I dealt with GSA a lot during the 90s and 00s. Buying hardware, after the requirements were set, was as simple as opening the GSA catalog sent by Compaq, matching up the base systems, adding options, and giving the polite person on the other end of the phone line your PO/requisition number. Delivered. If you had a local servicing outfit (like mine) taking the service call, we could call Compaq and get warranty parts with a serial number, no fancy invoice copy required. LOts of it came with 3 year warranty.

But goverment purchasing got all optimized and enhanced, and now you can't buy anything in less than a year.

Oh, and when HP absorbed Compaq, they pretty much dismissed the Compaq goverment sales department, since it was NIH. And no one liked working with HP's government sales group, since they were incompetent especially in service. Rumor was that some of the Compaq people came back, but too late - lots of agenies started bying elsewhere.

feh. Our Federal government is incompetent at nearly every level. It can hardly get worse, and dismissing everyone to start over would not be as bad as it might be letting them continue grinding away.

So, realizing that your competitors aren't going to lower their prices == collusion? Somehow, that doesn't seem fair to me. If it's purposeful, where they actually get together to do it ... fine, that's price fixing. But if everyone is just happy with the current price and realizes they don't have anything to gain by cutting the price down below their competitor's ... I don't see how that's illegal.

How is it illegal for a company to take what customers are willing to pay?

How is it illegal for companies to simply not lower prices... without colluding with each other?

Since when are profit margins required to be low?

How is it self-serving? Keeping your employees from using non-internal storage services for confidential data... I guess that's self-serving in the "protect your assets/intellectual property" way, but forbidding your employees from using external companies for storage of confidential data is hardly self-serving. It's right up there with making your employees password and/or encrypt their work laptops... :)

They got to a safe mode command prompt. They should be able to (maybe?) run msconfig from the command prompt and re-enable everything. This would, admittedly, look pretty funny, after having just disabled it due to "malware."

When I had a hospital gig, we knew back in 1995 that time would need to be syncronized amongst all the servers etc. We ran a local time server synched to a Tier 1 NTP server which was fortuitiously about 180 miles away. It has since gone to restricted access, but it's nailed to the USNO, and is still a Stratum One server. I bet they still use it as reference.

But even in 1995, NetWare servers were well behaved and accept NTP, and we set workstation time on login. As other servers came on, we went through the inevitable 'my server is more accurate' and blew them off until the Sun server showed up,and they refused to use our NTP. Fine. Took two weeks to resolve a 300ms difference, and then I watched as they re-fixed the error and synched with the NTP server they initially refused to use. In fariness, it was not SUN engineers involved, but they were arrogant enough to qualify.

Time is important to networks.

We did not, however, have any way to manage time on 'devices', such as infusion appliances etc. I do NOT think of an EMR as a 'medical device'. Nor do I think of the EMR sytem that way either. But if time isn't being synched on your network, you got some other problems, I suspect, that are not making your work easier or efficient as a network admin.

The important part is not that this is a new approach, but that they beat the previous record using less hardware.

apply this to all media, including print and radio.

What? You can't really verify someone's identity when they call in to a radio show? And those letters to-the-editor are similarly also difficult to ascertain the true authorship of?

Oh my, we've NEVER had any way to do this? The horror!

We sometimes kid around here, and one of our favorite bits of dark humor is that SAP is 'Satan's preferred method of interaction with our world".

Little did we know. It's not enough to gouge their customers, or to steal from them, but they have to diversify and thieve from the general public DIRECTLY, not merely via their surrogates, their blighted customers.

All this for $30,000. This bonehead now takes Martha Stewart's place as 'dumbest rich person in the U.S.A'.

Wonder how he will look in orange.

There's always an outlet. It will overflow somewhere.