And why did you go to the cloud if you rneeds (seemingly) can't tolerate any sort of downtime?
I can only assume that rather than continue to put your business at risk you've since hired IT folks and created a complete, redundant datacenter that not only has redundant hardware, network access from diferent providers, and a reliable form of emergency power that can run the datacenter indefinitely so that your application can achieve the four (or more) nines your business obvioulsy demands?
If you have not, than obvioulsy you want four nines of uptime, but you aren't willing to pay for it - so you don't deserve it. Cash the refund checks and come up with an alternate route for processing orders.
Three nines is almost 9 hours of outage, but they can come in little bursts, not all at once, and still count as a total of 9 hours of outage.
If you need three nines ( and that includes not only work hours but evening and weekend hours when your workforce probably wasn't using Live365 anyways), maybe you shouldn't be on a cloud service.
I once worked for an employer that turned off email from 11:00 -> 1:00 every work day on purpose. It was to increase actual productivity and reduce mindless CC:'ing and endless messaging about preparing to do something...
Maybe, just maybe, after the first few hours of the outage it would occur to an employee to go to BestBuy and pick up a retail copy of Office and install it on their PCs? Or maybe download the tial software from MS and run that for the duration of the outage?
Nope, I guess when a multi-million dollar contract is on the line, there's no way the employees can "think outside the box"...
And if it happens on the weekend, what is the "cost" of the 18 hour outage? Very nearly nothing in most cases.
Your imagined/calculated $80K "cost" is cut in half if the outage spills over into the weekend OR spillsover from the weekend into Monday...
Let's not forget the month over month savings from not having an IT infrastructure beyond a couple switches and an internet connection - that has to figure into your savings when weighed against the cost of an outage.
Your imaginary "company" has 100 employees who suddently become incapable of producing anything of value when their Live365 access is cut off? No cached documents, no local installs of Office? There's nothing they can do? Sounds like a company that shouldn't have been on a cloud-based solution, IMHO.
So, to take the original poster's comment that 36 hour outage in a month yields a 50% refund on service fees, that seems OK, I mean, it's 95% uptime (365-18)/365 * 100 = 95%. Would I like it if my service went down for 18 hours straight? No, of course not - but what is the suggested compensation for a 36-hour outage? 100% refund for the month despite giving the user 28 1/2 days of uninterrupted service?
What does Google offer for a 36 hour (1 1/2 day) outage? Amazon? I suspect this is actually a generous commitment from MS compared with other vendors in the space, but the Anti-MS bias forces the original poster to turn everything around and flaunt their ignorance of the subject.
If you can't afford for access to cloud services to go down, you shouldn't be on a cloud service.
I think you miss the point of a college education - the purpose of college is to ground you in many topics, so that you'll me well educated, and to prepare you for a lifetime of learning. You seem to be viewing college as a requirement to getting a higher-paying job.
I can't tell you how many 'computer people' I know that while very talented in their area (networking, administering, programming, etc.) wind-up stuck at some level of their career be ause they are not prepared to take on greater challenges. Learning how to write, how to think, analyze, and understand the world around you are the traits a college degree is supposed to give you.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with attending a trade school, but it will likely open fewer doors than a college degree with all that 'general education' material.
What do you want a degree for? Seriously, is it to check a box on an employment form, or do you want to learn something? You will learn from doing, be it in college or working somewhere. Have you considered not studying computers at college? At least not as your major - say you studied chemistry, biology, or mathematics, if you did that, you could build yourself an impressive career as a programmer in your chosen field. Your programming skills would augment your degree (or vice-versatile) and make you a very attractive candidate in your chosen field.
It is also much larger, the CPU isn't that much better, and weighs as much as twice the price of the netbook.
The netbook is a trade-off, but you compared the netbook to a laptop on a performance basis - the netbook isn't trying to compete on a performance basis, it is trying to compete on portability, and at half the size and weight, the netbook delivers.
The Dell Vostro V13 has a 1320x768 screen & $400 price w/ dual core CPU, 2 Gig of RAM, full-size keyboard, and the ability to go to 4 Gigs of RAM for $35 more. Battery life is only 3-4 hours, but suits my needs.
I don't get how MS killing off WinXP hurt netbook sales - Win7 works better on these machines, and is available for similar cost to mfg. Win7 Starter is a non-starter, but so few net books ship with that level of Win7 that I can't see it poisoning the entire netbook market.
I have an Asus EEE701, a Dell Mini 9, and a Dell Vostro V13 - with 7", 9", and 13" screens respectively - I won't be buying anymore, as the V13 suits my needs nicely (13" screen, dual core ULV CPU, 4 gigs RAM, 160 gig SSD for $450 + cost of SSD)... The netbook market isn't dead, it's saturated.
Dell Vostro V13 - I got mine for $450 w/ 2 gigs RAM and 500 Gig HD brand-new from Dell - 13" screen, just over 3 pounds, full-size keyboard, and a built-in WWAN card. I upped the RAM to 4 Gigs for $35 and now my ULV dual core CPU hums along nicely. I also swapped an SSD for the SATA HD, but that was a personal preference. Battery life could be better, but with my needs 3-4 hours is fine. Oh, it's about 1/2" thick...
The XO came out with their prototype in 2005, a Dell dimension 8400 w/ P4 CPU, 1 Gig RAM, DVD, Windows XP Pro, MS Office, and a 19" flat panel was $1,000 in may, 2005. $500 P4 PCs weren't that unusual then either, and the XO actually came out at about $200-250/each.
SUVs were a logical reaction to increasing CAFE standards that didn't include small trucks. They allowed car companies to offer full-size vehicles without having to invest in increasing the milage of their vehicles.
Range Rovers actually were heavy enough to qualify for tax credits as a "work truck" because of their weight, making them very affordable for anyone that was able to claim the car as a business expense...
"You might think that the executive team that engineered a lucrative buyout for their company would be rewarded. But eight execs from Skype instead found themselves fired just before their company was formally taken over by Microsoft. It appears that this move isn't meddling from Redmond; rather, the private equity firm that owns a 70 percent stake in Skype wanted to cut back on the payout to company execs that would normally accompany this kind of transaction."
I can't see how it was reasonable to expect that either side of this transaction would want to "reward" those that "engineered a lucrative buy-out" - either it costs the investors money (why give up money you don't have to?) or the buyer will be mad at the people that increased the price of your aqusition (why reward someone for driving up your cost?).
Charter school typically cost less than 'traditional' schools, so I'm not sure how her "$99" saying relates...
Charter schools do one thing most public schools do not - they put the children first - they are non-union. Don't think that makes a difference? Did student performance increase or decrease after tenure was introduced in your district? Given the choice between an 'out of control principal' firing teachers without cause (the teacher's union favorite justification for tenure) or a couple hundred teachers that are not accountable for their students performance (which is what I contend tenure does), I'll choose the out of control principal every time.
Teachers distract parents when they start talking about 'teaching to the test' - the tests were designed as assessments, indicators of a schools progress, not an exhaustive, all-inclusive inventory of the only things students need to know.
The tests are designed to identify weaknesses in the instruction, and by resorting to rote memorization and occasional cheating, issues in our public schools get buried under by standardized test scores.
Standardized tests are so skewed now it's amazing - kids in my district 'prepare' for them, are coddled by parents and teachers (have a big breakfast, don't assign homework, keep the school silent, tell kids to get extra sleep, etc), but the amazing thing is, none of these tests are traceable back to an individual student in any meaningful way - they aren't feedback mechanisms to gauge little Johnny's performance, they are used to keep the federal government out of failing districts/schools, and for teachers to justify ever-greater salaries. Don't believe me? Have you ever heard of anyone being contacted after the standardized tests and been told that your son or daughter has a problem with complex fractions, US History, or reading comprehension? I bet not, but I bet you know the school district's collective ranking compared with other school districts in the state...
Teachers choose to teach to the test (or the administration directs them to, either way, same effect) - parents need to explain to teachers/administrators, we want good students, not good test takers, and if the teachers simply teach the way we (the parents of today's students) were taught 20+ years ago, these assessment tests will take care of themselves.
How much of the power grid is in the hands of private power comapnies - state-regulated monopolies that have to get state approval for any expenditure, investment or rate increase aren't really "private sector" companies...
If your state was worried about implementing a "smart grid" they could simply require thier utility to do it, but they'd have to allow the utility to increase rates to pay for the investment, and oddly, most (but not all)politicians are against the idea of raising electricity rates...
Andrew Jackson is the only President to pay off the national debt. Presindent Clinton, with the "help" of the Republicans in Congress was able to restrain spending and get government spending in-line with revenues, leading to a token annual surplus his last year in office, with PROJECTED surpluses if nothing changed from the year 2000 to 2010... Unfortunately, things changed since Clinton left office.
Clinton reduced the annual deficit, yet did not reduce the national debt while he was in office He took office with $4.6T in debt and left office leaving about $5.6T in debt. [source]
Debt is what we accumulate, year after year. Deficit is the new debt we rack-up each year, that gets added to the debt. Debt Deficit
I couldn't find one provable assertion in that entire post - the gov't collects about $2.6T/year and spends about $4.3T/year, a $1.7T deficit each year (excluding the exceptional TARP, Stimulus, and other one-off spending events). The Bush Tax Cuts "cost" $470BN/year ($400BN/year for the "middle-class tax cuts" everyone was so keen on maintaining, and $70BN/year for the top 1-2% that we simply couldn't afford), and last year our entire military expenditures came to about $660BN/year, for all operations, including our "overseas contingency exercises" - that leaves you about $500BN/year short of being "in the black"...
Medicare & Social Security will implode in a few years, something needs to be done - your acceptance of the lie that Republicans want to "end" medicare is exactly why the Democrats have taken their "Thelma & Lousie" approach to simply over-promise benefits and gun it for the cliff...
MSNBC will be glad to know you're reflexively parroting their talking points without question.
Under the original law, telco equipment was to be rented out at a rate decided by gov't - typically based on fractional cost of equipment purchase, which is only one small part of total cost.
Under the previous ruling, a telco would maintain a Point of Presence, provide redundant connections to the POP, back-up power, etc. and install a DSLAM - a competitor could come in and tell the telco that they wanted a DSLAM port and only pay for the fractional cost of the DSLAM device. The telco had to eat the difference.
This allowed competitors to offer lower cost DSL service, for example.
Having a copy is not the same as owning a copy. The fact that you paid for the download/access to the eBook won't inoculate you if the copy you coaxed out of your reader turns up in the wrong place... With DRM ebooks you typically buy the right to read the book across a variety of devices, that's all.
I just now ordered three books from Amazon (I really wanted only two of them, but with the third I got free shipping by exceeding $25), and each one retailed for less than a dollar more than their eBook versions. A $15.72 physical book that was $14.99 as an eBook - there are no real savings there. I am paying zero to ship the books, saving on sales taxes, and when I tire of the book I can loan or outright give it away, I can't do that with an eBook.
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And why did you go to the cloud if you rneeds (seemingly) can't tolerate any sort of downtime?
I can only assume that rather than continue to put your business at risk you've since hired IT folks and created a complete, redundant datacenter that not only has redundant hardware, network access from diferent providers, and a reliable form of emergency power that can run the datacenter indefinitely so that your application can achieve the four (or more) nines your business obvioulsy demands?
If you have not, than obvioulsy you want four nines of uptime, but you aren't willing to pay for it - so you don't deserve it. Cash the refund checks and come up with an alternate route for processing orders.
Three nines is almost 9 hours of outage, but they can come in little bursts, not all at once, and still count as a total of 9 hours of outage.
If you need three nines ( and that includes not only work hours but evening and weekend hours when your workforce probably wasn't using Live365 anyways), maybe you shouldn't be on a cloud service.
I once worked for an employer that turned off email from 11:00 -> 1:00 every work day on purpose. It was to increase actual productivity and reduce mindless CC:'ing and endless messaging about preparing to do something...
Maybe, just maybe, after the first few hours of the outage it would occur to an employee to go to BestBuy and pick up a retail copy of Office and install it on their PCs? Or maybe download the tial software from MS and run that for the duration of the outage?
Nope, I guess when a multi-million dollar contract is on the line, there's no way the employees can "think outside the box"...
And if it happens on the weekend, what is the "cost" of the 18 hour outage? Very nearly nothing in most cases.
Your imagined/calculated $80K "cost" is cut in half if the outage spills over into the weekend OR spillsover from the weekend into Monday...
Let's not forget the month over month savings from not having an IT infrastructure beyond a couple switches and an internet connection - that has to figure into your savings when weighed against the cost of an outage.
Your imaginary "company" has 100 employees who suddently become incapable of producing anything of value when their Live365 access is cut off? No cached documents, no local installs of Office? There's nothing they can do? Sounds like a company that shouldn't have been on a cloud-based solution, IMHO.
So, to take the original poster's comment that 36 hour outage in a month yields a 50% refund on service fees, that seems OK, I mean, it's 95% uptime (365-18)/365 * 100 = 95%. Would I like it if my service went down for 18 hours straight? No, of course not - but what is the suggested compensation for a 36-hour outage? 100% refund for the month despite giving the user 28 1/2 days of uninterrupted service?
What does Google offer for a 36 hour (1 1/2 day) outage? Amazon? I suspect this is actually a generous commitment from MS compared with other vendors in the space, but the Anti-MS bias forces the original poster to turn everything around and flaunt their ignorance of the subject.
If you can't afford for access to cloud services to go down, you shouldn't be on a cloud service.
I think you miss the point of a college education - the purpose of college is to ground you in many topics, so that you'll me well educated, and to prepare you for a lifetime of learning. You seem to be viewing college as a requirement to getting a higher-paying job.
I can't tell you how many 'computer people' I know that while very talented in their area (networking, administering, programming, etc.) wind-up stuck at some level of their career be ause they are not prepared to take on greater challenges. Learning how to write, how to think, analyze, and understand the world around you are the traits a college degree is supposed to give you.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with attending a trade school, but it will likely open fewer doors than a college degree with all that 'general education' material.
What do you want a degree for? Seriously, is it to check a box on an employment form, or do you want to learn something? You will learn from doing, be it in college or working somewhere. Have you considered not studying computers at college? At least not as your major - say you studied chemistry, biology, or mathematics, if you did that, you could build yourself an impressive career as a programmer in your chosen field. Your programming skills would augment your degree (or vice-versatile) and make you a very attractive candidate in your chosen field.
It is also much larger, the CPU isn't that much better, and weighs as much as twice the price of the netbook.
The netbook is a trade-off, but you compared the netbook to a laptop on a performance basis - the netbook isn't trying to compete on a performance basis, it is trying to compete on portability, and at half the size and weight, the netbook delivers.
The Dell Vostro V13 has a 1320x768 screen & $400 price w/ dual core CPU, 2 Gig of RAM, full-size keyboard, and the ability to go to 4 Gigs of RAM for $35 more. Battery life is only 3-4 hours, but suits my needs.
I don't get how MS killing off WinXP hurt netbook sales - Win7 works better on these machines, and is available for similar cost to mfg. Win7 Starter is a non-starter, but so few net books ship with that level of Win7 that I can't see it poisoning the entire netbook market.
I have an Asus EEE701, a Dell Mini 9, and a Dell Vostro V13 - with 7", 9", and 13" screens respectively - I won't be buying anymore, as the V13 suits my needs nicely (13" screen, dual core ULV CPU, 4 gigs RAM, 160 gig SSD for $450 + cost of SSD)... The netbook market isn't dead, it's saturated.
Dell Vostro V13 - I got mine for $450 w/ 2 gigs RAM and 500 Gig HD brand-new from Dell - 13" screen, just over 3 pounds, full-size keyboard, and a built-in WWAN card. I upped the RAM to 4 Gigs for $35 and now my ULV dual core CPU hums along nicely. I also swapped an SSD for the SATA HD, but that was a personal preference. Battery life could be better, but with my needs 3-4 hours is fine. Oh, it's about 1/2" thick...
The XO came out with their prototype in 2005, a Dell dimension 8400 w/ P4 CPU, 1 Gig RAM, DVD, Windows XP Pro, MS Office, and a 19" flat panel was $1,000 in may, 2005. $500 P4 PCs weren't that unusual then either, and the XO actually came out at about $200-250/each.
SUVs were a logical reaction to increasing CAFE standards that didn't include small trucks. They allowed car companies to offer full-size vehicles without having to invest in increasing the milage of their vehicles.
Range Rovers actually were heavy enough to qualify for tax credits as a "work truck" because of their weight, making them very affordable for anyone that was able to claim the car as a business expense...
...recreate your parent's basement
I can't see how it was reasonable to expect that either side of this transaction would want to "reward" those that "engineered a lucrative buy-out" - either it costs the investors money (why give up money you don't have to?) or the buyer will be mad at the people that increased the price of your aqusition (why reward someone for driving up your cost?).
It gets me to work.
Charter school typically cost less than 'traditional' schools, so I'm not sure how her "$99" saying relates...
Charter schools do one thing most public schools do not - they put the children first - they are non-union. Don't think that makes a difference? Did student performance increase or decrease after tenure was introduced in your district? Given the choice between an 'out of control principal' firing teachers without cause (the teacher's union favorite justification for tenure) or a couple hundred teachers that are not accountable for their students performance (which is what I contend tenure does), I'll choose the out of control principal every time.
Every time.
Teachers distract parents when they start talking about 'teaching to the test' - the tests were designed as assessments, indicators of a schools progress, not an exhaustive, all-inclusive inventory of the only things students need to know.
The tests are designed to identify weaknesses in the instruction, and by resorting to rote memorization and occasional cheating, issues in our public schools get buried under by standardized test scores.
Standardized tests are so skewed now it's amazing - kids in my district 'prepare' for them, are coddled by parents and teachers (have a big breakfast, don't assign homework, keep the school silent, tell kids to get extra sleep, etc), but the amazing thing is, none of these tests are traceable back to an individual student in any meaningful way - they aren't feedback mechanisms to gauge little Johnny's performance, they are used to keep the federal government out of failing districts/schools, and for teachers to justify ever-greater salaries. Don't believe me? Have you ever heard of anyone being contacted after the standardized tests and been told that your son or daughter has a problem with complex fractions, US History, or reading comprehension? I bet not, but I bet you know the school district's collective ranking compared with other school districts in the state...
Teachers choose to teach to the test (or the administration directs them to, either way, same effect) - parents need to explain to teachers/administrators, we want good students, not good test takers, and if the teachers simply teach the way we (the parents of today's students) were taught 20+ years ago, these assessment tests will take care of themselves.
There are small, emergency power generators that run on natural gas
I just invested in G.E. - who else will they "award" this contract to, except for their very-own "Haliburton"?
How much of the power grid is in the hands of private power comapnies - state-regulated monopolies that have to get state approval for any expenditure, investment or rate increase aren't really "private sector" companies...
If your state was worried about implementing a "smart grid" they could simply require thier utility to do it, but they'd have to allow the utility to increase rates to pay for the investment, and oddly, most (but not all)politicians are against the idea of raising electricity rates...
Andrew Jackson is the only President to pay off the national debt. Presindent Clinton, with the "help" of the Republicans in Congress was able to restrain spending and get government spending in-line with revenues, leading to a token annual surplus his last year in office, with PROJECTED surpluses if nothing changed from the year 2000 to 2010... Unfortunately, things changed since Clinton left office.
Clinton reduced the annual deficit, yet did not reduce the national debt while he was in office He took office with $4.6T in debt and left office leaving about $5.6T in debt. [source]
Debt is what we accumulate, year after year. Deficit is the new debt we rack-up each year, that gets added to the debt. Debt Deficit
I couldn't find one provable assertion in that entire post - the gov't collects about $2.6T/year and spends about $4.3T/year, a $1.7T deficit each year (excluding the exceptional TARP, Stimulus, and other one-off spending events). The Bush Tax Cuts "cost" $470BN/year ($400BN/year for the "middle-class tax cuts" everyone was so keen on maintaining, and $70BN/year for the top 1-2% that we simply couldn't afford), and last year our entire military expenditures came to about $660BN/year, for all operations, including our "overseas contingency exercises" - that leaves you about $500BN/year short of being "in the black"...
Medicare & Social Security will implode in a few years, something needs to be done - your acceptance of the lie that Republicans want to "end" medicare is exactly why the Democrats have taken their "Thelma & Lousie" approach to simply over-promise benefits and gun it for the cliff...
MSNBC will be glad to know you're reflexively parroting their talking points without question.
Under the original law, telco equipment was to be rented out at a rate decided by gov't - typically based on fractional cost of equipment purchase, which is only one small part of total cost.
Under the previous ruling, a telco would maintain a Point of Presence, provide redundant connections to the POP, back-up power, etc. and install a DSLAM - a competitor could come in and tell the telco that they wanted a DSLAM port and only pay for the fractional cost of the DSLAM device. The telco had to eat the difference.
This allowed competitors to offer lower cost DSL service, for example.
Having a copy is not the same as owning a copy. The fact that you paid for the download/access to the eBook won't inoculate you if the copy you coaxed out of your reader turns up in the wrong place... With DRM ebooks you typically buy the right to read the book across a variety of devices, that's all.
I just now ordered three books from Amazon (I really wanted only two of them, but with the third I got free shipping by exceeding $25), and each one retailed for less than a dollar more than their eBook versions. A $15.72 physical book that was $14.99 as an eBook - there are no real savings there. I am paying zero to ship the books, saving on sales taxes, and when I tire of the book I can loan or outright give it away, I can't do that with an eBook.