I spent Christmas in a GSM dead zone which is approx 5 miles from a fairly large population and an interstate. At my parents I get 0 bars with the AT&T logo which alternates to 1 bar and no signal depending on atmospheric conditions. A cloud rolled in at about 2AM whereupon I got those "merry christmas" text messages... ah nice to wake up to.

The threshold with which they paint these signal zones on their coverage map is ridiculous. Naturally it only works outdoors or in a window sill at certain times, only on one side of the house. Some parts of the house will work. Almost anywhere else I get great coverage (aside from lakes close to the afore mentioned area where summer holidays are spent). This is repeated at aunt's and grandma's but not the roads between.

Pretty much everyone in the town has Alltel and some crappy to passable CDMA tech (just from looking at them).

On another note:
The reason Japan and Korea can roll out awesome networks are social but mostly geographic. Look at Japan for instance. Surface area is tiny compared to US. Japan: 145840 square miles. Texas: 268601 square miles. Also Texas doesn't line up neatly on either side of a mountain range. Sure you can argue user density and back-haul capacity but c'mon that's just one state.

I know this isn't likely to be a problem and I hope that I'm preaching to the converted, but please, for the love of all that is awesome, do not unionize tech jobs.

Unions = expensive to employers. Your job is mostly network based, they have networks in India. You want to press the gas on that problem?

Anyone heard anything in the news recently about all of the big union industries, like GM, Ford, Chrysler?

Goodyear shut down plants a year or so ago because they couldn't afford union labor.

Unions get greedy because they're composed of humans. Think about it, you have a vote on whether you A) demand more money like everyone around you or B) argue that you might hurt the bottom line and end up with your own job vanishing. Long term/empathetic to administration thinking? Might as well paint a target on your back. Corporations suck but when they hit hard times and have unions, they're almost guaranteed to fail.

The problem with outrageously expensive IT is that IT is like the power company. If the lights are on, who gives a crap how it happens. Damn that bill is high though. Nobody notices until the power goes out, and then you cuss those expensive bastards that can't maintain 100% uptime.

Want to move your job to India? Unionize!

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh. In other news, scientist have proven that sticking your hand in a blender may produce dexterity issues down the road.

Look at Citrix XenServer5. Take an awesome open source product. Add some awesome features closed source, sell it.

On the FOSS adoption side without service contract:

My boss is terrified of having something go wrong while the people that know what they are doing are out of the office. If there is not a 1800 number to call if it breaks, or requires normal operation beyond the remaining staff's knowledge level, he ain't doing it. Spend the money he says.

Rightfully so, in the event that several people were simultaneously hit by the same bus or were on the same plane that crashes. Now you have a free solution that is completely awesome but without some serious documentation (previous guys used google, experience, trial and error) you're up a creek.

I know, I know, a real IT person would document the hell out of it. Unless they were jumping from project to project with a large queue and no end in sight...then not so much.

I think the guy was talking about infiltrating the command-control network and commandeering the robots.

On the corruption side of things, he with the most money wins. Do you think anyone in Iraq can outspend Exxon? It could be argued maybe that Saudi interests could outspend Exxon, but its not like those guys agree on anything enough to form a viable plan of action...sort of.

I think as far as buying influence America has proven the most susceptible and the most influential simultaneously. You wouldn't need to buy the programmers when you can buy their bosses boss, or just the boss of all of the operators anyway.

Sorry for the late reply. Windows RDP only shares app memory as well as the application does. So maybe shared libraries get loaded once, but application data like a cache-glut of email and calendar items are process specific. That is the majority of the problem with Outlook. People that have 3000 items in their inbox and IT bosses without the backbone and/or policy backing to nuke 'em.

XenServer5 has a mode that is essentially custom made for this. It "streams" the OS and applications from a single image to multiple VMs. Clients connect to the VMs via RDP on thin clients. They're blending some of the Citrix Metaframe stuff with Xen VM and some apparently something else for the storage layer. There are a few modes for storage, one writes changes locally to attached storage on the VM Host. Another uses a RAM Disk. I think the last streams back to a difference/snapshot on the central SAN/NAS. From their propaganda, which I kind of like, you can upgrade an application, say Acrobat Reader or even AutoDesk stuff and it gets pushed to the ppl on reboot. The only issues I've had with RDP thin clients (Neoware/linux, now HP) is attaching peripherals other than a keyboard and mouse. We have managed to put cash drawers and receipt printers on them though. Had to do some custom scripting to get the terminal server to act correctly though. It also occasionally gets pissed off with thumb drives on public machines. You still don't save much on hardware with any large workloads. Its not like that 150MB instance of Outlook gets any smaller on a VM, you just have multiples of it on a single server.

Just by looking around on the road you can tell people are chomping at the bit to drive a tiny tin can looking car, especially if that car is also slow as hell. In fact, the less likely (real or perceived) someone with boobs will give it a second look, the better.

Wait, scratch that, the exact opposite is true.

How about something between the Tesla Roadster and the Smart car. A mid-sized sedan style vehicle that is a plug-in hybrid with a constant RPM diesel generator when needed. Or fuel cells whenever Hydrogen refueling becomes a reality.

0-30 in 6.5 seconds? Sheesh. Better buy a dorky bumper sticker right off the showroom floor. This will give the people waiting behind you at the green light something to laugh at while they try furiously to pass you.