I guess I'm still left wondering how you scale this out to 10s/100s and more terabytes the way you would with 'ordinary' SAS/SATA drives and an expansion bus and enclosures. I would think that at some level of stripe depth with SAS bus flash disk you're getting very large scaling while still delivering throughput and latency competitive with nvme for all but the most corner usage cases.
I'd be more impressed if they were putting their AIs to work on macro economics and equity fundamentals analysis and coming up with 3-5 year buy and hold strategies that aligned a company's fundamentals with macro economics to figure out growth patterns.
It seems like a racing team that's given all the money to the guys that get the car down the first straightaway.01 seconds faster than anyone else and forgotten about racing the rest of the track.
Unfortunately these $10,000+ printers seem to be real pieces of shit,
Oh, they're awful. Shitty software, terrible interfaces and half the time at customer locations the important bits that show you networking configuration are needlessly locked out by the vendor.
And quite often finding the right driver (and knowing what the right setting is) requires the knowledge of 1-2 people at the "copier" company, which is staffed mostly by sales and mechanical technicians.
When I last went through this exercise as a full time admin, I got a full court press from the office manager (who managed the "copier" contract) and I was able to demonstrate that the "MFP" was a bad idea -- they wanted to charge a $0.05 per page, and I was able to monitor page counts on our LaserJet fleet and model actual operating costs based on average coverage figures -- we were below $0.01 per page on the then-big 5 Si printers, including toner and maintenance contracts.
Based on pages printed, we could have bought new LaserJets every year and discarded the old ones and STILL saved money versus paying a nickel per impression.
I dragged out my spreedsheets and graphs for the meeting with the office manager and the copier rep. The copier representative was pretty embarrassed when I walked through my figures and the cost comparisons.
It uses regular paper as its base and then is coated with their nanoparticle brew, and it's supposed to be a resource saver?
Maybe in a closed loop environment where there is a ton of printing for short-term purposes where the week-long lifetime doesn't matter AND you can re-use the paper close to the maximum number. But what do you bet in real life it would get printed on once and then the paper rendered impossible to print on due to wrinkling, tears, etc.
Although at so many offices there's a printer and then there's the inbox-type container with ream-and-a-half stack of printouts that nobody collects from the printer and that just sit there until the inbox overflows and somebody dumps the entire stack into the recycling bin.
Perhaps if the printer could do an erase stage at the start of a print job you could have a printer that automatically recycles the output bin after 30 minutes back to the tray so it could be erased again.
I think the larger problem with nvme RAID is holding enough modules to get any capacity. There's only so many keyed slots. Do they make a 16x PCIe card that will take 4 nvme sticks at a time?
Nvme is wicked fast but it's difficult to get it to scale up in capacity with redundancy because of connectivity limitations. Do they make any cabinets that take nvme modules? Connected via SAS-12 it might not be too bad.
But in the business side of medicine, a lot of doctors buy into medical groups and by the time they're in their 50s they are the senior people in their group culling more profit from the group's practice and working fewer, better hours and then often selling out their share of the practice to someone new.
I have a friend who is an orthodontist and he started that way, and he then expanded the practice being the principal practitioner at a couple of new locations, which includes owning the buildings. He's 55 and I think if he sold his real estate holdings now he'd probably net more money than his future income from just orthodontics. Of course I think he will continue to work and either hold the lease on the real estate or sell the buildings when decides to retire.
As for the NFL/SV comparison, that's kind of silly. The NFL players make all that money in less than 10 years and then quite often leverage their football careers in sales, coaching positions or if they were better than average at money and income, into owning car dealerships or other large businesses where they make money even beyond their NFL earnings.
Of course there a lot of fools that blow it all on partying and large retinues of family and hangers on and wind up penniless.
What I find surprising is that these positions (no matter how vacuous their actual roles really were) are being given to celebrities who probably aren't even all that responsible for their own celebrity.
They themselves are quite often the products of PR agents, media handlers, producers, song writing "collaborators", and marketing campaigns. Giving them a job to provide visionary leadership assumes they are themselves responsible for their own successes and are wholly self-made.
I'd also wonder if these celebrities, especially the pop music stars, go in for these jobs on the downward arc of their careers, taking them to keep their own PR buzz going when their principal popularity is fading.
Now none of this is to say that these people are wholly talentless hacks, either, but in the realm of long-duration talent the list of people mentioned seem like pop music footnotes, not long-duration artists known for the depth of their creativity.
Admittedly it is wild speculation, but I find it hard to believe these immigrant doctors had all passed their residencies. More than a few were in their 50s and I don't see them doing 3-5 years of residency at that age, nor do I see the for-profit clinic they worked for paying the freight for fully licensed doctors *and* winding up with a staff dominated by immigrants.
And this urgent care business was a dodgy organization generally -- I didn't like working for them because they were kind of shady in how they interacted.
More speculation: maybe they weren't even "doctors" but were actually able to obtain credentials as nurse practitioners or another "lesser" category requiring less work that allowed them to treat urgent care type situations yet were passed off to patients as doctors with the specifics of their credentials merely assumed by patients. I know I've been in urgent care with only a nurse practitioner.
Some guy walks into the examination room with a dress shirt and tie and a white coat, you just think "doctor". And urgent care is never that much medical practice -- anything beyond antibiotics is almost always a referral to an emergency room or "your regular doctor" if there's no clinical urgency, so the illusion isn't hard to maintain. Most won't prescribe opioids or benzos as a general rule to keep the pill freaks at bay, so you can't even evaluate their standing based on that, other than adding to the speculation that part of why they don't prescribe those drugs is that their "doctors" *can't* write the prescriptions.
I did some work for an urgent care clinic network and many of the doctors I ran into at the clinic were immigrants from other countries.
Knowing how well the healthcare professions have fortified their jobs with barriers to entry, "review boards" controlled by trade group members, etc, I'd guess there's some process whereby they can practice the type of non-invasive medicine common in an urgent care clinic with a "lite" version of the medical boards and under USA doctor "supervision".
But full-blown licensure is probably much harder to obtain, with few medical degrees from foreign schools given full accreditation, and foreign doctors required to take lot of remedial instruction if not an entire medical school curriculum to practice medicine.
On one hand, it might keep out a lot of talentless hacks but on the other it makes sure the MD workforce is kept small and salaries and patient costs high.
Only newer or very famous titles and people boards got heavy trolling and or crapflooding. It was annoying on GoT, but if you get out of that 10% popularity bubble the they dissolved if not disappeared completely.
Most older films and people boards had little traffic and often had useful trivia or information about the actors -- where are they now, etc. Some films really had useful discussion on the topics.
And the per-title/person board format meant you could post about a small-role actor from the 1940s or 50s and it wouldn't get lost in the shuffle and the low volume meant your post could stick around for years. I've gotten replies to posts 4-5 years later.
This was one way of doing message forums right.
So many others are borderline useful when useful at all.
And what's stupid is the forums themselves were so basic I bet they took no storage, little code and little cpu overhead.
I think the "neo-Nazi and white supremacist support for Trump" idea itself is overblown.
How many people actively are engaged in those ideologies in any serious way? I'm thinking if there were 25,000 serious, involved white power supporters in this country, 500 per state, I'd be really surprised.
I think the number of pretty openly racist people who aren't ideological about it is much larger, but those people aren't the "white nationalists" associated with the Trump/Nazi support meme.
I also don't believe too much in the slippery slope concept, either -- visa bans today, camps tomorrow. American society has grown so much more liberal than it was 50 years ago and I think it was such an evolutionary process that you can't go back. Trump will overplay his hand too often and the public will lose interest in his policies and finally see through him.
The existential risk, of course, is that Trump's policies actually work, and that some level of official discrimination against Islamic immigrants is shown to be useful and effective.
So you run a factory or other facility, you meet all regulatory requirements on emissions and have a track record of excellent compliance (no evidence of cheating, mistakes, etc).
On what basis can you be sued? Sure, some evidence may turn up in the future that your emissions at 25 ppm are actually unsafe and make people sick, but if you don't know that and all laws and regulations allow for 25 ppm, but should you be liable for something that was otherwise legal and not known to be unsafe?
I've moved to adding additional backups of servers at greater risk of ransomware encryption, every 2-4 hours depending on what the site's environment can handle in terms of capacity and added disk load, usually retaining these backups for 2-3 days.
This way if ransomware hits, I've got both an additional backup to the daily backup and a very recent backup in case key files were affected.
Yeah, but will commercial software vendors follow Apple down the garden path to an ARM future when the rest of the world (Linux and Windows) is still on x86?
My guess is its more complicated than just telling the compiler to target ARM CPUs, and will an ARM Mac generate enough sales to make it worthwhile for vendors to do the extra work on their code base?
I'm assuming that most of the added work for Mac support now is fairly small scale UI stuff, and that the functional parts of applications and optimization is generally cross-platform, allowing for a lot of economies of scale across platforms as long as the instruction set is the same.
Or will it be a case like the iPad, where for many users its more or less feature complete out of the box with vendor-supplied applications, and as long as Adobe comes along it won't matter?
As a general rule, we're moving to a much more closely managed lifestyle across the board. Any personal habit which creates a cost somewhere down the line is being scrutinized. It's just like corporate finance guys squeezing costs out of a business, 50-60 years ago they lacked the tools to easily model and analyze costs, so there was a lot more built in slack in the system and now that the tools and data exist, they're coming up with all kinds of ways to squeeze costs and jack up profits.
Healthcare is experiencing the same effect, whether it's insurer driven or government driven under the rubric of program funding or public health. Nobody wants to pay for expenses they think can be eliminated.
Based on a lot of the new thinking surrounding sugar, I think one easy thing they could do is create an excise tax on sugar manufacturers and importers. Price increases on sugar at the source will force up the price of products with added sugar. Food manufacturers will have to either cut the junk sugar they add to juice flavor or charge a higher price and be less competitive.
If you could cut total sugar consumption in the population by 20% you'd probably work wonders with obesity and type II diabetes rates.
Secondly, just like the backups and drills that most companies don't bother to do, they won't bother to hire a service like this either.
Maybe, but often the real problem is that they don't have the facilities to do it in. It becomes kind of an existential question they can't answer. I think if you attacked the CIO/CFO with the idea of this service and why your staff can't do it now and what they don't know, you'd get more uptake than you might think. You might even get line staff on board with it, too, since a successful restore or the ability to adjust procedures to get a successful restore might (a) make them sleep better and night and (b) be an ace in their pocket if something does go wrong in an actual disaster -- "we hired the service, and tested the system as completely as possible and it worked. This failure is act-of-god/statistical improbability that you can't blame on us."
Say for example, the fiduciary regulations of Elbonia were changed to say that all app providers must have externally verified DR capability, then your business would fit right in and solve that need
I'd bet between SOX, HIPPA, partner agreements, insurance, etc, there's already enough soft requirements that you could say "Sure, you're not *mandated* to have more than "just" a DR plan, but if your plan is shit and non-viable your civil liability it limitless. A proven and certified execution of your DR plan is a get out of jail free card if it doesn't work for act-of-god reasons."
The cloud part is tougher, but to be honest, I don't really know how people protect themselves in those environments, and I'd wager a lot don't besides making redundant data copies and hoping that the cloud has them covered -- which it might, from a lot of physical failures, but I think they impart too much faith in cloud systems from a recovery perspective, but that's almost a different discussion.
Does anyone think that Backups/DR Testing as a business would be something that businesses would go for?
Everybody "runs backups" but due to all the usual limitations in time and capacity, nobody really tests whether they can restore everything and actually make it work, and how long it might actually take to accomplish this.
I always wondered if you could mount a hundred TB of storage, a couple of tape drives, and switching into one of those rock band roadie cases and take it to a business with the idea that they would hand over their backup media and then see what happens when they try to restore their data to your equipment.
The customer would provide all software and media, just as they would in a real disaster.
It would eliminate the "we can't restore everything" capacity issue most places have, the fact that the equipment would differ from what they have (even if its only slight model derivations) would be the kind of variation likely in a real DR scenario -- if you have to physically replace hardware, it likely won't be the same model stuff you have now.
An option would exist to have/not have the staff participate in the process -- I'm sure many CxOs are curious if their "system" can survive being restored by someone else.
I do think that the biggest mistake his critics make is assuming he's following the standard playbook. They say "he's doing X wrong" without realizing he's abandoned that playbook.
the jig is up, guys. and its about time! I hope its real, this time, though. something tells me that the orange haired monkey that is now running this country will not really care much about US; and he'll do whatever he wants to make himself better off. the rest of us, I seriously doubt he has our best interests at heart. not a republican big businessman. those are the very people that exclusively abuse this program and benefit directly from it!
IMHO, the risk is that the general Trump persona and the over-the-top reaction to everything he does will render his potentially useful actions ineffective, and worse, possibly poison issues like H1-B as just another aspect of a racist nationalist agenda, making positive change on that issue impossible.
It's utterly clear that the globalist/transnationals completely support mass immigration, jobs transfer, etc, whether for cynical motivation (more money for people at the top) or because it fits into some complex long-term agenda with altruistic motivations (spread the wealth, etc), so don't be surprised if/when Trump fails H1-B will back at status quo or worse when the globalists regain control.
As for Trump's personal motivation, I'm never quite sure on this. It's easy to align him with the usual cadre of rich corporate types, but I sometimes suspect that Trump himself doesn't feel like he fits into that crowd as a natural member, which is why he tries so hard and often comes off as a tacky and nouveau riche. He has to flout his wealth harder to prove he belongs.
Bottom line, he may not be motivationally aligned with traditional corporate interests or may not feel like he has to tow their line.
Mushrooms are lower impact, but that works against them, too, with shorter and less intense peak effects, and though shorter, they had a similar "long tail" effect where you just felt kind of hyper but without the benefits of peak effect.
They required dedicating less time, but I never found the difference completely compelling.
Who hasn't been burned by hardware that requires Java but then finds that either the browser or the JVM won't run the interface due to HTTPS compliance problems. And sometimes its not even Java -- we recently ran into some wireless controllers with a default public certificate that was revoked, breaking the management GUI and the captive portal functionality.
In an ideal world, an organization would have their own internal PKI or buy public trusted certificates for all of it, at least solving the HTTPS certificate issue. But this is a problem for a lot of organizations, either financially or in terms of complexity. And not just the complexity of running PKI, but in getting complex systems that use self-signed certificates to replace those certificates with trusted ones.
There's seldom a single certificate replacement tool/option, it's often a difficult task that if not done right breaks the whole solution.
I think it can be boiled down for the most part to the left shifting its focus from socialist economics to a fuzzy range of social issues, focused mostly on multiculturalism.
The political left has always been left vulnerable when they lose the support of workers and shift their priorities to non-labor social issues, especially when those issues are not salient to the majority population's labor sector. This provides a window for parties to offer policies of interest to the labor sector and capture them.
The problem the left has is that they end up prioritizing policies whose constituencies are only numerical minorities. It may work electorally if they can form a broad enough coalition, and at times they can pull in enough middle class voters to tip the balance. But the risk is that they have to have a broad coalition, and such a broad coalition is tough to sustain -- either you water down your social issues enough to not alienate the middle class voters, risking another candidate stealing your social issues faction or you alienate the middle class.
The question is why the left chose to abandon a lot of their socialist economics for social issues and multiculturalism. It's probably a combination of factors -- the failure of Communist states economically and their political oppression. The rise of civil rights as an alternative to Marxism as an animating drive of the political left. I also think that the decline of organized labor and its hostility to left-wing social issues tempted the left into trading them as a voting bloc for the broader voting bloc represented by multiculturalism and social issues.
I think the latter was a miscalculation, as they failed to see the overlap between middle class votes and economic issues, and they didn't trade for an equal scale voting bloc.
If the left abandons mainstream labor interests it almost always leads to fascism, the synthesis of labor-friendly economics with nationalism. If the left maintains itself principally as a party of labor interests, though, it seems to squelch nationalism and authoritarianism by forcing those elements into alliances with the economic establishment where establishment economic values end up superseding nationalist interests.
I mean it was the exact next story after this one on the front page. And I'm supposed to *rely* on this service to gain access to lost 2FA tokens somehow?
And since when do I trust Facebook with anything? I hardly trust them to keep the privacy settings where I put them.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I'm still left wondering how you scale this out to 10s/100s and more terabytes the way you would with 'ordinary' SAS/SATA drives and an expansion bus and enclosures. I would think that at some level of stripe depth with SAS bus flash disk you're getting very large scaling while still delivering throughput and latency competitive with nvme for all but the most corner usage cases.
I'd be more impressed if they were putting their AIs to work on macro economics and equity fundamentals analysis and coming up with 3-5 year buy and hold strategies that aligned a company's fundamentals with macro economics to figure out growth patterns.
It seems like a racing team that's given all the money to the guys that get the car down the first straightaway .01 seconds faster than anyone else and forgotten about racing the rest of the track.
Unfortunately these $10,000+ printers seem to be real pieces of shit,
Oh, they're awful. Shitty software, terrible interfaces and half the time at customer locations the important bits that show you networking configuration are needlessly locked out by the vendor.
And quite often finding the right driver (and knowing what the right setting is) requires the knowledge of 1-2 people at the "copier" company, which is staffed mostly by sales and mechanical technicians.
When I last went through this exercise as a full time admin, I got a full court press from the office manager (who managed the "copier" contract) and I was able to demonstrate that the "MFP" was a bad idea -- they wanted to charge a $0.05 per page, and I was able to monitor page counts on our LaserJet fleet and model actual operating costs based on average coverage figures -- we were below $0.01 per page on the then-big 5 Si printers, including toner and maintenance contracts.
Based on pages printed, we could have bought new LaserJets every year and discarded the old ones and STILL saved money versus paying a nickel per impression.
I dragged out my spreedsheets and graphs for the meeting with the office manager and the copier rep. The copier representative was pretty embarrassed when I walked through my figures and the cost comparisons.
It uses regular paper as its base and then is coated with their nanoparticle brew, and it's supposed to be a resource saver?
Maybe in a closed loop environment where there is a ton of printing for short-term purposes where the week-long lifetime doesn't matter AND you can re-use the paper close to the maximum number. But what do you bet in real life it would get printed on once and then the paper rendered impossible to print on due to wrinkling, tears, etc.
Although at so many offices there's a printer and then there's the inbox-type container with ream-and-a-half stack of printouts that nobody collects from the printer and that just sit there until the inbox overflows and somebody dumps the entire stack into the recycling bin.
Perhaps if the printer could do an erase stage at the start of a print job you could have a printer that automatically recycles the output bin after 30 minutes back to the tray so it could be erased again.
I think the larger problem with nvme RAID is holding enough modules to get any capacity. There's only so many keyed slots. Do they make a 16x PCIe card that will take 4 nvme sticks at a time?
Nvme is wicked fast but it's difficult to get it to scale up in capacity with redundancy because of connectivity limitations. Do they make any cabinets that take nvme modules? Connected via SAS-12 it might not be too bad.
But in the business side of medicine, a lot of doctors buy into medical groups and by the time they're in their 50s they are the senior people in their group culling more profit from the group's practice and working fewer, better hours and then often selling out their share of the practice to someone new.
I have a friend who is an orthodontist and he started that way, and he then expanded the practice being the principal practitioner at a couple of new locations, which includes owning the buildings. He's 55 and I think if he sold his real estate holdings now he'd probably net more money than his future income from just orthodontics. Of course I think he will continue to work and either hold the lease on the real estate or sell the buildings when decides to retire.
As for the NFL/SV comparison, that's kind of silly. The NFL players make all that money in less than 10 years and then quite often leverage their football careers in sales, coaching positions or if they were better than average at money and income, into owning car dealerships or other large businesses where they make money even beyond their NFL earnings.
Of course there a lot of fools that blow it all on partying and large retinues of family and hangers on and wind up penniless.
What I find surprising is that these positions (no matter how vacuous their actual roles really were) are being given to celebrities who probably aren't even all that responsible for their own celebrity.
They themselves are quite often the products of PR agents, media handlers, producers, song writing "collaborators", and marketing campaigns. Giving them a job to provide visionary leadership assumes they are themselves responsible for their own successes and are wholly self-made.
I'd also wonder if these celebrities, especially the pop music stars, go in for these jobs on the downward arc of their careers, taking them to keep their own PR buzz going when their principal popularity is fading.
Now none of this is to say that these people are wholly talentless hacks, either, but in the realm of long-duration talent the list of people mentioned seem like pop music footnotes, not long-duration artists known for the depth of their creativity.
Admittedly it is wild speculation, but I find it hard to believe these immigrant doctors had all passed their residencies. More than a few were in their 50s and I don't see them doing 3-5 years of residency at that age, nor do I see the for-profit clinic they worked for paying the freight for fully licensed doctors *and* winding up with a staff dominated by immigrants.
And this urgent care business was a dodgy organization generally -- I didn't like working for them because they were kind of shady in how they interacted.
More speculation: maybe they weren't even "doctors" but were actually able to obtain credentials as nurse practitioners or another "lesser" category requiring less work that allowed them to treat urgent care type situations yet were passed off to patients as doctors with the specifics of their credentials merely assumed by patients. I know I've been in urgent care with only a nurse practitioner.
Some guy walks into the examination room with a dress shirt and tie and a white coat, you just think "doctor". And urgent care is never that much medical practice -- anything beyond antibiotics is almost always a referral to an emergency room or "your regular doctor" if there's no clinical urgency, so the illusion isn't hard to maintain. Most won't prescribe opioids or benzos as a general rule to keep the pill freaks at bay, so you can't even evaluate their standing based on that, other than adding to the speculation that part of why they don't prescribe those drugs is that their "doctors" *can't* write the prescriptions.
I did some work for an urgent care clinic network and many of the doctors I ran into at the clinic were immigrants from other countries.
Knowing how well the healthcare professions have fortified their jobs with barriers to entry, "review boards" controlled by trade group members, etc, I'd guess there's some process whereby they can practice the type of non-invasive medicine common in an urgent care clinic with a "lite" version of the medical boards and under USA doctor "supervision".
But full-blown licensure is probably much harder to obtain, with few medical degrees from foreign schools given full accreditation, and foreign doctors required to take lot of remedial instruction if not an entire medical school curriculum to practice medicine.
On one hand, it might keep out a lot of talentless hacks but on the other it makes sure the MD workforce is kept small and salaries and patient costs high.
Only newer or very famous titles and people boards got heavy trolling and or crapflooding. It was annoying on GoT, but if you get out of that 10% popularity bubble the they dissolved if not disappeared completely.
Most older films and people boards had little traffic and often had useful trivia or information about the actors -- where are they now, etc. Some films really had useful discussion on the topics.
And the per-title/person board format meant you could post about a small-role actor from the 1940s or 50s and it wouldn't get lost in the shuffle and the low volume meant your post could stick around for years. I've gotten replies to posts 4-5 years later.
This was one way of doing message forums right.
So many others are borderline useful when useful at all.
And what's stupid is the forums themselves were so basic I bet they took no storage, little code and little cpu overhead.
I think the "neo-Nazi and white supremacist support for Trump" idea itself is overblown.
How many people actively are engaged in those ideologies in any serious way? I'm thinking if there were 25,000 serious, involved white power supporters in this country, 500 per state, I'd be really surprised.
I think the number of pretty openly racist people who aren't ideological about it is much larger, but those people aren't the "white nationalists" associated with the Trump/Nazi support meme.
I also don't believe too much in the slippery slope concept, either -- visa bans today, camps tomorrow. American society has grown so much more liberal than it was 50 years ago and I think it was such an evolutionary process that you can't go back. Trump will overplay his hand too often and the public will lose interest in his policies and finally see through him.
The existential risk, of course, is that Trump's policies actually work, and that some level of official discrimination against Islamic immigrants is shown to be useful and effective.
So you run a factory or other facility, you meet all regulatory requirements on emissions and have a track record of excellent compliance (no evidence of cheating, mistakes, etc).
On what basis can you be sued? Sure, some evidence may turn up in the future that your emissions at 25 ppm are actually unsafe and make people sick, but if you don't know that and all laws and regulations allow for 25 ppm, but should you be liable for something that was otherwise legal and not known to be unsafe?
I've moved to adding additional backups of servers at greater risk of ransomware encryption, every 2-4 hours depending on what the site's environment can handle in terms of capacity and added disk load, usually retaining these backups for 2-3 days.
This way if ransomware hits, I've got both an additional backup to the daily backup and a very recent backup in case key files were affected.
I guess maybe more conventional code would be pretty easily portable then, perhaps only really performance sensitive code might be affected.
Yeah, but will commercial software vendors follow Apple down the garden path to an ARM future when the rest of the world (Linux and Windows) is still on x86?
My guess is its more complicated than just telling the compiler to target ARM CPUs, and will an ARM Mac generate enough sales to make it worthwhile for vendors to do the extra work on their code base?
I'm assuming that most of the added work for Mac support now is fairly small scale UI stuff, and that the functional parts of applications and optimization is generally cross-platform, allowing for a lot of economies of scale across platforms as long as the instruction set is the same.
Or will it be a case like the iPad, where for many users its more or less feature complete out of the box with vendor-supplied applications, and as long as Adobe comes along it won't matter?
As a general rule, we're moving to a much more closely managed lifestyle across the board. Any personal habit which creates a cost somewhere down the line is being scrutinized. It's just like corporate finance guys squeezing costs out of a business, 50-60 years ago they lacked the tools to easily model and analyze costs, so there was a lot more built in slack in the system and now that the tools and data exist, they're coming up with all kinds of ways to squeeze costs and jack up profits.
Healthcare is experiencing the same effect, whether it's insurer driven or government driven under the rubric of program funding or public health. Nobody wants to pay for expenses they think can be eliminated.
Based on a lot of the new thinking surrounding sugar, I think one easy thing they could do is create an excise tax on sugar manufacturers and importers. Price increases on sugar at the source will force up the price of products with added sugar. Food manufacturers will have to either cut the junk sugar they add to juice flavor or charge a higher price and be less competitive.
If you could cut total sugar consumption in the population by 20% you'd probably work wonders with obesity and type II diabetes rates.
Secondly, just like the backups and drills that most companies don't bother to do, they won't bother to hire a service like this either.
Maybe, but often the real problem is that they don't have the facilities to do it in. It becomes kind of an existential question they can't answer. I think if you attacked the CIO/CFO with the idea of this service and why your staff can't do it now and what they don't know, you'd get more uptake than you might think. You might even get line staff on board with it, too, since a successful restore or the ability to adjust procedures to get a successful restore might (a) make them sleep better and night and (b) be an ace in their pocket if something does go wrong in an actual disaster -- "we hired the service, and tested the system as completely as possible and it worked. This failure is act-of-god/statistical improbability that you can't blame on us."
Say for example, the fiduciary regulations of Elbonia were changed to say that all app providers must have externally verified DR capability, then your business would fit right in and solve that need
I'd bet between SOX, HIPPA, partner agreements, insurance, etc, there's already enough soft requirements that you could say "Sure, you're not *mandated* to have more than "just" a DR plan, but if your plan is shit and non-viable your civil liability it limitless. A proven and certified execution of your DR plan is a get out of jail free card if it doesn't work for act-of-god reasons."
The cloud part is tougher, but to be honest, I don't really know how people protect themselves in those environments, and I'd wager a lot don't besides making redundant data copies and hoping that the cloud has them covered -- which it might, from a lot of physical failures, but I think they impart too much faith in cloud systems from a recovery perspective, but that's almost a different discussion.
Does anyone think that Backups/DR Testing as a business would be something that businesses would go for?
Everybody "runs backups" but due to all the usual limitations in time and capacity, nobody really tests whether they can restore everything and actually make it work, and how long it might actually take to accomplish this.
I always wondered if you could mount a hundred TB of storage, a couple of tape drives, and switching into one of those rock band roadie cases and take it to a business with the idea that they would hand over their backup media and then see what happens when they try to restore their data to your equipment.
The customer would provide all software and media, just as they would in a real disaster.
It would eliminate the "we can't restore everything" capacity issue most places have, the fact that the equipment would differ from what they have (even if its only slight model derivations) would be the kind of variation likely in a real DR scenario -- if you have to physically replace hardware, it likely won't be the same model stuff you have now.
An option would exist to have/not have the staff participate in the process -- I'm sure many CxOs are curious if their "system" can survive being restored by someone else.
I do think that the biggest mistake his critics make is assuming he's following the standard playbook. They say "he's doing X wrong" without realizing he's abandoned that playbook.
the jig is up, guys. and its about time! I hope its real, this time, though. something tells me that the orange haired monkey that is now running this country will not really care much about US; and he'll do whatever he wants to make himself better off. the rest of us, I seriously doubt he has our best interests at heart. not a republican big businessman. those are the very people that exclusively abuse this program and benefit directly from it!
IMHO, the risk is that the general Trump persona and the over-the-top reaction to everything he does will render his potentially useful actions ineffective, and worse, possibly poison issues like H1-B as just another aspect of a racist nationalist agenda, making positive change on that issue impossible.
It's utterly clear that the globalist/transnationals completely support mass immigration, jobs transfer, etc, whether for cynical motivation (more money for people at the top) or because it fits into some complex long-term agenda with altruistic motivations (spread the wealth, etc), so don't be surprised if/when Trump fails H1-B will back at status quo or worse when the globalists regain control.
As for Trump's personal motivation, I'm never quite sure on this. It's easy to align him with the usual cadre of rich corporate types, but I sometimes suspect that Trump himself doesn't feel like he fits into that crowd as a natural member, which is why he tries so hard and often comes off as a tacky and nouveau riche. He has to flout his wealth harder to prove he belongs.
Bottom line, he may not be motivationally aligned with traditional corporate interests or may not feel like he has to tow their line.
Mushrooms are lower impact, but that works against them, too, with shorter and less intense peak effects, and though shorter, they had a similar "long tail" effect where you just felt kind of hyper but without the benefits of peak effect.
They required dedicating less time, but I never found the difference completely compelling.
The first 4 hours were fun, but after that it just got kind of tedious.
There were always rumors it was jacked up with speed or strychnine, but I never thought you could fit enough of either in blotter for that to be true.
Who hasn't been burned by hardware that requires Java but then finds that either the browser or the JVM won't run the interface due to HTTPS compliance problems. And sometimes its not even Java -- we recently ran into some wireless controllers with a default public certificate that was revoked, breaking the management GUI and the captive portal functionality.
In an ideal world, an organization would have their own internal PKI or buy public trusted certificates for all of it, at least solving the HTTPS certificate issue. But this is a problem for a lot of organizations, either financially or in terms of complexity. And not just the complexity of running PKI, but in getting complex systems that use self-signed certificates to replace those certificates with trusted ones.
There's seldom a single certificate replacement tool/option, it's often a difficult task that if not done right breaks the whole solution.
I think it can be boiled down for the most part to the left shifting its focus from socialist economics to a fuzzy range of social issues, focused mostly on multiculturalism.
The political left has always been left vulnerable when they lose the support of workers and shift their priorities to non-labor social issues, especially when those issues are not salient to the majority population's labor sector. This provides a window for parties to offer policies of interest to the labor sector and capture them.
The problem the left has is that they end up prioritizing policies whose constituencies are only numerical minorities. It may work electorally if they can form a broad enough coalition, and at times they can pull in enough middle class voters to tip the balance. But the risk is that they have to have a broad coalition, and such a broad coalition is tough to sustain -- either you water down your social issues enough to not alienate the middle class voters, risking another candidate stealing your social issues faction or you alienate the middle class.
The question is why the left chose to abandon a lot of their socialist economics for social issues and multiculturalism. It's probably a combination of factors -- the failure of Communist states economically and their political oppression. The rise of civil rights as an alternative to Marxism as an animating drive of the political left. I also think that the decline of organized labor and its hostility to left-wing social issues tempted the left into trading them as a voting bloc for the broader voting bloc represented by multiculturalism and social issues.
I think the latter was a miscalculation, as they failed to see the overlap between middle class votes and economic issues, and they didn't trade for an equal scale voting bloc.
If the left abandons mainstream labor interests it almost always leads to fascism, the synthesis of labor-friendly economics with nationalism. If the left maintains itself principally as a party of labor interests, though, it seems to squelch nationalism and authoritarianism by forcing those elements into alliances with the economic establishment where establishment economic values end up superseding nationalist interests.
I mean it was the exact next story after this one on the front page. And I'm supposed to *rely* on this service to gain access to lost 2FA tokens somehow?
And since when do I trust Facebook with anything? I hardly trust them to keep the privacy settings where I put them.