The payout from the lawsuit was probably over time and the people who got the proceeds probably paid less taxes to take it over time. Keeping the shell of the business running for a few years made sense financially even if it was just a sham operation that would eventually fold.

You mean it will cost a lot of money.

Vendors will end up playing games where the features you want won't be available unless you buy into their new product lines featuring 802.3bz ports at increased prices. Dumb, unmanaged 1 gig at today's managed 1 gig prices or managed L2/L3 802.3bz at the price you paid 5 years ago for 1 gig.

Server and desktop vendors will have a new upcharge option for 802.3bz ports that will allow them to hold the line on 10 gig port prices, and stupidly, many people will go for it thinking "bargain!" and we'll end up with a bunch of deployed 802.3bz as a sunk cost, further pushing out widespread adoption and the commensurate economies of scale and price cuts for 10 gig.

IMHO, this is a solution looking for a problem. Too much speed ot justify to the desktop and not enough speed to justify the price increase over 1 gig. If anything IEEE should have built this into the 10G-BaseT spec, knowing full well that the copper restrictions would hinder adoption and economies of scale. Had they put a variable signalling rate of 2.5/5/10 into the 10G-BaseT spec we'd be paying 1 gig prices for those ports now, instead of the highway robbery prices 10 gig gets now.

This will only be a useful spec if it replaces the commodity 10/100/1000 ports out there now and becomes the defacto baseline ethernet option.

I'm kind of struggling for what this is good for besides giving switch vendors a reason to push needless IDF upgrades and technology vendors yet another upcharge option.

1 gig Ethernet is already overkill for just about every desktop purpose and still has some useful life left in many data center applications, especially for lower performance areas, even in network storage.

The only place it becomes somewhat weak is in heavy use AC wireless deployments where it can be truly taxed, but most often even these deployments the vast majority of use reverts to the average of typical cabled clients.

It also feels like a reason to keep prices artificially high on 10 gig copper. 1 gig was sky high expensive when it first came out, but quickly became commoditized and very soon nearly everything came with 1 gig ports. 10 gig base T seems like it's been out for ages but prices really haven't dropped nearly as fast and I can't quite figure out why, other than it's fast enough to cut port densities by at least half while still providing 5x or greater throughput of 1 gig ports in most server deployments (ie, if you had 4x 1 gig ports and switch to 2x 10 gig ports, you have 20 gig aggregate vs. 4 gig aggregate and single stream throughput 10x the 1 gig solution).

And as usual, vendors can't stand the idea of the customer buying half of what they did before and getting 5-10x more value than they used to.

I guess the new standards will be great, but only if they replace 1 gig wherever you used to expect 1 gig, ie, everywhere. Otherwise it's either irrelevant or a new way to pay higher prices for 25-50% of the performance you should be getting out of 10 gig at the price -- or higher -- you ought to be paying for 10 gig these days.

My guess is that MS really wants to kill of basic (SMB) file sharing. The protocol is open enough that world+dog has already implemented in everything, so every file server upgrade faces the prospect of losing out to something else -- shit appliances all the way up to big ticket EMC devices.

Trying to move everyone to Sharepoint has so many layers of lock in I get dizzy just thinking about them. The endless licensing sales for server, SQL and 3 different kinds of CALs. Relentless sunk costs of developer time and migration. Files sequestered away in a database unmigratable to competing file sharing platforms.

It's a perpetual motion machine of IT spending, right up to and including Office365 hosted migrations once the painful costs of adopting and infrastructure become realized.

I've never understood the attraction to it. I work at an IT consulting firm that sells Sharepoint services and our site is a complete joke, used mostly as a way to host OneNote notebooks.

How could you call yourself culturally aware and not know of the Dead Kennedys? While "cult" stars at the peak of their performing career, they remain a defining element of punk rock music.

They and their lead singer Jello Biafra made the national TV news when they were charged with "obscenity" for a poster included in their albums. Tipper Gore, Al Gore's wife, a critic of "offensive" rock music, sparred with Jello.

Bullshit.

In Minnesota user fees (of which gas taxes are just a subset) doesn't cover the maintenance cost of the roads and less than half the total cost of the roads. And the bitching about deferred maintenance and delayed capital spending for roads is endless.

Politically you would never get away with the $2-3 in statewide tax increase directly funneled to mass transit. The people who don't or can't use mass transit (ie, they live hundreds of miles from it) would never agree to a huge gas tax and the $4-6 increase you would need to impose on people who *could* use it in metro areas would be an economic disaster for almost everyone and a political impossibility.

If you imposed a metro-area transit gas tax of $5/gal to meaningfully fund transit improvements it would jack up my personal fuel expenses by 300% and I drive barely 10,000 miles a year.

I could probably afford it financially, but the reality is almost all of my driving for work to client sites is impossible *now* with mass transit -- and I live in the city and have clients in the city. The schedule and timing is not remotely viable for that, let alone reverse commuting to some suburb on a schedule designed around driving.

Kids these days don't know how accurate the Dead Kennedys criticisms were at the time or how weirdly prescient and ironic they seem now.

Every time I hear about a cop shooting going down I want to cue up "Police Truck".

You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown!

I always thought the Netware IPX/SPX network numbering system was quite clever -- 32 bits of network addressing and a 48 bit node address, usually based on MAC addresses.

I always think of how much simpler IP would have been with a similar structure -- subnets could have scaled easily without renumbering or routing when common /24 limits were hit. The use of MAC addresses for node addresses would have eliminated DHCP for the most part or essentially automated it as clients would have only had to query for a network number, not a node address.

I'd take it more seriously if they were to directly power their data centers from renewables 24/7 only instead of some of the funny math of just spending more money to "buy" renewable energy from grid producers at a large enough volume to say they run on 100% renewable (or worse, carbon credits).

Because on the back end, they're still dependent in terms of actual consumption on grid baseload generation even if they have a balance sheet that says otherwise.

Further, trying to run full-time off wind+solar would require a substantial investment in energy storage to balance night/still air and storage is where we need the investment. And build-anywhere storage, not pumped hydro or other geographically dependent storage, either.

Worse than that, you still need a Windows server running Update Manager components and the Windows client to install updates.

I think the switch from a heavyweight thick management ESX to ESXi was a good idea, but the problem is that it leaves all management capability needing a VM or external server with all the associated availability problems a single point of failure.

Frankly, I'd like to see ESXi re-thickened a bit to include vCenter management into the base install with master/slave clustering and a distributed database. This would improve vCenter availability and reduce the dependence on a separate VM.

Every new host would then be a potential vCenter cluster management participant. Upgrading a node across version boundary would upgrade vCenter, so as the cluster was upgraded the vCenter upgrade came with the package.

The downside would be that it would require more storage for the base image, breaking more than a few tiny SD/USB installs. The write rate of vCenter may be a bit much for the media used in these flash installs, but not by much and if server motherboards start shipping with M.2 slots the capacity and write durability shouldn't be issues.

They have some lame and limited HTML5 front end for vCenter now. 6.5 or 7 or whatever the new version is supposed to be called will supposedly have a HTML5 client. I don't know if its been released or not.

I seem to run across a fair number of places with AS/400 stuff. What's kind of interesting is the AS/400 stuff and people seem to run in this parallel universe IT department with their own staff somehow immune from the other pressures of the rest of the IT department.

Once in a blue moon I'll hear mention that some kind of AS/400 update or installation is happening, so it's not like they're strictly legacy systems. And at longer term clients with AS/400 I occasionally see something new/different in the "AS/400 rack".

I don't know what IBM's growth potential is or how at risk their active businesses like AS/400 are from being eaten by Wintel/Lintel systems are, but they sure seem to have carved out a niche that seems nearly immovable.

"Trump will ruin the country" is *mostly* a Democratic thing as an article of actual belief. Among Republicans, I'd argue it's more like "Trump will destroy party" and a dislike for his influence on political standing, not necessarily a wholesale disagreement with policy with the exception of where policy overlaps with Republican economic policies, which are mostly rubber stamps of corporate interests.

During the Cold War, when the US faced a military opponent of near parity and the chance of a nuclear war of near extinction, anti-communist and anti-Soviet rhetoric was extremely heated. The majority of US politicians vented relentlessly against communism and the Soviets without a war starting. And none of this takes into account the reality that we fight wars all the time anyway, without any attached rhetoric.

This is my other problem with this meme, it's usually stated in the most derogatory of terms. People that don't believe in the most hyperbolic and extreme outcomes of a Trump presidency are uneducated rednecks.

I'm willing to go along with the idea that Trump would make a *bad* President -- clumsy diplomacy, domestic political gridlock, divisive leadership. But the rest of the doom and gloom prophesy seems vastly overblown and tied to a sales technique designed to make anyone who doesn't accept it feel as if they're somehow stupid or uneducated.

NNTP was pretty decentralized, one of the challenges with it in the later days of NNTP was the relative ease of newgroup injection and crapflooding.

IIRC, NNTP server software on the hardware of the early 2000s scaled poorly and the traffic volumes were growing fast so you started to see ISPs get much more control oriented when it came to retention periods and which newgroup messages they would honor and from whom.