Admittedly, the start of my post is childish, but so was the grandparent poster.
I asked if there is anything that the slashdot community could do. I was referring to maybe a fund to help him with his legal costs, or otherwise with his hosting charges. Although the article does ask for assistance in getting D-Link's attention, if this doesn't help, maybe there is something else we can do?
Who cares what they were going to pay him? It was less than his costs. It still doesn't solve the issue of what they are going to do about the problem given that they caused it.
Have you ever worked as a sysadmin or worked admin'ing servers at an ISP? Hell, worked on anything big that has something to do with the internet? Your cable / DSL line doesn't count here.
I would take a guess and you just took the bait of a troll. Hook, line, sinker.. Rod, reel and copy of Angler's times...
Either that or the grandparent poster has never looked after an ISP style environment where co-operation between sysadmins makes your lives SOOOOOO much easier. A bit of common courtesy goes a long way to preventing problems down the track.
Option three would be that we just can't get our heads that far up our own arse to see things from his point of view..
1) The disk they give you will be a 'burned' disk vs a 'pressed' disk. It might have a shorter shelf life,
In time this will be overcome, and yes, burnt discs I think would have a shelf life, at the same time, you could just recopy the disc or transfer it to HDD. For average joe, this could be a problem.
At the same time, right now, I can't see VOD having the same catalogue as a big blockbuster or otherwise. Simply because of the complications with last mile.
I can go down the road and get a movie (Truck / station wagon full of media) and be home in 10 mins. I can't download a DVD quality movie in 10 mins (Wish I could but..) so again the problem would be last mile, VOD for cable doesn't support the bandwidth for a large warehouse of video, and ADSL can't support the short time frames in which people would want to watch it (Within 10 mins)
FTTH (Fibre to the Home) would be able to support it, but unless you are one of the lucky ones, FTTH is a long way off for a lot of people.
it is very much standard industry practice for one company to pay another to develop software. If HP needs Linux drivers for their latest CGI-oriented workstations, then they will need to pay NVidia to develop them
That it may be, and there is a theory there as well that NVidia could have developed the drivers for Linux knowing that the CGI market exists. Does anyone have any numbers on how many machines are used for the purpose of CGI?
I don't know, but it could quite well be that one of the studios asked NVidia for the drivers as well, quite possibly with the threat of making it an ATi marketing bonanza if ATi releases a decent linux driver. It's just more likely that NVidia would do it simply because of their size.
At the end of the day though, back room deals happen a lot, and the person who wrote this article seems about as informed on the subject as I am.
How is this article insightful?
on
The SLI Godfather
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I ask you, it's a complete opinion piece, there is no fact in there whatsoever from what I have seen. The only thing that is based in fact is that HP have a certain workstation line, and that they install RHEL on them and that HP is short for Hewlett Packard. I think the people that have these workstations would probably be reformatting them with a standard build anyway.
I don't doubt that some of it might be true, but at the same time, I don't see anything in here that really makes me turn around and go "Wow, HP paid xxxxxxxx for NVidia to write Linux drivers"
From what I have seen previously, the reason that NVidia make the driver available is because it's an easy port. That's why their IP is worth so much. Admittedly this isn't backed up with fact (Or at least a link to a website) either, but a quick google should see you good, right?
Depends on what your discount schedule is I guess..
I know for a fact that it costs me 20% less to buy HP than IBM because of my discount schedule with my reseller. On top of which I also get a great deal on support, 3 year 24x7x6 warranties cost me next to nothing with HP compared with IBM.
If you were able to manage out of a single hosts file before, then you would have been looking after a small organisation.
I find that even up to 1500 hosts, managing IP addresses out of a spreadsheet is fine. The amount of times that admins actually connect machines to networks isn't all that often (with the exception of workstations, but use dynamic DNS for that and don't worry about putting them into a spreadsheet) so the changes are minimal.
Get the solarwinds software if you are running Windows (or find a box to put it on) and in the engineers edition, there is a DNS auditing tool. Run that every now and again to make sure that what's in the spreadsheet and what's in DNS matches up and all is good.
If you are looking above 1500 hosts, then you might need to consider some of the other posts above.
I found in the past as long as your IP allocations are easily managable, and you know what it is that you want to manage, then it's all good.
Not usually but sometimes yes, and usually at the worst possible moment.
Take a look at the above submissions for the worst possible times for people to be saying the wrong thing...
(For all the people who have no idea about bash.org, it's a joke site for future reference. It contains things people have said over messenger and IRC)
I am thinking that with Vista with desktop searching the default search engine will be MSN.
Sorta figures really. Microsoft did it with IE and set the default page to MSN. They didn't get in trouble for that.
So everyone as they start picking up the desktop search stuff will be using that as well for internet searches, if they can get their shit together, there is no reason why they couldn't get a large portion of the market back from the Vista OS base.
If they start feeding part of the data from the desktop search engine back into MSN it will become more powerful in that it can start doing more personalised searches, hopefully making your viewing habits (From search engines) more relevant to you.
The only problem will be whether Google or anyone else gets a look in, or whether the user will be locked into the MS desktop search. If this is the case, then I think MS could well have another case on their hands. The problem with anti-trust cases in this instance is that after the product is shipped the damage is already done (Cutting off air supply anyone?)
You can output a DVD through 1080i outputs, but at the same time, the DVD only has so much information in it. The HD-DVD / Blu Ray disc has double or triple the amount of information in it. Yes, sound and video output will be a LOT better.
Just by outputing it over a higher quality signal doesn't make it a higher quality image.
Agreed, having consulted in this role before. I have found that this is very very true.
Most of the Sysadmins I was Sysadminning for were sysadmins for other organisations, not ours. They did remote support and on-site support. So essentially there was a break between external and internal. I was an internal sysadmin for a bunch of external sysadmins. (Remember what they say about the mechanic's car?)
The role which I was doing was partly an enforcement role (The organisation I was consulting to had many parts, and one of these parts got taken offline for a day when one of the external sysadmins came back onto our network with a virus) of anti-virus and updates.
The admins understood this part of the role and sympathised with the position I was in, this made it easier when I had to introduce a couple of policies when it came to connecting their machines back onto the network. Once they understood the logic behind it they were cool.
Aside from that though, I also got together with our Microsoft TAM and started getting information fed down to them, and acted as a go between to help them chase stuff up. This was my choice as it helped to support the rest of them who came into the same problems.
I also managed to provide them with a whole bunch of additional functionality such as mailing lists between them and the other sysadmins in the organisation (Who were looking after internal instead of external) so they had more resources themselves. I also managed to build a really good Citrix environment so that they could access all the internal systems from external, making their lives a lot easier.
I also found that by doing this, I managed to get a whole bunch of tools that I had never heard of from them and relay this information internal, but also managed to give them back a bunch of tools and utilities and got things done for them that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to get as I was able to leverage my position. (The latest and greatest laptops with a couple of gigs of RAM and VMWare anyone? How about 30 servers as test boxes for modelling customer's networks?)
So, the parent is very close if not right on the mark. Don't enforce (Unless you have to) and provide them with something that they find useful. You might find that it can be a very rewarding job.
are MANDATORILY locking out the normal video outputs on the boxes to screw over the people who buy them, No, they are giving the content providers a CHOICE as to whether they want to down res this output to the same standard as DVD or to leave it at HD, a debate that's still going on.
The hardware manufacturers are at the end of the day trying to sell boxes and a format to a bunch of consumers (The studios, and to a lesser extent at the moment, the public). They want their format to win, they know this is going to turn into another VHS vs Betamax war.
Based on this they leave the techical capabilities there to down res the image. What they are saying to the studios at the same time is "Don't bother as you will still be able to stop playback on the box of the pirater of future releases"
That leaves the option for them to do it open, but also with an incentive NOT to do it.
If the box manufacturers take the capability to do that away, then the studios aren't going to go for that format, and all the money that they poured into it is a dead investment.
What will happen in 10 years time however will be another matter, someone could well build a box that won't turn off the analogue outputs. At that stage though, the amount of people who would still be running the older boxes and TVs and REQUIRE this output would be minimal. Probably enough for the studios at that point not to care and to leave it at HD output anyway. At that stage the encryption will probably be broken and numerous keys found to decrypt the content anyway.
From a consumer point of view, unless you have a TV that does HD but doesn't do HDCP or have AVI or HDMI inputs, then that's really the only people that it's going to piss off.
The amount of people who are going HD crazy now in the US and Europe are all buying TVs with HDCP capabilies, and therefore HDMI / DVI inputs, so it's not going to affect them in any way.
Actually, all the boxes that are built around Blu Ray at the moment will output 1080i and 1080p over their Component outputs.
They are saying that it's up to the studios to disable this via the medium if they choose too. The box manufacturers want to stay as far away from this arguement as possible, they don't want the bad blood with the consumers. It could well be that the studios do choose to do this, aside from HDCP, Blu Ray also has the additional feature of being able to black list boxes. Apparently what they are doing is embedding the key of the machine that decoded the stream into the video output. That way the studios can pick up that key out of a ripped copy and then disable that unit for all future releases. Based on this, they don't want to introduce any further copy protection onto the Blu Ray discs such as a more advanced version of CSS encoding or other encryption.
However, a lot of this is up to the studios in how they want to protect their content when it's published. What happens thereafter the box manufacturers don't want to know.
Well that's what I was reading the other day anyway.
Actually the apparently request for the information was because the current administration wants to look at search queries for information regarding porn.
Now I am neutral on the whole "porn on the internet" industry and I see both sides, I personally see it as an abuse of power by the current administration for the purposes of campaigning, essentially to try to get re-elected, and I think that's a complete and utter bullshit reason to get the larger aggregate of information that they would be getting back.
The "noise" quotient of this request could be used for 101 other reason that I don't want to think about, the biggest of these, the stifling of civil liberties.
From a country who prides itself on it's freedom, I think the government even asking for this broad of data was a VERY VERY stupid mistake. I think Google could make this very painful and very public for them.
At the same time, I am going to buy some stock, I won't mortgage my house to do so, but...
I think if Google stay hard on their edge on this one, I think this will become a big case, widely looked upon by the tech industry. Another MS vs DOJ case. In some cases, it's quite worth it to buy stock when it's tanking.
I bought MCI Worldcom stock about 3 hours before they were delisted, one of the best stock moves I have ever made.
Google has widely been known as they cause for the "brain drain" in Silicon Valley right now, and they are going to continue. I am not saying that they are invulnerable to this, but I think they have the coffers to make this difficult for the DOJ.
At the end of the day, whether the government asked for it or not, it doesn't make it right. I personally agree with Google that the government might have the right to suponea this information in some cases, I personally don't agree with this instance of it's use and if I was Brin or someone else in this position I would be telling the government where to go as well.
I will be phoning Merrill Lynch on Monday for them to execute a buy order on my behalf.
Well it was said that there is a glut of IT workers left over from Y2K, A LOT of these people are immigrants. As an aussie, I can safely say that nearly everyone who I worked with on Y2k I wouldn't hire again. The simple fact of the matter is that they suck. They were good in the short term, but they weren't the best people on the face of the earth for IT.
In aus if you are any good you can find work, skilled workers might be taking one or two jobs (In the scheme of things) new people don't find good jobs fast, and it takes good contacts to find good work. Simple as that.
I can also say, in Sydney at the moment, finding really good developers is hard, real hard. If immigrants are coming in with those skills, let them come. Australia was built around immigration, white Australians 250 years ago didn't exist (The dutch on the west coast weren't settled, so they don't count).
From the people who I have spoken to in the past immigrants etc, I wouldn't hire these people either, simply because they didn't have the language skills (They couldn't speak english properly) or otherwise they weren't skilled enough. A lot of Australian companies demand the best of the best, and if the immigrants don't measure up in an IT sense, then maybe the immigrants should have done their homework a bit more before leaving their original country. People who are coming out of University don't seem to have all the skills either, now maybe it's just that I am picky, or maybe the universities aren't teaching what's required, either way, experience still counts for something in my book, and I find that these people who are going for jobs, don't have it or the equivalent level of knowledge.
I have a secondary MX record normally, that holds everything for 24 hours, if I think the outtage is going to last more than 24 hours, I either get another line in (usually a wireless broadband connection) or re-delegate to a webhost that I have in the US.
At the moment, I don't have broadband at home as I just moved. So all mail is sitting in POP3 mailboxes waiting for me to pick up. Generally I have the TTL on my domain to be 1 hour, so I can respond relatively quickly.
I had a 8meg / 512K line here in the UK that lasted me for a little while, I never had an outtage (I take that back, every 3 days I would lose the line for 50 seconds at 2:30am when my provider rebooted DSLAMs or changed circuits etc) that made me actually use my secondary mail host.
I found that a bulk of the mail that I got through my secondary mail exchanger was spam anyway, so I got my secondary doing anti-spam to cut down on the amount of crap that I got (Reduced my overall system load too).
Slashdot Mirror
To the mod who just downgraded my comment.
Admittedly, the start of my post is childish, but so was the grandparent poster.
I asked if there is anything that the slashdot community could do. I was referring to maybe a fund to help him with his legal costs, or otherwise with his hosting charges. Although the article does ask for assistance in getting D-Link's attention, if this doesn't help, maybe there is something else we can do?
How would you feel if this happened to you?
GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!
/. community to help you? Aside from getting this as front page news?
24 Carat pure GOLD!
Just to get back on point for a second here, is there any way for the
Being a sysadmin I have a bit of a clue how frustrating it can be dealing with all this stuff.
Who cares what they were going to pay him? It was less than his costs. It still doesn't solve the issue of what they are going to do about the problem given that they caused it.
Have you ever worked as a sysadmin or worked admin'ing servers at an ISP? Hell, worked on anything big that has something to do with the internet? Your cable / DSL line doesn't count here.
I would take a guess and you just took the bait of a troll. Hook, line, sinker.. Rod, reel and copy of Angler's times...
Either that or the grandparent poster has never looked after an ISP style environment where co-operation between sysadmins makes your lives SOOOOOO much easier. A bit of common courtesy goes a long way to preventing problems down the track.
Option three would be that we just can't get our heads that far up our own arse to see things from his point of view..
Me neither, grandparent poster? What are you on about?
1) The disk they give you will be a 'burned' disk vs a 'pressed' disk. It might have a shorter shelf life,
In time this will be overcome, and yes, burnt discs I think would have a shelf life, at the same time, you could just recopy the disc or transfer it to HDD. For average joe, this could be a problem.
At the same time, right now, I can't see VOD having the same catalogue as a big blockbuster or otherwise. Simply because of the complications with last mile.
I can go down the road and get a movie (Truck / station wagon full of media) and be home in 10 mins. I can't download a DVD quality movie in 10 mins (Wish I could but..) so again the problem would be last mile, VOD for cable doesn't support the bandwidth for a large warehouse of video, and ADSL can't support the short time frames in which people would want to watch it (Within 10 mins)
FTTH (Fibre to the Home) would be able to support it, but unless you are one of the lucky ones, FTTH is a long way off for a lot of people.
MOD PARENT UP!!!
I want to see this happen..
Can anyone come up with a business plan? (No, 1 2 3 Profit! doesn't count)
His parent was an AC, the error was obviously not corrected...
Theoretically, it should have been aborted..
it is very much standard industry practice for one company to pay another to develop software. If HP needs Linux drivers for their latest CGI-oriented workstations, then they will need to pay NVidia to develop them
That it may be, and there is a theory there as well that NVidia could have developed the drivers for Linux knowing that the CGI market exists. Does anyone have any numbers on how many machines are used for the purpose of CGI?
I don't know, but it could quite well be that one of the studios asked NVidia for the drivers as well, quite possibly with the threat of making it an ATi marketing bonanza if ATi releases a decent linux driver. It's just more likely that NVidia would do it simply because of their size.
At the end of the day though, back room deals happen a lot, and the person who wrote this article seems about as informed on the subject as I am.
I ask you, it's a complete opinion piece, there is no fact in there whatsoever from what I have seen. The only thing that is based in fact is that HP have a certain workstation line, and that they install RHEL on them and that HP is short for Hewlett Packard. I think the people that have these workstations would probably be reformatting them with a standard build anyway.
I don't doubt that some of it might be true, but at the same time, I don't see anything in here that really makes me turn around and go "Wow, HP paid xxxxxxxx for NVidia to write Linux drivers"
From what I have seen previously, the reason that NVidia make the driver available is because it's an easy port. That's why their IP is worth so much. Admittedly this isn't backed up with fact (Or at least a link to a website) either, but a quick google should see you good, right?
*sigh*
Depends on what your discount schedule is I guess..
I know for a fact that it costs me 20% less to buy HP than IBM because of my discount schedule with my reseller. On top of which I also get a great deal on support, 3 year 24x7x6 warranties cost me next to nothing with HP compared with IBM.
Is anyone seeing any data coming from the BitTorrent seeds yet? (17:39 GMT)
At the moment, I can't see any peers who have data, and the seeds don't appear to be sending data yet. The amount of seeds is slowly rising though...
If you were able to manage out of a single hosts file before, then you would have been looking after a small organisation.
I find that even up to 1500 hosts, managing IP addresses out of a spreadsheet is fine. The amount of times that admins actually connect machines to networks isn't all that often (with the exception of workstations, but use dynamic DNS for that and don't worry about putting them into a spreadsheet) so the changes are minimal.
Get the solarwinds software if you are running Windows (or find a box to put it on) and in the engineers edition, there is a DNS auditing tool. Run that every now and again to make sure that what's in the spreadsheet and what's in DNS matches up and all is good.
If you are looking above 1500 hosts, then you might need to consider some of the other posts above.
I found in the past as long as your IP allocations are easily managable, and you know what it is that you want to manage, then it's all good.
Berny
What do you think of IRC, is that recorded?
Not usually but sometimes yes, and usually at the worst possible moment.
Take a look at the above submissions for the worst possible times for people to be saying the wrong thing...
(For all the people who have no idea about bash.org, it's a joke site for future reference. It contains things people have said over messenger and IRC)
I am thinking that with Vista with desktop searching the default search engine will be MSN.
Sorta figures really. Microsoft did it with IE and set the default page to MSN. They didn't get in trouble for that.
So everyone as they start picking up the desktop search stuff will be using that as well for internet searches, if they can get their shit together, there is no reason why they couldn't get a large portion of the market back from the Vista OS base.
If they start feeding part of the data from the desktop search engine back into MSN it will become more powerful in that it can start doing more personalised searches, hopefully making your viewing habits (From search engines) more relevant to you.
The only problem will be whether Google or anyone else gets a look in, or whether the user will be locked into the MS desktop search. If this is the case, then I think MS could well have another case on their hands. The problem with anti-trust cases in this instance is that after the product is shipped the damage is already done (Cutting off air supply anyone?)
Berny
Another vote for RT.
It's brilliant, I used it for years and am about to go through and set it up again.
Berny
Garbage in, garbage out.
Yes, HD-DVD or Blu Ray will be that much better.
You can output a DVD through 1080i outputs, but at the same time, the DVD only has so much information in it. The HD-DVD / Blu Ray disc has double or triple the amount of information in it. Yes, sound and video output will be a LOT better.
Just by outputing it over a higher quality signal doesn't make it a higher quality image.
Agreed, having consulted in this role before. I have found that this is very very true.
Most of the Sysadmins I was Sysadminning for were sysadmins for other organisations, not ours. They did remote support and on-site support. So essentially there was a break between external and internal. I was an internal sysadmin for a bunch of external sysadmins. (Remember what they say about the mechanic's car?)
The role which I was doing was partly an enforcement role (The organisation I was consulting to had many parts, and one of these parts got taken offline for a day when one of the external sysadmins came back onto our network with a virus) of anti-virus and updates.
The admins understood this part of the role and sympathised with the position I was in, this made it easier when I had to introduce a couple of policies when it came to connecting their machines back onto the network. Once they understood the logic behind it they were cool.
Aside from that though, I also got together with our Microsoft TAM and started getting information fed down to them, and acted as a go between to help them chase stuff up. This was my choice as it helped to support the rest of them who came into the same problems.
I also managed to provide them with a whole bunch of additional functionality such as mailing lists between them and the other sysadmins in the organisation (Who were looking after internal instead of external) so they had more resources themselves. I also managed to build a really good Citrix environment so that they could access all the internal systems from external, making their lives a lot easier.
I also found that by doing this, I managed to get a whole bunch of tools that I had never heard of from them and relay this information internal, but also managed to give them back a bunch of tools and utilities and got things done for them that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to get as I was able to leverage my position. (The latest and greatest laptops with a couple of gigs of RAM and VMWare anyone? How about 30 servers as test boxes for modelling customer's networks?)
So, the parent is very close if not right on the mark. Don't enforce (Unless you have to) and provide them with something that they find useful. You might find that it can be a very rewarding job.
Berny
are MANDATORILY locking out the normal video outputs on the boxes to screw over the people who buy them,
No, they are giving the content providers a CHOICE as to whether they want to down res this output to the same standard as DVD or to leave it at HD, a debate that's still going on.
The hardware manufacturers are at the end of the day trying to sell boxes and a format to a bunch of consumers (The studios, and to a lesser extent at the moment, the public). They want their format to win, they know this is going to turn into another VHS vs Betamax war.
Based on this they leave the techical capabilities there to down res the image. What they are saying to the studios at the same time is "Don't bother as you will still be able to stop playback on the box of the pirater of future releases"
That leaves the option for them to do it open, but also with an incentive NOT to do it.
If the box manufacturers take the capability to do that away, then the studios aren't going to go for that format, and all the money that they poured into it is a dead investment.
What will happen in 10 years time however will be another matter, someone could well build a box that won't turn off the analogue outputs. At that stage though, the amount of people who would still be running the older boxes and TVs and REQUIRE this output would be minimal. Probably enough for the studios at that point not to care and to leave it at HD output anyway. At that stage the encryption will probably be broken and numerous keys found to decrypt the content anyway.
From a consumer point of view, unless you have a TV that does HD but doesn't do HDCP or have AVI or HDMI inputs, then that's really the only people that it's going to piss off.
The amount of people who are going HD crazy now in the US and Europe are all buying TVs with HDCP capabilies, and therefore HDMI / DVI inputs, so it's not going to affect them in any way.
Actually, all the boxes that are built around Blu Ray at the moment will output 1080i and 1080p over their Component outputs.
They are saying that it's up to the studios to disable this via the medium if they choose too. The box manufacturers want to stay as far away from this arguement as possible, they don't want the bad blood with the consumers. It could well be that the studios do choose to do this, aside from HDCP, Blu Ray also has the additional feature of being able to black list boxes. Apparently what they are doing is embedding the key of the machine that decoded the stream into the video output. That way the studios can pick up that key out of a ripped copy and then disable that unit for all future releases. Based on this, they don't want to introduce any further copy protection onto the Blu Ray discs such as a more advanced version of CSS encoding or other encryption.
However, a lot of this is up to the studios in how they want to protect their content when it's published. What happens thereafter the box manufacturers don't want to know.
Well that's what I was reading the other day anyway.
You knew MCI had huge assets, they weren't going away.
Also the fact that MCI worldcom is such a large part of the infrastructure internet. Government contracts and network and the rest of it...
Gamble that paid off well. That's all. More to the point good luck.
Actually the apparently request for the information was because the current administration wants to look at search queries for information regarding porn.
Now I am neutral on the whole "porn on the internet" industry and I see both sides, I personally see it as an abuse of power by the current administration for the purposes of campaigning, essentially to try to get re-elected, and I think that's a complete and utter bullshit reason to get the larger aggregate of information that they would be getting back.
The "noise" quotient of this request could be used for 101 other reason that I don't want to think about, the biggest of these, the stifling of civil liberties.
From a country who prides itself on it's freedom, I think the government even asking for this broad of data was a VERY VERY stupid mistake. I think Google could make this very painful and very public for them.
Berny
At the same time, I am going to buy some stock, I won't mortgage my house to do so, but...
I think if Google stay hard on their edge on this one, I think this will become a big case, widely looked upon by the tech industry. Another MS vs DOJ case. In some cases, it's quite worth it to buy stock when it's tanking.
I bought MCI Worldcom stock about 3 hours before they were delisted, one of the best stock moves I have ever made.
Google has widely been known as they cause for the "brain drain" in Silicon Valley right now, and they are going to continue. I am not saying that they are invulnerable to this, but I think they have the coffers to make this difficult for the DOJ.
At the end of the day, whether the government asked for it or not, it doesn't make it right. I personally agree with Google that the government might have the right to suponea this information in some cases, I personally don't agree with this instance of it's use and if I was Brin or someone else in this position I would be telling the government where to go as well.
I will be phoning Merrill Lynch on Monday for them to execute a buy order on my behalf.
Berny
Well it was said that there is a glut of IT workers left over from Y2K, A LOT of these people are immigrants. As an aussie, I can safely say that nearly everyone who I worked with on Y2k I wouldn't hire again. The simple fact of the matter is that they suck. They were good in the short term, but they weren't the best people on the face of the earth for IT.
In aus if you are any good you can find work, skilled workers might be taking one or two jobs (In the scheme of things) new people don't find good jobs fast, and it takes good contacts to find good work. Simple as that.
I can also say, in Sydney at the moment, finding really good developers is hard, real hard. If immigrants are coming in with those skills, let them come. Australia was built around immigration, white Australians 250 years ago didn't exist (The dutch on the west coast weren't settled, so they don't count).
From the people who I have spoken to in the past immigrants etc, I wouldn't hire these people either, simply because they didn't have the language skills (They couldn't speak english properly) or otherwise they weren't skilled enough. A lot of Australian companies demand the best of the best, and if the immigrants don't measure up in an IT sense, then maybe the immigrants should have done their homework a bit more before leaving their original country. People who are coming out of University don't seem to have all the skills either, now maybe it's just that I am picky, or maybe the universities aren't teaching what's required, either way, experience still counts for something in my book, and I find that these people who are going for jobs, don't have it or the equivalent level of knowledge.
I have a secondary MX record normally, that holds everything for 24 hours, if I think the outtage is going to last more than 24 hours, I either get another line in (usually a wireless broadband connection) or re-delegate to a webhost that I have in the US.
At the moment, I don't have broadband at home as I just moved. So all mail is sitting in POP3 mailboxes waiting for me to pick up. Generally I have the TTL on my domain to be 1 hour, so I can respond relatively quickly.
I had a 8meg / 512K line here in the UK that lasted me for a little while, I never had an outtage (I take that back, every 3 days I would lose the line for 50 seconds at 2:30am when my provider rebooted DSLAMs or changed circuits etc) that made me actually use my secondary mail host.
I found that a bulk of the mail that I got through my secondary mail exchanger was spam anyway, so I got my secondary doing anti-spam to cut down on the amount of crap that I got (Reduced my overall system load too).