I call BS. In general, private utilities are far less wasteful, more efficient, more concerned about their customers, far more forward-thinking, and certainly less corrupt than their city-owned counterparts. (And I say this as a former exec in a company selling to both private and public ownership in the utility market.)

Personally, I *like* getting my services from entities that make profits in a competitive market - it motivates them to take care of me, by delivering what I want at continually improving value.

Do you really think if any government had set up protected cloud services (whether at the city, state, or national level) that we'd ever get anything even remotely like Amazon's AWS, Google's Cloud Platform, Microsoft's Azure, or Rackspace's OpenStack? If so, as Jeff Foxworthy would put it, "You might be a fool"...

Profit and competition drives innovation - government drives corruption and waste - always following, never leading.

Based on the staggering incompetence of the City of Austin, as much as I hate Time Warner (see rant above), I'd prefer even them to a corrupt and crooked city-run Internet provider.

If you create real competition, then the competitive marketplace will look out for the public interest far better than a corrupt bureaucracy ever could. Oh, and do you think it's *really* a good idea to give the government (*any* government) direct control to monitor, filter, datamine, and collect all Internet data flowing in its territory?

At least with companies, we have legal redress - but you can't sue the government or government workers - in most cases, they're immune no matter what they do, so they're the *last* people I want running my Internet connection.

But implicit in your statement is the most important observation: the best possible outcomes happen when there is a competitive market. So why don't we just make sure that there is real and meaningful competition?

FWIW, the reason I have come to believe that Time Warner is perhaps one of the worst companies on the planet is that the corrupt Austin City Council has seen to it that in most parts of the city, there is no meaningful competition. TW delivers dreadful "30 Mbps" service that's 5-10 on a good day (unless you're running one of the common speedtests - they let that data fly through....) with horrendous latency and (I'm convinced) extreme prejudice against movie streams, especially from Netflix or Amazon. (And I'm not a heavy movie watcher, one a week, or maybe two if I can get a viewable connection...)

Google Fiber will bring competition, but only to those in the favored areas (trendy downtown and Mueller airport development). The rest of the city's still S.O.L., and AT&T isn't likely to run fiber anywhere except where they have to compete with Google...

WE NEED *REAL* NETWORK COMPETITION!

8" floppies were used by almost all serious micro- and mini-computers of the pre-PC era, so operating systems were all over the map - I've personally used 8" floppies on CP/M machines, various PDPs and VAXes (the former usually running RSX-11 and the latter running VMS, of course), the IBM Series/1 minicomputer, the TI 990, and the staggeringly powerful 68000-based 2D/3D CAD system running Unix Version 7 and later, BSD.

BTW, some of the older ones required "hard-sectored" floppies that had (10, IIRC) small holes punched around the inner side of the disk to assist in synchronization. The NorthStar CP/M machines were famous for that - I have a box of them in the garage with a *very* basic BASIC CAD program, but wouldn't have the foggiest idea where to get anything to read them, a fate that is soon to befall my QIC24 tapes, Zip disks, and both 5.25" and 3.5" Mac, PC, and Unix floppies, including some from the weird and wonderful (if doggy-slow) Intel-powered Sun 386i.

Hey, at least I still have players for vinyl and 8-track...

I've worked in aerospace plants doing work on black projects, and at at least one of them, even employees without any clearance had to "airlock" in and out of the plant, and briefcases and pockets were routinely searched.

At the very least, you had to open your briefcase and let the security officer (always armed) do a quick visual inspection of the contents. This was back before the fall of the Berlin Wall and later, the USSR (which is now making a comeback thanks to Obama and Putin, in that order) so violations were not only a firing offense, but one that would presumably get you a very uncomfortable interrogation. I expect it's pretty difficult to smuggle something as large as an 8" floppy out of (or into) a facility as secure as a nuclear missile silo.

As an aside, AF MissileMen are reportedly under orders to shoot the other officer in the silo if he goes off the rails. Now *that's* a security policy...

You laugh, but I found a CueCat when going through a drawer in my study over the weekend. Kinda thinking I ought to put it to work, just for old times' sake...

Are you sure? You sound an awful lot like Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper to me...

[CRM114]This message authenticated by CRM-114 discriminator[/CRM114]

You're not the first to suggest this - a surtax on earnings above the government salary is a *really* good way to deal with this.

University of Tennessee law professor and blogger Glenn Reynolds is one of the more outspoken proponents of this approach (he suggests a 50-75% surtax on earnings above the government official's salary for five years after leaving office.)

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit...

Although it's just a small step in eliminating cronyism and corruption, it's a meaningful and effective one, and we should all make sure that this is a major issue in every congressional election until it passes.

Ideally, this would apply to both elected and unelected officials, but the chances of getting congress to limit thier own feed trough is pretty slim given the heinous corruption levels we already have. (How *did* Harry Reid (and many others) get to be a multimillionaire *after* becoming an elected official?)

These are classics. My favorite, hands-down, is Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines". This is an odd book - it's written in hypertext (links to other pages and all - after all Nelson invented the term hypertext!) but in print form. Beyond that, it's really two books joined in the middle: Start reading form one cover, it's Computer Lib, start reading from the other, and it's Dream Machines.

Sure, parts of it are dated, but the concepts and thinking teach how to *think* about what we now call UI/UX and architectures better than anything else I've ever run across, and the principles are timeless. Without question the single most valuable computer book ever written - like some bizarrely wonderful foreign food dish, it's a delectable combination of manifesto, history, dreaming, ranting, and amazing insights from greats such as Vannevar Bush, Doug Englebart, and many more, especially Nelson himself. It is one of the weirdest, and most wonderfully serendipitous, books ever written. Lewis Carroll would have loved it, and I really wish Jonathan Ives had heard of it before saddling us with the form-over-function trainwreck that is iOS7...

The only bad thing about this one is that it's quite difficult to find - other than the nearly impossible-to-find original samizdata-like self-xeroxed original version, AFAIK, it's only been published once, by Microsoft Press back in 1987. I had to pay over $100 for a new copy after loaning my original to a reptile that didn't return it...

The other book is Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" This is a book that is still every bit as relevant today as when it was written - my good friend Dewayne Perry, one of the world's foremost software engineering experts, agrees that it's perhaps the most important book ever written on software engineering, and how to deal with building software in the real world.

Either one of these would be good, but if you reduce my computer library to one, I'm keeping Computer Lib. It's that good.

Well, gee, are you surprised after her "wise latina" comments? On the available evidence, the woman is as racist as they come, and what's an even greater travesty is that there was hardly a voice raised in opposition in her Senate confirmation hearings because the senators were all cowed by the threat of inevitable racism charges against them if they dared to point out the nominee's blatant racism....

One day we will achieve a truly color-blind society, but the Sotomayors are going to have to die off, first. It's like the Klan (which literally originated as the terrorist wing of the Democratic party) is still alive and well in its original home - it's just infected the government to carry out its new racist objectives...

Actually, there IS quite a bit of entirely legitimate controversy about whether global warming is happening. It certainly has NOT happened in the past 14 years, which is quite contrary to all the warmist's climate models. And further, there's incontrovertible proof that far warmer periods happened naturally hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and millions of years before the advent of fracking and SUVs. (Yay, internal combustion and *horsepower*!)

It is curious though, that the more evidence accumulates that the earth is NOT warming, the MORE CERTAIN the IPCC is that global warming must be happening. (see http://wattsupwiththat.files.w... to see how reality drifting from the model bizarrely leads to increased certainty...)

Agreed. If anything, this study simply proves beyond a reasonable doubt (especially when viewed with respect to a few thousand years of recorded history) that taking any action at all to "protect the earth" from such impacts would just be a monumental waste of money. While the risk isn't zero - it's certainly close enough.

If they want to take up a collection on Kickstarter or Indigogo, then fine, but there's no doubt that what they really want is another vacuum hose into the taxpayers' wallets to defend against a virtually non-existent threat.

Really guys, if I wanted meteor insurance, I'm sure I could get someone at Lloyd's to write it for me, and probably for a lot less than what the B612 Foundation will be soaking our government(s) for...

I would die first before moving to texas. most of my friend also feel the same.

in all my life, I have never heard anyone EXCITED about moving to texas, at least for tech. sure, there is tech there but only for those that can stomach the texas lifestyle and redneck attitudes.

the outright racism and bible-belt feel just is not compatible with many techies' view of what a good living area should offer.

Wow, I'd say that post pretty much serves as a prime example of how to beclown oneself while simultaneously establishing oneself as a bigot of the first degree!

There's a reason that 3 of the top 10 cities of the US are in Texas today, and Austin's rising with a bullet, showing staggering 6.6% growth, a substantial portion of which is tech, although way too much of that is the social/mobile bubble. (Austin is #11 today, Detroit is 18, FWIW...) Yeah, pretty tolerable weather, awesome food and music, really nice people (yep, even "bible-belt rednecks"), a great tech scene w/o the backstabbing attitude, entrepreneurial dynamism and focus on results, Formula 1/SxSW/ACL - why would anyone even consider working here? If there's a weak spot in Texas, BTW, it's Austin, mostly because of its "progressive" dedication to regulating the crap out of everything they can. (Don't get me started about permits here - smart people start or move their companies nearby, not in, Austin...)

Oh, and a friend of mine from Detroit (who happens to be black) told me years ago (when he had been in Texas only a few months) that not only was he shocked to find that there were actually far fewer racists in Texas than in Michigan, but that he preferred even those racists because "at least here in Texas and the South, you know when people have a racist bias!" He didn't find that to be true in Detroit, his home town, despite the fact that he came from a fairly well-connected family (his Mom was in the state congress), which insulated him from some of the racial bias in the first place...

Wow, there's a LOT of negativity and assuming that the CAB is only a bureaucratic, bad thing. (It may be, but hear me out - it shouldn't be, and if it is, you can help change that...)

I think part of the problem here could be that the OP is assuming that no good can come from this.

If the CAB is doing its job, then it should be *helping* to determine which patches to apply, why, and when, based on taking into account the hardware, software, networking, and application environments and the "risk" a patch represents to each. That kind of support is a real net plus to a sysadmin. Note that it's implicit that the CAB is either doing or facilitiating this extra work, not just dumping it on the admin. (In that case, it's not really a board, but the worst sort of bureaucratic assemblage holding authority but no responsibility by dictating policy to be implemented by others who have responsibility without authority.)

Yes, this *is* a lot of work, and it *may* be justified, especially if there's been a history of being bitten by patches that were more of less blindly applied simply because a vendor or package owner/author posted them.

As with all process issues, the important thing to understand is "*WHY* are we doing this?" That questions is frequently answered the best by answering other related questions, including, "Is this the best way?", and "How else could we achieve the same goal?" , and perhaps even more important in winnowing down the answers from that one - "What could we do that's 'close enough' in benefits, but way easier to implement and support?"

Asking the right questions is *really* important!

Why on earth should I really care what kind of CPU is in my laptop, *especially* if the OS runs on either x86 or ARM?

I think the whole point of the discussion here is that both hardware architectures and OS choices are becoming increasingly fungible, and that trend may only accelerate...

I'm with you on the quality digitizer/touchscreen, though...