I'm curious what post you were reading before I made no claim that Microsoft was helping the community at large or that they were working to create an open marketplace. That completely came from you totally misinterpreting what I wrote.
I actually said that MSFT lacks the ability to control standards these days due to much increased competition. I personally think this is a good thing as it has resulted in better products for all of us. Windows 7 is a lot better than Windows 98/ME/2000 which was the height of monopoly days for MS.
This is why I run Ubuntu as my desktop OS and have a VM with Windows 7 for all that lovely Windows only BS that server management apps like XenCenter seem to want to require.
So in summary, I don't know what you were reading but it clearly wasn't my post as your tone and questions don't relate to anything I said.
I'm curious, do you wait for a cavity before seeing a dentist?
To be honest, I've never seen someone take this approach with preventative care give that it is touted as the very reason healthcare costs in Japan for instance are such more lower per capita. Your stance makes zero sense and would leave you fired in the IT world as replacing hard drives in servers before they fail is a huge cost savings compared to unplanned downtime which coincidentally is a huge hardship in the medical world as well.
If I start doing something about my high cholesterol because preventative care identifies a risk then I stand a good chance of preventing a heart attack which will cost many tens of thousands of dollars more to deal with which will result in the same course of treatment as before the heart attack.
I may have just fed a troll though, if so, my bad!
That would require neither as HP sells extended life batteries giving you up to 16 hours of battery life. with HD video it should get you a good 10 hours. This is also an accessory for their tablet. I'm sure Lenovo and the others have such options too.
I'll disagree that Apple consistently makes a kick-ass product given how much iTunes sucks ass. Beyond that I think you underestimate the demand for Windows which is still far and wide the most purchased OS on the planet. Apple gets away with it only because their marketshare is low and because their is competition.
All those claims you've made about MSFT are indeed weak as none of them were successful and I might add that Microsoft has not filed any patents claims obstructing Linux. When they file a lawsuit I'll consider your point valid there.
Also, what legal wrangling are you referring to? I know they tried to get their standards into OOXML and of course they failed so again it was a weak attempt for obvious reasons. Again, no lawsuits came of this.
Otherwise you're describing what every commerical software developer does. This is why MXF became a standard in the video editing industry pushed almost entirely by Avid. I'm sorry, but MXF is far worse a file standard and makes MSFT look nice for the standards they were proposing.
MSFT lacks the power to create standards these days so I think you give them too much modern credit and diminish the accomplishments of their competition such as Mozilla for the browser, OpenOffice, the gazillion media players. Microsoft no longer has a monopoly on anything they do. I'd say they have competition which means they will lose ground but of course the market is also expanding so they will lose is slowly as their competitors become successful.
You need only look at the new browser ballet in Europe and subsequent uptake of both Opera and Firefox.
As a side note, I love my Android phone, in the past week two of my friends have ditched their iPhones for various issues. The funniest part is that one is totally non-tech and the ATT store tried to tell him he was on T-Mobile despite the fact that he wasn't. It could get any reception so it was always trying to connect to other networks. This was the reason he was bringing the phone in. Another friend called Apple support and they tried to tell him his phone belonged to someone else despite the fact that he purchased it from an ATT store. Then there's my boss who has had to replace his iPhone three times for bad batteries. I wouldn't call that particularly kick-ass. Of course I have an obvious bias against Apple as I have always seen their approach as evil starting with the days of Appletalk. When MS became evil I learned Linux. Now I support all three, weeeee!!!
While yes there are different licensing restrictions by Ubuntu box certainly does support DRM just like Windows 7. I'll grant its not nearly as widely support but who cares? Seriously? That tired argument needs to go away, the DRM in Windows gives it the ability to play DRM content and without DRM content it doesn't do anything. I have no idea where that bit of fud came from.
I also think there is a very tiny chance that you will ever see a site that says IE 9 only except in Intranet situations where corporations can specify which browser they want to standardize on. With web standards and HTML 5 most of the browser specific add-ons will not be required. As long as your browser is W3C compliant most of the web should be available to you in the coming years.
As for motivations in the FOSS world, that's mostly irrelevant when it comes to the mainstream distros. Most of them have non-free add-ons to make them useful. Ubuntu without Flash and mp3 support would be seriously lame. Same with Mandriva, Fedora, or any of the big guys. Oracle, SUSE, and Red Hat enterprise distros even require current support contracts to receive updates. Since they have to release the source you can always compile them yourself for free but unless you have staff dedicated to this task that is a huge waste of effort. Most people like to make money. Many understand that lock-in is a waste of effort although the strides Apple has made suggests otherwise. Even Microsoft is learning to play nice with others. My Windows and Linux servers have no trouble communicating. Hell, Ubuntu is my main desktop and it works fine even with Exchange.
I think you're confused. Microsoft could not control how people use their products. Obviously Microsoft likes the idea but there is a reason this is really only a problem in the financial industries which move the slowest with technology.
I know it's fun to blame Microsoft but they have only made weak attempts at vendor lockin especially since the antitrust case. As a Sysadmin who runs Windows and Linux servers together happily I'd say there has been a lot of success in the interoperability world. The only machines which consistently provide us with issues are ones produced by that fruity company which refuses to play nice with anybody but themselves.
I'm curious, given that in my immediate family I have one almost 30 year old sister without any health insurance and one 33 year old sister without health insurance you really wan to say that healthcare reform is just about creating more entitlements? I find your stance offensive given that my 33 year old sister has three kids who couldn't get insurance if she was going to be on the policy. So my brother-in-law and the three kids get insurance while her pre-existing thyroid condition keeps her from being covered.
This is unacceptable in every industrialised nation except for these United States of America and you're saying its acceptable how? If my personal story doesn't mean anything I would assume it doesn't given your stance that its about passing debt and selling children into slavery despite all the evidence suggesting that it would actually decrease our national deficit I would at least expect you to realise that there are 30 million plus Americans without coverage and thousands going broke even with coverage due to medical bills.
Congress has failed on every level, Bush couldn't have done anything to hurt this country if congress had actually done their job, the same is happening with Obama now. The bailouts you are so cavalier about are astonishing too. The only problem I saw with the bailouts was that there wasn't enough oversight into how the money was spent but GM going under would have put many 10s of thousands or more out of work at a time when unemployment numbers are already uncomfortably high. Let us not forget that many millions more would have lost their homes. There are lots of consequences had we not bailed them out as disgusting as the whole situation was.
I think you don't quite realise the actual difference between paying for a government granted monopoly or a government run service. If you believe in democracy then the government run service is ideal as you can vote on issues with the service and propose amendments. Those people happy with dial-up because they just check their email are missing out on a world of new abilities that are necessary to keep them competitive with the rest of the world. Is this really something we should want to encourage? That's an honest question and my bias is probably pretty obvious.
The main issue is that we've already given these giant telecoms tons of incentives and tax breaks and outright grants to build infrastructure and they used some of the money but a lot of it went to corporate bonuses and yacht money. Hundreds of billions of dollars was just thrown at them and hundreds of billions were wasted. So they can't currently afford to role out new infrastructure necessary to keep us competitive and neither can our government. What is the right choice here?
Fortunately I live in Arizona where local ISPs have kept up with the times as I have 100meg Internet here at my office due to be upgraded in the next 12 months. At home I have 50meg cable and I routinely get close to those speeds. The solution will probably be to form a government telecom in places like Florida which are ATT strongholds to create proper competition in those markets. ATT is really pissing me off right now as I have to put on a show in FL in a couple weeks and the best Internet I can get there is 3meg DSL?! This government service wouldn't be mandatory and could even run a small profit as long as profits were to be reinvested into telecom infrastructure or grants to get more and more rural communities access.
This would serve as warning for other areas too, poor quality Internet service will be met with new government backed competition. This would do wonders for my area keeping our local ISPs moving forward for fear of a new big pocket competitor. This would also help balance the politics getting involved as political ideology would make the government less competitive although I suppose its possible that some philosophies in some areas will make them more competitive. Either way its a win as more people gain access to almost infinite amounts of information.
The argument is simply that going without adequate battery power to handle transfer switching is asinine and you seem to think that's normal data-center behavior. You would be the only one that thinks that would be properly redundancy and all the data-centers I'm in have battery backed transformers to handle the load while they switch to alternate power.
The most expensive data center I'm in even goes so far as to have an hour of battery time to handle generator failures during a power outage.
ElectricTurtle and Critical Facilities both have comments that mirror my own experience and echo every data center best practice. People without this power are asking for problems. Google tried something against best practice and despite us individually not having more brain power than Google, collectively the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and every other large corporation with many large data centers have come to this conclusion. Many and I'm looking as those lovely Texas data centers keep trying to buck the best practice and surprise surprise, it bites them in the ass.
That said, Google has a great track record so I'm not going to call any of their practices into question, it sounds like the event was mishandled and that's why there was a service outage. Sometimes events are mishandled due to unforeseen circumstances or something didn't have their morning cup of coffee. That's why companies do post-mortems and the fact that Google was so open about it is a good sign that the same situation won't lead to another outage which is what matters given their stellar uptime.
Your Toyota argument completely falls apart because you pay them to build you a car and others pay them to build the exact same car. They retain the right to build the car despite you taking possession of the car your contracted with them to build. Coincidentally it's a great analogy.
So I'm sorry to say, those coders do have rights to keep the code they've produced no matter how badly you seem to not want them to. I'm not a coder, I just work with a few of them and have managed coders from time to time including contracting with coders where corporate counsel and I went over a lot of this. Mileage may vary as different states have wildly different laws. California is far more employee friendly than say Texas.
Where did you pick up that the poster was saying the programmer could refuse to give the company the source code?
The issue at hand is merely whether or not that programmer and re-use techniques developed as part of that job. Querying your database is almost exactly like querying my database, why would the programmer be required to come up with a new method to do this for every job? That would be insane!
Sorry, whoever pays the bills does not hold all the cards. If a specific IP agreement for a specific product was not signed then the programmer retains his/her rights to use that code as they see fit whether they are working for the same employer or a new one. I find it perplexing that companies would hire a programmer with specific skill sets and try to keep all rights to the code. That would mean that the programmer wouldn't progress past that point since they wouldn't be able to reuse the skills they had built up. That a programmer would agree to such a contract which I'm not even sure is legal to begin with is astonishing news to me but I've never met a programmer in my life that was bound under such an agreement and I've worked with a good number of web and old school programmers.
Of course a lot of employers try to pull the non-compete clauses contract BS too which is along the same lines, trying to get you to agree to something that you actually can't sign away because in most states at least it is not legal to deny your right to make a living with any employer.
Or buy two Xirrus units which are all in one turn-key arrays of access points all that will auto-tune for you. They have a 16 access point and an 8 access point versions that would handle this setup without any problem.
Except that more than likely the vast majority of attendees won't have IPv6 enabled on their machines or are running XP or older. IPv6 in XP is crap especially if you're trying to do a 6to4 setup.
The problem with conferences is that you have to accommodate a wide range of equipment. I'd love to just deploy 802.11n at my events except that I've yet to see any vendors or attendees with equipment that supports it. Hell, for a lot of them 802.11b is still the only choice. So I'm left with needing to expand 802.11b/g while at the same time deploying n so that the people paying for wireless can indeed get it reliably. That's why I only offer where I know I can do it properly otherwise we run them a wire for free. Haven't had to do that in a long time as I've made all those rookie mistakes before and I learned from them.
If you make your audience adjust to you expect lots of complaints and refunds!
Except in temporary setups where you don't have specified lengths or you have lots of wildly different lengths. By the time you measure out a run and test a pre-crimped cable you could have already installed the uncrimped cable. This also doesn't mention the fact that pulling cables with ends already on them is quite difficult compared to just straight cat5 or cat6 especially if you're using conduit.
We used to do the whole pre-crimped thing, costs us a lot less money and we can deploy a lot faster just making new cables. We deploy a good 50 miles of cabling for each of our events, that includes fiber as well as cat5. Fiber runs require more care so they still make sense to buy pre-made especially considering that they are more expensive per foot. We buy sufficient strand count fiber so it doesn't take long to string usually since you only have to string one, then copper takes whatever is in range.
Naturally everyone in my department has a set of professional grade crimpers though and a couple black box testing kits. We can setup our entire office consisting of 60 machines in one day with four of us. That used to take us three days having to measure out cables to make sure the run would work because naturally somebody decided to move something so it no longer matches our nice CAD drawings. Now we just simply don't have any issues.
Most of the time we don't even bother to test our cabling because we know how to crimp properly, all of us, so I just plug my netbook into each station and verify its connected to the right VLAN and away we go. I haven't had one not work in years unless wind has thrown a tree against it or something, but of course we still test because that's the last thing you want is for some marketing drone to come in and immediately start complaining they can't connect.
Most people don't realize the harsh realities of temporary setups that hold thousands or in my case tens of thousands of people many of whom love to hop on the network whether to watch our video feed or to surf the net. Course I don't know how many events PyCon has, I have four events that stay up for three to six weeks at a time. Our stuff just works and has survived impressive weather conditions since lots of it is in tents. We owe this to redundant wiring and switching. We've done the math as well and it's not even worth it to retain the cable, you might as well throw in a bin and recycle and use the money to fun an office party.
Or just get 4 LTO4 tapes or 2 LTO5 tapes at ~$70 a pop to achieve the same capacity with no software setups or drives that fail when they are not spun up regularly. Common hard drives are not good long term storage. They are great for online or near-line storage but at some point, bite the bullet and just get a tape drive. Given the datasets are only 3TB a single tape drive is sufficient, at that range you could have two drives backing up identical data and storing the tapes in separate locations. This is much safer. The LTO4/5 drives will recoup their cost after about 4 or 5 clients when compared with solutions such as yours. I have no idea how many clients the poster had though.
Sort of makes me happy when other people have been in similar positions as I. I work for a car auction company, we see throttle stick issues everywhere and few people even seem to know what to do in that situation. The thing I don't understand is why this basic knowledge I personally received in drivers ed is so rare to find in drivers on the road today?
I guess its a testament to the quality of modern cars compared to older cars. People just rely on the fact that it will work and when something goes wrong they have no idea what to do! It amazes me there have been fatalities with this problem as well. Nothing I've heard about this situation wouldn't be solved simply by throwing neutral and turning the car off to prevent extended red-lining and subsequent badness. We had a Camaro out in our parking lot do that, the guy slammed into 7 or 8 vehicles before he threw it into neutral and then blew his engine because he didn't think to shut the car off. That wasn't even fly by wire. I don't understand this fear people have of fly by wire and so far we've seen it has far fewer issues than cables that run through-out begging for something to catch on them and that's if they don't wear and snap. The system will last a lot longer and be much easier to repair. Replacing a simple solid state box is much easier than cables and pulleys strewn through-out the engine compartment.
Besides the fact that it is spelt Camry there is nothing wrong with your list nor the parents. The article was talking about the iPad beating Netbooks with "magic."
As someone who has driven a Porsche and understands all the extra maintenance involved that invariably costs more all the while eating my knees and I see a lot of parallels. There are far more Camrys on the road than there are Porches so you will not see a Porsche beating a Camry in marketshare which is again what the article is talking about.
My netbook is so functional that everyone in my family, the non-technical folks have also bought them. In some cases they also bought another keyboard and mouse, some hook them up to larger sreens but they work well for the vast majority of computing tasks. At work I have my regular laptop which I have to take from event to event, but I also take my netbook for when I'm getting into closets and configuring new gear on the fly. It's very easy to carry around all day with my laptop pretty much just remaining at whatever temporary setup I have.
I think most people agree that the iPad and a typical netbook are not in the same markets for a myriad of reasons others have already stated.
Precisely what France did during the U.S. revolutionary war. Of course that is also what the U.S. did to Iran when it was a democracy. Regime change is a crap shoot, you have to make sure you do it for the right reasons. Contributing the to the fall of a democracy wasn't a good idea for the U.S. and in many ways has led us where we are today. Naturally like in Iraq we end up facing opposing forces with weapons that we sold them. Risky business arms dealing is.
I too have a love of history, don't you enjoy people 350 years later making the same mistakes?
Of course you have tea party folks calling for the return of literacy tests and that's not even considered history for many in this country that were old enough to vote in 1969.
It strikes me as odd that people don't take more stock in history than they do. All these people thinking that because their position is arbitrarily different the lessons from the past don't apply. Spose that's a bit like me trying to pick up hot chicks though. If you didn't try and try again you'd never land one! Hopefully you don't try to same thing over and over though as we all know what that is the definition of.
Many people are complaining about the current state of American health insurance. What is your point? Lock in has always been bad and it always will be. Instead of the environment becoming more open it is becoming more closed. Are you deliberately trying to cloud the issue?
You might notice all the unlicensed cartridge crap went away and that most computers even across platforms are compatible now. Apple moving to x86 was good for the computing world. Of course restrictive DRM reintroduces the problems of the past.
I think you missed the point here. There is no statement about whether or not the iPad will be successful. This is a statement about what is good for consumers as a whole. A locked down user experience with zero privacy or control over your purchased hardware is deemed as a step in the wrong direction. I'm inclined to agree as a Linux user I appreciate choice so long as that choice doesn't restrict you to a particular platform.
Apple is trying to extend the iPhone marketplace into a broader computing space and while consumers may like the simplicity they aren't in a position to realize what they have lost which will ultimate stymie a generation of computer users. Imagine how hard it is to learn to program when you first have to learn how to jail break your device. I'm not saying this is how it will be with the iPad but it seems like a logical extension of current and past actions by Apple.
What makes you think that Sprint didn't expand their backbone? They are one of the largest Tier 1 bandwidth providers in the U.S. and own the majority of long haul fiber.
Most people that bash Sprint and Nextel had it in rural areas or in areas that were fairly new. Sprint's biggest problem has always been that they move slowly so you get new phones only periodically and only periodically they expand coverage. When they do expand coverage they provide proper coverage. Also, if you move to an area that doesn't have coverage they will let you out of your contract.
Besides that Sprint has a tendency to cost a little bit more but over that last two years that has really dramatically improved. For the business side they are still very pricey though, so much so my company switched to AT&T and now we're battling with dropped calls and inconsistent reception. Good fun! Problems we never had with Sprint but we're saving a couple of grand a month on service.
Worth noting, I had my Treo 5 years ago;) Sounds like you're doing better than most iPhone users I've encountered but admittedly, most users I've encountered are new users and so they are still playing around with it a lot.
WinMo phones don't stand out at all. To be honest, Windows doesn't impress people, it just works. I have a Samsung Jack for work, before that it was a MotoQ, and before that it was the Palm Treo 700w, I've had WinMo smart phones for four years now and all of them worked great with email support and all.
People don't buy WinMo to show off tech, they buy it because it had provisioning services and remote wipe competing head to head with RIM in the corporate world. For personal use most people saw no benefit and to be honest, most people probably still don't. WinMo has nothing that I would want for a personal cell device although that is largely the fault of the carriers crippling the OS. It's interface is terribly dated, that will change dramatically with WinMo 7 but at this stage I suspect it's too little too late. With the remarkable progress of Android even over the last year I can't see Microsoft keeping up with that momentum. Even the iPhone is starting to become blah for some. The carriers have stunted the mobile computing industry so I don't necessarily blame Apple for that even though I do love to hate them.
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I'm curious what post you were reading before I made no claim that Microsoft was helping the community at large or that they were working to create an open marketplace. That completely came from you totally misinterpreting what I wrote.
I actually said that MSFT lacks the ability to control standards these days due to much increased competition. I personally think this is a good thing as it has resulted in better products for all of us. Windows 7 is a lot better than Windows 98/ME/2000 which was the height of monopoly days for MS.
This is why I run Ubuntu as my desktop OS and have a VM with Windows 7 for all that lovely Windows only BS that server management apps like XenCenter seem to want to require.
So in summary, I don't know what you were reading but it clearly wasn't my post as your tone and questions don't relate to anything I said.
I'm curious, do you wait for a cavity before seeing a dentist?
To be honest, I've never seen someone take this approach with preventative care give that it is touted as the very reason healthcare costs in Japan for instance are such more lower per capita. Your stance makes zero sense and would leave you fired in the IT world as replacing hard drives in servers before they fail is a huge cost savings compared to unplanned downtime which coincidentally is a huge hardship in the medical world as well.
If I start doing something about my high cholesterol because preventative care identifies a risk then I stand a good chance of preventing a heart attack which will cost many tens of thousands of dollars more to deal with which will result in the same course of treatment as before the heart attack.
I may have just fed a troll though, if so, my bad!
That would require neither as HP sells extended life batteries giving you up to 16 hours of battery life. with HD video it should get you a good 10 hours. This is also an accessory for their tablet. I'm sure Lenovo and the others have such options too.
I'll disagree that Apple consistently makes a kick-ass product given how much iTunes sucks ass. Beyond that I think you underestimate the demand for Windows which is still far and wide the most purchased OS on the planet. Apple gets away with it only because their marketshare is low and because their is competition.
All those claims you've made about MSFT are indeed weak as none of them were successful and I might add that Microsoft has not filed any patents claims obstructing Linux. When they file a lawsuit I'll consider your point valid there.
Also, what legal wrangling are you referring to? I know they tried to get their standards into OOXML and of course they failed so again it was a weak attempt for obvious reasons. Again, no lawsuits came of this.
Otherwise you're describing what every commerical software developer does. This is why MXF became a standard in the video editing industry pushed almost entirely by Avid. I'm sorry, but MXF is far worse a file standard and makes MSFT look nice for the standards they were proposing.
MSFT lacks the power to create standards these days so I think you give them too much modern credit and diminish the accomplishments of their competition such as Mozilla for the browser, OpenOffice, the gazillion media players. Microsoft no longer has a monopoly on anything they do. I'd say they have competition which means they will lose ground but of course the market is also expanding so they will lose is slowly as their competitors become successful.
You need only look at the new browser ballet in Europe and subsequent uptake of both Opera and Firefox.
As a side note, I love my Android phone, in the past week two of my friends have ditched their iPhones for various issues. The funniest part is that one is totally non-tech and the ATT store tried to tell him he was on T-Mobile despite the fact that he wasn't. It could get any reception so it was always trying to connect to other networks. This was the reason he was bringing the phone in. Another friend called Apple support and they tried to tell him his phone belonged to someone else despite the fact that he purchased it from an ATT store. Then there's my boss who has had to replace his iPhone three times for bad batteries. I wouldn't call that particularly kick-ass. Of course I have an obvious bias against Apple as I have always seen their approach as evil starting with the days of Appletalk. When MS became evil I learned Linux. Now I support all three, weeeee!!!
While yes there are different licensing restrictions by Ubuntu box certainly does support DRM just like Windows 7. I'll grant its not nearly as widely support but who cares? Seriously? That tired argument needs to go away, the DRM in Windows gives it the ability to play DRM content and without DRM content it doesn't do anything. I have no idea where that bit of fud came from.
I also think there is a very tiny chance that you will ever see a site that says IE 9 only except in Intranet situations where corporations can specify which browser they want to standardize on. With web standards and HTML 5 most of the browser specific add-ons will not be required. As long as your browser is W3C compliant most of the web should be available to you in the coming years.
As for motivations in the FOSS world, that's mostly irrelevant when it comes to the mainstream distros. Most of them have non-free add-ons to make them useful. Ubuntu without Flash and mp3 support would be seriously lame. Same with Mandriva, Fedora, or any of the big guys. Oracle, SUSE, and Red Hat enterprise distros even require current support contracts to receive updates. Since they have to release the source you can always compile them yourself for free but unless you have staff dedicated to this task that is a huge waste of effort. Most people like to make money. Many understand that lock-in is a waste of effort although the strides Apple has made suggests otherwise. Even Microsoft is learning to play nice with others. My Windows and Linux servers have no trouble communicating. Hell, Ubuntu is my main desktop and it works fine even with Exchange.
I think you're confused. Microsoft could not control how people use their products. Obviously Microsoft likes the idea but there is a reason this is really only a problem in the financial industries which move the slowest with technology.
I know it's fun to blame Microsoft but they have only made weak attempts at vendor lockin especially since the antitrust case. As a Sysadmin who runs Windows and Linux servers together happily I'd say there has been a lot of success in the interoperability world. The only machines which consistently provide us with issues are ones produced by that fruity company which refuses to play nice with anybody but themselves.
XenServer and Virtual Box both do, and they are both free
I'm curious, given that in my immediate family I have one almost 30 year old sister without any health insurance and one 33 year old sister without health insurance you really wan to say that healthcare reform is just about creating more entitlements? I find your stance offensive given that my 33 year old sister has three kids who couldn't get insurance if she was going to be on the policy. So my brother-in-law and the three kids get insurance while her pre-existing thyroid condition keeps her from being covered.
This is unacceptable in every industrialised nation except for these United States of America and you're saying its acceptable how? If my personal story doesn't mean anything I would assume it doesn't given your stance that its about passing debt and selling children into slavery despite all the evidence suggesting that it would actually decrease our national deficit I would at least expect you to realise that there are 30 million plus Americans without coverage and thousands going broke even with coverage due to medical bills.
Congress has failed on every level, Bush couldn't have done anything to hurt this country if congress had actually done their job, the same is happening with Obama now. The bailouts you are so cavalier about are astonishing too. The only problem I saw with the bailouts was that there wasn't enough oversight into how the money was spent but GM going under would have put many 10s of thousands or more out of work at a time when unemployment numbers are already uncomfortably high. Let us not forget that many millions more would have lost their homes. There are lots of consequences had we not bailed them out as disgusting as the whole situation was.
I think you don't quite realise the actual difference between paying for a government granted monopoly or a government run service. If you believe in democracy then the government run service is ideal as you can vote on issues with the service and propose amendments. Those people happy with dial-up because they just check their email are missing out on a world of new abilities that are necessary to keep them competitive with the rest of the world. Is this really something we should want to encourage? That's an honest question and my bias is probably pretty obvious.
The main issue is that we've already given these giant telecoms tons of incentives and tax breaks and outright grants to build infrastructure and they used some of the money but a lot of it went to corporate bonuses and yacht money. Hundreds of billions of dollars was just thrown at them and hundreds of billions were wasted. So they can't currently afford to role out new infrastructure necessary to keep us competitive and neither can our government. What is the right choice here?
Fortunately I live in Arizona where local ISPs have kept up with the times as I have 100meg Internet here at my office due to be upgraded in the next 12 months. At home I have 50meg cable and I routinely get close to those speeds. The solution will probably be to form a government telecom in places like Florida which are ATT strongholds to create proper competition in those markets. ATT is really pissing me off right now as I have to put on a show in FL in a couple weeks and the best Internet I can get there is 3meg DSL?! This government service wouldn't be mandatory and could even run a small profit as long as profits were to be reinvested into telecom infrastructure or grants to get more and more rural communities access.
This would serve as warning for other areas too, poor quality Internet service will be met with new government backed competition. This would do wonders for my area keeping our local ISPs moving forward for fear of a new big pocket competitor. This would also help balance the politics getting involved as political ideology would make the government less competitive although I suppose its possible that some philosophies in some areas will make them more competitive. Either way its a win as more people gain access to almost infinite amounts of information.
The argument is simply that going without adequate battery power to handle transfer switching is asinine and you seem to think that's normal data-center behavior. You would be the only one that thinks that would be properly redundancy and all the data-centers I'm in have battery backed transformers to handle the load while they switch to alternate power.
The most expensive data center I'm in even goes so far as to have an hour of battery time to handle generator failures during a power outage.
ElectricTurtle and Critical Facilities both have comments that mirror my own experience and echo every data center best practice. People without this power are asking for problems. Google tried something against best practice and despite us individually not having more brain power than Google, collectively the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and every other large corporation with many large data centers have come to this conclusion. Many and I'm looking as those lovely Texas data centers keep trying to buck the best practice and surprise surprise, it bites them in the ass.
That said, Google has a great track record so I'm not going to call any of their practices into question, it sounds like the event was mishandled and that's why there was a service outage. Sometimes events are mishandled due to unforeseen circumstances or something didn't have their morning cup of coffee. That's why companies do post-mortems and the fact that Google was so open about it is a good sign that the same situation won't lead to another outage which is what matters given their stellar uptime.
Your Toyota argument completely falls apart because you pay them to build you a car and others pay them to build the exact same car. They retain the right to build the car despite you taking possession of the car your contracted with them to build. Coincidentally it's a great analogy.
So I'm sorry to say, those coders do have rights to keep the code they've produced no matter how badly you seem to not want them to. I'm not a coder, I just work with a few of them and have managed coders from time to time including contracting with coders where corporate counsel and I went over a lot of this. Mileage may vary as different states have wildly different laws. California is far more employee friendly than say Texas.
Where did you pick up that the poster was saying the programmer could refuse to give the company the source code?
The issue at hand is merely whether or not that programmer and re-use techniques developed as part of that job. Querying your database is almost exactly like querying my database, why would the programmer be required to come up with a new method to do this for every job? That would be insane!
Sorry, whoever pays the bills does not hold all the cards. If a specific IP agreement for a specific product was not signed then the programmer retains his/her rights to use that code as they see fit whether they are working for the same employer or a new one. I find it perplexing that companies would hire a programmer with specific skill sets and try to keep all rights to the code. That would mean that the programmer wouldn't progress past that point since they wouldn't be able to reuse the skills they had built up. That a programmer would agree to such a contract which I'm not even sure is legal to begin with is astonishing news to me but I've never met a programmer in my life that was bound under such an agreement and I've worked with a good number of web and old school programmers.
Of course a lot of employers try to pull the non-compete clauses contract BS too which is along the same lines, trying to get you to agree to something that you actually can't sign away because in most states at least it is not legal to deny your right to make a living with any employer.
Or buy two Xirrus units which are all in one turn-key arrays of access points all that will auto-tune for you. They have a 16 access point and an 8 access point versions that would handle this setup without any problem.
Except that more than likely the vast majority of attendees won't have IPv6 enabled on their machines or are running XP or older. IPv6 in XP is crap especially if you're trying to do a 6to4 setup.
The problem with conferences is that you have to accommodate a wide range of equipment. I'd love to just deploy 802.11n at my events except that I've yet to see any vendors or attendees with equipment that supports it. Hell, for a lot of them 802.11b is still the only choice. So I'm left with needing to expand 802.11b/g while at the same time deploying n so that the people paying for wireless can indeed get it reliably. That's why I only offer where I know I can do it properly otherwise we run them a wire for free. Haven't had to do that in a long time as I've made all those rookie mistakes before and I learned from them.
If you make your audience adjust to you expect lots of complaints and refunds!
Except in temporary setups where you don't have specified lengths or you have lots of wildly different lengths. By the time you measure out a run and test a pre-crimped cable you could have already installed the uncrimped cable. This also doesn't mention the fact that pulling cables with ends already on them is quite difficult compared to just straight cat5 or cat6 especially if you're using conduit.
We used to do the whole pre-crimped thing, costs us a lot less money and we can deploy a lot faster just making new cables. We deploy a good 50 miles of cabling for each of our events, that includes fiber as well as cat5. Fiber runs require more care so they still make sense to buy pre-made especially considering that they are more expensive per foot. We buy sufficient strand count fiber so it doesn't take long to string usually since you only have to string one, then copper takes whatever is in range.
Naturally everyone in my department has a set of professional grade crimpers though and a couple black box testing kits. We can setup our entire office consisting of 60 machines in one day with four of us. That used to take us three days having to measure out cables to make sure the run would work because naturally somebody decided to move something so it no longer matches our nice CAD drawings. Now we just simply don't have any issues.
Most of the time we don't even bother to test our cabling because we know how to crimp properly, all of us, so I just plug my netbook into each station and verify its connected to the right VLAN and away we go. I haven't had one not work in years unless wind has thrown a tree against it or something, but of course we still test because that's the last thing you want is for some marketing drone to come in and immediately start complaining they can't connect.
Most people don't realize the harsh realities of temporary setups that hold thousands or in my case tens of thousands of people many of whom love to hop on the network whether to watch our video feed or to surf the net. Course I don't know how many events PyCon has, I have four events that stay up for three to six weeks at a time. Our stuff just works and has survived impressive weather conditions since lots of it is in tents. We owe this to redundant wiring and switching. We've done the math as well and it's not even worth it to retain the cable, you might as well throw in a bin and recycle and use the money to fun an office party.
Or just get 4 LTO4 tapes or 2 LTO5 tapes at ~$70 a pop to achieve the same capacity with no software setups or drives that fail when they are not spun up regularly. Common hard drives are not good long term storage. They are great for online or near-line storage but at some point, bite the bullet and just get a tape drive. Given the datasets are only 3TB a single tape drive is sufficient, at that range you could have two drives backing up identical data and storing the tapes in separate locations. This is much safer. The LTO4/5 drives will recoup their cost after about 4 or 5 clients when compared with solutions such as yours. I have no idea how many clients the poster had though.
Sort of makes me happy when other people have been in similar positions as I. I work for a car auction company, we see throttle stick issues everywhere and few people even seem to know what to do in that situation. The thing I don't understand is why this basic knowledge I personally received in drivers ed is so rare to find in drivers on the road today?
I guess its a testament to the quality of modern cars compared to older cars. People just rely on the fact that it will work and when something goes wrong they have no idea what to do! It amazes me there have been fatalities with this problem as well. Nothing I've heard about this situation wouldn't be solved simply by throwing neutral and turning the car off to prevent extended red-lining and subsequent badness. We had a Camaro out in our parking lot do that, the guy slammed into 7 or 8 vehicles before he threw it into neutral and then blew his engine because he didn't think to shut the car off. That wasn't even fly by wire. I don't understand this fear people have of fly by wire and so far we've seen it has far fewer issues than cables that run through-out begging for something to catch on them and that's if they don't wear and snap. The system will last a lot longer and be much easier to repair. Replacing a simple solid state box is much easier than cables and pulleys strewn through-out the engine compartment.
Besides the fact that it is spelt Camry there is nothing wrong with your list nor the parents. The article was talking about the iPad beating Netbooks with "magic."
As someone who has driven a Porsche and understands all the extra maintenance involved that invariably costs more all the while eating my knees and I see a lot of parallels. There are far more Camrys on the road than there are Porches so you will not see a Porsche beating a Camry in marketshare which is again what the article is talking about.
My netbook is so functional that everyone in my family, the non-technical folks have also bought them. In some cases they also bought another keyboard and mouse, some hook them up to larger sreens but they work well for the vast majority of computing tasks. At work I have my regular laptop which I have to take from event to event, but I also take my netbook for when I'm getting into closets and configuring new gear on the fly. It's very easy to carry around all day with my laptop pretty much just remaining at whatever temporary setup I have.
I think most people agree that the iPad and a typical netbook are not in the same markets for a myriad of reasons others have already stated.
Precisely what France did during the U.S. revolutionary war. Of course that is also what the U.S. did to Iran when it was a democracy. Regime change is a crap shoot, you have to make sure you do it for the right reasons. Contributing the to the fall of a democracy wasn't a good idea for the U.S. and in many ways has led us where we are today. Naturally like in Iraq we end up facing opposing forces with weapons that we sold them. Risky business arms dealing is.
I too have a love of history, don't you enjoy people 350 years later making the same mistakes?
Of course you have tea party folks calling for the return of literacy tests and that's not even considered history for many in this country that were old enough to vote in 1969.
It strikes me as odd that people don't take more stock in history than they do. All these people thinking that because their position is arbitrarily different the lessons from the past don't apply. Spose that's a bit like me trying to pick up hot chicks though. If you didn't try and try again you'd never land one! Hopefully you don't try to same thing over and over though as we all know what that is the definition of.
Many people are complaining about the current state of American health insurance. What is your point? Lock in has always been bad and it always will be. Instead of the environment becoming more open it is becoming more closed. Are you deliberately trying to cloud the issue?
You might notice all the unlicensed cartridge crap went away and that most computers even across platforms are compatible now. Apple moving to x86 was good for the computing world. Of course restrictive DRM reintroduces the problems of the past.
I think you missed the point here. There is no statement about whether or not the iPad will be successful. This is a statement about what is good for consumers as a whole. A locked down user experience with zero privacy or control over your purchased hardware is deemed as a step in the wrong direction. I'm inclined to agree as a Linux user I appreciate choice so long as that choice doesn't restrict you to a particular platform.
Apple is trying to extend the iPhone marketplace into a broader computing space and while consumers may like the simplicity they aren't in a position to realize what they have lost which will ultimate stymie a generation of computer users. Imagine how hard it is to learn to program when you first have to learn how to jail break your device. I'm not saying this is how it will be with the iPad but it seems like a logical extension of current and past actions by Apple.
What makes you think that Sprint didn't expand their backbone? They are one of the largest Tier 1 bandwidth providers in the U.S. and own the majority of long haul fiber.
Most people that bash Sprint and Nextel had it in rural areas or in areas that were fairly new. Sprint's biggest problem has always been that they move slowly so you get new phones only periodically and only periodically they expand coverage. When they do expand coverage they provide proper coverage. Also, if you move to an area that doesn't have coverage they will let you out of your contract.
Besides that Sprint has a tendency to cost a little bit more but over that last two years that has really dramatically improved. For the business side they are still very pricey though, so much so my company switched to AT&T and now we're battling with dropped calls and inconsistent reception. Good fun! Problems we never had with Sprint but we're saving a couple of grand a month on service.
Worth noting, I had my Treo 5 years ago ;) Sounds like you're doing better than most iPhone users I've encountered but admittedly, most users I've encountered are new users and so they are still playing around with it a lot.
WinMo phones don't stand out at all. To be honest, Windows doesn't impress people, it just works. I have a Samsung Jack for work, before that it was a MotoQ, and before that it was the Palm Treo 700w, I've had WinMo smart phones for four years now and all of them worked great with email support and all.
People don't buy WinMo to show off tech, they buy it because it had provisioning services and remote wipe competing head to head with RIM in the corporate world. For personal use most people saw no benefit and to be honest, most people probably still don't. WinMo has nothing that I would want for a personal cell device although that is largely the fault of the carriers crippling the OS. It's interface is terribly dated, that will change dramatically with WinMo 7 but at this stage I suspect it's too little too late. With the remarkable progress of Android even over the last year I can't see Microsoft keeping up with that momentum. Even the iPhone is starting to become blah for some. The carriers have stunted the mobile computing industry so I don't necessarily blame Apple for that even though I do love to hate them.