The same is true of comms here in Australia, where in order to obtain a carriers license, equipment must have certain features available for law enforcement purposes according to a set spec defined by the ACMA. There are also various data retention policies.
However, when the government makes drastic and expensive changes to infrastructure requirements for their own desires, there's an expectation that they foot the bill for changes to existing gear. After all, they ARE the customers for these features. Funding it out of government/law enforcement budgets accurately reflects the costs of the enforcement.
Retrofitting configuration on to existing infrastructure can be very expensive compared to rolling out new kit, requiring changes from the management systems all the way to the network gear itself, testing/QA and so on. You're not just fiddling with ACLs or enabling netflows.
But even with that, they were reportedly pretty close to breaking the RAF, when they decided to change tactics and let them rebuild near the end of 1940.
Well lets see. If they try and message you after you've gotten your new droid/winphone/etc, they'll eventually get an error, if the previous conversation hasn't expired (expiry seems to take somewhere between an hour and a day, probably depending on network conditions). If it's expired and you're no longer on iMessage, or if they've had an error and try to send another message, it will go via SMS. Nothing default about it. Except in the case of an unexpired conversation, it's transparent.
If I want to remove a phone permanently from my iMessage account, I go into my iMessage settings, select the number and remove it. It's even easier if you own the device and it's part of your support profile, you can just do it through the Apple website. I own an iPad but my iPhone is employer-issue.
This iMessage stuff has been part of the iOS environment for literally years. This article is hyperventilating over nothing and is worthy only of a weary eye-roll.
Australian labels are generally allied under the ARIA organisation, which has cordial relations with the RIAA. They're closely aligned in intent.
The other interesting thing is, Australian copyright law is much stricter about "fair dealing" (our version of the US' "Fair Use" clause), with exemptions only for very specific use cases. For instance, transcoding a CD to MP3 is not legal in AU. Nor would be using a jingle in a powerpoint for a highschool project, unless the jingle itself was the object of study. ARIA has said they will not sue for personal use such as this, which was taken as justification for not building in additional consumer protections and fair deal exclusions during the most recent revision of AU copyright law.
It's fortunate that this issue occurred and the case was tried in US jurisdiction.
Take for example the Australian model HECS scheme. Effectively, it's a government loan which is paid for like a tax.
Everything is paid for as it would be if you paid up front, by the government. When you leave university and begin to earn income, your annual tax bill is increased by a minimum amount (which you can increase if you want, or perform direct payments into HECS) which pays down the debt until it is gone. If you stop making income, you stop paying off the debt.
I can't recall the specifics, but I believe the latest changes peg the debt value to CPI, so it grows at the government-determined rate of inflation, well below market interest rates.
Overall, people pay for what they use, they can be capped if they're trying to become a professional student and debt load isn't as crippling as it sounds under the US system.
Systemd brings standardized, concurrent, event-driven startup, so it takes less time to start up, both CPU time and wall clock time. For example, systemd's declarative unit files have much less boilerplate and take less effort to parse than SysV-style init scripts.
So?
Embedded systems using lightweight shells already take only a handful of seconds to boot up with their handrolled initscripts. And even more so than most desktops and servers, that embedded unit is probably going to be turned on for years at a time without reboots.
I've nothing against systemd itself, beside not being very familiar with its internals and being slightly annoyed at having to remember to type "systemctl" instead of "service", but it's silly to position its most-touted benefit as being "quicker boot times". A lot of the secondary benefits, well, we've already got things like OpenRC, rsyslogd and grep.
I may also be a little miffed at having ported a ton of old style init support glue (for a bunch of RH Kickstart configs) to the comparatively poorly documented Upstart, and now I have to change them again for 7's systemd:|.
None of those are nearly as complex or featured as Godot.
After having a look over the doco for Godot, I'd say that CrystalSpace isn't as far behind as you'd think (especially if you include CEL). However, Godot seems to have more nice features if you're actually developing a game (nice UI, publishing integration).
CS suffers from being more of a programmer's playground than a practical game engine and having quite a steep learning curve, but I've been toying with it for more than a decade.
Also, they were designed for hardware architectures not relevant any more today.
This hits closer to the mark - CS was started a long time ago, but it's ended up being well designed and modular. However, it's difficult to pick up new talent to implement new stuff with such a large existing codebase, leading to quite a bit of development inertia in certain areas.
Still, it works with modern OpenGL and console ports have been made.
I'm more interested in how Godot stacks up against a framework like Marmalade.
Well, I can't speak for the GP, but I don't keep any shortcuts on my desktop and pinned items are a bare minimum of common-use apps (Outlook, Firefox, PowerShell, etc). Having icons sprayed everywhere just feels extremely messy.
Admittedly, since getting a Mac at home, I have gotten into the habit of just hitting the windows key and searching for what I want (similar to Cmd-Space for Spotlight), which works better in Win8, but I still find the start screen incredibly annoying and inconsistent compared to the simplicity of a Start Menu that I've had for a decade.
Before that I had a Linux desktop and work machines running WindowMaker, which features a floating start menu:). My disdain for desktop icons and excessive pinning dates from that era.
Not sure what you mean by "trunk bandwidth", it could be either backhaul or transit.
Backhaul (from customer to ISP POP) needs to match closely or exceed end customer bandwidth. Most last mile wholesale providers will offer a 1:1 or low contention SLA, although some "manage" the bandwidth (they oversubscribe until someone complains). However, if an ISP can't get this, or they build it themselves, they need to make sure your backhaul interconnects are overbuilt enough to deal with expected growth in line with however long it would take to build additional capacity. This is the primary cost of end user connectivity. The local loop price is usually bundled in with backhaul for costing.
Transit is cheaper and much easier to manage, these are your interconnects to other networks. It needs to be overbuilt as well to exceed peak usage by enough margin to allow continual upgrades, but aggregate usage across an ISP is generally much lower than the sum of its customers. Transit physical interconnects are usually delivered directly into an ISP's POP (a location commonly shared with other network users and ISPs, like a regional datacentre) and benefit from economy of scale.
Discussing the cost of pure transit isn't too useful. Heavy users smash both backhaul and transit if they go nuts, and this usage can be much harder to predict and manage than 1000+ users calmly watching youtube or emailing kids for 5GB/mo. It is much easier at large scale, but for a small, non-profit rural co-op I imagine the handful of big users they have could get very expensive.
In the pricing model, there needs to be an element of discouragement (suddenly heavy users with deep pockets can still degrade network quality for everyone else) as well as recouping the cost of required upgrades and improvements to support the traffic. It is ridiculous for a non-profit to massively overcharge on the scale you're suggesting for no reason.
I'm not sure what Net Neutrality from the summary has to do with any of this either - this is usage-based billing over a flat pipe, not charging/throttling based on traffic type or destination. I may be a bit biased as I'm from somewhere where quota plans are the norm.
Getting a bit OT here, but I have not worked at a single company where the CEO/Managing Director/whatever did not work at least 2x the number of hours of practically everyone else.
For my current boss, stock market dabbling is leisure. Wining and dining whiners and strategic customers can be fun but it means he doesn't get spend time with the wife or golfing or just chilling in front of the TV. He's in at 5am checking projections and talking with vendors/big customers, regularily leaves at 4pm to go to business and networking seminars until late at night, or is just in the office until 6-7pm.
He's in his sixties, this is an established business that's been around for decades. Would you have the energy to build something like that from the ground up? I don't. He did. If he wants to relax a bit and drop the average back to a low 70-odd hours a week, good for him.
D-Bus is still portable across multiple free Unices and even Windows. The standalone daemon isn't going away anytime soon, and I can't see the multitude of projects depending on it giving up cross-platform compatibility.
In-kernel IPC reduces context switching and other related overheads. I'm not sure exactly how much of a performance gain this gives D-Bus clients and the system as a whole but if someone wants to spend their Christmas playing around and seeing if something is better then great! And that's part of the benefit of OSS.
At least here (AU), it's been practically impossible to get a MasterCard or Visa-backed card without a smartchip for half a decade, and in 2014 signatures will no longer be accepted to validate identity on credit purchases. There's been ads running for about a year requesting that people create a PIN for each of their cards. (AFR rundown)
Bank-issued cards (not store cards) always come with NFC as well now (doesn't seem to be any way to request otherwise). The last non-NFC card I had just expired and was replaced with a Visa PayWave. NFC & RFID is also very popular for specialist stuff : cabcharge cards, fuel cards, public transport.
A few times in the past I've done up quick spreadsheets to compare buying food vs. eating out. I'm in the same boat as a lot of others in the this thread - poor diet, long hours, fast food. I'm not going to pull stats out because they keep changing, but as general trends go:
Eating well on restaurant food is silly expensive. Noone is arguing about this.
Buying and cooking good food vs eating fast food is a close tie. I'm not a huge fan of veggies and meat/pasta is expensive to make up the bulk of your diet, so YMMV.
Buying and cooking crap food *can* be cheaper, if you're not buying microwave pizzas and burgers.
All of this is before taking into account the cost of my time. Once that's taken into account, it makes dropping through an expensive "healthy gourmet" carvery with free wifi or decent 3G coverage a hell of a lot cheaper than spending 30 mins a day preparing lunch and dinner. Eating out for lunch and dinner means no mess, I can still bring my laptop in and bill my time while I get off my feet, away from customers and enjoy food that's far better than I can cram into my schedule if I'm making it. I get to sleep an extra 30 minutes! That's worth a lot more than the money.
Everyone's scenario is different. I try to eat good food if possible and avoid the golden arches like the plague. Sometimes, though, you end up working 16 hours in a day without a break, it's midnight and they're all that's open. It beats scrambled eggs on toast. If you have a nice 9-5 job that you enjoy and can spend your weekends pursuing your shaved meat hobby, well, that's great too.
And yes, I take multivitamins to back up my highly variable & mediocre diet because it makes me feel healthier. I'm completely unworried that it might be just in my head - as long as I'm not taking relabelled rat poison and they're cheap as chips, I get a benefit out of it so they're worthwhile.
NBN doesn't use compatible GigE technology, so you wouldn't be able to use an fibre SFP or switch anyway. NBN's even heavily customised the firmware on the NTUs so nothing is quite standard.
The biggest issue with HFC is the shared medium. NBNCo fibre uses a 2.5/1.2Gbit OLT with a 32 or 64-split GPON local loop, a design that shares many of the same issues and has a maximum design speed compariable with FTTN w/VDSL local loops (~100Mbit). The biggest benefit of fibre is being able to deliver 100Mbit over 20KMs instead of 300m with DSL technology.
Intel are high-midrange (in terms of quality and performance) in both enterprise and desktop flash storage. Samsung has a very strong presence across the board due to reputation, very good performance (substantially better than Intel in production gear) and many of the vendor-branded enterprise drives (HP, NetApp, EMC, etc) have Samsung internals.
When I bought my current desktop's SSD (Samsung 840 Pro), the only other vendor with a drive even remotely close in performance was OCZ. Googling for "OCZ Vertex4 problems" quickly put that possibility to rest. At the time, Intel wasn't looking like they were bothering to keep up with performance on the desktop, but they're always been reasonable quality-wise.
OPEC will only accept dollars as a form of cash payment.
Or the strongest traded currency in the world, the Euro. It's also fairly popular for trade between the biggest energy exporter in the world (Russia) and the Eurozone. OPEC has several times publicly announced a desire to convert their cash reserves into euro.
True, it only has a small lead by worldwide trade value and runs a close second behind USD on trade volume, but even with Europe looking a bit shaky, the USA has its own problems.
There's a strong and escalating push outside of the US for nations to agree on alternatives to USD-based trade agreements - China has joined Europe and Russia in cheerleading these efforts.
10 years ago if I ordered wholesale goods from China, I would pay in USD-denominated amounts. Nowadays, the same factories and vendors accept even direct AUD payments and will invoice in my currency of choice.
That's across the lowest-latency, highest-performing set of international backbones out of Australia.
Now try a traceroute to waia.asn.au, hosted in Perth WAIX. I get 80-100ms from my core router in Brisbane, which has multiple carrier-grade fibre interconnects to upstream providers. A residential connection will add another 30-50ms. Perth is only ~4500kms away as the cable runs. You would be slightly better in Sydney (by ~10-15ms).
Some ISPs have poorly organised routing and peering arrangements that (for e.g.) terminate all VCs at a state-wide ag in the capital, so users next door to each other in Mackay have to route via Brisbane to ping each other. A Brisbane user trying to access something on a UQ website might end up going to Sydney and back instead of across an IX in Brisbane, which adds another ~30ms. Now imagine roaming users on 3G or LTE trying to use Citrix with latency bouncing up and down due to the medium itself.
A lot of what I do is either application delivery (Citrix, RDS, SSH, etc) or voice-grade comms. Our entire WAN business is built off the back of our experience in that area. 100ms is annoying. 200ms is unusable, from the perspective of Jane Sixpack sitting in front of her Citrix ERP app trying to key in phone orders or look up customer details. Jitter is incredibly frustrating and the source of many grey hairs.
International just gets silly. Average latency from AU to USA is 150-200ms, to the UK, 300-500ms, to Russia or Scandinavia, 500-600ms.
No there isn't any such possibility. You can export your data eg. from Excel as a read-only view but you can't export from Office 365 to anything. Office 2010 "is supported now" but it won't be forever, you can't use OpenOffice or similar to access your O365 content.
I'm not sure where you got this information from, because a workmate has just spent a month migrating a large organisation away from 365 and back to local Office/Exchange/etc.
Office 2013 doesn't require the cloud and works fine with local files. Exchange 365 supports direct mailbox migration to another Exchange 2013 server across the wire (no dumping to PST), Outlook just picks up the new settings without an issue. He ended up synching file stores to a common, DFS-R replicated location. There was a surprisingly minimum amount of fuss. Most of the problem was slow transfer speeds (mailboxes of unusual size) and users griping about how long it was taking.
Really, care to share some numbers? Seems like the Lumia sold so well they discontinued it 2 months after release.
I'm trying to find which Lumia you're talking about and I can't. The closest I can get is the 810, which was discontinued after about 6 months (still pretty short), presumably to make way for the 1020.
Say what you want about the phones, everyone I know who's purchased a Windows Phone has liked it and most of those are Lumias. Admittedly, there's not a lot of people I know who have WinPhones.
Considering that every phone I've purchased for myself has been a Nokia (still on an old N8), I'm seriously considering a Lumia myself. My work phone is an iPhone so I'm not keen on having 2 of them competing for which battery runs down first.
If anyone would've suggested to me that WP would've been an option a couple of years back they'd have been crowned the world's greatest comedian.
Is the tablet market grumbling and saying "gee, what we really want is something we can create a spreadsheet on"?
Unfortunately that's exactly what the business market is doing. It starts with spreadsheets and Citrix, the occasional email. ERP vendors are now rolling out apps to use them as simple endpoints either in the field or for simple tasks like stock control.
I've got a few customers using either iPads or Android tablets with barcode reader attachments to remove the need for paper records in their warehousing and logistics depts.
There's a lot of areas tablets work well. The problem is businesses trying to flog them off as a primary device for all users. A Surface Pro with a better battery might be able to replace a laptop because it *is* a super skinny laptop missing a keyboard. iPads, Surface RT, even the ASUS Transformer, not even close.
Alternatively, an $80/mo Linode (or similar) plan would cache 2 days of data (~200GB storage), offer some capacity to 'cook' it a bit before re-downloading (say, do some compression) and have enough transfer (8TB/mo) all in one shiny package. For pure storage, I think Dropbox and similar AWS-hosted services weigh in around the $60/mo mark at what would be needed.
Personally, I would spend money on an additional, dedicated Internet connection or (better) WAN tail to the customer and drop some staging hardware on their network border to ensure outages don't result in lost data.
The words 'budget' and 'cloud' together usually result in a selection of four-letter words, most notably, 'pain'.
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The same is true of comms here in Australia, where in order to obtain a carriers license, equipment must have certain features available for law enforcement purposes according to a set spec defined by the ACMA. There are also various data retention policies.
However, when the government makes drastic and expensive changes to infrastructure requirements for their own desires, there's an expectation that they foot the bill for changes to existing gear. After all, they ARE the customers for these features. Funding it out of government/law enforcement budgets accurately reflects the costs of the enforcement.
Retrofitting configuration on to existing infrastructure can be very expensive compared to rolling out new kit, requiring changes from the management systems all the way to the network gear itself, testing/QA and so on. You're not just fiddling with ACLs or enabling netflows.
But even with that, they were reportedly pretty close to breaking the RAF, when they decided to change tactics and let them rebuild near the end of 1940.
Well lets see. If they try and message you after you've gotten your new droid/winphone/etc, they'll eventually get an error, if the previous conversation hasn't expired (expiry seems to take somewhere between an hour and a day, probably depending on network conditions). If it's expired and you're no longer on iMessage, or if they've had an error and try to send another message, it will go via SMS. Nothing default about it. Except in the case of an unexpired conversation, it's transparent.
If I want to remove a phone permanently from my iMessage account, I go into my iMessage settings, select the number and remove it. It's even easier if you own the device and it's part of your support profile, you can just do it through the Apple website. I own an iPad but my iPhone is employer-issue.
This iMessage stuff has been part of the iOS environment for literally years. This article is hyperventilating over nothing and is worthy only of a weary eye-roll.
Probably. But if you try installing a custom firmware, it will literally explode.
I can see a lot of carriers warming to this idea.
Australian labels are generally allied under the ARIA organisation, which has cordial relations with the RIAA. They're closely aligned in intent.
The other interesting thing is, Australian copyright law is much stricter about "fair dealing" (our version of the US' "Fair Use" clause), with exemptions only for very specific use cases. For instance, transcoding a CD to MP3 is not legal in AU. Nor would be using a jingle in a powerpoint for a highschool project, unless the jingle itself was the object of study. ARIA has said they will not sue for personal use such as this, which was taken as justification for not building in additional consumer protections and fair deal exclusions during the most recent revision of AU copyright law.
It's fortunate that this issue occurred and the case was tried in US jurisdiction.
Take for example the Australian model HECS scheme. Effectively, it's a government loan which is paid for like a tax.
Everything is paid for as it would be if you paid up front, by the government. When you leave university and begin to earn income, your annual tax bill is increased by a minimum amount (which you can increase if you want, or perform direct payments into HECS) which pays down the debt until it is gone. If you stop making income, you stop paying off the debt.
I can't recall the specifics, but I believe the latest changes peg the debt value to CPI, so it grows at the government-determined rate of inflation, well below market interest rates.
Overall, people pay for what they use, they can be capped if they're trying to become a professional student and debt load isn't as crippling as it sounds under the US system.
Systemd brings standardized, concurrent, event-driven startup, so it takes less time to start up, both CPU time and wall clock time. For example, systemd's declarative unit files have much less boilerplate and take less effort to parse than SysV-style init scripts.
So?
Embedded systems using lightweight shells already take only a handful of seconds to boot up with their handrolled initscripts. And even more so than most desktops and servers, that embedded unit is probably going to be turned on for years at a time without reboots.
I've nothing against systemd itself, beside not being very familiar with its internals and being slightly annoyed at having to remember to type "systemctl" instead of "service", but it's silly to position its most-touted benefit as being "quicker boot times". A lot of the secondary benefits, well, we've already got things like OpenRC, rsyslogd and grep.
I may also be a little miffed at having ported a ton of old style init support glue (for a bunch of RH Kickstart configs) to the comparatively poorly documented Upstart, and now I have to change them again for 7's systemd :|.
None of those are nearly as complex or featured as Godot.
After having a look over the doco for Godot, I'd say that CrystalSpace isn't as far behind as you'd think (especially if you include CEL). However, Godot seems to have more nice features if you're actually developing a game (nice UI, publishing integration).
CS suffers from being more of a programmer's playground than a practical game engine and having quite a steep learning curve, but I've been toying with it for more than a decade.
Also, they were designed for hardware architectures not relevant any more today.
This hits closer to the mark - CS was started a long time ago, but it's ended up being well designed and modular. However, it's difficult to pick up new talent to implement new stuff with such a large existing codebase, leading to quite a bit of development inertia in certain areas.
Still, it works with modern OpenGL and console ports have been made.
I'm more interested in how Godot stacks up against a framework like Marmalade.
Well, I can't speak for the GP, but I don't keep any shortcuts on my desktop and pinned items are a bare minimum of common-use apps (Outlook, Firefox, PowerShell, etc). Having icons sprayed everywhere just feels extremely messy.
Admittedly, since getting a Mac at home, I have gotten into the habit of just hitting the windows key and searching for what I want (similar to Cmd-Space for Spotlight), which works better in Win8, but I still find the start screen incredibly annoying and inconsistent compared to the simplicity of a Start Menu that I've had for a decade.
Before that I had a Linux desktop and work machines running WindowMaker, which features a floating start menu :). My disdain for desktop icons and excessive pinning dates from that era.
Not sure what you mean by "trunk bandwidth", it could be either backhaul or transit.
Backhaul (from customer to ISP POP) needs to match closely or exceed end customer bandwidth. Most last mile wholesale providers will offer a 1:1 or low contention SLA, although some "manage" the bandwidth (they oversubscribe until someone complains). However, if an ISP can't get this, or they build it themselves, they need to make sure your backhaul interconnects are overbuilt enough to deal with expected growth in line with however long it would take to build additional capacity. This is the primary cost of end user connectivity. The local loop price is usually bundled in with backhaul for costing.
Transit is cheaper and much easier to manage, these are your interconnects to other networks. It needs to be overbuilt as well to exceed peak usage by enough margin to allow continual upgrades, but aggregate usage across an ISP is generally much lower than the sum of its customers. Transit physical interconnects are usually delivered directly into an ISP's POP (a location commonly shared with other network users and ISPs, like a regional datacentre) and benefit from economy of scale.
Discussing the cost of pure transit isn't too useful. Heavy users smash both backhaul and transit if they go nuts, and this usage can be much harder to predict and manage than 1000+ users calmly watching youtube or emailing kids for 5GB/mo. It is much easier at large scale, but for a small, non-profit rural co-op I imagine the handful of big users they have could get very expensive.
In the pricing model, there needs to be an element of discouragement (suddenly heavy users with deep pockets can still degrade network quality for everyone else) as well as recouping the cost of required upgrades and improvements to support the traffic. It is ridiculous for a non-profit to massively overcharge on the scale you're suggesting for no reason.
I'm not sure what Net Neutrality from the summary has to do with any of this either - this is usage-based billing over a flat pipe, not charging/throttling based on traffic type or destination. I may be a bit biased as I'm from somewhere where quota plans are the norm.
Getting a bit OT here, but I have not worked at a single company where the CEO/Managing Director/whatever did not work at least 2x the number of hours of practically everyone else.
For my current boss, stock market dabbling is leisure. Wining and dining whiners and strategic customers can be fun but it means he doesn't get spend time with the wife or golfing or just chilling in front of the TV. He's in at 5am checking projections and talking with vendors/big customers, regularily leaves at 4pm to go to business and networking seminars until late at night, or is just in the office until 6-7pm.
He's in his sixties, this is an established business that's been around for decades. Would you have the energy to build something like that from the ground up? I don't. He did. If he wants to relax a bit and drop the average back to a low 70-odd hours a week, good for him.
What?
D-Bus is still portable across multiple free Unices and even Windows. The standalone daemon isn't going away anytime soon, and I can't see the multitude of projects depending on it giving up cross-platform compatibility.
In-kernel IPC reduces context switching and other related overheads. I'm not sure exactly how much of a performance gain this gives D-Bus clients and the system as a whole but if someone wants to spend their Christmas playing around and seeing if something is better then great! And that's part of the benefit of OSS.
I thought this was already the case.
At least here (AU), it's been practically impossible to get a MasterCard or Visa-backed card without a smartchip for half a decade, and in 2014 signatures will no longer be accepted to validate identity on credit purchases. There's been ads running for about a year requesting that people create a PIN for each of their cards. (AFR rundown)
Bank-issued cards (not store cards) always come with NFC as well now (doesn't seem to be any way to request otherwise). The last non-NFC card I had just expired and was replaced with a Visa PayWave. NFC & RFID is also very popular for specialist stuff : cabcharge cards, fuel cards, public transport.
A few times in the past I've done up quick spreadsheets to compare buying food vs. eating out. I'm in the same boat as a lot of others in the this thread - poor diet, long hours, fast food. I'm not going to pull stats out because they keep changing, but as general trends go:
Eating well on restaurant food is silly expensive. Noone is arguing about this.
Buying and cooking good food vs eating fast food is a close tie. I'm not a huge fan of veggies and meat/pasta is expensive to make up the bulk of your diet, so YMMV.
Buying and cooking crap food *can* be cheaper, if you're not buying microwave pizzas and burgers.
All of this is before taking into account the cost of my time. Once that's taken into account, it makes dropping through an expensive "healthy gourmet" carvery with free wifi or decent 3G coverage a hell of a lot cheaper than spending 30 mins a day preparing lunch and dinner. Eating out for lunch and dinner means no mess, I can still bring my laptop in and bill my time while I get off my feet, away from customers and enjoy food that's far better than I can cram into my schedule if I'm making it. I get to sleep an extra 30 minutes! That's worth a lot more than the money.
Everyone's scenario is different. I try to eat good food if possible and avoid the golden arches like the plague. Sometimes, though, you end up working 16 hours in a day without a break, it's midnight and they're all that's open. It beats scrambled eggs on toast. If you have a nice 9-5 job that you enjoy and can spend your weekends pursuing your shaved meat hobby, well, that's great too.
And yes, I take multivitamins to back up my highly variable & mediocre diet because it makes me feel healthier. I'm completely unworried that it might be just in my head - as long as I'm not taking relabelled rat poison and they're cheap as chips, I get a benefit out of it so they're worthwhile.
NBN doesn't use compatible GigE technology, so you wouldn't be able to use an fibre SFP or switch anyway. NBN's even heavily customised the firmware on the NTUs so nothing is quite standard.
The biggest issue with HFC is the shared medium. NBNCo fibre uses a 2.5/1.2Gbit OLT with a 32 or 64-split GPON local loop, a design that shares many of the same issues and has a maximum design speed compariable with FTTN w/VDSL local loops (~100Mbit). The biggest benefit of fibre is being able to deliver 100Mbit over 20KMs instead of 300m with DSL technology.
Intel are high-midrange (in terms of quality and performance) in both enterprise and desktop flash storage. Samsung has a very strong presence across the board due to reputation, very good performance (substantially better than Intel in production gear) and many of the vendor-branded enterprise drives (HP, NetApp, EMC, etc) have Samsung internals.
When I bought my current desktop's SSD (Samsung 840 Pro), the only other vendor with a drive even remotely close in performance was OCZ. Googling for "OCZ Vertex4 problems" quickly put that possibility to rest. At the time, Intel wasn't looking like they were bothering to keep up with performance on the desktop, but they're always been reasonable quality-wise.
OPEC will only accept dollars as a form of cash payment.
Or the strongest traded currency in the world, the Euro. It's also fairly popular for trade between the biggest energy exporter in the world (Russia) and the Eurozone. OPEC has several times publicly announced a desire to convert their cash reserves into euro.
True, it only has a small lead by worldwide trade value and runs a close second behind USD on trade volume, but even with Europe looking a bit shaky, the USA has its own problems.
There's a strong and escalating push outside of the US for nations to agree on alternatives to USD-based trade agreements - China has joined Europe and Russia in cheerleading these efforts.
10 years ago if I ordered wholesale goods from China, I would pay in USD-denominated amounts. Nowadays, the same factories and vendors accept even direct AUD payments and will invoice in my currency of choice.
That's across the lowest-latency, highest-performing set of international backbones out of Australia.
Now try a traceroute to waia.asn.au, hosted in Perth WAIX. I get 80-100ms from my core router in Brisbane, which has multiple carrier-grade fibre interconnects to upstream providers. A residential connection will add another 30-50ms. Perth is only ~4500kms away as the cable runs. You would be slightly better in Sydney (by ~10-15ms).
Some ISPs have poorly organised routing and peering arrangements that (for e.g.) terminate all VCs at a state-wide ag in the capital, so users next door to each other in Mackay have to route via Brisbane to ping each other. A Brisbane user trying to access something on a UQ website might end up going to Sydney and back instead of across an IX in Brisbane, which adds another ~30ms. Now imagine roaming users on 3G or LTE trying to use Citrix with latency bouncing up and down due to the medium itself.
A lot of what I do is either application delivery (Citrix, RDS, SSH, etc) or voice-grade comms. Our entire WAN business is built off the back of our experience in that area. 100ms is annoying. 200ms is unusable, from the perspective of Jane Sixpack sitting in front of her Citrix ERP app trying to key in phone orders or look up customer details. Jitter is incredibly frustrating and the source of many grey hairs.
International just gets silly. Average latency from AU to USA is 150-200ms, to the UK, 300-500ms, to Russia or Scandinavia, 500-600ms.
No there isn't any such possibility. You can export your data eg. from Excel as a read-only view but you can't export from Office 365 to anything. Office 2010 "is supported now" but it won't be forever, you can't use OpenOffice or similar to access your O365 content.
I'm not sure where you got this information from, because a workmate has just spent a month migrating a large organisation away from 365 and back to local Office/Exchange/etc.
Office 2013 doesn't require the cloud and works fine with local files. Exchange 365 supports direct mailbox migration to another Exchange 2013 server across the wire (no dumping to PST), Outlook just picks up the new settings without an issue. He ended up synching file stores to a common, DFS-R replicated location. There was a surprisingly minimum amount of fuss. Most of the problem was slow transfer speeds (mailboxes of unusual size) and users griping about how long it was taking.
Really, care to share some numbers? Seems like the Lumia sold so well they discontinued it 2 months after release.
I'm trying to find which Lumia you're talking about and I can't. The closest I can get is the 810, which was discontinued after about 6 months (still pretty short), presumably to make way for the 1020.
Say what you want about the phones, everyone I know who's purchased a Windows Phone has liked it and most of those are Lumias. Admittedly, there's not a lot of people I know who have WinPhones.
Considering that every phone I've purchased for myself has been a Nokia (still on an old N8), I'm seriously considering a Lumia myself. My work phone is an iPhone so I'm not keen on having 2 of them competing for which battery runs down first.
If anyone would've suggested to me that WP would've been an option a couple of years back they'd have been crowned the world's greatest comedian.
Is the tablet market grumbling and saying "gee, what we really want is something we can create a spreadsheet on"?
Unfortunately that's exactly what the business market is doing. It starts with spreadsheets and Citrix, the occasional email. ERP vendors are now rolling out apps to use them as simple endpoints either in the field or for simple tasks like stock control.
I've got a few customers using either iPads or Android tablets with barcode reader attachments to remove the need for paper records in their warehousing and logistics depts.
There's a lot of areas tablets work well. The problem is businesses trying to flog them off as a primary device for all users. A Surface Pro with a better battery might be able to replace a laptop because it *is* a super skinny laptop missing a keyboard. iPads, Surface RT, even the ASUS Transformer, not even close.
It's 40 million in revenue, not net profit. They're charging $400 per advertiser on average, if the numbers are accurate.
Alternatively, an $80/mo Linode (or similar) plan would cache 2 days of data (~200GB storage), offer some capacity to 'cook' it a bit before re-downloading (say, do some compression) and have enough transfer (8TB/mo) all in one shiny package. For pure storage, I think Dropbox and similar AWS-hosted services weigh in around the $60/mo mark at what would be needed.
Personally, I would spend money on an additional, dedicated Internet connection or (better) WAN tail to the customer and drop some staging hardware on their network border to ensure outages don't result in lost data.
The words 'budget' and 'cloud' together usually result in a selection of four-letter words, most notably, 'pain'.
Life isn't worth it if you can't have a good steak.