It's doing no such thing. People may be using it as an excuse to build an empire or do stupid things, but that's not the fault of SOX. I worked for a *VERY* large financial company (the overall IT budget, across all branches, businesses, etc, was measured in the *billions* of dollars), and not once were we stopped from doing anything because of SOX. Not once was it even an issue, either.

Put the blame where it belongs, on stupid people. Then fire them.

Opposing DRM is most definitely a moral position, on any number of grounds, starting with the ones you don't want to acknowledge down to the less obvious ones, such as opposing anything that makes life more difficult without providing any benefit or opposing the conflation of 'buy' with 'rent', as you never actually buy anything with DRM, you simply rent it.

Feel free to pretend you aren't doing anything wrong when you say there's nothing wrong with DRM. Just be aware that that's exactly what you're doing -- pretending.

No, that's the maximum you can get over the period you paid for -- one month. You don't pay for your service in 15-minute chunks.

Except that you *cannot* get X. The best you could possibly get is 100% for 15 minutes plus 50% for fifteen minutes, lather, rinse, repeat.

Unless I've screwed up the math (entirely possible, it's late and I just spent an hour stuck in traffic), the maximum you can possibly get is (100+50)/2, or 75%.

No, actually, that's not the case. The phone companies are theoretically in competition. I have exactly one choice, AT&T. At my previous address, I had exactly one choice, Verizon.

And if there was *ANYWHERE* that Verizon could compete with AT&T, it's here. I can stand in my daughter's bedroom, look out the window, and *see* Keller -- where Verizon rolled out the very first pilot of FIOS.

But you will not find them competing *anywhere*.

Well, based on what I saw in Guild Wars, they're doing just this -- to ensure they rarely give you anything you can use. The chance of getting a good item for your class seemed to be a third or less of what it would have been if the loot was actually random.

I wanted to tell NetworkManager to do something specific (IIRC, use a specific DNS server rather than the one handed out by the DHCP server on my DSL gateway, but it's been a year or so) and couldn't. When I opened a ticket about it, it was closed WONTFIX with the notation that the idea behind it was zero-configuration and adding the ability to configure it to do this was therefore unacceptable.

I want gnome-terminal not to eat my right-clicks. People have been asking for that for *years* and are constantly told that the Gnome developers know better than they do about what they need.

I would love for the Gnome developers to sit in on that session.

And then be beaten with sledgehammers until they understand that the goal should not be 'unconfigurable' but 'no configuration needed 90% of the time, and configurable the remaining 10% of the time'.

The problem is not a lack of standards. The problem is failing to follow standards.

Actually, no. If there was no contract, he wins. Slam dunk. Because copyright is automatic, and has to be explicitly transferred.

If you aren't using RAID6, I will point my finger and laugh when this happens to you. :)

Hint: Do you think that's a raw drive you're seeing? No, you're seeing... a RAID5 volume presented as a drive by the array.

Not having RAID is simply not feasible in a 'real' datacenter, because you'll lose a disk or two each week -- if not day.

But then, what would I know -- I only work on a team handling several petabytes of space, having come from a team handling several *more* petabytes.

Where I work, we've only got a few petabytes of NFS storage. And it's only used for mission critical (in the literal meaning of the term -- no access to data, no work gets done, literally $millions lost if a deadline is blown) data.

NetApp doesn't seem to be having any trouble selling NFS, either.

So no, I don't think anyone uses NFS anymore.

>For real backup needs, tape is still king.

No, it's not.

As it happens, I do storage administration for a living. My previous employer had 4.5PB, and was actively evaluating moving from tape to a disk backup (although, since they're a major financial company and have so much data, it won't be a fast transition). My _current_ employer has perhaps half that, and our primary backup system is snapvaulted to a remote site, and then backing that up to a virtual tape library. It will be our *only* backup system as soon as we have enough capacity there to handle what little remains on tape.

Tape is expensive, time consuming, and problematic. The media costs are higher than for disk, the labor is *far* higher, and we have more trouble with our tape backups than our disk backups.

And the media cost for disks becomes even greater when you consider that tape compression is streaming, but data dedupe gets to take into account everything on the virtual library (we're aiming at a compression ratio of ~11 for libraries which have a full backup cycle. I have no reason to believe we won't do better than that).

Tape is obsolete.

I should have said 'a new career outside academia'. Politics, of course, is the sort of cesspool where plagiarism seems perfectly normal....