Makes sense. We support about 70,000 users, and the department has around 60 total employees. Networking is rather thinly staffed though, compared to the rest.
I have a hundred sites across a metro area. There are three of us that deal with racking, configuring, and maintaining switches, about 2600 switches in perhaps a thousand IDFs and cabinets. So far it hasn't required a whole lot of hands-on and we trust the desktop techs to handle limited patching when they call-in.
Non-Meraki solutions aren't going anywhere at all. Unfortunately Prime sucks when it comes to anything beyond WAPs.
We have about 2600 managed switches and perhaps 6000 WAPs, and Prime just bogs, regardless of how much hardware we throw at it. It's so bad that I'm about ready to try to take the switches out entirely and figure out some other solution for them.
If Meraki would allow one to go either way, either Cisco-hosted management or else locally-hosted management, I would be much more inclined to consider them, but since there is no locally-hosted management option I can't justify them in an enterprise setting.
You don't need smartnet for Catalyst 2960 or 3560 either. You also don't need it for 3850 L3 switches including the 10G models. They all have limited lifetime warranty.
We're looking to replace our ME3600X and 4500X models with 3850 models to get away from smartnet, I can justify it that even keeping three or four on the shelf for immediate-swapout I'll still save us money.
Meraki is a product-line of Cisco's. Saying, "Cisco Meraki," is like saying, "Chevrolet Impala."
"Cloud-managed IT service," is a bit oversimplified but not greatly so for anyone that knows how Meraki products work. Imagine all of your managed switches, routers, WAPs, etc connecting not to your own infrastructure for centralized management, but to Cisco's infrastructure for remote-centralized management. You log in to Cisco's Meraki website and do your config changes there through a GUI instead of SSHing or otherwise consoling-in to a switch locally or using something like Prime running on your own servers.
"Cloud-managed IT service," is also not especially strong marketing-speak when you consider the definition of "cloud" as someone else's server, as we've been using the term for the better part of a decade on Slashdot and elsewhere. Given how many different disparate IT functions Meraki can potentially do, "IT service," as in network infrastructure aspects of IT, is probably the furthest one can nail it down.
Either way though, if you've been paying attention to Cisco's products then you probably have some inkling of what the Meraki product-line does or how it works.
And this is what happens when you entrust your data to someone else's server.
I have exactly one meraki switch that's slated for replacement, I got it very cheap, but had I realized exactly what was entailed in using it I would never have bought it in the first place. I guess I like having entirely local control for my network infrastructure. Even if I can't afford Catalyst, those Linksys-derived SG-series small business switches would probably be better than Meraki if only so that I don't have to pay a subscription just to keep frames forwarding.
Well, for a lot of the population the rise of the smartphone coincides with the rise of heavy Internet usage, and the smartphone allows for ubiquitous access for basically everyone carrying one. This means that people that would not have sat-down at a computer for extended periods of time can still use the Internet and its social aspects, and can thus be part of the effects of this potential constant social-yet-anonymous interaction or even non-anonymous interaction. The smartphone allows it to penetrate further than ever before.
It's not even that, it's the fact that the devices are used for bidirectional communications which changes how personal the information coming in to the user is.
Before, with books, radio, television, even video games, the end-user of the item was both not able to communicate-back in real-time or near-real-time nor terribly likely to experience the negative things that come from from such forms of communications along with a degree of anonymity. Nothing coming back to the user was personal, so the user was not personally ridiculed, or guided, or otherwise personally manipulated.
Some of us got into the game early, with BBSes, Fidonet, Usenet, IRC, Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, etc, but the vast majority of the youth population didn't get into using the Internet for communications or as an extension of their social lives until fairly recently. As such, most kids were not affected by the opinions of anyone except those they actually personally met or knew. As such, stupid childhood crap remained just that, stupid childhood crap. One could obviously bring embarrassment or harassment down upon one's self, but it was usually limited in its effects.
Now, it's possible for stupid kid to mouth-off and suffer at the hands of complete strangers that would never have anything to do with them, or for someone with some weird tastes to suffer vitriol from others that they would never meet in real life, because the Internet as a medium makes that sort of thing possible. Immediately coming to mind are that girl with the Youtube videos whose dad threatened, "Consequences will never be the same," or somesuch stupidity, and the Rebecca Black "Friday" stupidity. The old forums tagline, "Open mouth, insert foot, echo internationally," has actually come to be for this generation.
Smart parents would do well to teach their children about the need for online anonymity, and why breaching it can have some fairly harsh and permanent results.
Also as a fan of the franchise, after what Abrams did to it I didn't bother watching any more Star Trek movies.
There's always been a lot of escapist space-opera. Star Trek usually offered something greater than that, even when using an episodic, rather than a serialized format. Granted, that something-greater isn't for everyone, as there are a lot of people that like the escapist space-opera stuff that don't like Star Trek, but that's OK, they've managed to create well over 500 hours of content and are arguably the most successful science fiction media franchise in history, so clearly there's enough audience for what Star Trek has offered to justify it.
The problem is that if one attempts to change it to make it appeal to even more people then that special-something that built the fanbase in the first place is lost, and I have no doubt that more fans would be lost than would be found in the new format, at least for something that requires as much commitment as a weekly TV series.
TV shows struggle to find the balance between character-interaction/development and the situations that the characters find themselves in. Too much of one or the other and the audience shrugs and tunes in to something else. From what little I've heard about this new series it was going to be far too much on characters and not nearly enough on big-picture situations. Hopefully someone at CBS or whoever manages the franchise will realize that unless they manage to walk a fine line, they're going to end up spending a lot of money producing a show that doesn't build an audience.
I always heard it as, "The Internet: where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents." I think it was making fun of Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, "Where all the men are handsome, all the women are strong, and all the children are above average."
I'm not a part of the Cult of Jobs or the Cult of Apple, but I can acknowledge that Jobs was very good at determining what people would want before most people even realized it, and was technologically savvy enough to know when to attempt to push the product development such that it was viable and could be brought to market. He was also very good with at least evaluating interface design, don't know if that was more of a veto-power sort of thing or if he had a real hand in it, but either way, Apple products under Jobs generally had good design. That hockeypuck mouse on the first iMac stands out as the opposite, and I'm certain that we can find other glaring examples throughout the years, but by and large, both the software interfaces and hardware aesthetics were quite good, and were well liked by the nontechnical buying-public and even by some tech-savvy users.
I don't see how anything in this relates to Uber. Apple is a products company, while ultimately Uber provides a service, and a service that once the phone app portion is concluded is not different enough from competitors' services to stand-out. The CEO of Uber trying to compare himself to Steve Jobs is like comparing Apples and Automobiles. It just doesn't make any sense.
I see a lot of people feeling bad the tech wasn't there. A lot of people feeling bad that people were scammed out of their money. But not a lot of people weeping for the idiots that thought that if they faked it long enough, they would finally be able to deliver.
I got to go to San Jose to see a private Cisco presentation on some upcoming tech they wanted us to buy, and among what we saw was Cisco video-conference tech, including camera systems that were able track who was speaking to point to them, and in multi-camera systems, to use some kind of logic to determine not only who was speaking, but who should have a camera remain trained on them as they were likely to speak next. This was running on the embedded software in the video-conference device, which probably has lower hardware specs than the average PC.
My point is that if you've seen that tech in-action and you've seen quadcopters in-action, it's not exactly a stretch to consider a marriage of the two technologies. The software that Cisco uses to follow the speaker and to train-in on who should have attention paid to them would both serve to inform the flight-control software and the video camera control software, and we've already seen flying demonstrations of quadcopters and other "drones" that perform maneuvers without direct human control, and there are studies on how clusters of autonomous robots could work in-tandem without a lot of communications, so potentially swarms of these things could be made to work. The problem is, all of these things were initially developed by very smart people that spent considerable amounts of time, if not dedicating parts of their lives (friend of mine's PhD several years in the making was on autonomous swarms) and actually integrating all of these technologies is both difficult and requires the cooperation of the entities that own these developments. If those entities don't want to cooperate then even though the tech exists, you still have to develop it yourself, and if you're not one of those PhDs with the knowledge to do it then it's very unlikely that you're going to be successful.
It would be lovely to have a personal, lightweight, safe-to-operate drone that could follow you around and do stuff for you, but those that own the tech to make it happen relatively easily aren't interested, so it's probably not going to happen.
My hatred of "idea people" comes from the dot com era. I met plenty of, "I got this idea for a website. You figure out all the difficulties, do all the work, and I take all the credit. I might give you a small cut of the profits." Even as a fresh-out-of-school kid, I knew these guys were charlatans.
At least those idea-people understood that implementation was beyond them.
One big problem I see now are those that think they are good enough and don't know their own limitations, who get in far over their heads. One expensive example if the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was one of the early greenscreen/CGI movies with live actors. The people behind the movie go in way over their heads and basically had to farm-out something like 90% of the post-production because they had no chance of doing all of the console-work and then rendering all of the CGI needed to make the film work. They had some decent ideas, but they had no idea how large the scale and scope of the undertaking was and obviously their financial backers didn't either. The sad thing about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is that it really wasn't all that good of a film. It wasn't Uwe Boll level, but wasn't John Landis level either despite having a lot of well respected actors in it.
In my humble opinion, the idea may come first, but the technology to build the prototype needs to come second if it's coming from a startup entrepreneur. Once something demonstrable (and I don't mean on-video, I mean live in-person) is available to show how the tech works, then it's time to invest, and that's after the tech-entrepreneur has managed to analyze the timetables it took to get to that proto-prototype phase along with the costs to at least ball-park development time and costs. Large companies might be able to start with an idea and self-fund using their existing revenue stream to pursue the new idea, but for startups that don't have anything proven this is a bad proposition.
Antivirus built-in to Windows, brought to you by the people that make the highly-infectable Windows!
In all seriousness, the biggest logical fault I have with using Microsoft's antivirus tool is that being both the source of the problem and the solution to the problem doesn't make a lot of sense. Without knowing Microsoft's priorities it's difficult to really say how independent their antivirus team is relative to their mainstream products teams, so for all we know they're subject to the same pressures to produce code regardless of quality that the main products teams face. Even if they are independent to an extent, we don't know how corporate culture impacts them such that their mentality might be similar.
Using a third-party product as essentially an audit is probably the right approach, if that third-party product can be trusted. Unfortunately over the years we've seen both paid products and free products devolve to where they should lose our trust. You can't permanently rely on a solution and have to always be ready to change if your previous choice becomes unsuitable.
With that in mind, Kaspersky may have some stuff going for it, but it has some stuff going against it too. Yevgeny Kaspersky seems to be at the top of the game when it comes to security, but since he continues to reside in his home country where there's a history of questionable actions and takeovers by the government that has also been suggested as a state-sponsor of cyberespionage, it's difficult to trust that there won't be government meddling in Kaspersky products or an outright takeover of the the company by the State should the State feel that it's in its best interests to do so. This isn't some random application, this is software that must establish deep integration into the OS to function and also must regularly communicate with company servers to retrieve new information and to update itself. We should be skeptical as to how much we trust any application that requires these kinds of privileges, and the source of the application is important.
This revision ('96) was my first Linux too. Left it ultimately because of a combination of the libc5/glibc2 fiasco and a lack of modern package management system.
If no systemd and if devuan fails I might just have to come back and put up with less package management.
There's often a difference between where the loan originates and the loan servicer. The entity that services the loans buys the debt from the original lender, which gets the original lender out of the loan for a small profit, while the servicer then collects principal and interest for their profit.
Loans may pass through several different servicers throughout their duration. Each time the loan is transferred it is the obligation of the entities in the transaction to properly document that transaction. This is typically easier with loans that are for an item that serves as collateral and has state-issued documentation upon it, like a vehicle or a property, as the act of transferring the loan requires the servicers to file with the state that transaction, but even in cases like that it can get messed up. The problems with subprime real estate and failure to maintain a chain of custody on the documentation is proof of that. When there's no item with a title or deed to serve as a state-mandated bit of ownership documentation though, it's a lot easier to lose track of all of the paperwork that proves who actually owns the loan.
It sounds like the entities that dealt with student loans bought them from the original lenders but didn't bother to properly document the transactions, and then they sold them, and that transaction was not properly documented either. Get too far from the original lender (or find that lender no longer in existence or having destroyed its own records as the completed sale may allow or mandate) and now it's basically impossible to prove anything. If a servicer presses a case in court and then has no documentation then who's to say that they ever owned the loan that they claim they have?
The other problem is the issue that everyone seems to think their idea for a new chat system is something revolutionary when it's just reinventing the wheel.
The Jabber/XMPP project attempted to create a truly universal protocol suite that could be implemented by any service to allow for cross-service communications, but so far the only entity that has a commercial version is Cisco with their Cisco Jabber product, and I'm not sure if it's actually cross-platform or if their XMPP implementation is restricted to other Cisco users. Either way they seem to be heading toward replacing their version of Jabber with Cisco Spark, which may well mean no more XMPP.
I have attempted several times to figure out your statement and each time I run into too many fallacies or other contradictions to derive any functional meaning from it.
An example problem:
Post-modern nonproductive billionaires are essentially the group that the Marxists were most disgusted with. Marxism doesn't care for the centralization of resources to the wealthy even if those wealthy individuals use their fortunes, but is even more disgusted with the consolidation of wealth in the hands of those that simply hoard it. Trotsky and Marxism is therefore essentially incompatible with the state of being a nonproductive billionaire.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes sense. We support about 70,000 users, and the department has around 60 total employees. Networking is rather thinly staffed though, compared to the rest.
I have a hundred sites across a metro area. There are three of us that deal with racking, configuring, and maintaining switches, about 2600 switches in perhaps a thousand IDFs and cabinets. So far it hasn't required a whole lot of hands-on and we trust the desktop techs to handle limited patching when they call-in.
Non-Meraki solutions aren't going anywhere at all. Unfortunately Prime sucks when it comes to anything beyond WAPs.
We have about 2600 managed switches and perhaps 6000 WAPs, and Prime just bogs, regardless of how much hardware we throw at it. It's so bad that I'm about ready to try to take the switches out entirely and figure out some other solution for them.
If Meraki would allow one to go either way, either Cisco-hosted management or else locally-hosted management, I would be much more inclined to consider them, but since there is no locally-hosted management option I can't justify them in an enterprise setting.
You don't need smartnet for Catalyst 2960 or 3560 either. You also don't need it for 3850 L3 switches including the 10G models. They all have limited lifetime warranty.
We're looking to replace our ME3600X and 4500X models with 3850 models to get away from smartnet, I can justify it that even keeping three or four on the shelf for immediate-swapout I'll still save us money.
Meraki is a product-line of Cisco's. Saying, "Cisco Meraki," is like saying, "Chevrolet Impala."
"Cloud-managed IT service," is a bit oversimplified but not greatly so for anyone that knows how Meraki products work. Imagine all of your managed switches, routers, WAPs, etc connecting not to your own infrastructure for centralized management, but to Cisco's infrastructure for remote-centralized management. You log in to Cisco's Meraki website and do your config changes there through a GUI instead of SSHing or otherwise consoling-in to a switch locally or using something like Prime running on your own servers.
"Cloud-managed IT service," is also not especially strong marketing-speak when you consider the definition of "cloud" as someone else's server, as we've been using the term for the better part of a decade on Slashdot and elsewhere. Given how many different disparate IT functions Meraki can potentially do, "IT service," as in network infrastructure aspects of IT, is probably the furthest one can nail it down.
Either way though, if you've been paying attention to Cisco's products then you probably have some inkling of what the Meraki product-line does or how it works.
And this is what happens when you entrust your data to someone else's server.
I have exactly one meraki switch that's slated for replacement, I got it very cheap, but had I realized exactly what was entailed in using it I would never have bought it in the first place. I guess I like having entirely local control for my network infrastructure. Even if I can't afford Catalyst, those Linksys-derived SG-series small business switches would probably be better than Meraki if only so that I don't have to pay a subscription just to keep frames forwarding.
Well, for a lot of the population the rise of the smartphone coincides with the rise of heavy Internet usage, and the smartphone allows for ubiquitous access for basically everyone carrying one. This means that people that would not have sat-down at a computer for extended periods of time can still use the Internet and its social aspects, and can thus be part of the effects of this potential constant social-yet-anonymous interaction or even non-anonymous interaction. The smartphone allows it to penetrate further than ever before.
It's not even that, it's the fact that the devices are used for bidirectional communications which changes how personal the information coming in to the user is.
Before, with books, radio, television, even video games, the end-user of the item was both not able to communicate-back in real-time or near-real-time nor terribly likely to experience the negative things that come from from such forms of communications along with a degree of anonymity. Nothing coming back to the user was personal, so the user was not personally ridiculed, or guided, or otherwise personally manipulated.
Some of us got into the game early, with BBSes, Fidonet, Usenet, IRC, Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, etc, but the vast majority of the youth population didn't get into using the Internet for communications or as an extension of their social lives until fairly recently. As such, most kids were not affected by the opinions of anyone except those they actually personally met or knew. As such, stupid childhood crap remained just that, stupid childhood crap. One could obviously bring embarrassment or harassment down upon one's self, but it was usually limited in its effects.
Now, it's possible for stupid kid to mouth-off and suffer at the hands of complete strangers that would never have anything to do with them, or for someone with some weird tastes to suffer vitriol from others that they would never meet in real life, because the Internet as a medium makes that sort of thing possible. Immediately coming to mind are that girl with the Youtube videos whose dad threatened, "Consequences will never be the same," or somesuch stupidity, and the Rebecca Black "Friday" stupidity. The old forums tagline, "Open mouth, insert foot, echo internationally," has actually come to be for this generation.
Smart parents would do well to teach their children about the need for online anonymity, and why breaching it can have some fairly harsh and permanent results.
Sounds like you're envious. Just not green with envy.
Don't talk about Fight Club.
Also as a fan of the franchise, after what Abrams did to it I didn't bother watching any more Star Trek movies.
There's always been a lot of escapist space-opera. Star Trek usually offered something greater than that, even when using an episodic, rather than a serialized format. Granted, that something-greater isn't for everyone, as there are a lot of people that like the escapist space-opera stuff that don't like Star Trek, but that's OK, they've managed to create well over 500 hours of content and are arguably the most successful science fiction media franchise in history, so clearly there's enough audience for what Star Trek has offered to justify it.
The problem is that if one attempts to change it to make it appeal to even more people then that special-something that built the fanbase in the first place is lost, and I have no doubt that more fans would be lost than would be found in the new format, at least for something that requires as much commitment as a weekly TV series.
TV shows struggle to find the balance between character-interaction/development and the situations that the characters find themselves in. Too much of one or the other and the audience shrugs and tunes in to something else. From what little I've heard about this new series it was going to be far too much on characters and not nearly enough on big-picture situations. Hopefully someone at CBS or whoever manages the franchise will realize that unless they manage to walk a fine line, they're going to end up spending a lot of money producing a show that doesn't build an audience.
I always heard it as, "The Internet: where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents." I think it was making fun of Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, "Where all the men are handsome, all the women are strong, and all the children are above average."
I'm not a part of the Cult of Jobs or the Cult of Apple, but I can acknowledge that Jobs was very good at determining what people would want before most people even realized it, and was technologically savvy enough to know when to attempt to push the product development such that it was viable and could be brought to market. He was also very good with at least evaluating interface design, don't know if that was more of a veto-power sort of thing or if he had a real hand in it, but either way, Apple products under Jobs generally had good design. That hockeypuck mouse on the first iMac stands out as the opposite, and I'm certain that we can find other glaring examples throughout the years, but by and large, both the software interfaces and hardware aesthetics were quite good, and were well liked by the nontechnical buying-public and even by some tech-savvy users.
I don't see how anything in this relates to Uber. Apple is a products company, while ultimately Uber provides a service, and a service that once the phone app portion is concluded is not different enough from competitors' services to stand-out. The CEO of Uber trying to compare himself to Steve Jobs is like comparing Apples and Automobiles. It just doesn't make any sense.
Since you can't return "in" a motorcycle in a conventional sense, maybe it was in a sidecar bolted to the motorcycle.
I see a lot of people feeling bad the tech wasn't there. A lot of people feeling bad that people were scammed out of their money. But not a lot of people weeping for the idiots that thought that if they faked it long enough, they would finally be able to deliver.
I got to go to San Jose to see a private Cisco presentation on some upcoming tech they wanted us to buy, and among what we saw was Cisco video-conference tech, including camera systems that were able track who was speaking to point to them, and in multi-camera systems, to use some kind of logic to determine not only who was speaking, but who should have a camera remain trained on them as they were likely to speak next. This was running on the embedded software in the video-conference device, which probably has lower hardware specs than the average PC.
My point is that if you've seen that tech in-action and you've seen quadcopters in-action, it's not exactly a stretch to consider a marriage of the two technologies. The software that Cisco uses to follow the speaker and to train-in on who should have attention paid to them would both serve to inform the flight-control software and the video camera control software, and we've already seen flying demonstrations of quadcopters and other "drones" that perform maneuvers without direct human control, and there are studies on how clusters of autonomous robots could work in-tandem without a lot of communications, so potentially swarms of these things could be made to work. The problem is, all of these things were initially developed by very smart people that spent considerable amounts of time, if not dedicating parts of their lives (friend of mine's PhD several years in the making was on autonomous swarms) and actually integrating all of these technologies is both difficult and requires the cooperation of the entities that own these developments. If those entities don't want to cooperate then even though the tech exists, you still have to develop it yourself, and if you're not one of those PhDs with the knowledge to do it then it's very unlikely that you're going to be successful.
It would be lovely to have a personal, lightweight, safe-to-operate drone that could follow you around and do stuff for you, but those that own the tech to make it happen relatively easily aren't interested, so it's probably not going to happen.
My hatred of "idea people" comes from the dot com era. I met plenty of, "I got this idea for a website. You figure out all the difficulties, do all the work, and I take all the credit. I might give you a small cut of the profits." Even as a fresh-out-of-school kid, I knew these guys were charlatans.
At least those idea-people understood that implementation was beyond them.
One big problem I see now are those that think they are good enough and don't know their own limitations, who get in far over their heads. One expensive example if the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was one of the early greenscreen/CGI movies with live actors. The people behind the movie go in way over their heads and basically had to farm-out something like 90% of the post-production because they had no chance of doing all of the console-work and then rendering all of the CGI needed to make the film work. They had some decent ideas, but they had no idea how large the scale and scope of the undertaking was and obviously their financial backers didn't either. The sad thing about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is that it really wasn't all that good of a film. It wasn't Uwe Boll level, but wasn't John Landis level either despite having a lot of well respected actors in it.
In my humble opinion, the idea may come first, but the technology to build the prototype needs to come second if it's coming from a startup entrepreneur. Once something demonstrable (and I don't mean on-video, I mean live in-person) is available to show how the tech works, then it's time to invest, and that's after the tech-entrepreneur has managed to analyze the timetables it took to get to that proto-prototype phase along with the costs to at least ball-park development time and costs. Large companies might be able to start with an idea and self-fund using their existing revenue stream to pursue the new idea, but for startups that don't have anything proven this is a bad proposition.
Antivirus built-in to Windows, brought to you by the people that make the highly-infectable Windows!
In all seriousness, the biggest logical fault I have with using Microsoft's antivirus tool is that being both the source of the problem and the solution to the problem doesn't make a lot of sense. Without knowing Microsoft's priorities it's difficult to really say how independent their antivirus team is relative to their mainstream products teams, so for all we know they're subject to the same pressures to produce code regardless of quality that the main products teams face. Even if they are independent to an extent, we don't know how corporate culture impacts them such that their mentality might be similar.
Using a third-party product as essentially an audit is probably the right approach, if that third-party product can be trusted. Unfortunately over the years we've seen both paid products and free products devolve to where they should lose our trust. You can't permanently rely on a solution and have to always be ready to change if your previous choice becomes unsuitable.
With that in mind, Kaspersky may have some stuff going for it, but it has some stuff going against it too. Yevgeny Kaspersky seems to be at the top of the game when it comes to security, but since he continues to reside in his home country where there's a history of questionable actions and takeovers by the government that has also been suggested as a state-sponsor of cyberespionage, it's difficult to trust that there won't be government meddling in Kaspersky products or an outright takeover of the the company by the State should the State feel that it's in its best interests to do so. This isn't some random application, this is software that must establish deep integration into the OS to function and also must regularly communicate with company servers to retrieve new information and to update itself. We should be skeptical as to how much we trust any application that requires these kinds of privileges, and the source of the application is important.
This revision ('96) was my first Linux too. Left it ultimately because of a combination of the libc5/glibc2 fiasco and a lack of modern package management system.
If no systemd and if devuan fails I might just have to come back and put up with less package management.
Maybe that's because we didn't have problems with ALSA or sysV or BSD init...
That's not wholly the issue.
There's often a difference between where the loan originates and the loan servicer. The entity that services the loans buys the debt from the original lender, which gets the original lender out of the loan for a small profit, while the servicer then collects principal and interest for their profit.
Loans may pass through several different servicers throughout their duration. Each time the loan is transferred it is the obligation of the entities in the transaction to properly document that transaction. This is typically easier with loans that are for an item that serves as collateral and has state-issued documentation upon it, like a vehicle or a property, as the act of transferring the loan requires the servicers to file with the state that transaction, but even in cases like that it can get messed up. The problems with subprime real estate and failure to maintain a chain of custody on the documentation is proof of that. When there's no item with a title or deed to serve as a state-mandated bit of ownership documentation though, it's a lot easier to lose track of all of the paperwork that proves who actually owns the loan.
It sounds like the entities that dealt with student loans bought them from the original lenders but didn't bother to properly document the transactions, and then they sold them, and that transaction was not properly documented either. Get too far from the original lender (or find that lender no longer in existence or having destroyed its own records as the completed sale may allow or mandate) and now it's basically impossible to prove anything. If a servicer presses a case in court and then has no documentation then who's to say that they ever owned the loan that they claim they have?
And for the 99% of people that don't use TOR?
The other problem is the issue that everyone seems to think their idea for a new chat system is something revolutionary when it's just reinventing the wheel.
The Jabber/XMPP project attempted to create a truly universal protocol suite that could be implemented by any service to allow for cross-service communications, but so far the only entity that has a commercial version is Cisco with their Cisco Jabber product, and I'm not sure if it's actually cross-platform or if their XMPP implementation is restricted to other Cisco users. Either way they seem to be heading toward replacing their version of Jabber with Cisco Spark, which may well mean no more XMPP.
Funny, he apparently missed IRC, at least on a cursory scan, along with UNIX "talk".
I have attempted several times to figure out your statement and each time I run into too many fallacies or other contradictions to derive any functional meaning from it.
An example problem:
Post-modern nonproductive billionaires are essentially the group that the Marxists were most disgusted with. Marxism doesn't care for the centralization of resources to the wealthy even if those wealthy individuals use their fortunes, but is even more disgusted with the consolidation of wealth in the hands of those that simply hoard it. Trotsky and Marxism is therefore essentially incompatible with the state of being a nonproductive billionaire.