If the latter requires the former, then sure... why not? In a world of IP-KVM and power outlets you can cycle remotely, I absolutely want someone (besides me) that's responsible for handling the late-night maintenance windows, the rack-and-stack, and any other layer-1 concerns.

I guess it just depends on the size of your company and whether there's managerial accountability for any screw-ups. I voice my opinion based on working at a company with > $95 billion of annual revenue. Were I working for a much smaller company with a more generalist instead of specialist workforce model, I might be inclined to agree with you. _________________________________
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True that. I'm a network engineer and during the course of troubleshooting, I'd start pinging something and forget about it. 40,000 pings later, I'd have dropped about 400 pings during my cable-modem days. I switched to Verizon FIOS and when I'd do the same thing, I'd have dropped ZERO packets.

Likewise, we're using a VOIP solution in our house and when I was doing the cable-modem thing, for some reason, my ATA would lock up and I'd have to power cycle it at least once per week. When I switched to FIOS, the problem went away. I have no idea why it would make any difference, but it really has. Knowing what I know now, even if the prices and speeds were the same, I'd still switch to FIOS.

My only frustration is that I've got 5Mbps upstream and the places I try to upload to cap their downstream (cough)HOSTROCKET(cough) so I'm still pushing content at 1Mbps. This is despite their swearing that they aren't rate-limiting... That kind of stuff may have been OK in 2004, but five years later, I'm a whole lot less forgiving.

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Ah, yes... The "anything goes" mentality. Who decides whether or not someone gets hurt? Or should we decide that anything goes there, too?

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I don't know that legislation is the answer, but you are SO RIGHT about mini-USB. At least my Nokia phones all had the same charger between models OR a mini-USB jack. I have one Samsung phone and my wife has another. Instead of using mini-USB, they use some crack-whore flat-style connector. The kicker? THEY'RE DIFFERENT BY 1/16th OF AN INCH.

You look into the connector and see an array of 10 to 20 pins. Mysteriously enough, there are FOUR on the other end. EVERY TIME. It doesn't matter if you put 100 pins on the end of the cable, it will STILL BE FOUR ON THE OTHER SIDE. If there is circuitry you have to put in the cable that modifies the signal and splits it out, you need to fit that in the phone itself.

AGH!

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There's two other options... you can stick with the one that's made with union labor and costs $300 or use the one constructed by illegal immigrants and costs $15. Both equate to human rights violations, to any person that can see beyond their own wallet.

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All these people accessing a shared medium at 60 Mbps? That's not exactly a recipe for success... I know there's acceptable oversubscription ratios, but this has to blow those out of the water.

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Sensationalism is moving like hot-cakes!

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I know your socialist heart wants to believe that every company that is large and successful could have only become that by mistreating others, but despite your passive-aggressive undertones, some companies are larger because they genuinely have a better product.

While traveling, I signed up for the tethering plan on a Samsung Glyde. It was expensive, but when I was in an EVDO with at least one or two bars, I had no trouble consisently getting ~680Kbps down.

I have to admit, their network really is better. My brother picked up an iPhone and the voice quality sucks and he's constantly dropping calls. My wife also has AT&T and doesn't have the voice quality issues, but still has dead spots and dropped calls.

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...doesn't necessarily make you stronger. This is yet another in a series of reports of diminished productivity from things ranging from multi-tasking to ridiculous levels of text messaging.

None of this should surprise anyone that can actually see the forest through the trees.

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I find it amusing that after Microsoft used their app (Windows) to edge out Netscape, Google is using their apps to edge out Microsoft.

Capitalism at it's finest! The best sword is a double-edged one, says I.

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I really don't think it's in your best interest to offload the data to a passive storage media. As quickly as storage is increasing, it's not unreasonable to literally keep every picture/movie you've ever taken, every email you've either sent/received, or any other piece of data you would vomit over if you lost it with you via either a network share or a local resource.

Personally, I keep a RAID-1 mirror established with some non-system internal SATA drives and have an external USB drive that I periodically back up to. When we leave for a vacation, I just lock the drive up at my office. I wish I could say I was disciplined enough to have two external drives and keep swapping them between my office and home, but I'm not there yet.

Bare-minimum, if I get hit with a nasty piece of malicious code or do something just plain stupid, I've only lost the delta between then and the last backup. If it's a simple drive failure (which has happened more than once,) I'm covered.

That's the great irony of our goverment:
The the good thing is that it is representative of the people.
The bad thing is that it is representative of the people.

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Best advice I can give... don't. Seriously, there's nothing special or magical about computers. Kids will pick it up quickly and there's no hurry. You don't want them to turn into the imaginationless kids that can't entertain themselves. Technology should enhance your life, not become it. If you rush this, your kid will likely have difficulty realizing that.

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Mechanical anything is pretty much toast. I'll look forward to having thumb-drive size movie rentals and a PC with no moving parts. Size, price, and noise will plummet together.

Off with their heads, says I.

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