I work for a small VAR and other than Office 365, almost nobody is interested in Microsoft cloud systems. We had a guy go whole hog into training and there was little customer interest, which doesn't help his (or anyone else's) training since it's a fairly dynamic offering which seems to evolve quickly.
I have been unimpressed with Office 365. The online tools are missing basic features present in the on-premise version. And the costs are high, once you pass about 40 users on premise is actually cheaper, and more so as your numbers increase.
Thanks for the info. I looked at the screenshots and I guess it's not clear to me that this one really has what it takes to do real analysis against the battery.
It's not clear to me that Apple provides a public developer API for reading more than battery percentage (I actually looked it up).
I would think any battery diagnostic app would have to monitor low level battery details while presenting a well-calibrated load (ie, that produces a known mAh real electrical load) against the phone's electrical system. The app would have a table derived from running it on new phones with known good batteries showing "ideal battery drain rate" which would then be compared against the data provided by the battery in question.
Battery "health" would then be the deviation between the canned data for known good batteries vs. the battery in the phone it's being run on.
The downside would be you would have to run the app for a fairly long time (minutes to possibly tens of minutes or longer) to get a reliable measure, and I'm also not sure how it would easily match background consumption variations (notifications or apps with frequently polled notification data). I suspect while testing you'd want to go into airplane mode.
I also am not sure how well such an app would deal with actual bad batteries like mine which are normal for 100-80% charge states but then have weird levels after that, such as jumping between levels at some power states.
I do a lot of boating and battery monitoring is a big deal and even where you have unrestricted access to batteries and can do a lot of load monitoring with good instruments, actual battery charge state and health are really hard to know well. The best instrument I've found, the Balmar SmartGauge, which has been extensively bench tested, nobody really knows how it works. It was developed for military vehicles, and the best anyone can figure is that it pulses the batteries with high frequency pulses and has some kind of internal tables from many well-calibrated tests of various chemistries.
What's weird is that Compellent, which was a big deal, now feels like a bastard stepchild, almost worse than Equallogic was relative to Compellent before the merger.
The product overlap is crazy and pre-merger Dell partners are now stumbling around trying to sell high margin EMC products but most weren't dealing with EMC-scale customers before hand and aren't being successful at it.
The extreme focus on HCI and VxRail is also kind silly, IMHO. It's way more expensive than standard host + san solutions and I think the push to sell it winds up selling cheaper competing products like Nutanix (but not Dell Nutanix) and Simplivity or even other non-HCI classic SAN solutions, usually all-flash.
And then there's vSAN itself, which is mostly platform agnostic, so why not just spec and order regular rack servers and skip the VxRail expense?
Nice deflection but this is an apple problem, lets not harp on how there is no more innovation anywhere just because apple cant.
No, really. My first thoughts are Microsoft, then VMware, and probably more after that. Apple would be not off that list, but my experience has been more positive with Apple than some of the others.
I'll pick on VMware as an example -- each of their last 3 releases has had major bugs for months after the release. The good/bad news is that staying on a previous release wasn't much of a loss in terms of new features, because there weren't many. Yet you sort of paid a price in support and compatibility if you lingered at an old release, so you had some motivation to upgrade.
And at the same time the user interface has been withering, with more and more functionality only offered in the Flash-based user interface, and the most recent release completely does away with the Windows client in favor of a third-rate web interface that hasn't gotten better in 3 or so releases.
Meanwhile, little significant innovation is seen in these releases. The only compelling feature is vSAN, but it's expensive to license and it's not clear how compelling it really is.
It certainly seems like Apple isn't the only one with this problem. The entire tech industry seems based around relentless production of new versions with flimsy features no one wanted, often sacrificing more than just stability but valued features that users make extensive use of.
I'm kind of convinced that the technology industry turned to consolidation to eliminate competition and is just using feature/version revisions to force users into paying for support or upgrades to keep up profits. Actual growth is very low and development investment is also low, which accounts for a lot of the reason quality is low.
I think the industry generally is lacking in compelling innovation and is more interested in just consolidation and rent-seeking; needless fake innovation is just window dressing and forced obsolescence.
I think you have to look at the down side of extremely restrictive prescriptions in terms of what it does in the illegal drug market.
Tightening of prescription opiates started happening BEFORE the current overdose crisis and I think drove a lot of more casual pill users to heroin as street prices for pills creeped up. A surge in heroin users and the short-term supply inelasticity of heroin means the market adapts -- hard-to-interdict synthetics from China get turned loose, either on its own or to pump up overly diluted heroin.
So now you have not only a lot of inexperienced heroin users, you have a lot of bad heroin as a result of mostly just tightening down the prescription pill supply.
My sense was that the DEA probably needed to clamp down on the high-dosage pill supply (Oxycontin 30 mg and larger, for example) while mostly tolerating a certain level of abuse and diversion in the low-dosage pill market (your extremely common 5 mg oxycodone and hydrocodones, like Percocet and Vicodin).
While you certainly will have some problems with this -- those with addictive tendences will probably escalate. That being said, the recreational abusers and the overprescribed will be inclined to stick with reliable, relatively low doses, and many will not develop addiction at all let alone overdose. The history of opium has demonstrated that a lot of addicts wind up being maintenance addicts, people who are addicted but maintain their consumption at levels that are long-term sustainable.
The counter to this (existing policy) just seems to cause a lot of problems. Way more black market opiates of unknown quantities, much higher overdose rates, and policy makers making patient care for people with legitimate uses of opiates much more difficult.
I think some of this is driven by trends. Business leaders see "other companies" in glossy magazines, in the news or wherever doing something "fun" and they want in on it too for fear of being left out.
But I think some of the "sit on the loveseat" is driven by management's own disconnection with how actual workers get actual work done. They "work" in jobs that mostly consist of going to meetings and writing reports about meetings and arranging for informal meetings with other managers. To them, "work" is kind of an extended cocktail party, except with frappacinos, kambucha or giant water bottles, so sitting around on couches or in non-office type spaces makes complete sense.
And it also makes sense to eliminate drab, ordinary office spaces represented by desks and cubicles where people actually get work done.
I think true zero carbs is nearly impossible without an extremely restricted diet. I think you're still about the same on the "spare change" carbs in a slightly wider diet even though you might hit 20g carbs in a day. A lot of it is locked up in fiber or feels like a byproduct of the chemistry used to assess carb content (ie, when you get 1g carbs from some seafood).
For me personally, I found it kind of hard to sustain over a long time period (past 2 years). I found that my dietary choices became really repetitive after a while. Restaurant meals were particularly difficult, as often I found it hard to get enough to eat without ordering 3 entrees, although it did illustrate that restaurants make a lot money selling tiny meat portions with giant carb portions.
The weight loss was good, but I only dropped about 20 and stalled out from there. Had I been able to lose another 10-20, I might have stuck with it longer, but the repetitive nature of the diet, the added effort of sustaining it in a carb-filled universe and the lack of continued weight loss caused me to mostly abandon it. I still avoid all sugary foods and many carbs, though I don't think avoiding them is really helpful, I think you need to not eat them ever for the diet to really work.
Dell has mostly re-branded themselves as DellEMC, which I think was supposed to be an upgrade for the Dell name to associate it with the EMC brand. That being said, I always thought buying EMC was just a gimmick to get VMware but in my exposure it sure seems like EMC won internally, and the Dell people were shoved aside.
Overall, I don't understand their conflicting strategy. If you talk to a "Dell EMC" rep for more than 5 minutes, they will try to sell you their 3x overpriced EMC vxRail platform which is VMware vSAN on top of proprietary mini-blade chasis of like 4 nodes.
The strange part of the whole hyperconverged storage/virtualization model coming out of DellEMC is that EMC is a major SAN vendor selling against its own brand/products, made worse by ALSO selling Nutanix which directly competes against VMware vSAN *and* the SAN business.
I think the company is so big and has so much overlap they need to reconsider what they're doing and greatly trim product lines. I can't help but think VMware innovation is totally choked by being owned by a giant hardware company -- any innovative ideas that don't involve selling more and more expensive hardware will die on the vine. The hardware side can't adapt to emerging software defined storage unless its meant to boost VMware first. And of course everybody has to bow to EMC's giant portfolio lest someone mess with their accounts.
I would have thought the smarter play for Dell would have been to have kept VMware as a wholly owned subsidiary but let it self-manage (even if self-managing didn't mean coding for Dell's proprietary platform) and then sell off EMC. EMC seems like the dinosaur whose market can't really ever grow that much because the products are too expensive for anything but Fortune 500.
Which is unbelievably easy to get plus we have no idea how much permanent ingress is allowed to the government or what data is just sent over regularly.
I don't think a common wireless utility (simply running the spectrum + backhaul) would be any less subject to the thin barrier of warrants or any less compromised than the major carriers already are.
The consumer benefit so greatly outweighs the "muh gubmint" risk.
The standard argument seems to be it's a safe on the inside, you can't crack it easily or without setting off alarms.
To which I reply, why not steal the entire ATM? This limits you to a subset of all ATMs -- mainly freestanding models, but I can see potential ruses for thieves who make like they're doing an intentional swap of a machine, slightly broadening the potential number of machines and reducing the need for brute force thefts of the machines.
With the entire ATM at your disposal, you have much more time for more deliberate physical attacks on the machine's cash vault.
I can also see an angle using entirely fake ATMs as a giant skimmer. I also wonder how easy it would be to get a real-but-not-legitimate ATM filled with cash. Probably nearly impossible, as I'm sure the guards have to do a bunch of tasks with the terminal and not just add cash (in addition to the normal codes needing to work).
I get that at one point SCO had assets worth plundering and probably some recurring income from licensed patents. But hasn't all of that basically been drained off?
I'm wondering what motivates anyone TODAY to sink money and resources into this case. It looks like it requires a multi-million dollar up front commitment to continued litigation combined with a very low chance of a significant payout.
The backers seem like they would be better off just investing those resources in equities. If there's any equity holders left, they seem like they would better served by liquidation. I doubt any of the IP is worth anything anymore, either.
I agree, we are entering into an era of marginal truth where simultaneous false flag operations and mixed facts/falsehoods make believing anything a marginal proposition.
Of course the downside of not knowing what to believe means not knowing what to disbelieve, and falsehoods gain the same veracity as truth.
A lot of this is getting rolled into software defined networking and used to create specific fine-grained rules and management of east/west network traffic inside a network.
I think the concept is reasonable to some degree and not entirely different from older ideas that treat the network more like concentric circles, with security increasing as you enter the circle and less and less traffic accepted from rings more than 1 ring above.
The problem with the present iteration of these concepts is that the vendors behind it seem to be pushing it as one more thing to buy when everyone already owns their base product -- ie, it's a growth strategy for them, not a particularly compelling practical or effective version of it.
I've only seen one fairly practical version of an untrusted internal network developed using traditional firewalls. Users were segmented off into groups of subnets, some group of servers was allowed access only from those subnets, and more secure systems only allowed connections from more select processes inside the first ring or internal VPN sessions from user machines for more secure applications. Most east-west traffic between user segments was blocked under the idea that no connections between user segment a and b really were necessary.
It wasn't a huge network but it required a lot of configuration and effort plus no small amount of user training and tolerance for not getting work done because of security limitations. It didn't seem really capable of scaling up very far, either.
So much skill development is just kind of dumped on employees who its assumed will just pick it up on their own. Some of that is OK, but there's a point (reached quickly) where it's just not practical or effective -- the technology is too complex to simulate/emulate without expensive hardware, too often there's little practical knowledge gained without practical production situations and workloads, way too much "certification" which just winds up being an exercise in memorizing a vendor's marketing buzzwords and trivia. Don't even get me started on 4 year degrees.
Then (at least in IT) there's the palpable decline in software quality combined with a dramatic increase in technology complexity. It's ironic, because without some of complex automation software the technology is too complex to operate manually but the software is low enough quality that the whole thing is unstable.
I think it's getting worse. We seem to have a growth in the amount of complexity of things individually and an increasing number of them, combined with a corresponding lack of investment in training.
As one kind of an example, an IT department 15 years ago had simpler networks, servers and software to manage. Now each of those things is much more complex than it used to be but the number of people managing it is the same and they probably don't know any more details than they did when it was simpler. High level management (virtualization, etc) may have made managing larger breadth easier, but I think the individual complexity has been addressed at all and lots of it is essentially not understood.
The problem with the IMDB rating, though, seems to be kind of skewed. The average rating of all IMDB movies is 6.9 and the median is 7.1. Basically half of all movies are 7/10 or better?
The other problem is that 40% of movies score between 5.0 and 7.0. I don't know about you, but I find the ratings in the center almost meaningless. I find wide variations in quality in that range that are not represented well by the rating. A 6.5 is not a guarantee of superior quality over 5.5.
And with a lot of those kinds of movies on streaming services, the IMDB score isn't super helpful in determining whether you'll waste 90 minutes on a turkey or not.
It's almost like if people assign a score between 4.5 and 7.5 to a movie, they need to be asked to score it *again* between 1 and 10 and then have that value used to weight the original score or be represented individually as a sub score.
If you travel anywhere near the Mexican border you already have to stop at mandatory Border Patrol checkpoints, even though you're not crossing the border.
I've been through several in Arizona and they feel fairly paramilitary although the "stop" generally involves just stopping for about 5 seconds and getting waved on. I figured being white and over 50 had something to do with the getting waved on part, however, I've seen the same wave-through thing happen with cars with Mexican plates in front of me and I've never seen anyone pulled off to the side when I've been through one.
Surprisingly, a vast part of the US (I think it's like hundreds of miles near any border) is in what I'd call a "reduced Constitution" zone where CBP has enhanced ability to stop and search US citizens. I'm a resident of Minnesota, but I haven't seen any evidence of this near the Canadian border, it seems more more intensive in the Southwest.
Yes, a significant and recurring element of the story is built around the use of AIs for both data analysis and for machine automation. A lot of the construction work is done by automated equipment and surface vehicles drive for hundreds of KM autonomously.
A big factor in the narrative arc is overpopulation on Earth and Mars' relatively small population which seems at least partly to be a function of automated labor. A lot of work on Mars consists of just lightly monitoring automated systems.
If officers must be visible to enforce traffic law, then you find bad drivers will only comply with traffic law when they can't see a cop.
If officers prefer hiding to catch speeders, selection bias says they will prioritize roads where it's easier to hide and drivers tend to drive faster for enforcement. They will not use crash data or safety enhancement criteria.
Cops shouldn't run speed traps based on the idea that people are driving faster and it's easier for them to hide. They should bias enforcement to areas that have bonafide data suggesting those roads have more accidents or safety problems.
Cops end up enforcing speed laws on roads which naturally encourage drivers to drive faster -- new stretches, with lower traffic levels and generally good road conditions -- and which enable easy hiding spots. This is just lazy policing with only marginal value in promoting safety.
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I work for a small VAR and other than Office 365, almost nobody is interested in Microsoft cloud systems. We had a guy go whole hog into training and there was little customer interest, which doesn't help his (or anyone else's) training since it's a fairly dynamic offering which seems to evolve quickly.
I have been unimpressed with Office 365. The online tools are missing basic features present in the on-premise version. And the costs are high, once you pass about 40 users on premise is actually cheaper, and more so as your numbers increase.
Thanks for the info. I looked at the screenshots and I guess it's not clear to me that this one really has what it takes to do real analysis against the battery.
It's not clear to me that Apple provides a public developer API for reading more than battery percentage (I actually looked it up).
I would think any battery diagnostic app would have to monitor low level battery details while presenting a well-calibrated load (ie, that produces a known mAh real electrical load) against the phone's electrical system. The app would have a table derived from running it on new phones with known good batteries showing "ideal battery drain rate" which would then be compared against the data provided by the battery in question.
Battery "health" would then be the deviation between the canned data for known good batteries vs. the battery in the phone it's being run on.
The downside would be you would have to run the app for a fairly long time (minutes to possibly tens of minutes or longer) to get a reliable measure, and I'm also not sure how it would easily match background consumption variations (notifications or apps with frequently polled notification data). I suspect while testing you'd want to go into airplane mode.
I also am not sure how well such an app would deal with actual bad batteries like mine which are normal for 100-80% charge states but then have weird levels after that, such as jumping between levels at some power states.
I do a lot of boating and battery monitoring is a big deal and even where you have unrestricted access to batteries and can do a lot of load monitoring with good instruments, actual battery charge state and health are really hard to know well. The best instrument I've found, the Balmar SmartGauge, which has been extensively bench tested, nobody really knows how it works. It was developed for military vehicles, and the best anyone can figure is that it pulses the batteries with high frequency pulses and has some kind of internal tables from many well-calibrated tests of various chemistries.
What's weird is that Compellent, which was a big deal, now feels like a bastard stepchild, almost worse than Equallogic was relative to Compellent before the merger.
The product overlap is crazy and pre-merger Dell partners are now stumbling around trying to sell high margin EMC products but most weren't dealing with EMC-scale customers before hand and aren't being successful at it.
The extreme focus on HCI and VxRail is also kind silly, IMHO. It's way more expensive than standard host + san solutions and I think the push to sell it winds up selling cheaper competing products like Nutanix (but not Dell Nutanix) and Simplivity or even other non-HCI classic SAN solutions, usually all-flash.
And then there's vSAN itself, which is mostly platform agnostic, so why not just spec and order regular rack servers and skip the VxRail expense?
How do you know how much capacity is left in the battery? Is there a diagnostic that shows?
I have a iPhone 6 Plus that has some weird battery behavior (jumping battery charge levels from like 80% to 49% and then staying at 49% for ages).
Nice deflection but this is an apple problem, lets not harp on how there is no more innovation anywhere just because apple cant.
No, really. My first thoughts are Microsoft, then VMware, and probably more after that. Apple would be not off that list, but my experience has been more positive with Apple than some of the others.
I'll pick on VMware as an example -- each of their last 3 releases has had major bugs for months after the release. The good/bad news is that staying on a previous release wasn't much of a loss in terms of new features, because there weren't many. Yet you sort of paid a price in support and compatibility if you lingered at an old release, so you had some motivation to upgrade.
And at the same time the user interface has been withering, with more and more functionality only offered in the Flash-based user interface, and the most recent release completely does away with the Windows client in favor of a third-rate web interface that hasn't gotten better in 3 or so releases.
Meanwhile, little significant innovation is seen in these releases. The only compelling feature is vSAN, but it's expensive to license and it's not clear how compelling it really is.
It certainly seems like Apple isn't the only one with this problem. The entire tech industry seems based around relentless production of new versions with flimsy features no one wanted, often sacrificing more than just stability but valued features that users make extensive use of.
I'm kind of convinced that the technology industry turned to consolidation to eliminate competition and is just using feature/version revisions to force users into paying for support or upgrades to keep up profits. Actual growth is very low and development investment is also low, which accounts for a lot of the reason quality is low.
I think the industry generally is lacking in compelling innovation and is more interested in just consolidation and rent-seeking; needless fake innovation is just window dressing and forced obsolescence.
I think you have to look at the down side of extremely restrictive prescriptions in terms of what it does in the illegal drug market.
Tightening of prescription opiates started happening BEFORE the current overdose crisis and I think drove a lot of more casual pill users to heroin as street prices for pills creeped up. A surge in heroin users and the short-term supply inelasticity of heroin means the market adapts -- hard-to-interdict synthetics from China get turned loose, either on its own or to pump up overly diluted heroin.
So now you have not only a lot of inexperienced heroin users, you have a lot of bad heroin as a result of mostly just tightening down the prescription pill supply.
My sense was that the DEA probably needed to clamp down on the high-dosage pill supply (Oxycontin 30 mg and larger, for example) while mostly tolerating a certain level of abuse and diversion in the low-dosage pill market (your extremely common 5 mg oxycodone and hydrocodones, like Percocet and Vicodin).
While you certainly will have some problems with this -- those with addictive tendences will probably escalate. That being said, the recreational abusers and the overprescribed will be inclined to stick with reliable, relatively low doses, and many will not develop addiction at all let alone overdose. The history of opium has demonstrated that a lot of addicts wind up being maintenance addicts, people who are addicted but maintain their consumption at levels that are long-term sustainable.
The counter to this (existing policy) just seems to cause a lot of problems. Way more black market opiates of unknown quantities, much higher overdose rates, and policy makers making patient care for people with legitimate uses of opiates much more difficult.
I think some of this is driven by trends. Business leaders see "other companies" in glossy magazines, in the news or wherever doing something "fun" and they want in on it too for fear of being left out.
But I think some of the "sit on the loveseat" is driven by management's own disconnection with how actual workers get actual work done. They "work" in jobs that mostly consist of going to meetings and writing reports about meetings and arranging for informal meetings with other managers. To them, "work" is kind of an extended cocktail party, except with frappacinos, kambucha or giant water bottles, so sitting around on couches or in non-office type spaces makes complete sense.
And it also makes sense to eliminate drab, ordinary office spaces represented by desks and cubicles where people actually get work done.
I think true zero carbs is nearly impossible without an extremely restricted diet. I think you're still about the same on the "spare change" carbs in a slightly wider diet even though you might hit 20g carbs in a day. A lot of it is locked up in fiber or feels like a byproduct of the chemistry used to assess carb content (ie, when you get 1g carbs from some seafood).
For me personally, I found it kind of hard to sustain over a long time period (past 2 years). I found that my dietary choices became really repetitive after a while. Restaurant meals were particularly difficult, as often I found it hard to get enough to eat without ordering 3 entrees, although it did illustrate that restaurants make a lot money selling tiny meat portions with giant carb portions.
The weight loss was good, but I only dropped about 20 and stalled out from there. Had I been able to lose another 10-20, I might have stuck with it longer, but the repetitive nature of the diet, the added effort of sustaining it in a carb-filled universe and the lack of continued weight loss caused me to mostly abandon it. I still avoid all sugary foods and many carbs, though I don't think avoiding them is really helpful, I think you need to not eat them ever for the diet to really work.
I find it hard to believe a law firm would negotiate representation that required them to sink a lot of hours into a losing cause.
Who can tell?
Dell has mostly re-branded themselves as DellEMC, which I think was supposed to be an upgrade for the Dell name to associate it with the EMC brand. That being said, I always thought buying EMC was just a gimmick to get VMware but in my exposure it sure seems like EMC won internally, and the Dell people were shoved aside.
Overall, I don't understand their conflicting strategy. If you talk to a "Dell EMC" rep for more than 5 minutes, they will try to sell you their 3x overpriced EMC vxRail platform which is VMware vSAN on top of proprietary mini-blade chasis of like 4 nodes.
The strange part of the whole hyperconverged storage/virtualization model coming out of DellEMC is that EMC is a major SAN vendor selling against its own brand/products, made worse by ALSO selling Nutanix which directly competes against VMware vSAN *and* the SAN business.
I think the company is so big and has so much overlap they need to reconsider what they're doing and greatly trim product lines. I can't help but think VMware innovation is totally choked by being owned by a giant hardware company -- any innovative ideas that don't involve selling more and more expensive hardware will die on the vine. The hardware side can't adapt to emerging software defined storage unless its meant to boost VMware first. And of course everybody has to bow to EMC's giant portfolio lest someone mess with their accounts.
I would have thought the smarter play for Dell would have been to have kept VMware as a wholly owned subsidiary but let it self-manage (even if self-managing didn't mean coding for Dell's proprietary platform) and then sell off EMC. EMC seems like the dinosaur whose market can't really ever grow that much because the products are too expensive for anything but Fortune 500.
Which is unbelievably easy to get plus we have no idea how much permanent ingress is allowed to the government or what data is just sent over regularly.
I don't think a common wireless utility (simply running the spectrum + backhaul) would be any less subject to the thin barrier of warrants or any less compromised than the major carriers already are.
The consumer benefit so greatly outweighs the "muh gubmint" risk.
What fantasy world do you live in where cellular carriers aren't regularly and enthusiastically turning over data to the government?
The standard argument seems to be it's a safe on the inside, you can't crack it easily or without setting off alarms.
To which I reply, why not steal the entire ATM? This limits you to a subset of all ATMs -- mainly freestanding models, but I can see potential ruses for thieves who make like they're doing an intentional swap of a machine, slightly broadening the potential number of machines and reducing the need for brute force thefts of the machines.
With the entire ATM at your disposal, you have much more time for more deliberate physical attacks on the machine's cash vault.
I can also see an angle using entirely fake ATMs as a giant skimmer. I also wonder how easy it would be to get a real-but-not-legitimate ATM filled with cash. Probably nearly impossible, as I'm sure the guards have to do a bunch of tasks with the terminal and not just add cash (in addition to the normal codes needing to work).
I get that at one point SCO had assets worth plundering and probably some recurring income from licensed patents. But hasn't all of that basically been drained off?
I'm wondering what motivates anyone TODAY to sink money and resources into this case. It looks like it requires a multi-million dollar up front commitment to continued litigation combined with a very low chance of a significant payout.
The backers seem like they would be better off just investing those resources in equities. If there's any equity holders left, they seem like they would better served by liquidation. I doubt any of the IP is worth anything anymore, either.
I agree, we are entering into an era of marginal truth where simultaneous false flag operations and mixed facts/falsehoods make believing anything a marginal proposition.
Of course the downside of not knowing what to believe means not knowing what to disbelieve, and falsehoods gain the same veracity as truth.
A lot of this is getting rolled into software defined networking and used to create specific fine-grained rules and management of east/west network traffic inside a network.
I think the concept is reasonable to some degree and not entirely different from older ideas that treat the network more like concentric circles, with security increasing as you enter the circle and less and less traffic accepted from rings more than 1 ring above.
The problem with the present iteration of these concepts is that the vendors behind it seem to be pushing it as one more thing to buy when everyone already owns their base product -- ie, it's a growth strategy for them, not a particularly compelling practical or effective version of it.
I've only seen one fairly practical version of an untrusted internal network developed using traditional firewalls. Users were segmented off into groups of subnets, some group of servers was allowed access only from those subnets, and more secure systems only allowed connections from more select processes inside the first ring or internal VPN sessions from user machines for more secure applications. Most east-west traffic between user segments was blocked under the idea that no connections between user segment a and b really were necessary.
It wasn't a huge network but it required a lot of configuration and effort plus no small amount of user training and tolerance for not getting work done because of security limitations. It didn't seem really capable of scaling up very far, either.
So much skill development is just kind of dumped on employees who its assumed will just pick it up on their own. Some of that is OK, but there's a point (reached quickly) where it's just not practical or effective -- the technology is too complex to simulate/emulate without expensive hardware, too often there's little practical knowledge gained without practical production situations and workloads, way too much "certification" which just winds up being an exercise in memorizing a vendor's marketing buzzwords and trivia. Don't even get me started on 4 year degrees.
Then (at least in IT) there's the palpable decline in software quality combined with a dramatic increase in technology complexity. It's ironic, because without some of complex automation software the technology is too complex to operate manually but the software is low enough quality that the whole thing is unstable.
I think it's getting worse. We seem to have a growth in the amount of complexity of things individually and an increasing number of them, combined with a corresponding lack of investment in training.
As one kind of an example, an IT department 15 years ago had simpler networks, servers and software to manage. Now each of those things is much more complex than it used to be but the number of people managing it is the same and they probably don't know any more details than they did when it was simpler. High level management (virtualization, etc) may have made managing larger breadth easier, but I think the individual complexity has been addressed at all and lots of it is essentially not understood.
The problem with the IMDB rating, though, seems to be kind of skewed. The average rating of all IMDB movies is 6.9 and the median is 7.1. Basically half of all movies are 7/10 or better?
The other problem is that 40% of movies score between 5.0 and 7.0. I don't know about you, but I find the ratings in the center almost meaningless. I find wide variations in quality in that range that are not represented well by the rating. A 6.5 is not a guarantee of superior quality over 5.5.
And with a lot of those kinds of movies on streaming services, the IMDB score isn't super helpful in determining whether you'll waste 90 minutes on a turkey or not.
It's almost like if people assign a score between 4.5 and 7.5 to a movie, they need to be asked to score it *again* between 1 and 10 and then have that value used to weight the original score or be represented individually as a sub score.
If you travel anywhere near the Mexican border you already have to stop at mandatory Border Patrol checkpoints, even though you're not crossing the border.
I've been through several in Arizona and they feel fairly paramilitary although the "stop" generally involves just stopping for about 5 seconds and getting waved on. I figured being white and over 50 had something to do with the getting waved on part, however, I've seen the same wave-through thing happen with cars with Mexican plates in front of me and I've never seen anyone pulled off to the side when I've been through one.
Surprisingly, a vast part of the US (I think it's like hundreds of miles near any border) is in what I'd call a "reduced Constitution" zone where CBP has enhanced ability to stop and search US citizens. I'm a resident of Minnesota, but I haven't seen any evidence of this near the Canadian border, it seems more more intensive in the Southwest.
Yes, a significant and recurring element of the story is built around the use of AIs for both data analysis and for machine automation. A lot of the construction work is done by automated equipment and surface vehicles drive for hundreds of KM autonomously.
A big factor in the narrative arc is overpopulation on Earth and Mars' relatively small population which seems at least partly to be a function of automated labor. A lot of work on Mars consists of just lightly monitoring automated systems.
I mean his Mars trilogy was nearly completely about the rise of a unique Martian society over the 100-200 years since its founding.
If officers must be visible to enforce traffic law, then you find bad drivers will only comply with traffic law when they can't see a cop.
If officers prefer hiding to catch speeders, selection bias says they will prioritize roads where it's easier to hide and drivers tend to drive faster for enforcement. They will not use crash data or safety enhancement criteria.
Cops shouldn't run speed traps based on the idea that people are driving faster and it's easier for them to hide. They should bias enforcement to areas that have bonafide data suggesting those roads have more accidents or safety problems.
Cops end up enforcing speed laws on roads which naturally encourage drivers to drive faster -- new stretches, with lower traffic levels and generally good road conditions -- and which enable easy hiding spots. This is just lazy policing with only marginal value in promoting safety.
See? You made my point. The deliberate smug promotion of transgenderism is part of why it's annoying.