Why is it that decent, smart people get it in their heads that they can only do one thing? Years ago I had some bungee-manager give me a lecture on how I was spreading myself too thin, and successful people chose one thing and did it well. Nonsense. Successful savants maybe, but creative/skilled people who've been doing something well for a decade or two..? (I'd steadfastly refused to choose between the management and tech tracks at my company, and my good performance in solving/building/managing/selling didn't fit their vision of a career.)

Instead of trying to find a place for yourself as a good systems engineer who will be applied to good peoplems, go look for an enterprise or business sector that could use someone like you. One of the coolest things I did in recent years was to stop thinking as an IT security geek (please, not another PCI assessment or pentest clown show), and got a yearlong gig with the UN as a governance reform manager who happened to specialize in IT. Same crap, but new challenges and way more satisfying work.

Look at the org's business, not the tech. Some examples: I have a engineering/physics/software geek friend who signed on last year with a biotech firm that does fish tagging. Instead of looking up up up the tech hierarchy, he now runs a small operation with just a couple of guys, doing world-class work. Another friend topped out in engineering management at a certain large redmond org, and decided that where she was working was more important that the specific engineering challenges, so she's now working for a school system in Hawaii. Both are incidentally now working on improving their health and have time for music that they'd been puting off for years. Second life in the real world. Nice.

iPad = a rock? Well, if you put it that way, I have to agree!

Ya doofy n00b, there's nothing Android about the Touchpads. Did you miss the... and the part about the...? And the big firesale... and then the open...? (*sigh*)...
Yeah, I guess you did.
Do ya live under that rock^h^h^h^hiPad?

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee....

The intersection is "fun to drive." The Tesla is a miniscule 2-seater that's not easily driven with the roof on except by hobbits. The Ural is an open 3-seater that drives like a lightweight car. Smart's a 2-seater made by cutting a C-class in half and stuffing in a motorcycle-spec 1000cc turbo. All more or less cargo-less with high smiles-per-mile. You get the point: quite comparable in actual use.

Everything else is in the eye of the beholder. For example, the Tesla roadster with its top off looks sporty (Don't be so smug -- I'd hardly call it beautiful), but with the standard roof on, it looks like a funny-lookin' guy with a bad toupee; the automotive equiv of old Gov. Blagojevich. And no matter what's under the hood, Accord says "soccer mom" and Altima says "first decent job and apartment, but I'll sell it when she gets pregnant." Ask a woman between the ages of 25-35, and apparently you'll be told the Fiat 500 is adorable**. The Prius looks like a wheel chock to me, but Portland hippies think it's sexy. Ask a guy from 2hrs east of here, and he'll say you & me we're all f@99ots because we don't have a diesel pickup with duallys and mudders. Ask the next guy down the line, and you'll get a completely different mix. YMMV.

Anyway, trying to mimic Apple's marketing success of the iPhone with anything outside of a 2-pay-period-disposable-income item is harder than you would think. Can't easily think of a successful example, but I could pave a highway coast to coast with the bodies of those who've failed. Currently Fiat is doing reasonably well on that path** with the 500, but Tesla would do well to avoid counting on that working for them.

I can't help but think that the folks over at Ural motorcycles/IMZ America have a better sense of the market right now. They've just introduced a new "Model T" at the low end of their range, bringing the basic Ural 2-wheel drive sidecar motorcycle to the US for under $10k. Irbit Motorworks (IMZ) is Russian, the design is sourced from midcentury BMW, and the last decade+ of updates (e.g. new cylinders/heads with modern compression, better mpg/reliability, etc) have been pushed by enthusiasts in the US and EU. It intersect with the Tesla in the "sheer fun to drive" category, and my guess is that with an economy just holding on, there's gonna be a lot more of these on the road.

In another post I muttered about T-Mo staying on as the value carrier in the US: "T-Mo isn't making money hand over fist, but they're doing _ok_, and that's good. In these times, in this economy, I want to give my money to an org that's doing _ok_: neither going out of business, nor robbing me. You hear that, T-Mo? "Ok" and "staying in business without f__king your customers" is the new black. So keep on keeping on."

Same goes for Ural/IMZ versus Tesla. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Tesla business model is too "lean on the rich to get thru hard times" which all too often degenerates to "ran outta high-end customers, so try to screw the next class for as much as we need to stay afloat..." You wanna impress me Tesla? Go buy the tooling for the Corbin Merlin or Sparrow and start turning out fun electric 1-seaters for $15k -- price-competitive with the Fiat 500, Smartcar, and Scion iQ.

I was just in another window, messaging a colleague about how there's still value in doing really lame or stupid things as long as you do those things consistently, and establish a common scope and language... so that you can then start to do real work. IOW: "You don't know how f---ed up things really are until you try."

This doc is basically the product of a terribly depressing concall on which CA after CA lamented the lack standards... and 5min from the end, one of the participants stepped up and said something like "Hey, we drafted this amateur-hour recommendation doc by ourselves -- how would the group like to adopt it?" This document is a very sad, sad, incomplete, short-sighted, sad (did I say sad?) first step -- basically munging together RFC 3647 with some ideas from PCI, but still sets no real standards for actual operational security of a CA.

However, if this gets adopted & reissued by a real standards-issuing body, /then/ people can say "Hey, ISO/IEC 2XXXX security standard for CAs really sucks; why don't we make it not suck..." THEN this doc will have had real value in ensuring there's a place for the non-suck document when it's done. (BS7799=suck, but it became 27002 and in the process set the stage for other standards that are, frankly, quite good.) The first step out of a swamp is still a step in the swamp.

-Jon

I used to work for a UN agency and spent a year specifically working on governance reform for IT. The idea that "the" UN has email systems is kind of funny. While some agencies have well-designed, well-run, consolidated communications & IT systems, those are more the exception than the rule. By and large, each agency has multiple divisions or programmes that run their own IT systems with little to no effective oversight. Disparate systems and dependence on abandonware are prevalent. Governance & policies are (*ahem*) lacking in most cases, and enforcement is by and large nonexistent. Tell a Deputy Director that he has to have a password of more than four characters or change it more than once a year? Good luck with that.
There is simply no framework or middle ground for getting an agency or multiple agencies to adopt best practices when their reality vacillates wildly between disasters/getting shot at/real work one day, and political fights/internal corruption/not having enough money to run simple services on the next. While seeing this on pastebin is disappointing, it's not the least bit surprising. It falls more in the category of "someone noticed the door was hanging open and put some mild effort into it" rather than "1337 h@xx0r broke into a fortress."
The sad part is that the likely outcome of this event is a long series of dreary Euro-proper weekly meetings at UNDP and other agencies, eventually resulting in a task force of a dozen people at the Secretariat charged with defining what "fix" means, followed by a slew of small teams at each affected agency to work on the perceived ICT policy, operation, and configuration problems. But no authority will be given to those teams to mandate changes to their respective ICT Chiefs. In 6-9 months a series of changes to security controls will be recommended, but they'll be overridden, redirected, and mangled by their respective IT orgs; in all probability the money & effort will be unrecognizable and the effects negligible. It's like The Office without the slightest hint of humor.

I've been with T-Mo for almost 15 years, and this is good news. Not great news -- I'm sure there will be more trouble for T-mo in some form or another -- but at least not this year, and probably not next. But you know what this does mean? I'm re-upping my contract with T-Mo. When T-Mo came calling last year (one of several "PLEEZ don't jump ship" themed customer retention campaigns) I told them desire to have a GSM phone was only trumped by a desire never to be an AT&T customer again. As long as the death star doesn't gobble them up, T-Mo can keep having my money.

Oh, and btw -- T-Mo coverage is more than adequate across the US & Canada, (Iirc I still don't have coverage in rural Neb and WY, but no trouble anywhere else), data services are cheap, and they actually have decent humans in the corp stores. T-Mo isn't making money hand over fist, but they're doing _ok_, and that's good. In these times, in this economy, I want to give my money to an org that's doing _ok_: neither going out of business, nor robbing me. You hear that, T-Mo? "Ok" and "staying in business without f__king your customers" is the new black. So keep on keeping on.

Nonsense. $120 avg per shot is not cheap, but it's by no means gouging or a "money grab." That fee has to cover back R&D costs of development -- averaging $250 million -- and Guardisil is a first-to-succeed research effort that took about twice as long as average (about 20 yrs) to develop. That means Merck started out in the hole for somewhere south of 1/2 Billion dollars. They don't even recoup dev costs (plus two decades of investors' interest losses) until they sell ~3.5 million doses, and that doesn't even address the "last mile" costs of refrigerated transport and storage, compliance with legal regs, medical recordkeeping, and a few bucks for the overscheduled intern to swab you with an alcohol wipe and stick the needle in you. Three times. Each time for less than the cost of a good tire on your car.

How exactly did you arrive at the firm belief that this is a gouging "money grab"? Show me the math.

I had my two preteen boys vaccinated last year.
Why?
Because somewhere out there are probably at least two girls who will will be safer for it in future years.

Sure, there are lots of other reasons for them, but HPV vaccinations for boys are more about doing the greater good.
The anti-vaccine protesters are kooks who can't count.
And the anti-promiscuity hand-wavers... are also kooks who can't count (and have no grasp of history).
Even the most basic grasp of statistics makes vaccination a clear and positive decision.

Just to be clear, I'm a serious fan of Cyanogen's work from the Zaurus era (went thru several generations of SL & C using his and others' work), and appreciate the effort that has gone into this. But as others have pointed out, the HP is going to some effort to ensure the hardware is a dead end, while WebOS remains a high-end viable platform and the dev base is very much alive. Seems if you're going to work on a niche market ubergeek-OS-mod, you ought to have higher goals.