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White House Email Follies
Presto Vivace forwards a link detailing a recent House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the White House missing emails mess. David Gewirtz's report, carried in OutlookPower and DominoPower (in 6 parts, keep clicking), makes for scary reading. "If, in fact, the bulk of the White House email records are now stored in bundles of rotting PST files, all at or above their maximum safe load-level, that ain't good in a very big way... I object to using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act."
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
They just need some excuse for "losing" dangerous email messages...
After all, it's not like there aren't answers to the question "how shall I archive my user's email for legal and regulatory purposes?" (Disclaimer- I work for a player in that market, but we're not on the first page of results for that search. So I don't feel too bad. Oh, wait - )
Given all the convenient archival problems, every executive branch email should be archived as a PDF and digitally signed and time stamped by a secure server with the private key in protected hardware. The archive needs to be outside of the executive branch.
is why are the dems allowing the White house off? They should be paying to have all the PST's restored. By now somebody has told them that the white house lied about the costs of the PST files. The need to go after them for perjery as well as getting the emails.
What really bothers me is that not this white house makes nixon and reagan look like boy scouts, but that the dems PROMISED to go after them, and really has done nothing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Here I am, some lowly line level system tech for a smallish town, and I'd be handed my marching orders were I even a quarter as incompetent as the white house staff seems to be. Which leads me to suspect:
1) Either they are that incompetent, and it's just a symptom of big government not knowing it's ass from it's face
OR
2) These people are purposefully appearing this inept.
Either option isn't pleasant, and both lead to a serious problem with our government where there will likely be no repercussions from this.
But then, we all knew that already, didn't we?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Considering how much we're spending in what are arguably other countries' wars, I'd find a claim of "excessive cost" for anything laughable.
Are you new here?
Honestly, this is a classic, almost Hollywood-style presidential-aid-villain-style tactic.
First, you dry up all the funding to something so that you can later claim there was not enough money to do it right.
And in the process of doing it "not right" some important stuff gets lost so the people in charge can't be charged later (which they can't anyway, because presidents make a habit of indemnifying their successors and most of the senior staff around them, because if they wouldn't, their successor wouldn't indemnify them...).
Still wondering why people actually get out of their bed and vote?
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Elsewhere in the world destruction of evidence is taken as guilt. Is that not the case in the USA?
In the USA, it matters a whole lot who you're talking about whether or not XYZ counts as guilt.
The Bush presidency has helped OBL's cause beyond his wildest dreams.
The SPCA has a much easier time recruiting when there's a serial puppy-kicker on the loose.
> operates at all near the level of minimum performance required
We should be so lucky to see such a high standard.
> Anyone still think all this incompetence that always protects Bush and his team is some kind of accident?
I would rather. The alternative explanation is EVIL and probably treasonous.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The actual moral to the story is don't switch FROM Lotus Notes. At least not to Exchange. If they had multiple replicated servers, it wouldn't have been as easy for them to ,ahem, accidently lose all those emails.
No, but a great many people have gone tribal: they like it that the President is willfully violating oath, honor, duty and law. It means the man at the top of the hierarchy they worship, and therefore the hierarchy itself, is above all, and they're part of that hierarchy. The only rules they have to follow are what Big Men say.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
" Mr. ISSA. Okay. So here we have a situation where the Clinton Administration is on a platform that has to be phased out. Simply, they lost the war of who is going to supply emails. A period of time goes on in which Yes, we are dealing, to Dr. Weinstein's concern, with getting good archives, but we are also dealing with the fact that I can't play my Betamax tapes any more, either, and I can't seem to find anybody who has a Betamax player any more."
Maybe Mr Issa should look here. And Republicans are the ones who lose wars these days.
Meanwhile, the General Services Administration just saved a million bucks of taxpayers money with Notes.
With the morons they have on staff up there - and that includes Bush - they can't be sure all sorts of incriminating stuff isn't in them. In fact, they probably assume there is.
So they stonewall.
Read TFA. They're making estimates of the cost of recovery of the PST files as wildly off the mark. They're claiming it would cost $50K just to recover ONE PST file! And half a million bucks to recover 5,000 PST files!
That's deliberately false testimony - i.e., perjury.
Face it, folks. This country is being run by criminals now - just like in Warren Ellis' comic, "Reload". Look up Sibel Edmonds on Google and see just how bad it is.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Slashdotters may think that it looks bad for the President's email systems to be horribly unreliable. Compared with what was probably in those emails, this is nothing. In fact, this whole missing email thing is brilliant, and from the Pres's perspective, a job well done. The missing content gives the Pres a get-out-of-jail-free card. Not that he really needs one, since our Constitution makes kings out of our Presidents here in America, with the ability to do whatever they damn well please.
Japanese scientist: Technically, sir, tomatoes are fags. Military scientist: He means fruits.
Really? And, what, precisely, is it meant to do?
It's primary function would be to store, send and receive emails. Does it do that well? Sure, it sends and receives emails fine, but it sure as heck can't store them correctly. Like the parent says, what sort of idiot decided that a 2GB limitation would be a good idea for a PST file? And what sort of moron let's it save past this point, corrupting the file?!?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
How good can a product be if it periodically trashes all of the data entrusted to it? Even better, when it does trash the data, it's in a proprietary format that makes it hard to try to parse through and salvage anything. The proprietary format also means that (like all MS products) if you'd like to use the data in a way MS didn't anticipate, you're SOL.
Based on comparing my experiance with non-MS mail programs (for DOS, Windows, and Unix over the years) to the experiances of MS users, I'd have to say that Outlook (in it's several variations) is a TERRIBLE program.