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Microsoft

What If There Was a Microsoft Appreciation Day? 362

theodp writes "In 2005, Microsoft came under fire after withdrawing support for an anti-gay-discrimination bill. 'I don't want the company to be in the position of appearing to dismiss the deeply-held beliefs of any employee, by picking sides on social policy issues,' explained CEO Steve Ballmer. That was then. Microsoft — like Google and Amazon — has since very publicly declared its support for gay-marriage legislation, which means it — unlike Chick-fil-A — needn't worry about the 'deeply-held beliefs of any employee' causing it to be blocked from doing business by the mayors of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. I guess we'll never know what Microsoft versions of 'Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day' or 'National Same-Sex Kiss Day' would have looked like."
AT&T

AT&T On Data Throttling: Blame Yourselves 406

zacharye writes in with a story about Senior EVP of AT&T technology and network operations John Donovan's blog post detailing why customers with unlimited smartphone plans are getting throttled. "In an effort to justify its policies surrounding data service throttling for subscribers with unlimited smartphone data plans, AT&T on Tuesday issued a brief report regarding data usage on its nationwide wireless network. Senior EVP of AT&T technology and network operations John Donovan wrote on a company blog that data traffic on AT&T's network has grown a staggering 20,000% over the past five years. Usage has doubled between 2010 and 2011 according to the executive, due in large part to the proliferation of smartphones. AT&T sold more smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011 than in any other quarter in its history. And because its smartphone subscribers use so much data, AT&T seems to suggest it has no choice but to put measures such as data throttling in place."

Comment Re:supply and demand (Score 1) 185

> The whole prescription thing is a racket, and both doctors and pharmacies are profitting handsomely.

They've solved that in The Netherlands by letting the insurance companies dictate the exact drugs to be used by their patients. They make deals directly with the drugs companies for the prices, and the pharmacists have to provide their choice in drugs.

The result: bottom line drug costs have increased substantially, forcing an inflation-busting increase in our monthly health insurance costs. At the same time, certain subsidiaries of said insurance companies are reporting massive profits thanks to large "management fees" from drugs companies.

In the meantime the ex-health ministers who made this possible have taken up cushy consultancy / board positions at the largest insurance companies here.

Oh, and the pharmacists have to stock a dozen makes of a drug to cover all of the insurance companies. Which has lead to a slew of pharmacy closures due to the increase in operating costs (and massive reduction in income - in the past each individual pharmacy had their own drug deals which subsidised their service - being on a smaller scale the final impact was less than what the massive insurance companies can achieve).

Comment Re:Et tu, Netherlands part 2 (Score 1) 304

> They've been doing stuff like that since forever. There aren't many companies that would do such a thing. That's the main reason I won't be easily persuaded to leave their service.

It's the reason why I pay more to stay on their service, instead of switching over to a faster connection with "we lie about our monthly fees" UPC.

Comment Re:I used to work in IT and.... (Score 1) 960

> Then you look at a developer who instead of contacting IT and asking for support, had admin access and
> changed the .net version of the app pool on their IIS instance from 2.x to 4.x

Why did the developer have admin access to a production server?

Us developers should only have access to test/qualification/staging, never to production. Unless we're the DevOp, in which case we're responsible for production and capable enough not to f**k it up.

Comment Re:Reflections (Score 1) 960

It'd probably be easier to just buy a desktop PC and use that as the build server. If you need to store the results of builds permanently then just copy that over to a file share.

Want backup? Buy two of them.

That's better than having IT buy a production-capable server with all that that entails when a consumer-level box is fit for purpose.

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