Not a great idea. I spent five years working post-sales in that environment.

The problem is that the sales people typically aren't motivated and view learning the technical details mostly as a waste of time. So they don't learn it as well as they should. Also, since they've been "trained", an engineer isn't as likely to be assigned to the sales person for the engagement. What you end up with is usually a sales person who thinks they understand the details.

The end result is that the post-sales engineer who gets assigned has to clean everything up. I probably spent at least 60% of my time having to re-engage our sales team for more appropriate contracts and re-engineer the "solution" the client was sold.

There were a few times I was sent to engagements following a new sale that had involved both a sales person and a pre-sales engineer. Those engagements went much more smoothly and usually resulted in increased sales of product and services.

What you describe is a best case scenario for a stolen credit card. Things don't always go that way, and there are a million ways for the incident to be much less pleasant. There is a very real chance a lot of people will have to spend a significant amount of time and energy to get this cleaned up.

Another thing to note here is that it's a closed system. Sure, in the end you won't have to pay the bill. But, I can guaran-damn-te the suits at Sony or Visa won't pay it either. So who pays the bill? Innocent bystanders when Sony raises their prices or Sony employees when they add the loss to their budget planning and have to eliminate another position to offset costs.

And watch a lot of them get turned away. The cable companies have been hard at work introducing legislation to greatly limit competition in a lot of areas. Try asking Verizon when FiOS will be available in Tennessee for example. In the entire Memphis area, your choice is pretty much Comcast or Comcast. There is DSL, but its throughput is laughable and the service is highly unreliable, and there is no "high end" DSL to speak of.

Shouldn't be uncomfortable. There are two types of schools: public and private.

Public schools are mostly paid for and to some degree run by "government" entities. They generally could care less about profit and tend to operate much like assembly lines.

Private schools are businesses. They don't always measure their own performance in terms of dollars, but make no mistake, they operate for profit. Sometimes the profit is the schools prestige, sometimes its student enrollment, and sometimes its simply a schools political involvement. Whatever it is though, its always about advancing either the school or the people who run it.

I have nothing to support this other than my personal experience, so take this as my thought and not as fact. That being said, most of the democrats I've known in my life have tended to convert to the republican party after they've started making decent salaries. IF that is true in a wider sense, then it would seem reasonable that the agenda you describe above would be pushed by both the democrats as well. Otherwise, they educate their base, their base makes more money, and they start losing people.

This has a lot to do with hardware acceleration in the GUI, which for the most part isn't there in any Android below 2.3. I bought my Droid 2 last september and noticed exactly what you mention. In 2.3, that's no longer true. It feels MUCH smoother. In fact, my wife went out a month ago and picked up a low end device (with 2.3) that has a much better response rate and feel despite having a processor only half as fast.

Best use ever.

Absolutely!

Portal was the perfect example of that. It was short, but it was amazingly well designed (simple that it was) and the story was fantastic. It was a small project that exploded because it was well done.

My guess: Not enough hookers and blow.

The reason Oracle is being singled out is because they don't have enough connections in this section of the Government (Read that as no one involved with this action on the Government side has an incentive to make this disappear). A government contractor should either:

1. Have someone on the purchasing side with an investment in the company who stands to profit if things go well.
2. Provide "incentive" to make sure things like this don't happen. Hookers and blow...

Agreed, but otoh its all relative. If you've ever had any support issues with them or had to endure the "Time Warner 9th Circle of Hell Phone Menu" (tm) any browser error, no matter how bad, seems like paradise.

Stories like this help convince me that the submitter and timothy have never worked in a medium or large enterprise environment. Anyone who has knows the value of backup tapes.

No, they never went away. Yes, they will be with us for a long time to come.

To anyone who has ever had to manage or deal with a large data archiving or backup system, tapes have always been a consideration. Even if they didn't end up using tapes, they were seriously considered. Very few other options offer the raw storage space, reliability, speed, modularity, and low degradation rates of tapes.

Actually, they have an excellent data network. It is slower than AT&T's HSPA, but in my experience it is much much more reliable. With Verizon, I average about 600 - 700 kbps down almost everywhere. With AT&T I might get 1mbps down or I might get 250 - 300 kbps down depending on which wall I'm standing next to. The reason for that is Verizon's EVDO A has been rolled out all over the place and is a little older than AT&T's HSPA. AT&T's rollout of their 3G network was (and continues to be) horrendously slow.

Actually, there are a lot of people who use handguns to hunt. I've known several.

Don't forget the typical 5GB data cap.

I call bullshit.

Yes, GM did pay back 6.7 billion. Then again, they received about 52 billion. So yeah, go ahead and give them a cheer for paying some back, but they're definitely not the hero's that a lot of people are making them out to be.

By the way, the losses on the money the government gave GM look to exceed around 30 billion.