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.

Xen!

Same non-existent support, lower cost.

You'll need to do a little tinkering beyond that.

My MSI Wind boots up and one of the options (F3 if I recall correctly) reinstalls Windows XP to the factory settings off a hidden volume.

I totally agree. I have an MSI Wind (U100) and I use TrueCrypt as someone above recommended. I've not noticed a huge performance decrease on the machine. I have one mount point and I add all personal files in there, leaving apps and OS files unencrypted. On my HP notebook I use Safeboot, which uses whole disk encryption. I used it without safeboot for nearly two years, and so far about six months with it installed. Again, I have no noticeable performance loss. Someone else who uses their computer more heavily than I might have more to add here, but for normal use whole disk encryption works fine. I don't have any problems with streaming youtube (or netflix) on either of the computers. Netflix and compiling C#/.Net stuff on VS2008 are about as CPU heavy as I get on these machines though, so again, there may be others with different experiences.

What happened to all the wankers who hooted and hollered about boycotting them after that?

Still here... still boycotting... just not as vocally anymore...

"What's the difference other than everyone has to own the game?"

The big obvious one is that battlenet was slow, crashed a often and was flooded with other problems. Back when starcraft was out I had high speed internet, along with very few others, but we still had LAN parties because social interaction was (and may still be) fun, and there is just no way you're going to out perform my LAN, even with today's high speed Internet. There's probably a lot of people out there who would just rather play online, typing or talking through a cold microphone, i'm not one of em.

"We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better."

I highly doubt it.

Just one more reason I no longer support Bizzard. Just as soon as I begin to forget why I dislike them they give me more reasons.

This is in fact why NXDomain breaks things in the way the poster describes, however, unless you're the kind of employer who wants to see EVERYTHING your subordinates are doing it's not actually the best practice to filter everything through the VPN.

Filtering everything through their VPN increases overall costs in bandwidth and hardware as Intron indicated. These are very real, very costly expenses that many employers overlook when implementing broad policies... and it's a fantastic point you raised that all too many companies forget.

Why should my connection to slashdot.org, for example, be secure on the company VPN? My ssh and nfs connections have very real reasons to be secure however!! On the other hand you could fix this by filtering DNS traffic through the VPN, but not web traffic. The cost of DNS traffic is marginal comparatively to other services, but the benefit for companies facing these specific issues is obvious.