This is extremely true. I was in the Marine Corps during DADT and the repeal. I heard maybe a couple of people complain at the repeal of DADT, and in execution I noticed a grand total of 0 changes, including no decrease in the rampant number of dick and gay jokes.

"To those who say that self-driving cars have nothing to do with Google's core business selling ads, listen up: Google was just awarded a patent for an ad-powered taxi service. The patent, which was first spotted by TechCrunch, would allow advertisers to offer potential customers a free ride to their place of business. This would solve one of the biggest problems for brick-and-mortar retailers: getting customers to their location. The system would offer free or discounted transportation based on an algorithm-powered decision-making process involving the user's current location, the cost of transportation, and the potential profit from a completed sale. The concept is basically a "free ride coupon" and mentioned transportation modes like taxis, trains, buses, or even autonomous vehicles." http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

I don't know how many read this (probably not many, came from a link, from a link in the automated semi article last month). Its a study from Oxford where they went through the various industries, and the results were pretty scary. http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.... From the summary, since I know 98% won't RTFA: "We distinguish between high, medium and low risk occupations, depending on their probability of computerisation. We make no attempt to estimate the number of jobs that will actually be automated, and focus on potential job automatability over some unspecified number of years. According to our estimates around 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category. We refer to these as jobs at risk – i.e. jobs we expect could be automated relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two."

First off.... Wow, most of this thread is useless (not that I'm shocked). He doesn't state specifics on finances. I would say I can't "afford" to be out of work for more than 3 months too. In reality I put a ton of money away for retirement and kids college, and could probably make it a few years without working, but with my current retirement plans, I couldn't "afford" more time that either. It really doesn't give specifics on the financials and everyone is just speculating wildly. For the real question he asked... I switched from software to network engineering about a decade ago, because my then employer (the USMC) told me to, so there really wasn't an option. I found it interesting, and after transitioning to the private sector stayed on the networking side. While you can make that amount of money, you are starting in a new field lacking relevant experience. The 150k+ jobs are almost exclusively working in sales engineering, ISP, or a senior engineer at a very large enterprise. Even with a CCIE (which isn't exactly a small undertaking) the only position that you would likely get hired into is the sales side, the other two will likely require a large amount of work experience as well. The sales side is easier, because to be a Cisco requires certified personnel to receive "gold" and "silver" partner levels. A couple of side notes... Outsourcing and H1-B's are every bit as prevalent for network engineers as software engineers. They may not be bringing a ton of people in for 45k cable monkey jobs, but for the gusy in the 6 figure range... You betcha.. They are all over the place. And the potential for other onshore outsourcing is possible to. Verizon, AT&T, and BT take on huge clients every day that are outsourcing their networking. I think the best way ahead.... If networking interests you... You could stick with software and migrate toward one of the SDN platforms... Cisco ACI or VNX and hope its VHS and not Betamax... Or even worse, laserdisc and never gets adoption.

Software is Uber's primary business. Opentable isn't a restaurant, they are a software as a service operating in the restaurant industry. Golfnow isn't a golf company, they are software company in the golf industry. Uber is the same thing. They may be targeting a certain industry, but ultimately they are a software company servicing that industry.

While Liam Neeson was an established actor with some memorable roles (Schindler's List / Les Mis / Excalibur) his career was completely transformed by Star Wars. He went to leading roles in action movies and franchises. Before Star Wars, he had never been in a movie that grossed 100 mil, and afterwards was in the Batman, Narnia, and Taken, Titan's franchises and is #16 on the boxofficemojo gross list. To dismiss SW having an impact by just saying he was already established is a pretty poor statement. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/p...

The Doomsday Clock is currently closer to midnight than it was during the Bay of Pigs. Really? REALLY?

The sad part, is they they aren't really a crap software company. They are a stupid software company. I've personally owned an ipad, galaxy tab, and blackberry playbook. The playbook had the best UI of the three. Incredibly intuitive os and gestures and slick presentation. But it rarely got used because they chose the "walled garden" approach without the user base to create the demand for app developers to support it. They did a half ass attempt right before I sold my playbook for pennies on the dollar to port google app's, but only ones they approved that didn't have a paid blackberry counterpart. Thanks, but no thanks.

For me the first two that come to mind... F-5 and Riverbed. F-5 has a few security suites and data mining services that haven't really caught hold, but the vast majority of their business is still load balancing. As SDN becomes more prevalent, much of that requirement will go away. Same goes for Riverbed, they have network and application performance monitors, but their core business is still WAN acceleration. With the combination of bandwidth becoming cheaper and less traffic being able to be optimized over the WAN (VDI is becoming much more prevalent and PCoIP doesn't do particularly well / video is becoming more of the percentage of the WAN utilization anyway / etc..) I could see them being in trouble.

Nintendo isn't going away. There look may change, and they may be out of hardware in 10 years, but just from the core character base of Mario and the like they can pretty easily morph out of hardware into a 3rd party software distributor for the other gaming platforms. Regardless of what the median age of gamers changes to, there will always be a market for kids, plus the nostalgia factor for those that grew up with the brand.

I'm not saying that it can't (or even shouldn't) be done by somebody else. But most people think of the FCC and things like the "wardrobe malfunction" of the super bowl and the like, when they do serve other functions. But the sad reality is politicians are typically not very good at understanding the second and third order effects, and I could absolutely see a defunding occur because of politics without considering core business of the agency like spectrum management even being considered.

I'm not saying that it won't happen... But it would be bad. Pretty much everybody in the real world is cares about the FCC, they probably just don't know it. The most important job they have is spectrum management. The average person probably cares if someone else is using the spectrum allocation allotted to the carrier that is managed by the FCC. And from the government perspective, its all fun and games until someone starts stepping on an x band satellite uplink freq for something critical to national security or military radar system.

Except if you have an AS and playing in BGP, there is a responsibility to maintain your equipment because it is a global network. As ruebarb mentioned, although they can do it, this isn't really what 6500's are made for. There are better, cheaper, and more efficient ways to do it anyway. Even a ASR 1000 would be a better choice. Just because a switch can route, doesn't make it the right choice for a router. And 7600's are at EOL anyway. If you have any left in production, you should be watching them like a hawk at this point. FWIW, if everyone was IPV6, this problem would have been far worse. TCAM can hold twice as many v4 routes as v6, and the v6 by nature are more fragmented. This wasn't a case of IPV4 breaking the internet... It was a case of poor design and monitoring.