We recently decommissioned a perfectly good Sonicwall CDP-6080 with 4TB of backup storage. We were only using about half of the device's available storage, and it was plenty fast for our needs, yet Sonicwall/Dell would not renew our service contract for the device. We were simply told to buy the replacement model in the lineup.

At the time (4 years ago), it was one of the few backup appliances that could handle AD/Exchange/SQL/Linux off-site backup and manual external archiving to disk. It was expensive but it fit the bill perfectly, and it wasn't Backup Exec...

Fast forward a few years, and we've put our web server, RDP/SQL farm, and email in the cloud. We figured we would simply keep the CDP appliance as an AD/file server backup device. Since Dell/Sonicwall refused our support renewal, we put our backup in the cloud.

I suspect as cloud services become more popular, hardware vendors will have less leverage in pushing unnecessary hardware upgrades on their clients.

Verizon started field testing IPv6 on their FIOS network in 2010. I figured it's 2013 - they should be done testing by now.

I called our business services rep about a month ago and asked about IPv6 service for our FIOS connections at our offices.

The rep's response:

"IPv6, what's that?" "Hold on. Let me ask my support engineer."

Support engineer's response:

"IPv6 - What's that?"

I may retire from the IT business before Verizon deploys IPv6.

-ted

As A free man, I should never have to justify my choices for self-defense. My exercising of that right hurts no one.

Are you arguing that free people do not have the right to self-defense and choosing the tools that allow the people to exercise that right?

Self-defense is a natural-born right. As a human being I have the right to defend myself and my loved ones. I don't have to ask you or society for that permission.

That is ONE of the basic tenets of our government's founding documents. The second amendment PROTECTS the right of individuals to bear arms for self-defense, it does not GRANT that right.

Your view is one where governments grant rights - that is a wrong-headed view. Governments do not grant the "right" of self-defense" any more than they grant the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Our government is structured such that it protects natural-born rights, it does not "grant" them.

There are over 300 million guns in this country. There are probably 30-50 million gun owners in this country.

One man can not defend against a hellfire missle, but do you think that 2-4 million armed people could secure the fuel resources of this country? That is a staggering amount of people. Without fuel, a hellfire missile, tank or aircraft is pretty useless.

I know - the military would then obtain fuel overseas and bring it in.....right. We've made lots of friends in the world. Would the world would rush to the aid of our military during all out civil war? I doubt it.

You make the opponent fight your war, not the other way around. How do you explain the rough time our military had in Vietnam and Afghanistan? You can't tell me our side had a clear victory in either theater, despite clear financial and training advantages.

Losses on both sides would be enormous, and it's not clear that the US military would fire on its own people anyway. I know a few guys serving who have said flat out they would disobey any order to shoot american citizens.

Finally, even if you could not fight overwhelming force, and the situation became dire, would you rather die lying down, or fighting and hope you take out some of the opposition?

I want a fighting chance.

Your definition of tyranny and mine are a bit different. Until "they" start shooting at us, we are merely seeking peaceful redress of our grievances.

Yes, our political and justice system do have their flaws, but a shooting match is not required to fix the current flaws. Good candidates and honest elections can fix these problems. Is our government ready to kill millions of it's own citizens? I don't think so.

The right to keep and bear arms goes back to the founding days of this country. Our founding fathers realized that without an armed population, government is free to do as it wishes. Our founders needed their guns to declare their independence and self-rule. They also knew that maintaining that independence required an armed populace.

I am stunned when someone poses a statement along the lines of: "You don't have tyranny, why do you need guns?" The person asking this question never stops to think "maybe they don't have tyranny because they have guns".

The next standard argument against guns is that a guy with a rifle could never challenge a tank or aircraft. This is true. But what an armed population lacks in technology, they make up for in numbers. During hunting season the woods of Pennsylvania are filled with 600,000 to 700,000 armed people. At that time, it is the largest "standing army" in the world. Think about that for a minute - one state of hunters dwarfs the biggest standing army in the world.

If tyranny comes to our country, the entire armed population will need to fight. If Afghanistan and Syria taught us anything it's that armed asymmetric guerrilla warfare is very effective. It even gives the world's best funded, best trained military a difficult time.

The responsibility of bearing arms is not a "macho" or "manly" thing. I choose to become proficient with firearms for a number of reasons - readiness if my country needs me, and readiness if my family needs me. I could not live with myself if someone caused harm to my family and I could do nothing to stop them.

Finally, the right of free men and women to defend themselves and their property is a natural-born right, not subject to the political process or the whims of others. Those that say they are free without the means to defend themselves are only free so long as others allow them to be free. That is not true freedom.

The concepts of freedom, liberty, and self-defense are not difficult concepts to understand. They are so deeply ingrained in american life, that these protections have been intentionally and strongly worded into our government's founding documents. These are the documents we all agree to govern ourselves by.

I'm working the Samsung booth at CES this year and I worked it last year. When I saw the engineers (last year) assembling the 4k demo sets, I asked where the content was coming from. The answer was a half-rack of servers behind the wall filled with powerful machines and lots of disks. Clearly not practical for consumers.

This year, the 4k sets are being driven by slightly smaller computers, presumably with compression. Samsung is demoing their compression technology (HEVC) VS h.264. I'm sure the manufacturers know that with the sorry state of networks, 4K video is not possible without more advanced compression algorithms to reduce data rates.

Here in the US, network providers have an enormous negotiating advantage when dealing with media companies. The one or two wires leading to your house are owned by the ISPs.

If media companies continue to turn the screws on ISPs, the ISPs can simply refuse to carry their content.

Think of the potential fall-out. Disney decides that Verizon isn't playing ball with regards to copyright enforcement. Disney makes unreasonable demands of Verizon and how they treat their customers. Verizon can simply stop distributing Disney's channels. The advertising and merchandising dollars that result from Phineas and Ferb would be sorely missed by Disney.

Let's be honest. If a carrier or two decides to make an example out of one of the content providers, there isn't much the content providers can do about it. There are only a couple of ways I can get TV and Internet. It's not like I can go out and get another ISP very easily.

Media companies better tread lightly here. They need the network operators to distribute their products. The network operators need us to keep paying the bill.

Your laptop running Linux (Ubuntu), Chrome (Google), and Flash (Adobe) is unstable and you blame whom exactly?

Just because Google and Adobe do not have their shit together while developing for Linux, does not necessarily mean that Microsoft can take credit for a fine OS.

That said, I run Mac OS and Windows 7 just fine on a dual-boot Mac Pro. Adobe products do suck pretty much anywhere though.

-ted

Apple bought PA semi to design their own chips. I'll bet Apple will eventually design an desktop chip and move away from the x86 architecture. They have switched architectures a couple of times before. There is no reason to believe they couldn't do it again.

This could complete their grand strategy of unifying their desktop OS and mobile OS. It would also give them more independence from outside vendors.

I wonder what it would cost to buy AMD lock, stock, and barrel?

-ted

I've switched to Netvibes.com - their free service is pretty good - better than iGoogle in some ways.

-ted

Many here are defending the program as a "global competitive market" for jobs, and that we should be able to import workers no matter the economic conditions.

If other countries were so welcoming of our unemployed, I would agree with the sentiment.

Would China be as welcoming to the scores of our unemployed in the manufacturing sector? Would China even allow them into the country? I suspect not.

If our unemployment levels are high, we should not import workers for ANY reason. Market forces can fix this problem easily. A labor shortage drives up labor cost, that encourages more people into the field.

The companies I have worked for used H-1B workers to increase the available labor pool - that increased supply pushed down wages - basic economic stuff.

-ted

You may want to build system images of important machines and just "re-image" after a virus infection. I do that with the few Windows machines we have here.

Clonezilla is fantastic for this. It's free and it make simple images that can be stored on any file share. It doesn't yet image to drives smaller than the original source machine, but I'm confident they will add that in the future. For now, I image to drives equal in size or larger.

Sure Acronis, Ghost and the like work as well, but it's hard to argue with free.

-ted

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but doesn't the LTE spec eventually make ALL cellular traffic (voice, data, SMS) IP based?

It seems logical that if all services over the entire network are provided via IP, that's what you pay for.

It's a good thing we have visionaries like this guy running corporate america. Without guys like him the BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS might not be so.

SDV is a partial answer to the frequency congestion problem on cable networks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_video

Instead of sending all channels down the wire, your cable box requests a channel, and that channel is dynamically allocated to a particular frequency at the head-end servicing your neighborhood. Other people that want to watch that channel will then tune to that frequency.