Last year I absentmindedly left my GPS and Cellphone in the car (was running late to work). About an hour later I realized I didn't have my Cell on me and went out to the car to retrieve it. Lo and behold my TomTom 920T GPS, and my Motorola Q9c were both gone and the window in my car was smashed out. Rough retail value of the phone and gps together were around the $1000.00 range. The police came and took a report, I even actually still had the boxes for both units with the serial numbers. I've not heard anything since.
What really irks me is that I know for certain that the Cell Phone should be traceable. At least the police could have called Verizon and checked to see if it showed up in any of the 50-100 pawn shops in town. We're not talking major investigate work here, we're talking about what should be a 10-20min call. I called TomTom and also asked them if they could at least make it where that unit will never get an update.. they said it was a feature that many have requested, but at this point in time they didn't offer that.
I know that there are more important things like murders, etc.. but hey they had to take the time to take the report, could at least do a little diligence.
Problem is since the economy is week, the state has been taking in less taxes. Since the state has been taking in lesss taxes they're giving less to the university. Since the university is getting less from the state they've raised tuition.
When I went to the University of South Carolina in 1991 the tuition was around $1200.00 per semester, rumor has it that it's over $3000.00 per semester now. Roughly 13 years over doubled in price. Granted this isnt Ivy league, but not much hope of working part time and paying for shool at those prices. Only hope is to get loans, grants, etc and pray the economy eventually comes back to some semblance of what it was.
I think that the reason that a lot of these patches do not get applied is due to the "If it isn't broken, don't fix it" mentality. I know that many Microsoft Security patches in the past have caused say 1 out of 10 small volume custom applications to fail in some way after they were applied. The business being conducted by the application may have justified say a 50K dollar initial investment to have it written by a developer. However, the month-to month return does not justify paying a Maintenance fee in order to keep a developer up to speed on your code base. Microsoft has been releasing patches for either IIS, or SQL Server, or OS on roughly a schedule of 2-4 a month. Your average 10-50 man company that had an application written for their specific need is not going to be willing to pay you $4000.00 a month to maintain a secondary system with their application installed, 10-20 hours to test every single function, etc every time Microsoft releases a batch of patches. In their minds it's built, it works, and it's done and they are not going to pay a dime more. If you are lucky, they might do that when something like today's situation comes up. That is why most systems (I will even say Linux/Apache/XSQL systems) don't get every single patch that comes down the pipe applied. In a perfect world you would not accept the work unless there was a good maintenance fee included, but in the real world you take the work that people will give you and deal with the ongoing maintenance on a case-by-case basis. The only contracts where you get that kind of commitment is when there is EXTREMELY good revenue involved and the companies business absolutely relies on the application.
Ok, I know there is going to be a little delay in the call. But I have used Netmeeting a good bit to talk to people all over the world just playing and fairly often it is very workable. I'd just like to see a box that would let me hook my Cordless Telephone to my computers sound card so that I could walk away, anyone seen a device like this. Will the net2phone thing allow you to do this? Even at 5 cents a miniute the costs add up when you talk for an hour or so twice a week. I'm already paying $45.00 a month for a cable modem, might as well use some of that bandwith.
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Last year I absentmindedly left my GPS and Cellphone in the car (was running late to work). About an hour later I realized I didn't have my Cell on me and went out to the car to retrieve it. Lo and behold my TomTom 920T GPS, and my Motorola Q9c were both gone and the window in my car was smashed out. Rough retail value of the phone and gps together were around the $1000.00 range. The police came and took a report, I even actually still had the boxes for both units with the serial numbers. I've not heard anything since.
What really irks me is that I know for certain that the Cell Phone should be traceable. At least the police could have called Verizon and checked to see if it showed up in any of the 50-100 pawn shops in town. We're not talking major investigate work here, we're talking about what should be a 10-20min call. I called TomTom and also asked them if they could at least make it where that unit will never get an update.. they said it was a feature that many have requested, but at this point in time they didn't offer that.
I know that there are more important things like murders, etc.. but hey they had to take the time to take the report, could at least do a little diligence.
Whooops, I meant weak.....
Problem is since the economy is week, the state has been taking in less taxes. Since the state has been taking in lesss taxes they're giving less to the university. Since the university is getting less from the state they've raised tuition.
When I went to the University of South Carolina in 1991 the tuition was around $1200.00 per semester, rumor has it that it's over $3000.00 per semester now. Roughly 13 years over doubled in price. Granted this isnt Ivy league, but not much hope of working part time and paying for shool at those prices. Only hope is to get loans, grants, etc and pray the economy eventually comes back to some semblance of what it was.
I think that the reason that a lot of these patches do not get applied is due to the "If it isn't broken, don't fix it" mentality. I know that many Microsoft Security patches in the past have caused say 1 out of 10 small volume custom applications to fail in some way after they were applied. The business being conducted by the application may have justified say a 50K dollar initial investment to have it written by a developer. However, the month-to month return does not justify paying a Maintenance fee in order to keep a developer up to speed on your code base. Microsoft has been releasing patches for either IIS, or SQL Server, or OS on roughly a schedule of 2-4 a month. Your average 10-50 man company that had an application written for their specific need is not going to be willing to pay you $4000.00 a month to maintain a secondary system with their application installed, 10-20 hours to test every single function, etc every time Microsoft releases a batch of patches. In their minds it's built, it works, and it's done and they are not going to pay a dime more. If you are lucky, they might do that when something like today's situation comes up. That is why most systems (I will even say Linux/Apache/XSQL systems) don't get every single patch that comes down the pipe applied. In a perfect world you would not accept the work unless there was a good maintenance fee included, but in the real world you take the work that people will give you and deal with the ongoing maintenance on a case-by-case basis. The only contracts where you get that kind of commitment is when there is EXTREMELY good revenue involved and the companies business absolutely relies on the application.
Ok, I know there is going to be a little delay in the call. But I have used Netmeeting a good bit to talk to people all over the world just playing and fairly often it is very workable. I'd just like to see a box that would let me hook my Cordless Telephone to my computers sound card so that I could walk away, anyone seen a device like this. Will the net2phone thing allow you to do this? Even at 5 cents a miniute the costs add up when you talk for an hour or so twice a week. I'm already paying $45.00 a month for a cable modem, might as well use some of that bandwith.