Managing 800 GB of storage back then was like managing 8 TB today. LTO tapes that only held 100 gigs, only 100 meg ethernet.
IIRC, only about 100 GB was really active, maybe another 50 was warm-ish and the rest was just cold data from old projects and forgotten crap, like today.
The problem was compounded by the client, a cellular company, who would come up with a promotion and then tweak it for the 20-odd markets the ad was supposed to run in. If it was a truly simple ad (which they seldom were), you would have the same base layout (Quark file, graphics, fonts, misc other stuff) times the number of markets.
Where it got fun is when the client wanted to see variations of the ad AND the way it had to change for various markets. If an ad had 5 variations, now you had 100 versions of the same ad and the graphics department never really made use of some of the storage efficiencies offered even back then (ie, graphic elements that never changed only existing once in the filesystem), so you literally would end up with 100 directories with graphics duplicated many times over.
I've noticed that graphics dedupes really well -- one client with 4 TB of raw graphics files gets 80% dedupe on that volume. Wish I would have had that back then. Between thin provisioning and dedupe, it would have made for a lot less equipment at least.
I'm not "Jeff's" marriage counselor, nor exposed to all the private details of his or any of my other friend's lives. It could just be that birds of a feather flock together, and we're all generally friends because we share similar personalities and weaknesses and that just leads to a high correlation of similar relationship strengths and weaknesses.
If you can't ask your partner for intimacy, then it's not biology, it's communication.
You can ask for sex, but I don't think you can ask for intimacy -- intimacy requires an organic desire that originates within the partners. Sex can kindle intimacy, but it can't create it.
I think one of the challenges, though, of the asking is that if you ask and you get it, what are you actually getting? Are you getting a partner who is motivated out of an organic, genuine interest, or are you getting a partner who's going along to get along?
At best you might get a partner who provides a theatrically convincing orifice for you to orgasm in. At worst, you get an emotionally dead, passive participant, the stereotypical cold fish who just lies there and might as well have a visible thought bubble that says "Are you finished yet?"
When people complain about "not enough sex" I suspect that it's not exclusively frequency that's the complaint, it's at least as much a complaint about a lack of organic, internally originated enthusiasm for sex.
I think some men just don't care (the old joke: "Why do women fake their orgasms? Because they think men care."), and view sex as the same whether she just holds still long enough for him to finish or whether she puts on a garter and fishnet stockings and talks dirty. It wouldn't surprise me that lack of sexual satisfaction among married men today is a function of women who don't feel obligated to go along with "the marital duty" and men being more aware of what their wives actually want, creating a kind of negative feedback loop.
It doesn't seem to pan out that way, at least in my exposure to couples in their 40s. Every man I know in his 40s complains about the lack of sex in his marriage, and conventional explanations of imbalanced parenting, housekeeping, substantial physical appearance changes, etc always seem to be contradicted, often in multiple categories, in any given example.
"Jeff" complains about sex being a 1-2 times a month activity, but Jeff does about 60% of the parenting in my experience, is 6 years younger than his wife and is outstanding physical shape and very attractive (when we go out, he's almost embarrassed at how often women hit on him in bars). His wife runs a freelance marketing business and he's a solo practice attorney, so both have jobs of about equivalent levels of responsibility and income as I understand it.
My sense is that any theory of lessened sex drive in women over 40 may be contingent on marital status (ie, married) and childbearing status (have given birth) as strong influencers. Women who never married or never have given birth may have stronger social or biological influences that increase their interest in sex.
With the recent FDA approval of flibanserin (the "female Viagra"), there has been a lot of debate over it with a not insignificant chorus of women supporting it because "they want to have sex but just don't have the desire". I'd also doubt that such a drug would get developed and put through FDA scrutiny if the company and investors lacked decent data that said a good sized market didn't exist for it.
Like anything else, I don't think you can arbitrarily say "all older women don't want sex" or "women over 40 want more sex". It's probably most likely that both things can be true at the same time but with clusters of characteristics around both groupings.
I think the inherent scarcity in research resources means that you will pretty much always have a kind of gatekeeper who decides what projects and who's projects gets funded and what doesn't.
It'd be great if that gatekeeper was a neutral party without a vested interest, but I'd wager it likely takes someone inherently knowledgeable in the field to be able to intelligently understand the research requests.
You could have a committee to hopefully limit individual vested interests, but ultimately there are influencers who can stack committees.
I think if you could get researchers to acknowledge these kinds of existential confirmation biases in research selection you probably would be able to build committees with the scientific chops to evaluate research proposals but with enough outsiders that career/standing/theoretical biases wouldn't crowd out proposals with the potential to contradict prevailing theories.
Careers and status make major contributions. If you got onto the dietary cholesterol is bad for you theory early as a scientist, your entire career and standing is built around that theory.
As you gain influence and status over research proposals and funding, you're more likely to approve proposals that advance the theories you're invested in and reject proposals that might disprove your career-invested theories.
The entire process, not just individual studies or their results, becomes a victim of both ego and a kind of large-scale confirmation bias.
Gary Taubes wrote a great article for Science about this relative to research into dietary sodium intake. The people in charge of the money were heavily invested in the salt-is-bad-for-you theory and basically politicized the research process to further their own theories.
It seems excessive, but I've seen some weird shit.
I recently did some work for a company that had BOTH Office365 and a six server Exchange on premise system for maybe 500 users. Not a hybrid deployment, but two separate systems with some crazy SMTP smarthost configuration to make it act more like a hybrid configuration. Worse, the on-premise setup was a 2010/2013 hybrid with a mishmash of CAS- and mailbox-only servers and combined roles.
This same company had 30 VMs to support a single application. I didn't have anything to do with that "system" but I had a hard time wrapping my brain around how that was meant to work. Not surprisingly, this company had been a mostly-outsourced IT shop for years.
10 plus years ago I worked in advertising and that was just a plain crazy business. Client business was often based in a specific agency office and each office expected to be able to run as independently as possible and given the account management and business goals and incentives, most offices had the juice to see it done that way. One office in Irvine had (in 2001!) nearly 800 GB of storage over four servers for a headcount of less than 30. Such setups were the norm, not the exception in the 4 local offices I oversaw.
The business structure abetted this -- our agency was run as a standalone company, but wholly owned by an international holding company dominated by about 4-5 major players. Most smaller agencies had management and reporting through one of the majors, and this led to all kinds of crazy attempts at consolidation of vendors, back end services and often competing cloud-like initiatives -- two of the majors had their own private cloud-like initiatives AND there was a separate, holding-company wide initiative (mostly backed by the 3 smaller majors) that overlapped with the individual ones. From what the CFO told me, while these initiatives made some sense from elimination of redundancy the biggest motivation was the juicy "management fees" that hit the revenue side of the books of the entity controlling the initiatives. We paid $100k/year in "IT management fees" to our reporting major for literally nothing other than changing large Dell PC orders behind our backs to meet their standards (shipment refused at the dock).
It was compounded by the holding company's habit of occasionally stripping a remote office from one agency and relabeling it as another agency's office to make some client at the new parent's office with a geographically local office in the remote office's city happy they had a "local office". You can only imagine the IT chaos this led to and usually the net result was that individual office locations mostly ended up being their own IT islands just to get the job done versus frequent rip-and-replace restructuring to integrate. A small agency in San Diego got turned into one of our offices and I had two senior management officials call me within a half an hour with totally conflicting directions. The head of creative was demanding maximum integration, as soon as possible, and the CFO told me not to do a damn thing but be nice as financially we would be spending $0.00 on any integration tasks along with a Godfather-like reminder of "who I reported to."
Anyway, it's not hard to see how IT can turn into a runaway train if you combine strange business structures and incentives with outsourcing.
I don't know that I agree with the specific phrasing of the parent poster -- mostly for rhetorical reasons -- but I think he's right, despite the ridiculous criticism of the followup posters.
I'm 48 years old and 100% of the married men in my peer group (middle class, mostly white males married to mostly white females, all with white collar jobs) complain about their wives lack of interest in sex. ALL of them. I don't think any of the conventional explanations make sense.
As far as I know from my experience with them in domestic situations, all are good contributors to their kids parenting -- two have wives with more demanding jobs and their husbands probably do MORE parenting than their wives. None have any kind of financial problems. All but one are in excellent physical shape, and the former, while "chunky" looks like he did when he was 25, so he's no more out of shape than he was when he was married.
Two of them have both told me stories that when they were trying to have children -- even their second -- their wives were extremely interested in sex, and once the second baby came along -- BAM! -- no interest. Like a switch had flipped, and neither has related any significant life change that happened concurrently (major change in job responsibilities, etc).
My explanation for this is that this is mostly evolutionary biology in action. When women who have given birth hit their 40s, they lose their sex drive. The biology is probably buried in hormonal changes, especially considering that women hit menopause and go infertile.
In terms of evolution, it makes sense that biologically women would lose interest in sex as their bodies become less able to bear children. Women over 40 have increased risk of pregnancy problems, children with chromosomal problems, etc, all things that could be a threat to her or her other offspring if she were to die in childbirth. Childbearing and childrearing is demanding physically, and the older people get the less physical stamina they have.
I think as a well-known phenomenon its probably even gotten "worse" because women are less dependent on men and have greater legal recognition. In times past, older, married women probably didn't want sex any more than they do now, but either went along with it because they felt they had to or their husbands just took it because they could (yes, this is gross, and no I would never support the idea of a husband raping his wife).
This has to be a major reason for it. My wife recent got an Acura MDX and it has the technology package. The user interface is AWFUL.
My son and I took it to run an errand out to where we keep our boat. The highway interchange to take our usual route was closed, so we ended up off course. We pulled into a parking lot and it took me 20 minutes to get the navigation system to point to a location close enough that I could self-navigate.
I've owned an Apple ][, four Macintoshes, built more PCs than I can count with every version of Windows since 3.1, taught myself Linux (in the late 90s, using Slackware) and FreeBSD (which I still run) and work as an IT contractor installing VMware, Hyper-V, storage and networking.
If that UI baffles me, how the fuck does some non-techie get it?
A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, reflecting the custom of its commander, characteristically a flag officer, flying a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the first, largest, fastest, most heavily armed, or best known.
I've seen it used in automotive contexts where it seems to have a similar meaning -- I've heard the Mercedes S600 referred to as the "flagship sedan".
Since they won't be sending weapons or any admirals to those planets, I'm guessing that it will mean the biggest probe they can afford.
I only tried using them when I first got my cellular-enabled iPad. Because it was an ATT cellular model, they would automatically associate with ATT hotspots and I figured that was better than the buy-as-you-go data I used at the time.
I gave up when I realized how unusable they were and just disabled the ATT hotspot association and used LTE, which was much faster.
The free ATT hotspots I've found to be basically unusable tarpits of service that would make me grateful for the whine and hiss of a 9600 baud modem.
I've mostly encountered them at McDonalds where they were almost always unusable. I kind of wonder how they get their Internet service for these, whether they just steal from whatever the specific franchise might have or whether it's something more retarded, like an ancient 3G hotspot above the ceiling.
I heard a podcast of a lecture given by a professor of epistemology and it was truly fascinating. My take away was really how little we know and how many things we THINK we know are built on foundations of things we don't actually know.
Even simple statements like "the book is on the table" which would seem to be clear-cut statements of fact depend heavily on our understanding of what is a table, a book and what it means to be on something, and how we are able to state that we know what those things mean.
I kind of think this is BS. The closest local large grocery store has their cold storage shelves (frozen and refrigerated) along the back and side walls of the entire store. Your argument about practicality would make more sense if all of it was concentrated at the back of the store, but cold storage is like a giant U surrounding the packaged goods in the center of the store. AFAICT there is no rear access to larger bulk cold storage on any of these shelves, and most don't even have easy access to the "back room" area of the store, which I don't think is even all that big or even big enough to hold a lot of stock.
Plus, any newly built grocery stores could easily place cold storage anywhere. When it's a new store, they could easily run branch lines for power or bulk chiller feeds in the floor to where they wanted the cold items. If they wanted rear stocking or storage, just make a 6 foot wide aisle inside the larger chiller compartment (ala Costco).
It also doesn't seem like most large groceries even have that much of a "back room warehouse" for cold or packaged goods. The consumer accessible shelves seem like they are the warehouse, for cold or room temperature packaged goods.
They could probably add in a plant to do hydrogen generation with the "overflow" electricity not needed for grid purposes and pretty easily tie it into the existing natural gas network while they're at it.
Do you actually live within the Minneapolis city limits?
The utility crews were here early in the spring and I only knew it was fiber because they took a couple of days to do my immediate area and on a dog walk I saw the cable spool on the side of the road. I talked to the guys on the lift truck and they said it was Century Link.
And I thought Comcast offered faster speeds in Minneapolis -- the Strib just had an article today in the paper about how they're doubling the speeds of all their consumer tiers, and the existing Tiers I think went to 100 Mbps. I have business class, which seems exempt from these free speed upgrades but other than toe-tapping during multi-gig downloads the ~20Mbps down I get is good enough for pretty much everything I do and I love my static IPs, so I haven't been tempted to change anything.
Once competitive gigabit is actually available to my specific house (either the CL fiber or US Internet extending their footprint), I might decide the static IP game isn't necessary and start looking at shifting my home server crap to a hosted setup. I'm not convinced the economics will work in my favor, but the price for static IPs and gigabit fiber from USI is expensive.
Century Link recently had a utility crew in my residential neighborhood in Minneapolis stringing fiber optic cable on the poles. I don't think we've gotten any SUBSCRIBE NOW! fliers in the mail from them, but I would wager that Comcast has lost a lot of TV subscribers and more and more people are just hanging onto a TV subscription (often lower-end, like me) just because they're the only high speed Internet game available.
Once you get someone offering gigabit in your area for prices on par with Comcast, even more people will think WTF, why pay for even the few channels I get but don't watch just for Internet?
Serious Internet competition has to scare Comcast because it eliminates both a TV customer and an Internet customer.
I also wonder if speed increases aren't also due to more coax capacity being available for data due to stuff like switched digital video and fewer TV customers generally.
...if they have the sophistication to model the actual costs of the various options in a comprehensive way that includes deciphering the hazy costs associated with cloud hosting itself (availability options, CPU options, storage costs etc), premise costs (upgraded Internet access with true secondary path), migration costs (can some systems be just P2V'd to a cloud hosting provider or does it involve a platform switch and/or upgrade?), impact on staffing, general in-house implementation from a desktop perspective, etc, as well as longer-term contingency costs like deciding it doesn't work and needing to migrate back.
And then do the same for premise hosted systems, and then compare for reasonable lifetime of ownership (3-5 years).
Many IT people could probably do this themselves but Finance doing this would be smarter since they have access and understanding of other business cost dynamics. And it helps do it as in-depth as possible.
But it depends on the definition of finance and how sophisticated they are. My experience lately has been a surprising number of cloud adopters going back to on premise for a lot of things because they found cloud to be expensive and when they looked at what they actually ended up paying versus what it had cost them to do it on site found on site to be cost competitive and have flexibility that cloud lacked.
This leads me to believe that cloud pricing is very opaque and these organizations didn't do a lot of cost modeling, somebody heard cloud and some kind of $19.95/month sales pitch and mentally compared that to the last IT infrastructure invoice they paid.
They should allow drugs that mellow prisoners out and use access to them as a behavioral control mechanism.
Would you rather run a prison where men are in cages with no outlets for the boredom, rage and hostility, or run a prison where men can smoke marijuana and mellow out?
Prison supplied pot would greatly undermine the drug trade which would have all kind of ancillary benefits itself in terms of limiting gang influence, as well as providing an extremely attractive reward economy for good behavior.
This is why you would end up with, if not in red letter law then in case law, exemptions in for "reasonable effort" to secure systems, even if reasonable effort ended up being pretty heavy lifting (ie, certified vendors, regular external audits, well-defined security practices, etc).
I would imagine that any law would get so watered down by interested parties that it would be only the egregious cases eligible for prosecution or litigation. Anyone who could wave an audit around would be basically exempt because it would provide a reasonable effort shield which would deflect criticism.
As much as I'd like to drag all the cheap-ass executives who shortchange IT security and reliability with an eye on promotion and their own bonuses into the street and have them tarred and feathered, I can only imagine that such a regulation would have loopholes a mile wide.
What makes a system insecure? The system integration/networking? The software, especially third party software with its disclaimers about "no liability for implied merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose"?
Who judges a system as secure/insecure? If I get a third party to sign off on it, are the execs then immune? How long does a system retain its status as officially secure? Can you patch it with new patches, which theoretically could introduce their own flaws?
How about unknown zero-days? You could judge a system as secure and then a new zero-day appears in some critical security juncture that renders it insecure. Worse yet, what about unknown exploits used for which there are no patches?
To me it smells like Sarbanes-Oxley all over again.
It's a kludge, though, in NTFS, in Netware it just worked.
IPX/SPX as a layer 3 protocol isn't what I wanted, I wanted TCPv4 with a network prefix and the MAC as the node address. Clients could derive their address automatically from network traffic by picking up the network address from the wire and they already knew their MAC address.
Although to be honest, IPX/SPX even as a secondary protocol wasn't that bad to support in a mixed environment. We had no issues with TCP, IPX *and* CrappleTalk on 512k frame relay links. We retired internetworking on IPX when the last Netware servers went away but were stuck with AppleTalk (circa 2003).
I still think Netware's filesystem permission model was better than anything out there now, at least for filesharing.
The feature I miss the most is allowing traversal through a directory hierarchy a user has no explicit permissions for to get to a folder they do have permissions for. I find the workarounds for this in other filesystems to be extremely ugly.
I think NDS was better in a lot of ways than AD, although it would have been nice if there had been something better than bindery mode for eliminating the need for users to know their fully qualified NDS name.
I also kind of wish TCP/IP had used the network:mac numbering scheme that IPX used. The rest of IPX/SPX I don't need, but there'd be no talk of address exhaustion of IPv4 if that scheme had been adopted, little need for DHCP address assignment and the addressing scheme would scale to the larger broadcast domains enabled by modern switching (avoiding the need to renumber legacy segments completely when they exhausted a/24 space and expansion via mask reduction wasn't possible due to linear numbering on adjacent segments).
If you can't get a service at the first try, and the deadline is approaching, offer more. Surely these things could be automated? You wouldn't be the one making the negotiation itself, after all.
Right now I can get a predictable ride with a car in front of my house in 10 minutes. When you're on a 7:30 AM flight, how much extra time do you have to shave $5 off a ride that cost $20 to begin with and is at least a third less than a cab ever was?
Based on prices as they are now, I doubt a pure bid/ask market would significantly lower the prices. People more concerned with time than price would likely consistently overbid the price floor and drivers would probably consistently ask a price where they were guaranteed to make a profit.
Given the economics of operating a car and what rides cost now, it's hard to see drivers being profitable now. Uber policies may actually be holding off-peak prices down versus what drivers might want to make.
I've been lucky that the last time I was the victim of a crime was in 1992. I got my car window smashed in a restaurant parking lot and my stereo stolen. The cops gave me a police report number for insurance and that was the end of it.
But I've heard from two different people who live within a few blocks of me recently who had been burglary victims and the police dusted for prints in both cases, including one where the only break-in was the garage and the item stolen was a low-end bike.
Our neighborhood is, for lack of a better term, middle middle class, so I don't think we're being treated like oligarchs. Plus, we live within the actual city limits (a city of about 400,000 people), so it further surprises me that they have the resources for a print kit when it was likely somebody got shot on the other side of town.
Over the past year, though, minor burglaries have spiked somewhat so maybe there's some actually reasonable police management happening where they suspect a serial burglar. It's possible there is also some political pressure from our councillor as the neighborhood group is kind of vocal about the frequency of small burglaries. But that kind of seems like the right sort of feedback loop my 9th grade civics book would have predicted.
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Managing 800 GB of storage back then was like managing 8 TB today. LTO tapes that only held 100 gigs, only 100 meg ethernet.
IIRC, only about 100 GB was really active, maybe another 50 was warm-ish and the rest was just cold data from old projects and forgotten crap, like today.
The problem was compounded by the client, a cellular company, who would come up with a promotion and then tweak it for the 20-odd markets the ad was supposed to run in. If it was a truly simple ad (which they seldom were), you would have the same base layout (Quark file, graphics, fonts, misc other stuff) times the number of markets.
Where it got fun is when the client wanted to see variations of the ad AND the way it had to change for various markets. If an ad had 5 variations, now you had 100 versions of the same ad and the graphics department never really made use of some of the storage efficiencies offered even back then (ie, graphic elements that never changed only existing once in the filesystem), so you literally would end up with 100 directories with graphics duplicated many times over.
I've noticed that graphics dedupes really well -- one client with 4 TB of raw graphics files gets 80% dedupe on that volume. Wish I would have had that back then. Between thin provisioning and dedupe, it would have made for a lot less equipment at least.
I'm not "Jeff's" marriage counselor, nor exposed to all the private details of his or any of my other friend's lives. It could just be that birds of a feather flock together, and we're all generally friends because we share similar personalities and weaknesses and that just leads to a high correlation of similar relationship strengths and weaknesses.
If you can't ask your partner for intimacy, then it's not biology, it's communication.
You can ask for sex, but I don't think you can ask for intimacy -- intimacy requires an organic desire that originates within the partners. Sex can kindle intimacy, but it can't create it.
I think one of the challenges, though, of the asking is that if you ask and you get it, what are you actually getting? Are you getting a partner who is motivated out of an organic, genuine interest, or are you getting a partner who's going along to get along?
At best you might get a partner who provides a theatrically convincing orifice for you to orgasm in. At worst, you get an emotionally dead, passive participant, the stereotypical cold fish who just lies there and might as well have a visible thought bubble that says "Are you finished yet?"
When people complain about "not enough sex" I suspect that it's not exclusively frequency that's the complaint, it's at least as much a complaint about a lack of organic, internally originated enthusiasm for sex.
I think some men just don't care (the old joke: "Why do women fake their orgasms? Because they think men care."), and view sex as the same whether she just holds still long enough for him to finish or whether she puts on a garter and fishnet stockings and talks dirty. It wouldn't surprise me that lack of sexual satisfaction among married men today is a function of women who don't feel obligated to go along with "the marital duty" and men being more aware of what their wives actually want, creating a kind of negative feedback loop.
It doesn't seem to pan out that way, at least in my exposure to couples in their 40s. Every man I know in his 40s complains about the lack of sex in his marriage, and conventional explanations of imbalanced parenting, housekeeping, substantial physical appearance changes, etc always seem to be contradicted, often in multiple categories, in any given example.
"Jeff" complains about sex being a 1-2 times a month activity, but Jeff does about 60% of the parenting in my experience, is 6 years younger than his wife and is outstanding physical shape and very attractive (when we go out, he's almost embarrassed at how often women hit on him in bars). His wife runs a freelance marketing business and he's a solo practice attorney, so both have jobs of about equivalent levels of responsibility and income as I understand it.
My sense is that any theory of lessened sex drive in women over 40 may be contingent on marital status (ie, married) and childbearing status (have given birth) as strong influencers. Women who never married or never have given birth may have stronger social or biological influences that increase their interest in sex.
With the recent FDA approval of flibanserin (the "female Viagra"), there has been a lot of debate over it with a not insignificant chorus of women supporting it because "they want to have sex but just don't have the desire". I'd also doubt that such a drug would get developed and put through FDA scrutiny if the company and investors lacked decent data that said a good sized market didn't exist for it.
Like anything else, I don't think you can arbitrarily say "all older women don't want sex" or "women over 40 want more sex". It's probably most likely that both things can be true at the same time but with clusters of characteristics around both groupings.
I think the inherent scarcity in research resources means that you will pretty much always have a kind of gatekeeper who decides what projects and who's projects gets funded and what doesn't.
It'd be great if that gatekeeper was a neutral party without a vested interest, but I'd wager it likely takes someone inherently knowledgeable in the field to be able to intelligently understand the research requests.
You could have a committee to hopefully limit individual vested interests, but ultimately there are influencers who can stack committees.
I think if you could get researchers to acknowledge these kinds of existential confirmation biases in research selection you probably would be able to build committees with the scientific chops to evaluate research proposals but with enough outsiders that career/standing/theoretical biases wouldn't crowd out proposals with the potential to contradict prevailing theories.
Careers and status make major contributions. If you got onto the dietary cholesterol is bad for you theory early as a scientist, your entire career and standing is built around that theory.
As you gain influence and status over research proposals and funding, you're more likely to approve proposals that advance the theories you're invested in and reject proposals that might disprove your career-invested theories.
The entire process, not just individual studies or their results, becomes a victim of both ego and a kind of large-scale confirmation bias.
Gary Taubes wrote a great article for Science about this relative to research into dietary sodium intake. The people in charge of the money were heavily invested in the salt-is-bad-for-you theory and basically politicized the research process to further their own theories.
http://garytaubes.com/wp-conte...
It seems excessive, but I've seen some weird shit.
I recently did some work for a company that had BOTH Office365 and a six server Exchange on premise system for maybe 500 users. Not a hybrid deployment, but two separate systems with some crazy SMTP smarthost configuration to make it act more like a hybrid configuration. Worse, the on-premise setup was a 2010/2013 hybrid with a mishmash of CAS- and mailbox-only servers and combined roles.
This same company had 30 VMs to support a single application. I didn't have anything to do with that "system" but I had a hard time wrapping my brain around how that was meant to work. Not surprisingly, this company had been a mostly-outsourced IT shop for years.
10 plus years ago I worked in advertising and that was just a plain crazy business. Client business was often based in a specific agency office and each office expected to be able to run as independently as possible and given the account management and business goals and incentives, most offices had the juice to see it done that way. One office in Irvine had (in 2001!) nearly 800 GB of storage over four servers for a headcount of less than 30. Such setups were the norm, not the exception in the 4 local offices I oversaw.
The business structure abetted this -- our agency was run as a standalone company, but wholly owned by an international holding company dominated by about 4-5 major players. Most smaller agencies had management and reporting through one of the majors, and this led to all kinds of crazy attempts at consolidation of vendors, back end services and often competing cloud-like initiatives -- two of the majors had their own private cloud-like initiatives AND there was a separate, holding-company wide initiative (mostly backed by the 3 smaller majors) that overlapped with the individual ones. From what the CFO told me, while these initiatives made some sense from elimination of redundancy the biggest motivation was the juicy "management fees" that hit the revenue side of the books of the entity controlling the initiatives. We paid $100k/year in "IT management fees" to our reporting major for literally nothing other than changing large Dell PC orders behind our backs to meet their standards (shipment refused at the dock).
It was compounded by the holding company's habit of occasionally stripping a remote office from one agency and relabeling it as another agency's office to make some client at the new parent's office with a geographically local office in the remote office's city happy they had a "local office". You can only imagine the IT chaos this led to and usually the net result was that individual office locations mostly ended up being their own IT islands just to get the job done versus frequent rip-and-replace restructuring to integrate. A small agency in San Diego got turned into one of our offices and I had two senior management officials call me within a half an hour with totally conflicting directions. The head of creative was demanding maximum integration, as soon as possible, and the CFO told me not to do a damn thing but be nice as financially we would be spending $0.00 on any integration tasks along with a Godfather-like reminder of "who I reported to."
Anyway, it's not hard to see how IT can turn into a runaway train if you combine strange business structures and incentives with outsourcing.
I don't know that I agree with the specific phrasing of the parent poster -- mostly for rhetorical reasons -- but I think he's right, despite the ridiculous criticism of the followup posters.
I'm 48 years old and 100% of the married men in my peer group (middle class, mostly white males married to mostly white females, all with white collar jobs) complain about their wives lack of interest in sex. ALL of them. I don't think any of the conventional explanations make sense.
As far as I know from my experience with them in domestic situations, all are good contributors to their kids parenting -- two have wives with more demanding jobs and their husbands probably do MORE parenting than their wives. None have any kind of financial problems. All but one are in excellent physical shape, and the former, while "chunky" looks like he did when he was 25, so he's no more out of shape than he was when he was married.
Two of them have both told me stories that when they were trying to have children -- even their second -- their wives were extremely interested in sex, and once the second baby came along -- BAM! -- no interest. Like a switch had flipped, and neither has related any significant life change that happened concurrently (major change in job responsibilities, etc).
My explanation for this is that this is mostly evolutionary biology in action. When women who have given birth hit their 40s, they lose their sex drive. The biology is probably buried in hormonal changes, especially considering that women hit menopause and go infertile.
In terms of evolution, it makes sense that biologically women would lose interest in sex as their bodies become less able to bear children. Women over 40 have increased risk of pregnancy problems, children with chromosomal problems, etc, all things that could be a threat to her or her other offspring if she were to die in childbirth. Childbearing and childrearing is demanding physically, and the older people get the less physical stamina they have.
I think as a well-known phenomenon its probably even gotten "worse" because women are less dependent on men and have greater legal recognition. In times past, older, married women probably didn't want sex any more than they do now, but either went along with it because they felt they had to or their husbands just took it because they could (yes, this is gross, and no I would never support the idea of a husband raping his wife).
This has to be a major reason for it. My wife recent got an Acura MDX and it has the technology package. The user interface is AWFUL.
My son and I took it to run an errand out to where we keep our boat. The highway interchange to take our usual route was closed, so we ended up off course. We pulled into a parking lot and it took me 20 minutes to get the navigation system to point to a location close enough that I could self-navigate.
I've owned an Apple ][, four Macintoshes, built more PCs than I can count with every version of Windows since 3.1, taught myself Linux (in the late 90s, using Slackware) and FreeBSD (which I still run) and work as an IT contractor installing VMware, Hyper-V, storage and networking.
If that UI baffles me, how the fuck does some non-techie get it?
In naval parlance, Wikipedia defines it as:
A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, reflecting the custom of its commander, characteristically a flag officer, flying a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the first, largest, fastest, most heavily armed, or best known.
I've seen it used in automotive contexts where it seems to have a similar meaning -- I've heard the Mercedes S600 referred to as the "flagship sedan".
Since they won't be sending weapons or any admirals to those planets, I'm guessing that it will mean the biggest probe they can afford.
I only tried using them when I first got my cellular-enabled iPad. Because it was an ATT cellular model, they would automatically associate with ATT hotspots and I figured that was better than the buy-as-you-go data I used at the time.
I gave up when I realized how unusable they were and just disabled the ATT hotspot association and used LTE, which was much faster.
The free ATT hotspots I've found to be basically unusable tarpits of service that would make me grateful for the whine and hiss of a 9600 baud modem.
I've mostly encountered them at McDonalds where they were almost always unusable. I kind of wonder how they get their Internet service for these, whether they just steal from whatever the specific franchise might have or whether it's something more retarded, like an ancient 3G hotspot above the ceiling.
I heard a podcast of a lecture given by a professor of epistemology and it was truly fascinating. My take away was really how little we know and how many things we THINK we know are built on foundations of things we don't actually know.
Even simple statements like "the book is on the table" which would seem to be clear-cut statements of fact depend heavily on our understanding of what is a table, a book and what it means to be on something, and how we are able to state that we know what those things mean.
I kind of think this is BS. The closest local large grocery store has their cold storage shelves (frozen and refrigerated) along the back and side walls of the entire store. Your argument about practicality would make more sense if all of it was concentrated at the back of the store, but cold storage is like a giant U surrounding the packaged goods in the center of the store. AFAICT there is no rear access to larger bulk cold storage on any of these shelves, and most don't even have easy access to the "back room" area of the store, which I don't think is even all that big or even big enough to hold a lot of stock.
Plus, any newly built grocery stores could easily place cold storage anywhere. When it's a new store, they could easily run branch lines for power or bulk chiller feeds in the floor to where they wanted the cold items. If they wanted rear stocking or storage, just make a 6 foot wide aisle inside the larger chiller compartment (ala Costco).
It also doesn't seem like most large groceries even have that much of a "back room warehouse" for cold or packaged goods. The consumer accessible shelves seem like they are the warehouse, for cold or room temperature packaged goods.
They could probably add in a plant to do hydrogen generation with the "overflow" electricity not needed for grid purposes and pretty easily tie it into the existing natural gas network while they're at it.
Do you actually live within the Minneapolis city limits?
The utility crews were here early in the spring and I only knew it was fiber because they took a couple of days to do my immediate area and on a dog walk I saw the cable spool on the side of the road. I talked to the guys on the lift truck and they said it was Century Link.
And I thought Comcast offered faster speeds in Minneapolis -- the Strib just had an article today in the paper about how they're doubling the speeds of all their consumer tiers, and the existing Tiers I think went to 100 Mbps. I have business class, which seems exempt from these free speed upgrades but other than toe-tapping during multi-gig downloads the ~20Mbps down I get is good enough for pretty much everything I do and I love my static IPs, so I haven't been tempted to change anything.
Once competitive gigabit is actually available to my specific house (either the CL fiber or US Internet extending their footprint), I might decide the static IP game isn't necessary and start looking at shifting my home server crap to a hosted setup. I'm not convinced the economics will work in my favor, but the price for static IPs and gigabit fiber from USI is expensive.
Century Link recently had a utility crew in my residential neighborhood in Minneapolis stringing fiber optic cable on the poles. I don't think we've gotten any SUBSCRIBE NOW! fliers in the mail from them, but I would wager that Comcast has lost a lot of TV subscribers and more and more people are just hanging onto a TV subscription (often lower-end, like me) just because they're the only high speed Internet game available.
Once you get someone offering gigabit in your area for prices on par with Comcast, even more people will think WTF, why pay for even the few channels I get but don't watch just for Internet?
Serious Internet competition has to scare Comcast because it eliminates both a TV customer and an Internet customer.
I also wonder if speed increases aren't also due to more coax capacity being available for data due to stuff like switched digital video and fewer TV customers generally.
...if they have the sophistication to model the actual costs of the various options in a comprehensive way that includes deciphering the hazy costs associated with cloud hosting itself (availability options, CPU options, storage costs etc), premise costs (upgraded Internet access with true secondary path), migration costs (can some systems be just P2V'd to a cloud hosting provider or does it involve a platform switch and/or upgrade?), impact on staffing, general in-house implementation from a desktop perspective, etc, as well as longer-term contingency costs like deciding it doesn't work and needing to migrate back.
And then do the same for premise hosted systems, and then compare for reasonable lifetime of ownership (3-5 years).
Many IT people could probably do this themselves but Finance doing this would be smarter since they have access and understanding of other business cost dynamics. And it helps do it as in-depth as possible.
But it depends on the definition of finance and how sophisticated they are. My experience lately has been a surprising number of cloud adopters going back to on premise for a lot of things because they found cloud to be expensive and when they looked at what they actually ended up paying versus what it had cost them to do it on site found on site to be cost competitive and have flexibility that cloud lacked.
This leads me to believe that cloud pricing is very opaque and these organizations didn't do a lot of cost modeling, somebody heard cloud and some kind of $19.95/month sales pitch and mentally compared that to the last IT infrastructure invoice they paid.
They should allow drugs that mellow prisoners out and use access to them as a behavioral control mechanism.
Would you rather run a prison where men are in cages with no outlets for the boredom, rage and hostility, or run a prison where men can smoke marijuana and mellow out?
Prison supplied pot would greatly undermine the drug trade which would have all kind of ancillary benefits itself in terms of limiting gang influence, as well as providing an extremely attractive reward economy for good behavior.
This is why you would end up with, if not in red letter law then in case law, exemptions in for "reasonable effort" to secure systems, even if reasonable effort ended up being pretty heavy lifting (ie, certified vendors, regular external audits, well-defined security practices, etc).
I would imagine that any law would get so watered down by interested parties that it would be only the egregious cases eligible for prosecution or litigation. Anyone who could wave an audit around would be basically exempt because it would provide a reasonable effort shield which would deflect criticism.
As much as I'd like to drag all the cheap-ass executives who shortchange IT security and reliability with an eye on promotion and their own bonuses into the street and have them tarred and feathered, I can only imagine that such a regulation would have loopholes a mile wide.
What makes a system insecure? The system integration/networking? The software, especially third party software with its disclaimers about "no liability for implied merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose"?
Who judges a system as secure/insecure? If I get a third party to sign off on it, are the execs then immune? How long does a system retain its status as officially secure? Can you patch it with new patches, which theoretically could introduce their own flaws?
How about unknown zero-days? You could judge a system as secure and then a new zero-day appears in some critical security juncture that renders it insecure. Worse yet, what about unknown exploits used for which there are no patches?
To me it smells like Sarbanes-Oxley all over again.
It's a kludge, though, in NTFS, in Netware it just worked.
IPX/SPX as a layer 3 protocol isn't what I wanted, I wanted TCPv4 with a network prefix and the MAC as the node address. Clients could derive their address automatically from network traffic by picking up the network address from the wire and they already knew their MAC address.
Although to be honest, IPX/SPX even as a secondary protocol wasn't that bad to support in a mixed environment. We had no issues with TCP, IPX *and* CrappleTalk on 512k frame relay links. We retired internetworking on IPX when the last Netware servers went away but were stuck with AppleTalk (circa 2003).
I still think Netware's filesystem permission model was better than anything out there now, at least for filesharing.
The feature I miss the most is allowing traversal through a directory hierarchy a user has no explicit permissions for to get to a folder they do have permissions for. I find the workarounds for this in other filesystems to be extremely ugly.
I think NDS was better in a lot of ways than AD, although it would have been nice if there had been something better than bindery mode for eliminating the need for users to know their fully qualified NDS name.
I also kind of wish TCP/IP had used the network:mac numbering scheme that IPX used. The rest of IPX/SPX I don't need, but there'd be no talk of address exhaustion of IPv4 if that scheme had been adopted, little need for DHCP address assignment and the addressing scheme would scale to the larger broadcast domains enabled by modern switching (avoiding the need to renumber legacy segments completely when they exhausted a /24 space and expansion via mask reduction wasn't possible due to linear numbering on adjacent segments).
If you can't get a service at the first try, and the deadline is approaching, offer more. Surely these things could be automated? You wouldn't be the one making the negotiation itself, after all.
Right now I can get a predictable ride with a car in front of my house in 10 minutes. When you're on a 7:30 AM flight, how much extra time do you have to shave $5 off a ride that cost $20 to begin with and is at least a third less than a cab ever was?
Based on prices as they are now, I doubt a pure bid/ask market would significantly lower the prices. People more concerned with time than price would likely consistently overbid the price floor and drivers would probably consistently ask a price where they were guaranteed to make a profit.
Given the economics of operating a car and what rides cost now, it's hard to see drivers being profitable now. Uber policies may actually be holding off-peak prices down versus what drivers might want to make.
I've been lucky that the last time I was the victim of a crime was in 1992. I got my car window smashed in a restaurant parking lot and my stereo stolen. The cops gave me a police report number for insurance and that was the end of it.
But I've heard from two different people who live within a few blocks of me recently who had been burglary victims and the police dusted for prints in both cases, including one where the only break-in was the garage and the item stolen was a low-end bike.
Our neighborhood is, for lack of a better term, middle middle class, so I don't think we're being treated like oligarchs. Plus, we live within the actual city limits (a city of about 400,000 people), so it further surprises me that they have the resources for a print kit when it was likely somebody got shot on the other side of town.
Over the past year, though, minor burglaries have spiked somewhat so maybe there's some actually reasonable police management happening where they suspect a serial burglar. It's possible there is also some political pressure from our councillor as the neighborhood group is kind of vocal about the frequency of small burglaries. But that kind of seems like the right sort of feedback loop my 9th grade civics book would have predicted.