This is why the critical infrastructure, whose failure could cost lives and fortunes, doesn't belong on the network.
Didn't help Iran when STUXNET hit, did it?
The truth is: if you have no network-connection, people start using USB-sticks over and over - which creates a completely different attack-surface.
Air-gapping critical infrastructure isn't a bad idea - but it can't be an excuse to not secure these system at all.
I like this quote: "Finally, Snowden’s physical location worked to his advantage. In a contractor’s office 5,000 miles and six time zones from headquarters, he was free from prying eyes. Much of his workday occurred after the masses at Ft. Meade had already gone home for dinner. Had he been in Maryland, someone who couldn’t audit his activities electronically still might have noticed his use of thumb drives."
Reminds me of the days when Aldrich Ames was splurging all the money the Soviets gave him - and nobody noticed (the first couple of years).
The US Govt is going to pick this up, just in time for the elections.
I'm sure the Prison Corporations will be in favor; as well as all the greedy politicians.
It's not like it's legal, or anything, but Really; when has that stopped them from doing something?
Actually, all hyperbole aside, my thoughts were "why are they stopping this and why aren't WE in the US doing this?"
Trial-periods and time spent in prison before execution is much shorter in China.
In China, the verdict is usually "final" on the spot and execution follows swiftly.
Most inmates in the US and Europe probably have some sort of infectious disease (from sharing needles, drugs, etc.pp.) that they acquired in the years waiting for the verdict and the appeal and the appeal to the appeal....
Reminds me of the cops in that series.
The creepy thing is that almost everything I see in the news almost every day reminds me of the dystopian future in that TV-series.
The trick they did was to place everything in 2077 - when in reality it's just around the corner.
For your situation it depends on a few things. First is how your overall business works. If the server farm is just a small part of the cost of your business, and your product is strong, saving a few bucks on the servers won't matter. But if your business is mostly driven by the server farm and it is a large percentage of your companies expense, you will find out if you are right soon enough..
I'm not sure, actually. There aren't that many physical servers (a couple of hundred - vmware has helped reduced than a lot, already). We are a bit of a "boutique"-ISP in that some of our customers are not price-sensitive at all. Which is good, because we can't compete on price anyway - we compete on flexibility, knowledge, reaction-time. We usually build multi-server, often multi-site, multi-network solutions in heterogeneous environments with high availabilty demands....
Salaries are probably at least as big an expense.
What will or will not happen is that one of your competitors will use an OSS implementation to lower their costs. True, they may have problems in stabilizing it, but they may not. In any case, if they can operate more efficiently that you can, you will have to change. If they cannot operate more efficiently than you can, then you are absolutely correct.
True. Efficiency has always been a concern.
You are saying the same thing many UNIX companies said about Linux many years ago.
Until recently, we mostly used FreeBSD;-)
Now, a lot of Ubuntu is creeping in...
THB, I'm trying to make-up my mind on OpenStack.
We already have a large VMware installation - and due to the way our business works (customers work with us and the servers we provide for them for years instead of months or weeks, almost no "peak load" stuff that requires dynamic provisioning...), I feel we don't really need a scale-out platform (which OpenStack seems to be) but rather a virtualization-platform.
If we were to implement OpenStack, we'd have to build in parallel:
-a new storage platform (like ceph or gluster, which we know nothing about, obviously)
-a new backup platform (equivalent of veeam?)
-most likely a separated switching (going 10G)
-and probably duplicate a lot more things that are on VMware currently
Add on top of that the fact that it usually requires a lot of time and effort to get anything built "right" (and seldom on the 1st attempt), I doubt we'd make a lot of savings over VMware even in the medium term.
Even more concerning in my view is the fact that most of the corporate "backers" of OpenStack sell public "Cloud-Services" themselves - we have already learned the hard way (via a different "cloud" product) that when for these companies the need to choose between customers of such a public service and those with a "private cloud" installation arises, they will most likely tend to favor their public cloud customers (or whichever business is bigger).
Coupled with that comes my prediction that OpenStack will "fragment" rather sooner rather than later, with each of its backers offering some sort of "enhanced" ("enterprise") version (with stability patches and some additional features) that may or may not be a bit cheaper overall than VMware (all things taken into account), leaving you with a solution that works "almost like VMware, for almost the same price".
Am I too pessimistic?
I have a busy Typo3-site running with NGINX+PHP-FPM.
No Apache anymore.
Unless you need complex rewrite rules or the need for user-accessible.htaccess files, there's no need for Apache.
Switzerland is far too small and with far too many large international companies with assets and real business in the US.
As the whole "tax evaders" situation described above proved, it caves in far too fast.
Add to that that they probably have no interest protecting a company that isn't even Swiss...
There's a reason why Snowden didn't fly to Zurich or Geneva from the beginning - he did his research (and from what he saw in 2007, apparently he didn't like the city anyway)
No, but I'd really hate it if the "flagship" phone was bigger than the iPhone5.
I don't read books on it (I do that on my 24" iMac) or buy a real book. For what I do (some Mail, reading slashot and a couple of other sites, WeatherPro, some other apps and a couple of games - and phoning people, receiving calls) the size of the screen on my iPhone 4S is big enough. I don't want to lug around anything bigger.
If I wanted to, I'd have bought an iPad Mini long ago.
I also don't need a stylus (I don't need or want to run rdesktop on my phone, like the co-worker with the SG Note 2 does).
Given Apple's latest quarterly numbers, there seem to be at least a couple of other people who think likewise.
There is a market for "phat" phones - but I doubt it's much larger than the vocal audience that continues to push these phones.
Guess what, there are other nations, also well-off that are not hated by some many other people.
There's a reason the US is targeted and it's not your aircondition - your posting is just a perfect example of why the US is perceived to be a "problem" in large parts of the world.
If it wasn't so sad, your posting would be funny.
Single-Thread performance was never the strong point of the SPARC architecture.
But I believe, memory-bus and I/O performance was superior - until AMD HT and then Intel QPI surfaced....
At least, they didn't waste as much money and focus on a "Windows NT" strategy as SGI did.
I didn't really "miss" it, though I never laid my hand on the larger kit from back then.
I also don't deny that they had great products. Just that the market didn't think they were great enough, at some point.
I have to agree. While everyone kind of liked SUN and cherished their accomplishments - few ever bought anything of them.
It might have worked, if everybody actually using Solaris had also bought SUN x86 servers instead of installing it on generic hardware and bought more software from their stack. Additionally, for too long their business strategy seemed to be "Let's invent some mind-blowingly cool stuff and then have sales try to sell it to our customers".
And this not for one product, but basically for almost all of the products they came up with in the last years.
Oracle has no choice but to milk their current customers literally till the sun goes down.
I didn't understand much of Unix before I read her book. But then I got my hands on the (then already ancient) 1st edition of the Unix System Administration Handbook - and it felt like a fog being lifted.
And I admit, I also thought she was a guy. She probably has baskets full of letters and emails with "Dear Mr Nemeth,...".
this does not lead to an increase of cases where the thief invokes the "kill-switch" of the victim first.
The problem with people who make laws is that they think criminals have the same line of thinking as them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's so ..... fishy
This is why the critical infrastructure, whose failure could cost lives and fortunes, doesn't belong on the network.
Didn't help Iran when STUXNET hit, did it?
The truth is: if you have no network-connection, people start using USB-sticks over and over - which creates a completely different attack-surface.
Air-gapping critical infrastructure isn't a bad idea - but it can't be an excuse to not secure these system at all.
"Finally, Snowden’s physical location worked to his advantage. In a contractor’s office 5,000 miles and six time zones from headquarters, he was free from prying eyes. Much of his workday occurred after the masses at Ft. Meade had already gone home for dinner. Had he been in Maryland, someone who couldn’t audit his activities electronically still might have noticed his use of thumb drives."
Reminds me of the days when Aldrich Ames was splurging all the money the Soviets gave him - and nobody noticed (the first couple of years).
Actually, all hyperbole aside, my thoughts were "why are they stopping this and why aren't WE in the US doing this?"
Trial-periods and time spent in prison before execution is much shorter in China.
In China, the verdict is usually "final" on the spot and execution follows swiftly.
Most inmates in the US and Europe probably have some sort of infectious disease (from sharing needles, drugs, etc.pp.) that they acquired in the years waiting for the verdict and the appeal and the appeal to the appeal....
Reminds me of the cops in that series.
The creepy thing is that almost everything I see in the news almost every day reminds me of the dystopian future in that TV-series.
The trick they did was to place everything in 2077 - when in reality it's just around the corner.
For your situation it depends on a few things. First is how your overall business works. If the server farm is just a small part of the cost of your business, and your product is strong, saving a few bucks on the servers won't matter. But if your business is mostly driven by the server farm and it is a large percentage of your companies expense, you will find out if you are right soon enough..
I'm not sure, actually. There aren't that many physical servers (a couple of hundred - vmware has helped reduced than a lot, already). We are a bit of a "boutique"-ISP in that some of our customers are not price-sensitive at all. Which is good, because we can't compete on price anyway - we compete on flexibility, knowledge, reaction-time. We usually build multi-server, often multi-site, multi-network solutions in heterogeneous environments with high availabilty demands....
Salaries are probably at least as big an expense.
What will or will not happen is that one of your competitors will use an OSS implementation to lower their costs. True, they may have problems in stabilizing it, but they may not. In any case, if they can operate more efficiently that you can, you will have to change. If they cannot operate more efficiently than you can, then you are absolutely correct.
True. Efficiency has always been a concern.
You are saying the same thing many UNIX companies said about Linux many years ago.
Until recently, we mostly used FreeBSD ;-)
Now, a lot of Ubuntu is creeping in...
We already have a large VMware installation - and due to the way our business works (customers work with us and the servers we provide for them for years instead of months or weeks, almost no "peak load" stuff that requires dynamic provisioning...), I feel we don't really need a scale-out platform (which OpenStack seems to be) but rather a virtualization-platform.
If we were to implement OpenStack, we'd have to build in parallel:
Add on top of that the fact that it usually requires a lot of time and effort to get anything built "right" (and seldom on the 1st attempt), I doubt we'd make a lot of savings over VMware even in the medium term.
Even more concerning in my view is the fact that most of the corporate "backers" of OpenStack sell public "Cloud-Services" themselves - we have already learned the hard way (via a different "cloud" product) that when for these companies the need to choose between customers of such a public service and those with a "private cloud" installation arises, they will most likely tend to favor their public cloud customers (or whichever business is bigger).
Coupled with that comes my prediction that OpenStack will "fragment" rather sooner rather than later, with each of its backers offering some sort of "enhanced" ("enterprise") version (with stability patches and some additional features) that may or may not be a bit cheaper overall than VMware (all things taken into account), leaving you with a solution that works "almost like VMware, for almost the same price".
Am I too pessimistic?
I have a busy Typo3-site running with NGINX+PHP-FPM. .htaccess files, there's no need for Apache.
No Apache anymore.
Unless you need complex rewrite rules or the need for user-accessible
Switzerland is far too small and with far too many large international companies with assets and real business in the US.
As the whole "tax evaders" situation described above proved, it caves in far too fast.
Add to that that they probably have no interest protecting a company that isn't even Swiss...
There's a reason why Snowden didn't fly to Zurich or Geneva from the beginning - he did his research (and from what he saw in 2007, apparently he didn't like the city anyway)
I'm really surprised at what people can get worked up on.
The people selling expensive (4 and 5-figure expensive) watches and jewelery to Chinese tourists here are making an absolute fortune these days.
I don't read books on it (I do that on my 24" iMac) or buy a real book. For what I do (some Mail, reading slashot and a couple of other sites, WeatherPro, some other apps and a couple of games - and phoning people, receiving calls) the size of the screen on my iPhone 4S is big enough. I don't want to lug around anything bigger.
If I wanted to, I'd have bought an iPad Mini long ago.
I also don't need a stylus (I don't need or want to run rdesktop on my phone, like the co-worker with the SG Note 2 does).
Given Apple's latest quarterly numbers, there seem to be at least a couple of other people who think likewise.
There is a market for "phat" phones - but I doubt it's much larger than the vocal audience that continues to push these phones.
This is a very dangerous and slippery slope that the US has led the western world onto.
Judging from history, nothing good can ever come from this.
It will need a couple of TV-shows for Americans to realize the reality ;-)
Guess what, there are other nations, also well-off that are not hated by some many other people. There's a reason the US is targeted and it's not your aircondition - your posting is just a perfect example of why the US is perceived to be a "problem" in large parts of the world. If it wasn't so sad, your posting would be funny.
Huh? "We put the dot in dot-com" for example was years after slashdot.
Hah - I've still got a couple of t-shirts with that slogan.
Still wearing them - they are quite sturdy ;-)
Single-Thread performance was never the strong point of the SPARC architecture.
But I believe, memory-bus and I/O performance was superior - until AMD HT and then Intel QPI surfaced....
At least, they didn't waste as much money and focus on a "Windows NT" strategy as SGI did.
I didn't really "miss" it, though I never laid my hand on the larger kit from back then.
I also don't deny that they had great products. Just that the market didn't think they were great enough, at some point.
It might have worked, if everybody actually using Solaris had also bought SUN x86 servers instead of installing it on generic hardware and bought more software from their stack. Additionally, for too long their business strategy seemed to be "Let's invent some mind-blowingly cool stuff and then have sales try to sell it to our customers".
And this not for one product, but basically for almost all of the products they came up with in the last years.
Oracle has no choice but to milk their current customers literally till the sun goes down.
...for Leibowitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
Yes, religion is the only way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Force
Gives a new meaning to the word "high-priest of technology"...
And I admit, I also thought she was a guy. She probably has baskets full of letters and emails with "Dear Mr Nemeth, ...".
Evi Nemeth, we owe you!
Do they only sell to "large" customers, buying a couple of hundreds a time?
What does such a switch cost, compared to a Switch from Cisco or HP?
It's more or less the same, right?
Can't people even get the half-dozen different computer models that Apple makes right?
this does not lead to an increase of cases where the thief invokes the "kill-switch" of the victim first. The problem with people who make laws is that they think criminals have the same line of thinking as them.