Uh yeah, won't work. I receive a lot of mail on my gmail account, but don't send any -- I send it out through my own servers so my email gets stamped with my domain rather than google's.
Hmmm. Maybe what I mean to say is "your plan might work, but will reduce a lot of the value that a legitimate user might get out of the service."
We supposedly have Truth in Advertising laws already on the books, but super-fast, all-you-can-eat, Internet connections are still being advertised. I'd start by applying the existing law to those claims.
Ah, but you lose there because "unlimited" in relation to internet accounts classically means as to connect time, not throughput. This dates back to the time where the scarce resource was time on the IPS's modem farm, not upstream bandwidth. So as long as there isn't a limit on your connection time, they win.
Sales Engineer: My favorite. Great pay, good hours, lots of good lunches, some very technical and challenging problems. It's just like being in IT, but you are paid well and everyone appreciates you.
Everyone except the IT staff you lean on to solve your problems. I've almost never worked with an S/E who wasn't an idiot who kept trying to dig his way out of his hole by digging even deeper.
Usually the work flow goes like this:
S/E makes a mess.
IT figures out what mess was, undoes mess. Moves S/E incrementally along towards his goal. Only incrementally because S/E both wants to learn how to do it himself, and therefore keeps the ultimate goal a secret from IT.
Repeat until either the goal is reached, or IT quits.
Except for me wondering how the VP is any less screwed when your backups are in-house (or rather, handled in-house, because you do offsite your tapes, don't you?) but anyways.
And you know what? In the long run, it won't matter. Solutions to your complaints will be found. Outsourcing will happen. Sure, there will be hobbyists and paranoid cranks and those who are convinced that they are somehow special who will run their own mail and operate their own storage and handle their own backups...
Really, look at banks. We outsource money storage, and nobody thinks anything of it.
I think people are confusing two jobs here: help desk is not necessarily Information Technology. It is a service provided by IT today, however to lump it all in with IT is the same over-simplification as lumping "HTML jockeys" in with "programmers".
If Sally in Accounting can't drive her Word to get to the printer correctly, or Joe's hard disk needs to be replace, those are always going to be a help desk job, and that's always best served on site (assuming there's enough of a demand to make it cost-effective). However, outsourcing applications, data storage, and other services will see a corresponding decline in in-house IT.
Which sucks for the help desk monkeys, as there's no easy ladder from help desk into the "harder" IT tasks.
But the IT services will be outsourced:
outsourced email
outsourced file storage and sharing (ie MS-Sharepoint)
outsourced backups
outsourced compute farm (happening today in a small way)
outsourced desktop (you could run a simple office today using Sun Ray technology, and back-end it with Windows terminal services or VMs for Windows clients)
Many of you are laughing, but all these services are happening today at varying scales. Eventually it will be cost-effective.
The Zenn: Zero Emissions, No Noise. Made in Canada; exported to the world.
Apparently you can buy and operate one in the US today; in Canada, you can only operate it in British Columbia, as LSVs (Low Speed Vehicles) are regulated by the provinces, and today only BC has regulations in place for them. If it was legal to sell them in Canada, they'd go for about $12K.
When you're checking out at the supermarket and you notice your item rang up for $2.99 instead of $3.99 that it was supposed to, do you say something?
Yes. If you want the right to complain when the machine rings it up for $4.49 instead of $3.99, you better point it out when the error goes in your favor.
Of course, I've also handed money back to cashiers when they give me too much change (ranging from extra pennies up through several hundred dollars), and I always get a stunned look from the cashier when I do it.
It's called honesty and integrity -- look into it.
The parent has been unfairly modded as a Troll, because he's right. Network-based PXE reinstallation systems exist and work well (RedHat linux users may be interested in googling for "Cobbler" for example.)
However he's also wrong. The best solution is to have ultra-thin clients like Sun Rays. That way there is no expensive gear on student's desks, and everything is run on computers locked safely up in a data center. Plus you'll get session portability and hardware homogenity benefits. You can even run rdesktop or the Sun connector app to connect to Windows Terminal Servers (or, if you have the resources, individual VMware sessions for each user) to grant access to those evil, evil windows applications.
Troll me too, moderators.
So I go to the store, buy a gallon, pour in (by now) 15/16ths of the bottle, and now the tank is full. And I'm left with a 1 gallon jug with 1 cup of fluid in it. So the almost empty jug has to sit in the garage or the trunk until I use a little fluid.
Ahh, but with a little thinking you can make this work in your favor. Especially if you don't have a warning device that you are about to go empty.
My windshield washer fluid resevoir is 3 litres, and I buy fluid by the four liter container. I put the 3/4 empty container in my trunk (I have an old milk crate for this) and drive around with it. So what happens is that when I run out of fluid, in the dark, when it is messy weather, and miles away from any service station, I pull over to the side of the road, put the remaining litre of fluid in, and then buy a replacement 4 litre container the next time I gas up. Then when the 1 litre runs out, I refill from the new container, and the cycle repeats. So I always either have spare fluid ready, or I am on my way to buy some.
My wife thought I was excessive about this, but her car has a 4 litre capacity with no warning function and keeps running out of fluid miles away from a gas station.
I dont see how they can justify charging that much for a tiny exchange of data.
Because people can, and do, pay them. The carriers are charging what the market will bear. If you cannot afford the service, or object to the pricing thereof, you are quite welcome to not use the service.
I tell them it used to be that way, but since the Internet came along, my profession got downgraded to the equivalent of plumber -- a blue collar worker -- more maintenance and administration and less research and development.
You, sir, get it.
We are actually comparable to practically any trade -- skilled, responsible for the guts of how business happens, yet resented for our very existence.
Actually Corporate IT is probably safe -- it is only the RIM BES servers which are down. Here in Canada, if you have your own BES, it's business as usual.
So Corporate IT is only in trouble if they cheaped out and didn't buy their own BES.
RH admitted that 300+ packages in RHEL5 are rpms from FC6. RHEL 5 strongly resembles of FC6... it is nothing but augmented version of it anyway...and CentOS is exactly that as well.
Yeah, I used to think that too.
Two years later I have a Fedora Core 3 based mail server in production that doesn't have any further updates coming and is too critical to down and rebuild. (I'm sure a hardware failure will force the issue eventually -- can't come soon enough for me).
It is, however, the last one. My current infrastructure is all CentOS 4.x; in three or six months I'll start migrating to CentOS 5.x for new systems.
in my experience (twice now) Dell will honor their warranty if you run Linux (but then I always return the laptop without the hard drive), but both times I told them I ran linux.
Through work I had a Dell that had Linux on it, and it threw a disk. Dell replaced it without question. Now this was a leased system and had the next-business-day on-site support contract with it, so if you are comparing this result to the one-year return-to-depot warrantee, your results may differ. But generally if you have the fancy contracts you'll get better service.
I've had to call dell on a couple of occasions (bad CD, bad battery, bad HD, bad mainboard... hmmm, not all the same computer, but maybe these things are not as reliable as I originally was thinking) but they have always sent me what I needed.
My god, man, this is Slashdot -- it is no place for rational discourse. And on economic theory no less!
Unless you are going to rail about the "unfairness" and "greed" inherent to the current system, I recommend you find another place to discuss the matter.
(Now in your defense, you did disguise your rationality by using "bare" instead of "bear".)
Kill off Windows, and then you have a bunch of better processors - PPC, ARM, whatever. Smaller battery. No special cooling. No need for a hard drive. No Windows license.
And no users.
Eliminate the ability to run software on it, and you'll eliminate all customer demand at the same time -- think of the savings in distribution and sales costs!
If people were willing to run non-windows programs, Linux would be a lot more popular than it is. Heck, the Mac would be a lot more popular than it is. But they are not, and the smart money is on giving people what they think they want and not what some slashdot crowd thinks they want.
Think about it -- the killer feature here is the ability to run windows in an ultraportable format.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh yeah, won't work. I receive a lot of mail on my gmail account, but don't send any -- I send it out through my own servers so my email gets stamped with my domain rather than google's.
Hmmm. Maybe what I mean to say is "your plan might work, but will reduce a lot of the value that a legitimate user might get out of the service."
Ah, but you lose there because "unlimited" in relation to internet accounts classically means as to connect time, not throughput. This dates back to the time where the scarce resource was time on the IPS's modem farm, not upstream bandwidth. So as long as there isn't a limit on your connection time, they win.
You kids today.
I don't understand this thinking.
Opinion polls show that an election now would result in a government largely the same as the one we have today, if not a conservative majority.
So why is a liberal an idiot for failing to force an election that the canadian public doesn't want, and he can't win?
You, sir miss the obvious.
The, ah, "only reason why it is done" is because there's money in it.
My internal parsing of this asked me: why is he throwing condoms in the street?...
Everyone except the IT staff you lean on to solve your problems. I've almost never worked with an S/E who wasn't an idiot who kept trying to dig his way out of his hole by digging even deeper.
Usually the work flow goes like this:
But I'm sure they go to some very nice lunches.
You know what? You are right.
Except for me wondering how the VP is any less screwed when your backups are in-house (or rather, handled in-house, because you do offsite your tapes, don't you?) but anyways.
And you know what? In the long run, it won't matter. Solutions to your complaints will be found. Outsourcing will happen. Sure, there will be hobbyists and paranoid cranks and those who are convinced that they are somehow special who will run their own mail and operate their own storage and handle their own backups...
Really, look at banks. We outsource money storage, and nobody thinks anything of it.
I think people are confusing two jobs here: help desk is not necessarily Information Technology. It is a service provided by IT today, however to lump it all in with IT is the same over-simplification as lumping "HTML jockeys" in with "programmers".
If Sally in Accounting can't drive her Word to get to the printer correctly, or Joe's hard disk needs to be replace, those are always going to be a help desk job, and that's always best served on site (assuming there's enough of a demand to make it cost-effective). However, outsourcing applications, data storage, and other services will see a corresponding decline in in-house IT.
Which sucks for the help desk monkeys, as there's no easy ladder from help desk into the "harder" IT tasks.
But the IT services will be outsourced:
Many of you are laughing, but all these services are happening today at varying scales. Eventually it will be cost-effective.
Is it irony that you managed to plug your own pay-site while slamming another business? ($20 a month to look at webcams? Am I on crack?!)
But more importantly, your links don't really explain what myminicity is all about, or why it is bad.
Apparently you can buy and operate one in the US today; in Canada, you can only operate it in British Columbia, as LSVs (Low Speed Vehicles) are regulated by the provinces, and today only BC has regulations in place for them. If it was legal to sell them in Canada, they'd go for about $12K.
Thank you Rick Mercer!
Upgrade them? I roll my own coils!
Of course, I've also handed money back to cashiers when they give me too much change (ranging from extra pennies up through several hundred dollars), and I always get a stunned look from the cashier when I do it.
It's called honesty and integrity -- look into it.
The parent has been unfairly modded as a Troll, because he's right. Network-based PXE reinstallation systems exist and work well (RedHat linux users may be interested in googling for "Cobbler" for example.) However he's also wrong. The best solution is to have ultra-thin clients like Sun Rays. That way there is no expensive gear on student's desks, and everything is run on computers locked safely up in a data center. Plus you'll get session portability and hardware homogenity benefits. You can even run rdesktop or the Sun connector app to connect to Windows Terminal Servers (or, if you have the resources, individual VMware sessions for each user) to grant access to those evil, evil windows applications. Troll me too, moderators.
My windshield washer fluid resevoir is 3 litres, and I buy fluid by the four liter container. I put the 3/4 empty container in my trunk (I have an old milk crate for this) and drive around with it. So what happens is that when I run out of fluid, in the dark, when it is messy weather, and miles away from any service station, I pull over to the side of the road, put the remaining litre of fluid in, and then buy a replacement 4 litre container the next time I gas up. Then when the 1 litre runs out, I refill from the new container, and the cycle repeats. So I always either have spare fluid ready, or I am on my way to buy some.
My wife thought I was excessive about this, but her car has a 4 litre capacity with no warning function and keeps running out of fluid miles away from a gas station.
We are actually comparable to practically any trade -- skilled, responsible for the guts of how business happens, yet resented for our very existence.
So Corporate IT is only in trouble if they cheaped out and didn't buy their own BES.
Two years later I have a Fedora Core 3 based mail server in production that doesn't have any further updates coming and is too critical to down and rebuild. (I'm sure a hardware failure will force the issue eventually -- can't come soon enough for me).
It is, however, the last one. My current infrastructure is all CentOS 4.x; in three or six months I'll start migrating to CentOS 5.x for new systems.
I've had to call dell on a couple of occasions (bad CD, bad battery, bad HD, bad mainboard... hmmm, not all the same computer, but maybe these things are not as reliable as I originally was thinking) but they have always sent me what I needed.
Hey -- measured in Internet Time, we're Senior Citizens now! When do we get our pensions?
Unless you are going to rail about the "unfairness" and "greed" inherent to the current system, I recommend you find another place to discuss the matter.
(Now in your defense, you did disguise your rationality by using "bare" instead of "bear".)
Eliminate the ability to run software on it, and you'll eliminate all customer demand at the same time -- think of the savings in distribution and sales costs!
If people were willing to run non-windows programs, Linux would be a lot more popular than it is. Heck, the Mac would be a lot more popular than it is. But they are not, and the smart money is on giving people what they think they want and not what some slashdot crowd thinks they want.
Think about it -- the killer feature here is the ability to run windows in an ultraportable format.