You've been pushing this Storage Virtualization on us storage admins for years now, and it's more trouble than it's worth. What is it? It's putting some sort of appliance (or in HDS's view a new disk array) in front of all of my other disk arrays, trying to commoditize my back end disk arrays, so that I can have capacity provided by any vendor I choose. You make claims like,
1. "You'll never have vendor lock-in with Storage virtualization!" However, now that I'm using your appliance to provide the intelligence (snapshots, sync/async replication, migration etc) I'm now locked into your solution. 2. "This will be easy to manage." How many of these fucking appliances do I need for my new 100TB disk array? When I've got over 300 storage ports on my various arrays, and my appliance has 4 (IBM SVC I'm looking at you), how many nodes do I need? I'm now spending as much time trying to scale up your appliance solution that for every large array I deploy, I need 4 racks worth of appliances. 3. "This will be homogeneous!" Bull fucking shit. You claimed that this stuff will work with any vendor's disk arrays so that I can purchase the cheapest $/GB arrays out there. No more DMX, just clariion, no more DS8000 now fastT. What a load. You only support other vendor's disk arrays during the initial migration and then I'm pretty much stuck with your arrays until the end of time. So much for your utopian view of any vendor. So now that I've got to standardize on your back end disk arrays, it's not like you're saving me the trouble of only having one loadbalancing software solutions (DMP, Powerpath, HDLM, SDD etc..). If I have DMX on the backend, I'm using Powerpath whether I like it or not. This would have been nice if I was willing to have four different vendor's selling me backend capacity, but since I don't want to deal with service contracts from four different vendors, that idea is a goner.
Besides, when I go to your large conferences down in Tampa, FL; even your own IT doesn't use it. Why? Because all you did is add another layer of complexity (troubleshooting, firmware updates, configuration) between my servers and their storage.
You can take this appliance (or switch based in EMC's case) based storage virtualization and Shove It!
btw: There's a reason why we connect mainframe channels directly to the control units. (OpenSystems translation: Connecting hba ports to storage array ports.) Answer: Cable doesn't need upgrading, doesn't need maintenance contracts and is 100% passive.
If any employee caused this kind of damage the customers/consumers would sue and employees would be terminated. Yet in this case, we have companies (and hence employees) that are "too big|valuable|important too fail" so they get bailed out.
If I did this at my company (I manage a large mainframe storage environment at a recognizable financial institution on WallStreet), say by blowing away a ton of customer data, I can guarantee I would be walked to the door before the end of the day.
People in peer departments of mine (like those than manage the networks, server admins etc) that have no input to the investment direction of this company's holdings, have lost bonuses, haven't been able to purchase equipment and staff has been cut. We had nothing to do with this bullsh!t, and yet us like the rest of American's are having to suffer while the MBAs reap in the dollars that the Federal Gov't is handing out.
I wish I could get a $200k bonus for blowing away a PetaByte of mainframe storage. Maybe I'll go power off the z10 and see if Obama will bail out my unemployed ass.
How often do we see the respective trade rags publish this stuff?...wait for solaris 10 SR1...wait for AIX 6.3 ML 0001...wait for HPUX 11.11.11.i.1...wait for OS/400... z/OS...
Maybe Garmin/TomTom will replace their current OS with Android. However, I don't see any outdoorsman/athlete tossing their Garmin device for a GPS enabled cell phone. Why? Garmin devices are purpose built, they can be strapped to my wrist, my arm, they are waterproof, I can easily mount it to the handlebars of my mountain/road bike, they have heart rate monitors built in, I can attach a secondary transponder to my dogs when they are out herding so I know where they are.
I also love the fact that they can download maps from the National Geographic Topographic Map Series. Now there's nothing that would stop someone from writing a android app to interface with these maps. But currently google maps doesn't help me out on the trail.
Garmin is a brand and people buy their products for the features, nobody buys Garmin b/c of the underlying OS.
The author really believes that China is rewarding intellects? According to wikipedia, China spent $40Billion on the 2008 Olympics.
I don't see intellects in any First world country making the same money as athletes. Nike spends on sponsorships $255 to $260million a year and spent $143.4 million on advertising in the first nine months of 2008. Note that Nike is a $31Billion company.
As a kid growing up? I don't recall any commercials saying "I wanna be like Stephen [Hawking]" or kids beating up other kids for some intellectual device, but they were sure beating each other up for a pair of Air Jordans.
Anybody else ever notice that the only commercials on TV for Educational Institutions (besides community or trade schools) are during college football games? Those commercials are only for the two schools that are playing. There's a commercial every 5minutes for sneakers, Under Armor shirts, Fitness equipment, sports drinks or sporting events. (As a side note, anybody recall the last time you saw an advertisement for Educational Software, besides Rosetta Stone? But there's a commercial every hour for some new XBOX/PS3/Wii game).
Intellectuals are enablers of other people to go onto great success. I guarantee you there were a ton of intellectuals that designed the bike, software to track, study the technique of Lance Armstrong's cycling career and victories in the Tour de France. But other than the brand, Trek, those big brained people will never be known, nor will someone pay them $50m in endorsements.
Btw: It's not just athletes vs intellectuals. Not all intellectuals are compensated equally either. I maintain the storage environment for a very large mainframe environment for a household WallStreet financial firm. Over a PB of online FICON disk much of it synchronously replicated to a remote disaster recovery site, and I can assure that my bonus is not even close to that of an entry level trader. I'm sure I could do a lot more damage than that 28yr old MBA.
I haven't received a single personal note from a Microsoft PR person for roughly four years.
I didn't see any technical review by Dvorak in the article just a bunch of complaints about MSFT's marketing/PR efforts. Oddly I don't recall seeing a lot of PR from IBM regarding zOS either, but my zSeries keeps on running. Seems that he's just sore he hasn't received any TLC from MSFT. Aww poor Dvorak... sorry that your feelings got hurt.
Somebody send Ballmer ASAP to give this guy a hug.
That's not to say I'm fervently anti-piracy, I'll admit that I've downloaded a fair amount of movies, music and software in my life but it's almost always been because it was too expensive, not yet released where I live or simply much more convenient to do so.
As an example, a piece large expensive "professional" software that I want to use at home for fun or some minor non-commercial purpose isn't something I'm about to pony up $300 or whatever it costs for....
So what would you pay for a movie, a song or a copy of "professional" software? All of these cost corporations/people time and money. Would you only pay $10 for a copy of some software that took $25m to develop or a movie with a $100m budget? Why do you only stop at things you can anonymously download and create a perfect copy of?
Cue car analogy: I don't think a 2009 Ford Mustang is worth $20,000, does that mean I should be able to go out and "download" (read: steal) one from a car dealer's lot? In both cases the author of the software/movie/song and automaker aren't being compensated Sure there are some great companies out there that can build you a car from scratch (kit cars) which are akin to the legitimate use of jailbreaking the iPhone; but there might be some companies that also allow you to disable car alarms and tracking systems. Those would be equivalent to enabling you to download cracked iPhone apps.
I would bet that most people who pirate stuff from the internet would never allow the fruits of all of their labor to go for free. Even FOSS companies might give away their software, have associated income streams, like Professional Services and Support to make up for the lost revenue due to giving away the software.
I'd be interested to know how google disposes of all of their servers. Anybody have insight on this? If these are cheap, throw away servers, I'd be interested in what their expected lifetime is and what is done with them when they are refreshed with newer hardware.
While I am not in the highest risk group (young children, healthcare workers etc..), I am getting it because I know far too many mother's out there who have children who read some blurb or headline and think "No way on earth my kid is getting the vaccine!"
I have no intentions of getting sick FROM THEM.
These are the same parents that don't want their kids getting chicken pox due to "discomfort".
I have a friend that didn't get their kid circumsized (which is usually done in the first when the boy is only a few days old) because they wanted to leave this decision up to the child. Note that the boy has already had quite a few urinary infections due to this.
Along with that, you get video content -- in most cases, live concert recordings
So, I'm going to assume that this is the same stuff we get on youtube? Also I'm doubting if there are songs which are only available via the LP, then they probably won't be any good. Otherwise the radio stations would have crammed these into our skulls on a "repeat every 5 min" playlist.
I am not a programmer, but my career has been built on managing storage (disk, vtl and tape). While data loss cannot kill you, in the physical sense. I'm sure that if you lost something that was irreplaceable or unrecreateable. We've heard of the 'mental anguish' that people who have lost their WoW characters have suffered from. I think some of them even committed suicide.
If EMC/HDS/HP/IBM released disk array firmware/microcode that corrupted user data, you can bet their customers/corporations would be suing the hell out of the vendor. Trust me on this one, I've taken part in such legal action and I've also taken part in actions to kick out a vendor who's disk array ran into a major firmware bug when a IO board was replaced. That vendor is nolonger providing product to my company. Would anybody return their Mac because of this? Doubt it.
Most would say, "Well it's just a computer being a computer, they have bugs, crash, it's normal for them to lose data."
Try replacing the word computer with bridge/airplane/car brakes/traffic lights etc etc.
With people putting more and more sentimental information on their computer systems, instead of in a shoebox/photo album, one can nolonger say that photos don't contain value, they could be considered priceless. Ask people who have had their house burn to the ground what it means to lose all of their sentimental information (wedding albums, baby shoes etc etc).
When will software/computer/IT companies be held to the same standards that other engineers (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical) are? If a bridge is built and it collapses due to a poor design, or a gadget catches fire or brakes are poorly designed, people head to their local courthouse and sue.
In the computer world, people just accept that "All my photographs, resume, music, documents, tax returns, whatever" being lost forever is par for the course.
How do you measure the value of data? You can't assign $/KB of data, as one couldn't equate a 20MB Stephen King unpublished manuscript to be equivalent to 4 hi-res pictures of my wife's flower garden. However, I'm not a fan or Stephen King, but my wife loves her flower garden.
Should computers (or electric devices in general) with persistent storage carry a huge warning label on them that says,
"Not guaranteed to maintain data integrity, always back up your data. Use at your own risk."
I've seen quite a few ideas around here about clearing out blank entries. So what happens if I have an idea and a name and I want to register it at the very beginning of the development cycle so that I don't have to find a new name after I've done all the work? So for a month or two there's nothing there until I finish my dev cycle. So then apple clears out my entry and some squatter takes it. Guess I'll have to write a program that polls the app store for variations of my app's name.
How would you notify customers that their machine is spewing spam or part of a botnet? Would you continue with the phone calls? Surely paying people to call customers about a virus can't be cheap, and doesn't scale. What is your ISP doing about this?
Even if what comcast is doing isn't the best solution, it's gotta be better than doing nothing, or taking the draconian measures of turning off service until you call in and they tell you, "Sir/Ma'am we turned off your service because your home computer is sending out spam. Once you've fixed it, we'll turn your service back on." I work at a "large database company" and in our labs if a lab machine is detected to be infected, the lab admins will shut of the ethernet drop that server connects to until you fix it.
Any machine or robot that performs an automated task could theoretically be reprogrammed. Ever been to a car factory? You nolonger have armies of people welding the frame together. One could potentially instruct one robot to create a few weaker welds. Then it's up to the QA team to catch it. If the number was low enough, they might not be able to trace it back to the robot being hacked or programmed incorrectly since 98% of the time it makes that one out of 500 welds correctly.
Atleast they're leaving something left besides SAT scores and GPA. I can see people asking for all subjective material removed from applications. Then it would come down to pure SAT scores and GPAs. Now highschools are going to have to be more focused on improving their ranking compared to some other school. Additionally, the old adages of schools looking for well rounded applicants would head out the window.
{rant} As a side note since we're on the topic of removing some form of written material, I'm sick of working with engineers who write procedures, functional specs, test plans, white papers that are as if they never even bothered to read it over after writing it. I bet the average/. poster puts more effort into their 'All your bases belong...' comments than some engineers put into their documentation.
I've even worked with consultants who charged us $350k for a datacenter design; and while technically solid, the quality of the writing was on par with my 10year old and was about 2 steps away from the short hand notation one might use in an email, SMS or tweet. {/rant}
However you're probably aware that storage vendors are selling storage virtualization solutions that go infront of their own disk arrays so that even if you 'kicked out' the array vendor; you'd still be stuck with the same vendor who is selling you the virtualization appliance.
In the past few years we've seen storage virtualization appear on the market. This is where you have some appliance that sits in front of your heterogeneous disk arrays and in turn presents a single type of lun/disk to all of your hosts. That way all the hosts will use the same loadbalancing software (powerpath, sdd, hdlm etc..) regardless of what type (brand or model) of back end storage you have. While this seems great in that you can buy IBM one month, EMC DMX the next, followed by HDS the third as whoever has the cheapest $/GB price and all the intelligence (replication for example) is in the appliance.
The problem is what do you do when you need to migrate to someone else's Virtualization appliance? Going from IBM SVC to EMC InVista is no easy task and would most likely force you to end up performing host based migrations (VxVM, LVM etc..). Not a pretty thought when you have to put together plans for HPUX, AIX, Solaris, windows, Linux, Vmware etc etc etc.
Clouds are not different than the above example. You've got some sort of virtualized environment and when it's time to move to a new virtualized environment it's back to the dark ages of migration.
Of course this would lead someone to create a Virtualized Virtualization appliance. Which would sit between you and the virtualization appliance or cloud and provide yet another layer.
Canadians: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid collision.
Americans: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Negative. You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Canadians: No, I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Americans: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS LINCOLN, THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES' ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIED BY THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE 15 DEGREES NORTH--I SAY AGAIN, THAT'S ONE FIVE DEGREES NORTH--OR COUNTER-MEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP.
Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.
Second in the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy..
Use Carrier in a sentence..
"My girlfriend was so drunk she couldn't walk home, so I had to carrier."
I can't believe nobody has brought up this nugget..
Oracle had hoped to complete the purchase of Sun by the end of August, but a secondary investigation by the by European Commission announced Sept. 3 into restraint of trade has delayed its completion until January or later. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison has said in an interview that Sun is losing $100 million a month as deal winds down to completion.
Seems like a lot until you realize they have almost $3B in the bank.
I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.
Seriously, stop it. I don't care if Mac stuff is better. I don't care if Mac stuff is cool. I don't care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I'm not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you've got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There's a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER.
Slashdot Mirror
EMC, IBM, HDS and HP I'm looking at you.
You've been pushing this Storage Virtualization on us storage admins for years now, and it's more trouble than it's worth. What is it? It's putting some sort of appliance (or in HDS's view a new disk array) in front of all of my other disk arrays, trying to commoditize my back end disk arrays, so that I can have capacity provided by any vendor I choose. You make claims like,
1. "You'll never have vendor lock-in with Storage virtualization!" However, now that I'm using your appliance to provide the intelligence (snapshots, sync/async replication, migration etc) I'm now locked into your solution.
2. "This will be easy to manage." How many of these fucking appliances do I need for my new 100TB disk array? When I've got over 300 storage ports on my various arrays, and my appliance has 4 (IBM SVC I'm looking at you), how many nodes do I need? I'm now spending as much time trying to scale up your appliance solution that for every large array I deploy, I need 4 racks worth of appliances.
3. "This will be homogeneous!" Bull fucking shit. You claimed that this stuff will work with any vendor's disk arrays so that I can purchase the cheapest $/GB arrays out there. No more DMX, just clariion, no more DS8000 now fastT. What a load. You only support other vendor's disk arrays during the initial migration and then I'm pretty much stuck with your arrays until the end of time. So much for your utopian view of any vendor. So now that I've got to standardize on your back end disk arrays, it's not like you're saving me the trouble of only having one loadbalancing software solutions (DMP, Powerpath, HDLM, SDD etc..). If I have DMX on the backend, I'm using Powerpath whether I like it or not. This would have been nice if I was willing to have four different vendor's selling me backend capacity, but since I don't want to deal with service contracts from four different vendors, that idea is a goner.
Besides, when I go to your large conferences down in Tampa, FL; even your own IT doesn't use it. Why? Because all you did is add another layer of complexity (troubleshooting, firmware updates, configuration) between my servers and their storage.
You can take this appliance (or switch based in EMC's case) based storage virtualization and Shove It!
btw: There's a reason why we connect mainframe channels directly to the control units. (OpenSystems translation: Connecting hba ports to storage array ports.) Answer: Cable doesn't need upgrading, doesn't need maintenance contracts and is 100% passive.
If any employee caused this kind of damage the customers/consumers would sue and employees would be terminated. Yet in this case, we have companies (and hence employees) that are "too big|valuable|important too fail" so they get bailed out.
If I did this at my company (I manage a large mainframe storage environment at a recognizable financial institution on WallStreet), say by blowing away a ton of customer data, I can guarantee I would be walked to the door before the end of the day.
People in peer departments of mine (like those than manage the networks, server admins etc) that have no input to the investment direction of this company's holdings, have lost bonuses, haven't been able to purchase equipment and staff has been cut. We had nothing to do with this bullsh!t, and yet us like the rest of American's are having to suffer while the MBAs reap in the dollars that the Federal Gov't is handing out.
I wish I could get a $200k bonus for blowing away a PetaByte of mainframe storage. Maybe I'll go power off the z10 and see if Obama will bail out my unemployed ass.
How often do we see the respective trade rags publish this stuff? ...wait for solaris 10 SR1 ...wait for AIX 6.3 ML 0001 ...wait for HPUX 11.11.11.i.1 ...wait for OS/400 ... z/OS ...
Maybe Garmin/TomTom will replace their current OS with Android. However, I don't see any outdoorsman/athlete tossing their Garmin device for a GPS enabled cell phone. Why? Garmin devices are purpose built, they can be strapped to my wrist, my arm, they are waterproof, I can easily mount it to the handlebars of my mountain/road bike, they have heart rate monitors built in, I can attach a secondary transponder to my dogs when they are out herding so I know where they are.
I also love the fact that they can download maps from the National Geographic Topographic Map Series. Now there's nothing that would stop someone from writing a android app to interface with these maps. But currently google maps doesn't help me out on the trail.
Garmin is a brand and people buy their products for the features, nobody buys Garmin b/c of the underlying OS.
The author really believes that China is rewarding intellects? According to wikipedia, China spent $40Billion on the 2008 Olympics.
I don't see intellects in any First world country making the same money as athletes. Nike spends on sponsorships $255 to $260million a year and spent $143.4 million on advertising in the first nine months of 2008. Note that Nike is a $31Billion company.
In comparison, the National Science Foundation received a total of $6.49 billion for FY09.
As a kid growing up? I don't recall any commercials saying "I wanna be like Stephen [Hawking]" or kids beating up other kids for some intellectual device, but they were sure beating each other up for a pair of Air Jordans.
Anybody else ever notice that the only commercials on TV for Educational Institutions (besides community or trade schools) are during college football games? Those commercials are only for the two schools that are playing. There's a commercial every 5minutes for sneakers, Under Armor shirts, Fitness equipment, sports drinks or sporting events. (As a side note, anybody recall the last time you saw an advertisement for Educational Software, besides Rosetta Stone? But there's a commercial every hour for some new XBOX/PS3/Wii game).
Intellectuals are enablers of other people to go onto great success. I guarantee you there were a ton of intellectuals that designed the bike, software to track, study the technique of Lance Armstrong's cycling career and victories in the Tour de France. But other than the brand, Trek, those big brained people will never be known, nor will someone pay them $50m in endorsements.
Btw: It's not just athletes vs intellectuals. Not all intellectuals are compensated equally either. I maintain the storage environment for a very large mainframe environment for a household WallStreet financial firm. Over a PB of online FICON disk much of it synchronously replicated to a remote disaster recovery site, and I can assure that my bonus is not even close to that of an entry level trader. I'm sure I could do a lot more damage than that 28yr old MBA.
Are watch batteries made from Li-Ion?
Yep.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_battery
I haven't received a single personal note from a Microsoft PR person for roughly four years.
I didn't see any technical review by Dvorak in the article just a bunch of complaints about MSFT's marketing/PR efforts. Oddly I don't recall seeing a lot of PR from IBM regarding zOS either, but my zSeries keeps on running. Seems that he's just sore he hasn't received any TLC from MSFT. Aww poor Dvorak... sorry that your feelings got hurt.
Somebody send Ballmer ASAP to give this guy a hug.
That's not to say I'm fervently anti-piracy, I'll admit that I've downloaded a fair amount of movies, music and software in my life but it's almost always been because it was too expensive, not yet released where I live or simply much more convenient to do so.
As an example, a piece large expensive "professional" software that I want to use at home for fun or some minor non-commercial purpose isn't something I'm about to pony up $300 or whatever it costs for....
So what would you pay for a movie, a song or a copy of "professional" software? All of these cost corporations/people time and money. Would you only pay $10 for a copy of some software that took $25m to develop or a movie with a $100m budget? Why do you only stop at things you can anonymously download and create a perfect copy of?
Cue car analogy:
I don't think a 2009 Ford Mustang is worth $20,000, does that mean I should be able to go out and "download" (read: steal) one from a car dealer's lot? In both cases the author of the software/movie/song and automaker aren't being compensated Sure there are some great companies out there that can build you a car from scratch (kit cars) which are akin to the legitimate use of jailbreaking the iPhone; but there might be some companies that also allow you to disable car alarms and tracking systems. Those would be equivalent to enabling you to download cracked iPhone apps.
I would bet that most people who pirate stuff from the internet would never allow the fruits of all of their labor to go for free. Even FOSS companies might give away their software, have associated income streams, like Professional Services and Support to make up for the lost revenue due to giving away the software.
One of my alltime favorites on getting back at the scammer:
http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/
I'd be interested to know how google disposes of all of their servers. Anybody have insight on this? If these are cheap, throw away servers, I'd be interested in what their expected lifetime is and what is done with them when they are refreshed with newer hardware.
While I am not in the highest risk group (young children, healthcare workers etc..), I am getting it because I know far too many mother's out there who have children who read some blurb or headline and think "No way on earth my kid is getting the vaccine!"
I have no intentions of getting sick FROM THEM.
These are the same parents that don't want their kids getting chicken pox due to "discomfort".
I have a friend that didn't get their kid circumsized (which is usually done in the first when the boy is only a few days old) because they wanted to leave this decision up to the child. Note that the boy has already had quite a few urinary infections due to this.
Along with that, you get video content -- in most cases, live concert recordings
So, I'm going to assume that this is the same stuff we get on youtube? Also I'm doubting if there are songs which are only available via the LP, then they probably won't be any good. Otherwise the radio stations would have crammed these into our skulls on a "repeat every 5 min" playlist.
I am not a programmer, but my career has been built on managing storage (disk, vtl and tape). While data loss cannot kill you, in the physical sense. I'm sure that if you lost something that was irreplaceable or unrecreateable. We've heard of the 'mental anguish' that people who have lost their WoW characters have suffered from. I think some of them even committed suicide.
If EMC/HDS/HP/IBM released disk array firmware/microcode that corrupted user data, you can bet their customers/corporations would be suing the hell out of the vendor. Trust me on this one, I've taken part in such legal action and I've also taken part in actions to kick out a vendor who's disk array ran into a major firmware bug when a IO board was replaced. That vendor is nolonger providing product to my company. Would anybody return their Mac because of this? Doubt it.
Most would say, "Well it's just a computer being a computer, they have bugs, crash, it's normal for them to lose data."
Try replacing the word computer with bridge/airplane/car brakes/traffic lights etc etc.
With people putting more and more sentimental information on their computer systems, instead of in a shoebox/photo album, one can nolonger say that photos don't contain value, they could be considered priceless. Ask people who have had their house burn to the ground what it means to lose all of their sentimental information (wedding albums, baby shoes etc etc).
When will software/computer/IT companies be held to the same standards that other engineers (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical) are? If a bridge is built and it collapses due to a poor design, or a gadget catches fire or brakes are poorly designed, people head to their local courthouse and sue.
In the computer world, people just accept that "All my photographs, resume, music, documents, tax returns, whatever" being lost forever is par for the course.
How do you measure the value of data? You can't assign $/KB of data, as one couldn't equate a 20MB Stephen King unpublished manuscript to be equivalent to 4 hi-res pictures of my wife's flower garden. However, I'm not a fan or Stephen King, but my wife loves her flower garden.
Should computers (or electric devices in general) with persistent storage carry a huge warning label on them that says,
"Not guaranteed to maintain data integrity, always back up your data. Use at your own risk."
I've seen quite a few ideas around here about clearing out blank entries. So what happens if I have an idea and a name and I want to register it at the very beginning of the development cycle so that I don't have to find a new name after I've done all the work? So for a month or two there's nothing there until I finish my dev cycle. So then apple clears out my entry and some squatter takes it. Guess I'll have to write a program that polls the app store for variations of my app's name.
Blocking SMTP just prevents the email flood from hitting the ISPs network, but doesn't do anything to benefit the customer.
Here's a question for the masses here on /.
How would you notify customers that their machine is spewing spam or part of a botnet? Would you continue with the phone calls? Surely paying people to call customers about a virus can't be cheap, and doesn't scale. What is your ISP doing about this?
Even if what comcast is doing isn't the best solution, it's gotta be better than doing nothing, or taking the draconian measures of turning off service until you call in and they tell you, "Sir/Ma'am we turned off your service because your home computer is sending out spam. Once you've fixed it, we'll turn your service back on." I work at a "large database company" and in our labs if a lab machine is detected to be infected, the lab admins will shut of the ethernet drop that server connects to until you fix it.
What goes to the person who reports the most false positives?
Any machine or robot that performs an automated task could theoretically be reprogrammed. Ever been to a car factory? You nolonger have armies of people welding the frame together. One could potentially instruct one robot to create a few weaker welds. Then it's up to the QA team to catch it. If the number was low enough, they might not be able to trace it back to the robot being hacked or programmed incorrectly since 98% of the time it makes that one out of 500 welds correctly.
Atleast they're leaving something left besides SAT scores and GPA. I can see people asking for all subjective material removed from applications. Then it would come down to pure SAT scores and GPAs. Now highschools are going to have to be more focused on improving their ranking compared to some other school. Additionally, the old adages of schools looking for well rounded applicants would head out the window.
{rant} /. poster puts more effort into their 'All your bases belong...' comments than some engineers put into their documentation.
As a side note since we're on the topic of removing some form of written material, I'm sick of working with engineers who write procedures, functional specs, test plans, white papers that are as if they never even bothered to read it over after writing it. I bet the average
I've even worked with consultants who charged us $350k for a datacenter design; and while technically solid, the quality of the writing was on par with my 10year old and was about 2 steps away from the short hand notation one might use in an email, SMS or tweet.
{/rant}
However you're probably aware that storage vendors are selling storage virtualization solutions that go infront of their own disk arrays so that even if you 'kicked out' the array vendor; you'd still be stuck with the same vendor who is selling you the virtualization appliance.
In the past few years we've seen storage virtualization appear on the market. This is where you have some appliance that sits in front of your heterogeneous disk arrays and in turn presents a single type of lun/disk to all of your hosts. That way all the hosts will use the same loadbalancing software (powerpath, sdd, hdlm etc..) regardless of what type (brand or model) of back end storage you have. While this seems great in that you can buy IBM one month, EMC DMX the next, followed by HDS the third as whoever has the cheapest $/GB price and all the intelligence (replication for example) is in the appliance.
The problem is what do you do when you need to migrate to someone else's Virtualization appliance? Going from IBM SVC to EMC InVista is no easy task and would most likely force you to end up performing host based migrations (VxVM, LVM etc..). Not a pretty thought when you have to put together plans for HPUX, AIX, Solaris, windows, Linux, Vmware etc etc etc.
Clouds are not different than the above example. You've got some sort of virtualized environment and when it's time to move to a new virtualized environment it's back to the dark ages of migration.
Of course this would lead someone to create a Virtualized Virtualization appliance. Which would sit between you and the virtualization appliance or cloud and provide yet another layer.
Carrier, two examples that I'm aware of:
First is the age old joke:
Second in the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy..
Use Carrier in a sentence..
"My girlfriend was so drunk she couldn't walk home, so I had to carrier."
I can't believe nobody has brought up this nugget..
Seems like a lot until you realize they have almost $3B in the bank.
Priceless...