Time to start sending out resumes.

In other words,

/me puts on his sunglasses

... Steve jobs has been uploaded to the iCloud.

I always said that the original break-up of the legacy Ma Bell did not go far enough. It was broken up into local and long distance entities, with local telcos providing local telephone service, and AT&T long distance providing long distance service.

The problem is that the ILECs ended up owning both the physical plant, and the voice/data service. The breakup should've had its bar pushed even farther down the line. Specifically down to the last mile, and not an inch above that. The local telephone companies should've left with owning nothing but the last mile, and all they would do is charge tariffed rates for maintaining the physical plant. They should not have allowed to provide voice or data services as well. The ILECs should own only the physical plant, and any company should be allowed to install their equipment in the CO, and provide voice or data service to any wired customer, charging whatever the competition will bear, with ILECs getting paid a tariffed rate (the higher the capacity of the last mile, the more they could charge) for maintaining the physical plant, and nothing more.

I'm in one of the states where Amazon recently announced they agreed to collect sales tax. Starting in about a year and a half.

At first, I couldn't figure out why they agreed. Although, I understand, there were discussions going on between Amazon and the state government, from what I could see it was nowhere near the level of contention that I've read about in other states, where lawsuits were flying back and forth.

But I figured that there had to be a business reason that Amazon thought worked in their favor, for them to agree so readily to this. After thinking about the various possibilities, that's pretty much what I thought was going on. I have a huge Newegg warehouse a mile from here, this area is convenient to all the major highways, and there are many other warehouses here. I figure that Amazon was planning to open a warehouse here, so they figured that they'll have to do it anyway, but now they bargained at least a year's worth of tax-free sales.

Then, a week ago, on a Thursday, I ordered some junk from Amazon. Super-saver shipping. Previously, it took them 4-5 days to ship, from somewhere out on the Left Coast. This time, the stuff arrived the following Monday. The tracking info on the package started somewhere in Joisey. Go figure.

I wouldn't be surprised if, in a year, they'll figure out a way around the sales tax anyway...

I have no idea how my current employer does performance review. I haven't had to deal with performance reviews in over 15 years. This is one of the benefits of working as a consultant on a contract, and one of the things I don't miss about working as an employee.

I personally find consulting to be a more civilized, sane way to earn a living. My total compensation gets negotiated up front, for some prescribed period of time. Then, when the time is up, we just negotiate again(1). Simple. No fuss, no mess. You know how much you're making, and you don't feel shortchanged when the bean counters decide to cut down on some fringe benefit.

I guess that periodic contract extensions would count as a periodic performance review, of some sort. But there's no bureaucracy involved, and I don't need to dance like a pony, in front of someone. It's purely a business transaction, and nothing more.

The oft heard suggestion of unionizing is a joke. It's never going to happen. If you want to unionize, sure, but good luck to you. On the other hand, if you want to become a consultant, that can happen today. Your choice.

(1) Yes, I've went through an occasion of an 800lb corporate gorilla deciding, by fiat, to cut all their consultants' rates, for budgetary reasons, assuming that everyone is going to accept it and that they have no choice in the matter. As my then-managers discovered, that assumption was wrong. One of the other benefits of consulting, you see, is far fewer questions of what happened at your last job. Naturally, contracts come to an end all the time, and one's services are no longer required. Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly understandable, and expected.

Microsoft needs to hire more people in marketing. Whoever thought up of this name "Surface", needs to be fired.

Hey, didya hear about this hot new tablet? It's called "Surface"!!!

It's obvious that they're trying to pick a generic name, in the spirit of "Word" and "Access". But, for some reason, this one doesn't fly. When I read this yesterday, I had to double-check and make sure I didn't accidentally stumble on The Onion.

Really, if they wanted to pick a generic name that's likely to form a subliminal association with this gizmo, they should've just called it "Jumped the shark", and that would've been the end of it.

Another job well-done, by the alleged editors. That link goes to the second page of a two-page article.

First page.

Your provider has de-facto admitted that they messed up. These things happen. The only question is whether they would truly respond in a professional manner. If they do, and they agree to the following, do the following, and move on. Contact them, and request them to:

* Provision a new virtual host for you.

* You will copy all your existing data into your new virtual host, using your own copies of whatever you use the host for. You do have your own copies of everything, and you don't trust the host with the entirety of your data, right?

* For convenience, I think it's ok to copy some data directly from your compromised host, provided that you're comfortable with whatever verification steps you deem are necessary to certify that it hasn't been tampered with. Data, no code.

* When your migration is complete, your provider will swap in your replacement virtual host in place of the compromised one, which they'll decomission.

Of course, for the duration of your migration, your host will not charge you for the second virtual host. You might consider negotiation with your host for an additional discount, as compensation for the work you have to do as a result of their security breach. I think that free hosting for however long it takes you to migrate, that is, no charge for the new virtual host, and billing suspended for your compromised host, would be fair. If that's the two weeks they're already willing to give you, then that's that.

The focus of the movie will be the less-known romance Steve Jobs had with Ada Lovelace. That's why they chose Kutcher. He's the natural choice for something like that.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just can't find -- even on that anonymous blog that I've never heard of -- any reference to any state that was trying to make birth control illegal. That's what Twinkle-Toes was blabbering about, way out in the left field back on Jan. 7th, on orders from Axelrod.

I don't think I'll ever use a subsidized phone again. The last contract phone I got was some shitty Motorola that, believe it or not, was completely incapable of reliably ringing the alarm clock every day, on its preset time. And I could easily crash that worthless garbage simply by adding a recurring calendar entry for several years in advance (the dumb thing apparently creates an individual calendar entry for each date, and runs out of its pitifully small internal memory very quickly). Googling around, I was not the only one, but it was too late to return that POS. That was the last time I allowed myself to be locked into a contract in exchange for some piece of crap.

My current Nokia, bought at retail, is the best phone I ever had. I just popped in T-mobile's SIM, and that was the end of it. Although it's a smart phone, I don't need, and I don't pay for, an overpriced data plan, I just use it with Wi-fi. Works fine, and without any hassles from either the phone, or T-mobile. Too bad that looks like this will be the last good phone that Nokia will ever make, now that they've sold their soul to Microsoft.

T-mobile used to have some pretty sweet discounted plans, on a contract-free, bring-your-own-GSM-phone basis They still do, but just as not as good as they used to be.

Congratulations. I, myself, bought a Honda Pilot four years ago. The window sticker also had Alabama as the car's "port of entry", or whatever the term was called; and also showed, as I recall, that only about 15% of its parts came from Japan, and the rest was built in the US.

It's now four years later, and my Pilot stills runs like new. I'm not kidding, or overexagerating. I can barely hear the engine on cruise control, and the transmission still shifts gears like it rolled off the dealer's lot yesterday. This is the best car I ever had.

America sure builds damn good cars these days.

I haven't looked at this fix in detail, but from the sounds of it, I'm not convinced that the fix is complete.

The attacker, for example, could request 999,999 individual one byte ranges of a 1,000,000 byte document. In a partial range response, each individual partial range gets wrapped into a separate MIME entity. The response from the server is basically a multipart MIME document. There's significant overhead per MIME section. Each single byte of the document gets attached to a header that, perhaps would be around 40-50 bytes long. Still quite a bit of bandwidth amplification.

Thank you for parroting the union's talking points. You can report back to Da Boss that you've done what he wanted you to do.

All of those profits that the striking union believe entitles them to fat paychecks were coming from Verizon's wireless division, which is not unionized, and growing rapidly. The unionized wireline side of Verizon has been a losing money pit, losing 30% of its wireline subscribers, over the last decade. The wireline unions struck because they wanted the profitable side of Verizon to subsidize the money-losing side's salaries, benefits, and pensions. But faced with the prospect of losing their free medical benefits (for some strange reason, Verizon decided they didn't want to continue paying their striking workers), and suddenly faced with the prospect of actually paying their own way, the union folded. They're trying to spin it as some sort of a victory, but it's a complete, 100%, total loss.