While most casual users won't be bothered by this, the more tech savvy or people in the audio visual fields will be concerned.
Tech savvy people in almost any field have been bothered by Microsoft for a long time.
People are funny about how much crap they'll take. They take the big insults, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes for years. Then they'll go off over some silly little thing.
Maybe this is that thing.
I'm continually amazed at how consistently tone deaf MS can be. One blunder after another. You'd think they'd get something right, just by accident.
But my opinion was always if the taxpayers pay for it, the taxpayers own it. Research, patents and discoveries and even software. At a minimum the government should be able to transfer licenses from one branch to another. If your research is that valuable, don't take federal money. A lot of universities are taking federal money for research and then selling those discoveries to companies that sell them back to the taxpayers. It's not always that clean but it just doesn't seem right.
If you don't like the restrictions, don't sell to the government. I love the way so many institutions, lately including banks, are acting like they're doing us a favor taking federal money. And there's always someone who will yap about government wouldn't be able to get access the best software tools. I doubt that. I'm not talking about making anything the government buys open source, just that government can move software licenses around based on need.
Funny a legislator from Michigan would be the tool of the publishing industry. I didn't realize textbooks were big business up there.
They're going to get a visit from the chair throwing monkey dancing CEO in the MS corporate jet. Probably playing Flight of the Valkyries as they swoop in from the south.
And their history of anti-competitive behavior, I'm not sure this is the right case. Now if the case was making hardware makers decouple the hardware and software costs, that might be different. If MS could raise the price of XP in a competitive environment, even if they're competing against their own products, more power to them. The only element that's not right is the one that's been wrong for a long time. MS using it's monopoly position to run the OEM's and leverage their market position to freeze out competition. This case doesn't really get at that. Sounds more like someone whining they can't get XP.
But today there are a lot of good operating system choices. MS isn't the only game in town...as far as you can get past the OEM issue...not even the best game in town. If you could buy a retail copy of Windows from someone like Dell, and that cost was essentially the same as the price quoted on a new PC or laptop, then the market can really decide what the best OS for the money really is. When you don't have a choice, you don't have a market.
Geez, about the only good thing that we could agree upon about Microsoft is that they do some research even though they may not complete the projects.
The issues isn't that they do research, or even that Microsoft spends more than their peers. The issue is MS spends disproportionately more for research and loses market share. Instead of putting that money into creating the best operating system ever put on computers, they spend $7.5 billion and get the Zune.
Rumblings from the stockholders. Now isn't that interesting. Microsoft has been able to keep their earnings up, but so did Enron. Right up to the end.
16 billion in school construction funding was removed, as well as another $3.5 billion for higher education construction.
By all means cut that waste out of the stimulus package. We can't have people going to school and learning things, nothing worthwhile could ever come from that. I've got an idea, let's take that money and give it to the military to spend on some crap hole half-way around the world. That's a much better investment.
...what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?
I can tell you exactly what has them spooked. We have Ubuntu desktops in our office and users get along on them just fine. No massive retraining costs, no one whining they can't get their work done, no software licensing to manage, we can create a custom installation image and drop it on a network drive that comes complete with productivity software, graphics software, web browsing, everything you need. Combine that with corporate Gmail, PHP and MySQL and you have an office that runs just dandy without any Microsoft products or.NET in the mix.
That's what they're afraid of and for good reason. Because running a Ubuntu office is low-cost, low-stress and we can run twice the number of machines per admin we could with Windows. And we don't have to dance on MS's string for product activation, put up with their DRM, pay extra for anti-virus or site licensing. We don't have the virus/trojan of the day suddenly interrupting our day and we're free to focus on productive labor rather than putting so much effort into serving the software and MS.
And my wife, the most potentially destructive computer user anywhere, a person who can trash almost any computer and almost any OS. Always by accident. Ms. I wasn't doing anything and the screen just went black...the hard drive started making a funny noise...it just died...is the screen supposed to be all blue like that? A person who couldn't tell you what a command line was, let alone type anything into one. She gets along just fine on Ubuntu. I haven't had to work on that machine since installing 8.04.
The box says it's an RCA DTA800B1, which I got at Wal-Mart. The TV downstairs, which is connected to the exact same outside antenna, gets three more ranges than the converter will detect. And, of course, there's no way to manually tell the converter box to look at a particular digital channel. If it doesn't scan it, it won't find it. Period.
I got my coupons and converters already, for the two TV's that aren't on satellite. They don't work very well. We lose two of our local stations that look fine in analog, but apparently not enough digital signal to show up in the converter box scan. They'll show up on the digital TV downstairs but not on the DTV converters.
This one just happens to be subscribing large groups by having their ISP pay.
It's a little more serious than that. This is an attempt by content providers to push the cable subscription model on to the internet where ISP's essentially become the cable operators and subscribe to sites before users can access them. Only I don't think it's going to work. Content providers would be cutting their own throats...not that I would mind seeing that happen to some of them. Their traffic would crater and it would open up opportunities for smaller providers to eat into their market.
This is ESPN trying to carve out a lofty niche for themselves and effectively tax everyone on an ISP's system whether they use the site or not. It's a lot cheaper to manage payment from one source than trying to sell to the world at large and the overhead that goes with it. So it's definitely good for ESPN. You...not so much.
Retreats at luxury spas, buying private jets, handing out billions in "retention bonuses" when there are 10's of thousands out of work in the finance industry and the companies are asking for a taxpayer bailout. Then they repay those same taxpayers by trying to hire foreigners to replace them.
It's obvious to everyone outside Wall St. that these people just don't get it. Entitlement has become so entrenched it's a way of life for them.
Microsoft threatening Intel unless they knock off the Linux integration. Now, all of a sudden, Intel is having all kinds of problems with their Linux drivers.
Coincidence or anti-competitive behavior in action?
That was my thought. Seems like it would be easier to frame Windows apps to a Linux client than try to force some bizarre Citrix solution for a Windows client. Then you're paying for Windows and Citrix which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
I'll confess to not knowing how Windows licensing over thin clients works. Do you have to have a Windows license for every seat? Seemingly undermining the value of a thin client solution. Or do you need a license for every connection, like a CAL? Which would be a figure somewhat lower than the total number of clients.
One of us missed something for sure because the article says they were arrested by Indian police in India. And that the auditors were a local subsidiary of PwC, well outside of US jurisdiction.
Enron was an Indian firm. So was Lehmann. How exactly did the US jurisdictions and having the reporting and oversight prevent them from happening ?
That's our problem, now isn't it? One could point to the recent elections and suggest that there is some unhappiness with the regulatory climate on this side of the pond. We'll deal with our own issues. That really wasn't the point.
We outsource some of our development, but they're local companies. If something goes south we can take them to court, but short of that I can drive over to their office and find out for myself what's going on. Not so easy to do if your vendor is in Bangladore, now is it?
I have zero sympathy...and the meter readings to prove it...for companies shipping jobs overseas to save money and getting burned. Too bad, bucko. We can fix our regulatory environment and I frankly don't give a crap what happens in yours.
Maybe stick to managing your own problems, that might be a good start.
Indian police arrested two employees from the affiliate of PricewaterhouseCoopers who audited Satyam Computer Services, the IT outsourcing giant at the center of the nation's largest fraud inquiry.
Let's see, companies ship thousands of jobs to places that don't have the reporting and oversight capabilities we have here (or at least used to have) and are outside the jurisdiction of US courts in order to save a few bucks at the expense of several thousand local employees. They deal with the language barrier, the cost of travel, a culture where bribery can be a way of life, and time zone issues. Then said companies get taken to the cleaners because they can't audit their operations on that side of the world properly.
Hmmmm, let me be the first to say HA-HA! I guess we need new batteries in the sympathy meter because it's showing a big, fat ZERO right now.
It's probably the NSA's traffic cloning and storage system that can't keep up with trying to record all of America's VOIP calls. We're sorry, but this mailbox...United States of America...is full.
If the copy was lawfully made (i.e. with permission of the Copyright holder) then it belongs to the person who owns the piece of paper.
That makes sense, otherwise the whole situation gets mind-bendingly stupid. And then what happens when someone takes notes on a computer? Reaching into my bag and taking my computer without permission would seem to be a lot more serious.
My remedy would be to try and have the teacher charged with theft. Involving an otherwise law-abiding person with the criminal justice system, which imho is almost as bad as trying to retrieve class notes. It's like you have to become stupid to fight stupid...sort of a stupid arms race. All of that effort to stop an otherwise intelligent person from being a massive retard. Which is okay, it's a free country. I always tell my neighbors if they're going to be stupid, do it indoors. Don't put it on public display. Except this teacher was being invasively silly, which requires an equally silly response to get them to wake up to the fact they're being an idiot. That cycle raises the stupid background radiation for all of us, wastes a huge amount of time and effort, generates hard feelings and takes productive effort away from more worthy, non-stupid pursuits. All because there's no objective way to show someone being unreasonable that their behavior is, in fact, silly.
There's a mathematical formula in here somewhere but someone took my notes.
Nah, I was there. There's a ton of crap out there. A lot of it we know about, a lot we still don't. A bunch has been cleaned up but it's a huge expanse of land that's been in use over 60 years. I personally found stuff buried in cabinets in labs that have been in use for decades that scared me. The researchers using that lab at the time had no idea it was there. People come and go out there all the time. Stuff gets left behind, the next person to use that space doesn't have a clue what went on there before and doesn't want to deal with the paperwork to get rid of it. Now apply that to hundreds of square miles of desert dedicated to producing weapons of mass destruction in a hurry. I'll take bizarre radioisotopes for 600, Alex. And the answer was always the daily double. Some of those projects were military, either secret or undocumented or both. And they tended to bury their mistakes.
It's beautiful country, no doubt. And cancer rate in the area population, adjusted for age, is actually lower than the general population. Ambient radiation...depends where you're standing and when you were there. The iodine releases...those were bad but a long time ago. The old A & B reactors might be a museum now, but I don't think you'll ever get the grand tour of the canyon facilities in the 200 Area. There are a lot of doors in those you wouldn't want to open. The K Basins, the rod pools...I wonder if those cases have corroded all the way through yet? I'd be surprised if they got those cleaned up, it was hard to even handle them. There were rooms full of rotting rods.
The real problem with the cleanup is a lack of will to get it done, not necessarily the contractors. I was on a site one day...15 contractors standing around, half of them half-way into protective equipment. I asked why everyone was standing around and they said they had to wait for a mandatory safety lecture but the person giving it was late. 45 minutes later some dude shows up and gives them a five minute pep talk on slip, trip and fall hazards. Cornered him on his way off site and asked if he knew how much money went down the drain because he couldn't get there on time. He was furious. I got a call a couple days later...I won't tell you who from...but they were concerned about hearing that I wasn't a team player. Still not, but that's not here or there. Contractors are what they are and everyone has a lawyer, but the real problem is good old fashioned mismanagement.
In short, you don't know shit. If you live in the Tri-Cities you only know what the PR people tell you. If you're DoE management, you definitely don't have a clue. If you work out there somewhere, you know your little space and that's it. If you're EPA or Ecology you know your projects but not the whole picture. If you do anything classified you don't talk to anyone else and no one knows what you really do. Everything is so compartmentalized, a lot of historical knowledge is long gone, and the Bush administration has been running things out there the last decade. The same people who brought us Katrina and Iraq supervising a hazmat cleanup. ROFL!
Much more. Take a drive out there sometime. Mile after mile of desert. There is construction rubble, old reactors, contaminated pipes and equipment mixed with construction rubble. Even the stuff they know is there is bad. Tanks full of screaming hot radioactive waste that burp flammable gas. Can't stabilize it, can't remove it, and definitely no smoking near it. The cesium pool...no life guard on duty. N Springs, the canyon facilities. And that's just what we know about. There are certainly more finds like this one buried out there. More plutonium, uranium, americium, cesium, thorium, take your pickium there's a container of it buried out there, probably mixed with something toxic, mutagenic, or carcinogenic that's equally scary when it's not radioactive. They were in a hurry, didn't understand the risks, record keeping was...occasional...and what scientists did was not understood by the majority of people working out there and frequently not well regulated.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, it is what it is out there. Just don't be surprised what turns up in a backhoe bucket out at Hanford.
The first time reading that I thought it said employees were being exhorted to "get more with ass." Which I thought was either brutally honest job advice or a complete change of direction in the business plan. Or perhaps some bizarre hybrid. PHP Booty Call.
It's "big news" here when we find a government organisation or a school going with a Linux installation...
We're not a big office but we run on Linux. Primary application servers and most of the desktops. So far it hasn't been any big news outside and not a big deal inside. It was a quiet transition, no user upheaval. The best part is we (the IT department) don't have to spend part of our day handling the crisis/virus/trojan/black screen crisis of the moment. We actually have time to document, plan upgrades, and spend time on development instead of serving the Redmond machine. The stress level comes way down.
You don't realize how much time you spend servicing Microsoft until you get away from them. Not just servicing the machines but the whole ecosystem. It's so complex, you need so many supporting services to keep it running right that the Windows admins I've seen are in a constant state of stress. And I think they like it, even though they tend to complain about how busy they are. Maybe it's job security. Don't know and honestly don't care.
All I know is I can go to a partner integration meeting today knowing everything is working fine and, in the absence of hardware failure or massive internet outage, will stay working. That there won't be a stack of trouble tickets in the queue or bill for some piece of software that does...something...that we need because MS didn't include it in the base server package.
Slashdot Mirror
While most casual users won't be bothered by this, the more tech savvy or people in the audio visual fields will be concerned.
Tech savvy people in almost any field have been bothered by Microsoft for a long time.
People are funny about how much crap they'll take. They take the big insults, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes for years. Then they'll go off over some silly little thing.
Maybe this is that thing.
I'm continually amazed at how consistently tone deaf MS can be. One blunder after another. You'd think they'd get something right, just by accident.
But my opinion was always if the taxpayers pay for it, the taxpayers own it. Research, patents and discoveries and even software. At a minimum the government should be able to transfer licenses from one branch to another. If your research is that valuable, don't take federal money. A lot of universities are taking federal money for research and then selling those discoveries to companies that sell them back to the taxpayers. It's not always that clean but it just doesn't seem right.
If you don't like the restrictions, don't sell to the government. I love the way so many institutions, lately including banks, are acting like they're doing us a favor taking federal money. And there's always someone who will yap about government wouldn't be able to get access the best software tools. I doubt that. I'm not talking about making anything the government buys open source, just that government can move software licenses around based on need.
Funny a legislator from Michigan would be the tool of the publishing industry. I didn't realize textbooks were big business up there.
They're going to get a visit from the chair throwing monkey dancing CEO in the MS corporate jet. Probably playing Flight of the Valkyries as they swoop in from the south.
And their history of anti-competitive behavior, I'm not sure this is the right case. Now if the case was making hardware makers decouple the hardware and software costs, that might be different. If MS could raise the price of XP in a competitive environment, even if they're competing against their own products, more power to them. The only element that's not right is the one that's been wrong for a long time. MS using it's monopoly position to run the OEM's and leverage their market position to freeze out competition. This case doesn't really get at that. Sounds more like someone whining they can't get XP.
But today there are a lot of good operating system choices. MS isn't the only game in town...as far as you can get past the OEM issue...not even the best game in town. If you could buy a retail copy of Windows from someone like Dell, and that cost was essentially the same as the price quoted on a new PC or laptop, then the market can really decide what the best OS for the money really is. When you don't have a choice, you don't have a market.
Humans - The other white meat
free upgrade program, which allows Vista users to switch to Windows 7 when it arrives.
Can't just admit they made a mistake and throw their user base a bone. Why is that so hard? Do the right thing for a change.
Geez, about the only good thing that we could agree upon about Microsoft is that they do some research even though they may not complete the projects.
The issues isn't that they do research, or even that Microsoft spends more than their peers. The issue is MS spends disproportionately more for research and loses market share. Instead of putting that money into creating the best operating system ever put on computers, they spend $7.5 billion and get the Zune.
Rumblings from the stockholders. Now isn't that interesting. Microsoft has been able to keep their earnings up, but so did Enron. Right up to the end.
So I'm not the only one who read that as Budweiser!
Just what I was thinking. Free beer and Euro-babes. Sign me up!
16 billion in school construction funding was removed, as well as another $3.5 billion for higher education construction.
By all means cut that waste out of the stimulus package. We can't have people going to school and learning things, nothing worthwhile could ever come from that. I've got an idea, let's take that money and give it to the military to spend on some crap hole half-way around the world. That's a much better investment.
I can tell you exactly what has them spooked. We have Ubuntu desktops in our office and users get along on them just fine. No massive retraining costs, no one whining they can't get their work done, no software licensing to manage, we can create a custom installation image and drop it on a network drive that comes complete with productivity software, graphics software, web browsing, everything you need. Combine that with corporate Gmail, PHP and MySQL and you have an office that runs just dandy without any Microsoft products or .NET in the mix.
That's what they're afraid of and for good reason. Because running a Ubuntu office is low-cost, low-stress and we can run twice the number of machines per admin we could with Windows. And we don't have to dance on MS's string for product activation, put up with their DRM, pay extra for anti-virus or site licensing. We don't have the virus/trojan of the day suddenly interrupting our day and we're free to focus on productive labor rather than putting so much effort into serving the software and MS.
And my wife, the most potentially destructive computer user anywhere, a person who can trash almost any computer and almost any OS. Always by accident. Ms. I wasn't doing anything and the screen just went black...the hard drive started making a funny noise...it just died...is the screen supposed to be all blue like that? A person who couldn't tell you what a command line was, let alone type anything into one. She gets along just fine on Ubuntu. I haven't had to work on that machine since installing 8.04.
MS should be worried. Ubuntu is a great product.
The box says it's an RCA DTA800B1, which I got at Wal-Mart. The TV downstairs, which is connected to the exact same outside antenna, gets three more ranges than the converter will detect. And, of course, there's no way to manually tell the converter box to look at a particular digital channel. If it doesn't scan it, it won't find it. Period.
I'd definitely look at a different unit.
I got my coupons and converters already, for the two TV's that aren't on satellite. They don't work very well. We lose two of our local stations that look fine in analog, but apparently not enough digital signal to show up in the converter box scan. They'll show up on the digital TV downstairs but not on the DTV converters.
So far I'm not impressed.
This one just happens to be subscribing large groups by having their ISP pay.
It's a little more serious than that. This is an attempt by content providers to push the cable subscription model on to the internet where ISP's essentially become the cable operators and subscribe to sites before users can access them. Only I don't think it's going to work. Content providers would be cutting their own throats...not that I would mind seeing that happen to some of them. Their traffic would crater and it would open up opportunities for smaller providers to eat into their market.
This is ESPN trying to carve out a lofty niche for themselves and effectively tax everyone on an ISP's system whether they use the site or not. It's a lot cheaper to manage payment from one source than trying to sell to the world at large and the overhead that goes with it. So it's definitely good for ESPN. You...not so much.
Retreats at luxury spas, buying private jets, handing out billions in "retention bonuses" when there are 10's of thousands out of work in the finance industry and the companies are asking for a taxpayer bailout. Then they repay those same taxpayers by trying to hire foreigners to replace them.
It's obvious to everyone outside Wall St. that these people just don't get it. Entitlement has become so entrenched it's a way of life for them.
Microsoft threatening Intel unless they knock off the Linux integration. Now, all of a sudden, Intel is having all kinds of problems with their Linux drivers.
Coincidence or anti-competitive behavior in action?
Microsoft.com...this site may harm your computer. Apple.com, symantec.com, wikipedia.
Lucy, you got a lot of 'splainin to do.
That was my thought. Seems like it would be easier to frame Windows apps to a Linux client than try to force some bizarre Citrix solution for a Windows client. Then you're paying for Windows and Citrix which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
I'll confess to not knowing how Windows licensing over thin clients works. Do you have to have a Windows license for every seat? Seemingly undermining the value of a thin client solution. Or do you need a license for every connection, like a CAL? Which would be a figure somewhat lower than the total number of clients.
One of us missed something for sure because the article says they were arrested by Indian police in India. And that the auditors were a local subsidiary of PwC, well outside of US jurisdiction.
Enron was an Indian firm. So was Lehmann. How exactly did the US jurisdictions and having the reporting and oversight prevent them from happening ?
That's our problem, now isn't it? One could point to the recent elections and suggest that there is some unhappiness with the regulatory climate on this side of the pond. We'll deal with our own issues. That really wasn't the point.
We outsource some of our development, but they're local companies. If something goes south we can take them to court, but short of that I can drive over to their office and find out for myself what's going on. Not so easy to do if your vendor is in Bangladore, now is it?
I have zero sympathy...and the meter readings to prove it...for companies shipping jobs overseas to save money and getting burned. Too bad, bucko. We can fix our regulatory environment and I frankly don't give a crap what happens in yours.
Maybe stick to managing your own problems, that might be a good start.
Indian police arrested two employees from the affiliate of PricewaterhouseCoopers who audited Satyam Computer Services, the IT outsourcing giant at the center of the nation's largest fraud inquiry.
Let's see, companies ship thousands of jobs to places that don't have the reporting and oversight capabilities we have here (or at least used to have) and are outside the jurisdiction of US courts in order to save a few bucks at the expense of several thousand local employees. They deal with the language barrier, the cost of travel, a culture where bribery can be a way of life, and time zone issues. Then said companies get taken to the cleaners because they can't audit their operations on that side of the world properly.
Hmmmm, let me be the first to say HA-HA! I guess we need new batteries in the sympathy meter because it's showing a big, fat ZERO right now.
I doubt the problem is up at that level anyways.
It's probably the NSA's traffic cloning and storage system that can't keep up with trying to record all of America's VOIP calls. We're sorry, but this mailbox...United States of America...is full.
If the copy was lawfully made (i.e. with permission of the Copyright holder) then it belongs to the person who owns the piece of paper.
That makes sense, otherwise the whole situation gets mind-bendingly stupid. And then what happens when someone takes notes on a computer? Reaching into my bag and taking my computer without permission would seem to be a lot more serious.
My remedy would be to try and have the teacher charged with theft. Involving an otherwise law-abiding person with the criminal justice system, which imho is almost as bad as trying to retrieve class notes. It's like you have to become stupid to fight stupid...sort of a stupid arms race. All of that effort to stop an otherwise intelligent person from being a massive retard. Which is okay, it's a free country. I always tell my neighbors if they're going to be stupid, do it indoors. Don't put it on public display. Except this teacher was being invasively silly, which requires an equally silly response to get them to wake up to the fact they're being an idiot. That cycle raises the stupid background radiation for all of us, wastes a huge amount of time and effort, generates hard feelings and takes productive effort away from more worthy, non-stupid pursuits. All because there's no objective way to show someone being unreasonable that their behavior is, in fact, silly.
There's a mathematical formula in here somewhere but someone took my notes.
but its hardly the fallout 3 scenario you imply.
Nah, I was there. There's a ton of crap out there. A lot of it we know about, a lot we still don't. A bunch has been cleaned up but it's a huge expanse of land that's been in use over 60 years. I personally found stuff buried in cabinets in labs that have been in use for decades that scared me. The researchers using that lab at the time had no idea it was there. People come and go out there all the time. Stuff gets left behind, the next person to use that space doesn't have a clue what went on there before and doesn't want to deal with the paperwork to get rid of it. Now apply that to hundreds of square miles of desert dedicated to producing weapons of mass destruction in a hurry. I'll take bizarre radioisotopes for 600, Alex. And the answer was always the daily double. Some of those projects were military, either secret or undocumented or both. And they tended to bury their mistakes.
It's beautiful country, no doubt. And cancer rate in the area population, adjusted for age, is actually lower than the general population. Ambient radiation...depends where you're standing and when you were there. The iodine releases...those were bad but a long time ago. The old A & B reactors might be a museum now, but I don't think you'll ever get the grand tour of the canyon facilities in the 200 Area. There are a lot of doors in those you wouldn't want to open. The K Basins, the rod pools...I wonder if those cases have corroded all the way through yet? I'd be surprised if they got those cleaned up, it was hard to even handle them. There were rooms full of rotting rods.
The real problem with the cleanup is a lack of will to get it done, not necessarily the contractors. I was on a site one day...15 contractors standing around, half of them half-way into protective equipment. I asked why everyone was standing around and they said they had to wait for a mandatory safety lecture but the person giving it was late. 45 minutes later some dude shows up and gives them a five minute pep talk on slip, trip and fall hazards. Cornered him on his way off site and asked if he knew how much money went down the drain because he couldn't get there on time. He was furious. I got a call a couple days later...I won't tell you who from...but they were concerned about hearing that I wasn't a team player. Still not, but that's not here or there. Contractors are what they are and everyone has a lawyer, but the real problem is good old fashioned mismanagement.
In short, you don't know shit. If you live in the Tri-Cities you only know what the PR people tell you. If you're DoE management, you definitely don't have a clue. If you work out there somewhere, you know your little space and that's it. If you're EPA or Ecology you know your projects but not the whole picture. If you do anything classified you don't talk to anyone else and no one knows what you really do. Everything is so compartmentalized, a lot of historical knowledge is long gone, and the Bush administration has been running things out there the last decade. The same people who brought us Katrina and Iraq supervising a hazmat cleanup. ROFL!
Much more. Take a drive out there sometime. Mile after mile of desert. There is construction rubble, old reactors, contaminated pipes and equipment mixed with construction rubble. Even the stuff they know is there is bad. Tanks full of screaming hot radioactive waste that burp flammable gas. Can't stabilize it, can't remove it, and definitely no smoking near it. The cesium pool...no life guard on duty. N Springs, the canyon facilities. And that's just what we know about. There are certainly more finds like this one buried out there. More plutonium, uranium, americium, cesium, thorium, take your pickium there's a container of it buried out there, probably mixed with something toxic, mutagenic, or carcinogenic that's equally scary when it's not radioactive. They were in a hurry, didn't understand the risks, record keeping was...occasional...and what scientists did was not understood by the majority of people working out there and frequently not well regulated.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, it is what it is out there. Just don't be surprised what turns up in a backhoe bucket out at Hanford.
The first time reading that I thought it said employees were being exhorted to "get more with ass." Which I thought was either brutally honest job advice or a complete change of direction in the business plan. Or perhaps some bizarre hybrid. PHP Booty Call.
It's "big news" here when we find a government organisation or a school going with a Linux installation...
We're not a big office but we run on Linux. Primary application servers and most of the desktops. So far it hasn't been any big news outside and not a big deal inside. It was a quiet transition, no user upheaval. The best part is we (the IT department) don't have to spend part of our day handling the crisis/virus/trojan/black screen crisis of the moment. We actually have time to document, plan upgrades, and spend time on development instead of serving the Redmond machine. The stress level comes way down.
You don't realize how much time you spend servicing Microsoft until you get away from them. Not just servicing the machines but the whole ecosystem. It's so complex, you need so many supporting services to keep it running right that the Windows admins I've seen are in a constant state of stress. And I think they like it, even though they tend to complain about how busy they are. Maybe it's job security. Don't know and honestly don't care.
All I know is I can go to a partner integration meeting today knowing everything is working fine and, in the absence of hardware failure or massive internet outage, will stay working. That there won't be a stack of trouble tickets in the queue or bill for some piece of software that does...something...that we need because MS didn't include it in the base server package.