, including the desktop-oriented Fedora. Which also includes VNC, VPN and Windows Remote Desktop clients as well for those who don't have a decent remote command-line interface.
In fact, all these tools are part of the standard Fedora installation repositories. You don't have to go out and assemble them from various third parties and tools sub-sites of microsoft.com. Or, for that matter, budget for them or worry about the BSA auditing them.
The primary advantage that Windows has had was not some fabled superior Enterprise toolset, it was the multitude of cheap support people who knew Windows. Which is why Windows 8 has proven so problematic. It is, by all accounts (and my own limited experience) not enough like "Windows" to be readily usable by by traditional Windows users.
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It wouldn't have been such a problem if they'd kept calling things Linksys, and not put the Cisco Systems logo all over everything. Then releasing all the Linksys kit as Cisco SMB - that was just crazy.
A route to disaster?
Try issuing the Windows command "route /print" and see.
Handguns wreak havoc on a suppressor. Look at Iraq. You cannot win a war with a handgun but a sizable portion of the population will make life living hell for any kind of government if the government decide to play against the rules.
Actually, when I look at Iraq, I see more suicide bombers and IEDs than handguns.
You act like the government army can attack its own country the same way it attacks others.
You can't nuke your own land, it makes it worthless for you too.
You can't carpet bomb your own cities, it makes them worthless for you too.
Our military depends on machines to destroy other countries before we actually start fighting because we don't actually want what they have. That military can't knock out the militia's command and control or supply lines without effectively wiping out its own as well.
The result is a more typical ground war, in which case all the gadgets the military has aren't all that useful. Sure, better rifles, but ... assuming the entire population is against you (hint, we've not seen that type of war in anyones current lifetime) the war is drastically different. Even in the middle east, most of the population wasn't/isn't against us. They may be for a while due to fear of their local enemies like the Taliban, but after we roll past they generally are on our side. Well, on our side probably isn't right, they just mostly want left the fuck alone.
America's army attacking America would be a fight every single second of its campaign. At no point would they have any allies. Everything they did would be a struggle, and while we can't pour our own cannons, we'd damn sure steal them from defactors who are on our side. Do some history research, look at the civil war.
What, then are the goals that your hypothetical army are striving for? Not all wars are intended to end with any more civilian population than it takes to provide slaves for agriculture, mining, manufacturing and so forth. If a sufficiently deranged Pol Pot is in control, not even a nuclear option can be ruled out. For lesser carnage you can employ non-nuclear devices such as daisy-cutter bombs. Who cares if the cities are demolished? Put everyone in FEMA trailers! Isn't that part of the grand fantasy anyway?
America's greatest strength isn't in a bunch of guys running around with guns and maybe a few defectors, it's that we've built up a culture that says we don't let things get that far. Even people like Nixon folded rather than risk damaging the democratic traditions and processes of the USA.
The greatest danger to liberty isn't armed conflict, it's when the people allow themselves to be enslaved. And if they wait until it takes armed conflict to resist, it's already too late.
The 2nd amendment exists to guarantee the people of the united states retain the capability to wage war against the government.
Tell that to the people at Ruby Ridge.
Try acquiring your own Predator drone. Assert your right to keep and bear personal thermonuclear weapons. You might be able to buy a tank if you have the cash, but chances are it would be thoroughly gelded.
In 1776, a well-regulated militia could band together and cast its own cannons, bore its own rifles and pretty well put itself on an equal footing with a unit of the British Army.
These days you can't even come close. A lot of military technology isn't buildable by any single person or small group. But even when it is, it's often illegal to acquire it. There are more and more places where even the most basic weaponry is forbidden. Try asserting your Second Amendment Rights at an airport or courthouse.
The stereotype of the brave Patriot brandishing his gun at the US Government is a cartoon. A pitiful, pathetic joke. The reality is a mouse waving around a toothpick at a horde of cats.
So pardon if I laugh at the brave heroes. Our primary defenses against an unjust government lie in other areas these days. Including the fact that we've brought up the children who become members of the nation's armed forces to believe that the protection of the nation is more important than the protection of the government.
It's just as well that we don't have real 2nd Amendment rights, however. We live in a highly-leveraged age. It no longer takes an army to wipe out a city, just a suitably deranged well-armed individual. Four people can take down a skyscraper and they don't even need to buy or build weapons. And we get frequent reminders that there's no shortage of suitably-deranged individuals.
I used to maintain that there were 4 communications rights, only one of which enjoys support at a fundamental constitutional level...
Actually, any of these four can be asserted at the constitutional level, as rights retained by the people under the 9th Amendment.
True. What I was saying was that only one has explicit support. As you noted, implicit support is available. The main difference is the amount of wiggle room allowed the lawyers. Either way they'll wiggle, though. The judicially-sanctioned existence of the abomination called the "Free Speech Zone" is ample proof of that.
This month's Forbes also claims "Job Growth is Overrated" - because apparently all those unemployed people are going to flock to buy more-efficiently-produced products with the paychecks they're not receiving. And chortles that "Suckers are beneficial to society. They cover the overhead".
I used to maintain that there were 4 communications rights, only one of which enjoys support at a fundamental constitutional level:
1. The right to speak.
2. The right to listen.
3. The right to remain silent.
4. The right not to listen.
Then I realized there are 2 more:
5. The right to be heard.
6. The right not to hear.
The right to speak is meaningless if the speakers are all corralled into "Free Speech Zones" so that people whose obligation is to listen can avoid hearing. The right not to hear is what we want when it comes to telemarketers, spammers and the Westboro Baptist Church.
Obviously there is a certain conflict between these different rights, but for certain times and places, each right has its place.
As a rallying cry, Bush's declaration was as close to resembling a real leader as he ever got.
Unfortunately, unscrupulous people then took it and applied it to every dodgy political action they could get away with. Don't support Guantanamo? You must be a terrorist sympathizer! Alarmed by the Patriot Act? Why do you hate America? Don't want to wear a flag pin? You traitor, you hate our Freedoms!
The actual fracturing of the USA into polarized factions, I consider to go further back than 9/11 - back to at least the Reagan administration when "liberal" became a 4-letter word instead of just the group of wrong-headed idiots on the other side. However, post-9/11, polarization progressed to the point where it has become practically a religion. Our representatives spend more time attempting to sabotage "the Enemy" than they do in supporting their country.
I'm sincerely hoping the submitter was being sarcastic about that. Because civil liberties shouldn't be a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue, it should be an every-wing issue. It's the fundamental idea of modern democracy, and should never be negotiable.
The modern-day USA suffers from bipolar illness. Absolutely nothing is safe from "with-us-or-against-us", even if it's only which end of an egg to crack open.
This is the free market in action. Would you rather the White House block the sale?
Of course not. That would be Socialism. And everyone knows that Socialism is just another name for Communism and Communism is Evil and we shouldn't allow Communists to infiltrate our red-blooded 'Merican business!
It's called a joke. I'm frankly alarmed that you didn't think that "getting paid to not work means socialism" was a load of bullshit.
Be afraid. An awful lot of people will agree, unfortunately.
Well, at my company, if someone is sick they could lose a $100,000 contract by missing a meeting with a customer so nobody gives a damn if you're sick, lol.
Because infecting a customer with a loathsome disease is such a great way of doing business.
Yep. Seen it more times than I can count.
Did automation make IT easier? It seems to me that the tools for IT are easier than they were 10-15 years ago.
Yep. A lot of good tools.
So now we're expected to use them to do things that were too complicated to do 10-15 years ago.
In the 1950's you read a punched card, moved/computed with the data, wrote something out. End of UI.
In the 1980's you had to supply logic to allow users to get things done from the menu, the toolbar, maybe a popup, and with luck, 1-2 other places.
In the 1990s' you had to make it work with the Internet.
In the 2000's, you had to make it interactive using AJAX.
These days, we have to make it all cloud-friendly.
The reward for being able to do something well is more work.
I have been an investor for a long time. Here's a secret: It takes money to make money. If you start out with $5000 and you double it, you have $10,000. If you start out with $500,000 and double it, you have $1 million.
Here's another secret. If you're working at MacDonald's, you won't have a whole lot left over to buy shares with at the end of the week compared to the person whose paycheck is $150K/year. And it's not just in raw dollars. The $150K guy doesn't need to buy 10 times as much in the way of daily necessities as the $15K McDonald's guy. So percentage-wise, the bigger the salary, the bigger percentage of income is investible. Oh, and then there's the tax rules that favor investment income over paycheck (ask Mitt Romney).
And while we're on the topic of investing, don't expect to double your investment every year. Some people will, but some people hit the lottery, too. You're going to be doing exceptionally well if you get 10% per year in appreciation. You can boost the yield, but that requires riskier investments. The ones promising a really high yield are either scamming or doing something that they will shortly get caught and prosecuted for.
So, in sum, you can feather a nest with investments, but unless you're really good at playing markets as a full-time job, you won't get rich off it unless you have a lot of money to play with. The people working on Wall Street make the really big bucks by making small taps into large sums of money as it flows by from one place to another (0.01% of a hundred million or so isn't chicken feed).
OK. so how about becoming an executive? Well, much as we like to sneer, executives do have to have certain talents. They need to be "people persons", because that's what executives do, is direct people. Not a good fit for your typical anti-social computer geek.
People skills are essential, but even more essential if you want to get into the Executive Suite is connections. The C-level jobs and corporate directorates form a mutual back-scratching society. They help each other. Outsiders, not so much. If you went to the right schools, came from the right family and/or have/make the right friends, the way will be greased. If you're just some guy nobody knows, you'd better be bringing something with tangible value to the table.
I could also enumerate out why we're not all becoming rich by founding our our own business and becoming entrepreneurs, but enough. If it was easy to become wealthy in a capitalist society, we'd all be doing it. As it is, the only really easy way is to pick the right parents. All the other ways require work, persistence, the right kind of talent, and luck.
Because IT stuff is easy. I mean, you just type some things and click a few buttons, right? That's not hard. Why do you need 100k a year to do that?
That's right! All You Have To Do Is...
Who leaves their business secrets in the open. Especially laptops, they get lost stolen, or as the article says people examining it.
Like US Customs.
How about Windows 95 with Microsoft Bob?
I think that's a violation of the Geneva Convention.
It wasn't that long ago that encryption was classified as a munition by the US Government. Meaning that merely having a secure browser on your laptop would likely put you in violation.
It's a processor that runs at 210C.
So can you brew tea with it, too?
Not if you are applying for a job only you are qualified to do.
Get over yourself. They'll tell you that India/China is full of people with your qualifications. Sometimes it will even be true.
A better bet is to be qualified for a job that no one else wants to do. Or have a friend/relative on the inside.
Yes, and the more that the farmers have to pay for communications, the more they'll have to charge you for food.
The Internet is not a luxury for farmers these days any more than it is for any other business. We're constantly being bombarded with news stories about how, by virtue of various data services farmers make themselves more productive.
One way or another, however, you - the farm products consumer - end up footing the bill for it. The question is, do you want farmers to have to pay for their data services at retail rates, one farm at a time, or wholesale rates, through some sort of organization?
I should add that selection based on culture (love, pre-arranged weddings etc) rather than fitness also does not help evolution.
Your definition of "fitness" is not the Darwinian definition. It sounds, in fact, more like the pseudo-Darwinian conceit that "fitness" means the ability to kill or resist being killed. When Darwin said "survival", he didn't mean "last person on the island", he meant that the species in question had found a niche where its population would be stable.
Survivability comes in many forms. Some, like tigers are primarily solitary. Some, like herd animals, depend on the group. We have ample evidence these days that in many cases, survivability (in the Darwinian sense), can come even from relatives who never directly contribute DNA to the continuation of the species.
Love as a primarily positive evolutionary trait can be debated, although certainly being unlovable isn't going to afford many non-violent ways to swim in the gene pool. Pre-arranged weddings, on the other hand, can make the difference between a tribe being exterminated or being able to ally itself with other tribes. Systems of laws and mores can ensure that the unlovable whose sole means of propagation is rape will be taken out of circulation relatively quickly.
Social structures as evolutionary forces are not unique to the human race. But they are a powerful contributor. If we went strictly on kill or be killed based on physical fitness, we probably wouldn't have produced a Stephen Hawking.
My condolences on your choice of (DRM'ed) printers. But duplex printers (and scanners) frequently spit the paper almost completely out and suck it back in again, even when they're laser printers and hence have no wet ink to dry.
I just printed out a better phone.
(Or is that still a ways off? Ahem.)
I just printed out an Apple lawyer.
Yes, but you are talking about servers, and I am talking about office user workstation support. My comment was strictly concerning workstations for the common office user in a large enterprise. User support is a completely different beast than server support.
None of the resources I mentioned are exclusive to server configurations. They are part of all of the Red Hat family distros, including the desktop-oriented Fedora. Which also includes VNC, VPN and Windows Remote Desktop clients as well for those who don't have a decent remote command-line interface.
In fact, all these tools are part of the standard Fedora installation repositories. You don't have to go out and assemble them from various third parties and tools sub-sites of microsoft.com. Or, for that matter, budget for them or worry about the BSA auditing them.
The primary advantage that Windows has had was not some fabled superior Enterprise toolset, it was the multitude of cheap support people who knew Windows. Which is why Windows 8 has proven so problematic. It is, by all accounts (and my own limited experience) not enough like "Windows" to be readily usable by by traditional Windows users.