When my audio Caller ID announces a call coming from "Out of Area" (aka no incoming caller id information), then I let the machine get it.
Then, if the business really wants to get a hold of me, they'll leave a message and, if I'm home, I can pick up.
This has worked pretty well until recently, when some of the more obnoxious telemarketers have played a pre-recorded spam message into my machine.
I could have sworn it was not legal for them to do this; certain state statutes prevent it.
Possibly my outgoing message must explicitly refuse such calls, or the loophole interpretation is that I am implicitly agreeing to opt-in, to receive such spam.
<philosophical>
One of the more tragic developments in modern society is that more and more of our "public attention commons" is getting exploited because the cost of doing so is largely external to the people doing the exploiting. For millenia, we've paid attention to people wanting our attention. With few people, such interruptions are infrequent and of little cost to our emotional well-being.
Not anymore.
Unless laws are put in place to provide guarantees of private space, then it will be exploited.
But that won't happen. Instead, we'll all just turn into stressed out consumers that develop our ability to actively ignore our environment, other people and any attempt to grab our attention.
The newest sign of affluence is less intrusion into your personal attention.
This sounds like a great application of economics!
I suspect it's already in effect.
Eg, given the U.S. reliance on Saudi Oil and the vulnerability of the U.S. economy to any instability in the House of Saud, wouldn't it be prudent to have a backup source of oil in, oh, say Iraq?
I really would like to see IPv6 take off and become widely used, even in the U.S.
Until then, why not start a market where IPv4 addresses may be bought and sold and even leased for a while?
A central marketplace would enable the IPv4 address changes to be forwarded automatically into the big DNS servers and a small tax on the transaction could fund the minimal cost of doing the updating.
Finally, if the price for IPv4 addresses gets too high, then IPv6 will become naturally attractive, much in the same way that obtaining .net or .org addresses is less expensive than getting the more sought-after .com registered domains.
And I thought I was a lazy bastard with lots of short bash aliases to minimize typing!
I can see where these people will use up every damn single letter alias and function name around!
alias i=init
alias u=unmount . .
If it really takes off, then maybe the filesystem naming conventions will be next. We'll turn the tide from current verbose offerings such as "/home/joeuser" to the much more succinct "/u/ju".
I think the large projects for large companies can afford some of the risks of overseas outsourcing of their projects. There are risks and there are rewards in doing so.
Small companies, small short projects that live and die on frequent interfacing with small and medium sized business owners will probably be better off in most cases talking with a local support developer.
If your project grows large, stable and is properly constructed of commodity pieces, then it will make sense to move those functions to where they can be performed at the lowest cost.
I can also see where some of the lesser desirable jobs could be outsourced, such as quality testing of the weirdest kind, documentation. (You know how much your ace programmers love doing that.) In the end, we could end up with higher quality software than we do now.
If I understood the article correctly, your digital picture would be signed, something only the possessor of the private key could do. Much in the same way that you can sign your email with a GPG key.
Anyone can verify the signature on the photo, but I don't see how Akmed or Abdul can sign their own photos without the private key. I'm assuming the government will keep the private keys locked up in a vault at the passport issuing office.
It's great that you've started to exercise already. Keep at it!
I usually just dedicate a couple hours each day to going to they gym, working out with weights or on the cardio equipment, taking a shower. I find it really improves my outlook at work. If you can do it mid-afternoon that's great, but not everyone has such a flexible schedule.
Diet is incredibly important. I haven't given up on beer, but I steer clear of refined starches as much as possible (sugar, white flour) potatoes should hardly enter your diet.
Eat lots of lean meat and raw vegetables and fruits, drink lots of water.
I like the idea of lots of IPv6 addresses, enough to provide for ISPs to provide each subscriber with a static IP address.
Open relay? Source of spam?
Guess what? When re-connect you get that exact same address that is going to be at the receiving end of irate spam recipients!
No more evading consequences through the magic of DHCP.
And, for one-time lusers that change ISPs after each offense, the responsible ISP that has clear identifying information (I had to show a driver's license to get my account) about said spammer can post `em to a blacklist. Irresponsible ISPs can simply have themselves blacklisted wholescale.
A solid reliable freely-redistributable implementation of SVG, and in Mozilla, would be one of the finest things, IMNHO.
A really good SVG implementation could make give web documents the elevated precision of presentation, akin to PDF, but in a W3C standard.
With extensions such as MathML and dynamic SVG, the format could form the basis of not just web documents, but paper documents (eg, stuff that currently is done in Word, Quark, Framemaker, TeX), as well as dynamic presentations (eg, Powerpoint) and, simple interactive applications that are currently done in text boxes in JavaScript.
Once a freely-available SVG renderer is available, then editing and composition tools for SVG documents should really take off. BTW, I don't count Adobe's SVG viewer because it is restricted to only a handful of platforms and no source is provided.
From what little I understand, the Mozilla SVG effort has been a one man show and entangled in licensing clauses.
It would be really nice if this were all cleared up and a big push into SVG by the Mozilla team were made.
how expensive this Linux licensing is going to be?
Not much to me, I figure.
The instant that SCO releases documents in court detailing exactly which lines in the Linux source distribution infringe upon their copyright, and the instant the court (and appeals) verify exactly which kernel version has the infringing lines introduced, I'll revert to that kernel version and await the introduction of independent implementations for whatever functionality is lost.
I forgot to add that a credible threat worth substantial discounts includes details that you can really only get if you invest a little money and effort into a pilot prototype, some survey of your servers, etc.
Otherwise, the MS contract negotiator is going to look at you kind of squinty eyed when you claim that your girlfriend's mechanic knows a guy selling yellowcake from Africa that said Linux Rox and could save your business Lotsa Money.
In the old days, you'd have an oil pressure gauge and an oil temperature gauge and you'd be able to tell pretty quick not only if something was wrong, but have a good idea of exactly what was wrong. And you'd be able to fix it yourself.
But scary technical looking gauges on automobiles have gone away. Now, you'll get complicated behind-the-scenes Boolean evaluation from multiple sensors feeding into a microprocessor that results in a "Check Engine" light, which will mean that you'll take it into a specialist for precise diagnosis and repair. You probably won't repair it yourself.
The analogy continues.
My old Honda had a Check Engine light that would flip on going down steep hills for extended times (sounds suspiciously like the sensor was in the back of the oilpan, eh?) but would reset if I turned the car off and restarted it. And guess what most people do to their Windows computers start displaying "Check Engine" lights? You got it - power cycle!]
I'm one of the people that likes the more detailed diagnostics, even if they give a scary impression of a high performance race car about to explode to the casual user (My God - look at those packet collisions!)
Let distro makers hide those messages behind clouds or penguins, but make it real easy to see those diagnostics and you'll get a lot more backyard mechanics improving the vehicle.
As a piece of advice for distro makers that hide behind soothing graphical "Check Engine" lights: make sure your system readily handles sudden, abrupt power cycling at any time, but especially after encountering other problems.
If Microsoft lowers their price to consumers, the end user STILL wins BECAUSE OF LINUX.
So, thank you GNU/Linux - even if you lose the fight
I agree. Clearly, the margins on their products are sufficiently large that Microsoft can easily afford to make such discounts.
But if GNU/Linux loses, then the competition is gone and one can expect price flexibility to return to a much more inelastic model consistent with Microsoft's desktop monopoly position in the marketplace.
Anyone that is buying big contracts (and there are some very large contracts) from Microsoft ought to think carefully about this.
It would not be unreasonable for them to use the threat of Linux to obtain a discount in their current negotiations, and then to plough a third or a half of the saved money into further Linux development in the direction that their business needs. Then, they'll be guaranteed to have an effective lever for negotiating future discounts with Microsoft.
Or, who knows, it may actually turn out that Linux proves to be such a significant cost-savings, that a great deal more expense could be spared at that time.
The right way to do open source development is to add real value to your freely-released product.
The difficulty is that if your project is popular and successful, then other open source developers may release open code that moves in the same direction as what you're doing. Your special super-duper improvement to foo, foobar may be rendered obsolete by foobaz in a few short months.
That's a brutally competitive position to be in. The challenge to making money then is to develop lots of really good code add-ons or plug-ins more quickly and better than the buzzing swarm of random open source developers.
This kind of competitive landscape is absolutely fantastic for consumers, but can make life for the developer trying to make a living difficult. The only room I see is for services: configuration, mainenance, custom-patches for special customer orders. A genuinely useful, general purpose add-on to a piece of free software will be replicated freely in some given amount of time, particularly if it's not difficult to do and/or you charge too much for your add-on.
Strictly, Richard Stallman is right and correct. That if you give in on your principles about free software, then you cannot complain if the software owner suddenly locks up the work and suddenly starts charging you an arm and a leg for the product. But though Richard is right, has high principles and thinks everyone ought to be similarly principled, generous, cooperative, etc., this leaves festering the practical issue of earning a livelihood doing something related to computer programming.
Richard never provides a comforting answer to all the good-hearted programmers thinking "Yes, I'd like to be a generous individual and give away my software and prevent anyone else from caging it by stapling it with the GPL."
"Now that I've done this nice generous thing, how do I live nicely and not like a pauper?"
Good idealistic programmers should love programming so much they do it for the love of it in their spare time, like artists. From what I know of artists, 99.8% of them work at something else that doesn't pay too well. Few get to earn a decent living doing what they love to do. That's a hard reality to face for a budding programmer.
I'd be really curious to hear what Peter Deutch (Aladdin Ghostscript) and the commercial SSH developers have to say about idealism, commercialism, earning a living, competing against their own earlier free software, etc.
Seems sort of counter-productive to give your #2 threat a lot of free publicity.
Possibly, but Gate's saying this weakens the position of regulatory bodies and courts in both the U.S. and in the E.U. that have, are and will consider Microsoft to be using its monopoly position to compete unfairly. If people believe there is any semblance of serious competition, then they will be less likely to want to interfere with the marketplace.
A broad audience of consumers and businessmen would not believe Bill Gates if he said that Apple or AOL were serious competitors and that Microsoft was in constant immediate danger of being
overthrown in its markets.
The same audience is less familiar with Linux. Being an Unknown Factor, Bill is taking advantage of their ignorance to paint Linux as a serious threat.
I believe Linux is a serious long-term threat to Microsoft, but it is also to Bill's advantage to say so, given his companies current environment.
Their programmers have demonstrated that a Linux box can process records much faster
If this is true, then it seems to me like a small step to just create a Linux shadow system operating in tandem with the existing SCO system.
If the shadow system demonstrates the needed performance, reliability and maintainability that your organization requires after some weeks or even months, then it will be a simple matter to switch the roles of the two systems and ultimately unplug the SCO box and redeploy it if the cost of that "security blanket" is too high.
Re:Why are they running Windows then?
on
Can .NET Really Scale?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
telling those companies they don't just have to buy
TANSTAAFL.
No matter what you'll have to layout cash to buy
the three essential ingredients:
hardware
software
people to support and maintain the hardware and software
Microsoft marketing would have you believe that their software solves all your problems and that lots of cheaply available people can do the job. They'll still charge you for their software and you'll find out that hardware still costs something and that getting good people to support and maintain your software and hardware is more expensive, but worth it.
Linux advocates will tell you that the software costs zero and that any competent sysadmin can do the job. You'll find out you still have to buy reasonable hardware. And you'll find out that getting good poeple to maintain and support your hw and sw costs more, but is worth it.
So far it has been 4 hours since my e-mail... no response whatsoever
Lemme guess.
Your request for help to cisco.com is not really going to go to 198.133.219.25 but to, uhm, a new different, uh, help center, that will be happy to send you an IOS sploit^H^H^H^H^H^H update to have you up and going in a jiffy.
Pardon my recursive tight loop, but with whom does Lloyds of London deal with about obtaining insurance for catastrophes that might happen to themselves?
Certainly if they had a terrible catastrophe at the same time as their policy holders, then there'd be some unhappy customers.
From what little I recall, they have Names of investors that shoulder the risk in return for the premiums. Maybe the individual underwriters are distributed so broadly that they wouldn't all be wiped out in the same catastrophe.
By now, I'm betting everyone in the United States has purchased Windows two or three times, whether they've wanted to or not.
Practically, though, the cost will be zero money, but mucho of your privacy. Love those radio boxes where I get to pick a gender, DOB, ZIP code and household income range.
Is that this legislation is being proposed contemporaneously with other legislation to help people in repressive regimes circumvent government-imposed restrictions on free exchange of information.
Of course, it will never occur to most members of U.S. Congress that the former legislation pushes the United States further into the direction of being a repressive regime itself. After all, this is the same U.S. Congress that passed the Patriot Act.
The better approach is to ask and, before you ask, put together thoughtful, objective evidence that you are a valuable employee and deserving of being compensated more than you are currently.
Bosses like to feel powerful, and you're putting the ball into their court where they can feel like they're making a decision rather than being subjected to blackmail (think - how would you respond to either presentation?).
A good boss will do what they can to keep you if you've made a fair case (be logical, professional and unemotional in your presentation) and believe you are a valuable asset to the company.
And, while you polish your resume - using exactly the same arguments that you needed to present to your current boss - you can start looking for other offers at your leisure.
If you've given your boss an opportunity to compensate you fairly and he doesn't take that opportunity, then he has only himself to blame and cannot fall back into some BS about a blackmailing SOB employee. You will have left on as good terms as it is possible to do. You can say goodbye and how much you've enjoyed working there, etc., but that there was no way you could forego the increased compensation.
It's wise to never burn any bridges, because you never know if you'll want to cross back, even if you think you never will. Even if you leave because your boss is a psychotic, force yourself to be courteous and kind.
Slashdot Mirror
When my audio Caller ID announces a call coming from "Out of Area" (aka no incoming caller id information), then I let the machine get it.
Then, if the business really wants to get a hold of me, they'll leave a message and, if I'm home, I can pick up.
This has worked pretty well until recently, when some of the more obnoxious telemarketers have played a pre-recorded spam message into my machine.
I could have sworn it was not legal for them to do this; certain state statutes prevent it.
Possibly my outgoing message must explicitly refuse such calls, or the loophole interpretation is that I am implicitly agreeing to opt-in, to receive such spam.
<philosophical>One of the more tragic developments in modern society is that more and more of our "public attention commons" is getting exploited because the cost of doing so is largely external to the people doing the exploiting. For millenia, we've paid attention to people wanting our attention. With few people, such interruptions are infrequent and of little cost to our emotional well-being.
Not anymore.
Unless laws are put in place to provide guarantees of private space, then it will be exploited.
But that won't happen. Instead, we'll all just turn into stressed out consumers that develop our ability to actively ignore our environment, other people and any attempt to grab our attention.
The newest sign of affluence is less intrusion into your personal attention.
</philosophical>FBI wants the ability to tap phone calls placed over broadband connections
This sounds like a great application of economics!
I suspect it's already in effect.
Eg, given the U.S. reliance on Saudi Oil and the vulnerability of the U.S. economy to any instability in the House of Saud, wouldn't it be prudent to have a backup source of oil in, oh, say Iraq?
I really would like to see IPv6 take off and become widely used, even in the U.S.
Until then, why not start a market where IPv4 addresses may be bought and sold and even leased for a while?
A central marketplace would enable the IPv4 address changes to be forwarded automatically into the big DNS servers and a small tax on the transaction could fund the minimal cost of doing the updating.
Finally, if the price for IPv4 addresses gets too high, then IPv6 will become naturally attractive, much in the same way that obtaining .net or .org addresses is less expensive than getting the more sought-after .com registered domains.
And I thought I was a lazy bastard with lots of short bash aliases to minimize typing!
I can see where these people will use up every damn single letter alias and function name around!
alias i=init
.
.
alias u=unmount
If it really takes off, then maybe the filesystem naming conventions will be next. We'll turn the tide from current verbose offerings such as "/home/joeuser" to the much more succinct "/u/ju".
I think the large projects for large companies can afford some of the risks of overseas outsourcing of their projects. There are risks and there are rewards in doing so.
Small companies, small short projects that live and die on frequent interfacing with small and medium sized business owners will probably be better off in most cases talking with a local support developer.
If your project grows large, stable and is properly constructed of commodity pieces, then it will make sense to move those functions to where they can be performed at the lowest cost.
I can also see where some of the lesser desirable jobs could be outsourced, such as quality testing of the weirdest kind, documentation. (You know how much your ace programmers love doing that.) In the end, we could end up with higher quality software than we do now.
If I understood the article correctly, your digital picture would be signed, something only the possessor of the private key could do. Much in the same way that you can sign your email with a GPG key.
Anyone can verify the signature on the photo, but I don't see how Akmed or Abdul can sign their own photos without the private key. I'm assuming the government will keep the private keys locked up in a vault at the passport issuing office.
Am I missing something?
It's great that you've started to exercise already. Keep at it!
I usually just dedicate a couple hours each day to going to they gym, working out with weights or on the cardio equipment, taking a shower. I find it really improves my outlook at work. If you can do it mid-afternoon that's great, but not everyone has such a flexible schedule.
Diet is incredibly important. I haven't given up on beer, but I steer clear of refined starches as much as possible (sugar, white flour) potatoes should hardly enter your diet.
Eat lots of lean meat and raw vegetables and fruits, drink lots of water.
You'll look better and you'll feel better.
I like the idea of lots of IPv6 addresses, enough to provide for ISPs to provide each subscriber with a static IP address.
Open relay? Source of spam?
Guess what? When re-connect you get that exact same address that is going to be at the receiving end of irate spam recipients!
No more evading consequences through the magic of DHCP.
And, for one-time lusers that change ISPs after each offense, the responsible ISP that has clear identifying information (I had to show a driver's license to get my account) about said spammer can post `em to a blacklist. Irresponsible ISPs can simply have themselves blacklisted wholescale.
There's plenty of names for large numbers here.
We need some good old-fashioned hyperinflation to help teach people about numbers with lots of zeroes.
SVG to Mozilla
A solid reliable freely-redistributable implementation of SVG, and in Mozilla, would be one of the finest things, IMNHO.
A really good SVG implementation could make give web documents the elevated precision of presentation, akin to PDF, but in a W3C standard.
With extensions such as MathML and dynamic SVG, the format could form the basis of not just web documents, but paper documents (eg, stuff that currently is done in Word, Quark, Framemaker, TeX), as well as dynamic presentations (eg, Powerpoint) and, simple interactive applications that are currently done in text boxes in JavaScript.
Once a freely-available SVG renderer is available, then editing and composition tools for SVG documents should really take off. BTW, I don't count Adobe's SVG viewer because it is restricted to only a handful of platforms and no source is provided.
From what little I understand, the Mozilla SVG effort has been a one man show and entangled in licensing clauses.
It would be really nice if this were all cleared up and a big push into SVG by the Mozilla team were made.
how expensive this Linux licensing is going to be?
Not much to me, I figure.
The instant that SCO releases documents in court detailing exactly which lines in the Linux source distribution infringe upon their copyright, and the instant the court (and appeals) verify exactly which kernel version has the infringing lines introduced, I'll revert to that kernel version and await the introduction of independent implementations for whatever functionality is lost.
build up its case for world domination
And like many such strategies, they're doing a lot of saber-rattling.
Many of us wonder just what length saber it is that SCO really has.
threat of Linux
I forgot to add that a credible threat worth substantial discounts includes details that you can really only get if you invest a little money and effort into a pilot prototype, some survey of your servers, etc.
Otherwise, the MS contract negotiator is going to look at you kind of squinty eyed when you claim that your girlfriend's mechanic knows a guy selling yellowcake from Africa that said Linux Rox and could save your business Lotsa Money.
it is confusing and/or intimidating;
So computers are going the way of automobiles.
In the old days, you'd have an oil pressure gauge and an oil temperature gauge and you'd be able to tell pretty quick not only if something was wrong, but have a good idea of exactly what was wrong. And you'd be able to fix it yourself.
But scary technical looking gauges on automobiles have gone away. Now, you'll get complicated behind-the-scenes Boolean evaluation from multiple sensors feeding into a microprocessor that results in a "Check Engine" light, which will mean that you'll take it into a specialist for precise diagnosis and repair. You probably won't repair it yourself.
The analogy continues.
My old Honda had a Check Engine light that would flip on going down steep hills for extended times (sounds suspiciously like the sensor was in the back of the oilpan, eh?) but would reset if I turned the car off and restarted it. And guess what most people do to their Windows computers start displaying "Check Engine" lights? You got it - power cycle!]
I'm one of the people that likes the more detailed diagnostics, even if they give a scary impression of a high performance race car about to explode to the casual user (My God - look at those packet collisions!)
Let distro makers hide those messages behind clouds or penguins, but make it real easy to see those diagnostics and you'll get a lot more backyard mechanics improving the vehicle.
As a piece of advice for distro makers that hide behind soothing graphical "Check Engine" lights: make sure your system readily handles sudden, abrupt power cycling at any time, but especially after encountering other problems.
If Microsoft lowers their price to consumers, the end user STILL wins BECAUSE OF LINUX.
So, thank you GNU/Linux - even if you lose the fight
I agree. Clearly, the margins on their products are sufficiently large that Microsoft can easily afford to make such discounts.
But if GNU/Linux loses, then the competition is gone and one can expect price flexibility to return to a much more inelastic model consistent with Microsoft's desktop monopoly position in the marketplace.
Anyone that is buying big contracts (and there are some very large contracts) from Microsoft ought to think carefully about this.
It would not be unreasonable for them to use the threat of Linux to obtain a discount in their current negotiations, and then to plough a third or a half of the saved money into further Linux development in the direction that their business needs. Then, they'll be guaranteed to have an effective lever for negotiating future discounts with Microsoft.
Or, who knows, it may actually turn out that Linux proves to be such a significant cost-savings, that a great deal more expense could be spared at that time.
The right way to do open source development is to add real value to your freely-released product.
The difficulty is that if your project is popular and successful, then other open source developers may release open code that moves in the same direction as what you're doing. Your special super-duper improvement to foo, foobar may be rendered obsolete by foobaz in a few short months.
That's a brutally competitive position to be in. The challenge to making money then is to develop lots of really good code add-ons or plug-ins more quickly and better than the buzzing swarm of random open source developers.
This kind of competitive landscape is absolutely fantastic for consumers, but can make life for the developer trying to make a living difficult. The only room I see is for services: configuration, mainenance, custom-patches for special customer orders. A genuinely useful, general purpose add-on to a piece of free software will be replicated freely in some given amount of time, particularly if it's not difficult to do and/or you charge too much for your add-on.
Strictly, Richard Stallman is right and correct. That if you give in on your principles about free software, then you cannot complain if the software owner suddenly locks up the work and suddenly starts charging you an arm and a leg for the product. But though Richard is right, has high principles and thinks everyone ought to be similarly principled, generous, cooperative, etc., this leaves festering the practical issue of earning a livelihood doing something related to computer programming.
Richard never provides a comforting answer to all the good-hearted programmers thinking "Yes, I'd like to be a generous individual and give away my software and prevent anyone else from caging it by stapling it with the GPL."
"Now that I've done this nice generous thing, how do I live nicely and not like a pauper?"
Good idealistic programmers should love programming so much they do it for the love of it in their spare time, like artists. From what I know of artists, 99.8% of them work at something else that doesn't pay too well. Few get to earn a decent living doing what they love to do. That's a hard reality to face for a budding programmer.
I'd be really curious to hear what Peter Deutch (Aladdin Ghostscript) and the commercial SSH developers have to say about idealism, commercialism, earning a living, competing against their own earlier free software, etc.
Seems sort of counter-productive to give your #2 threat a lot of free publicity.
Possibly, but Gate's saying this weakens the position of regulatory bodies and courts in both the U.S. and in the E.U. that have, are and will consider Microsoft to be using its monopoly position to compete unfairly. If people believe there is any semblance of serious competition, then they will be less likely to want to interfere with the marketplace.
A broad audience of consumers and businessmen would not believe Bill Gates if he said that Apple or AOL were serious competitors and that Microsoft was in constant immediate danger of being overthrown in its markets.
The same audience is less familiar with Linux. Being an Unknown Factor, Bill is taking advantage of their ignorance to paint Linux as a serious threat.
I believe Linux is a serious long-term threat to Microsoft, but it is also to Bill's advantage to say so, given his companies current environment.
Their programmers have demonstrated that a Linux box can process records much faster
If this is true, then it seems to me like a small step to just create a Linux shadow system operating in tandem with the existing SCO system.
If the shadow system demonstrates the needed performance, reliability and maintainability that your organization requires after some weeks or even months, then it will be a simple matter to switch the roles of the two systems and ultimately unplug the SCO box and redeploy it if the cost of that "security blanket" is too high.
telling those companies they don't just have to buy
TANSTAAFL.
No matter what you'll have to layout cash to buy the three essential ingredients:
Microsoft marketing would have you believe that their software solves all your problems and that lots of cheaply available people can do the job. They'll still charge you for their software and you'll find out that hardware still costs something and that getting good people to support and maintain your software and hardware is more expensive, but worth it.
Linux advocates will tell you that the software costs zero and that any competent sysadmin can do the job. You'll find out you still have to buy reasonable hardware. And you'll find out that getting good poeple to maintain and support your hw and sw costs more, but is worth it.
Any way you go you're gonna pay.
So far it has been 4 hours since my e-mail... no response whatsoever
Lemme guess.
Your request for help to cisco.com is not really going to go to 198.133.219.25 but to, uhm, a new different, uh, help center, that will be happy to send you an IOS sploit^H^H^H^H^H^H update to have you up and going in a jiffy.
Pardon my recursive tight loop, but with whom does Lloyds of London deal with about obtaining insurance for catastrophes that might happen to themselves?
Certainly if they had a terrible catastrophe at the same time as their policy holders, then there'd be some unhappy customers.
From what little I recall, they have Names of investors that shoulder the risk in return for the premiums. Maybe the individual underwriters are distributed so broadly that they wouldn't all be wiped out in the same catastrophe.
By now, I'm betting everyone in the United States has purchased Windows two or three times, whether they've wanted to or not.
Practically, though, the cost will be zero money, but mucho of your privacy. Love those radio boxes where I get to pick a gender, DOB, ZIP code and household income range.
Is that this legislation is being proposed contemporaneously with other legislation to help people in repressive regimes circumvent government-imposed restrictions on free exchange of information.
Of course, it will never occur to most members of U.S. Congress that the former legislation pushes the United States further into the direction of being a repressive regime itself. After all, this is the same U.S. Congress that passed the Patriot Act.
Threatening to walk is NEVER the right answer.
Exactly right on.
The better approach is to ask and, before you ask, put together thoughtful, objective evidence that you are a valuable employee and deserving of being compensated more than you are currently.
Bosses like to feel powerful, and you're putting the ball into their court where they can feel like they're making a decision rather than being subjected to blackmail (think - how would you respond to either presentation?).
A good boss will do what they can to keep you if you've made a fair case (be logical, professional and unemotional in your presentation) and believe you are a valuable asset to the company.
And, while you polish your resume - using exactly the same arguments that you needed to present to your current boss - you can start looking for other offers at your leisure.
If you've given your boss an opportunity to compensate you fairly and he doesn't take that opportunity, then he has only himself to blame and cannot fall back into some BS about a blackmailing SOB employee. You will have left on as good terms as it is possible to do. You can say goodbye and how much you've enjoyed working there, etc., but that there was no way you could forego the increased compensation.
It's wise to never burn any bridges, because you never know if you'll want to cross back, even if you think you never will. Even if you leave because your boss is a psychotic, force yourself to be courteous and kind.