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Comment EULA (Score 2) 666

OK start with the Red Hat License agreement. Have any of you read it? In a nutshell, it says that anywhere you run Red Hat on a server it requires purchase of a subscription. And you can't buy a workstation subscription for a server, it has to be a server subscription. Subscriptions are based on 'sockets', which means CPU in real terms.

A 2 socket RHEL license costs $349/year on the 'self-support' model, and a 4 socket license costs $1,598 per year for standard subscription. Compare that to Windows Server 2008. The cost is $722.99 on CDW right now for W2K8R2 Standard. BUT, that's a one-time cost. And you get patches for free, regardless if you have a support contract or not. Figure that a Windows Server version may be supported for 10 years or more (2003 will run through 2015.)

Red Hat: $350 per year for 12 years = $4,200
Windows Server: $722 total, for 12 years = $722

That ends up costing you six times as much in license and support to run RHEL. Extrapolate that across hundreds of servers, and it becomes a monstrous expense. 500 servers = $174,500 per year. And yes, I assume you are going to re-buy a license for the new Windows Server one or two revs into the future.

THIS is exactly why we are not using RHEL in a highly compliance-oriented industry, and why we elected to go with CentOS. In the end we're going to be doing the support ourselves anyway, and Red Hat's cost structure is outrageous for what you get.

Comment Don't get a false sense of privacy here... (Score 2) 352

Wiping your cookies, adblock, flashblock, etc - it's all worthless.

Even if you remove all cookies, the iframe that is the 'like' button will set a new cookie. Facebook tracks these new 'anonymous' cookies centrally, and then when you DO login to your actual account, they can read this cookie and marry up your previous behavioral habits and sites you visited. The advice here leads people to believe you can fight this simply by erasing cookies. The only way to really make that effective is:

1) Log out of Facebook
2) Remove all Facebook cookies
3) Browse around to other sites
4) Clear all Facebook cookies AGAIN
5) Log in to Facebook

Without step #4 the rest of it is not doing you any good.

The same is true of new signups, where your browsing history (before you even had an account!) is correlated to the new account to help build a profile of your activity.

Comment Re:In other news... (Score 1) 284

Read the articles you linked to.


"Keeping up with their promise to make smartphones more root-friendly,"

"They didn't specify which handsets will receive the capability or when we can expect to see it, but the company promises to keep us updated "every few weeks.""

"Motorola said it plans to enable the unlockable/relockable bootloader currently found on Motorola XOOM across its portfolio of devices starting in late 2011, "where carriers and operators will allow it.""

What's funny is you lot sure like to drag out the 'reality distortion field' a lot.

Why was this modded down instead of up?

Comment You want good outbound email? (Score 2) 71

All I have to say is http://www.authsmtp.com./

I have no relationship to them other than a happy customer, but it took me WEEKS of effort to find a good mail relay from the cloud that could hit the inbox of all of the major e-mail providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.) They do it every time and for very little.

Comment Re:What might this look like? (Score 1) 158

It sounds like you are interested in something more along the lines of batches of data and not a realtime API.

Banks / Credit Unions / FIs do this now to send transactions between their own networks. I'm not aware of a consumer-oriented version of this, but that's not to say it shouldn't exist. PayPal is starting to move that direction with their x.com API. But you are going to be hit with more charges routing through PayPal than you would otherwise.

Comment Re:What might this look like? (Score 1) 158

OK, but that's talking about a few things -

* A solid and modern online banking application
* Easily understood fee structures
* Home/mobile capture
* One time credit card purchasing

This is great from the perspective of a single 'end customer', but what I am getting at is more of an API that allows developers to tap in to certain types of information that might be stored at a financial institution. What type of APIs would be available, and what would be the use cases for each of them?

Comment What might this look like? (Score 3, Interesting) 158

I'll state at a high level that I work for a Credit Union, and there are a lot of us that believe in a model such as the one you are describing. Can I take this discussion in a slightly different direction? Rather than "where can I get this today", how about "what would you want from a service like this"? Reply with a list of features and describe the problem you are trying to solve.

Do you want to only access your own account, or offer a service to multiple customers of the financial institution?
Are you thinking along the lines of web services?
What type of transactions would you want - realtime (i.e. what's my account balance now) or batch (show me all transactions for the last 6 months)?
Are you talking about wire transfers, ACH, checks, etc?
Are you thinking a pull model, where you query into the data or a push model, where you are alerted when things happen?

Don't get dragged down in any pricing or cost at this point - just tell me in more detail what you want.

First Person Shooters (Games)

Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters 203

Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes." Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.

Psystar "Definitely Still Shipping" Mac Clones 833

Preedit writes "Continuing its defiance of Apple, Psystar is reassuring customers that it is "definitely still shipping" its line of Mac clones. And, in a further nose-thumbing at Steve Jobs, Psystar this week said it's now making Leopard restore disks available to its customers, even as Apple insists that Mac clones sold to date be recalled. In its story on the latest developments, Infoweek is reporting that tiny Psystar apparently has no intention of backing down in its legal dispute with the much larger Apple."

Comment Easy: Greet your team (Score 3, Insightful) 584

There may be more than one answer, but this one would definitely go a long way in an interview.

The first thing I would do after arriving at the office is greet any members of the team who were already in the office. It goes a long way when a boss spends the time to interact with the team and employees always appreciate little things like that. It's not a flashy answer, but it demonstrates that you want to emphasize communication and teamwork.

Comment Re:Signatureless, no change. Contactless, problem (Score 1) 186

"Since almost nobody checks the signature anyway"

Its been my experience that about 10-20% of the people I had my credit card to actually look at and read the signature on my credit card. I have "PLEASE SEE ID" written in that box and it would be a stretch to say that more than 1 out of 5 purchases result in the person asking for my ID.

Often times the cashier will flip it over and look at it, but won't bother to ask for my ID. I partially do this to see if they will ask for my ID. I hope that if I ever lose my wallet and someone tries to use my credit card that they get that 1 out of 5 that actually asks for the ID.

I also make an effort to thank the people that actually do ask for my ID.

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