I love the complaints in here over DST, I especially like the suggestions that "schools should adjust schedules so that kids should not go to school in the dark."
And therein lies the problem. So instead of adjusting the clocks, we'll now adjust everybody's schedule. In the winter time, you work from 9A-6P. In the summertime, you work from 10A-7P. Bam!
You now sleep until 8A instead of 7A, or in the winter time you sleep until 7A instead of 8A!
And....you're doing exactly what you would have fucking done with DST, except where you change the timings...
I am reading lots of arguments where people go "Well what about THIS random edge case? and THAT one?" You won't win against these people. These are the same people who willingly drop $20,000 on a new truck because they might get 2 inches of snow in the winter, rather than simply $1,000 on a set of good winter tires and wheels. Or $20,000 on a truck because there is the rare occasion they may need to haul something, rather than renting a truck from the local Home Depot or UHaul for a hundred bucks or two.
Funny thing about Pebble is that they weren't a "smart watch" company. They were a data mining Silicon Valley company. Pebble was looking for more data scientists than they were giving a damn about making a hardware product. I met a few of them.
The hardware product was just barely a thing to allow them to collect the data they wanted (where their real attempt at money was in data collection and sales). "Big Data" is going belly up it seems.
I agree with you, but I still think it's a problem for most American workers. Though there is a large bit of uneducated populace that could take on these jobs. Though I highly doubt someone who obtained a 4-year degree is going to come out and do laborious farm-hand type work even if you tied the minimum wage to the cost of living. (That said, at least in the short term, it might help because a cost of living min wage would be far higher than what the education was worth itself).
Honestly, while I don't disagree that being a good farmer takes a lot of education, dedication, experience, and time; the average American college student is going through many tens of thousands of dollars in debt, being told that this was what they needed to do in order to compete in the educated world economy; only to get out of school and find the jobs are at worst "internships" that are unpaid, and at best are jobs that are paid like absolute garbage. For that matter, the universities also are not necessarily providing them the skills they need to actually contribute in the workforce. I often times interact with college students in my career and I find that while they are energetic and want to learn, they were woefully unprepared for even the most basic understanding. And this is an absolute problem for anyone entering a Bachelor's program. The problem is, our education system is doing this en masse, to every single student. "Get the paper! It will get you a career and you'll pay that loan right off! Your American dream will come true!"
Again, I'm not discounting the farmers. Though I do discount the farm hands who do nothing but do menial tasks in the field. Though I do agree that farm work should pay more as well and incentivize hiring locals to do the jobs.
At any rate, the problem is multi-pronged and requires a multi-pronged approach to fixing. Unfortunately that requires analyzing both education and VISA policies. And Americans love their college football culture too much to give a shit about the actual education quality received. It's pretty terrible.
Just independent until mommy and daddy's money comes and saves the day. Just like they got a job at 14 years old, saved up all of the money themselves, bought themselves a car, paid full insurance, pay for a cell phone, and oh pay their own health insurance once they turn 18 (none of this let's sit on parents' insurance until 25 nonsense, remember, you automatically have 'agency' at 18, right?)
Curse opened an office in Irvine recently (past year or so) which I suspected at the time was a move to court someone in California into buying Curse. I called back when they announced the opening of the office, amusingly (I've got friends that work at Curse and also at other local game companies in that region). Why they needed to open an office there for this, I'm not sure; but I suspected it due to the proximity of Blizzard & Riot Games.
I suspect if anything it's possible that Twitch will continue to allow Curse to operate semi independently. The standard folks to leave will likely be out of jobs here soon. Typical back office IT, HR, all of the Overhead stuff. Likely all pulled into the Twitch realm. Or not. It really depends. If they start making too many changes too early a lot of the Curse staff might bail and all of the knowledge will leave.
I think it's funny how people seem to think that being anonymous is important while simultaneously being pissed off that the government doesn't do enough to "deter cheating" of the voting system, legality of immigration status. In short, MY privacy is IMPORTANT, but YOUR privacy is not!
Even more amusing is that they all seem to have no problems with private companies hoarding all of this data. We have no Constitutional protections against private entities. Google and Facebook are far more powerful than the NSA, FBI, and DEA combined. But let's not draw any attention to that, shall we? Let's all focus on how the EVIL GUBMINT is STORIN' DATA ON ME!
Let's pay no attention to the fact that the things you post on social networking or the Internet in general, or the stuff you buy, can be used to build a profile of you that not only controls how much money you're going to spend on something (interest rates), but also whether or not you're hirable at all. You know, things that are truly important to like 99.99% of anyone in the country, earning money and buying goods and services with their money.
Those people ARE enemies. Groups filing for tax-free status for dubious bullshit reasons are garbage. None of these groups are doing anything charitable, lol.
No, they enabled copy protection that the content producers want to see enabled before they let you stream 1080P/4K content. That's just how it is. It sucks, but don't go after Microsoft on this one.
The good news is that since 4K will be so hard to obtain--then most end users will ultimately just use 720P content anyway. There's no demand for 4K content in the sense that if it's too fucking difficult to access nobody will want it.
Yes, People still "think" this. And it's in your best interest to read the platform documentation for the systems and applications you're leveraging before you make decisions on whether to go physical or virtual.
As an example of the "scalability problem", Microsoft has documented their Exchange 2013 Preferred Architecture--which is pretty much 2U, 2CPU servers with JBOD of 7200 RPM disks. Essentially, you take away what you think and know being a VM platform guy (Snapshots, SANs, LUNs, RAID, etc.) and throw it out the window because none of it applies to Exchange 2013 (and newer). Microsoft, and other application vendors, have built resiliency into the application stack. Because of this, all of your traditional VM methods of failover (host failover, DRS, HA) do not apply to the technology. Or rather, is an unsupported configuration which may result in performance problems at best, and data resiliency problems at worst.
The links below don't necessarily say don't virtualize, but they do say to understand the design they're going for and build appropriately (scale out, not up). VM Architecture is a massive overhead cost in comparison of throwing a bunch of dumb servers together and saying "make it work".
This is just one particular item that I think doesn't lend itself well to virtualization, but another area is SQL server--where the disk i/o requirements of SQL are so intense that it's cheaper to build out a dedicated SQL cluster than it is to build out a virtualization environment that meets the disk i/o needs of the databases.
An application which leans heavily on iops workload is something like Sharepoint (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc298801.aspx). Microsoft strongly recommends dedicating a cluster to Sharepoint, do not share (do not add an instance to a cluster running other applications), and that for a large size you may need some serious iops.
Again, these things aren't impossible to virtualize. But the raw needs of both of these applications lend themselves better to physical hardware rather than being tossed on a VM cluster. By the time you dedicate enough resources (whether CPU time, dynamic memory usage, or io priority) to these apps, you would have been better off just buying some dedicated physical hardware, and you'd end up with much better performance.
Yes, for a lot of workloads VM is great. Things like low end application servers, scale-out web servers (using web clusters preferably where you can) are great. You can get a lot of VM density on a great many workloads. But not everything can be done this way. Unless you want to put 100Gbps links in all of your physical servers going to your storage clusters...and SSDs everywhere.
People keep saying this to me. "Oh we won't need your type in a few years because cloud everything." Never mind the fact that around 99% of my work is software-based. I only rarely on occasion mess with hardware. Every 5 years for a hardware refresh, and the occasional drive swap from a vendor. Everything else I do is software-based. And it really doesn't matter whether it's "in the cloud", or "on premise". My job role stays the same. So I save a whole 15 minutes a year on not having to swap drives.
What you will see with "cloud", just like "virtualization", is a maturation of the technology's use inside a company. Not every workload is appropriate for virtualization, and not every workload will be appropriate nor cost effective in the cloud. The cloud is great for every "devops" guy who thinks they're going to write the next Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix--but yet again, for 99% of companies out there, workloads are entirely static. There's just little need for "SUPER HYPER SCALE AUTOSCALING UP AND DOWN CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE" for a vast majority of business workloads.
Specific applications are hugely appropriate for "cloud", particularly e-mail (and I say this as an Exchange Administrator). And for these "we need this up 110% of the time" applications, they'll find that if the "cloud vendor" has a problem there's nobody they can call to fix the issue. And never underestimate the value of management having someone that they can call to "look at the issue right away at 2:30AM". This need will keep a lot of folks employed.
Finally, you can't really depreciate cloud assets like you can capital expenses. So really, again, you're ultimately just comparing the cost of operating a datacenter versus the cloud technology. And you can already not worry about operating your own datacenter by simply using a colocated one.
So at the end of the day, no matter how much technology changes. No, the 'devops' revolution isn't actually going to happen, and being able to swap a drive or add some ram will still be a necessary skill.
I feel ya there. I'm trying to stay away from the concept of "Get off my lawn", and push more towards education.
It is no surprise that a vast majority of the modern investments in technology are "web-based". A lot of people that are coming out of schools now had their first introduction to computing and networks over the "web", and they learned backwards.
There were those of us who saw the evolution of the web "forwards". Who remembers installing the Trumpet Winsock TCP/IP stack on Windows? Because it didn't have a TCP stack? [or for that matter, IP?]
What we're seeing now is a lot of "reinvention of the wheel" because those folks are quite literally working backwards. And not everything they're doing is a "bad thing". There are a lot of great techs coming out to make platforms management and all easier.
I try to meet in the middle. And no doubt, as time goes on, after dozens of years of abstraction from the hardware and the lower layers, these folks will ask themselves "HOLY CRAP I CAN ACTUALLY DO WHAT WITH THE HARDWARE?!", and a world of 50 years of technology will rush into their brain as they discover what those that have followed it have been saying all along.
The documented exploits are almost completely worthless, especially: "As for local IP address disclosure, this can be used to map an organization behind a NAT,"
Guess this 'researcher' has never considered using IPv6.
Right now there's a massive push for even the smallest web projects to be "cloud scale" to this degree. No, the crazy custom shit that Google does in their datacenter is not something you need in YOUR datacenter.
Selling "Customers as a service" is the big, new economy and every single "startup" and "app" coming out of places like Y Combinator in the past few years has been about nothing more than selling your information. Every mobile app, every mobile game. Every "CHECK OUT THIS FREE NEW THING!" For example, Life 360. Think they're offering this for free? Life360 is currently valued at $250M. Facebook paid a few billion for WhatsApp Messenger.
You're a complete moron if you haven't been watching this.
I disagree. Firefox and chrome were both fast for the time. IE was just that bad. Now it's not and people are starting to see that perhaps FF and Chrome aren't as good as they claim they are. There certainly not doing the best they can be.
It is incredibly important as an IT person to be able to MITM your connections on a company network. And we fully employ such functionality where we are.
First and foremost, compliance is a thing. As a personal user you may not have to care, but as a business the organization has to take special care when handling certain types of information. So we need to be able to see where that information is going.
Another reason is for IPS. Many attacks, like spam, change the locations from which they come from. But a particular type of attack is almost never going to change. There are only limited ways, for example, to exploit any individual hole in a web browser. And you can flag on that to a degree that is significantly more successful than simply being able to block IP ranges, which is about all you get if you do not MITM connections.
There are real, legitimate concerns and reasons to MITM. If you don't like it, don't do non-company things on company Internet and equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
You say this, but let's share your credentials for kernel development.
I love the complaints in here over DST, I especially like the suggestions that "schools should adjust schedules so that kids should not go to school in the dark."
And therein lies the problem. So instead of adjusting the clocks, we'll now adjust everybody's schedule. In the winter time, you work from 9A-6P. In the summertime, you work from 10A-7P. Bam!
You now sleep until 8A instead of 7A, or in the winter time you sleep until 7A instead of 8A!
And....you're doing exactly what you would have fucking done with DST, except where you change the timings...
I am reading lots of arguments where people go "Well what about THIS random edge case? and THAT one?" You won't win against these people. These are the same people who willingly drop $20,000 on a new truck because they might get 2 inches of snow in the winter, rather than simply $1,000 on a set of good winter tires and wheels. Or $20,000 on a truck because there is the rare occasion they may need to haul something, rather than renting a truck from the local Home Depot or UHaul for a hundred bucks or two.
Funny thing about Pebble is that they weren't a "smart watch" company. They were a data mining Silicon Valley company. Pebble was looking for more data scientists than they were giving a damn about making a hardware product. I met a few of them.
The hardware product was just barely a thing to allow them to collect the data they wanted (where their real attempt at money was in data collection and sales). "Big Data" is going belly up it seems.
I agree with you, but I still think it's a problem for most American workers. Though there is a large bit of uneducated populace that could take on these jobs. Though I highly doubt someone who obtained a 4-year degree is going to come out and do laborious farm-hand type work even if you tied the minimum wage to the cost of living. (That said, at least in the short term, it might help because a cost of living min wage would be far higher than what the education was worth itself).
Honestly, while I don't disagree that being a good farmer takes a lot of education, dedication, experience, and time; the average American college student is going through many tens of thousands of dollars in debt, being told that this was what they needed to do in order to compete in the educated world economy; only to get out of school and find the jobs are at worst "internships" that are unpaid, and at best are jobs that are paid like absolute garbage. For that matter, the universities also are not necessarily providing them the skills they need to actually contribute in the workforce. I often times interact with college students in my career and I find that while they are energetic and want to learn, they were woefully unprepared for even the most basic understanding. And this is an absolute problem for anyone entering a Bachelor's program. The problem is, our education system is doing this en masse, to every single student. "Get the paper! It will get you a career and you'll pay that loan right off! Your American dream will come true!"
Again, I'm not discounting the farmers. Though I do discount the farm hands who do nothing but do menial tasks in the field. Though I do agree that farm work should pay more as well and incentivize hiring locals to do the jobs.
At any rate, the problem is multi-pronged and requires a multi-pronged approach to fixing. Unfortunately that requires analyzing both education and VISA policies. And Americans love their college football culture too much to give a shit about the actual education quality received. It's pretty terrible.
Just independent until mommy and daddy's money comes and saves the day. Just like they got a job at 14 years old, saved up all of the money themselves, bought themselves a car, paid full insurance, pay for a cell phone, and oh pay their own health insurance once they turn 18 (none of this let's sit on parents' insurance until 25 nonsense, remember, you automatically have 'agency' at 18, right?)
Highly doubt it.
Curse opened an office in Irvine recently (past year or so) which I suspected at the time was a move to court someone in California into buying Curse. I called back when they announced the opening of the office, amusingly (I've got friends that work at Curse and also at other local game companies in that region). Why they needed to open an office there for this, I'm not sure; but I suspected it due to the proximity of Blizzard & Riot Games.
I suspect if anything it's possible that Twitch will continue to allow Curse to operate semi independently. The standard folks to leave will likely be out of jobs here soon. Typical back office IT, HR, all of the Overhead stuff. Likely all pulled into the Twitch realm. Or not. It really depends. If they start making too many changes too early a lot of the Curse staff might bail and all of the knowledge will leave.
I think it's funny how people seem to think that being anonymous is important while simultaneously being pissed off that the government doesn't do enough to "deter cheating" of the voting system, legality of immigration status. In short, MY privacy is IMPORTANT, but YOUR privacy is not!
Even more amusing is that they all seem to have no problems with private companies hoarding all of this data. We have no Constitutional protections against private entities. Google and Facebook are far more powerful than the NSA, FBI, and DEA combined. But let's not draw any attention to that, shall we? Let's all focus on how the EVIL GUBMINT is STORIN' DATA ON ME!
Let's pay no attention to the fact that the things you post on social networking or the Internet in general, or the stuff you buy, can be used to build a profile of you that not only controls how much money you're going to spend on something (interest rates), but also whether or not you're hirable at all. You know, things that are truly important to like 99.99% of anyone in the country, earning money and buying goods and services with their money.
Those people ARE enemies. Groups filing for tax-free status for dubious bullshit reasons are garbage. None of these groups are doing anything charitable, lol.
No, they enabled copy protection that the content producers want to see enabled before they let you stream 1080P/4K content. That's just how it is. It sucks, but don't go after Microsoft on this one.
The good news is that since 4K will be so hard to obtain--then most end users will ultimately just use 720P content anyway. There's no demand for 4K content in the sense that if it's too fucking difficult to access nobody will want it.
Here's a fun fact:
Anyone who knows anything about datacenters knew what they would be collecting when they built the Utah datacenter. its building wasn't a secret.
You want to know who else has datacenters that size? Facebook and Google.
What the fuck did you think the NSA was going to do with a datacenter in Utah that rivaled a Facebook datacenter?
https://defensesystems.com/Articles/2011/01/07/NSA-spy-cyber-intelligence-data-center-Utah.aspx
This shit was common knowledge. Here's an article about it a full 2.5 years before Mr. Idiot leaked information.
Bruce's petition has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. Why bother posting it?
Yes, People still "think" this. And it's in your best interest to read the platform documentation for the systems and applications you're leveraging before you make decisions on whether to go physical or virtual.
As an example of the "scalability problem", Microsoft has documented their Exchange 2013 Preferred Architecture--which is pretty much 2U, 2CPU servers with JBOD of 7200 RPM disks. Essentially, you take away what you think and know being a VM platform guy (Snapshots, SANs, LUNs, RAID, etc.) and throw it out the window because none of it applies to Exchange 2013 (and newer). Microsoft, and other application vendors, have built resiliency into the application stack. Because of this, all of your traditional VM methods of failover (host failover, DRS, HA) do not apply to the technology. Or rather, is an unsupported configuration which may result in performance problems at best, and data resiliency problems at worst.
The links below don't necessarily say don't virtualize, but they do say to understand the design they're going for and build appropriately (scale out, not up). VM Architecture is a massive overhead cost in comparison of throwing a bunch of dumb servers together and saying "make it work".
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2014/04/21/the-preferred-architecture.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2015/06/19/ask-the-perf-guy-how-big-is-too-big.aspx
This is just one particular item that I think doesn't lend itself well to virtualization, but another area is SQL server--where the disk i/o requirements of SQL are so intense that it's cheaper to build out a dedicated SQL cluster than it is to build out a virtualization environment that meets the disk i/o needs of the databases.
An application which leans heavily on iops workload is something like Sharepoint (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc298801.aspx). Microsoft strongly recommends dedicating a cluster to Sharepoint, do not share (do not add an instance to a cluster running other applications), and that for a large size you may need some serious iops.
Again, these things aren't impossible to virtualize. But the raw needs of both of these applications lend themselves better to physical hardware rather than being tossed on a VM cluster. By the time you dedicate enough resources (whether CPU time, dynamic memory usage, or io priority) to these apps, you would have been better off just buying some dedicated physical hardware, and you'd end up with much better performance.
Yes, for a lot of workloads VM is great. Things like low end application servers, scale-out web servers (using web clusters preferably where you can) are great. You can get a lot of VM density on a great many workloads. But not everything can be done this way. Unless you want to put 100Gbps links in all of your physical servers going to your storage clusters...and SSDs everywhere.
And then your Internet connection goes out.
People keep saying this to me. "Oh we won't need your type in a few years because cloud everything." Never mind the fact that around 99% of my work is software-based. I only rarely on occasion mess with hardware. Every 5 years for a hardware refresh, and the occasional drive swap from a vendor. Everything else I do is software-based. And it really doesn't matter whether it's "in the cloud", or "on premise". My job role stays the same. So I save a whole 15 minutes a year on not having to swap drives.
What you will see with "cloud", just like "virtualization", is a maturation of the technology's use inside a company. Not every workload is appropriate for virtualization, and not every workload will be appropriate nor cost effective in the cloud. The cloud is great for every "devops" guy who thinks they're going to write the next Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix--but yet again, for 99% of companies out there, workloads are entirely static. There's just little need for "SUPER HYPER SCALE AUTOSCALING UP AND DOWN CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE" for a vast majority of business workloads.
Specific applications are hugely appropriate for "cloud", particularly e-mail (and I say this as an Exchange Administrator). And for these "we need this up 110% of the time" applications, they'll find that if the "cloud vendor" has a problem there's nobody they can call to fix the issue. And never underestimate the value of management having someone that they can call to "look at the issue right away at 2:30AM". This need will keep a lot of folks employed.
Finally, you can't really depreciate cloud assets like you can capital expenses. So really, again, you're ultimately just comparing the cost of operating a datacenter versus the cloud technology. And you can already not worry about operating your own datacenter by simply using a colocated one.
So at the end of the day, no matter how much technology changes. No, the 'devops' revolution isn't actually going to happen, and being able to swap a drive or add some ram will still be a necessary skill.
I feel ya there. I'm trying to stay away from the concept of "Get off my lawn", and push more towards education.
It is no surprise that a vast majority of the modern investments in technology are "web-based". A lot of people that are coming out of schools now had their first introduction to computing and networks over the "web", and they learned backwards.
There were those of us who saw the evolution of the web "forwards". Who remembers installing the Trumpet Winsock TCP/IP stack on Windows? Because it didn't have a TCP stack? [or for that matter, IP?]
What we're seeing now is a lot of "reinvention of the wheel" because those folks are quite literally working backwards. And not everything they're doing is a "bad thing". There are a lot of great techs coming out to make platforms management and all easier.
I try to meet in the middle. And no doubt, as time goes on, after dozens of years of abstraction from the hardware and the lower layers, these folks will ask themselves "HOLY CRAP I CAN ACTUALLY DO WHAT WITH THE HARDWARE?!", and a world of 50 years of technology will rush into their brain as they discover what those that have followed it have been saying all along.
Welcome to IT. Where the youngin's come in and rip up everything that was built for decades because "oh that's too complicated".
The documented exploits are almost completely worthless, especially: "As for local IP address disclosure, this can be used to map an organization behind a NAT,"
Guess this 'researcher' has never considered using IPv6.
Right now there's a massive push for even the smallest web projects to be "cloud scale" to this degree. No, the crazy custom shit that Google does in their datacenter is not something you need in YOUR datacenter.
You're an idiot, plain and simple.
Selling "Customers as a service" is the big, new economy and every single "startup" and "app" coming out of places like Y Combinator in the past few years has been about nothing more than selling your information. Every mobile app, every mobile game. Every "CHECK OUT THIS FREE NEW THING!" For example, Life 360. Think they're offering this for free? Life360 is currently valued at $250M. Facebook paid a few billion for WhatsApp Messenger.
You're a complete moron if you haven't been watching this.
I disagree. Firefox and chrome were both fast for the time. IE was just that bad. Now it's not and people are starting to see that perhaps FF and Chrome aren't as good as they claim they are. There certainly not doing the best they can be.
It is incredibly important as an IT person to be able to MITM your connections on a company network. And we fully employ such functionality where we are.
First and foremost, compliance is a thing. As a personal user you may not have to care, but as a business the organization has to take special care when handling certain types of information. So we need to be able to see where that information is going.
Another reason is for IPS. Many attacks, like spam, change the locations from which they come from. But a particular type of attack is almost never going to change. There are only limited ways, for example, to exploit any individual hole in a web browser. And you can flag on that to a degree that is significantly more successful than simply being able to block IP ranges, which is about all you get if you do not MITM connections.
There are real, legitimate concerns and reasons to MITM. If you don't like it, don't do non-company things on company Internet and equipment.
Uhm, Windows logs are XML data...
This right here folks is the most important post in this thread.