Capitalism, american capitalism, basically encourages this twisted practice of squeezing as much cash by hook or by crook out of anyone even remotely related to your service. Looking to companies to solve the problem is like looking at a cigarette lighter to fix your burning house. br.
America has no recourse for evil companies, in fact it prides itself on this fact.
HRblock.com makes pretty quick work of taxes, and it works seamlessly in aurora in Gentoo linux. The only downside is the constant upsell. at some point you're clicking quickly because you just want to get shit done and accidentally upgrade yourself to a $120 tax package. After that, you literally cannot back out or restart.
The largest barrier to getting anything in the workplace but windows is a common ground with which you can collaborate and work. If you want to replace say, sharepoint, you can expect to have to sell everyone on the idea. your replacement needs to work seamlessly, just like sharepoint.
if you have a vmware deployment, linux is pretty much a non-starter as anything but a guest OS. you cant administer vsphere from linux, at least not in a way that wont make you hate your life. Many timecard systems and in house software packages might be predicated entirely on windows Internet Explorer, so the loss of ADP might piss off accounting. determine your userbase and its needs first.
Switching people from exchange is a daunting task, but egroupware and others can step up to the plate with a web-based UI. its also a huge cost saver. Whether or not your office wants that is another matter entirely. your linux systems will have to authenticate to AD, and never the other way around because windows just cant. while Libreoffice sure is a nice replacement for a new office, its a disaster when it comes to some of the finer points of complex excel spreadsheets, pivot tables, and the latest doc format. Lync, er, microsoft communicator as it was once called, has tentative support in linux but you lose helpful features like auto away and auto populate and that "call this person" feature I wonder if anyone ever uses..
doing this isnt easy. Ive spent 5 years of my career doing it, and the biggest hurdle is going to be your users. They want features like desktop sharing for meetings and gantt charts for planning. Linux doesnt really 'get' it like microsoft. The key is to make sure the channels of communication between windows users and linux users, be they desktop application level or enterprise, is uninterrupted. sometimes a quick switch from say lync to jabber is best. in other places you might want to phase things like sharepoint out over time. make sure you know how they work, and have a plan to provide a service that helps them achieve what theyre being paid to do.
another pitfall to be wary of is Microsofts jagged edge. Decreasing site licenses will beget unforseen costs like losing your Azure discount or more expensive license seats overall. the purchase terms will also change randomly and rapidly in an attempt to kill your linux idea from the management down (they do this to force meetings with your managers, who in turn dont invite you because its about a budget and not a computer to them.) Once I weaned a prior company off lync and exchange, I had microsoft representatives drop in entirely unannounced and ask for a meeting with almost every manager they could find (and me.) They will hound you with phonecalls, bombard you with junk mail, and chew up your time like never before. They do not like being shown the door.
American foreign policy has been, and continues to exist, on autopilot. the kind of 'hearts-and-minds' democracy predates the carter administration and was originally pushed as part of a diet of secret military coups, sponsored terrorist campaigns, and random acts of embargo designed to pressure communist and socialist governments in latin america toward democracy. the people we would install were usually brutally dictatorial.
the problem is Cuba has watched us do this for quite some time, and become seriously good at identifying and stamping out any of our attempts to topple leadership or foster civil unrest. The only reason we were scared of castro when he had nuclear arms wasnt because he was a madman, but because our shenannigans could now be met with scorched earth instead of populism and pocket resistance.
we are and continue to be on autopilot because the people who run our government, the plutocracy behind the politicians, is utterly mortified at the idea of alternative theories of government that distribute wealth. the US government in turn does what it can now as a fading superpower to appease its cloistered elite, which is apparently so pointless as to involve irritating SMS traffic.
what cuba could do in turn if it seriously wanted to agitate america, and it does not, is liberate the Guantanamo Bay detention center and nationalize its prisoners.
Is it a crime of opportunity or another page in the current chapter of Anti-Tech movement in San Francisco?
No. neither. Interesting_crime + San_francisco doesnt mean its some primal scream against the jackboot of some technological ruling class. Thats just hysterical conjecture. Police cannot be everywhere at every minute of the day. Given this fact, crimes will occur. These can vary from bicycle theft to parking structure arson and even home invasion. each is unique and cannot be condensed meaningfully into some hot button issue used to drive click revenue.
san francisco has, as most every other major american metropolitan area, numerous significant problems and challenges and while some of them predicate violent crime and property damage, it is irresponsible to try to categorize them into one particular problem. We are, as humans, prone to sampling bias by our wanton nature of categorization and observation of false patterns.
this story would make more sense if it were Prius or Tesla arson, or intentional sabotage of major transportation systems, but the size and weight of vehicles like the mini, yaris, smart, beetle, and a host of other subcompacts simply lend themselves to hooliganism. My crown victoria on the other hand with two-ton curb weight and police spotlight on the other hand, does not. in turn it also does nothing for the environment at 14 miles per gallon and 15 years of age.
disclaimer: ive never lived in san francisco, i just hope they can roll with the punches.
Either we're looking to justify 2014's budget, reduce inquiry into the CIA, or keep americans in agreement with the narrative that america should do something, anything, about russian foreign policy that in no way concerns us ever.
busses are far more efficient means of transporting people into and out of anywhere. they have a lower carbon footprint than hordes of cars as well. Carpooling to a lesser extent also helps. Not holding your asinine art-pop circle jerk in the middle of nowhere is also a spectacular start to a better commute.
but whatever you do, stop trying to arithmatically justify your american fetish with driving everywhere. Cars do not scale.
But you merely adopted the shell. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the GUI until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!
The login prompts betray you, because they belong to me.
so give it your best, young man. I and my greybeards are forged in this art. We know that behind your presentation, your boldface scrawlings and your bemused predatory preamble that we have coffee ringed RFC's that have seen more fervent attempts than yours. Save yourself some grief and maybe curry our favour. target our PHB instead.
I know this is offtopic but its worth mentioning. In Los Angeles we've had a subway and heavy rail transit system in existence for 21 years. since 1993. the survey is for the next phase of the expo line.
Hi Theo,
I'm a fan of OpenBSD partly for its hacker ethic and partly for the songs. A few of them don't have commentary, which I find sad. For songs like 'El Puffiachi' and 'I'm Still Here', what was your creative input if any?
s/developing world/emerging market/
this is no different than a cattle farmer targeting a different breed of heiffer for the opportunity to market, say, wagyu beef. the challenge is what to market to someone who only makes 60 cents a day.
walmart will never invest in this because the truck of the future for them is the train. Long-haul tractor trailers are a dying breed perpetuated by cheap oil, and the future of regional and local trucking is in battery or hybrid power demonstrated by Staples and numerous other companies.
speaking as an angelino, using a cellphone in los angeles is arbitrarily legal depending on class and social status. Are you a police officer? Do you have diplomatic plates? were you Justin Bieber? then rev up those angry birds on the 101 and get ready to snapchat your next novel.
if you're one of the unwashed masses then be prepared for an almost entirely random enforcement experience. is today a warning day? or is it our legendary MANDATORY ENFORCEMENT ZONE policy where you'll be fined no matter what. Did you use your cellphone at a red light in a school zone? double fine. Was there construction? double fine. Did you just rear-end someone while on a cellphone? that piece of technology will never be considered in the accident report and is as good as having never happened.
dont get me wrong. im not here to defend cell usage in a moving vehicle but there is nothing about LA that precludes you from setting your 4-ways, pulling over, checking the phone, and safely entering traffic again. Or hell, plan the route before you get in the car. The trouble i find is the LAPD is like a magic 8-ball when it comes to enforcing this law. if you can make it to court, if you have the money and the time, then 60% of the time you'll get out of it every time.
1. new currency emerges, becomes significant
2. reigning system of currency/government considers it a threat.
3. coordinated attacks on the stock exchange
4. bankruptcy, uncertainty, disappearance
5. 'Maybe X currency isnt so bad after all!"
the fact stands that shifting major trade away from the dollar is dangerous, but the bitcoin midel would be catastrophic. its a world where international financial sanctions cant work, and in which America would need to do more than just show up to security council meetings in the UN for a rubber-stamp vote against $evil_dictator.
Iraq and Iran serve as real-world examples of this in action. both countries have in the past attempted to shift oil trade away from the dollar. Nothing says monetary supremacy like de-stabilizing the competitions government.
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/... http://www.projectcensored.org...
At best federal agencies hope to sway public opinion. they dont want you to do what they tell you, but rather to want to do what they tell you. the government predicates their position upon the conviction that online forums are no different than a public forum, which could not be further from the truth. Tea Party 'town halls' are a prime example of the FUD and disinformation tactic being used to disrupt a political group in power. Its a functional effort to turn civil discourse into a cattle car by injecting audience that stand, scream, and then immediately sit or defend pointless illogical opinions to run down the clock.
the internet interperets ignorance, malice, and poorly defined opinions and conjecture as spam, and has for 15 years honed tools and systems in online forums to ensure. the 50 clandestine posters in a free software forum defending SOPA or PIPA will, nearly instantaneously, be downvoted to oblivion in a system which is very much designed to keep the topic of discussion of relevance. systems like karma and abuse tracking dont exist in meatspace forums, but these are tools which members can use to shut down abusers or track malicious participants who abuse the tools as well. and finally its worth nothing to poison one forum when in its place dissuaded or frustrated posters can erect 10 more. mobility is a moot concern on the internet; a luxury meatspace forums just dont have.
a CEO arguably isnt an employee anymore. the position of CEO is no different than the badge on an expensive luxury sedan or the star on your christmas tree. A CEO's competitive salary is directly proportional to the level of success you wish to project to the markets at large. the CEO, much like the badge, exists to be stroked and admired for its performance and implied success. And once you come to invest in it, rarely do you accept negative criticism. Heres an example: Ed Lampert, the CEO of Sears and KMart, nearly bankrupted both companies on numerous occasions. he was arguably the worst CEO on the face of the planet, with the exception of maybe Albert J. Dunlap who was nicknamed "the chainsaw." (or hell, lex luthor) Both CEO's were paid in excess of 2 million dollars per year. Now you might say, "but lampert insists his new salary is only a dollar a year!" and while this might be true, Sears fully insists he is available to earn up to 4.5 million dollars in bonuses a year (cited in a 2013 AP Article.)
so yes, if you consider the CEO a real employee (let alone a real person) just like you and me, then she/he is stratospherically overpaid.
The argument is predicated on the logic that microsoft no longer observes windows as a viable or competitive product. history tells us that through several iterations and permutations of the OS, microsoft considers the product sound and functional at any level of the integrated circuit from ARM to Xeon. it also fails to acknowledge that microsoft doesnt just want a slice of the android apps market, it wants a market completely of its own. its an incredibly lucrative ecosystem, as theyve seen from microtransactions and service subscription in their XBox product.
the problem of developers is a recent addition for microsoft. in the past, 'by hook or by crook' if you wrote code and expected users to be a part of it, you took your seat at Redmonds table and ate cake. theres also another big fact to face: the layered approach cannot work with UEFI, signed binaries, DRM and Trusted computing all of which werent prevalent or in existence when IBM saw clones emerge in the market. This in combination with ferocious litigation is the reason apple doesnt find mac clones to be very threatening.
open sourcing the proprietary bits of android is a nuclear option, and one i think redmond might consider, but only if it places them closer to an apps market.
these are just the ramblings of an old man, so feel free to skip em but I remember
Studying, the academic pursuit of higher education that is, was originally predicated on the ostensible monetary success ones career may bring. Doctors and Engineers were paid much more handsomely for their services than artists and english majors. in return they enjoyed much more demanding work some would argue.
with the encroachment of privatized education this is no longer the case. the monetary shackles of student loans are interminable and ensure that no matter how successful an engineer may be, they are ultimately relegated for a substantial portion of their adult lives to subsistence living. Engineers, like english and philosophy majors, dont just "get a job" after college anymore. In fact many students watching newly minted engineers join the workforce as hamburger cooks and third shift walmart drones would just as soon skip the college experience entirely.
and what about the successful engineers? shops when faced with pressure to make wages more competitive have instead lobbied for more cheap H-1B visas and interns. Code is written in the Phillipines, and hardware assembled in Taiwan. Greybeards like myself sit in cubicles and 'kindly do the needful' to turn a rather mocking phrase while the rank and file, what we hire for simple CAD or EE work, is mandated to start with 5 years experience and an advanced degree. It guarantees we never hire anything that comes out of the alma mater.
People forget Google is keeping the patents previously held by motorola in this deal. The patents would be used solely to defend against litigious trolls like Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft -- having failed deleteriously to make any headway in mobile phones -- being relegated to siphoning off revenue from Google, and Apple having run out of gas to keep innovating after blowing their wad on iDevices in the Jobs era. Without a strong patent portfolio Google would expect to find itself bled quarterly in tandem with microsofts earnings and losses reports like so many other TomToms and Samsungs. And without said patent portfolio Apple would surely enjoy bleeding Google dry in court for centuries given their deep pockets.
Motorolas mobile phone technology was easily outclassed by HTC and made further irrelevant by the fact that Google has vehemently resisted becoming a hardware company. This is the equivalent of sucking the juice out of a Capri Sun, and finding someone willing to buy the packaging. Any patents or prior claims inherited by the Motorola purchase, one would conjecture with much chagrin, would be employed to defend against Microsoft hardware patent chicanery in court. As of late Redmond has taken a keen liking to sticking their dick in googles hardware manufacturers as a means of surviving a market that doesnt seem to give two shits about them beyond XBox.
what generally kills things like SaaS providers and online content is not the cost to back up the data. tapes could be arguably just as cheap and once the data is stored, the medium is just as powerless as blu-ray. Time-to-restoration is a very big concern. things like SAS arrays of LVM striped blu-ray disks could mitigate the issue but seeing as the machinery is the same pick-and-stick model used with tape robots, throughput is going to suffer. the definition of 'cold' also comes to mind as most cold storage is one-and-done. the next interaction it sees is when its boxed and shipped to some cave in the midwest where it drives profit for some disaster recovery service like iron mountain.
what about the halflife of inks? consumer cyanic ink cd-r is supposedly OK for 10 years, although ive seen laminate degradation in less than that personally. will a disk, with arguably fewer moving parts than a tape, be able to cope with stresses to its laminates as its routinely retrieved and re-read at a data-backup frequency?
By taking a sampling of different pubs in the Netherlands researchers found the increase in phrases like 'Madeas Witness Protection stole 90 minutes of my fucking life' and 'Was ghostrider seriously intended to be that awful?' indicated the blockade may have shortcomings.
its failure was confirmed when sightings of the phrases 'I dont understand why michael bay keeps making Transformer movies' and 'Is Jayden Smith some kind of anagram for helicopter parenting?'
I dont know if anyones used Azure but my boss made me find a reason to shoehorn it into the infrastructure because microsoft swore our 25k in free credit for it was tied neatly to our license discount for Windows. it is a clusterfuck of unworkable web 2.0 line and symbol bullshit that is easily outranked and outclassed by even the most entry-level hosting providers in ease of use. heres a rundown of my experience:
1. signup. microsoft juggles you between 3 different portals, all of which basically mandate internet explorer, and a username with a microsoft TLD. now that im boatanchored to the rest of the redmond world, we can continue to provisioning?
2. no. now you have to apply for a service and confirm the subscription in email. what this means, i mean on a technical level, god only knows. its some ephemeral obfuscation imbued in the product to impart a sense of legitimacy in the process of your virtual cloud experience no doubt.
3. we have a subscription and now we can start provisioning images. you have about 10 different microsoft images and 2 linux images sanctioned by some third party entity no ones ever heard of. Linux VM's require a goofy disclaimer but come with a package selection feature, so i guess thats useful.
4. Windows or Linux, youve made your choice, and youre provisioning nicely but beware: navigating away from the provisioning page will cause the process to stop.
5. Whatever lofty dreams you had about microsofts commitment to cloud and scaleable architecture as a departure from their haggared burro of licensed OS and direct attached storage becomes an afterthought. Microsoft (as they did me) emails you stating they improperly provisioned your VM in the wrong datacenter and that you, not them, are now responsible for the fix. this requires you delete your entire VM and start over again.
6. you stare into the internet, your limit break clearly reached, and observe an ocean of other more capable and well established providers and players in this world of virualized SaaS and PaaS. the interface is clean, the support is in plain fucking english, and if you arent hounded to tie your active directory to it. the thought that anyone, or any group for that matter, would stop to give two shits in an open consortium of existing sucessful and dedicated players to consider an offering from a software company that for its entire existence has sought nothing but ruthless destruction of every other open standard in the world, is bad comedy.
to microsoft: no one cares, and I mean this in all sincerity. its not a troll or a flame its just a sad fact. your designs, your servers and your processes and procedures contextualized historically in their offering to the open anything community have been a complete farce. this isnt your cup of tea and it never has been. You're completely outnumbered, hopelessly outgunned, and the best you can do is peddle lock-in to traditionalist business models sadly manacled in mediocrity. Look at your phones, tablets, zunes, and everything youve fought so hard to make a part of the world thats forsaken you and just stop shoveling time and money into strategies you're laughably unqualified to adopt.
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism, american capitalism, basically encourages this twisted practice of squeezing as much cash by hook or by crook out of anyone even remotely related to your service. Looking to companies to solve the problem is like looking at a cigarette lighter to fix your burning house.
br. America has no recourse for evil companies, in fact it prides itself on this fact.
HRblock.com makes pretty quick work of taxes, and it works seamlessly in aurora in Gentoo linux. The only downside is the constant upsell. at some point you're clicking quickly because you just want to get shit done and accidentally upgrade yourself to a $120 tax package. After that, you literally cannot back out or restart.
The largest barrier to getting anything in the workplace but windows is a common ground with which you can collaborate and work. If you want to replace say, sharepoint, you can expect to have to sell everyone on the idea. your replacement needs to work seamlessly, just like sharepoint.
if you have a vmware deployment, linux is pretty much a non-starter as anything but a guest OS. you cant administer vsphere from linux, at least not in a way that wont make you hate your life. Many timecard systems and in house software packages might be predicated entirely on windows Internet Explorer, so the loss of ADP might piss off accounting. determine your userbase and its needs first.
Switching people from exchange is a daunting task, but egroupware and others can step up to the plate with a web-based UI. its also a huge cost saver. Whether or not your office wants that is another matter entirely. your linux systems will have to authenticate to AD, and never the other way around because windows just cant. while Libreoffice sure is a nice replacement for a new office, its a disaster when it comes to some of the finer points of complex excel spreadsheets, pivot tables, and the latest doc format. Lync, er, microsoft communicator as it was once called, has tentative support in linux but you lose helpful features like auto away and auto populate and that "call this person" feature I wonder if anyone ever uses..
doing this isnt easy. Ive spent 5 years of my career doing it, and the biggest hurdle is going to be your users. They want features like desktop sharing for meetings and gantt charts for planning. Linux doesnt really 'get' it like microsoft. The key is to make sure the channels of communication between windows users and linux users, be they desktop application level or enterprise, is uninterrupted. sometimes a quick switch from say lync to jabber is best. in other places you might want to phase things like sharepoint out over time. make sure you know how they work, and have a plan to provide a service that helps them achieve what theyre being paid to do.
another pitfall to be wary of is Microsofts jagged edge. Decreasing site licenses will beget unforseen costs like losing your Azure discount or more expensive license seats overall. the purchase terms will also change randomly and rapidly in an attempt to kill your linux idea from the management down (they do this to force meetings with your managers, who in turn dont invite you because its about a budget and not a computer to them.) Once I weaned a prior company off lync and exchange, I had microsoft representatives drop in entirely unannounced and ask for a meeting with almost every manager they could find (and me.) They will hound you with phonecalls, bombard you with junk mail, and chew up your time like never before. They do not like being shown the door.
American foreign policy has been, and continues to exist, on autopilot. the kind of 'hearts-and-minds' democracy predates the carter administration and was originally pushed as part of a diet of secret military coups, sponsored terrorist campaigns, and random acts of embargo designed to pressure communist and socialist governments in latin america toward democracy. the people we would install were usually brutally dictatorial.
the problem is Cuba has watched us do this for quite some time, and become seriously good at identifying and stamping out any of our attempts to topple leadership or foster civil unrest. The only reason we were scared of castro when he had nuclear arms wasnt because he was a madman, but because our shenannigans could now be met with scorched earth instead of populism and pocket resistance.
we are and continue to be on autopilot because the people who run our government, the plutocracy behind the politicians, is utterly mortified at the idea of alternative theories of government that distribute wealth. the US government in turn does what it can now as a fading superpower to appease its cloistered elite, which is apparently so pointless as to involve irritating SMS traffic.
what cuba could do in turn if it seriously wanted to agitate america, and it does not, is liberate the Guantanamo Bay detention center and nationalize its prisoners.
Is it a crime of opportunity or another page in the current chapter of Anti-Tech movement in San Francisco?
No. neither. Interesting_crime + San_francisco doesnt mean its some primal scream against the jackboot of some technological ruling class. Thats just hysterical conjecture. Police cannot be everywhere at every minute of the day. Given this fact, crimes will occur. These can vary from bicycle theft to parking structure arson and even home invasion. each is unique and cannot be condensed meaningfully into some hot button issue used to drive click revenue. san francisco has, as most every other major american metropolitan area, numerous significant problems and challenges and while some of them predicate violent crime and property damage, it is irresponsible to try to categorize them into one particular problem. We are, as humans, prone to sampling bias by our wanton nature of categorization and observation of false patterns.
this story would make more sense if it were Prius or Tesla arson, or intentional sabotage of major transportation systems, but the size and weight of vehicles like the mini, yaris, smart, beetle, and a host of other subcompacts simply lend themselves to hooliganism. My crown victoria on the other hand with two-ton curb weight and police spotlight on the other hand, does not. in turn it also does nothing for the environment at 14 miles per gallon and 15 years of age.
disclaimer: ive never lived in san francisco, i just hope they can roll with the punches.
s/the Germans/some assclown on his iphone at a berlin pub/
Either we're looking to justify 2014's budget, reduce inquiry into the CIA, or keep americans in agreement with the narrative that america should do something, anything, about russian foreign policy that in no way concerns us ever.
busses are far more efficient means of transporting people into and out of anywhere. they have a lower carbon footprint than hordes of cars as well. Carpooling to a lesser extent also helps. Not holding your asinine art-pop circle jerk in the middle of nowhere is also a spectacular start to a better commute.
but whatever you do, stop trying to arithmatically justify your american fetish with driving everywhere. Cars do not scale.
But you merely adopted the shell. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the GUI until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!
The login prompts betray you, because they belong to me.
so give it your best, young man. I and my greybeards are forged in this art. We know that behind your presentation, your boldface scrawlings and your bemused predatory preamble that we have coffee ringed RFC's that have seen more fervent attempts than yours. Save yourself some grief and maybe curry our favour. target our PHB instead.
I know this is offtopic but its worth mentioning. In Los Angeles we've had a subway and heavy rail transit system in existence for 21 years. since 1993. the survey is for the next phase of the expo line.
Hi Theo, I'm a fan of OpenBSD partly for its hacker ethic and partly for the songs. A few of them don't have commentary, which I find sad. For songs like 'El Puffiachi' and 'I'm Still Here', what was your creative input if any?
or at least temper the amount youre willing to commit to them.
s/developing world/emerging market/ this is no different than a cattle farmer targeting a different breed of heiffer for the opportunity to market, say, wagyu beef. the challenge is what to market to someone who only makes 60 cents a day.
walmart will never invest in this because the truck of the future for them is the train. Long-haul tractor trailers are a dying breed perpetuated by cheap oil, and the future of regional and local trucking is in battery or hybrid power demonstrated by Staples and numerous other companies.
speaking as an angelino, using a cellphone in los angeles is arbitrarily legal depending on class and social status. Are you a police officer? Do you have diplomatic plates? were you Justin Bieber? then rev up those angry birds on the 101 and get ready to snapchat your next novel.
if you're one of the unwashed masses then be prepared for an almost entirely random enforcement experience. is today a warning day? or is it our legendary MANDATORY ENFORCEMENT ZONE policy where you'll be fined no matter what. Did you use your cellphone at a red light in a school zone? double fine. Was there construction? double fine. Did you just rear-end someone while on a cellphone? that piece of technology will never be considered in the accident report and is as good as having never happened.
dont get me wrong. im not here to defend cell usage in a moving vehicle but there is nothing about LA that precludes you from setting your 4-ways, pulling over, checking the phone, and safely entering traffic again. Or hell, plan the route before you get in the car. The trouble i find is the LAPD is like a magic 8-ball when it comes to enforcing this law. if you can make it to court, if you have the money and the time, then 60% of the time you'll get out of it every time.
1. new currency emerges, becomes significant
2. reigning system of currency/government considers it a threat.
3. coordinated attacks on the stock exchange
4. bankruptcy, uncertainty, disappearance
5. 'Maybe X currency isnt so bad after all!"
the fact stands that shifting major trade away from the dollar is dangerous, but the bitcoin midel would be catastrophic. its a world where international financial sanctions cant work, and in which America would need to do more than just show up to security council meetings in the UN for a rubber-stamp vote against $evil_dictator. Iraq and Iran serve as real-world examples of this in action. both countries have in the past attempted to shift oil trade away from the dollar. Nothing says monetary supremacy like de-stabilizing the competitions government.
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/...
http://www.projectcensored.org...
At best federal agencies hope to sway public opinion. they dont want you to do what they tell you, but rather to want to do what they tell you. the government predicates their position upon the conviction that online forums are no different than a public forum, which could not be further from the truth. Tea Party 'town halls' are a prime example of the FUD and disinformation tactic being used to disrupt a political group in power. Its a functional effort to turn civil discourse into a cattle car by injecting audience that stand, scream, and then immediately sit or defend pointless illogical opinions to run down the clock.
the internet interperets ignorance, malice, and poorly defined opinions and conjecture as spam, and has for 15 years honed tools and systems in online forums to ensure. the 50 clandestine posters in a free software forum defending SOPA or PIPA will, nearly instantaneously, be downvoted to oblivion in a system which is very much designed to keep the topic of discussion of relevance. systems like karma and abuse tracking dont exist in meatspace forums, but these are tools which members can use to shut down abusers or track malicious participants who abuse the tools as well. and finally its worth nothing to poison one forum when in its place dissuaded or frustrated posters can erect 10 more. mobility is a moot concern on the internet; a luxury meatspace forums just dont have.
a CEO arguably isnt an employee anymore. the position of CEO is no different than the badge on an expensive luxury sedan or the star on your christmas tree. A CEO's competitive salary is directly proportional to the level of success you wish to project to the markets at large. the CEO, much like the badge, exists to be stroked and admired for its performance and implied success. And once you come to invest in it, rarely do you accept negative criticism. Heres an example: Ed Lampert, the CEO of Sears and KMart, nearly bankrupted both companies on numerous occasions. he was arguably the worst CEO on the face of the planet, with the exception of maybe Albert J. Dunlap who was nicknamed "the chainsaw." (or hell, lex luthor) Both CEO's were paid in excess of 2 million dollars per year. Now you might say, "but lampert insists his new salary is only a dollar a year!" and while this might be true, Sears fully insists he is available to earn up to 4.5 million dollars in bonuses a year (cited in a 2013 AP Article.)
so yes, if you consider the CEO a real employee (let alone a real person) just like you and me, then she/he is stratospherically overpaid.
The argument is predicated on the logic that microsoft no longer observes windows as a viable or competitive product. history tells us that through several iterations and permutations of the OS, microsoft considers the product sound and functional at any level of the integrated circuit from ARM to Xeon. it also fails to acknowledge that microsoft doesnt just want a slice of the android apps market, it wants a market completely of its own. its an incredibly lucrative ecosystem, as theyve seen from microtransactions and service subscription in their XBox product.
the problem of developers is a recent addition for microsoft. in the past, 'by hook or by crook' if you wrote code and expected users to be a part of it, you took your seat at Redmonds table and ate cake. theres also another big fact to face: the layered approach cannot work with UEFI, signed binaries, DRM and Trusted computing all of which werent prevalent or in existence when IBM saw clones emerge in the market. This in combination with ferocious litigation is the reason apple doesnt find mac clones to be very threatening.
open sourcing the proprietary bits of android is a nuclear option, and one i think redmond might consider, but only if it places them closer to an apps market.
these are just the ramblings of an old man, so feel free to skip em but I remember Studying, the academic pursuit of higher education that is, was originally predicated on the ostensible monetary success ones career may bring. Doctors and Engineers were paid much more handsomely for their services than artists and english majors. in return they enjoyed much more demanding work some would argue.
with the encroachment of privatized education this is no longer the case. the monetary shackles of student loans are interminable and ensure that no matter how successful an engineer may be, they are ultimately relegated for a substantial portion of their adult lives to subsistence living. Engineers, like english and philosophy majors, dont just "get a job" after college anymore. In fact many students watching newly minted engineers join the workforce as hamburger cooks and third shift walmart drones would just as soon skip the college experience entirely.
and what about the successful engineers? shops when faced with pressure to make wages more competitive have instead lobbied for more cheap H-1B visas and interns. Code is written in the Phillipines, and hardware assembled in Taiwan. Greybeards like myself sit in cubicles and 'kindly do the needful' to turn a rather mocking phrase while the rank and file, what we hire for simple CAD or EE work, is mandated to start with 5 years experience and an advanced degree. It guarantees we never hire anything that comes out of the alma mater.
People forget Google is keeping the patents previously held by motorola in this deal. The patents would be used solely to defend against litigious trolls like Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft -- having failed deleteriously to make any headway in mobile phones -- being relegated to siphoning off revenue from Google, and Apple having run out of gas to keep innovating after blowing their wad on iDevices in the Jobs era. Without a strong patent portfolio Google would expect to find itself bled quarterly in tandem with microsofts earnings and losses reports like so many other TomToms and Samsungs. And without said patent portfolio Apple would surely enjoy bleeding Google dry in court for centuries given their deep pockets.
Motorolas mobile phone technology was easily outclassed by HTC and made further irrelevant by the fact that Google has vehemently resisted becoming a hardware company. This is the equivalent of sucking the juice out of a Capri Sun, and finding someone willing to buy the packaging. Any patents or prior claims inherited by the Motorola purchase, one would conjecture with much chagrin, would be employed to defend against Microsoft hardware patent chicanery in court. As of late Redmond has taken a keen liking to sticking their dick in googles hardware manufacturers as a means of surviving a market that doesnt seem to give two shits about them beyond XBox.
what generally kills things like SaaS providers and online content is not the cost to back up the data. tapes could be arguably just as cheap and once the data is stored, the medium is just as powerless as blu-ray. Time-to-restoration is a very big concern. things like SAS arrays of LVM striped blu-ray disks could mitigate the issue but seeing as the machinery is the same pick-and-stick model used with tape robots, throughput is going to suffer. the definition of 'cold' also comes to mind as most cold storage is one-and-done. the next interaction it sees is when its boxed and shipped to some cave in the midwest where it drives profit for some disaster recovery service like iron mountain.
what about the halflife of inks? consumer cyanic ink cd-r is supposedly OK for 10 years, although ive seen laminate degradation in less than that personally. will a disk, with arguably fewer moving parts than a tape, be able to cope with stresses to its laminates as its routinely retrieved and re-read at a data-backup frequency?
user: Facebook, why do you want to read my text messages?
Facebook:Fuck you, thats why.
user: okay.jpg.
All joking aside though, seriously, stop using facebook. You're the product, not the consumer, so none of your opinions or concerns sincerely matter.
By taking a sampling of different pubs in the Netherlands researchers found the increase in phrases like 'Madeas Witness Protection stole 90 minutes of my fucking life' and 'Was ghostrider seriously intended to be that awful?' indicated the blockade may have shortcomings.
its failure was confirmed when sightings of the phrases 'I dont understand why michael bay keeps making Transformer movies' and 'Is Jayden Smith some kind of anagram for helicopter parenting?'
I dont know if anyones used Azure but my boss made me find a reason to shoehorn it into the infrastructure because microsoft swore our 25k in free credit for it was tied neatly to our license discount for Windows. it is a clusterfuck of unworkable web 2.0 line and symbol bullshit that is easily outranked and outclassed by even the most entry-level hosting providers in ease of use. heres a rundown of my experience:
1. signup. microsoft juggles you between 3 different portals, all of which basically mandate internet explorer, and a username with a microsoft TLD. now that im boatanchored to the rest of the redmond world, we can continue to provisioning?
2. no. now you have to apply for a service and confirm the subscription in email. what this means, i mean on a technical level, god only knows. its some ephemeral obfuscation imbued in the product to impart a sense of legitimacy in the process of your virtual cloud experience no doubt.
3. we have a subscription and now we can start provisioning images. you have about 10 different microsoft images and 2 linux images sanctioned by some third party entity no ones ever heard of. Linux VM's require a goofy disclaimer but come with a package selection feature, so i guess thats useful.
4. Windows or Linux, youve made your choice, and youre provisioning nicely but beware: navigating away from the provisioning page will cause the process to stop.
5. Whatever lofty dreams you had about microsofts commitment to cloud and scaleable architecture as a departure from their haggared burro of licensed OS and direct attached storage becomes an afterthought. Microsoft (as they did me) emails you stating they improperly provisioned your VM in the wrong datacenter and that you, not them, are now responsible for the fix. this requires you delete your entire VM and start over again.
6. you stare into the internet, your limit break clearly reached, and observe an ocean of other more capable and well established providers and players in this world of virualized SaaS and PaaS. the interface is clean, the support is in plain fucking english, and if you arent hounded to tie your active directory to it. the thought that anyone, or any group for that matter, would stop to give two shits in an open consortium of existing sucessful and dedicated players to consider an offering from a software company that for its entire existence has sought nothing but ruthless destruction of every other open standard in the world, is bad comedy.
to microsoft: no one cares, and I mean this in all sincerity. its not a troll or a flame its just a sad fact. your designs, your servers and your processes and procedures contextualized historically in their offering to the open anything community have been a complete farce. this isnt your cup of tea and it never has been. You're completely outnumbered, hopelessly outgunned, and the best you can do is peddle lock-in to traditionalist business models sadly manacled in mediocrity. Look at your phones, tablets, zunes, and everything youve fought so hard to make a part of the world thats forsaken you and just stop shoveling time and money into strategies you're laughably unqualified to adopt.