We can then put that money towards more developers (or better salaries for us current devs), as well as paying for training, nicer dev machines, etc. At the same time, if we do have a problem with any sort of hosted service through azure, support is literally a phone call away, and I can't remember the last time a resolution didn't happen within a couple hours.
Who's this we? Are you some kind of dev-only shop, self-managed?
I would bet that in most instances, the "savings" from moving to cloud never becomes more budget for the IT department, especially if its money for salaries. If anything it just cuts your budget or feeds some bonus pool for executives.
which in the case of the 85kwh Model S, would be enough to power me for 2 days.
I'd swear someone in my family has a secret pot farm hidden in my 2,000 sq ft house someplace because every time I see electricity usage on Slashdot I wonder where the hell all my power goes.
My bill for October (no heat, no AC usage) was for 987 kWh. Most of my lighting is CFL or LED (all of the lights that get used a lot are), my fridge is less than 5 years old and we use natural gas for cooking and heating. I do have about 4 PCs but two are diskless and one is off more than it is on.
A roughly 40kWh used Tesla battery would get me through a day but probably be most useful for runtimes of an hour before starting an external generator.
Yes they will. Just like cable companies, they will get the best laws that money can buy.
When I posted my original comment I didn't think of this, but it's not hard to CAs to start claiming they provide a beneficial security service by validating certificate buyers, helping to keep bad guys from running encrypted web sites to sell drugs, defile white women and support terrorism.
Maybe they will agree to some kind of "national security compromise" that enables regulation of CAs and their continued monopoly status, of course in exchange for giving the NSA backdoor access.
Sure, they do business selling code-signing certs, wildcard and SAN certs but I have to believe that a not insignificant part of their business is selling boring, single-name certs for web servers.
If you can suddenly get SSL certs for your web server for free and have them work like a paid certificate (wide-spread browser and device support) won't a lot of people do just this?
Or will it be some kind of "we need support" thing where people keep buying them because of corporate policy and the "only" users will be hobbyists and tinkerers who had previously used self-signed certs or none at all?
Even if they call them "advisors" or "lawyers" or "business managers" or something else?
I would mostly assume many uniquely successful people have somebody that advises or negotiates for them and may help steer business to them or filter out offers.
Even many high level corporate types will sometimes rely on somebody to help them negotiate a salary package even if the position is a "normal" full time job.
That's so old school these days. Most people go to school to qualify for a career that makes them boatloads of money with the least amount of effort.
I think this is kind of the point -- people don't WANT to be educated, they want what economists call the "signalling effect" of a college degree in some employment field.
And I think we're poorer for it as a culture -- no one recognizes the same political tricks and gimcrackery employed by the Roman elite getting recycled today, just as an example.
But then again, I have heard a counter-argument that classical education even in its heyday was also usurped by non-educational agendas, such as regional elites seeking to broaden their power base by exposing their children to elites from other regions, hoping to form social and economic alliances (or, why people STILL go to Harvard), or looking to find class-appropriate mates for their daughters.
Didn't people USED to go to college for the educational purpose of building a broad understanding of human knowledge -- history, literature, humanities, science, foreign languages, etc?
Most people now seem to go to college to obtain some kind of vocational certification and get a "career", usually in business, an engineering speciality or if they really apply themselves, in a medical field or law. General learning is a bunch of requirements students don't care about and the instructors mainly view them as an opportunity for ideological posturing.
The best I see these bootcamps is replacing some trade schools or community college technical programs. They might have value for people with an IT background but employed and looking for a new skill to market.
What surprises me is that he keeps coming back for more and Slashdots editors keep letting him.
I can't help but think he'd be an interesting guy to meet at least once. I'd rather talk to someone with ideas and opinions I don't like that someone without any of either.
Right, but you generally DO need a reason to deny them unemployment compensation -- they have to be fired for cause and the rules are quite strict.
I've fired somebody with what HR said were well-documented for-cause reasons just to have the person appeal and the state find in their favor and award unemployment. In my case they felt that the letters written and the HR policy weren't quite specific enough about not showing up for work and claiming "vacation" in an email at 9:30 AM.
Maybe some places don't care, but usually there's some kind of dollar cost to companies that do a lot of at-will terminations that result in unemployment compensation.
I'm not opposed to a draconian security policy, but I would imagine that one of the major training and education components of working somewhere like that IS training and education about what you can and can't do and what the consequences of doing the wrong thing.
I would expect that having a security clearance would mean I would be subjected to hours (days?) of training in dealing with secrets, where you can put them, where you can't, etc, and the consequences of violating these rules. Using Evernote would be totally unambiguous.
I guess I would also expect that they wouldn't just rely on soft compliance, that there would be technology designed to block access to it and serious (and again, well disseminated) rules about using non-compliant technology for work purposes (ie, you're not going to get away with using your LTE personal iPad in a company meeting because it is basically a circumvention device).
I just don't know how you get to the point where somebody is literally walked out of a building from a meeting after being "discovered" using Evernote. Either they were poorly informed or they were actively interested in obtaining secrets.
Most managers I've dealt with think of Facebook as a time-waster. It's hard to see a brand acceptance of a Facebook-related service that's "for work".
I think most users associate it with their personal social lives and I would just about guarantee that Facebook would mandate linking your work profile to your social profile and most people would reject that.
For better or for worse, I think LinkedIn already is seen as the "work" social networking site and has the network effect going for it.
We've had people walked out, fired, for using Evernote in meetings.
I'm curious how you'd know. Did someone trip a content filter/IDS trying to use it or did someone grab a laptop/tablet and demand to see what they were doing?
It sounds pretty fascist to shitcan someone like that, especially if the policy they were fired under wasn't fairly specific about Evernote-type services.
It seems hard to believe someone would risk immediate termination for Evernote. I've known people who liked it but I don't think I know anyone who'd say "Yeah, I like it so much I'd risk getting fired for it."
My last boss was one of those people who end up an IT director because they run out of operations management roles to take and IT Director is somehow a step above facilities management in the operations hierarchy.
Anyway, he worked at our local newspaper and when a major strike was planned including most of the unionized employees (from reporters to truck drivers), he happened to be on the management strike committee.
They hired a private security company and one of the "products" on offer from the company were professional goons who would start fights and instigate violence among the strikers. The security company said the men were "indepdendent consultants" who couldn't be tied back to the security firm or the newspaper and were even willing to get arrested if necessary.
I would believe at this point that similar "services" could be had from private security contractors with rolexes full of ex-special forces types willing to do a more physical form of conflict resolution. I'm sure somebody who knows something at L3 could be leaned on to provide information on the naughty customer who in turn could be persuaded to change their behavior, versus, say having their hands shattered with a ball peen hammer, which tends to preclude any kind of onoging technology career.
Cost seems like a good explanation. I have no idea how long it takes to wash an entire building, but at the pay rate quoted in the story they could employ two guys for a whole year for under $300,000. A really good machine would probably be a million dollars to design and implement and would still need maintenance and probably a full-time guy to operate it.
I find it hard to believe there isn't a technological solution to this that could limit exterior manual cleaning to something done every couple of years. The idea that some machine used on the old World Trade Center sucked seems like a weak excuse -- a car from the early 70s sucks now, too, compared to current cars employing modern technology.
Some ideas off the top of my head:
1) A self-contained pressure washing system that recycles its own water with some combination of sheeting chemistry, forced air and microfiber to ensure the window is clean. Hard to believe you can't design a machine capable of cleaning well.
2) Why not integrate a cleaning system into the window framing or structural system capable of washing either a bank of windows or several vertical floor sections? It might need fixing itself, but it could be combined with once-every-five years exterior maintenance and "thorough" cleaning.
3) Are there coatings or other materials science solutions that would make dirt and pollution less likely to stick to the windows and make cleaning necessary only every 5 years or when exterior maintenance was necessary?
I would think that fracturing the market would be less likely the greater the number of competitors.
The more services there are, the more likely their subscriber base is smaller and the more a content provider is going to charge per view and upfront to guarantee the same revenue they would get releasing content to more outlets.
There's very little fracturing between Netflix and Amazon now -- both have some self-produced shows and both have a handful of exclusives. Amazon is probably paying a dear price to get HBO content exclusively.
It's probably the reason Amazon and Netflix are getting big on self-produced content. It may be cheaper to produce a good show yourself and have an exclusive than to buy them from content providers.
The use of disposable phones, multiple SIM cards, etc, is a near-universal presence in any kind of mass entertainment featuring espionage or even semi-organized criminal enterprises.
Even at this point, how low-level and stupid do most criminals have to be to use/carry a cell phone any longer than absolutely necessary? And if they do use one, wouldn't it be a throwaway they would get rid of after a short period?
Ultimately sting-ray and it's ilk seem like they would just no longer be useful.
How many "big cities" in the US have a really good public transportation system that enables convenient and timely transit? Usually it seems to boil down to "how many cities have a subway system?"
In those places without a built-up subway system, you're stuck with the bus. Passable for short trips provided the schedule is frequent (which it usually isn't) or for suburban-downtown express services (provided that's actually your trip).
These bus systems are usually unusable for anything else. Commute times for basic, in-city transportation can run to an hour of combined riding and waiting times for car trip times that run 20 minutes. Ad-hoc trips or multiple-destination trips can end up taking a whole day.
Years ago I used to ride the bus to the University located in the city I lived -- it was often an hour trip on the bus and 20 minutes by car. Even the express to downtown from where I live (again, in the city) was an 8 block walk to the stop and then a 35 minute ride. All told I was out nearly an hour and a half in bus time for what amounted to 40 minutes of driving.
I think "increases road usage" doesn't make sense.
If 10 people decide to take Uber instead of driving, that's 9 less cars that use the road at all. You can't make any statement about total miles driven without know where those 10 people start and end their trip.
Uber could reduce congestion by reducing the number of cars that need to use the road at the same time.
The way to think about UberX is that economically, a car is physical capital that is underutilized. It gets driven to work, parked and does no useful work until it is driven home. Uber lets people maximize the utility of the capital.
If they really are committed to this, then let's make consumer privacy black letter criminal law and violation of it a felony offense with mandatory jail time.
My guess is that when they say they are committed to it, they just aren't that committed to it, which means they aren't committed to it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
We can then put that money towards more developers (or better salaries for us current devs), as well as paying for training, nicer dev machines, etc. At the same time, if we do have a problem with any sort of hosted service through azure, support is literally a phone call away, and I can't remember the last time a resolution didn't happen within a couple hours.
Who's this we? Are you some kind of dev-only shop, self-managed?
I would bet that in most instances, the "savings" from moving to cloud never becomes more budget for the IT department, especially if its money for salaries. If anything it just cuts your budget or feeds some bonus pool for executives.
which in the case of the 85kwh Model S, would be enough to power me for 2 days.
I'd swear someone in my family has a secret pot farm hidden in my 2,000 sq ft house someplace because every time I see electricity usage on Slashdot I wonder where the hell all my power goes.
My bill for October (no heat, no AC usage) was for 987 kWh. Most of my lighting is CFL or LED (all of the lights that get used a lot are), my fridge is less than 5 years old and we use natural gas for cooking and heating. I do have about 4 PCs but two are diskless and one is off more than it is on.
A roughly 40kWh used Tesla battery would get me through a day but probably be most useful for runtimes of an hour before starting an external generator.
Yes they will. Just like cable companies, they will get the best laws that money can buy.
When I posted my original comment I didn't think of this, but it's not hard to CAs to start claiming they provide a beneficial security service by validating certificate buyers, helping to keep bad guys from running encrypted web sites to sell drugs, defile white women and support terrorism.
Maybe they will agree to some kind of "national security compromise" that enables regulation of CAs and their continued monopoly status, of course in exchange for giving the NSA backdoor access.
Sure, they do business selling code-signing certs, wildcard and SAN certs but I have to believe that a not insignificant part of their business is selling boring, single-name certs for web servers.
If you can suddenly get SSL certs for your web server for free and have them work like a paid certificate (wide-spread browser and device support) won't a lot of people do just this?
Or will it be some kind of "we need support" thing where people keep buying them because of corporate policy and the "only" users will be hobbyists and tinkerers who had previously used self-signed certs or none at all?
Everybody in Cleveland has one.
Even if they call them "advisors" or "lawyers" or "business managers" or something else?
I would mostly assume many uniquely successful people have somebody that advises or negotiates for them and may help steer business to them or filter out offers.
Even many high level corporate types will sometimes rely on somebody to help them negotiate a salary package even if the position is a "normal" full time job.
I don't think it makes you a "rock star" though.
That's so old school these days. Most people go to school to qualify for a career that makes them boatloads of money with the least amount of effort.
I think this is kind of the point -- people don't WANT to be educated, they want what economists call the "signalling effect" of a college degree in some employment field.
And I think we're poorer for it as a culture -- no one recognizes the same political tricks and gimcrackery employed by the Roman elite getting recycled today, just as an example.
But then again, I have heard a counter-argument that classical education even in its heyday was also usurped by non-educational agendas, such as regional elites seeking to broaden their power base by exposing their children to elites from other regions, hoping to form social and economic alliances (or, why people STILL go to Harvard), or looking to find class-appropriate mates for their daughters.
Didn't people USED to go to college for the educational purpose of building a broad understanding of human knowledge -- history, literature, humanities, science, foreign languages, etc?
Most people now seem to go to college to obtain some kind of vocational certification and get a "career", usually in business, an engineering speciality or if they really apply themselves, in a medical field or law. General learning is a bunch of requirements students don't care about and the instructors mainly view them as an opportunity for ideological posturing.
The best I see these bootcamps is replacing some trade schools or community college technical programs. They might have value for people with an IT background but employed and looking for a new skill to market.
What surprises me is that he keeps coming back for more and Slashdots editors keep letting him.
I can't help but think he'd be an interesting guy to meet at least once. I'd rather talk to someone with ideas and opinions I don't like that someone without any of either.
Right, but you generally DO need a reason to deny them unemployment compensation -- they have to be fired for cause and the rules are quite strict.
I've fired somebody with what HR said were well-documented for-cause reasons just to have the person appeal and the state find in their favor and award unemployment. In my case they felt that the letters written and the HR policy weren't quite specific enough about not showing up for work and claiming "vacation" in an email at 9:30 AM.
Maybe some places don't care, but usually there's some kind of dollar cost to companies that do a lot of at-will terminations that result in unemployment compensation.
I'm not opposed to a draconian security policy, but I would imagine that one of the major training and education components of working somewhere like that IS training and education about what you can and can't do and what the consequences of doing the wrong thing.
I would expect that having a security clearance would mean I would be subjected to hours (days?) of training in dealing with secrets, where you can put them, where you can't, etc, and the consequences of violating these rules. Using Evernote would be totally unambiguous.
I guess I would also expect that they wouldn't just rely on soft compliance, that there would be technology designed to block access to it and serious (and again, well disseminated) rules about using non-compliant technology for work purposes (ie, you're not going to get away with using your LTE personal iPad in a company meeting because it is basically a circumvention device).
I just don't know how you get to the point where somebody is literally walked out of a building from a meeting after being "discovered" using Evernote. Either they were poorly informed or they were actively interested in obtaining secrets.
Most managers I've dealt with think of Facebook as a time-waster. It's hard to see a brand acceptance of a Facebook-related service that's "for work".
I think most users associate it with their personal social lives and I would just about guarantee that Facebook would mandate linking your work profile to your social profile and most people would reject that.
For better or for worse, I think LinkedIn already is seen as the "work" social networking site and has the network effect going for it.
We've had people walked out, fired, for using Evernote in meetings.
I'm curious how you'd know. Did someone trip a content filter/IDS trying to use it or did someone grab a laptop/tablet and demand to see what they were doing?
It sounds pretty fascist to shitcan someone like that, especially if the policy they were fired under wasn't fairly specific about Evernote-type services.
It seems hard to believe someone would risk immediate termination for Evernote. I've known people who liked it but I don't think I know anyone who'd say "Yeah, I like it so much I'd risk getting fired for it."
They know how to be completely unambiguous in how they describe their wrong beliefs.
I would describe it as knowing how to be completely ambiguous when they believe they are wrong.
My last boss was one of those people who end up an IT director because they run out of operations management roles to take and IT Director is somehow a step above facilities management in the operations hierarchy.
Anyway, he worked at our local newspaper and when a major strike was planned including most of the unionized employees (from reporters to truck drivers), he happened to be on the management strike committee.
They hired a private security company and one of the "products" on offer from the company were professional goons who would start fights and instigate violence among the strikers. The security company said the men were "indepdendent consultants" who couldn't be tied back to the security firm or the newspaper and were even willing to get arrested if necessary.
I would believe at this point that similar "services" could be had from private security contractors with rolexes full of ex-special forces types willing to do a more physical form of conflict resolution. I'm sure somebody who knows something at L3 could be leaned on to provide information on the naughty customer who in turn could be persuaded to change their behavior, versus, say having their hands shattered with a ball peen hammer, which tends to preclude any kind of onoging technology career.
Worse, it seems to also add "...and everybody has a financial stake in the current system, too"
It read to me like "I rode in a car once 40 years ago, and it sucked. Cars don't work well."
Cost seems like a good explanation. I have no idea how long it takes to wash an entire building, but at the pay rate quoted in the story they could employ two guys for a whole year for under $300,000. A really good machine would probably be a million dollars to design and implement and would still need maintenance and probably a full-time guy to operate it.
I find it hard to believe there isn't a technological solution to this that could limit exterior manual cleaning to something done every couple of years. The idea that some machine used on the old World Trade Center sucked seems like a weak excuse -- a car from the early 70s sucks now, too, compared to current cars employing modern technology.
Some ideas off the top of my head:
1) A self-contained pressure washing system that recycles its own water with some combination of sheeting chemistry, forced air and microfiber to ensure the window is clean. Hard to believe you can't design a machine capable of cleaning well.
2) Why not integrate a cleaning system into the window framing or structural system capable of washing either a bank of windows or several vertical floor sections? It might need fixing itself, but it could be combined with once-every-five years exterior maintenance and "thorough" cleaning.
3) Are there coatings or other materials science solutions that would make dirt and pollution less likely to stick to the windows and make cleaning necessary only every 5 years or when exterior maintenance was necessary?
I would think that fracturing the market would be less likely the greater the number of competitors.
The more services there are, the more likely their subscriber base is smaller and the more a content provider is going to charge per view and upfront to guarantee the same revenue they would get releasing content to more outlets.
There's very little fracturing between Netflix and Amazon now -- both have some self-produced shows and both have a handful of exclusives. Amazon is probably paying a dear price to get HBO content exclusively.
It's probably the reason Amazon and Netflix are getting big on self-produced content. It may be cheaper to produce a good show yourself and have an exclusive than to buy them from content providers.
The use of disposable phones, multiple SIM cards, etc, is a near-universal presence in any kind of mass entertainment featuring espionage or even semi-organized criminal enterprises.
Even at this point, how low-level and stupid do most criminals have to be to use/carry a cell phone any longer than absolutely necessary? And if they do use one, wouldn't it be a throwaway they would get rid of after a short period?
Ultimately sting-ray and it's ilk seem like they would just no longer be useful.
How many "big cities" in the US have a really good public transportation system that enables convenient and timely transit? Usually it seems to boil down to "how many cities have a subway system?"
In those places without a built-up subway system, you're stuck with the bus. Passable for short trips provided the schedule is frequent (which it usually isn't) or for suburban-downtown express services (provided that's actually your trip).
These bus systems are usually unusable for anything else. Commute times for basic, in-city transportation can run to an hour of combined riding and waiting times for car trip times that run 20 minutes. Ad-hoc trips or multiple-destination trips can end up taking a whole day.
Years ago I used to ride the bus to the University located in the city I lived -- it was often an hour trip on the bus and 20 minutes by car. Even the express to downtown from where I live (again, in the city) was an 8 block walk to the stop and then a 35 minute ride. All told I was out nearly an hour and a half in bus time for what amounted to 40 minutes of driving.
I think "increases road usage" doesn't make sense.
If 10 people decide to take Uber instead of driving, that's 9 less cars that use the road at all. You can't make any statement about total miles driven without know where those 10 people start and end their trip.
Uber could reduce congestion by reducing the number of cars that need to use the road at the same time.
The way to think about UberX is that economically, a car is physical capital that is underutilized. It gets driven to work, parked and does no useful work until it is driven home. Uber lets people maximize the utility of the capital.
If they really are committed to this, then let's make consumer privacy black letter criminal law and violation of it a felony offense with mandatory jail time.
My guess is that when they say they are committed to it, they just aren't that committed to it, which means they aren't committed to it at all.
I've used Crystal Disk Info and while it reports SMART info, I can't make much out of the info.
Many values for Samsung spinning rust just have values of Current and Worst of 100 and either a raw value of 0 or some insanely huge number.
How did triple the population of China migrate across China?
Maybe those would be an option for home use since their size and weight wouldn't matter.