The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States.
I wonder if those companies are still getting tax breaks to move jobs overseas?
If partnering up with one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet is all in a days work, how does your personal information on MySpace rate any concern?
Funny it never dawns on a certain segment of our population that one of our major cable news sources is heavily influenced by the Saudis. That would be particularly noticeable, on topics related to climate change.
Apparently the female star sulked throughout the whole production.
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio sulked through almost every production she was ever in. Maybe one of the reasons she's only got 27 entries on her reel and everything since 2004 has been TV and hasn't been in a decent movie since 2000.
Be difficult talent long enough and word gets around. She was pretty hot as Carmen in Color of Money, that was just three years before The Abyss.
But the SCO fiasco is an outright fraud. This has to be one of the most blatant abuses of our legal system I can remember. Why didn't the SEC anal probe McBride and put an end to this charade? You'd think that was part of their job. There were certainly enough complaints filed.
Seems too good to be true. I wonder what the downside is.
Other than the usual impacts of large scale mining, converting methane to CO2 is better than releasing the methane itself. There's at least some research going on to sequester and manage CO2, I'm not sure about methane.
Don't worry until you have had a radiation team doing measurements in your apartment and found out that the levels are near what's considered unhealthy.
Time, distance and shielding are your friends. But that's really immaterial here, the perception is what you have to consider. Not just for yourself but when you want to sell it sometime in the future.
I can go on for hours about why it's safe to live under power lines, but if it's your house, it's not going to sell. I'd take a pass. Not because of the microwaves, but because of the resale issues.
According to Assistant Secretary Larry Strickling, Obama's top official at the Department of Commerce, the US government's policy of leaving the Internet alone is over.
Any time this has happened the past, geeks blaze a trail to another communication medium. While most people were using phones to make phone calls, geeks used it to create a BBS system. Later came the internet, which was a great place until AOL came along. Just seems like when one medium starts becoming crowded and excessively regulated, geeks will find another place.
Maybe self-discovering mesh networks, something over satellite, not sure what's next. But the more crowded and regulated the internet gets, the more the inner geek will start looking around for a less crowded place.
In the months leading up to the February 19 orbital decay over Mongolia, the fall of the rocket stage was followed by amateur satellite trackers.
And what happens when one of these drops on Beijing? Or Vancouver? Or San Francisco? I thought the flight paths were calculated so the boosters dropped in the ocean?
I used to think where they came down was no accident. Now I'm wondering if they're just playing the odds.
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has merely issued a Demand for Information rather than shutting down a plant that is lacking a full compliment of safety personnel
What's bizarre about the whole thing is the level of radiation leaks that started all this trouble weren't even that high, near the level we can measure accurately. There was no need to lie, unless they were trying to cover up something even bigger. They could have owned up to their troubles and fixed most of what was wrong and probably stayed out of trouble.
Now they're screwed. After the NRC proctological exam, they probably will get shut down. Of course, with all the protections the Supreme Court gives artificial corporate people, you can be sure no one will actually be held accountable.
..the ability to demand customer information from Internet or cell phone companies via an administrative subpoena, with no judicial review (text of the HB150).
I don't get it. Isn't Utah the home of a lot of those militant constitutional crusaders? So giving health care coverage to poor people and making people have health insurance to cut out the freeloaders in the health care system is socialism and unconstitutional, but law enforcement reviewing GPS cellphone data and their ISP logs without a warrant is all okay? You want the government out of our lives...unless it's abortion or right to die, then government intervention is okay.
I am a big supporter of nuclear power for environmental and economic reasons and I believe these guys ought to be nailed to the cross over this.
Having worked in the nuclear industry, I understand there's a lot of unreasonable fear about radiation and radioactivity. I also understand that 2.5 million picocuries per liter sounds like a huge amount, but it's closer to a drop of tritium in a swimming pool. That's a very low level of contamination.
Even at that, lying under oath and otherwise being dishonest is not okay. Patient education and being truthful will win over time. Yes, you'll have to sometimes make expensive repairs, which you'll then pass on in the form of rate hikes. That's life in the nuclear business.
...I believe these guys ought to be nailed to the cross
At the time, many large companies were switching to having huge numbers of contractors instead of regular employees.
It's true, there were a lot of companies abusing the private contractor exemptions. Many were doing it blatantly.
But now it's a handicap. There have been many times I could have stayed on with companies as a sub-contractor but they were afraid of getting dinged by the IRS.
We need something in between the wild west days when everyone was a contractor and what we have today. There has to be a better solution.
It would be more surprising if no one thought of make a raft or boat for tens of thousands of years.
It's more than that. If they had boats, they had to have some way to navigate and something resembling charts or maps. You don't just launch a raft and hope to get somewhere. Aiming for an island, even a big island, if you're off by a couple degrees you could miss by a hundred miles.
If this discovery holds up, it's going to overturn a lot of what we think we know about human history. Getting around by sea is more than a hairy frat party on a raft. The ocean is rather effective at eliminating the unprepared and unwary. It means packing tools to make repairs at sea, carrying food and water and something to bail out the boat. Doesn't sound like much until you try it with the technology they had. Then come the questions about what compelled them to make a dangerous journey like that in the first place?
Though SuperFetch is a little less aggressive in Windows 7, it will still use a substantial amount of memory...
If Windows 7 actually uses that much memory it's not scaremongering, it's memory hogging. Whether it's using it on not is a pretty fine distinction, it's still using it just because it can. If something else needs it, Windows has to decide if it wants to let go of it or not.
Still seems like pretty heavy-handed way of allotting memory to me. The original contention seems to be basically intact. Windows 7 is sucking up your system memory to make Windows appear faster.
But where are we going to store the waste? I'm all for nuclear power. It's clean and not nearly as dangerous as a lot of people think, but the waste is a big political deal. No one wants the storage facilities in their back yard.
It could also be, "Leave and we'll kill your family." Or economic threats, or they could have threatened anyone who ever worked in the China offices with arrest and prosecution, they have a lot of ugly tools at their disposal. Probably not, but when you're dealing with a government you don't always know the whole story.
I'm just saying it's a little early to condemn Google before we get more facts.
Office and Windows have been their big profit centers for a long time. The big surprise there is that Office looks like it accounts for slightly more of their overall profit. And it was a surprise to see the margin on the server group. Back in the day I worked in a MSFT shop, it seemed like every day we were shelling out money for some license, another CAL or connector because the one we got didn't cover internet connections during a full moon, the support subscriptions that would regularly see large price increases, a piece of support software that was expiring. It was an every day thing that someone would come in and need money for something. Getting on without Windows servers is a blissful breeze in comparison.
You can argue the merits, but I find OpenOffice and GoogleDocs work for me. At home and the office. When we replaced Office with OpenOffice at the shop there weren't any complaints about the change. We did field a lot of calls about how to do stuff (mail merge), but there wasn't anyone crying for Microsoft leeks and onions. Although we didn't have anyone doing a lot of footnotes, either. If memory serves that's one feature of Word that pays for itself in a research setting.
Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects.
They complain one day about out of control government spending, so when Obama cuts an expensive program that isn't working, they complain about that. Those fiscal conservatives in the Alabama congressional delegation are having a collective heart attack trying to hang on to their pork projects.
Gmail. We set up some shared calendars in Google Apps and offered to set up clients but most people just used the web interface. One person wanted to keep Outlook. No big deal, we had IMAP enabled anyway so we could run backups on the accounts even though we never actually used them, that was a nod to the CEO's paranoia.
With shared calendars and group mailing lists, we didn't really need a groupware solution. Everyone used chat more than anything else. I'd have 3-4 chat windows going all day. Nice thing about Gmail is it treats the chat transcript like an email and those got backed up with the messages.
With gmail, google effectively has access to all your company's email.
Sure they do. So does everyone running an email relay between you and the recipient. Any one of those relay points could easily copy all your email and scan it for business intelligence.
If security is a concern you consider options like password protected attachments or encryption. We set up a Truecrypt container on the file server for the secret stuff and I can only think of one instance we wanted to encrypt anything going by email.
I give Google credit for realizing that getting caught browsing corporate email and docs on their system would be devastating for their enterprise aspirations. As you pointed out, that would be true for any company in the enterprise space. My brother and his wife do data security for one of those three letter agencies and he always reminds me that you have to trust someone. My philosophy is to trust companies that have the most to lose if they get caught being untrustworthy.
It's not perfect but neither are the alternatives. Your ISP can monitor all the traffic that goes across the wire. That worries me more than Google reading my email. I trust AT&T a lot less than Google. But, despite that concern, I'm not prepared to encrypt all our traffic through remote proxies and all the hoops you'd entail trying to hide traffic from your ISP running deep packet inspection. You either have to trust someone or spend a lot of sleepless nights sweating the alternatives.
3. Switched our 5-computer lab for visitors and program members over to linuxmint. It needs no configuration, let alone administration, and its better than the prior windows 2000 by far.
Interesting. We switched out most of our office workstations to Ubuntu with OpenOffice (customer support, help desk, development, and most of the admin seats). Kept one token XP box in the conference room to support those GoToMeeting things, very few of which support Linux. Accounting needed a Windows kiosk for some Windows-only software and outside sales staff wanted to keep their Windows laptops. The one graphics/marketing gal had a Mac. We had few problems with user acceptance, though there was some training involved transitioning from Office to OpenOffice. That was the most difficult part of the whole change.
There were two old Win 2K servers we replaced with CentOS and we scrapped the 2008 servers and SQL server. We rented space on an outsource Windows host to support legacy applications and switched development from.NYET to PHP. We let go two.NET developers and replaced them with one really amazing PHP developer and the entry level developer we hired to replace the Exchange admin. We not only saved the salaries, but the cost of the workstations and VisualStudio.
Be interesting to get more detail on the phone server. Our local provider actually had a pretty good system and the price was right. Google Apps was very popular.
You must be an Exchange admin. There have been three disruptions in two years, only one had any impact on business operations and that was only for a couple hours. Not enough to justify the cost difference.
In the end, it all depends on how you make the calculation. Sure, a switch *could* cost more, but it *could* also cost less depending on the scenario you choose to follow.
Having actually replaced proprietary systems with open source alternatives, I can tell you none of the expense talking points that usually get thrown around by people invested in Microsoft products have ever materialized. There are always minor disruptions, but no worse than moving to the next version of a proprietary product. The license savings have been huge, but it's more than that. You don't realize how often proprietary companies come back and back for another drop of blood until they're gone. It's like Little Shop of IT Horrors. The up front license costs are only one layer of cost savings.
This may not be a great example, but the last company I worked at saved big when we replaced Exchange with Gmail, which I don't consider an open source product. Not only did we scrap Exchange and the associated server OS licenses, we let the Exchange admin go and replaced them with a lower cost developer. That saved a ton of money and we were able to channel that savings into increased productivity. Double bonus. Gmail is simple enough the help desk could manage the administration.
Really, it's all in how you implement the changes. The barrier for most companies is that their IT decisions are being made by people invested in proprietary technology. They'll never get out from under it.
Slashdot Mirror
The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States.
I wonder if those companies are still getting tax breaks to move jobs overseas?
What do you expect from a company that gets a lot of its funding from Saudi Arabia? Murdoch is also investing in Saudi companies owned by the same person.
If partnering up with one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet is all in a days work, how does your personal information on MySpace rate any concern?
Funny it never dawns on a certain segment of our population that one of our major cable news sources is heavily influenced by the Saudis. That would be particularly noticeable, on topics related to climate change.
Apparently the female star sulked throughout the whole production.
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio sulked through almost every production she was ever in. Maybe one of the reasons she's only got 27 entries on her reel and everything since 2004 has been TV and hasn't been in a decent movie since 2000.
Be difficult talent long enough and word gets around. She was pretty hot as Carmen in Color of Money, that was just three years before The Abyss.
But the SCO fiasco is an outright fraud. This has to be one of the most blatant abuses of our legal system I can remember. Why didn't the SEC anal probe McBride and put an end to this charade? You'd think that was part of their job. There were certainly enough complaints filed.
Pathetic this joke of a company is still alive.
Seems too good to be true. I wonder what the downside is.
Other than the usual impacts of large scale mining, converting methane to CO2 is better than releasing the methane itself. There's at least some research going on to sequester and manage CO2, I'm not sure about methane.
Don't worry until you have had a radiation team doing measurements in your apartment and found out that the levels are near what's considered unhealthy.
Time, distance and shielding are your friends. But that's really immaterial here, the perception is what you have to consider. Not just for yourself but when you want to sell it sometime in the future.
I can go on for hours about why it's safe to live under power lines, but if it's your house, it's not going to sell. I'd take a pass. Not because of the microwaves, but because of the resale issues.
According to Assistant Secretary Larry Strickling, Obama's top official at the Department of Commerce, the US government's policy of leaving the Internet alone is over.
Any time this has happened the past, geeks blaze a trail to another communication medium. While most people were using phones to make phone calls, geeks used it to create a BBS system. Later came the internet, which was a great place until AOL came along. Just seems like when one medium starts becoming crowded and excessively regulated, geeks will find another place.
Maybe self-discovering mesh networks, something over satellite, not sure what's next. But the more crowded and regulated the internet gets, the more the inner geek will start looking around for a less crowded place.
In the months leading up to the February 19 orbital decay over Mongolia, the fall of the rocket stage was followed by amateur satellite trackers.
And what happens when one of these drops on Beijing? Or Vancouver? Or San Francisco? I thought the flight paths were calculated so the boosters dropped in the ocean?
I used to think where they came down was no accident. Now I'm wondering if they're just playing the odds.
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has merely issued a Demand for Information rather than shutting down a plant that is lacking a full compliment of safety personnel
What's bizarre about the whole thing is the level of radiation leaks that started all this trouble weren't even that high, near the level we can measure accurately. There was no need to lie, unless they were trying to cover up something even bigger. They could have owned up to their troubles and fixed most of what was wrong and probably stayed out of trouble.
Now they're screwed. After the NRC proctological exam, they probably will get shut down. Of course, with all the protections the Supreme Court gives artificial corporate people, you can be sure no one will actually be held accountable.
I don't get it. Isn't Utah the home of a lot of those militant constitutional crusaders? So giving health care coverage to poor people and making people have health insurance to cut out the freeloaders in the health care system is socialism and unconstitutional, but law enforcement reviewing GPS cellphone data and their ISP logs without a warrant is all okay? You want the government out of our lives...unless it's abortion or right to die, then government intervention is okay.
How do you rationalize positions like that?
I am a big supporter of nuclear power for environmental and economic reasons and I believe these guys ought to be nailed to the cross over this.
Having worked in the nuclear industry, I understand there's a lot of unreasonable fear about radiation and radioactivity. I also understand that 2.5 million picocuries per liter sounds like a huge amount, but it's closer to a drop of tritium in a swimming pool. That's a very low level of contamination.
Even at that, lying under oath and otherwise being dishonest is not okay. Patient education and being truthful will win over time. Yes, you'll have to sometimes make expensive repairs, which you'll then pass on in the form of rate hikes. That's life in the nuclear business.
I'll help pound the nails.
Microsoft issued a news release celebrating the accord, while Amazon declined to comment.
Sometimes which dog is barking tells you a lot about what's going on out in the pasture.
At the time, many large companies were switching to having huge numbers of contractors instead of regular employees.
It's true, there were a lot of companies abusing the private contractor exemptions. Many were doing it blatantly.
But now it's a handicap. There have been many times I could have stayed on with companies as a sub-contractor but they were afraid of getting dinged by the IRS.
We need something in between the wild west days when everyone was a contractor and what we have today. There has to be a better solution.
It would be more surprising if no one thought of make a raft or boat for tens of thousands of years.
It's more than that. If they had boats, they had to have some way to navigate and something resembling charts or maps. You don't just launch a raft and hope to get somewhere. Aiming for an island, even a big island, if you're off by a couple degrees you could miss by a hundred miles.
If this discovery holds up, it's going to overturn a lot of what we think we know about human history. Getting around by sea is more than a hairy frat party on a raft. The ocean is rather effective at eliminating the unprepared and unwary. It means packing tools to make repairs at sea, carrying food and water and something to bail out the boat. Doesn't sound like much until you try it with the technology they had. Then come the questions about what compelled them to make a dangerous journey like that in the first place?
Though SuperFetch is a little less aggressive in Windows 7, it will still use a substantial amount of memory...
If Windows 7 actually uses that much memory it's not scaremongering, it's memory hogging. Whether it's using it on not is a pretty fine distinction, it's still using it just because it can. If something else needs it, Windows has to decide if it wants to let go of it or not.
Still seems like pretty heavy-handed way of allotting memory to me. The original contention seems to be basically intact. Windows 7 is sucking up your system memory to make Windows appear faster.
But where are we going to store the waste? I'm all for nuclear power. It's clean and not nearly as dangerous as a lot of people think, but the waste is a big political deal. No one wants the storage facilities in their back yard.
The genome of a 5,000-year-old man from Greenland has been sequenced from scalp hair remains.
Next they'll be inserting DNA copies into fertilized eggs and spawning a new race of extinct human beings. Welcome to Saqqaq Park.
Obviously not being evil is too expensive.
It could also be, "Leave and we'll kill your family." Or economic threats, or they could have threatened anyone who ever worked in the China offices with arrest and prosecution, they have a lot of ugly tools at their disposal. Probably not, but when you're dealing with a government you don't always know the whole story.
I'm just saying it's a little early to condemn Google before we get more facts.
Office and Windows have been their big profit centers for a long time. The big surprise there is that Office looks like it accounts for slightly more of their overall profit. And it was a surprise to see the margin on the server group. Back in the day I worked in a MSFT shop, it seemed like every day we were shelling out money for some license, another CAL or connector because the one we got didn't cover internet connections during a full moon, the support subscriptions that would regularly see large price increases, a piece of support software that was expiring. It was an every day thing that someone would come in and need money for something. Getting on without Windows servers is a blissful breeze in comparison.
You can argue the merits, but I find OpenOffice and GoogleDocs work for me. At home and the office. When we replaced Office with OpenOffice at the shop there weren't any complaints about the change. We did field a lot of calls about how to do stuff (mail merge), but there wasn't anyone crying for Microsoft leeks and onions. Although we didn't have anyone doing a lot of footnotes, either. If memory serves that's one feature of Word that pays for itself in a research setting.
Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects.
They complain one day about out of control government spending, so when Obama cuts an expensive program that isn't working, they complain about that. Those fiscal conservatives in the Alabama congressional delegation are having a collective heart attack trying to hang on to their pork projects.
Hey Chad, what are you using for email?
Gmail. We set up some shared calendars in Google Apps and offered to set up clients but most people just used the web interface. One person wanted to keep Outlook. No big deal, we had IMAP enabled anyway so we could run backups on the accounts even though we never actually used them, that was a nod to the CEO's paranoia.
With shared calendars and group mailing lists, we didn't really need a groupware solution. Everyone used chat more than anything else. I'd have 3-4 chat windows going all day. Nice thing about Gmail is it treats the chat transcript like an email and those got backed up with the messages.
With gmail, google effectively has access to all your company's email.
Sure they do. So does everyone running an email relay between you and the recipient. Any one of those relay points could easily copy all your email and scan it for business intelligence.
If security is a concern you consider options like password protected attachments or encryption. We set up a Truecrypt container on the file server for the secret stuff and I can only think of one instance we wanted to encrypt anything going by email.
I give Google credit for realizing that getting caught browsing corporate email and docs on their system would be devastating for their enterprise aspirations. As you pointed out, that would be true for any company in the enterprise space. My brother and his wife do data security for one of those three letter agencies and he always reminds me that you have to trust someone. My philosophy is to trust companies that have the most to lose if they get caught being untrustworthy.
It's not perfect but neither are the alternatives. Your ISP can monitor all the traffic that goes across the wire. That worries me more than Google reading my email. I trust AT&T a lot less than Google. But, despite that concern, I'm not prepared to encrypt all our traffic through remote proxies and all the hoops you'd entail trying to hide traffic from your ISP running deep packet inspection. You either have to trust someone or spend a lot of sleepless nights sweating the alternatives.
3. Switched our 5-computer lab for visitors and program members over to linuxmint. It needs no configuration, let alone administration, and its better than the prior windows 2000 by far.
Interesting. We switched out most of our office workstations to Ubuntu with OpenOffice (customer support, help desk, development, and most of the admin seats). Kept one token XP box in the conference room to support those GoToMeeting things, very few of which support Linux. Accounting needed a Windows kiosk for some Windows-only software and outside sales staff wanted to keep their Windows laptops. The one graphics/marketing gal had a Mac. We had few problems with user acceptance, though there was some training involved transitioning from Office to OpenOffice. That was the most difficult part of the whole change.
There were two old Win 2K servers we replaced with CentOS and we scrapped the 2008 servers and SQL server. We rented space on an outsource Windows host to support legacy applications and switched development from .NYET to PHP. We let go two .NET developers and replaced them with one really amazing PHP developer and the entry level developer we hired to replace the Exchange admin. We not only saved the salaries, but the cost of the workstations and VisualStudio.
Be interesting to get more detail on the phone server. Our local provider actually had a pretty good system and the price was right. Google Apps was very popular.
How'd that Gmail outage work for you?
You must be an Exchange admin. There have been three disruptions in two years, only one had any impact on business operations and that was only for a couple hours. Not enough to justify the cost difference.
How's that new cubicle working out for you?
In the end, it all depends on how you make the calculation. Sure, a switch *could* cost more, but it *could* also cost less depending on the scenario you choose to follow.
Having actually replaced proprietary systems with open source alternatives, I can tell you none of the expense talking points that usually get thrown around by people invested in Microsoft products have ever materialized. There are always minor disruptions, but no worse than moving to the next version of a proprietary product. The license savings have been huge, but it's more than that. You don't realize how often proprietary companies come back and back for another drop of blood until they're gone. It's like Little Shop of IT Horrors. The up front license costs are only one layer of cost savings.
This may not be a great example, but the last company I worked at saved big when we replaced Exchange with Gmail, which I don't consider an open source product. Not only did we scrap Exchange and the associated server OS licenses, we let the Exchange admin go and replaced them with a lower cost developer. That saved a ton of money and we were able to channel that savings into increased productivity. Double bonus. Gmail is simple enough the help desk could manage the administration.
Really, it's all in how you implement the changes. The barrier for most companies is that their IT decisions are being made by people invested in proprietary technology. They'll never get out from under it.