It happened to me I ordered a accessory from an online music store, then they sent me a dozen of what I ordered. I emailed their Customer Service by (no phone # on thier site) of what happened and I'd be glad to return if they make shipping arrangements. A week goes by and no response so I send a second email and again no reply. After that I kept copies of the emails I send and kept the merchadise. I had no use for the extrass so couple years later I donated them to a local music program for kids.

Seem like idea of build Private Cloud should start increasing.

What was always taught about security if they have physical access they have you. So with commerical clouds you're giving physical acess to ???????

Thru a buddy I got a mini tour of JBL's research lab and they had an anechoic chamber to test speaker designs. I got to spend a few minutes in the anechoic chamber and it was strange but cool sensation. First the floor was a suspended wire mesh so almost like floating, then when door was closed I starting to hear my own body and nothing else, excellent. I'd love to have an anechoic chamber or a float tank to zone out in.

I had been using MBP's but like article wanted something upgradeable. I had ThinkPads in past so got a T530 and so far Linux is fine on it. Just wish I could find a video driver that I could lower the resolution most don't fill the screen when resolution is dropped. I looked at the System76 and interesting, but expensive compared to others. Hope the Levnovo holds up like my IBM ThinkPad did it was a tank.

One place I was at we were doing 24/7 support so someone had to always be onsite. For holidays our boss just split the day into 3 hour shifts starting at 6am. For only having to work 3 hours wasn't too painful still got most of the day with family/friends. Boss also said it will be dead bring DVDs to watch, just answer phone if it rings. So pretty painless Holiday work.

I thought I heard Japan has something like this in place???

  Sure need it, if a Executive wants more money then help the company do better so whole companies slice grows.

We did something similar we got to portable drives that can connect to internet. They have a minimal Linux that we could term into, we then setup a rsync to pull the files from the servers. So no matter where the drives were plugged in if they could get to the internet they could get to our server and rsync files. So three of the company exec's took a drive home so we had multiple backups of key files.

When I worked for Borland we used to joke that we were Microsoft's training site, because so many employees were either recruited away or just plain left for MS.

Even the non-compete's don't work because MS have so many types of projects they can put you on something different till your non-compete expires.

I discovered them years ago and bought from them both for myself, but also companies I worked for. Their customer service was great. All the best with the store front.

The mega corporations are buying up or pushing out of business all the small businesses. I recently sold by house and moved and in process used a lot of local businesses. Talking with them most were saying they will probably be gone in 3-4 years. The big corporations are cutting deals with cash strapped cites for major concessions that are driving the little guys out with extra fees, permits, and licenses.

I work in a Agile shop, but lucky for me in DevOps. All the SCRUMs, Code Sprints, developer trying to play QA is just a way to be cheap and to the "Suits" with OCD be controlling. The last big product rollout they got all their constants to come in and create code sprints and try to whip everyone up. A week in all the developers were ticked off and burnt and told the "suits" can hit the targets with all time wasted on writing test cases and not code. So the drop the Agile crap and got the rollout done. Think the "suits" would learn, no development is back to Agile suckage. Where I'm at Agile is all about control and trying to make 60 seconds of every minute work.

When people stick to the idea, previous days targets, any issues, todays targets, and move on. It fine, but when others start whining or manager wantabee start say "don't be so negative..." it turns to be a pain.

At another place I worked we had morning meeting (sit down) with all who were at work. Meeting was set a one hour max. Manger made any annoucements and floor open to issues and questions, very informal. Those ended up being good meetings very informative and some morning only 15 minutes long.

One of the companies I worked for the legal department had to come to our dev team meeting. Some guy had been sending copies of his software to our developers. We had a new version of an add-on product coming out. He also made add-ons and knew was guessing the direction we were going and probably many aspects would be the same.

What our legal department said was if our programmer's have never seen the other guys program they are "clean" programmers and no copyright violation if similar things show up. If our programmers had seen or been show the other guys program then wrote similar thing they are "dirty" programmer and what they do would be copyright violation. So legal dept collected all the still sealed copies and held them then ripped the other guy a new one.

Now what is really strange is legal said if marketing sees the other guys product and then describes a feature to a programmer the programmer is still considered a "clean" programmer. Geez no wonder there is no consistency in legal decisions.

I got into computers in the Apple II days, the first mouse I touched was on a Apple Lisa the forefather of the Mac. I worked for Mac software companies and Apple partners. So I have been around Apple and watched them a long time. I was never a Apple cult person because dealing with and watching their business practices they could be jerks. Apple was a company that tried to compete via innovation, but over the past few years their switch to litigation before innovation makes me sick.

Apple get back to R&D and Marketing and push the Legal department into the background where it belongs.

They alway tried to hide the amount of corn and the energy required to make ethanol. It never was a cost-effective solution.

The Amazon's and other large companies can afford the extra development and work to collect taxes at all the various rates and get it to the states. States have been pushing for this a long time and well eventually get it. The will be a burdon on the small internet businesses and cut into the slim margins they have to compete with the large companies.

What I would rather see is a ban on states collecting internet sales taxes, and a Federal internet sales tax. Not that I want to pay more, but have a single federal tax would make collection and payment for businesses of all sizes simpler. Then the Fed's could take the collected taxes and comes with some way to divide it up between all the states.