I would say that the negativity is exactly what makes the tech industry as successful as it is. Geeks, being the borderline socially inept creatures that we are, generally, tend to care very little about the feelings of others and have no hesitation calling each other out. It makes us better. It encourages us to make sure that our ideas are sound before we share them. Then once we share them, we are encouraged to refine them, because we have to. Geeks are vicious. We will call each other out. Geeks have pretty finely calibrated bullshit detectors. That is why so many of us have a hard time moving into management and dealing with executives and sales people.

This seems as good a place as any to reach a wide audience of people who commute on southern California freeways.

Did anyone notice how many times they rebuild the center divider on the 710 in between the 405 and the 5? (Compton, Lynwood, Bell, South Gate, etc)

I am referring to the 2005-2009ish time frame. I swear that they literally built the entire length of it, tore it down and rebuilt it at least three times.

Are you me? Seriously? My story is exactly the same.

I moved from Long Beach, where I had Charter and got great customer service and excellent internet service (was paying for 15mb, regularly got 20+mb) and low rates. I moved closer to work, am stuck with Time Warner and hate it. My only alternative is AT&T uVerse which is a steaming piece too.

You have Hulu buffering issues. I have Netflix buffering issues. I am paying Time Warner for the second tier of service (15mb) because I made the mistake of assuming that if I paid more, they might give me better service. I live in a pretty densely populated apartment complex. I know that the local node is over subscribed. They will not do anything about it though.

Time Warner. That pretty much says it all.

I agree. It is not a particularly viable solution for a lot of people. It is the best one I have been able to come up with though. I know that when I suggested it to my parents, they balked at it. I do not need to live at home. I make well over six figures a year. But I am getting ready to have kids, they are getting ready to retire, with our combined incomes we could get a decent sized piece of property and have our own buildings, an estate or compound of sorts. I think it would be cool, they didn't go for it.

The wealth dynamic in this country does not make any sense to me. We are way off topic at this point, but oh well... welcome to Slashdot. It does not make any sense to me to have property, and then sell it to fund retirement. In my mind, property should be something that is passed down generation after generation. This is especially true for people who are moving up socially, shifting from renting to being able to buy their own home. Once that foundation is established, by all means preserve it.

Welcome to reality. The economic system is setup to promote GROWTH, not savings. There are so many people in the world right now who need jobs and jobs require growth. We can debate the folly of unlimited all the time growth, but that is not the point I am getting at here.

The point is that as a society, we need people who are engaged with each other. Savers are not engaged. They are sitting on their toys and not sharing them.

The larger issue for society is the retirees are getting screwed. This is what should be happening, as sad as it is. The old need to die off to make way for the next generation. If old people want to live in comfort, their options are pretty limited. In my mind, the only real solution is multi-generational households where the young are taught to respect their elders. Ideas like that are "anti-American" and contrary to the American dream where people grow up, go to college, leave the house, start their own family, retire on their savings and then start the cycle all over again.

As a society, how long can we support a model where people earn so much more than they need so that they are then able to figuratively sit on their asses for twenty to thirty years (on average)? Or to view it from a slightly different angle, how do we justify paying someone for a job that they are not even doing anymore while hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people who are capable of working do not have jobs?

I have been building my own PCs since the early-1990s (first one I built was a 486 dx2/66 with 4MB of RAM. That's right, 4MB bitches!)

Last year I spent my bonus on a decent computer, i7 960 (3.2Ghz), Asus board, 12GB of RAM and an nVidia 560GTX. It is running Win7x64 Enterprise. I might toss in an SSD for the boot drive, but other than that do not have any plans to upgrade it. Maybe in a few years I will buy another video card, assuming that the cards are still using PCI-E.

Unless Microsoft pulls some seriously shady moves, Win7 should be good for at least five years, if not longer.

The only app that I run that taxes the processor at all is Handbrake. The games I play use 25-50% of it.

It is fairly old, but is also far from being a typical computer of that generation. Most people could not afford SLI, especially not with what 9800GTX's cost when the Q6600 was in the sweet spot of the market.

Even the late 2000s. I just had to buy Snow Leopard for my g/f's MBP (older 15", Dual Core 2.4, 4GB RAM) so that she could play WoW. WoW ran just fine on all the previous versions, but for some reason the newest version needed a version higher than 10.6. Same thing for... Google Drive and newer versions of Chrome and Firefox. WoW I could kind of understand, not really, but fine, whatever. Simple web browsers? That was what upset me. From a hardware point of view, there is no reason that the laptop could not run the web browser. I have an older desktop with less impressive specs running Win7 and it runs Chrome and Firefox just fine. But not OSX, nope, no sir. Pay the Apple tax.

You probably never worried about it because every developer supported it and every video card driver set supported it. You never had to worry about it because the support was implied. You would have had to go a long way out of your way to find a card that was not DirectX compatible, if such a beast even exists.

If he pays the average tax rate, low six figures. Probably $100-125k a year.

You must have missed the part of the article where it mentions that one of the Canadian companies that makes it their business to set these up only charges $2000 per account, per year.

One of those firms — Commonwealth Trust Ltd., based in the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean — was founded and, until 2009, run by a Toronto native, Tom Ward. The company's senior ranks included a number of other Canadians. It mainly sets up corporations in the BVI for the wealthy, charging around $2,000 a year per account for its services.

Let's consider for a second what the implications of the government taxing that wealth is.

The way I see it, if they tax it and use it to pay down the debt, the money is just destroyed outright. That is not necessarily a bad thing. These "rich" people have all of that money just sitting there. It is not productive money currently. It is not being used to create jobs, pay salaries or in any other way contribute to the economy. For your average citizen, if all of that "money" vanished into thin air, they would not notice. They do not see it now, they will not see it if governments tax it and pay down debt with it.

On the other hand, if the government confiscates that money through taxation and then uses it to fund programs, the money enters into circulation. The more money in circulation, the more inflation we see. Long term, any programs that are funded with that money create a problem because taxation of that money is a one time event. The programs are perpetual. Perpetual programs will require funding long after the one time windfall has been exhausted.

What do all of you think? Even if the governments were to get together and find a way to tax all of that offshore income, would it be a good thing for the economy?

You are absolutely correct in all of your observations. That is why it is so important to vet any cloud provider, and then continue to do yearly audits.

My organization deals with large financial institutions, among others. We have auditors in our data centers and going through our IT operations on a yearly basis. We are in constant communication with the clients' risk management team.

At this point, the "cloud" is too new for everyone to just jump aboard. I would say that unless a company understands the risks involved in the cloud and has the staff to appropriately manage the risks, they should not trust their operations to a cloud provider. The companies who are a good match for cloud providers are those who have taken a good look at doing it themselves and decided not to due to the cost or complexity. Companies in that position know enough about what it takes to do it based on their own planning. They are in the position to not be fooled by smoke and mirrors from the vendor.

The cloud can work, but it takes a lot of staff and skill to do it right. Right now the margins are there to enable the early adopters to do it well. The pricing pressure has not come to the market in such force that it is impossible to do it right and be profitable. In five years from now, it is going to be a different story. The current players will have established themselves to the point where they are leveraging economies of scale to drive down costs. New entrants into the market will not be able to compete on cost.

I understand being unpopular. I have had a similar career experiences and although it often times takes months or years for things to play out, the satisfaction and recognition that comes from having foreseen the challenges long before others did is very rewarding. Have you made it to the point in your career where you can mitigate the failure? Have you reached the point where you architect systems to be resilient to failure and continue running? It is one thing to perceive a risk. Anybody can do that. It is another thing entirely to mitigate the risk and develop solutions to address it.

I tell you that you are ignorant because you do not seem to understand the technology. You do not seem to understand the market drivers that pushing the industry towards "the cloud". So let's clear up a few things.

Technology fails. You are not some guru because you can predict that technology fails. The industry has been dealing with failure for decades. Hard drives fail so they RAID them. Servers fail so they mirror them. RAM fails so ECC was developed. Power fails during writes so battery backed cache was developed. Do you see the trend here? Virtualization is all about improving up time and reducing the impact of failure. With some of the SAN replication technologies available, entire data centers can fail, petabytes of data can go offline and then be available across the country or across the world in less than hour.

As a business model, the cloud is not going to fail because the economies of scale are making it cost prohibitive for smaller companies to do IT in house. Ten years ago, companies did not have Gmail and hosted Exchange as options for email. Now they do and only the largest corporations still run their own email infrastructure because it is too expensive for a small business to setup the highly available infrastructure required to guarantee 24x7 up time for email. For example the company I work for did over $900 million in revenue last year and we are not hosting our own Exchange because it is more cost effective to outsource it.

The same goes for large LOB applications. The SaaS model works. At scale it is less expensive for one company to run Oracle for 50 companies than it is for 50 companies to run Oracle for themselves.

Ten years from now, you are going to look back on this conversation and realize that you were on the wrong side of history. The cloud model is not going anywhere because it is built on top of all of the technology trends. It is the pinnacle of everything that the IT industry has been building for the last fifty years.