pronounced bayner, heh

"If the guaranteed annual income had gone through, we would have eliminated poverty."

At best you would have changed the bar for poverty. Like it or not people are in poverty weather the poverty line is 20k annually or 100k annually. If you're at the bottom, you're at the bottom, the numerical value is really vary arbitrary.

For Windows as a guest on Xen you need a host that supports VT in the CPU. If your CPU supports it it'll be an option usually in the BIOS -- you can also check for the vmx flag in /proc/cpuinfo. With VirtualBox that's not the case, windows seems to work fine for standard tasks.

VirtualBox comes with a pretty interface that makes administration easy, xen does not. Although if you want a GUI for Xen there are options out there. Citrix makes one, also there's cloudmin which is really easy to use.

I downloaded this tonight for my droidx and my first impression is not good. In about and hour of use i had to force close twice, the phone was horribly slow while it was running, and pages looked terrible. Maybe the next release ill give it another go.

I used a somewhat customized version of nVentory http://sourceforge.net/projects/nventory/ to manage my data center. The nice thing about it is that you can build clients that connect, update and register themselves through a RESTful interface. It comes with a working linux client, other clients are pretty trivial to make using the linux client as an example.

You missed one on the list:

* "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone"

Not that I agree with what they did, but it's the Hotels right to refuse service.

I just left a company that fired 20% of our staff (many of whom I knew) and tried to strong arm the rest of us into long unpaid hours in compensation. Getting the job done and all that corporate hoo-rah. There are many people still there, putting up with the corporate bs. Not me. You're perfectly capable of saying no, leaving and getting another job. I take it from your post you've never stood up for yourself? Try it sometime. Provided you're not totally inept it really can improve your life.

What stops you from negotiating this on your own? If your skills are in demand, and you're well trained enough in your field you can negotiate anything within reason. I really don't understand people who are told to work for free and just do it no questions asked. You have a choice. There's nothing magical about a union, just they are more willing to say no... you're perfectly capable to do that on your own.

"I haven't either. Is there a good reason why we don't have one though?"

Because, no offense, I can negotiate my own pay and benefits better than you all can collectively for me.

For some professions, like teachers, police, etc, where everyone is doing the same exact job it might make sense to go union..... but you and me, although we are "IT", have two very different jobs and responsibilities. "On call" for you might be drastically different than for me. For better or worse a union is negotiating things very broadly and you can't just package "IT" with a bow and serve up the same one to everyone.

As an alternative, learn to negotiate, learn what questions to ask and what to ask for in return. Know what you're willing to accept, and don't be afraid to reject an offer. Ask for what you'll still be happy with 2 years from now. Try and avoid technically inept companies, and make sure expectations are set (i.e. this pager is for catastrophic network failure, not your home email account is broken).

It's $300 per VM. That $300 is paid each three years, and drops your price per hour in half. If you're running your instance 24/7 it ends up making a lot of sense to just reserve it.

"Looking at the article, it is likely that people are re-requesting the same machine be started & stopped multiple times per day"

Guilty! I use EC2 as a cheap way to learn / test things in my spare time that I don't get to do at work. As a result I'm starting and stopping machines right now. In the next couple hours I'll probably launch a total of 10 instances for a couple hours.

You run a certain risk with personal data on company hardware. At the very least if you get fired or laid off you'll lose that data if it's not backed up. At the worst end of the spectrum, you'll lose that data and it'll be owned by someone else. You have only two options:

1) Don't take the money. Politely refuse it, and thank your employer for the kind gesture.
2) Take the money and then buy yourself a second notebook. This way you have one you own and one that's the company's.

Would this apply to the app store? Apple has been actively blocking certain applications from the market for some time now, just wondering how this applies to that market.

Additionally, there was a long time where I could not access AIM services through my Verizon blackberry, it was blocked by Verizon, but has since been lifted and I'm able to use the service fine. I'm curious how this will play out with cell companies and their practices of blocking applications and protocols that compete, or make it easier for consumers to work around expensive competing telco offerings. It's certainly not something specific to Apple, or even something new to telcos in general.

While I agree with your point that unions in general have a hold on California legislature, I'd like to clarify one point; Teachers here don't make 20% above the median. The median for California in 2007 was $55,450 as per the most recent income census.

The problem comes from administrative overhead. Of which California is the highest in the nation. Additionally retirement benefits for school staff is way out of control.

The later is the one that's going to cause us the most pain in the future, sense the school pension system in California does not pay for itself, and is continually growing at a faster rate than growth in tax revenue.

One of the problems, IMO, is the legislature here does not address the important issues, like school funding and annual budgets. One interesting proposal going around for next year's ballot is to reduce the legislature to part time to force them to focus on important issues. More on this can be found at: http://www.reformcal.com/cms/

The goals of this project are admirable, however the implications of such a change are up for debate.

"Will those savings offset the new infrastructure the state government will have to build for compliance and auditing of the third parties?"

Ideally compliance and auditing of sensitive data with an internal IT department should be the same as with an external IT department. A government IT employee is no more or less likely to loose, steal or mishandle sensitive data than an employee in the private sector.

As for your other points about costs of converting to the "cloud" I think you hit the nail on the head. If they have the existing infrastructure to justify a new $300m data center, I can totally see development costs exceeding $300m in building out new apps, or converting existing ones to the cloud.