My work doesn't require 'just' interaction with systems and data. It also requires interaction with co-workers both in the physical office and in newrly every time zone on the planet. My 'customers' are no longer just in North American, but on every continent except Antarctica and Africa, and the latter is coming on board soon. I already telecommute, but I need to do so from a location where my most important collaborators are physically available, and that is the 'office'. I project my services from there.
To be at home would deny me both ready and rich access to my team. Physical presence permits ad hoc meetings, adding in team members, quick face-to-face covnersations for minutes that avoid IMs and email chains that take much of an hour, and avoid misunderstandings. No teleconferencing works like that yet. For one thing, cameras are banned - data loss policy. We have a teleconferencing space to use, but it's for extended international or cross-continent needs.
And I very much prefer to be part of a team, not alone. I did that for the better part of 14 years, and it's not very attractive.
Telecommuting is so attractive in principle.
And to answer the unasked question of telecommuting offering the equivalence of a raise, well there are things to consider. Including your employer's reasonable and justifiable perception that saving money on commuting translates into a lower pay rate, since your expenses are decreased. This will probably be expressed as either lower raises or slower raises. Compensation is often based on market forces, and if a telecommuting job is attractive to others who would take less pay for the convenience of being home (mothers seem to fit this model very well), then you are competing with people who otherwise would not be in the market. Child raisers in particular may use the calculus of a tlecommuting job permitting them to avoid expensive day care. This lets them see a discounted job as actually incremental income where an office job is income offset by expenses. Work that out and tell me you can compete. Maybe.
Telecommuting will, one day, be seen as another advantage to Corporations, and a detriment to the worker. Watch.
Let's not get too far into the collision of telecommuting data access (ISPs) and bandwidth. If we start streaming our favorite videos during the day to avoid the nighttime crush and gamers, watch when telecommuters start using that bandwidth all day long. And watch when ISPs filter VPNs and ask you to pay more for unfettered corporate access. I would expect them to offer corporations that deploy their workes to home a 'deal' on dedicated access. Wait, I bet they do already... SOHO accounts and such. For more money.
Ties aren't the problem. More than anything else, US spots fans have less interest in national teams and international championships. First, because we have arguably the best national leagues in Baseball & Football, though I would LOVE to see the Word Series winner play the Japanese champion, I just don't know if it would work. Football, of course, is an entirely American invention.
Don't go all basketball on me, cause in case you didn't realize this, we no longer care much about the NBA. Hockey is an acquired taste in the US.
Americans seems to prefer the sports we either invented or dominate. One of our many shortcomings.
... not just in the rules and play, but in the TV coverage.
Soccer is insanely popular the world over, and TV coverage of soccer seems to provide a wider view of the field, which is crucial. Soccer covers a lot of ground on a regular basis, where American football doesn't so much. And those long plays tend to be easier to zoom into. Zoom into a decent penetration in a soccer match, and you'll miss everything important.
And I love both. I'd love to have a wider view of football.
Yah, even in 2003, with mixed-mode AD and NT 4.0 servers, the damned Solarix box serving radiology and NFS shares, keeping your shiny new Server 03 box happy for more than a week was sometimes a challenge.
Wait, I forget. If it leaks memory, stops replicating, buffers packets instead of forwarding them, and turns deaf to NFS, it's probably the admin's fault. The same one who explained that using MSFT.COM would be fine as a local domain, since it wasn;t being used and would never cause a resolution problem, and that was how it was taught in MCSE school.
Well, the admin was part of telecom. Not my responsibility back then, I was the Novell guy. My stuff was incompatible, obsolete, hard to interface with, and up for an average of 600 days. Not just boring, not Microsoft. And they took 2 years to get the only database app they ran on a server ported over to SQL Server from an Advantage database on a Novell server that went down once in 5 years, for a Y2K fix. I really didn't hate to leave that gig in the end, but I still grit my teeth when I think of the migration to Microsoft they went through. Inevitable, but still irritating.
Where I work (non-govermental) they are required by law to ensure data is not recoverable from surplus or decomissioned systems, even desktops and notebooks. 'Ensure' means to guarantee upon legal and regulatory penalties up to and including forfeiture of profits and punitive damages in excess of the company's net worth and revenue. In other words, the penalty is bankruptcy and dissolution.
We wish to avoid that.
There is, sadly, only one absolutely guaranteed method of preventing data recovery, and that is drive destruction. Not just drilling a hole in the platters, not just crushing them flat, but shredding them in a machine designed for that purpose, which is what happens.
Ddespite all the assurances, there are no software or hardware vendors that will also guarantee, to the extent of their demise, that their software will absolutely destroy data and still allow the drive to be reused. None. their marketing claims fail when you put them on the spot to not only guarantee, but prove, that data is not recoverable. Not when you specify the penalty for failure.
In this scenario, we shred the drives. Which renders most machines into scrap as well, selling them for a pittance as spares and inert parts. Kinda sad, I would buy my current notebook when it gets decommed, but that's just not practical since the drive will cost more than the unit is really worth.
I'm guessing one reason you're tasked with finding a solution is that this new requirement escaped attention, and the extra cost is enough to justify finding a way around it. If so, and if there are not such penalties that would make that unwise, I would recommend:
- Wipe with the best stuff available. - Format and install an OS, probably from an image. - Fill the drive with 'random' data. Fill to 0% free. Use smaller and smaller files to do this. - Wipe again. - Format and install again. - Use a different wiper and repeat steps 1-5 Above. Twice. - Use an different OS and repeat 1-6 above. Twice. Different data to fill the drive. - Wipe with a third different wiper and third different OS (probably a server OS this time) and do 1-5 again. Twice. Different data to fill the drive this time also. - Send a sample drive out to to one of the recovery specialists and pay them anything to get anything off the original data. You did put on some predictable data, right? Give them a copy - this is what they are looking for. Don't put any of this data in your OS and fill stuff, ok? If they find ANYTHING, including OS files, this is a failure. Directory entries with timestamps before your wiping count as a find.
If that seems inane, well, it's more work than a drive is worth, even with automation. You get it now don't you? Just buy the drives and let your boss whimper a little over the dollars. It's not worth the trouble.
And, yes, this is overkill. If his exposure is less than the loss of the company, then he can eliminate some of these steps. No problem. It just won't happen where I work.
He could have focused on sound drivers also. And video drivers. But you can't leave those out, so you ship with a broken driver model becausae you can't go all the way to a decent driver scheme.
And that didn't get fixed until XP. At least then, XP was capable of killing the sound driver on shutdown, since we aren;t going to be listening to music with the machine turned off...
Now if they would just fix the MUP, and make namimg work decently, even Win 7 would shape up. But no, Microsoft's name searching on LANs continues to suck. Network shares still hide from you, and Windows still asks around just in case it missed a name server, browser manager, or some unknown name source. Seriously, you're searching for the Unknown Name Server? On a domain?
Your opinion is common, and IMHO, somewhat misguided.
- Justice delayed is justice denied. It's taken this long to get past MS's delaying tactics. You seem to think this is Novell's fault.
- Novell will be able to show that it was materially harmed by deliberate acts by MS, intended to harm their products, and done without disclosure. Had MS just sayd out front that Win 95 would not support WP, and you needed to buy Word, well, that would be a different legal case, probably one for restraint of trade. And behold, that's the case now, save that Novell is claiming MS did it surreptitiously.
- And Novell lost most of their networking advantages the same way, MS rendering their products incompatible on purpose, while promoting their competitive solutions.
No need for an analogy here. Such acts are illegal. Making better products isn't. Mostly. But this wasn't a patent case.
There were other reasons that WP was dependent on running with Win95:
- WP4x slammed the market because they wrote print drivers for virtually every printer, and back then printers were wacko. No two were alike. So having print drivers for your fancy NEC daisy wheel printer was crucial. Even Word for DOS lagged here. In fact, WP support was largely printer support, and they did very well.
- Then Windows 3x did printing for you, albeit at the lowest common denominator, and Wp's key feature was diminished. They did, of course, write their won print subsystem so stuff like superscripts and kerning actually worked right, and fonts were properly supported.
- Windows 95 made vast improvements in printing, and of course HP started making laser printers, and WP's advantages in supporting all these dot-matrix and wheel printers started to not matter at all. WP's biggest advantage, WYSIWYG printing, was being incorporated into Windows. Advantage MS.
- Word for Windows finally got printing right around that time, and WP was being crushed by both loss of their printing advantage and the killing off of several key features - the file dialogs that made a secretary's life tolerable as documents proliferated, the inherent networking advantage of those dialogs, in a LAN environment where Novell ruled and VINES was the big corporation/government solution, and naming was critical to managing those many many documents.
MS didn't just drop those APIs, they purposefully showed them in pre-release examples of the OS, and failed to notify any of the developers in advance that they would not ship (except for a very few, under NDAs, like Adobe and Autodesk, but that story is not entirely substantiated to this day). Novell didn't get any notice, and their client (and WP, not just WordPerfect but Office and the mail stuff) all were left holding their cannoli on release.
Not just embarassing, but in the shop I was in then, we had plans to deploy 95 in a month after release, and that became 6 months as the NetWare client was fixed. Management started to scream that we should ditch NetWare and go to NTAS, but we survived that.
Oh, and after 7 years, the shop did finally kill NetWare and go to Server 2003. And the server reboots went from single-digits per 7 years to single-digts per week. But at least it's compatible.
"I don't doubt that MS over-promised on what features the OS would deliver, given that they've done that with every OS release I can recall, but to say that they shelved a viable feature to sink Novell, and that it was actually the cause of Novell going under is a real stretch."
Well, at least one federal judge stretched that way. Go back up a few posts and read.
"very few users would gamble with multitasking under Win9x (except for things like running an IRC client, an MP3 player and a web browser at the same time). "
Sounds like actual, genuine multitasking to me. And hitting one of the soft spots, the TCP stack, pretty hard. Browsers of that era weren't much to write home about and were by themselves crash-worthy. MP3 players then were pus. mIRC was tolerable.
Just as a note, I weas running W4W 3.11, dialing into a local ISP and hitting my AOL account via TCP/IP pretty much every night. It would crash every 2-3 hours. Trumpet Winsock was all there was. Then I bought the Win95 upgrade (and a full version for a second machine running Slackware 0.9 at the time). the full version was entirely normal, but the upgrade ran without rebooting until the first patch came out, something about DUN I think. I know of no other machine that did that, not even any of my others. Scary. I was pained to reboot it, and it never ran more than a week after that. One theory was that some modules from the upgrade stayed in memory and I was running a transitional W4W driver somewhere, but that's insane.
Gates' claim that they wanted to clean up 95 and that meant leaving out file naming stuff that WP relied upon, though, is disingenuous and a lie. The same APIs were used heavily by Novell for their NetWare client in W4W, and that was a target - MS was dedicated to crushing the NetWare client. Novell kept coming back, but finally succumbed. And discussion about Gates' requirement to make APIs available to all is a lie also - it may have been a legal requirement, but it was ignored, and the Word team took full advantage of their insider access to Windows APIs. Isn't this settled fact, and one of the foundations of the now dying Justice consent decree/antitrust judgement? Really? We still discuss this?
2 meter stuff is pretty cheap. Same price range as dicking around witrh Arduinos, once you've included breadboards, power supplies, blah blah blah. Addmittedly, some hams don't think of 2 meter as 'ham', but it's cheap, a busy band, and if you get the urge to go SW you'll be able to sell off your stuff. Probably. Real hams never sell anything.
Now, it does get more expensive for better stuff. But there are licenses today that don't seem to require as much tech as before. Learn up and you can buy some used stuff, it up, and be on the air.
If you want a cheap hobby, try QRP!. And be a *real* ham and build yer own.
Oh, and antennas are the coolest part of all this, to me. Clever antenna designs make all the difference...
Even if you get hung up on the live/dead count, this is a valid relative count, that is, the FCC is counting the licenses the same way, and so growth is apparent no matter.
And while hams do tend to expire, as well as their licenses, the growth recently would not be expected to include so many dead as live.
"Is there a minimum that Groupon makes businesses sign up for?"
Think about this for a moment...
If you're a multinational bakery, you can go crazy and sell a million sample cakes via Groupon, and you're thinking in terms of hundred-thousands.
If you're a local frozen yogurt shop, you're thinking in terms of dozens.
The scales are wildly different.
Asking the question "Is there a minimum that Groupon makes businesses sign up for?" implies either that:
- you think Groupon treats all businesses the same. - you think Groupon doesn't treat all businesses the same.
If you think Groupon treats every business the same, well, you may be right, but this is highly doubtful. Remarkably so. For one thing, it is not just sensible that Groupon would want to know your typical volume just to spot the multinational and get them on to someone skilled in negiotiating such a deal, but there is little profit (or likelihood) in trying to get the fees from the yogurt shop if they happen to sell 100,000 Groupons. Not worth the effort of even letting them sign up for such a widespread campaign.
So, if you think Groupon doesn't treat all businesses the same, why did you ask the question?
Sometimes,in war, a quick decisive victory saves lives otherwise spent on a futile and protracted defense. WWI perhaps an example. War is always about winners, losers, death, and pain. I get it.
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My work doesn't require 'just' interaction with systems and data. It also requires interaction with co-workers both in the physical office and in newrly every time zone on the planet. My 'customers' are no longer just in North American, but on every continent except Antarctica and Africa, and the latter is coming on board soon. I already telecommute, but I need to do so from a location where my most important collaborators are physically available, and that is the 'office'. I project my services from there.
To be at home would deny me both ready and rich access to my team. Physical presence permits ad hoc meetings, adding in team members, quick face-to-face covnersations for minutes that avoid IMs and email chains that take much of an hour, and avoid misunderstandings. No teleconferencing works like that yet. For one thing, cameras are banned - data loss policy. We have a teleconferencing space to use, but it's for extended international or cross-continent needs.
And I very much prefer to be part of a team, not alone. I did that for the better part of 14 years, and it's not very attractive.
Telecommuting is so attractive in principle.
And to answer the unasked question of telecommuting offering the equivalence of a raise, well there are things to consider. Including your employer's reasonable and justifiable perception that saving money on commuting translates into a lower pay rate, since your expenses are decreased. This will probably be expressed as either lower raises or slower raises. Compensation is often based on market forces, and if a telecommuting job is attractive to others who would take less pay for the convenience of being home (mothers seem to fit this model very well), then you are competing with people who otherwise would not be in the market. Child raisers in particular may use the calculus of a tlecommuting job permitting them to avoid expensive day care. This lets them see a discounted job as actually incremental income where an office job is income offset by expenses. Work that out and tell me you can compete. Maybe.
Telecommuting will, one day, be seen as another advantage to Corporations, and a detriment to the worker. Watch.
Let's not get too far into the collision of telecommuting data access (ISPs) and bandwidth. If we start streaming our favorite videos during the day to avoid the nighttime crush and gamers, watch when telecommuters start using that bandwidth all day long. And watch when ISPs filter VPNs and ask you to pay more for unfettered corporate access. I would expect them to offer corporations that deploy their workes to home a 'deal' on dedicated access. Wait, I bet they do already... SOHO accounts and such. For more money.
Changing pricing mid-contract would give you the option to terminate without penalty. Then we can all go to Sprint...
I would expect an Apple network to price close to AT&T. Remember, Apple gets kickbacks from the carriers now, I *BET* so equal pricing works.
Now, on renewal, you get to choose.
But Apple would need to learn how to run TMO aka "APPLECELL", and maybe they don't want to after all.
There are other options.
Jobs always wanted to be a carrier. It could work, but they would need to grow coverage bigtime.
Google is not interested in that. Trust Me.
AT&T is *IN* that direction, been GSM since Cingular, actually before.
This was always about spectrum for AT&T. For DT, it's more about ditching a non-core distraction. For cash.
Ties aren't the problem. More than anything else, US spots fans have less interest in national teams and international championships. First, because we have arguably the best national leagues in Baseball & Football, though I would LOVE to see the Word Series winner play the Japanese champion, I just don't know if it would work. Football, of course, is an entirely American invention.
Don't go all basketball on me, cause in case you didn't realize this, we no longer care much about the NBA. Hockey is an acquired taste in the US.
Americans seems to prefer the sports we either invented or dominate. One of our many shortcomings.
... not just in the rules and play, but in the TV coverage.
Soccer is insanely popular the world over, and TV coverage of soccer seems to provide a wider view of the field, which is crucial. Soccer covers a lot of ground on a regular basis, where American football doesn't so much. And those long plays tend to be easier to zoom into. Zoom into a decent penetration in a soccer match, and you'll miss everything important.
And I love both. I'd love to have a wider view of football.
Given that we look at that with as much as 8 years experience, today's environments are just not the same.
But those admins didn't need my help. They were fine.
Yah, even in 2003, with mixed-mode AD and NT 4.0 servers, the damned Solarix box serving radiology and NFS shares, keeping your shiny new Server 03 box happy for more than a week was sometimes a challenge.
Wait, I forget. If it leaks memory, stops replicating, buffers packets instead of forwarding them, and turns deaf to NFS, it's probably the admin's fault. The same one who explained that using MSFT.COM would be fine as a local domain, since it wasn;t being used and would never cause a resolution problem, and that was how it was taught in MCSE school.
Well, the admin was part of telecom. Not my responsibility back then, I was the Novell guy. My stuff was incompatible, obsolete, hard to interface with, and up for an average of 600 days. Not just boring, not Microsoft. And they took 2 years to get the only database app they ran on a server ported over to SQL Server from an Advantage database on a Novell server that went down once in 5 years, for a Y2K fix. I really didn't hate to leave that gig in the end, but I still grit my teeth when I think of the migration to Microsoft they went through. Inevitable, but still irritating.
Where I work (non-govermental) they are required by law to ensure data is not recoverable from surplus or decomissioned systems, even desktops and notebooks. 'Ensure' means to guarantee upon legal and regulatory penalties up to and including forfeiture of profits and punitive damages in excess of the company's net worth and revenue. In other words, the penalty is bankruptcy and dissolution.
We wish to avoid that.
There is, sadly, only one absolutely guaranteed method of preventing data recovery, and that is drive destruction. Not just drilling a hole in the platters, not just crushing them flat, but shredding them in a machine designed for that purpose, which is what happens.
Ddespite all the assurances, there are no software or hardware vendors that will also guarantee, to the extent of their demise, that their software will absolutely destroy data and still allow the drive to be reused. None. their marketing claims fail when you put them on the spot to not only guarantee, but prove, that data is not recoverable. Not when you specify the penalty for failure.
In this scenario, we shred the drives. Which renders most machines into scrap as well, selling them for a pittance as spares and inert parts. Kinda sad, I would buy my current notebook when it gets decommed, but that's just not practical since the drive will cost more than the unit is really worth.
I'm guessing one reason you're tasked with finding a solution is that this new requirement escaped attention, and the extra cost is enough to justify finding a way around it. If so, and if there are not such penalties that would make that unwise, I would recommend:
- Wipe with the best stuff available.
- Format and install an OS, probably from an image.
- Fill the drive with 'random' data. Fill to 0% free. Use smaller and smaller files to do this.
- Wipe again.
- Format and install again.
- Use a different wiper and repeat steps 1-5 Above. Twice.
- Use an different OS and repeat 1-6 above. Twice. Different data to fill the drive.
- Wipe with a third different wiper and third different OS (probably a server OS this time) and do 1-5 again. Twice. Different data to fill the drive this time also.
- Send a sample drive out to to one of the recovery specialists and pay them anything to get anything off the original data. You did put on some predictable data, right? Give them a copy - this is what they are looking for. Don't put any of this data in your OS and fill stuff, ok? If they find ANYTHING, including OS files, this is a failure. Directory entries with timestamps before your wiping count as a find.
If that seems inane, well, it's more work than a drive is worth, even with automation. You get it now don't you? Just buy the drives and let your boss whimper a little over the dollars. It's not worth the trouble.
And, yes, this is overkill. If his exposure is less than the loss of the company, then he can eliminate some of these steps. No problem. It just won't happen where I work.
It's not contract law, it's antitrust.
He could have focused on sound drivers also. And video drivers. But you can't leave those out, so you ship with a broken driver model becausae you can't go all the way to a decent driver scheme.
And that didn't get fixed until XP. At least then, XP was capable of killing the sound driver on shutdown, since we aren;t going to be listening to music with the machine turned off...
Now if they would just fix the MUP, and make namimg work decently, even Win 7 would shape up. But no, Microsoft's name searching on LANs continues to suck. Network shares still hide from you, and Windows still asks around just in case it missed a name server, browser manager, or some unknown name source. Seriously, you're searching for the Unknown Name Server? On a domain?
Your opinion is common, and IMHO, somewhat misguided.
- Justice delayed is justice denied. It's taken this long to get past MS's delaying tactics. You seem to think this is Novell's fault.
- Novell will be able to show that it was materially harmed by deliberate acts by MS, intended to harm their products, and done without disclosure. Had MS just sayd out front that Win 95 would not support WP, and you needed to buy Word, well, that would be a different legal case, probably one for restraint of trade. And behold, that's the case now, save that Novell is claiming MS did it surreptitiously.
- And Novell lost most of their networking advantages the same way, MS rendering their products incompatible on purpose, while promoting their competitive solutions.
No need for an analogy here. Such acts are illegal. Making better products isn't. Mostly. But this wasn't a patent case.
There were other reasons that WP was dependent on running with Win95:
- WP4x slammed the market because they wrote print drivers for virtually every printer, and back then printers were wacko. No two were alike. So having print drivers for your fancy NEC daisy wheel printer was crucial. Even Word for DOS lagged here. In fact, WP support was largely printer support, and they did very well.
- Then Windows 3x did printing for you, albeit at the lowest common denominator, and Wp's key feature was diminished. They did, of course, write their won print subsystem so stuff like superscripts and kerning actually worked right, and fonts were properly supported.
- Windows 95 made vast improvements in printing, and of course HP started making laser printers, and WP's advantages in supporting all these dot-matrix and wheel printers started to not matter at all. WP's biggest advantage, WYSIWYG printing, was being incorporated into Windows. Advantage MS.
- Word for Windows finally got printing right around that time, and WP was being crushed by both loss of their printing advantage and the killing off of several key features - the file dialogs that made a secretary's life tolerable as documents proliferated, the inherent networking advantage of those dialogs, in a LAN environment where Novell ruled and VINES was the big corporation/government solution, and naming was critical to managing those many many documents.
MS didn't just drop those APIs, they purposefully showed them in pre-release examples of the OS, and failed to notify any of the developers in advance that they would not ship (except for a very few, under NDAs, like Adobe and Autodesk, but that story is not entirely substantiated to this day). Novell didn't get any notice, and their client (and WP, not just WordPerfect but Office and the mail stuff) all were left holding their cannoli on release.
Not just embarassing, but in the shop I was in then, we had plans to deploy 95 in a month after release, and that became 6 months as the NetWare client was fixed. Management started to scream that we should ditch NetWare and go to NTAS, but we survived that.
Oh, and after 7 years, the shop did finally kill NetWare and go to Server 2003. And the server reboots went from single-digits per 7 years to single-digts per week. But at least it's compatible.
"I don't doubt that MS over-promised on what features the OS would deliver, given that they've done that with every OS release I can recall, but to say that they shelved a viable feature to sink Novell, and that it was actually the cause of Novell going under is a real stretch."
Well, at least one federal judge stretched that way. Go back up a few posts and read.
If they had put another 8MB in that shit would have worked. Too cheap to buy 2M sticks.
Wow. Just wow.
"very few users would gamble with multitasking under Win9x (except for things like running an IRC client, an MP3 player and a web browser at the same time). "
Sounds like actual, genuine multitasking to me. And hitting one of the soft spots, the TCP stack, pretty hard. Browsers of that era weren't much to write home about and were by themselves crash-worthy. MP3 players then were pus. mIRC was tolerable.
Just as a note, I weas running W4W 3.11, dialing into a local ISP and hitting my AOL account via TCP/IP pretty much every night. It would crash every 2-3 hours. Trumpet Winsock was all there was. Then I bought the Win95 upgrade (and a full version for a second machine running Slackware 0.9 at the time). the full version was entirely normal, but the upgrade ran without rebooting until the first patch came out, something about DUN I think. I know of no other machine that did that, not even any of my others. Scary. I was pained to reboot it, and it never ran more than a week after that. One theory was that some modules from the upgrade stayed in memory and I was running a transitional W4W driver somewhere, but that's insane.
Gates' claim that they wanted to clean up 95 and that meant leaving out file naming stuff that WP relied upon, though, is disingenuous and a lie. The same APIs were used heavily by Novell for their NetWare client in W4W, and that was a target - MS was dedicated to crushing the NetWare client. Novell kept coming back, but finally succumbed. And discussion about Gates' requirement to make APIs available to all is a lie also - it may have been a legal requirement, but it was ignored, and the Word team took full advantage of their insider access to Windows APIs. Isn't this settled fact, and one of the foundations of the now dying Justice consent decree/antitrust judgement? Really? We still discuss this?
considerable money?
2 meter stuff is pretty cheap. Same price range as dicking around witrh Arduinos, once you've included breadboards, power supplies, blah blah blah. Addmittedly, some hams don't think of 2 meter as 'ham', but it's cheap, a busy band, and if you get the urge to go SW you'll be able to sell off your stuff. Probably. Real hams never sell anything.
Now, it does get more expensive for better stuff. But there are licenses today that don't seem to require as much tech as before. Learn up and you can buy some used stuff, it up, and be on the air.
If you want a cheap hobby, try QRP!. And be a *real* ham and build yer own.
Oh, and antennas are the coolest part of all this, to me. Clever antenna designs make all the difference...
Even if you get hung up on the live/dead count, this is a valid relative count, that is, the FCC is counting the licenses the same way, and so growth is apparent no matter.
And while hams do tend to expire, as well as their licenses, the growth recently would not be expected to include so many dead as live.
"Is there a minimum that Groupon makes businesses sign up for?"
Think about this for a moment...
If you're a multinational bakery, you can go crazy and sell a million sample cakes via Groupon, and you're thinking in terms of hundred-thousands.
If you're a local frozen yogurt shop, you're thinking in terms of dozens.
The scales are wildly different.
Asking the question "Is there a minimum that Groupon makes businesses sign up for?" implies either that:
- you think Groupon treats all businesses the same.
- you think Groupon doesn't treat all businesses the same.
If you think Groupon treats every business the same, well, you may be right, but this is highly doubtful. Remarkably so. For one thing, it is not just sensible that Groupon would want to know your typical volume just to spot the multinational and get them on to someone skilled in negiotiating such a deal, but there is little profit (or likelihood) in trying to get the fees from the yogurt shop if they happen to sell 100,000 Groupons. Not worth the effort of even letting them sign up for such a widespread campaign.
So, if you think Groupon doesn't treat all businesses the same, why did you ask the question?
Don't forget Groupon gets a cut of this. And it ain't 25%.
Is it like this?
Well, you can buy that now.
And this winter, we read that there is not only a Facebook phone coming (albeit no sign of this particular one yet), but there's more than one.
Hey, when do we get new news, huh?
The constant prompting to link contacts to Facebook friends is already a feature or many Android phones, especially the ones running Sense.
Nothing new there.
Plugging in a USB stick isn't 'doing it yourself'.
They have cube farms for people at the JAX. I've been there.
And they smell marginally better, though the food is way way better.
Sometimes,in war, a quick decisive victory saves lives otherwise spent on a futile and protracted defense. WWI perhaps an example.
War is always about winners, losers, death, and pain. I get it.