"'These days people are connecting iPhones, Xboxes and 17 other devices in the home."
Seriously? Certs and a degree are needed to hook up equipment to a home network?
And here in central Oregon, a grocery store clerk will be lucky to make $18,000 per year for a 40 hour week with no benefits. Seeing as Mr. Hawking won't be here either, it's rather irrelevant.
The only thing to watch out for in Prineville is if any of the Sisters volcanoes erupt. There is a lava dome building there so you never know........................
It's the redneck centre of Oregon. Massively depressed, a pretty much unskilled workforce, a huge meth and alcohol problem and those who aren't unemployed are pretty much on minimum wage. It's seen the biggest drop in property prices outside of Vegas and the local government is pretty much bust.
As for Mount Bachelor, it's more expensive to ski there than pretty much anywhere else in the US. The lifts are frequently out of service but don't expect a refund.
Got a link? As far as I can tell, FB recruited about 5 people from C.O. and imported the rest. There is a large amount of local resentment regarding the tax breaks given to FB. I also saw the number of employees listed as 30, not 55.
Summers in Prineville (and central Oregon in general) aren't exactly cool. 90F to 100F temps aren't uncommon. The upside is that they are pretty short. This year we barely got out of winter in July!
So how does Prineville fit in then? The nearest passenger airport is Redmond, about 20 miles away but it's hardly a major airport. The nearest large airport would be PDX, but that's a good 3.5 hours away across the Cascade mountains. Not an easy trip in the winter.
I used to work for an Infiniti car dealership. I noticed how many people referred to the brand as "Infinity" instead, so I registered an alternative to the dealerships domain with the last "i" changed to a "y". That domain received well over 50 e-mails a week, not just sales inquiries, but finance and corporate mail too. Management weren't too happy, but I pointed out that it was better I'd registered it than someone outside of the company.
" while they drove 80,000 BMW's to and from work"
You either had a lot of managers or they had a lot of cars each. either way, it must have been a pretty large parking lot.
Prineville is about 3.5 hours from Portland in the summer. In the winter, it can be a lot longer. You need to cross the Cascade range. Central Oregon can be very, very isolated. We have one small airport in Redmond. Add at least $100 onto what you would pay for an airfare anywhere else. The largest town is Bend which has a population of around 80,000. Bend falls into the "nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there" category.
I have a business here. I need to employ a couple of decent network and server techs. Nothing fancy. Just need to know some basic networking stuff and how to maintain a mail server, read logs, do basic troubleshooting, etc. After a month of looking, forget about it. The few people in the area with those skills are snapped up. The reason you can't pump your own gas here is pretty obvious; most of the population here can't do anything more complicated. I have friends who operated stores that they had to close down because they couldn't get trustworthy staff.
Oh yes, there were lots of tax breaks given and those were a source of a lot of local angst. They have a 15 year exemption from property taxes and were looking for a 10 year exemption from state income and excise taxes.
60% of the energy for the FB data center is from coal fired sources. Very little of the electricity in central Oregon is from "green" sources. If anything, geo-thermal energy is what they should be looking at here. The area is still very active.
"As for no value added, do you live in Oregon? It rains A LOT."
I live in Oregon. I actually live about 15 miles from Prineville. There's a reason it's called the "high desert". I think you're confusing us with the valley.
As someone living in the area, I can report that you're pretty much on the ball. The Prineville FB data center employs 35 people, but the tech jobs were all filled out of area. The lower grade jobs were filled locally.
The days of tech staff on site seem to be gone. When I was operations manager at one of the largest DC's in Europe, most had a large staff of Networking, Unix, Windows, database and operations experts on site 24x7x365. Nowadays, most of the work is done remotely.
The impact on local employment tends to come more from the building and ongoing maintenance of the facilities, rather than the hiring of locals as techs. Prineville (and the whole central Oregon area) really doesn't have any sort of tech base anyway.
Our local cable internet provider has a 100Gb monthly cap in place. A few months ago, a friend of mine called in a panic because here usual $52 internet bill had come in at over $600. The first thing I did was check the daily breakdown of her usage on the ISP's website. It showed a fairly consistent 16Gb a day of usage. Bear in mind that this is a woman who lives alone, is totally non-technical and has one PC hooked up to a cable modem. No wireless, no laptop, no consoles, nothing.
I was showing here the daily usage when she remembered that at the start of the month, she was visiting a relative out of state. Those days still showed the 16Gb a day. I checked the Windows event logs for those days - nothing at all, which fitted pretty well with her insistence that the PC was switched off.
So called up the ISP. After getting nowhere with billing, I asked for the tech support people. Was pretty much told that I was lying and she wasn't going to gt out of paying the bill. Their attitude was that their system was foolproof and that there must have been someone in the house using the Internet that weekend she was away. No one else has a key and the house sits on an acre lot on the outskirts of town.
Then the support guy told me that the metering was still showing high usage in real time. I pulled the plug on the cable modem and guess what? No change in the metering. Asked him to explain that and was told again that I must be "mistaken". After getting escalated yet again, I finally got them to cancel the overage charge but they still wouldn't accept that there was a problem on their end. My friend is now on a wireless Internet provider now and the software I installed shows a pretty ocnsistent usage of around 6Gb a month.
Dexter works for Miami Metro. It's Horatio Caine, AKA Mr. Sunglasses, who works for Miami Dade Police. Imagine the witty one liners he could hang on a drone. On the other hand, lets not.
Our local cable ISP instituted a 30Gb cap. After a big outcry they bumped it to 100Gb. Part of their argument was that 98% of their subscribers used less than 5Gb in a month. I ended up switching to DSL instead. The connection quality isn't as good but I couldn't manage on the 100Gb a month, or afford the $1.50 a Gb overage charge.
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You really don't want to go there do you?
Only if you're camping. Then it's loitering within tent. I'll get my coat...............
"'These days people are connecting iPhones, Xboxes and 17 other devices in the home." Seriously? Certs and a degree are needed to hook up equipment to a home network?
And here in central Oregon, a grocery store clerk will be lucky to make $18,000 per year for a 40 hour week with no benefits. Seeing as Mr. Hawking won't be here either, it's rather irrelevant.
The only thing to watch out for in Prineville is if any of the Sisters volcanoes erupt. There is a lava dome building there so you never know........................
It's the redneck centre of Oregon. Massively depressed, a pretty much unskilled workforce, a huge meth and alcohol problem and those who aren't unemployed are pretty much on minimum wage. It's seen the biggest drop in property prices outside of Vegas and the local government is pretty much bust. As for Mount Bachelor, it's more expensive to ski there than pretty much anywhere else in the US. The lifts are frequently out of service but don't expect a refund.
Got a link? As far as I can tell, FB recruited about 5 people from C.O. and imported the rest. There is a large amount of local resentment regarding the tax breaks given to FB. I also saw the number of employees listed as 30, not 55.
Summers in Prineville (and central Oregon in general) aren't exactly cool. 90F to 100F temps aren't uncommon. The upside is that they are pretty short. This year we barely got out of winter in July!
So how does Prineville fit in then? The nearest passenger airport is Redmond, about 20 miles away but it's hardly a major airport. The nearest large airport would be PDX, but that's a good 3.5 hours away across the Cascade mountains. Not an easy trip in the winter.
Not quite sure why the Guardian would be doing any research on behalf of The Daily Torygraph.................
What about those states with no sales tax at the moment? Are those folks going to pay sales tax on Internet sales only?
It's called the Windows Media Center extender. Sadly, MS don't seem to be that interested in WMC which is a shame. It's one of their better products.
You can add health care to that list too.
I used to work for an Infiniti car dealership. I noticed how many people referred to the brand as "Infinity" instead, so I registered an alternative to the dealerships domain with the last "i" changed to a "y". That domain received well over 50 e-mails a week, not just sales inquiries, but finance and corporate mail too. Management weren't too happy, but I pointed out that it was better I'd registered it than someone outside of the company.
One of my favorite past-times was to text "Battery Low" messages to my co-workers.
" while they drove 80,000 BMW's to and from work" You either had a lot of managers or they had a lot of cars each. either way, it must have been a pretty large parking lot.
Prineville is about 3.5 hours from Portland in the summer. In the winter, it can be a lot longer. You need to cross the Cascade range. Central Oregon can be very, very isolated. We have one small airport in Redmond. Add at least $100 onto what you would pay for an airfare anywhere else. The largest town is Bend which has a population of around 80,000. Bend falls into the "nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there" category.
I have a business here. I need to employ a couple of decent network and server techs. Nothing fancy. Just need to know some basic networking stuff and how to maintain a mail server, read logs, do basic troubleshooting, etc. After a month of looking, forget about it. The few people in the area with those skills are snapped up. The reason you can't pump your own gas here is pretty obvious; most of the population here can't do anything more complicated. I have friends who operated stores that they had to close down because they couldn't get trustworthy staff.
Oh yes, there were lots of tax breaks given and those were a source of a lot of local angst. They have a 15 year exemption from property taxes and were looking for a 10 year exemption from state income and excise taxes.
60% of the energy for the FB data center is from coal fired sources. Very little of the electricity in central Oregon is from "green" sources. If anything, geo-thermal energy is what they should be looking at here. The area is still very active.
"As for no value added, do you live in Oregon? It rains A LOT." I live in Oregon. I actually live about 15 miles from Prineville. There's a reason it's called the "high desert". I think you're confusing us with the valley.
As someone living in the area, I can report that you're pretty much on the ball. The Prineville FB data center employs 35 people, but the tech jobs were all filled out of area. The lower grade jobs were filled locally. The days of tech staff on site seem to be gone. When I was operations manager at one of the largest DC's in Europe, most had a large staff of Networking, Unix, Windows, database and operations experts on site 24x7x365. Nowadays, most of the work is done remotely. The impact on local employment tends to come more from the building and ongoing maintenance of the facilities, rather than the hiring of locals as techs. Prineville (and the whole central Oregon area) really doesn't have any sort of tech base anyway.
Our local cable internet provider has a 100Gb monthly cap in place. A few months ago, a friend of mine called in a panic because here usual $52 internet bill had come in at over $600. The first thing I did was check the daily breakdown of her usage on the ISP's website. It showed a fairly consistent 16Gb a day of usage. Bear in mind that this is a woman who lives alone, is totally non-technical and has one PC hooked up to a cable modem. No wireless, no laptop, no consoles, nothing. I was showing here the daily usage when she remembered that at the start of the month, she was visiting a relative out of state. Those days still showed the 16Gb a day. I checked the Windows event logs for those days - nothing at all, which fitted pretty well with her insistence that the PC was switched off. So called up the ISP. After getting nowhere with billing, I asked for the tech support people. Was pretty much told that I was lying and she wasn't going to gt out of paying the bill. Their attitude was that their system was foolproof and that there must have been someone in the house using the Internet that weekend she was away. No one else has a key and the house sits on an acre lot on the outskirts of town. Then the support guy told me that the metering was still showing high usage in real time. I pulled the plug on the cable modem and guess what? No change in the metering. Asked him to explain that and was told again that I must be "mistaken". After getting escalated yet again, I finally got them to cancel the overage charge but they still wouldn't accept that there was a problem on their end. My friend is now on a wireless Internet provider now and the software I installed shows a pretty ocnsistent usage of around 6Gb a month.
Dexter works for Miami Metro. It's Horatio Caine, AKA Mr. Sunglasses, who works for Miami Dade Police. Imagine the witty one liners he could hang on a drone. On the other hand, lets not.
Our local cable ISP instituted a 30Gb cap. After a big outcry they bumped it to 100Gb. Part of their argument was that 98% of their subscribers used less than 5Gb in a month. I ended up switching to DSL instead. The connection quality isn't as good but I couldn't manage on the 100Gb a month, or afford the $1.50 a Gb overage charge.