[A couple generations ago, kids] went and played outside instead.
It used to be considered safe to let kids walk unaccompanied to a public playground until the moral panic about "stranger danger", AMBER alerts, trumped up charges of child neglect, and such.
Interesting, ours still play outside. No, I don't live in some small town in the boonies either, but in what I'd call suburbia at best in one of the larger metro areas. But I agree that the level of hysteria about a few bad eggs has seriously skewed how children get to play and interact, unless you take active steps to encourage healthy behavior.
In your case, you apparently are dealing with some of the few. It's like trying to change a FOX News addict. They have to come to the realization themselves,you can help, but that's all.
what's the closest substitute for MSNBC's Morning Joe Brewed by Starbucks, MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, ESPN's Monday Night Football, or those NHL games shown on NBC Sports (the station formerly known as OLN)?
Radio?
Seriously, if you're going to list things that are specifically done by cable to lock you into cable, guess what the option is? Yep, that's right - cable.
There's a surprisingly large segment of current cable customers who've never watched any of these shows, or could easily live without them. Once you realize that these "features" are costing you $1K/year or more, it's pretty easy in my case at least to simply say "no". I know quite a few others who feel the same and are in the process of cutting cable as well.
Cable used to be $13 a month plus $5-10 per premium package. Basic cable starts now around $30/month on an intro package, and fees etc rapidly expand that into a $60-100/month package, esp after the intro rate stops, depending upon how many TVs you have, how many DVRs you'd like, HD? Sure, $10 plus $5-10 per additional receiver/DVR, depending upon carrier. Yes, I know there's supposed to be something like a $10/month basic access package, good luck getting it and viewing it on a decent TV or getting the provider to service it if there's a quality problem.
a) it's most likely a pretty old child.
b)perhaps it will focus the child on more important activities.
What the heck did people do before ESPN? Geez. I remember - as kids we listened to radio, or, more commonly, went and played outside instead.
I can always make my own meals by buying ingredients and save a huge amount of money (I eat out a lot), but I can't make my own cable service or cell phone service.
And apparently the cable companies have another successful convert.
There's this whole method of receiving HDTV that has 15 Mbps streams, 5.1 audio, is not subject to "authorization" from a centralized authorization server nor has limits on whether you can record the stream, edit it, or store it that is also free: OTA. For the rest, you can get a Netlfix, Hulu, or Vudu account or use Redbox or BlockBuster, and you're good to go for a fraction of the cost of cable. Cable has kept jacking their prices up to keep their revenues increasing, so they can keep their shareholders happy, which in turn caused content producers to demand a bigger piece of the broadcasting pie, which has turned into a vicious unsustainable price escalation as far as consumers are concerned.
The only way it will stop is when enough consumers cut the cable and bail. If you think it cannot happen, it's already happened with landlines, and cable is already losing subscribers as a whole, there are a few major players at this point, the market's saturated, and the only "growth" a provider can generate is through a combination of cannibalizing another providers subscribers and/or raising rates. Given that people are already bailing on cable, going with OTA and/or streaming options, you'll note that all of a sudden we're facing ridiculously low caps on data per month to the point where even streaming a few Netflix HD movies starts seriously putting you near your cap.
The fees tacked on are minor, and the bundle discounts are gamed to not really be discounts. I supposedly get a bundle discount of $10, but amazingly I get an HD fee of $10 a month. Lose the bundle, lose the fee, and the discount - wind up paying roughly what was expected for internet service.
And speaking of all this, I'm about to chop the cable myself, having reviewed what little I watch is all available via OTA, so bought an OTA network receiver for my DVR services and ready to shut off the cable. Oh, and the entire solution has an ROI of less than 8 months and has the additional benefit of not requiring me to phone home on every show I wish to watch nor be limited in any way of how much or how long I store things, nor control how I fast forward or, gasp, even skip, commercials or if there happens to be a crappy portion of a show. Did you know a football game can actually be viewed in about 30 minutes?
In all of the fights between Windows and Mac users over the disparity in viruses for both platforms, I've never seen a Windows user point out the fact that Windows is often used on infrastructure that is valuable to compromise. No major business runs their corporate infrastructure on Macs. No major sites with valuable data I know of are hosted on Apple hardware.
Really? You must not read a lot of those types of articles, or at least not the same ones I've read. And, while there may be more windows systems in infrastructure than macs, in my experience that windows number is dwarfed by *nix systems.
Secondary note: there still aren't any "viruses" out there. It's pretty much trojans, although the FLASHBACK trojan could almost be called a virus in the way it operated.
What has changed with the marketshare is that now Macs are used by the upper-middle and upper classes extensively at work and at home. So even at 6.5% of the market, you're far more likely now to compromise a Mac with valuable data or access to it now.
Actually, I've been noticing in my particular area that the people with macs tend to be the higher ups in the corporate world, people like project leads and architects, CTOs, CIOs, you know, people with no access whatsoever to any valuable company assets. I started noticing this trend about 5 years ago, and the proliferation has been noticeably accelerating over the past 3 years. I suppose that increases the desirability of compromising macs even more, essentially proving the conclusion if not the methodology.
I didn't gloss over that, I said that Windows backup and restore works very well.
I've had 0 succes with windows backup and restore. (we used 2008 R2 for creating a loadable image - it failed, wound up using a dd clone operation) But that was another story.
Going with a Mac is out too, for several reasons. First is compatibility, since I do graphics work that is intended for specific applications that run on Windows. In this regard, a Mac is not really any more useful to me than a Linux desktop OS would be. The second issue is cost. I am not willing to pay literally double for a Mac that has lower specs across the board than my PC has. The last issue is that vastly more hardware and peripherals are produced and available for Windows PCs than for Macs.
I'm curious - what graphics formats are you using that are windows applications only? I was under the impression that the WMF and like formats were quickly disappearing from common use.
I used to think that Apple was more expensive too. Until I tried to get a matching PC. Depending upon what hardware you're needing, some accessories can seem to be a little more on the surface, but when you actually try to match specs, Apple isn't usually too much more, and in some cases cheaper - the Mac Air is one prime example.
Many essentially require *all* rights signed over, after all, what would have happened if the game took off and he decided to increase profit by self-publishing?
Essentially - all publishers "require" effective ownership be transferred unless you have enough pull to become your own publisher (aka Rowling, and maybe someone like Stephen King) My statement is that this entire concept is a sham that completely undermines the original intent of copyright. (same issues in the music industry, movies not as much since movies are generally no longer made by individuals or small groups of principals)
I'm not sure what your issue is. I certainly didn't contradict myself or lie about anything you said, merely stating that the current situation is a travesty, and that all that's required is a contractual limited grant to copy, despite what the publishers desire,
No, publishers don't need rights transferred to them, nor do they need ownership of any sort. All the need is to be granted the rights required to publish and that can be for a limited timeframe and/or number of copies even. This is how copyright was originally envisioned to work. Creators retained their copyright, and granted generally via contract to a second party, if necessary, the right to copy the work. Just take a look at how things worked even as recently as the late 1800s. Authors did a lot of self-publishing.
You didn't read some of the other postings - where at least one posted that some items were merely redirected from Hulu. Which would make the comparison apples to apples.
So have I, but times have changed since the days when Windows carried the "NT" moniker. The backup and restore functionality that comes with Windows 7 works very well and does not require Windows to be installed in order to restore from a disk image.
I suppose I deserve that. I still think of 2008R2 as an "NT" server.... because it suffers from many of the same core architectural failures that NT did, because it's the same fundamental core. I will also admit that I installed W7 (in a VM) looked at it a few times, and have only used it for IE9 debugging. Restoring the system is as easy as copying the original backup VM for me.
A good GUI based backup software can be easily understood and used without the need to look up anything. I just set my options and let it go at it. I also have peace of mind that they will work correctly with the file systems that I use most (NTFS and exFAT) because they were specifically designed for them.
There's also GUI front ends to at least the asr piece, that make it as simple as 2 or 3 clicks. File systems are irrelevant with these tools. In fact, asr is about as good as it gets since it allows cloning your system while its running and does so very efficiently, because it is fully integrated with the OS.
...People that tend to rely on those pieces of software mentioned generally have never tested the backups personally and blindly rely on them.
For home use, the Windows 7 backup and restore is perfectly fine. For business systems, it's worth it to buy good backup software.
I note you gloss over the piece about people blindly relying on them.
So run it in a VM, unless, of course, you're looking to run the latest specialized graphics cards and playing the latest windows games.
What would be the point? I would spend 99% of my time in the VM and incur a severe performance penalty in the process. I do a lot of graphics editing, video editing and 3D modeling work, all of which utilize the hardware in my PC to its limits. Most of the major pieces of software that I use has no real equivalent for Linux. The smaller applications might have replacements but I'm not going to rework my entire workflow and relearn how to use something else to do the things that I can already do very well.
Very well, you have a suite of software that is specific to Windows and you like it. You disparage Linux for this field, which I won't argue, as I agree that for that use, Linux still has a ways to go. However, Apple has some of the premier software available in these fields between them and Adobe. (While Adobe ran better on Windows with v4-5.0 due to their failure to migrate to Cocoa for those versions, they completed the migration in 5.5.)
People seem to like the idea that "bandwidth is next to free" and the cost is only in the last mile, and for all intents and purposes it has gotten very cheap compared to years gone by but if it were free (or somewhere approaching free) then explain to me how CDNs are a multi-billion dollar a year business, please. Surely it can't be that network operators at the national level are interested in optimizing traffic (in the name of reducing costs) by moving the content closer to the consumer, can it? But but but bandwidth is free! If Akamai were going to earn $1 billion a year from moving data around surely they are doing it by hand-delivering DVDs to consumers thus reducing the last-mile cost! Oh, wait, that's a different company.
First: Akamai: they make lots of money to improve the user experience and lower the resource load on servers, nothing more, nothing less. Having worked at companies that have used Akamai and served 10s of thousands of concurrent users, I can definitely tell you what happens when, say, Akamai goes down at an inconvenient time - load spikes at your datacenter can go up 1000-fold or more, as your servers struggle to serve all those images marketing thought so nifty to include everywhere, resulting in lots of slow page loads, dropped connections, and unhappy customers. The cost of hosting enough hardware to serve the need yourself is far greater than using a service like Akamai, especially since it usually isn't a constant need.
What's the difference in cost of sending one packet across a network vs 1000?
Bandwidth is next to free, as long as you haven't saturated the connection. Once that occurs, the connection will need to be upgraded or otherwise expanded to be able to carry more data. At that point, there's an infrastructure cost. But otherwise, the costs are relatively constant, since the network doesn't shut down merely because no one's using it.
This definitely screams Net Neutrality, and also that networks should belong to the localities in which they reside, as a mere service pipe like any other municipality provided service, especially since those cables were by and large paid for by tax payers in the first place.
And wow - if windows doesn't make you reinstall the OS first, and the upgrades, and the backup/restore software of choice, and its upgrades, before you can start the restore process in most cases.
It doesn't. Boot off of your install disc, choose to repair, point it at your backup image and off it goes.
You know, I've worked on actual NT server systems. We had full backup solutions, tested several, from Veritas et al. ALL of them required a base windows system to recover a server from. The windows backup/restore is a less than 50% crapshoot that is far less reliable than TimeMachine to boot should it happen to "complete". Granted, it's been a few years since I've had the displeasure to deal with this personally and the software could have gotten a little better.
Unless, of course, you went with some real backup software, such as dd and cloned
"Real" backup software is something like Acronis or Paragon, not some unreliable hodge-podge of scripts and a chain of commandline utilities that have a 50/50 chance of actually working.
dd (or, for Apple, asr) are block based copying utilities. They tend to have the extremely difficult format of
<cmd> <source> <target>
and tend to be as reliable as a file copy command. (Yes, there might be one or two options for each, but you can discover which you'd like to use in seconds on Google.)
Now, if you want some 3rd party backup solution, that's fine as well, and recommended naturally for server systems. For your home system, that isn't usually necessary. People that tend to rely on those pieces of software mentioned generally have never tested the backups personally and blindly rely on them.
via Linux. But in that case, why are you running windows as the main OS anyways?
Because Linux does run the software that I use and because I don't want an OS that I have to spend a lot of time coaxing and configuring every time I want to get a new piece of hardware or software working. Windows just works with everything that matters to me.
So run it in a VM, unless, of course, you're looking to run the latest specialized graphics cards and playing the latest windows games.
I also know of H1-Bs that have jumped to other jobs rather than returning home, which seems like a violation of the H1-B program to me.
To the best of my knowledge, any sort of "jumping jobs" requires re-applying for the visa, and going through the same lengthy process as the first time.
I can promise you in the two recent cases I have knowledge of there was no lengthy re-application process filed. Let go in a downsizing on Friday, one was relocated and working at a new site within 2 weeks, the other took 3 weeks and was relocated 1500 miles away.
As for the green-card/citizenship requirements. That's a different topic. Personally, I favor moving back to the pre 1973 immigration laws, in which preference is not merely given to those from nations with hardship or refugee status, but instead to those with valuable skills, with humanitarian asylum considerations as needed.
Whether they are always abused or not is not the point, they are abused on a significant scale. I also know of H1-Bs that have jumped to other jobs rather than returning home, which seems like a violation of the H1-B program to me. Companies with H1-Bs should be required to see that an H1-B that is let go uses a company supplied return ticket, or never be allowed to hire any visa'd worker again. That would stop a lot of problems. In the case of Infosys, they should be banned from working with US companies at all, although that would realistically likely never happen due to the global nature of many US companies.
I think if that were restated as being here on work visas, then there's a whole different point. Of course, you can also point to wonderful upstanding companies like Infosys and know that they aren't the only ones operating in this fashion to quickly deduce that there's something smelly going on in IT that's not occurring in any other industry. Landscaping, food service, and construction generally have issues with undocumented workers, not workers on visas that take US jobs for less than their US counterparts all with a wink wink nod smile from your friendly immigration office.
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[A couple generations ago, kids] went and played outside instead.
It used to be considered safe to let kids walk unaccompanied to a public playground until the moral panic about "stranger danger", AMBER alerts, trumped up charges of child neglect, and such.
Interesting, ours still play outside. No, I don't live in some small town in the boonies either, but in what I'd call suburbia at best in one of the larger metro areas. But I agree that the level of hysteria about a few bad eggs has seriously skewed how children get to play and interact, unless you take active steps to encourage healthy behavior.
In your case, you apparently are dealing with some of the few. It's like trying to change a FOX News addict. They have to come to the realization themselves,you can help, but that's all.
That's hilarious.
Good job of proving my point ;)
But is it a virus?
what's the closest substitute for MSNBC's Morning Joe Brewed by Starbucks, MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, ESPN's Monday Night Football, or those NHL games shown on NBC Sports (the station formerly known as OLN)?
Radio?
Seriously, if you're going to list things that are specifically done by cable to lock you into cable, guess what the option is? Yep, that's right - cable.
There's a surprisingly large segment of current cable customers who've never watched any of these shows, or could easily live without them. Once you realize that these "features" are costing you $1K/year or more, it's pretty easy in my case at least to simply say "no". I know quite a few others who feel the same and are in the process of cutting cable as well.
Cable used to be $13 a month plus $5-10 per premium package. Basic cable starts now around $30/month on an intro package, and fees etc rapidly expand that into a $60-100/month package, esp after the intro rate stops, depending upon how many TVs you have, how many DVRs you'd like, HD? Sure, $10 plus $5-10 per additional receiver/DVR, depending upon carrier. Yes, I know there's supposed to be something like a $10/month basic access package, good luck getting it and viewing it on a decent TV or getting the provider to service it if there's a quality problem.
a) it's most likely a pretty old child.
b)perhaps it will focus the child on more important activities.
What the heck did people do before ESPN? Geez. I remember - as kids we listened to radio, or, more commonly, went and played outside instead.
I don't watch it or go to a pub and have a beer, provided I have the time to watch it in the first place.
I can always make my own meals by buying ingredients and save a huge amount of money (I eat out a lot), but I can't make my own cable service or cell phone service.
And apparently the cable companies have another successful convert.
There's this whole method of receiving HDTV that has 15 Mbps streams, 5.1 audio, is not subject to "authorization" from a centralized authorization server nor has limits on whether you can record the stream, edit it, or store it that is also free: OTA. For the rest, you can get a Netlfix, Hulu, or Vudu account or use Redbox or BlockBuster, and you're good to go for a fraction of the cost of cable. Cable has kept jacking their prices up to keep their revenues increasing, so they can keep their shareholders happy, which in turn caused content producers to demand a bigger piece of the broadcasting pie, which has turned into a vicious unsustainable price escalation as far as consumers are concerned.
The only way it will stop is when enough consumers cut the cable and bail. If you think it cannot happen, it's already happened with landlines, and cable is already losing subscribers as a whole, there are a few major players at this point, the market's saturated, and the only "growth" a provider can generate is through a combination of cannibalizing another providers subscribers and/or raising rates. Given that people are already bailing on cable, going with OTA and/or streaming options, you'll note that all of a sudden we're facing ridiculously low caps on data per month to the point where even streaming a few Netflix HD movies starts seriously putting you near your cap.
The fees tacked on are minor, and the bundle discounts are gamed to not really be discounts. I supposedly get a bundle discount of $10, but amazingly I get an HD fee of $10 a month. Lose the bundle, lose the fee, and the discount - wind up paying roughly what was expected for internet service.
And speaking of all this, I'm about to chop the cable myself, having reviewed what little I watch is all available via OTA, so bought an OTA network receiver for my DVR services and ready to shut off the cable. Oh, and the entire solution has an ROI of less than 8 months and has the additional benefit of not requiring me to phone home on every show I wish to watch nor be limited in any way of how much or how long I store things, nor control how I fast forward or, gasp, even skip, commercials or if there happens to be a crappy portion of a show. Did you know a football game can actually be viewed in about 30 minutes?
It's all just "malware" nowadays, and the lines are blurred to the point of one being indistinguishable from the other.
I merely responded (correctly) that there was a difference.
Back on topic: Flashback is a trojan that morphed to take advantage of an exploit that allowed it to take on virus like capabilities.
Correct - it was a trojan that evolved to utilize an exploit that allowed virus like capabilities.
There is a difference however - Trojans require user interaction. Viruses do not.
In all of the fights between Windows and Mac users over the disparity in viruses for both platforms, I've never seen a Windows user point out the fact that Windows is often used on infrastructure that is valuable to compromise. No major business runs their corporate infrastructure on Macs. No major sites with valuable data I know of are hosted on Apple hardware.
Really? You must not read a lot of those types of articles, or at least not the same ones I've read. And, while there may be more windows systems in infrastructure than macs, in my experience that windows number is dwarfed by *nix systems.
Secondary note: there still aren't any "viruses" out there. It's pretty much trojans, although the FLASHBACK trojan could almost be called a virus in the way it operated.
What has changed with the marketshare is that now Macs are used by the upper-middle and upper classes extensively at work and at home. So even at 6.5% of the market, you're far more likely now to compromise a Mac with valuable data or access to it now.
Actually, I've been noticing in my particular area that the people with macs tend to be the higher ups in the corporate world, people like project leads and architects, CTOs, CIOs, you know, people with no access whatsoever to any valuable company assets. I started noticing this trend about 5 years ago, and the proliferation has been noticeably accelerating over the past 3 years. I suppose that increases the desirability of compromising macs even more, essentially proving the conclusion if not the methodology.
I didn't gloss over that, I said that Windows backup and restore works very well.
I've had 0 succes with windows backup and restore. (we used 2008 R2 for creating a loadable image - it failed, wound up using a dd clone operation) But that was another story.
Going with a Mac is out too, for several reasons. First is compatibility, since I do graphics work that is intended for specific applications that run on Windows. In this regard, a Mac is not really any more useful to me than a Linux desktop OS would be. The second issue is cost. I am not willing to pay literally double for a Mac that has lower specs across the board than my PC has. The last issue is that vastly more hardware and peripherals are produced and available for Windows PCs than for Macs.
I'm curious - what graphics formats are you using that are windows applications only? I was under the impression that the WMF and like formats were quickly disappearing from common use.
I used to think that Apple was more expensive too. Until I tried to get a matching PC. Depending upon what hardware you're needing, some accessories can seem to be a little more on the surface, but when you actually try to match specs, Apple isn't usually too much more, and in some cases cheaper - the Mac Air is one prime example.
Many essentially require *all* rights signed over, after all, what would have happened if the game took off and he decided to increase profit by self-publishing?
Essentially - all publishers "require" effective ownership be transferred unless you have enough pull to become your own publisher (aka Rowling, and maybe someone like Stephen King) My statement is that this entire concept is a sham that completely undermines the original intent of copyright. (same issues in the music industry, movies not as much since movies are generally no longer made by individuals or small groups of principals)
I'm not sure what your issue is. I certainly didn't contradict myself or lie about anything you said, merely stating that the current situation is a travesty, and that all that's required is a contractual limited grant to copy, despite what the publishers desire,
simple - they don't need to own the copyright. A contractual permission is sufficient.
After all, you can fit any curve you want through two points. I'd be more interested what happens after we've had a few hundred strips take place.
I'd like a circle with a radius 1/4 the distance between the two points please.
No, publishers don't need rights transferred to them, nor do they need ownership of any sort. All the need is to be granted the rights required to publish and that can be for a limited timeframe and/or number of copies even. This is how copyright was originally envisioned to work. Creators retained their copyright, and granted generally via contract to a second party, if necessary, the right to copy the work. Just take a look at how things worked even as recently as the late 1800s. Authors did a lot of self-publishing.
You didn't read some of the other postings - where at least one posted that some items were merely redirected from Hulu. Which would make the comparison apples to apples.
So have I, but times have changed since the days when Windows carried the "NT" moniker. The backup and restore functionality that comes with Windows 7 works very well and does not require Windows to be installed in order to restore from a disk image.
I suppose I deserve that. I still think of 2008R2 as an "NT" server.... because it suffers from many of the same core architectural failures that NT did, because it's the same fundamental core. I will also admit that I installed W7 (in a VM) looked at it a few times, and have only used it for IE9 debugging. Restoring the system is as easy as copying the original backup VM for me.
A good GUI based backup software can be easily understood and used without the need to look up anything. I just set my options and let it go at it. I also have peace of mind that they will work correctly with the file systems that I use most (NTFS and exFAT) because they were specifically designed for them.
There's also GUI front ends to at least the asr piece, that make it as simple as 2 or 3 clicks. File systems are irrelevant with these tools. In fact, asr is about as good as it gets since it allows cloning your system while its running and does so very efficiently, because it is fully integrated with the OS.
...People that tend to rely on those pieces of software mentioned generally have never tested the backups personally and blindly rely on them.
For home use, the Windows 7 backup and restore is perfectly fine. For business systems, it's worth it to buy good backup software.
I note you gloss over the piece about people blindly relying on them.
So run it in a VM, unless, of course, you're looking to run the latest specialized graphics cards and playing the latest windows games.
What would be the point? I would spend 99% of my time in the VM and incur a severe performance penalty in the process. I do a lot of graphics editing, video editing and 3D modeling work, all of which utilize the hardware in my PC to its limits. Most of the major pieces of software that I use has no real equivalent for Linux. The smaller applications might have replacements but I'm not going to rework my entire workflow and relearn how to use something else to do the things that I can already do very well.
Very well, you have a suite of software that is specific to Windows and you like it. You disparage Linux for this field, which I won't argue, as I agree that for that use, Linux still has a ways to go. However, Apple has some of the premier software available in these fields between them and Adobe. (While Adobe ran better on Windows with v4-5.0 due to their failure to migrate to Cocoa for those versions, they completed the migration in 5.5.)
People seem to like the idea that "bandwidth is next to free" and the cost is only in the last mile, and for all intents and purposes it has gotten very cheap compared to years gone by but if it were free (or somewhere approaching free) then explain to me how CDNs are a multi-billion dollar a year business, please. Surely it can't be that network operators at the national level are interested in optimizing traffic (in the name of reducing costs) by moving the content closer to the consumer, can it? But but but bandwidth is free! If Akamai were going to earn $1 billion a year from moving data around surely they are doing it by hand-delivering DVDs to consumers thus reducing the last-mile cost! Oh, wait, that's a different company.
First: Akamai: they make lots of money to improve the user experience and lower the resource load on servers, nothing more, nothing less. Having worked at companies that have used Akamai and served 10s of thousands of concurrent users, I can definitely tell you what happens when, say, Akamai goes down at an inconvenient time - load spikes at your datacenter can go up 1000-fold or more, as your servers struggle to serve all those images marketing thought so nifty to include everywhere, resulting in lots of slow page loads, dropped connections, and unhappy customers. The cost of hosting enough hardware to serve the need yourself is far greater than using a service like Akamai, especially since it usually isn't a constant need.
What's the difference in cost of sending one packet across a network vs 1000?
Bandwidth is next to free, as long as you haven't saturated the connection. Once that occurs, the connection will need to be upgraded or otherwise expanded to be able to carry more data. At that point, there's an infrastructure cost. But otherwise, the costs are relatively constant, since the network doesn't shut down merely because no one's using it.
Some posts deserve a higher mod than 5...
This definitely screams Net Neutrality, and also that networks should belong to the localities in which they reside, as a mere service pipe like any other municipality provided service, especially since those cables were by and large paid for by tax payers in the first place.
And wow - if windows doesn't make you reinstall the OS first, and the upgrades, and the backup/restore software of choice, and its upgrades, before you can start the restore process in most cases.
It doesn't. Boot off of your install disc, choose to repair, point it at your backup image and off it goes.
You know, I've worked on actual NT server systems. We had full backup solutions, tested several, from Veritas et al. ALL of them required a base windows system to recover a server from. The windows backup/restore is a less than 50% crapshoot that is far less reliable than TimeMachine to boot should it happen to "complete". Granted, it's been a few years since I've had the displeasure to deal with this personally and the software could have gotten a little better.
Unless, of course, you went with some real backup software, such as dd and cloned
"Real" backup software is something like Acronis or Paragon, not some unreliable hodge-podge of scripts and a chain of commandline utilities that have a 50/50 chance of actually working.
dd (or, for Apple, asr) are block based copying utilities. They tend to have the extremely difficult format of
<cmd> <source> <target>
and tend to be as reliable as a file copy command. (Yes, there might be one or two options for each, but you can discover which you'd like to use in seconds on Google.)
Now, if you want some 3rd party backup solution, that's fine as well, and recommended naturally for server systems. For your home system, that isn't usually necessary. People that tend to rely on those pieces of software mentioned generally have never tested the backups personally and blindly rely on them.
via Linux. But in that case, why are you running windows as the main OS anyways?
Because Linux does run the software that I use and because I don't want an OS that I have to spend a lot of time coaxing and configuring every time I want to get a new piece of hardware or software working. Windows just works with everything that matters to me.
So run it in a VM, unless, of course, you're looking to run the latest specialized graphics cards and playing the latest windows games.
I also know of H1-Bs that have jumped to other jobs rather than returning home, which seems like a violation of the H1-B program to me.
To the best of my knowledge, any sort of "jumping jobs" requires re-applying for the visa, and going through the same lengthy process as the first time.
I can promise you in the two recent cases I have knowledge of there was no lengthy re-application process filed. Let go in a downsizing on Friday, one was relocated and working at a new site within 2 weeks, the other took 3 weeks and was relocated 1500 miles away.
As for the green-card/citizenship requirements. That's a different topic. Personally, I favor moving back to the pre 1973 immigration laws, in which preference is not merely given to those from nations with hardship or refugee status, but instead to those with valuable skills, with humanitarian asylum considerations as needed.
Whether they are always abused or not is not the point, they are abused on a significant scale. I also know of H1-Bs that have jumped to other jobs rather than returning home, which seems like a violation of the H1-B program to me. Companies with H1-Bs should be required to see that an H1-B that is let go uses a company supplied return ticket, or never be allowed to hire any visa'd worker again. That would stop a lot of problems. In the case of Infosys, they should be banned from working with US companies at all, although that would realistically likely never happen due to the global nature of many US companies.
I think if that were restated as being here on work visas, then there's a whole different point. Of course, you can also point to wonderful upstanding companies like Infosys and know that they aren't the only ones operating in this fashion to quickly deduce that there's something smelly going on in IT that's not occurring in any other industry. Landscaping, food service, and construction generally have issues with undocumented workers, not workers on visas that take US jobs for less than their US counterparts all with a wink wink nod smile from your friendly immigration office.