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Comment Some things not thought of... (Score 2) 453

Lets assume they establish a viable colony on Mars, which is so successful it outlives the parent company. Whose responsibility is it then? The Dutch government?
Will they have a virtual seat at the UN?
What about laws with clear legal language that specify the "earth". "globally", etc... will those laws apply to Mars?
If a martian worker wants to telework in the US, will they require a visa or some sort of space permit?

Comment What the OP (Score 1) 313

It's implied that they have userland software that for some reason won't work in 64 bit windows. The asker then goes on to suggest using 6 different OS's as well, as if their finicky software has no problem with linux or windows from XP to 8. Is the real question about PAE? I feel like we are missing something here.

Comment Re:Fascist bloodlust (Score 4, Insightful) 380

What other feedback mechanism is in place to prevent secrecy being used to just cover up rather than protect legitimately secret documents?

I'm of the opinion that if you give anyone the power to declare information secret if will be abused to some degree X. What can be done to keep X as small as possible while still protecting real secrets?

I don't think there is a simple answer. While Bradley Manning's alleged actions are illegal and there should be punishment, the secrecy system has no practical safeguards right now - so in general I have a hard time saying that those actions had an overall negative effect for my country.

AT&T

AT&T To Pay $700,000 For Overcharging Consumers 74

An anonymous reader writes "CNet reports on an agreement between AT&T and the FCC which will require the telecom company to pay $700,000 to the federal government to resolve overcharging complaints. AT&T will also refund charges to customers who were switched from pay-as-you-go data plans to monthly plans after AT&T said they could keep the old plans. 'AT&T has also agreed to an extensive compliance plan (PDF), which includes: consumer notification, training of customer care representatives, and periodic compliance reports to the FCC. AT&T must also conduct additional searches of its records to identify improperly switched consumers and ensure appropriate refunds.'"
Government

Irked By Cyberspying, Georgia Outs Russia-based Hacker 95

coondoggie writes "In one of the photos, the dark-haired, bearded hacker is peering into his computer's screen, perhaps puzzled at what's happening. Minutes later, he cuts his computer's connection, realizing he has been discovered. In an unprecedented move, the country of Georgia — irritated by persistent cyber-spying attacks — has published two photos of a Russia-based hacker who, the Georgians allege, waged a persistent, months-long campaign that stole confidential information from Georgian government ministries, parliament, banks and NGOs."

Comment Re:My view. (Score 1) 396

Very well written. I only wanted to make one, trivial comment - an OS cannot possibly allow an email program to directly change the latency of interrupt handlers (your DPC latency remark). This implies that a userland program can somehow change the behavior of the kernel and hardware significantly, which either cannot or should not be the case.

As tiny as that statement is, especially mixed in with a sea of insightful, poignant insight I found the juxtaposition of your knowledge with that one remark vexing.
I don't use windows, but I would be tempted to check against Outlook next time I'm in the office :)

Comment Reality VS Expectations (Score 1) 396

When are the Windows folks going to get to the desperation phase?
http://www.vtaide.com/gleanings/expectation2.htm

I'm lucky I was able to do so, but I jumped the Windows ship entirely mid-Vista era. Before I get flamed to death, I'm only speaking for my perspective, here.
For me, I can spend mental resources on several things: learning new technologies, making things work, development, etc. The key point is those resources are finite. Having done Windows administration since NT, I can tell you from past experience and from where the Redmond train is headed you will always be re-learning how to do the same things. Damn near everything I learned in linux with Redhat Valhalla still applies or is just slightly different now, in 2012. What has changed is me. Because of the time I have spent honing my skill with an OS whose skills tend to carry over, I have an entire corporate network that I can easily manage, with comfort knowing there will always be a distro, mine or someone elses, I will be able to get work done in. From a software persepective, I'm really happy I didn't spend a bunch of mental resources learning Silverlight/.NET whatever and put the time into learning Scala, Python bunch other exciting techs that are Free to do what I want with, not just MS. I don't want career lock-in, essentially.

Just my 2 cents, we'll see if my bet continues to pay off.

Comment The PBX istelf is the easy part (Score 5, Informative) 224

You need to really be concerned about the following:
1.) Provisioning the equipment. I don't know how "small" a small office is, but this is going to spiral out of control quickly if you don't have an elegant way to setup handsets and make changes.
2.) Your change from circuit switched to packets. There are a lot of discussion points here, but the biggest you need to be aware of is latency is king. You might have a really slick p2p setup with OpenSWAN on 2 high bandwidth, cheap DSL or cable connections, but the jitter will kill you.
3.) How does your voice come in? If you are under contract and you have a PRI or some TDM circuit, you have to consider how you will interface that, and the cards you will need, or the SIP gateway you'll buy are not cheap.
4.) Who is going to manage the call routes, system secuity. I'm well versed with Asterisk, and you'll not find an all inclusive interface unless you go the Digium SwitchVOX route. If you don't pay close attention to security up front, you will experience toll fraud pronto.
5.) Handset support. What are you going to do for replacement parts, who is going to setup all the buttons, etc.
6.) Codecs. Some of the best are not free, i.e. G729. Just about any handset you get will support G711, but 12 bits of fidelity at 64k/sec each way (plur overheard for UDP/RTP) is not that great.
7.) Voice prompts, auto attendants, voicemail, etc.
8.) Status/BLF lights on phones. There isn't really a standardized way to do this, but SIP's Subscribe/Notify is used by some, I think Aastra.
9.) Key system habits. You won't be able to "pick up Line 2".

If I haven't scared you out of it yet, Aastra and Snom make excellent, RFC 3261 compliant handsets, Asterisk is a lot better than it used to be, and there are some alterntives you might find interesting like FreeSwitch or YXA.

Good luck.

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