The cloud is the most hyped word that IT has ever come endured. It is nothing more than the old concept of the mainframe to centralize resources to a given location. People replaced that with thin clients and again it was nothing more than a way to centralize resources to a given location. Now we have the cloud and we are centralizing resources to a given location.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like duck it must be a duck. Azure and other cloud variants are nothing more than attempts to move everyone to the cloud (and encourage outsourcing of services). However the cloud doesn't even mean a third party provider anymore. You can get a cloud provider to put their cloud services in your own facilities (Amazon and Microsoft Azure both support doing this). It's really nothing more than the old architecture diagram model for saying "the network" that got hijacked by marketing departments.
All your doing with the cloud is putting resources in a given location. It might be your location, Amazon's, Rack Spaces or any other providers. That's it, there's nothing magical about it. Therefore all Azure is doing is making it easy to put resources in another location. This is something that IT professionals have been doing for over 40 years, changing the name make it special.
Make a package, use version control, or you could use something like trip wire, look for differences, or you could use your cluster control software to look for differences. Even something as simple as looking for differences between the file sizes, and MD5 checksum, or a failure report from your delivery mechanism. Without doubt there are a number of other methods to do this.
The bottom line is to look for differences between the nodes of the cluster and you should pretty readily be able to tell that one of your systems isn't like the other. The peer review process should have looked for this difference before it went to production. This was a business critical system and the service owner should have had their representative sign off on the change during a maintenance window as successful.
By the way, they trading firms will often retain old data just for the purpose of using it for testing systems like this in the Development lab. Set it up in a VLAN, isolate it from production and simulate an hour or two's worth of trading against known results to see what comes up. Now the testing for that is far more complicated as your simulating data and that is a different story altogether.
Couldn't agree with you more. I set up the Software Delivery and Patch Management process at a very large trading company with a presence in just about every exchange across the world.
It took 6 months to develop the process, build up the lab, institute change management, get people to understand the differences between Server up time and Service up time, introduce maintenance windows and their associated SLAs, all the way up to having an inventory of the disks used on the servers with the appropriate certified techs on hand for those first reboots. Developing the process involved two different server teams, the network team, management, infrastructure, database team, two security teams and myself.
When everything was said and done the basic process fit on a single page Visio slide. Everything worked on a ticket system with each person assigned a given responsibility for part of the ticket and a peer review before anything went live. I also pressed that business critical systems had to be signed off on by the service owner to prevent something like this from happening.
The time to develop the process took a while, however once it was up and running the time to actually runs things through it was fairly quick. Since everything was in the ticket it was easy to see exactly where things were at, who signed off on what and to ensure that due diligence was done.
Free OS X doesn't compete with Linux except on a very limited basis - it's free.
Unless you build a hackintosh and blatantly violate the license you can't even install OS X anywhere except a Mac. It's very distinctly not open source and arguably just as proprietary as Windows. It's free, but only if you purchased the hardware to begin with, and Apple has never been accused of making price competitive hardware by anybody except a fanboy.
You can certainly run Linux on your Mac, but that's a pretty limited subset of people to begin with. Considering the last Mac OS only cost $20 to begin with and you likely didn't have too many people holding out for cost reasons alone. In other words, the people that wanted to have the Mac hardware with Linux almost certainly made that move a while ago. This really doesn't impact much of anyone.
They had 8 systems in the cluster and only rolled out the code to 7 of them. The upgrade only ran on part of the cluster before it was put into production. A simple peer review would have caught the failure on the 8th system and prevented in from going live. A simple test would have caught that code on system didn't match the others. The more critical the system is the higher the level of review it should have before going live.
This is what maintenance windows and peer review are for. So, yes, these failures are trivially avoidable by following best practices and testing before releasing to production. Traveling as a consultant that implemented changes like these onto production systems used on exchanges is how I made my living for a few years. It really isn't difficult, you just have to have a best practices friendly process and follow it.
I actually made your point on a comment I made about this story yesterday and am in complete agreement with you. The lack of proper process is what did this in and their failure to have proper change management and follow industry best practices is incompetence of the highest level. This was entirely preventable and I would have been fired in a heartbeat if I had done this when I was doing that work.
The problem with this is that they didn't know they were losing money.
That is a load of utter bullocks.
The problem is that they have any kind of process for testing things before putting them into production. It was a cowboy operation without following best practices and a result like this was inevitable. If they had followed best practices and done testing ahead of time, they would have known before losing hundreds of millions of dollars. But they didn't do that, they didn't do peer review or a number of other things. There are reasons that process is developed even though it is inconvenient.
This was entirely preventable and the only way I would have sympathy for the programmers or sysadmins if someone had stepped up and said we need to run things through a dev to production test process and got overruled. Everything else was incompetence. You don't roll out new code to production without vetting it and verifying the results. The higher the risk, the closer you review the results.
This, a thousand times this. I have never met a security professional that thought their environment was secure. Everything is always coached within the context of risk management.
This had absolutely jack to do with bad code, that wasn't the problem. The problem was a failure to adhere to best practices that would have prevented the bad code from ever seeing production to begin with. The lack of a process for the distribution of code to production made a failure for bad code inevitable.
This was sheer incompetence of the highest magnitude and should have been readily caught in the lab. This is what happens when cowboys run the show and ITIL is considered a four letter word. Take your younger staff, the wannabe cowboys and make them read this report. Let them learn at others incompetence. As for getting your management to read this, that's an entirely different story.
Wikipedia was run by people that equated quantity with quality. It was routine to see someone heralded as authoritative because they had made tens of thousand or more edits. In reality the only thing that shows is that someone is obsessive compulsive, doesn't have a job or has a job where they don't have to work. The result was large numbers of articles that were complete and utter crap, a few that were well qualified and the constant question of was the last edit done by a PhD that's an expert in the field or a bored teenager?
It's long overdue for quantity to step to the wayside so that quality can step up to the plate. When wikipedia can stop ranking editors by quantity and start ranking editors by quality the entire site will gain credibility. The concept that just anyone can know what their talking and edit something accordingly leads to idiots that cite wikipedia over the CDC or a thousand other examples I can think of.
Wikipedia still suffers from tremendous a vocal minority on certain political subjects that are locked and to prevent any viewpoint other than the vocal minority that won the right to represent their view on the given subject. Wikipedia has made improvements, but it has a hell of a long way to go before it can be anything other than a starting point for the curious and gullible.
I/have/ worked in that environment, and Chicago and others. In total I have worked with companies with presences around about 40 exchanges across the world. I have worked with machines on the trading floor and servers on the back end of the exchanges. I've had budgets measured in watts, not dollars and played the latency game. I've been up to my eyeballs in making sure everything was compliant with SEC rules and regulations.
There are tools that are are used for implementing change to production servers. I used to work as a consultant that implemented the use of one of these tools. My job brought me to the companies that run on these exchanges where I implemented said tools. I always made sure companies had process to implement change to avoid doing exactly the kind of thing this company did. Considering this is how I made my living for a few years I'm inclined to say this is possible.
There is no reason this can't be done on Wall Street, I've done it. There is no reason things can't be tested in development first. It's simply a matter of having the resources, process and training available to the staff that need them.
No proper change management, no peer review, no proper lab testing. Dev should always reflect production to the greatest reasonable level. No proper maintenance windows. You should never be surprised by a change in production. This is a case study in incompetence and the failure to execute industry best practices. I'm guessing the guy or gal who raised the best practices flag was ignored as being inconvenient or too expensive.
If I'd done this kind of thing when I was working with the exchanges I would have been fired in a heartbeat. Whoever failed to utilize best practices, or whoever failed to allow the utilization of best practices had damn well better have been fired. This is incompetence of the highest level and a perfect example of why ITIL based best practices were born.
Some blue laws stick around for reasons that have nothing to do with religion. In Minnesota every few years someone gets irritated that you can't go to a liquor store or a car dealership on Sunday and tries to overturn the blue laws prohibiting it. Inevitably the car dealerships and liquor stores are always the ones that fight overturning the blue laws.
The reason is simple and it has nothing to do with religion. As long as everyone has to be closed on Sunday no one has to incur the cost of being open on Sunday. Since Sunday is generally a poor day for most retail anyways, it literally isn't worth being open unless your competitors are. As long as all of the competitors are all closed than there is nothing to be gained as any possible sales would happen on another day anyways.
Mileage doesn't work because you get taxed when you drive out of state. GPS doesn't work because it's big brother in your car and it's a political nightmare. Refusing to acknowledge that non gas using vehicles cause wear and tear also doesn't work, especially as society shifts towards using more and more of them.
The reality is that every vehicle on the road has a certain impact. The only way to avoid double taxation for fuel with a mileage based tax is to simply charge a large annual fee for the license tab. You then couple this with repealing the gas tax entirely so that you aren't taxing people twice over. You could even make it affordable by putting the price into peoples taxes and letting people take payroll deductions so that they don't get hit with large fees every year.
You can then charge a given amount based on the weight of the vehicle. Using the weight of the vehicle is arguably the fairest way to do this as the vehicles weight is the largest contributing factor to the amount of wear and tear it causes to infrastructure. This way commercial vehicles get charged appropriately for the greater wear and tear they inflict while small vehicles that don't cause a lot of wear and tear get charged less.
Everyone uses the road system and it's only fair that everyone pays for it. Think about, what happens if the dreams of Tesla motors and similar companies are realized and were no longer using gas at all?
I've got exactly what you need! Tinfoil hats are cheap. They are easy, to make too, it takes less than two minutes. Don't believe the MIT study that debunks the time honored tinfoil hat, it's a government conspiracy you know!
Don't worry, there are support groups for conspiracy theorists! Now I know like any number of other conspiracy theories those pesky facts might get in the way. However, learn from Joseph Goebbels and don't ever let logic, facts or reality get in your way. I know you look like a raving lunatic to any rational person, but not to worry, there is someone even crazier will soon show up to defend you, so cheer up!
This policy will change just as soon as someone posts a beheading video of a friend or family member of a high ranking executive of Google or Facebook. Until it's personal it's an abstract that gets clicks and makes money.
Meanwhile they will zealously block the boob in the name of family values. America, where boobs are abhorrent and snuff videos are protected for profit. Something is very wrong here.
Okay, your not helping yourself or anyone else like you think you are. I'm not writing this response for you personally, I'm writing it before other people follow your advice and get themselves in legal trouble.
You have rights if your a fraud victim and you should exercise them, which you haven't done. In order to protect yourself and your credit rating you have to file a fraud complaint and send it to the and creditagency and company.
If you don't do that the company can continue to report against your credit report and you can be sued by the company in the jurisdiction that they have on file and get a judgment against you. Without a fraud dispute the company has no way of knowing your right address and the fraudulent address will be used for the jurisdiction you are sued under. Once a judgment is issued against someone you can have your wages garnished, credit ruined, tax refunds seized and property sold at auction.
You'll have hell to get an judgment overturned that was issued in another jurisdiction and than your in a position of explaining why you couldn't be bothered to write a simple affidavit and mail it in. Someone following your advice could well get a judgment against them that they couldn't get rid of - even after proving they didn't take it out. With a lot of jurisdictions allowing people to be arrested in order to enforce payment of judgments your advice could well put someone in jail.
* Before I worked in IT I made a living performing large balance credit card fraud investigations ($5000+). I was the one of two people in a well known company that would track down situations like yours. Please stop giving legal advice when you haven't got the slightest clue what your talking about.
Publishers are killing gaming on the PC through ever escalating levels of DRM. The PC has pretty well always been the better platform for gaming from a technical sense for hardware capability. You had the ability to upgrade your system, patch it and customize it at levels that a console could never match. A console is only updated every so many years, patching is a logistical pain if is even possible and the only customizations you can do are typically to the outside of the case.
The problem is that publishers have been cranking up the DRM to higher and higher levels of entitlement. What originally started as nothing more than deprivation of the product quickly became deprivation of your computer. Games would do things like replace hardware drivers and interfere with your ability to burn CD's or DVD's. The DRM measures were typically not disclosed and worse not uninstalled upon removing the game.
Gamers could spend hours upon hours trying to figure out why their computer wasn't working correctly only to discover that SecureROM or another product had done something like replacing drivers for their hardware. Nobody appreciates having a product sabotage their computer and the DRM companies refused to cooperate with disclosing anything about what they were doing to peoples computers. The result often required hours of troubleshooting at best to a complete rebuild to restore a computer. You also had the loss of the original software that caused the problem to begin with and were typically out at least $50.
Add in stunts like mandatory activation, registration and serial numbers and you end up with something that cannot be used anonymously and forced the disclosure of marketing information. Even when activation worked many companies would then self destruct the ability to use software if you made certain undisclosed changes. Things escalated to the point where simply changing a piece of hardware in your computer would be enough to ruin your game as it then refused to play.
Self entitlement furthered to the point where you had to be online to check in your serial number just to start a game. Publishers were oblivious to the fact that that most of the world does not live in Silicon Valley and for many people this was not reasonable. Once publishers started requiring players to be online in order to play at all they really burned the last of the bridges.
For a regular user, even one who has purchased the software it has become a situation that simply isn't worth it anymore. Countless millions of people have purchased a piece of software only to turn around and then download the pirated version just to get something that worked and didn't break their computer.
Are computers technically superior in just about every way? Absolutely, but the computer gaming industry is imploding from self entitlement and the publishers will have a future of paying higher and higher royalties to Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft.
The union of concerned scientists is effectively a front for Greenpeace. They are rabidly anti-nuclear in any regard. It's a bit like saying your going to claim the Tea Party to be neutral on taxes.
It can be done, but let's look at what you did. You used a series of keyboard commands to take and save your screenshot. However this required:
Print Screen - dedicated special key many typical users don't know about Windows Key - everyone knows this, no problem paint - remember how to spell the name of the program - big problem for non standard applications! enter - confirming what you typed - users have to be trained though CTRL V - non-intuitive and something you definitely have to train people on CTRL S - non-intuitive as well and another thing to remember.
In essence you have a series of commands to memorize instead of a simple visual interface that you can stumble your way through. There is absolutely no doubt that these kind of short cuts have been available since the earliest days of Windows (other OS's have them as well). Unfortunately this would require a training class to teach everyone how to use as well as helpdesk time to remind people for follow up. Likewise a similar training class would be required for how to use the Metro interface.
My last employer had over 30,000 systems. Another recent one I worked as an architect at has over 100,000 systems. I know you can do what you described, but in order for Bob in Sales, Suzy in accounting and tens of thousands of others to know this it going to take a lot of training. This training could be in the form of a CBT in which case I have licensing, testing and delivery considerations. The training could be in the form of classroom training in which case I have logistical issues involving that. I could try to have trickle down training where I turn Bob's boss in Sales into a trainer, but that that tends to be a disaster.
All of these would quickly run into costs that would be sky high and in most environments training would never be approved. I've seen organizations look at the training costs and instead send emails to try to train users on this kind of thing. The result is always either a flood of calls to the help desk or users who remain untrained and use a product wrong. Any which way I go I am losing productivity across an entire enterprise.
Frankly anybody incompetent enough to force their enterprise to go through that instead of sticking with the same menu structure that doesn't require training to begin with deserves to be fired. No architect is going to do that to their organization, and the result is that the enterprise simply refuses to use Windows 8 and published adoption rates show deployment of Windows 8 is the lowest of any Windows operating system ever.
Which is great for a single user on their own personal computer. However the idea of doing that for the enterprise with tens of thousands or a 100,000+ systems is something that I should never have to do. Star Dock, Classic Shell and like kind programs shouldn't be needed to begin with and there are questions of scalability, stability, support and so on (all the more so since it would be a core app). It's simply too big of a kludge and not worth the risk unless you are financially invested in Microsoft stock.
It's a bit like Firefox. I used it personally at home for years while simultaneously refusing to even consider deploying it within the enterprise. What works great for the user doesn't necessarily scale for the enterprise and the product has to be both mature and predictable. The programmers behind a product might be the best on earth, but the needs of the enterprise go beyond simply filling the check box of does the program do 'x'.
The worst downturn the industry has ever seen is a bit hysterical, seriously? The entire industry is losing billions of dollars over something that is being rejected by consumers at a level never before seen in history and you think I'm being hysterical? Do you pay any attention to the industry whatsoever?
Things are so bad that some OEM's have stared risking inclusion of third party start menus in a desperate attempt to get consumers to start buying PC's again. Your right that the enterprise will keep using Windows 7 and skip over Windows 8 just like Vista. However unless Microsoft fixes things with Windows 9 (Windows Blue includes a transition to yearly updates to the OS) they will also skip other versions. By the time the enterprise is ready to transition off of Windows 7 it is entirely feasible that other companies (Apple, Ubuntu, Google etc) will finally be ready for the enterprise.
This is sort of what Windows 8 should have been to begin with. What this doesn't do is fix the issue with the missing Start MENU. The result is that every time you need to load an application through the menu you are forced back into the abomination that is the Metro interface. This is a deal breaker for the enterprise and shows Microsoft's continued contempt for their customers and what their customers need.
A tablet interface has no business on a desktop and Microsoft should have made it completely optional. Fixing boot to desktop was a half hearted start to be able to say they were listening to feedback - sort of. However the stunt with the Start Button instead of the Start Menu was a slap in the face to the enterprise and large OEM's that have been begging Microsoft to restore the Start Menu.
Sales will continue their worst downturn in history since the advent of the personal computer. OEM's will continue to lose money hand over fist. Enterprise customers held with contempt are evaluating third party vendors they never would have considered before. If you force people to use a new interface regardless, than it's an opportunity for your customers to pick what that interface is going to be. Sales of Mac's to the Enterprise have hit record highs, Linux is breaking through where it never did before. People are even toying with Chromebooks.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me
It's an old saying used to make pretend that bullying isn't a real thing and that the victim has the power to stop things. It also happens to be one of the greatest lies ever told to generations of victims by adults that couldn't be bothered to do anything to help the victim.
Countless kids have committed or attempted suicide after being bullied to death. It's time to stop blaming the victims in society and start holding the perpetrators accountable. The kids who did this deserve to be in juvenile prison as surely as if they had pulled the trigger themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation please
The cloud is the most hyped word that IT has ever come endured. It is nothing more than the old concept of the mainframe to centralize resources to a given location. People replaced that with thin clients and again it was nothing more than a way to centralize resources to a given location. Now we have the cloud and we are centralizing resources to a given location.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like duck it must be a duck. Azure and other cloud variants are nothing more than attempts to move everyone to the cloud (and encourage outsourcing of services). However the cloud doesn't even mean a third party provider anymore. You can get a cloud provider to put their cloud services in your own facilities (Amazon and Microsoft Azure both support doing this). It's really nothing more than the old architecture diagram model for saying "the network" that got hijacked by marketing departments.
All your doing with the cloud is putting resources in a given location. It might be your location, Amazon's, Rack Spaces or any other providers. That's it, there's nothing magical about it. Therefore all Azure is doing is making it easy to put resources in another location. This is something that IT professionals have been doing for over 40 years, changing the name make it special.
Make a package, use version control, or you could use something like trip wire, look for differences, or you could use your cluster control software to look for differences. Even something as simple as looking for differences between the file sizes, and MD5 checksum, or a failure report from your delivery mechanism. Without doubt there are a number of other methods to do this.
The bottom line is to look for differences between the nodes of the cluster and you should pretty readily be able to tell that one of your systems isn't like the other. The peer review process should have looked for this difference before it went to production. This was a business critical system and the service owner should have had their representative sign off on the change during a maintenance window as successful.
By the way, they trading firms will often retain old data just for the purpose of using it for testing systems like this in the Development lab. Set it up in a VLAN, isolate it from production and simulate an hour or two's worth of trading against known results to see what comes up. Now the testing for that is far more complicated as your simulating data and that is a different story altogether.
Couldn't agree with you more. I set up the Software Delivery and Patch Management process at a very large trading company with a presence in just about every exchange across the world.
It took 6 months to develop the process, build up the lab, institute change management, get people to understand the differences between Server up time and Service up time, introduce maintenance windows and their associated SLAs, all the way up to having an inventory of the disks used on the servers with the appropriate certified techs on hand for those first reboots. Developing the process involved two different server teams, the network team, management, infrastructure, database team, two security teams and myself.
When everything was said and done the basic process fit on a single page Visio slide. Everything worked on a ticket system with each person assigned a given responsibility for part of the ticket and a peer review before anything went live. I also pressed that business critical systems had to be signed off on by the service owner to prevent something like this from happening.
The time to develop the process took a while, however once it was up and running the time to actually runs things through it was fairly quick. Since everything was in the ticket it was easy to see exactly where things were at, who signed off on what and to ensure that due diligence was done.
Free OS X doesn't compete with Linux except on a very limited basis - it's free.
Unless you build a hackintosh and blatantly violate the license you can't even install OS X anywhere except a Mac. It's very distinctly not open source and arguably just as proprietary as Windows. It's free, but only if you purchased the hardware to begin with, and Apple has never been accused of making price competitive hardware by anybody except a fanboy.
You can certainly run Linux on your Mac, but that's a pretty limited subset of people to begin with. Considering the last Mac OS only cost $20 to begin with and you likely didn't have too many people holding out for cost reasons alone. In other words, the people that wanted to have the Mac hardware with Linux almost certainly made that move a while ago. This really doesn't impact much of anyone.
They had 8 systems in the cluster and only rolled out the code to 7 of them. The upgrade only ran on part of the cluster before it was put into production. A simple peer review would have caught the failure on the 8th system and prevented in from going live. A simple test would have caught that code on system didn't match the others. The more critical the system is the higher the level of review it should have before going live.
This is what maintenance windows and peer review are for. So, yes, these failures are trivially avoidable by following best practices and testing before releasing to production. Traveling as a consultant that implemented changes like these onto production systems used on exchanges is how I made my living for a few years. It really isn't difficult, you just have to have a best practices friendly process and follow it.
I actually made your point on a comment I made about this story yesterday and am in complete agreement with you. The lack of proper process is what did this in and their failure to have proper change management and follow industry best practices is incompetence of the highest level. This was entirely preventable and I would have been fired in a heartbeat if I had done this when I was doing that work.
That is a load of utter bullocks.
The problem is that they have any kind of process for testing things before putting them into production. It was a cowboy operation without following best practices and a result like this was inevitable. If they had followed best practices and done testing ahead of time, they would have known before losing hundreds of millions of dollars. But they didn't do that, they didn't do peer review or a number of other things. There are reasons that process is developed even though it is inconvenient.
This was entirely preventable and the only way I would have sympathy for the programmers or sysadmins if someone had stepped up and said we need to run things through a dev to production test process and got overruled. Everything else was incompetence. You don't roll out new code to production without vetting it and verifying the results. The higher the risk, the closer you review the results.
This, a thousand times this. I have never met a security professional that thought their environment was secure. Everything is always coached within the context of risk management.
This had absolutely jack to do with bad code, that wasn't the problem. The problem was a failure to adhere to best practices that would have prevented the bad code from ever seeing production to begin with. The lack of a process for the distribution of code to production made a failure for bad code inevitable.
This was sheer incompetence of the highest magnitude and should have been readily caught in the lab. This is what happens when cowboys run the show and ITIL is considered a four letter word. Take your younger staff, the wannabe cowboys and make them read this report. Let them learn at others incompetence. As for getting your management to read this, that's an entirely different story.
Wikipedia was run by people that equated quantity with quality. It was routine to see someone heralded as authoritative because they had made tens of thousand or more edits. In reality the only thing that shows is that someone is obsessive compulsive, doesn't have a job or has a job where they don't have to work. The result was large numbers of articles that were complete and utter crap, a few that were well qualified and the constant question of was the last edit done by a PhD that's an expert in the field or a bored teenager?
It's long overdue for quantity to step to the wayside so that quality can step up to the plate. When wikipedia can stop ranking editors by quantity and start ranking editors by quality the entire site will gain credibility. The concept that just anyone can know what their talking and edit something accordingly leads to idiots that cite wikipedia over the CDC or a thousand other examples I can think of.
Wikipedia still suffers from tremendous a vocal minority on certain political subjects that are locked and to prevent any viewpoint other than the vocal minority that won the right to represent their view on the given subject. Wikipedia has made improvements, but it has a hell of a long way to go before it can be anything other than a starting point for the curious and gullible.
I /have/ worked in that environment, and Chicago and others. In total I have worked with companies with presences around about 40 exchanges across the world. I have worked with machines on the trading floor and servers on the back end of the exchanges. I've had budgets measured in watts, not dollars and played the latency game. I've been up to my eyeballs in making sure everything was compliant with SEC rules and regulations.
There are tools that are are used for implementing change to production servers. I used to work as a consultant that implemented the use of one of these tools. My job brought me to the companies that run on these exchanges where I implemented said tools. I always made sure companies had process to implement change to avoid doing exactly the kind of thing this company did. Considering this is how I made my living for a few years I'm inclined to say this is possible.
There is no reason this can't be done on Wall Street, I've done it. There is no reason things can't be tested in development first. It's simply a matter of having the resources, process and training available to the staff that need them.
No proper change management, no peer review, no proper lab testing. Dev should always reflect production to the greatest reasonable level. No proper maintenance windows. You should never be surprised by a change in production. This is a case study in incompetence and the failure to execute industry best practices. I'm guessing the guy or gal who raised the best practices flag was ignored as being inconvenient or too expensive.
If I'd done this kind of thing when I was working with the exchanges I would have been fired in a heartbeat. Whoever failed to utilize best practices, or whoever failed to allow the utilization of best practices had damn well better have been fired. This is incompetence of the highest level and a perfect example of why ITIL based best practices were born.
Some blue laws stick around for reasons that have nothing to do with religion. In Minnesota every few years someone gets irritated that you can't go to a liquor store or a car dealership on Sunday and tries to overturn the blue laws prohibiting it. Inevitably the car dealerships and liquor stores are always the ones that fight overturning the blue laws.
The reason is simple and it has nothing to do with religion. As long as everyone has to be closed on Sunday no one has to incur the cost of being open on Sunday. Since Sunday is generally a poor day for most retail anyways, it literally isn't worth being open unless your competitors are. As long as all of the competitors are all closed than there is nothing to be gained as any possible sales would happen on another day anyways.
Mileage doesn't work because you get taxed when you drive out of state. GPS doesn't work because it's big brother in your car and it's a political nightmare. Refusing to acknowledge that non gas using vehicles cause wear and tear also doesn't work, especially as society shifts towards using more and more of them.
The reality is that every vehicle on the road has a certain impact. The only way to avoid double taxation for fuel with a mileage based tax is to simply charge a large annual fee for the license tab. You then couple this with repealing the gas tax entirely so that you aren't taxing people twice over. You could even make it affordable by putting the price into peoples taxes and letting people take payroll deductions so that they don't get hit with large fees every year.
You can then charge a given amount based on the weight of the vehicle. Using the weight of the vehicle is arguably the fairest way to do this as the vehicles weight is the largest contributing factor to the amount of wear and tear it causes to infrastructure. This way commercial vehicles get charged appropriately for the greater wear and tear they inflict while small vehicles that don't cause a lot of wear and tear get charged less.
Everyone uses the road system and it's only fair that everyone pays for it. Think about, what happens if the dreams of Tesla motors and similar companies are realized and were no longer using gas at all?
I've got exactly what you need! Tinfoil hats are cheap. They are easy, to make too, it takes less than two minutes. Don't believe the MIT study that debunks the time honored tinfoil hat, it's a government conspiracy you know!
Don't worry, there are support groups for conspiracy theorists! Now I know like any number of other conspiracy theories those pesky facts might get in the way. However, learn from Joseph Goebbels and don't ever let logic, facts or reality get in your way. I know you look like a raving lunatic to any rational person, but not to worry, there is someone even crazier will soon show up to defend you, so cheer up!
This policy will change just as soon as someone posts a beheading video of a friend or family member of a high ranking executive of Google or Facebook. Until it's personal it's an abstract that gets clicks and makes money.
Meanwhile they will zealously block the boob in the name of family values. America, where boobs are abhorrent and snuff videos are protected for profit. Something is very wrong here.
Okay, your not helping yourself or anyone else like you think you are. I'm not writing this response for you personally, I'm writing it before other people follow your advice and get themselves in legal trouble.
You have rights if your a fraud victim and you should exercise them, which you haven't done. In order to protect yourself and your credit rating you have to file a fraud complaint and send it to the and credit agency and company.
If you don't do that the company can continue to report against your credit report and you can be sued by the company in the jurisdiction that they have on file and get a judgment against you. Without a fraud dispute the company has no way of knowing your right address and the fraudulent address will be used for the jurisdiction you are sued under. Once a judgment is issued against someone you can have your wages garnished, credit ruined, tax refunds seized and property sold at auction.
You'll have hell to get an judgment overturned that was issued in another jurisdiction and than your in a position of explaining why you couldn't be bothered to write a simple affidavit and mail it in. Someone following your advice could well get a judgment against them that they couldn't get rid of - even after proving they didn't take it out. With a lot of jurisdictions allowing people to be arrested in order to enforce payment of judgments your advice could well put someone in jail.
* Before I worked in IT I made a living performing large balance credit card fraud investigations ($5000+). I was the one of two people in a well known company that would track down situations like yours. Please stop giving legal advice when you haven't got the slightest clue what your talking about.
Publishers are killing gaming on the PC through ever escalating levels of DRM. The PC has pretty well always been the better platform for gaming from a technical sense for hardware capability. You had the ability to upgrade your system, patch it and customize it at levels that a console could never match. A console is only updated every so many years, patching is a logistical pain if is even possible and the only customizations you can do are typically to the outside of the case.
The problem is that publishers have been cranking up the DRM to higher and higher levels of entitlement. What originally started as nothing more than deprivation of the product quickly became deprivation of your computer. Games would do things like replace hardware drivers and interfere with your ability to burn CD's or DVD's. The DRM measures were typically not disclosed and worse not uninstalled upon removing the game.
Gamers could spend hours upon hours trying to figure out why their computer wasn't working correctly only to discover that SecureROM or another product had done something like replacing drivers for their hardware. Nobody appreciates having a product sabotage their computer and the DRM companies refused to cooperate with disclosing anything about what they were doing to peoples computers. The result often required hours of troubleshooting at best to a complete rebuild to restore a computer. You also had the loss of the original software that caused the problem to begin with and were typically out at least $50.
Add in stunts like mandatory activation, registration and serial numbers and you end up with something that cannot be used anonymously and forced the disclosure of marketing information. Even when activation worked many companies would then self destruct the ability to use software if you made certain undisclosed changes. Things escalated to the point where simply changing a piece of hardware in your computer would be enough to ruin your game as it then refused to play.
Self entitlement furthered to the point where you had to be online to check in your serial number just to start a game. Publishers were oblivious to the fact that that most of the world does not live in Silicon Valley and for many people this was not reasonable. Once publishers started requiring players to be online in order to play at all they really burned the last of the bridges.
For a regular user, even one who has purchased the software it has become a situation that simply isn't worth it anymore. Countless millions of people have purchased a piece of software only to turn around and then download the pirated version just to get something that worked and didn't break their computer.
Are computers technically superior in just about every way? Absolutely, but the computer gaming industry is imploding from self entitlement and the publishers will have a future of paying higher and higher royalties to Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft.
The union of concerned scientists is effectively a front for Greenpeace. They are rabidly anti-nuclear in any regard. It's a bit like saying your going to claim the Tea Party to be neutral on taxes.
It can be done, but let's look at what you did. You used a series of keyboard commands to take and save your screenshot. However this required:
Print Screen - dedicated special key many typical users don't know about
Windows Key - everyone knows this, no problem
paint - remember how to spell the name of the program - big problem for non standard applications!
enter - confirming what you typed - users have to be trained though
CTRL V - non-intuitive and something you definitely have to train people on
CTRL S - non-intuitive as well and another thing to remember.
In essence you have a series of commands to memorize instead of a simple visual interface that you can stumble your way through. There is absolutely no doubt that these kind of short cuts have been available since the earliest days of Windows (other OS's have them as well). Unfortunately this would require a training class to teach everyone how to use as well as helpdesk time to remind people for follow up. Likewise a similar training class would be required for how to use the Metro interface.
My last employer had over 30,000 systems. Another recent one I worked as an architect at has over 100,000 systems. I know you can do what you described, but in order for Bob in Sales, Suzy in accounting and tens of thousands of others to know this it going to take a lot of training. This training could be in the form of a CBT in which case I have licensing, testing and delivery considerations. The training could be in the form of classroom training in which case I have logistical issues involving that. I could try to have trickle down training where I turn Bob's boss in Sales into a trainer, but that that tends to be a disaster.
All of these would quickly run into costs that would be sky high and in most environments training would never be approved. I've seen organizations look at the training costs and instead send emails to try to train users on this kind of thing. The result is always either a flood of calls to the help desk or users who remain untrained and use a product wrong. Any which way I go I am losing productivity across an entire enterprise.
Frankly anybody incompetent enough to force their enterprise to go through that instead of sticking with the same menu structure that doesn't require training to begin with deserves to be fired. No architect is going to do that to their organization, and the result is that the enterprise simply refuses to use Windows 8 and published adoption rates show deployment of Windows 8 is the lowest of any Windows operating system ever.
Which is great for a single user on their own personal computer. However the idea of doing that for the enterprise with tens of thousands or a 100,000+ systems is something that I should never have to do. Star Dock, Classic Shell and like kind programs shouldn't be needed to begin with and there are questions of scalability, stability, support and so on (all the more so since it would be a core app). It's simply too big of a kludge and not worth the risk unless you are financially invested in Microsoft stock.
It's a bit like Firefox. I used it personally at home for years while simultaneously refusing to even consider deploying it within the enterprise. What works great for the user doesn't necessarily scale for the enterprise and the product has to be both mature and predictable. The programmers behind a product might be the best on earth, but the needs of the enterprise go beyond simply filling the check box of does the program do 'x'.
The worst downturn the industry has ever seen is a bit hysterical, seriously? The entire industry is losing billions of dollars over something that is being rejected by consumers at a level never before seen in history and you think I'm being hysterical? Do you pay any attention to the industry whatsoever?
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/10/08/northamber_fiscal_13/
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238326/Windows_8_takes_blame_for_brutal_PC_sales_slide
http://www.electronista.com/articles/13/04/10/apple.toshiba.beating.industry.average.still.suffering.downturns/
http://www.statesman.com/news/business/slump-deepens-for-global-pc-sales/nXH6c/
Things are so bad that some OEM's have stared risking inclusion of third party start menus in a desperate attempt to get consumers to start buying PC's again. Your right that the enterprise will keep using Windows 7 and skip over Windows 8 just like Vista. However unless Microsoft fixes things with Windows 9 (Windows Blue includes a transition to yearly updates to the OS) they will also skip other versions. By the time the enterprise is ready to transition off of Windows 7 it is entirely feasible that other companies (Apple, Ubuntu, Google etc) will finally be ready for the enterprise.
The Start Menu really is that big of a deal.
This is sort of what Windows 8 should have been to begin with. What this doesn't do is fix the issue with the missing Start MENU. The result is that every time you need to load an application through the menu you are forced back into the abomination that is the Metro interface. This is a deal breaker for the enterprise and shows Microsoft's continued contempt for their customers and what their customers need.
A tablet interface has no business on a desktop and Microsoft should have made it completely optional. Fixing boot to desktop was a half hearted start to be able to say they were listening to feedback - sort of. However the stunt with the Start Button instead of the Start Menu was a slap in the face to the enterprise and large OEM's that have been begging Microsoft to restore the Start Menu.
Sales will continue their worst downturn in history since the advent of the personal computer. OEM's will continue to lose money hand over fist. Enterprise customers held with contempt are evaluating third party vendors they never would have considered before. If you force people to use a new interface regardless, than it's an opportunity for your customers to pick what that interface is going to be. Sales of Mac's to the Enterprise have hit record highs, Linux is breaking through where it never did before. People are even toying with Chromebooks.
It's an old saying used to make pretend that bullying isn't a real thing and that the victim has the power to stop things. It also happens to be one of the greatest lies ever told to generations of victims by adults that couldn't be bothered to do anything to help the victim.
Countless kids have committed or attempted suicide after being bullied to death. It's time to stop blaming the victims in society and start holding the perpetrators accountable. The kids who did this deserve to be in juvenile prison as surely as if they had pulled the trigger themselves.