servers aren't all unique, some need to provide the internet archive with 50 petabytes of storage(on 7 TB/disc spinning rust if they are using raid 1+0), some need to be secure against outside hacks and obvious indoor hacks, some need to host the 'cloud', some need to be able to route 3000 petabytes of data a day(route not store)....

I totally understand what they're doing and that's fine if they want to operate in that way. Its people just need to realize this and use the name and prestige its name on their resume brings when they hop to a smaller but potentially more enjoyable organization.

The IT world is certainly competitive; however, ALL companies should see the internal benefits to training employees and working to ensure they do not leave. Companies with the mindset you laid out above are doing themselves a double disservice by not training their employees and leveraging the benefits and immediate returns provided by investments in their human capital. In some fields and with some resources, professional development is seen as a bigger happiness motivator and retention tool than more salary.

What you have outlined above is a company which is not interested in its people and only its immediate bottom line and one where it's clear its people should move on regardless of payscale and internal short-term opportunity provided.

As someone who has repeatedly attended and presented at conferences in my field, I make it a point during negotiations for any new job to ensure these are funded fully but only if I am presenting; otherwise, I opt to share in the costs associated in attending with my employer.

Each and every company I have worked at in the past (and current) has a budget for training and professional development of its employees, some more than others; however, by making a case that I am giving back to a community of like-minded professionals and putting our name and brand out there during presentations, I have found this is an easy sell for companies for which I want to work.

I work extensively w/SAS and utilize a lot of the conference (SAS Global Forum/SUGI prior) materials in my day to day both for myself and our entire organization. By making it clear to my employers that I want to give back by presenting, I have opened organization's view on how the sharing of information benefits the business while benefiting the entire industry.

Make your determination and desires known when you sign on and, if that is not an option, make it clear to your management that you want to do the same thing. While I have received a variety of different types of pushback over the years for this view, they have all relented and ended up changing their world view when the benefits are presented as they are.

Conferences are not inexpensive (SAS Global Forum is usually around $3000 - $3500 for a single person encompassing travel, conference registration, lodging, meals, etc) but the ROI can be HUGE beyond that depending on the knowledge transfers that occur, the networking opportunities, and the new business development which I have seen from these conferences.

While I did not attend SASGF 2014 this year, it was solely due to my available time to develop a presentation topic, not because my company would not send me (this was my first missed attendance since I became involved in the SAS world) and I look forward to contributing to and learning from others in the future.

Best of luck.

the real reason republicans hate obama care is simple. it eliminates two very important metrics for keeping people poor.

first off it means buisnesses can't 'manipulate' cash strapped people to make artificial job growth or contraction simply by hiring more or less people for the same total work hours. this no longer works when you are required to provide heathcare then they have no choice but to give people the hours wages needed to live a good life, instead of making them work to boost or contract the economy.

prior to obama care the working poor had only quacks peddling fake insurance houses constantly shifting locations and doing many unscrupulus methods to keep the poor from being able to pay for care via insurance. if you were poor enough you could hit the jackpot of qualifying for medicare, for the rest it means payday loans to buy meds and such, and the unscrupulis con artists insurance is slowly beginning to fade away, because of the new law.

why don't you grep the source? the equasion for m and m2 should all be open source...

minor point but ISIS is a company looking for a new name...
ISIL is the actual terrorist group funded and trained by americans to make syria's leaders have a war with someone.

once released under public domain some hacker somewhere builds a website shows tons of content under public domain, links to youtube then claims ownership and DMCA takedowns original content and runs with as much cash as they can turn over from people who paid for access to what content they provided.

it's happened before... to http://theoatmeal.com/ and he didn't even release as public domain.

the best way to do this is to make a basic user account for normal mode, and an administrator account for accessing everything. all the settings for WM can be made so that admin can see everything wile basic user sees only a custom menubar and desktop and can't actually do anything. if their desktop icons are made immutable they won't be able to remove them, and if you find cheap hardware to run it all on they won't be a target anymore except to spammers/con artists.

http://linuxgizmos.com/fanless-x86-mini-pc-runs-debian-on-2-3-watts/

is a $100 device you could work with and just tell them it's their new pc. since it has a serial port many hardware modems will work, and need no drivers, usb modems may or may not work i don't know...

i don't know where to go with Linux recommendations but pppd on freebsd will allow dialup on demand, but if you don't want that a manual link can be put on the desktop. chflags run as root (chattr if you don't like bsd and insist on linux) can make files immutable then not even root can delete, or move without running the chflags program first. if you want parts of the os to be protected feel free to make immutable files anywhere you feel like it to 'harden' the system the freebsd handbook has a walkthrough on compiling the kernel which is highly recommended for removing features and making the system harder to hack. disable or remove everything you or they don't need to further harden the system, and use a customizable WM and edit it so that only the functions you or they need are present i don't know what the people use these days, though.
freebsd is easily configured to run on slow computers. keep in mind software modems may be a real pain to configure and there are usb modems that might work good, further research is required. i don't know what hardware you're running for them, but if you've got them on an arm board there are way more people working on linux based ARM support while FreeBSD warns they aren't end user ready... however a basic browser and email virtually anything x86 is usable for a modern browser which may not work right on dialup requires at least 256MB of ram with 1GB or better recommended by me.

the fancy ones are $8,000 instead of $80 is because IP laws protect monopolies. in an open ecosystem where everything is free as in libre, any person designing medical devices could interoperate with everyone else designing medical devices. ever call to every piece of hardware would be workable by anyone who wanted to. every program even one privately funded, would then be opened to the community so their competitors could learn what you did and how and be able to build on what you did.

and if that smells like lost profit to you, maybe it is, but it's better for everyone. there is no vendor lock in forcing you to use inferior or vulnerable platforms. there is no 'upgrade cycle' that hardware vendors crave, the free market is always releasing inferior hardware to generate new upgrade cycles.

the government is supposed to be fixing things which corporations do wrong and they just don't care it seems. planned obsolescence.... do i need to rant more here?

if you think of sick people only in dollars and cents then you are in need of some morality. if you think we need to reinvent every medical tool every 20-30 years to 'fund' the proprietary developers of hardware and software then think of all the things that could have been done with those people not doing BS work, in a civilization where people are more than the dollars they have in their wallets.

> "The world economy and middle-class lifestyle are built on theft, slavery, extortion and murder."

They have those things in many countries, yet they remain shitholes compared to America. There's more to the success of America than just criminality.

Putting forth such a blanket statement only makes you look absurd.

lets look here, cnn the ptb lap dog they are have a 'salary' calculator that caps at $400,000 a year. http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/ yet america has 1565 billionaires according to forbes.com. http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2014/03/03/forbes-billionaires-full-list-of-the-richest-americans/ so to correct you, the blanket statement that the middle class lifestyle is unsustainable or the cause of the problem is absurd. clearly a system that supports 1,500 billionaires yet no one can apparently get a salary over $400,000 is definitely a gamed system. it is the top 1% who are the problem and the middle class only supports a dream of the poor to not be poor, while doing so for little rewards while whole nations are bankrupted so an investment banker can get 50% growth of income for billionaires, and the 304,118 millionaires can keep growing their wealth http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2014/02/14/where-the-304118-u-s-millionaire-earners-live/
one in one hundred people are millionaires. and the civilization that caused this is not going to sustain it forever. if the romans couldn't do it we sure as hell can't.

"Heads of finance are just giving the market what it wants, and their riches and status indicate how good they are at doing it. They're successful, not sick."

until the peasants start revolting the rich can do almost anything. the exception is access to heaven.

"They wouldn't be so successful if you the People (not you specifically, but as a whole) didn't create the demand, either directly or indirectly through the government you were supposed to keep in check."

the government hasn't created the mass of happy peasants that was corporation which took away the governments ability to keep in check the power of the rich, in the name of the peasants they serve.

"The leaders are just doing their jobs. It's the people who are sick."

no one is sick. you just haven't gotten it yet. the human consciousness is the parallel of many nodes. each node knows only what its node is working on. there is nothing not even light that can travel across the entire brain and provide every node with the same data. the visual cortex is exceptionally good at throwing away visual data and piping to other nodes the compressed lossy perhaps fractal data to nodes specializing in data storage. there are many nodes each about the size of a usa penny generally in a tube shaped form. each node can do its unique job and its frankly amazing how many nodes the human brain has. why do i bring this up? because your brain invents the reality you believe in for you and not even logic can fix that. it has nodes invented to do this. there are chemicals that impact your mind, including the six nodes that the sugar and cocaine target, that keeps the data flowing between nodes. as they do their respective jobs. and create the consciousness matrix that makes up your highly parallel mind that has been programed by most schools to be highly serial. even games are highly serial. i learned how to play with the best but it was a path of diminishing returns my other nodes either craved the data or rejected it. the ones that craved it got tired easily the ones that rejected it stopped trusting the rest of the nodes. there is no dd for the brain but the cycle i was in was as close to it as is possible. making every day the same at blinding speed while parts of my brain became exhausted and other dark. the true sickness is that there is none. we are all healthy and the chemicals just make one side win or the other in the terms of how the brain works. and depending on who you are and who your doctor is will determine if they try to slow down your nodes or speed them up. the rest is a moot point it is not a sickness but rather two roads to early failure of nodes or to lazy nodes doing little real work and staying dark.

and yet a $100 wifi dual band router is capable of transferring files wirelessly 8 bands of 40mhz that carries 1300Mbit/s of data and there is enough bands for a whole apartment building to each have a wifi router in every apartment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11
802.11ac
Main article: IEEE 802.11ac

IEEE 802.11ac-2013 is an amendment to IEEE 802.11, published in December 2013, that builds on 802.11n.[18] Changes compared to 802.11n include wider channels (80 or 160 MHz versus 40 MHz) in the 5 GHz band, more spatial streams (up to eight versus four), higher order modulation (up to 256-QAM vs. 64-QAM), and the addition of Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). As of October 2013, high-end implementations support 80 MHz channels, three spatial streams, and 256-QAM, yielding a data rate of up to 433.3 Mbit/s per spatial stream, 1300 Mbit/s total, in 80 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band.[19] Vendors have announced plans to release so-called "Wave 2" devices with support for 160 MHz channels, four spatial streams, and MU-MIMO in 2014 and 2015.[20][21][22]

that worked great for openssl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed
their solution? a fork to libssl without all the messy kludges for various vendors/platforms.