1. Drugs shouldn't be advertised because it leads to consumerism of drugs which is a lot more dangerous to one's health. 2. Academic research is largely funded by the government and individual donations. I work in the field and it's very rare to see drug companies funding any type of research 3. Bayer's profit is in the billions and 2011 Q3 had it's profit doubled in the emerging market. 4. There are a lot of drug companies out there and they would be glad to cannibalize Bayer's share in a large, growing market like India or China. Most research is again, government funded and open, most drugs have alternatives from several companies and it doesn't take 10-20 years to recover their investment. I don't know if you know the processes in those companies but they will cancel internal research if it isn't projected to turn a profit anywhere soon.
Worse than that, when I worked with them about a decade ago, the more esoteric iptables rules had to be manually entered on command line. The only thing proprietary about those boxes was the interface, even the VPN was Poptop. There were actually quite a few companies in the same time period that used the exact same hardware (and you can still buy it today) to run their own firewalls - basically 1U boxes with n-number of ethernet ports.
You don't seem to be aware that 90% of homeless people don't show up in your local grocery store. For every 100 people you see on the street, 1 of them is going to be homeless. Doesn't mean they are criminals, I've been homeless myself a few times and know a few people that are homeless right now. Doesn't mean they don't have a roof over their head or that they don't have a job or that they're criminal. I make 65k+ and have been homeless recently.
I don't know if you've ever been part of such cult like Christian Scientists or Jehovah's Witnesses, but the GP is very right. This very sentence on your source:
They are free, however, to choose whatever form of medical treatment they desire - including a transplant. The question of organ and tissue donation is an individual decision.
is a standard response given by the media response groups of those cults. Same with Jehovah's Witnesses (trust me, I was born into the cult and only recently broke free), they have the EXACT same response regards blood transfusions YET it is the first sentence that they truly do believe (Christian Scientists, JW have a similar policy regarding any medical procedure involving whole blood or their own non-consistent view on what blood is composed off): Christian Scientists normally rely on spiritual instead of medical means of healing.
Which means they basically don't ever seek medical help so the point is moot in the first place.
(Depending on the local variant of Christian Scientists the following may vary but there are various offshoots that do practice the following, this is a universal policy among Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide though) If they however do seek the specific medical help from outside sources they do get kicked out (disfellowshipped or excommunicated) which in those groups is an immense psychological pressure as you're not allowed or at least are strongly discouraged to have any close contact with people on the outside of the cult including but not limited to co-workers, family, siblings, your own parents and your own children (I do have sources to back that up too for JW cult apologists).
For these devices (mobile devices) though the problem is that
1) you have to go pretty deep into the guts of these devices to get the performance required. I would compare it to some of the tricks that were used in the first 3D shooters like Doom etc. in order to render properly. 2) Not all device support the whole subset of whatever environment you may want to use. I think that was the main problem here is that you program a specific shader through eg. the OpenGL interface (is that even available on Android?) and then device x comes along and the manufacturer decided to either drop or not implement that feature in their GPU in order to save costs, brainpower etc.
You have a lot of faith in humanity, calling them capable of reacting intelligently to unexpected situations and all. Many humans don't know what to do in emergency situations, some just freeze, some freak out and flap their hands about.
You may not have noticed but most "advanced" life support monitoring systems run on a version of Windows (usually XP SP1 or SP2, some NT). Now THAT is disturbing.
And regardless, I didn't say that it is necessarily a "life support system" but potentially life supporting systems like documentation (eRecords anyone?) that can't go between branches and/or entities. The fact is that paper has been mostly out of the picture at most hospitals (once you filled in your forms, they go in a computer system) and nobody except for ER seems to have a clue on how to use paper in case of upgrades, power outages or central outages (server down etc)
How many potentially life supporting systems don't sit behind a small hospital's domain? If one branch of a hospital can't resolve the main office because the US Guvmint decided to shut it down it is not only inconvenient but it may also delay or crash a lot of information processing systems which could potentially result in actual deaths.
My question is... how does it work. Is it a fully JavaScript/Ajax terminal? Is it using the GateOne servers as a gateway? Is it using a script on someone else's server? What are the security implications of this? How easy would it be to implement this on a malicious page or hack someone's server and modify this to capture keystrokes or SSH keys? Does it support SSH keys?
It's still unthinkable. Practically-unlimited storage for most people is still 200MB of documents and 2G of movies/pictures. Also, most servers for small companies are barely used.
Go look when you need a petabyte of cloud storage and a cluster of computers to keep your business running and see how much more the cloud is going to cost you. The thing is that Amazon or whoever you pay still needs to manage the same hardware and pay the same number of employees to keep the same amount of hardware running but now they also need to make a profit and customer care overhead, billing overhead etc.
Hosted systems and shared hosting have always been a better choice for small companies (those that have the option not to have a dedicated IT person) but once you have to hire someone to manage them and maybe get a couple of servers, the advantage disappears quickly and the cloud won't change the money. If your company is large enough to have an IT department and that company can actually save money by outsourcing their IT needs, maybe the IT department itself is very badly managed.
I know several people that worked at Kodak and I interviewed quite a few times with them. IMHO these are the problems:
- They didn't want to believe digital was going to take over the market. They believed analog was superior (which it was back in the day) but also that it wouldn't improve and people always would need analog copies. This is true to an extent but their developing process was horrendously overpriced and the stores that developed internally went with Fuji or any other competitor.
- Bad management. They had several layers of management and most of them were incompetent. There were entire divisions being ran without the knowledge of Kodak leadership. Duplicated efforts, bad building, bad quality assurance, several layers of customer service and technical service. Even their later printer divisions suffered from the old structure.
- Patent warfare. Instead of trying to compete they started using patents and contracts as an offensive measure which brings some cash in the short term but it burns out really quickly as their competitors could easily pay for the settlements and the limited settlements they did have (as many of their patents were invalid) could not account for the waste that is still going on to this day.
Ever found an old cell phone in your night stand drawer or wherever? I recently found one from the early 90's (almost 20 years old) and the thing still had a 1/2 charge left and worked. Battery cells take forever to self-discharge and at that point there will probably be more damage to other parts of the car because it's been standing still so long (corrosion, plants growing in or through the body, rodents nesting and chewing through cables) that maybe you should just scrap the car.
a) Yes I understand, but again, if you don't have the budget for properly licensed machines, you shouldn't be using them. Guess who will pay for an unlicensed machine on their network during one of these audits: Your job. Because even though you may have complained about it for years, you have also enabled it. Simply give them the machine with a free OS (FreeDOS will work) and tell them that you're not allowed by law to give them a Home edition if the machine was purchased with school funds and tell them you don't want to go to jail and also include the cost of fines to the school district for improper licensing. You'll get one of two results: the school will pay for your stuff to make the problem go away or the school will find out about this free stuff on the market.
b) But that's the way it works. If you want NEW stuff, then you should quote those prices. If you're bidding against your own purchasing department, you have already lost the war because they'll continue buying the improper items with bad licensing etc. If you have no budget, ask parents to donate their old computers and continue cobbling old stuff together.
c) Again, properly specced out computers will run whatever software the teachers need and Mac's are very prevalent in education. The good thing about Apple is they make things really easy on your end and the pricing will be honest. That was my point. Whether or not you'll still need Windows machines here and there is up to him to decide but it doesn't take away that Mac's may fix a lot of his issues with licensing.
e) If he has a discretionary budget it still behooves him to cut spending. It may give him some leeway with the other stuff if he can quote lower prices than normal on commodity items. I do it as follows: quote them the high price and then later buy the item at a lower price. It gives you good cred if nothing else.
Again, be creative with what you have and try to save money left and right. If you end up saving 50% on the backend systems you'll leave some room to breathe for them jn their budgets and they'll be more flexible with you when you're not saying "we need enterprisey stuff to make my life easy, please donate $100k to Microsoft"
I have worked in EDU for quite a few years now, I was involved with a K-12 before (consulting) and have been at two higher ed jobs (one in central IT, one in research)
a) Go open source and simply tell them: no more Windows because your licensing doesn't check out (licensing for small-to-mid schools is mighty expensive even if you get all the discounts). You have to not only get your licensing for your machines (which are ridiculously low to pull in your non-technical staff at a low point sometimes $10 or $20 for Professional versions or bundles with Office and Windows licenses) but a heap load of servers and CAL's to get everything on the Microsoft-side to work together (which ended up in one of the negotiations I was in averaging $25/FTE/service (Exchange, Sharepoint, Forefront and AD (the standard suite) was thus $100/FTE) + several $100's per server (~$300 for W2K3 Standard back then).
b) Spec a lot higher than you need. Sure, someone (you) can go to Dell/HP and spec out a $500 machine but you should budget for that machine to cost $1500, your purchasing department (if there is one) will balk and negotiate you down to $1000 and you'll get a decent machine. I have to do this all the time in research because computer gear is the first thing that gets axed out of the budgets. For ballpark figures in research: budget your workstations at 2x the actual cost, servers at 3x the actual cost, storage at 4x the actual cost and you'll usually barely be able to afford what you need.
c) If you really need MS Office or a 'commercial' offering because the manager/purchasing/principal wants someone to yell at when it breaks down talk to an Apple rep and have them spec out your environment including all software licensing, they're pretty honest about it unlike Microsoft as the client is simple and included in your hardware cost (no 'upgrade' or 'enterprise' required), Server is unlimited clients and cheap (and again, your organization qualifies regardless), no CAL's, no FTE calculations, no hidden fees, no need for extra licenses or site licenses just to evade their auditing department (I'm your customer Microsoft, not your serf), you'll get a rep that has experience with K-12, free seminars and classes. They're great and easy to manage and integrate well with Windows even though they may require an overhaul of your entrenched Windows admins that got hired because they're the friend of the cousin of the principal.
d) Get better negotiation skills and set up vendors against each other. Dell for example will RAISE their prices or remove their cheapest offerings for K-12 (especially existing customers) unless you can pit two sales people against each other. They can sometimes go to great lengths to reduce their cost. Alternatively, I have found that if you need a boatload of generic computers, you might even be cheaper getting a local company to custom build you a boatload of your specced out computers. I have worked with a company that custom builds laptops and desktops (if you need more than 50) and they have local, free customer and technical service whenever it breaks down and they're cheaper than the Dell/HP offerings and they build only to what you need. I needed for example specific workstations (2 nVidia cards with at least 1GB VRAM, Xeon CPU's, 16GB ECC RAM) and HP would sell me machines that came with the choice of Quadro ($$$) or an empty slot while Dell would in the same lineup have 1 month a shipment of nVidia cards and the next a shipment with ATI (now AMD) cards and then all of a sudden they would send me a machine with ECC RAM but the motherboard didn't support the ECC functionality.
e) Look elsewhere to cut your budget. Do you really need Cisco gear? How about HP or Netgear even? Do you really need service plans? Do you really need Microsoft software on your server? LDAP is free, Samba is free and both are just as easy to manage as AD with the proper tools. And for the whiners that say "how about Global Policies" - do you really use that crap? In an educational environment you want to be
I don't know if you have been in corporate IT lately but these people selling the crap are indeed selling this as the end-all-be-all of computing. Everything (data storage, web hosting, virtual servers, desktops, crm and similar databasing needs, e-mail,...) is supposed to be in the cloud at a much lower price point. Microsoft is one of the worst offenders as they sell their entire suite (Exchange, AD, ShitPoint, Office...) in the "cloud" these days, promise the world but have no way to deliver.
If you have an IT organization with more than 2 IT people where stuffing the "cloud" (or having everything hosted for you) is going to end up being cheaper you have a really badly managed department that is extremely bloated.
For enterprise data storage: average price is $1,000/TB/year (Amazon et al) while a decent locally managed system (SAS, HA) should be ~$100-300/TB/year. Off course if you pay NetApp or the like (at ~$3,000/TB/year) for your storage, you brought this upon yourself and the person making that decision should've been fired.
MegaUpload was (to me at least) more a place where documents and other things got put by whistleblowers. There was very few pirated content on MU, it wasn't the place to go for your latest movie or video game.
Shutting down MU did more damage to whistleblowers, the Anon community and similar groups than to pirates. There was also a host of information on there that has now simply disappeared and needs to be re-uploaded elsewhere.
a) In a hotel it is going to be useless because those outlets probably cost ~$100 or more PER OUTLET + installation costs and backend headaches. This is going to cost more than you'll ever get out of it especially as you'll need outlets for lamps, tv's etc and the average high-end computer these days lasting 10 hours on a single battery charge. Or are you going to charge $1 for every started kWh (even so how many kWh do you use at a hotel?)
b) Most likely the device that you plug in has to be able to authenticate over the mains. This is a non-trivial problem as you'll have to communicate somehow with 110/220VAC from a low-power device. So all devices will have to have some type of input device and output device (imagine lamps with PDA's attached to them?) that cost is also going to add up as all your devices (TV etc.) have to be switched over.
c) Could be used in applications where you definitely do not want people plugging in other gear into certain outlets. For example hospitals have those special outlets (marked green, yellow and/or red instead of the standard grey/white) where sometimes issues appear because patients plug in their laptop or other chargers into those designated outlets. Those outlets are for specific medical equipment and depending on the outlet are also on the backup generator grids.
iPhone Configuration Utility (free, allows you to lock down pretty much any feature of your iDevice). I've seen at least one deployment where an iPod Touch is used for a museums guided audio tour (because those specific IR devices cost a shit-ton more than an iPod Touch).
Android has similar options (paid)
Windows devices have similar options (but you must deploy Active Directory, Windows Server (to run it), SQL Server (backend), Exchange (remote wipe and push the policy) and pay for CAL's for all those)
Well, the services for companionship are pricey, girlfriends are cheaper.
If you really don't want to attach yourself to anyone, just put it on your profile and be honest, girls will appreciate it when you tell them: "This is what I want and I'm sticking to it" and I got several dates out of it because they appreciate that you're realistic and I've eventually found someone I like.
Also, the hotties on the dating sites are either never going to reply to you or they're plants. They already get 100's of e-mails daily, yours has to be pretty special for her to read it and even more special for her to reply. You're better off picking someone like that up in real life.
Adobe deserves to die imho. They were indeed dragged kicking and screaming. Same for MS Office. You either adapt or die, if your code is so shitty you can't port it between slightly different architectures without breaking it, you have a really bad development team.
They would've taken the money. More likely they "offered" money whether it was in a sting or not in order to be able to claim extortion and put the Anonymous hackers in a bad light.
I don't think the hackers are interested in money as much as they are in the information. The fact is Symantec screwed up and they'll have to take it, if they can't protect themselves then why should we trust them?
It maybe inconsiderate, off-putting and creepy to you but that doesn't mean it's unlawful or wrong. What is creepy to you today may be accepted tomorrow or elsewhere in the world.
Yes, people are allowed to be assholes. You're allowed to use a megaphone and a stand and the government does provide those as well (they're called public parks).
I think churches and preachers are inconsiderate, off-putting and creepy and the government does provide them with money by not having them pay taxes.
Sexual harassment in the workplace usually involves either communicating or touching someone inappropriately with whom you work and those laws are there to protect you from someone in authority.
Sexual harassment outside the workplace is called assault and cannot be done verbally (you can insult someone even using sexual pejoratives under the first amendment).
IANAL but that's what real life has learned me so far.
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1. Drugs shouldn't be advertised because it leads to consumerism of drugs which is a lot more dangerous to one's health.
2. Academic research is largely funded by the government and individual donations. I work in the field and it's very rare to see drug companies funding any type of research
3. Bayer's profit is in the billions and 2011 Q3 had it's profit doubled in the emerging market.
4. There are a lot of drug companies out there and they would be glad to cannibalize Bayer's share in a large, growing market like India or China. Most research is again, government funded and open, most drugs have alternatives from several companies and it doesn't take 10-20 years to recover their investment. I don't know if you know the processes in those companies but they will cancel internal research if it isn't projected to turn a profit anywhere soon.
Worse than that, when I worked with them about a decade ago, the more esoteric iptables rules had to be manually entered on command line. The only thing proprietary about those boxes was the interface, even the VPN was Poptop. There were actually quite a few companies in the same time period that used the exact same hardware (and you can still buy it today) to run their own firewalls - basically 1U boxes with n-number of ethernet ports.
You don't seem to be aware that 90% of homeless people don't show up in your local grocery store. For every 100 people you see on the street, 1 of them is going to be homeless. Doesn't mean they are criminals, I've been homeless myself a few times and know a few people that are homeless right now. Doesn't mean they don't have a roof over their head or that they don't have a job or that they're criminal. I make 65k+ and have been homeless recently.
I don't know if you've ever been part of such cult like Christian Scientists or Jehovah's Witnesses, but the GP is very right. This very sentence on your source:
They are free, however, to choose whatever form of medical treatment they desire - including a transplant. The question of organ and tissue donation is an individual decision.
is a standard response given by the media response groups of those cults. Same with Jehovah's Witnesses (trust me, I was born into the cult and only recently broke free), they have the EXACT same response regards blood transfusions YET it is the first sentence that they truly do believe (Christian Scientists, JW have a similar policy regarding any medical procedure involving whole blood or their own non-consistent view on what blood is composed off): Christian Scientists normally rely on spiritual instead of medical means of healing.
Which means they basically don't ever seek medical help so the point is moot in the first place.
(Depending on the local variant of Christian Scientists the following may vary but there are various offshoots that do practice the following, this is a universal policy among Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide though) If they however do seek the specific medical help from outside sources they do get kicked out (disfellowshipped or excommunicated) which in those groups is an immense psychological pressure as you're not allowed or at least are strongly discouraged to have any close contact with people on the outside of the cult including but not limited to co-workers, family, siblings, your own parents and your own children (I do have sources to back that up too for JW cult apologists).
For these devices (mobile devices) though the problem is that
1) you have to go pretty deep into the guts of these devices to get the performance required. I would compare it to some of the tricks that were used in the first 3D shooters like Doom etc. in order to render properly.
2) Not all device support the whole subset of whatever environment you may want to use. I think that was the main problem here is that you program a specific shader through eg. the OpenGL interface (is that even available on Android?) and then device x comes along and the manufacturer decided to either drop or not implement that feature in their GPU in order to save costs, brainpower etc.
You have a lot of faith in humanity, calling them capable of reacting intelligently to unexpected situations and all. Many humans don't know what to do in emergency situations, some just freeze, some freak out and flap their hands about.
You may not have noticed but most "advanced" life support monitoring systems run on a version of Windows (usually XP SP1 or SP2, some NT). Now THAT is disturbing.
And regardless, I didn't say that it is necessarily a "life support system" but potentially life supporting systems like documentation (eRecords anyone?) that can't go between branches and/or entities. The fact is that paper has been mostly out of the picture at most hospitals (once you filled in your forms, they go in a computer system) and nobody except for ER seems to have a clue on how to use paper in case of upgrades, power outages or central outages (server down etc)
Yet...
How many potentially life supporting systems don't sit behind a small hospital's domain? If one branch of a hospital can't resolve the main office because the US Guvmint decided to shut it down it is not only inconvenient but it may also delay or crash a lot of information processing systems which could potentially result in actual deaths.
I used Opera and Safari and neither works.
My question is... how does it work. Is it a fully JavaScript/Ajax terminal? Is it using the GateOne servers as a gateway? Is it using a script on someone else's server? What are the security implications of this? How easy would it be to implement this on a malicious page or hack someone's server and modify this to capture keystrokes or SSH keys? Does it support SSH keys?
It's still unthinkable. Practically-unlimited storage for most people is still 200MB of documents and 2G of movies/pictures. Also, most servers for small companies are barely used.
Go look when you need a petabyte of cloud storage and a cluster of computers to keep your business running and see how much more the cloud is going to cost you. The thing is that Amazon or whoever you pay still needs to manage the same hardware and pay the same number of employees to keep the same amount of hardware running but now they also need to make a profit and customer care overhead, billing overhead etc.
Hosted systems and shared hosting have always been a better choice for small companies (those that have the option not to have a dedicated IT person) but once you have to hire someone to manage them and maybe get a couple of servers, the advantage disappears quickly and the cloud won't change the money. If your company is large enough to have an IT department and that company can actually save money by outsourcing their IT needs, maybe the IT department itself is very badly managed.
I know several people that worked at Kodak and I interviewed quite a few times with them. IMHO these are the problems:
- They didn't want to believe digital was going to take over the market. They believed analog was superior (which it was back in the day) but also that it wouldn't improve and people always would need analog copies. This is true to an extent but their developing process was horrendously overpriced and the stores that developed internally went with Fuji or any other competitor.
- Bad management. They had several layers of management and most of them were incompetent. There were entire divisions being ran without the knowledge of Kodak leadership. Duplicated efforts, bad building, bad quality assurance, several layers of customer service and technical service. Even their later printer divisions suffered from the old structure.
- Patent warfare. Instead of trying to compete they started using patents and contracts as an offensive measure which brings some cash in the short term but it burns out really quickly as their competitors could easily pay for the settlements and the limited settlements they did have (as many of their patents were invalid) could not account for the waste that is still going on to this day.
Ever found an old cell phone in your night stand drawer or wherever? I recently found one from the early 90's (almost 20 years old) and the thing still had a 1/2 charge left and worked. Battery cells take forever to self-discharge and at that point there will probably be more damage to other parts of the car because it's been standing still so long (corrosion, plants growing in or through the body, rodents nesting and chewing through cables) that maybe you should just scrap the car.
a) Yes I understand, but again, if you don't have the budget for properly licensed machines, you shouldn't be using them. Guess who will pay for an unlicensed machine on their network during one of these audits: Your job. Because even though you may have complained about it for years, you have also enabled it. Simply give them the machine with a free OS (FreeDOS will work) and tell them that you're not allowed by law to give them a Home edition if the machine was purchased with school funds and tell them you don't want to go to jail and also include the cost of fines to the school district for improper licensing. You'll get one of two results: the school will pay for your stuff to make the problem go away or the school will find out about this free stuff on the market.
b) But that's the way it works. If you want NEW stuff, then you should quote those prices. If you're bidding against your own purchasing department, you have already lost the war because they'll continue buying the improper items with bad licensing etc. If you have no budget, ask parents to donate their old computers and continue cobbling old stuff together.
c) Again, properly specced out computers will run whatever software the teachers need and Mac's are very prevalent in education. The good thing about Apple is they make things really easy on your end and the pricing will be honest. That was my point. Whether or not you'll still need Windows machines here and there is up to him to decide but it doesn't take away that Mac's may fix a lot of his issues with licensing.
e) If he has a discretionary budget it still behooves him to cut spending. It may give him some leeway with the other stuff if he can quote lower prices than normal on commodity items. I do it as follows: quote them the high price and then later buy the item at a lower price. It gives you good cred if nothing else.
Again, be creative with what you have and try to save money left and right. If you end up saving 50% on the backend systems you'll leave some room to breathe for them jn their budgets and they'll be more flexible with you when you're not saying "we need enterprisey stuff to make my life easy, please donate $100k to Microsoft"
I have worked in EDU for quite a few years now, I was involved with a K-12 before (consulting) and have been at two higher ed jobs (one in central IT, one in research)
a) Go open source and simply tell them: no more Windows because your licensing doesn't check out (licensing for small-to-mid schools is mighty expensive even if you get all the discounts). You have to not only get your licensing for your machines (which are ridiculously low to pull in your non-technical staff at a low point sometimes $10 or $20 for Professional versions or bundles with Office and Windows licenses) but a heap load of servers and CAL's to get everything on the Microsoft-side to work together (which ended up in one of the negotiations I was in averaging $25/FTE/service (Exchange, Sharepoint, Forefront and AD (the standard suite) was thus $100/FTE) + several $100's per server (~$300 for W2K3 Standard back then).
b) Spec a lot higher than you need. Sure, someone (you) can go to Dell/HP and spec out a $500 machine but you should budget for that machine to cost $1500, your purchasing department (if there is one) will balk and negotiate you down to $1000 and you'll get a decent machine. I have to do this all the time in research because computer gear is the first thing that gets axed out of the budgets. For ballpark figures in research: budget your workstations at 2x the actual cost, servers at 3x the actual cost, storage at 4x the actual cost and you'll usually barely be able to afford what you need.
c) If you really need MS Office or a 'commercial' offering because the manager/purchasing/principal wants someone to yell at when it breaks down talk to an Apple rep and have them spec out your environment including all software licensing, they're pretty honest about it unlike Microsoft as the client is simple and included in your hardware cost (no 'upgrade' or 'enterprise' required), Server is unlimited clients and cheap (and again, your organization qualifies regardless), no CAL's, no FTE calculations, no hidden fees, no need for extra licenses or site licenses just to evade their auditing department (I'm your customer Microsoft, not your serf), you'll get a rep that has experience with K-12, free seminars and classes. They're great and easy to manage and integrate well with Windows even though they may require an overhaul of your entrenched Windows admins that got hired because they're the friend of the cousin of the principal.
d) Get better negotiation skills and set up vendors against each other. Dell for example will RAISE their prices or remove their cheapest offerings for K-12 (especially existing customers) unless you can pit two sales people against each other. They can sometimes go to great lengths to reduce their cost. Alternatively, I have found that if you need a boatload of generic computers, you might even be cheaper getting a local company to custom build you a boatload of your specced out computers. I have worked with a company that custom builds laptops and desktops (if you need more than 50) and they have local, free customer and technical service whenever it breaks down and they're cheaper than the Dell/HP offerings and they build only to what you need. I needed for example specific workstations (2 nVidia cards with at least 1GB VRAM, Xeon CPU's, 16GB ECC RAM) and HP would sell me machines that came with the choice of Quadro ($$$) or an empty slot while Dell would in the same lineup have 1 month a shipment of nVidia cards and the next a shipment with ATI (now AMD) cards and then all of a sudden they would send me a machine with ECC RAM but the motherboard didn't support the ECC functionality.
e) Look elsewhere to cut your budget. Do you really need Cisco gear? How about HP or Netgear even? Do you really need service plans? Do you really need Microsoft software on your server? LDAP is free, Samba is free and both are just as easy to manage as AD with the proper tools. And for the whiners that say "how about Global Policies" - do you really use that crap? In an educational environment you want to be
I don't know if you have been in corporate IT lately but these people selling the crap are indeed selling this as the end-all-be-all of computing. Everything (data storage, web hosting, virtual servers, desktops, crm and similar databasing needs, e-mail, ...) is supposed to be in the cloud at a much lower price point. Microsoft is one of the worst offenders as they sell their entire suite (Exchange, AD, ShitPoint, Office ...) in the "cloud" these days, promise the world but have no way to deliver.
If you have an IT organization with more than 2 IT people where stuffing the "cloud" (or having everything hosted for you) is going to end up being cheaper you have a really badly managed department that is extremely bloated.
For enterprise data storage: average price is $1,000/TB/year (Amazon et al) while a decent locally managed system (SAS, HA) should be ~$100-300/TB/year. Off course if you pay NetApp or the like (at ~$3,000/TB/year) for your storage, you brought this upon yourself and the person making that decision should've been fired.
MegaUpload was (to me at least) more a place where documents and other things got put by whistleblowers. There was very few pirated content on MU, it wasn't the place to go for your latest movie or video game.
Shutting down MU did more damage to whistleblowers, the Anon community and similar groups than to pirates. There was also a host of information on there that has now simply disappeared and needs to be re-uploaded elsewhere.
$90? Where do you get your software? Windows 7 from the Windows store is $319.99. Even the stripped version (Home) is $199.99
a) In a hotel it is going to be useless because those outlets probably cost ~$100 or more PER OUTLET + installation costs and backend headaches. This is going to cost more than you'll ever get out of it especially as you'll need outlets for lamps, tv's etc and the average high-end computer these days lasting 10 hours on a single battery charge. Or are you going to charge $1 for every started kWh (even so how many kWh do you use at a hotel?)
b) Most likely the device that you plug in has to be able to authenticate over the mains. This is a non-trivial problem as you'll have to communicate somehow with 110/220VAC from a low-power device. So all devices will have to have some type of input device and output device (imagine lamps with PDA's attached to them?) that cost is also going to add up as all your devices (TV etc.) have to be switched over.
c) Could be used in applications where you definitely do not want people plugging in other gear into certain outlets. For example hospitals have those special outlets (marked green, yellow and/or red instead of the standard grey/white) where sometimes issues appear because patients plug in their laptop or other chargers into those designated outlets. Those outlets are for specific medical equipment and depending on the outlet are also on the backup generator grids.
iPhone Configuration Utility (free, allows you to lock down pretty much any feature of your iDevice). I've seen at least one deployment where an iPod Touch is used for a museums guided audio tour (because those specific IR devices cost a shit-ton more than an iPod Touch).
Android has similar options (paid)
Windows devices have similar options (but you must deploy Active Directory, Windows Server (to run it), SQL Server (backend), Exchange (remote wipe and push the policy) and pay for CAL's for all those)
Well, the services for companionship are pricey, girlfriends are cheaper.
If you really don't want to attach yourself to anyone, just put it on your profile and be honest, girls will appreciate it when you tell them: "This is what I want and I'm sticking to it" and I got several dates out of it because they appreciate that you're realistic and I've eventually found someone I like.
Also, the hotties on the dating sites are either never going to reply to you or they're plants. They already get 100's of e-mails daily, yours has to be pretty special for her to read it and even more special for her to reply. You're better off picking someone like that up in real life.
AAAARRRGGGGHHHH. I love how their deaths are so dramatic.
Adobe deserves to die imho. They were indeed dragged kicking and screaming. Same for MS Office. You either adapt or die, if your code is so shitty you can't port it between slightly different architectures without breaking it, you have a really bad development team.
They would've taken the money. More likely they "offered" money whether it was in a sting or not in order to be able to claim extortion and put the Anonymous hackers in a bad light.
I don't think the hackers are interested in money as much as they are in the information. The fact is Symantec screwed up and they'll have to take it, if they can't protect themselves then why should we trust them?
It maybe inconsiderate, off-putting and creepy to you but that doesn't mean it's unlawful or wrong. What is creepy to you today may be accepted tomorrow or elsewhere in the world.
Yes, people are allowed to be assholes. You're allowed to use a megaphone and a stand and the government does provide those as well (they're called public parks).
I think churches and preachers are inconsiderate, off-putting and creepy and the government does provide them with money by not having them pay taxes.
Sexual harassment in the workplace usually involves either communicating or touching someone inappropriately with whom you work and those laws are there to protect you from someone in authority.
Sexual harassment outside the workplace is called assault and cannot be done verbally (you can insult someone even using sexual pejoratives under the first amendment).
IANAL but that's what real life has learned me so far.