FWIW, while I'm sure Linus is living quite comfortably, and may in fact be a millionaire (which really isn't that much money these days: my parents were paper millionaires and they were a postal carrier and a government clerk.. they only were "millionaires" because the Southern California house they owned wound up being worth $600,000, plus another $400,000 combined in retirement assets), but he's not exactly living the life of a 1%er. From what I understand, he earns a respectable salary from the Linux Foundation, but not anything out-of-line for a talented software engineer in Portland.

He's not exactly shuttling around the West Hills in a limo. Unless you consider TriMet MAX (Portland's light-rail system) a limo.

Nagios can be built and designed in such a way that there are no false criticals and few spurious alerts. but it requires dedication, documentation, and attention to detail. Most Nagios installations I've run across are built and maintained by people who often lack one (or more) of these three traits, or are a single-man IT operation that can never devote the time or resources to doing it properly.

I have seen systems of Nagios and Zenoss (and a few others) that are devastatingly precise, accurate, and timely. However, they were typically set up by a highly dediated TEAM of sysadmins who's entire job for the organizations they work for is managing the tactical systems. It's a full-time job in and of itself, and not one that many organizations really devote the manpower to do "right." They do it just "good enough", which is why you are used to seeing the installations you are seeing.

Google's exactly the kind of organization that has the man- and brain-power to do it right. And it's not really that hard, it's mostly just simple attention to detail. And that's a trait I've found is lacking in a lot of the current crop of junior system administrators I've run across.

While I agree that Microsoft will likely never "go away", to a large degree the statement that "the next generation .. will not be dominated by Microsoft" has already come true. The vast majority of new "screens" that people are viewing content on, surfing the Internet on, and generally "using" in their day-to-day life are smartphones and tablets. And Microsoft is being pummeled by Android and Apple. People are looking at what they used to buy laptops for and deciding "hey, I can do 90% of this with an iPad/GalaxyTab, and the 10% that I need to use a keyboard for my old laptop works just fine."

Behind the scenes HP (and the other manufacturers) would respond to Microsoft by saying "look, Samsung is killing us. Apple is killing us. Let us sell Windows 7 or our next new product is a laptop that runs Android."

Actually, if the sales numbers are to be believed, people just aren't buying new PCs at all.

No, but spammers and scammers do use automated bots to CALL all the people in the phone book.

Let me make sure I understand this.

Congress is waging war over $2 billion in budget cuts. In a budget that is around $3 trillion. The deficit alone is $680 billion.

Let's frame this in context. This is arguing over a 2 cent line item on a $300 bill.

And we wonder why our government is the laughing stock of the free world.

They're still getting valuable data. As I understand it, part of what they're doing is using your physical location in the store triangulated from your phone. While using a VPN does limit SOME of the information they're gathering, it doesn't eliminate all of it.

> Mt. Gox? Seriously? How do you even pronounce it?

"Magic the Gathering Online Exchange."

That should scare you.

We have this impression of the reliability and stability of the POTS network partially because it is ubiquitous and invisible. Yet, as someone who has spent most of my adult life working in and around copper twisted pair, I can tell you POTS isn't as "reliable" as you think.

You have the impression that POTS is reliable because there's a small army of men and women maintaining it. AT&T is claiming that it is costing them a fortune to maintain the copper twisted pair infrastructure to the standards dictated by the FCC for a rapidly dwindling number of customers. People are leaving copper-pair services by the thousands every day: some are going wireless, some are going to pure-play VoIP providers, and even the "cable company" (or the telephone company's own fiber).

Copper wire only lasts 20-30 years hanging from the side of a pole, on average, before it will likely need to be replaced. Especially in urban areas, where cable replacement isn't cheap, most of the landline phone companies are staring down the barrel of 50-60 year old copper infrastructure that may have as many as 75% of the pairs condemned.

Let me put it this way. No IT department for a business in a 100-year-old building facing a phone rewire job would replace all that 50-year-old 25-pair with.. more Category 2. The minimum they'd pull is Cat5e or "6", and even more likely they'd pull a significant amount of fiber, if not to the desk at least to a departmental wiring closet. That's the same decision the phone companies want to make.

From a strictly technical/engineering perspective, it's 100% the right choice. Copper loop is functionally obsolete in almost every way.

All batteries are DC.

Unless you know of some alien technology even Tesla himself wasn't privvy to.

It has already had the practical "chilling effect" of making all the large 3D-printable object sites from not having anything that even remotely could be a gun part restrict.. gun parts.

This is sort of my pet peeve with this whole thing.

It's not the SPEEDS that suck, dear FCC, it's the stingy caps. I'd be happy with 1-2Mb down if I wasn't hard capped at 1.5GB per month.

I can tell you for a fact that at least one of the "big four" is buying way more than a single T1 for their towers, at least where I live. They buy a fairly large amount of dark fiber from the company I work for to connect a number of towers on the outskirts of town.

Granted, they could be running a single T1 over every fiber. But I somehow doubt that.

I've told the IT department where I work they can have my Blackberry Bold when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

So, it's Google's fault the consumer didn't read the dialogue box that says "Turning location services on will transmit your location to Google. For more information, see our website" in a large font?

I think a lot of people take the "personal responsibility" wharrglbe a bit far sometimes, but in this case, it's hard to have sympathy for consumers that turn a feature on, are told what it does, and are surprised when told later that's what it does.