This seems as good a place as any to reach a wide audience of people who commute on southern California freeways.
Did anyone notice how many times they rebuild the center divider on the 710 in between the 405 and the 5? (Compton, Lynwood, Bell, South Gate, etc)
I am referring to the 2005-2009ish time frame. I swear that they literally built the entire length of it, tore it down and rebuilt it at least three times.
I agree. It is not a particularly viable solution for a lot of people. It is the best one I have been able to come up with though. I know that when I suggested it to my parents, they balked at it. I do not need to live at home. I make well over six figures a year. But I am getting ready to have kids, they are getting ready to retire, with our combined incomes we could get a decent sized piece of property and have our own buildings, an estate or compound of sorts. I think it would be cool, they didn't go for it.
The wealth dynamic in this country does not make any sense to me. We are way off topic at this point, but oh well... welcome to Slashdot. It does not make any sense to me to have property, and then sell it to fund retirement. In my mind, property should be something that is passed down generation after generation. This is especially true for people who are moving up socially, shifting from renting to being able to buy their own home. Once that foundation is established, by all means preserve it.
Welcome to reality. The economic system is setup to promote GROWTH, not savings. There are so many people in the world right now who need jobs and jobs require growth. We can debate the folly of unlimited all the time growth, but that is not the point I am getting at here.
The point is that as a society, we need people who are engaged with each other. Savers are not engaged. They are sitting on their toys and not sharing them.
The larger issue for society is the retirees are getting screwed. This is what should be happening, as sad as it is. The old need to die off to make way for the next generation. If old people want to live in comfort, their options are pretty limited. In my mind, the only real solution is multi-generational households where the young are taught to respect their elders. Ideas like that are "anti-American" and contrary to the American dream where people grow up, go to college, leave the house, start their own family, retire on their savings and then start the cycle all over again.
As a society, how long can we support a model where people earn so much more than they need so that they are then able to figuratively sit on their asses for twenty to thirty years (on average)? Or to view it from a slightly different angle, how do we justify paying someone for a job that they are not even doing anymore while hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people who are capable of working do not have jobs?
I have been building my own PCs since the early-1990s (first one I built was a 486 dx2/66 with 4MB of RAM. That's right, 4MB bitches!)
Last year I spent my bonus on a decent computer, i7 960 (3.2Ghz), Asus board, 12GB of RAM and an nVidia 560GTX. It is running Win7x64 Enterprise. I might toss in an SSD for the boot drive, but other than that do not have any plans to upgrade it. Maybe in a few years I will buy another video card, assuming that the cards are still using PCI-E.
Unless Microsoft pulls some seriously shady moves, Win7 should be good for at least five years, if not longer.
The only app that I run that taxes the processor at all is Handbrake. The games I play use 25-50% of it.
It is fairly old, but is also far from being a typical computer of that generation. Most people could not afford SLI, especially not with what 9800GTX's cost when the Q6600 was in the sweet spot of the market.
Even the late 2000s. I just had to buy Snow Leopard for my g/f's MBP (older 15", Dual Core 2.4, 4GB RAM) so that she could play WoW. WoW ran just fine on all the previous versions, but for some reason the newest version needed a version higher than 10.6. Same thing for... Google Drive and newer versions of Chrome and Firefox. WoW I could kind of understand, not really, but fine, whatever. Simple web browsers? That was what upset me. From a hardware point of view, there is no reason that the laptop could not run the web browser. I have an older desktop with less impressive specs running Win7 and it runs Chrome and Firefox just fine. But not OSX, nope, no sir. Pay the Apple tax.
You probably never worried about it because every developer supported it and every video card driver set supported it. You never had to worry about it because the support was implied. You would have had to go a long way out of your way to find a card that was not DirectX compatible, if such a beast even exists.
You must have missed the part of the article where it mentions that one of the Canadian companies that makes it their business to set these up only charges $2000 per account, per year.
One of those firms — Commonwealth Trust Ltd., based in the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean — was founded and, until 2009, run by a Toronto native, Tom Ward. The company's senior ranks included a number of other Canadians. It mainly sets up corporations in the BVI for the wealthy, charging around $2,000 a year per account for its services.
Let's consider for a second what the implications of the government taxing that wealth is.
The way I see it, if they tax it and use it to pay down the debt, the money is just destroyed outright. That is not necessarily a bad thing. These "rich" people have all of that money just sitting there. It is not productive money currently. It is not being used to create jobs, pay salaries or in any other way contribute to the economy. For your average citizen, if all of that "money" vanished into thin air, they would not notice. They do not see it now, they will not see it if governments tax it and pay down debt with it.
On the other hand, if the government confiscates that money through taxation and then uses it to fund programs, the money enters into circulation. The more money in circulation, the more inflation we see. Long term, any programs that are funded with that money create a problem because taxation of that money is a one time event. The programs are perpetual. Perpetual programs will require funding long after the one time windfall has been exhausted.
What do all of you think? Even if the governments were to get together and find a way to tax all of that offshore income, would it be a good thing for the economy?
You are absolutely correct in all of your observations. That is why it is so important to vet any cloud provider, and then continue to do yearly audits.
My organization deals with large financial institutions, among others. We have auditors in our data centers and going through our IT operations on a yearly basis. We are in constant communication with the clients' risk management team.
At this point, the "cloud" is too new for everyone to just jump aboard. I would say that unless a company understands the risks involved in the cloud and has the staff to appropriately manage the risks, they should not trust their operations to a cloud provider. The companies who are a good match for cloud providers are those who have taken a good look at doing it themselves and decided not to due to the cost or complexity. Companies in that position know enough about what it takes to do it based on their own planning. They are in the position to not be fooled by smoke and mirrors from the vendor.
The cloud can work, but it takes a lot of staff and skill to do it right. Right now the margins are there to enable the early adopters to do it well. The pricing pressure has not come to the market in such force that it is impossible to do it right and be profitable. In five years from now, it is going to be a different story. The current players will have established themselves to the point where they are leveraging economies of scale to drive down costs. New entrants into the market will not be able to compete on cost.
I understand being unpopular. I have had a similar career experiences and although it often times takes months or years for things to play out, the satisfaction and recognition that comes from having foreseen the challenges long before others did is very rewarding. Have you made it to the point in your career where you can mitigate the failure? Have you reached the point where you architect systems to be resilient to failure and continue running? It is one thing to perceive a risk. Anybody can do that. It is another thing entirely to mitigate the risk and develop solutions to address it.
I tell you that you are ignorant because you do not seem to understand the technology. You do not seem to understand the market drivers that pushing the industry towards "the cloud". So let's clear up a few things.
Technology fails. You are not some guru because you can predict that technology fails. The industry has been dealing with failure for decades. Hard drives fail so they RAID them. Servers fail so they mirror them. RAM fails so ECC was developed. Power fails during writes so battery backed cache was developed. Do you see the trend here? Virtualization is all about improving up time and reducing the impact of failure. With some of the SAN replication technologies available, entire data centers can fail, petabytes of data can go offline and then be available across the country or across the world in less than hour.
As a business model, the cloud is not going to fail because the economies of scale are making it cost prohibitive for smaller companies to do IT in house. Ten years ago, companies did not have Gmail and hosted Exchange as options for email. Now they do and only the largest corporations still run their own email infrastructure because it is too expensive for a small business to setup the highly available infrastructure required to guarantee 24x7 up time for email. For example the company I work for did over $900 million in revenue last year and we are not hosting our own Exchange because it is more cost effective to outsource it.
The same goes for large LOB applications. The SaaS model works. At scale it is less expensive for one company to run Oracle for 50 companies than it is for 50 companies to run Oracle for themselves.
Ten years from now, you are going to look back on this conversation and realize that you were on the wrong side of history. The cloud model is not going anywhere because it is built on top of all of the technology trends. It is the pinnacle of everything that the IT industry has been building for the last fifty years.
I work in IT operations for a SaaS provider that generates over $60 million a year in revenue. We give our clients guaranteed SLAs and back them up. We host a small handful of specific applications targeted at a narrow market. We are not a traditional "cloud provider" where we let any monkey install whatever application they want. We do have a "private cloud" with excellent up time and our clients are very happy with the service we provide.
Like everything in life, you get out of your service what you put into it. If you are not willing to do your homework and due diligence, you will get bit in the ass. If you know enough about the service you are buying, you can find good providers. But expect to pay for it.
I think the "alphabet soup" confused you because you do not understand the technology. To anyone who knows anything about highly available application stacks, what I said is very clear.
What is your DR strategy like? Do you have a redundant data center to fall over to when your UCS chassis takes a dump? Do you have another SAN that you are replicating to in near real time to give you 1 minute RPO and 15 minute RTO?
My experience was the same as yours (cheaper to do it in-house) until we had to start considering DR. Then the cost of spinning up an entire second infrastructure "just in case" became cost prohibitive. Now obviously we do not have the second site in cold standby. It is live and in use for production purposes with enough spare capacity to handle a fail-over, but it was a huge cost. It is not easy to design an infrastructure that can fail over a 50+ node application that accesses in access of 100TB of data with a 1 minute RPO and 15 minute RTO.
I still haven't received a good answer for when the whole thing falls over one day and people do not have access to their data. Or maybe even their Applications. And it will happen.
It is called an SLA. You do due diligence when you select a provider. You do an audit to make sure that they can do what the sales monkeys claim they can do. You make them conduct a full blown DR test of your application stack. You make them promise to continue to do tests on a quarterly or bi-yearly basis. You get it all down in an iron clad contract that stipulates the penalties for breaking the contract.
If they do not succeed, you do not do business with them.
When you find a provider that can do all of the above, do not be surprised when they charge you an arm and a leg. There are a lot of people who claim five nines uptime, full multi-site DR, blah blah blah. There are very few who can actually deliver it. Those who can deliver it have more prospective customers than they can handle, and therefore can demand high prices for their services.
You make a good point on staffing. I work for a SaaS provider and we have good sized footprints at redundant data centers. Our clients pay us to host their applications because it is less expensive for them and we can leverage economies of scale. There are also regulatory considerations that make it cost prohibitive to host certain kinds of data in house.
The biggest challenge however is staffing. There are simply not enough competent IT people in the world. The need for talent outstrips the available talent pool. At the upper levels of the game, junior people cannot get the hands on experience that employers are working for. It is a chicken and egg problem. People need SAN experts, but how do people get SAN experience? The same thing goes for anything at scale, be it databases, web farms, Exchange, virtualization, whatever. Companies can hire people and mentor them and bring them up, but anyone with the skills and abilities to learn what needs to be done will also quickly realize that once they are capable of performing on their own, there is serious money to be made in consulting or working somewhere else.
Although the article discusses data center consolidation, the real trend that I have observed is talent consolidation. It is not easy to build up the kind of organization required to support 99.999% uptime. The tech is one thing, but then you have to have the processes, be it ITIL or ISO 27002 or COBIT. You need the security infrastructure. You need the regulatory infrastructure (SOX, PCI, HIPAA, whatever). You need true HA within the site and DR for when the unthinkable happens. Running an effective IT infrastructure takes a small army of people to do it right, and those people are in high demand and can command whatever salary they want. There is a lot of money to be made in the SaaS model, but there is also a lot of risk.
My experience has been that they recommend it just because they can. I have dealt with this in the past in consultation with the risk management teams of various financial industry clients of ours. The first couple of times they asked me to do 7 pass zeroing on multiple terabytes of data, I tried to push back on it. Not a single one of them could produce any proof that a single pass was insufficient to render the data unreadable. Yet they all insist that it must be done to DoD standard, 7 pass wipe. It is just one of those idiocies that comes from the "security and risk" people who do not really understand what the risk is and are just checking off boxes on a form that they do not really understand.
"A brilliant industrialist named Justin Cord awakes from a 300-year cryonic suspension into a world that has accepted an extreme form of market capitalism. It's a world in which humans themselves have become incorporated and most people no longer own a majority of themselves."
I suppose it depends on where you live. I had the opposite experience with AT&T in downtown LA. Granted we were a business customer with over 50 cellphone lines. But when we were getting 2 bars in the office, I called them up and they had us up to full strengthen in a couple of months.
I had the same thing happen with Verizon in Long Beach, CA when they first rolled out 4G. Their network was a mess. It would not hold a 4G signal and the phone would constantly bounce between 3G and 4G. I called in three problem areas around the neighborhood and they fixed all of them.
It all comes down to how you deal with them. Usually playing a bit dumb and saying something like, "I am getting terrible service here, but my friends who have (insert other carrier here) get great service. What can you guys do about it? I really do not want to have to go through the headache of changing plans, but a $200 disconnect fee is a small price to pay for being with a carrier that can give me good service."
Did you ever contact them about the call problems? Most carriers take those dead zone reports seriously. It usually takes them 3-6 months to actually get field engineering around to resolving it though.
I have only reported dead zones to Verizon, so YMMV.
The SEC and DOJ have stated that they are going to be more actively pursuing this. That public statement, combined with whistle blower rewards makes it a ripe environment for these kind of investigations. Some prosecutions will come out of them. Most of them will end with settlements. Practically every Fortune 50 corporation will face some form of FCPA action over the next five years.
Just to give the Apple haters something to work with, look... Apple got dinged too.
News for nerds? There's an app for that. There is good money in offering SaaS based FCPA compliance programs to major international corporations. Sure they could build it in house, but who is going to trust a corporation to keep themselves out of trouble? And besides, why would they take the risk that they miss something? It is much easier for them to offload the risk and cost of running the program to a third party.
I find it even more odd that the inquiry was limited to "weaponized drones". So the AG believes that the President cannot use a drone to kill American citizens, but that leaves open everything else from his fists up through nuclear weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems as good a place as any to reach a wide audience of people who commute on southern California freeways.
Did anyone notice how many times they rebuild the center divider on the 710 in between the 405 and the 5? (Compton, Lynwood, Bell, South Gate, etc)
I am referring to the 2005-2009ish time frame. I swear that they literally built the entire length of it, tore it down and rebuilt it at least three times.
I agree. It is not a particularly viable solution for a lot of people. It is the best one I have been able to come up with though. I know that when I suggested it to my parents, they balked at it. I do not need to live at home. I make well over six figures a year. But I am getting ready to have kids, they are getting ready to retire, with our combined incomes we could get a decent sized piece of property and have our own buildings, an estate or compound of sorts. I think it would be cool, they didn't go for it.
The wealth dynamic in this country does not make any sense to me. We are way off topic at this point, but oh well... welcome to Slashdot. It does not make any sense to me to have property, and then sell it to fund retirement. In my mind, property should be something that is passed down generation after generation. This is especially true for people who are moving up socially, shifting from renting to being able to buy their own home. Once that foundation is established, by all means preserve it.
Welcome to reality. The economic system is setup to promote GROWTH, not savings. There are so many people in the world right now who need jobs and jobs require growth. We can debate the folly of unlimited all the time growth, but that is not the point I am getting at here.
The point is that as a society, we need people who are engaged with each other. Savers are not engaged. They are sitting on their toys and not sharing them.
The larger issue for society is the retirees are getting screwed. This is what should be happening, as sad as it is. The old need to die off to make way for the next generation. If old people want to live in comfort, their options are pretty limited. In my mind, the only real solution is multi-generational households where the young are taught to respect their elders. Ideas like that are "anti-American" and contrary to the American dream where people grow up, go to college, leave the house, start their own family, retire on their savings and then start the cycle all over again.
As a society, how long can we support a model where people earn so much more than they need so that they are then able to figuratively sit on their asses for twenty to thirty years (on average)? Or to view it from a slightly different angle, how do we justify paying someone for a job that they are not even doing anymore while hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people who are capable of working do not have jobs?
I have been building my own PCs since the early-1990s (first one I built was a 486 dx2/66 with 4MB of RAM. That's right, 4MB bitches!)
Last year I spent my bonus on a decent computer, i7 960 (3.2Ghz), Asus board, 12GB of RAM and an nVidia 560GTX. It is running Win7x64 Enterprise. I might toss in an SSD for the boot drive, but other than that do not have any plans to upgrade it. Maybe in a few years I will buy another video card, assuming that the cards are still using PCI-E.
Unless Microsoft pulls some seriously shady moves, Win7 should be good for at least five years, if not longer.
The only app that I run that taxes the processor at all is Handbrake. The games I play use 25-50% of it.
It is fairly old, but is also far from being a typical computer of that generation. Most people could not afford SLI, especially not with what 9800GTX's cost when the Q6600 was in the sweet spot of the market.
Even the late 2000s. I just had to buy Snow Leopard for my g/f's MBP (older 15", Dual Core 2.4, 4GB RAM) so that she could play WoW. WoW ran just fine on all the previous versions, but for some reason the newest version needed a version higher than 10.6. Same thing for... Google Drive and newer versions of Chrome and Firefox. WoW I could kind of understand, not really, but fine, whatever. Simple web browsers? That was what upset me. From a hardware point of view, there is no reason that the laptop could not run the web browser. I have an older desktop with less impressive specs running Win7 and it runs Chrome and Firefox just fine. But not OSX, nope, no sir. Pay the Apple tax.
You probably never worried about it because every developer supported it and every video card driver set supported it. You never had to worry about it because the support was implied. You would have had to go a long way out of your way to find a card that was not DirectX compatible, if such a beast even exists.
If he pays the average tax rate, low six figures. Probably $100-125k a year.
You must have missed the part of the article where it mentions that one of the Canadian companies that makes it their business to set these up only charges $2000 per account, per year.
One of those firms — Commonwealth Trust Ltd., based in the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean — was founded and, until 2009, run by a Toronto native, Tom Ward. The company's senior ranks included a number of other Canadians. It mainly sets up corporations in the BVI for the wealthy, charging around $2,000 a year per account for its services.
Let's consider for a second what the implications of the government taxing that wealth is.
The way I see it, if they tax it and use it to pay down the debt, the money is just destroyed outright. That is not necessarily a bad thing. These "rich" people have all of that money just sitting there. It is not productive money currently. It is not being used to create jobs, pay salaries or in any other way contribute to the economy. For your average citizen, if all of that "money" vanished into thin air, they would not notice. They do not see it now, they will not see it if governments tax it and pay down debt with it.
On the other hand, if the government confiscates that money through taxation and then uses it to fund programs, the money enters into circulation. The more money in circulation, the more inflation we see. Long term, any programs that are funded with that money create a problem because taxation of that money is a one time event. The programs are perpetual. Perpetual programs will require funding long after the one time windfall has been exhausted.
What do all of you think? Even if the governments were to get together and find a way to tax all of that offshore income, would it be a good thing for the economy?
You are absolutely correct in all of your observations. That is why it is so important to vet any cloud provider, and then continue to do yearly audits.
My organization deals with large financial institutions, among others. We have auditors in our data centers and going through our IT operations on a yearly basis. We are in constant communication with the clients' risk management team.
At this point, the "cloud" is too new for everyone to just jump aboard. I would say that unless a company understands the risks involved in the cloud and has the staff to appropriately manage the risks, they should not trust their operations to a cloud provider. The companies who are a good match for cloud providers are those who have taken a good look at doing it themselves and decided not to due to the cost or complexity. Companies in that position know enough about what it takes to do it based on their own planning. They are in the position to not be fooled by smoke and mirrors from the vendor.
The cloud can work, but it takes a lot of staff and skill to do it right. Right now the margins are there to enable the early adopters to do it well. The pricing pressure has not come to the market in such force that it is impossible to do it right and be profitable. In five years from now, it is going to be a different story. The current players will have established themselves to the point where they are leveraging economies of scale to drive down costs. New entrants into the market will not be able to compete on cost.
I understand being unpopular. I have had a similar career experiences and although it often times takes months or years for things to play out, the satisfaction and recognition that comes from having foreseen the challenges long before others did is very rewarding. Have you made it to the point in your career where you can mitigate the failure? Have you reached the point where you architect systems to be resilient to failure and continue running? It is one thing to perceive a risk. Anybody can do that. It is another thing entirely to mitigate the risk and develop solutions to address it.
I tell you that you are ignorant because you do not seem to understand the technology. You do not seem to understand the market drivers that pushing the industry towards "the cloud". So let's clear up a few things.
Technology fails. You are not some guru because you can predict that technology fails. The industry has been dealing with failure for decades. Hard drives fail so they RAID them. Servers fail so they mirror them. RAM fails so ECC was developed. Power fails during writes so battery backed cache was developed. Do you see the trend here? Virtualization is all about improving up time and reducing the impact of failure. With some of the SAN replication technologies available, entire data centers can fail, petabytes of data can go offline and then be available across the country or across the world in less than hour.
As a business model, the cloud is not going to fail because the economies of scale are making it cost prohibitive for smaller companies to do IT in house. Ten years ago, companies did not have Gmail and hosted Exchange as options for email. Now they do and only the largest corporations still run their own email infrastructure because it is too expensive for a small business to setup the highly available infrastructure required to guarantee 24x7 up time for email. For example the company I work for did over $900 million in revenue last year and we are not hosting our own Exchange because it is more cost effective to outsource it.
The same goes for large LOB applications. The SaaS model works. At scale it is less expensive for one company to run Oracle for 50 companies than it is for 50 companies to run Oracle for themselves.
Ten years from now, you are going to look back on this conversation and realize that you were on the wrong side of history. The cloud model is not going anywhere because it is built on top of all of the technology trends. It is the pinnacle of everything that the IT industry has been building for the last fifty years.
I am trying to educate you. Obviously I failed.
I work in IT operations for a SaaS provider that generates over $60 million a year in revenue. We give our clients guaranteed SLAs and back them up. We host a small handful of specific applications targeted at a narrow market. We are not a traditional "cloud provider" where we let any monkey install whatever application they want. We do have a "private cloud" with excellent up time and our clients are very happy with the service we provide.
Like everything in life, you get out of your service what you put into it. If you are not willing to do your homework and due diligence, you will get bit in the ass. If you know enough about the service you are buying, you can find good providers. But expect to pay for it.
I think the "alphabet soup" confused you because you do not understand the technology. To anyone who knows anything about highly available application stacks, what I said is very clear.
Maybe you've heard of Citrix?
What is your DR strategy like? Do you have a redundant data center to fall over to when your UCS chassis takes a dump? Do you have another SAN that you are replicating to in near real time to give you 1 minute RPO and 15 minute RTO?
My experience was the same as yours (cheaper to do it in-house) until we had to start considering DR. Then the cost of spinning up an entire second infrastructure "just in case" became cost prohibitive. Now obviously we do not have the second site in cold standby. It is live and in use for production purposes with enough spare capacity to handle a fail-over, but it was a huge cost. It is not easy to design an infrastructure that can fail over a 50+ node application that accesses in access of 100TB of data with a 1 minute RPO and 15 minute RTO.
I still haven't received a good answer for when the whole thing falls over one day and people do not have access to their data. Or maybe even their Applications. And it will happen.
It is called an SLA. You do due diligence when you select a provider. You do an audit to make sure that they can do what the sales monkeys claim they can do. You make them conduct a full blown DR test of your application stack. You make them promise to continue to do tests on a quarterly or bi-yearly basis. You get it all down in an iron clad contract that stipulates the penalties for breaking the contract.
If they do not succeed, you do not do business with them.
When you find a provider that can do all of the above, do not be surprised when they charge you an arm and a leg. There are a lot of people who claim five nines uptime, full multi-site DR, blah blah blah. There are very few who can actually deliver it. Those who can deliver it have more prospective customers than they can handle, and therefore can demand high prices for their services.
You make a good point on staffing. I work for a SaaS provider and we have good sized footprints at redundant data centers. Our clients pay us to host their applications because it is less expensive for them and we can leverage economies of scale. There are also regulatory considerations that make it cost prohibitive to host certain kinds of data in house.
The biggest challenge however is staffing. There are simply not enough competent IT people in the world. The need for talent outstrips the available talent pool. At the upper levels of the game, junior people cannot get the hands on experience that employers are working for. It is a chicken and egg problem. People need SAN experts, but how do people get SAN experience? The same thing goes for anything at scale, be it databases, web farms, Exchange, virtualization, whatever. Companies can hire people and mentor them and bring them up, but anyone with the skills and abilities to learn what needs to be done will also quickly realize that once they are capable of performing on their own, there is serious money to be made in consulting or working somewhere else.
Although the article discusses data center consolidation, the real trend that I have observed is talent consolidation. It is not easy to build up the kind of organization required to support 99.999% uptime. The tech is one thing, but then you have to have the processes, be it ITIL or ISO 27002 or COBIT. You need the security infrastructure. You need the regulatory infrastructure (SOX, PCI, HIPAA, whatever). You need true HA within the site and DR for when the unthinkable happens. Running an effective IT infrastructure takes a small army of people to do it right, and those people are in high demand and can command whatever salary they want. There is a lot of money to be made in the SaaS model, but there is also a lot of risk.
A format is not the same as an overwrite. Even a low level format is not the same as zeroing.
My experience has been that they recommend it just because they can. I have dealt with this in the past in consultation with the risk management teams of various financial industry clients of ours. The first couple of times they asked me to do 7 pass zeroing on multiple terabytes of data, I tried to push back on it. Not a single one of them could produce any proof that a single pass was insufficient to render the data unreadable. Yet they all insist that it must be done to DoD standard, 7 pass wipe. It is just one of those idiocies that comes from the "security and risk" people who do not really understand what the risk is and are just checking off boxes on a form that they do not really understand.
It was good and thought provoking.
http://www.theunincorporatedman.com/
"A brilliant industrialist named Justin Cord awakes from a 300-year cryonic suspension into a world that has accepted an extreme form of market capitalism. It's a world in which humans themselves have become incorporated and most people no longer own a majority of themselves."
I suppose it depends on where you live. I had the opposite experience with AT&T in downtown LA. Granted we were a business customer with over 50 cellphone lines. But when we were getting 2 bars in the office, I called them up and they had us up to full strengthen in a couple of months.
I had the same thing happen with Verizon in Long Beach, CA when they first rolled out 4G. Their network was a mess. It would not hold a 4G signal and the phone would constantly bounce between 3G and 4G. I called in three problem areas around the neighborhood and they fixed all of them.
It all comes down to how you deal with them. Usually playing a bit dumb and saying something like, "I am getting terrible service here, but my friends who have (insert other carrier here) get great service. What can you guys do about it? I really do not want to have to go through the headache of changing plans, but a $200 disconnect fee is a small price to pay for being with a carrier that can give me good service."
Did you ever contact them about the call problems? Most carriers take those dead zone reports seriously. It usually takes them 3-6 months to actually get field engineering around to resolving it though.
I have only reported dead zones to Verizon, so YMMV.
Let me help you guys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
The SEC and DOJ have stated that they are going to be more actively pursuing this. That public statement, combined with whistle blower rewards makes it a ripe environment for these kind of investigations. Some prosecutions will come out of them. Most of them will end with settlements. Practically every Fortune 50 corporation will face some form of FCPA action over the next five years.
Just to give the Apple haters something to work with, look... Apple got dinged too.
http://www.fcpablog.com/blog/tag/apple#
Here's an article about the SEC's increased interest in FCPA litigation.
http://www.trust.org/trustlaw/news/fcpa-and-extraterritorial-regulation-becoming-bigger-issues-for-financial-institutions-conference-hears
News for nerds? There's an app for that. There is good money in offering SaaS based FCPA compliance programs to major international corporations. Sure they could build it in house, but who is going to trust a corporation to keep themselves out of trouble? And besides, why would they take the risk that they miss something? It is much easier for them to offload the risk and cost of running the program to a third party.
I find it even more odd that the inquiry was limited to "weaponized drones". So the AG believes that the President cannot use a drone to kill American citizens, but that leaves open everything else from his fists up through nuclear weapons.
You forgot Bullfrog, the studio that developed Syndicate. They recycled that IP as a worthless FPS that had very little to do with the original game.