I would be all for this as long as if someone else sends in a patent application for the same/similar invention both are then considered "obvious for those practicing the art", and thus, unpatentable.
I mean come on. We keep our data center staffed 24x7 and do not need anyone sleeping there to do it. This is called simply not paying for what they need. If they need 24x7 support, they simply need 3 shifts of workers.
Sure, if he is talking about on a windows machine, but on linux/unix/bsd/osx, this already exists in sudo. If you need "root" privileges for something, you setup a sudo rule for that individual user for running that individual command.
You set some basic parameters, such as min/max filesizes to use, stepping size between files, how many processes/threads to use in the test, etc., etc.,... It will run a gambit of tests reading/writing files, sequential, random, varying read/write sizes, and sizes of the files it is creating. It outputs nice graphs so you can see where the peek performance values are in terms of the storage dealing with different sized files and read/write sizes.
You will see it much more in private schools than in public ones. The main reason is the base assumption of wealth of the family. You can't expect a family that can barely afford food and housing to have a computer and internet connection at home. Many people take these things for granted (especially people who read Slashdot), but the reality is that there are many school districts where 20% or more of the students qualify for free breakfast and lunch because those might be the only meals they have for the day.
In private schools, you will see systems like you mentioned in use. Case in point, my cousin's school uses one. His parents can see every homework assignment, every memo/note every night. They can see what class he is in at that moment, what readings they are doing in class that day, what grades he received on every quiz, test, and assignment as soon as they are marked. They know if he is in danger of not getting an "A" for the term while he still has a chance to fix things. It IS an advantage, and one he would have unfairly over other students at the school if their parents did not have computer and internet access. It is why most public schools will not implement it. That said, the reality being what it is, statistically, the parents/families who can not afford a computer and internet access are already hurting the child's performance by not having access to materials which could help teach their child things that he/she is struggling with, especially given the fact that statistically, those parents themselves are least capable of knowing the subject themselves well enough to help.
And then he really owns AT&T with a breach of privacy, emotional trauma, slander of character, breach of contract case, and probably wins several million.
Are we talking USA vs China in space? Or are we talking planet Earth vs ET?
In the fist scenario, (i.e. country vs country all on planet Earth), space combat would simply be small unmanned drones and/or other small craft with maybe 1-5 crew members. There are simply no reasons as of now for anything more than that until we start talking fighting that spans the solar system, and even then, autonomous/semi-autonomous drones would probably be the choice at greater distances.
As for Earth vs ET, it would depend on propulsion technology requirements. If simply defense, same as for country to country, as distances involved would still mean they are the best solution. Things change if we are talking an offensive campaign on unknow types of targets at some general location (i.e. we narrowed down what solar system the attacks are comming from). Obviously drone scouts would help, but for the actual attack, you would probably need some type of human presence to lead the attack as history has proven time and time again that plans do not withstand contact with the enemy.
If you have been with that company for a long time, you might be able to take the position your boss has (well maybe not his exact position, but similar within the company). Being that you are tired of explaining things over and over to your revolving bosses, you could probably become one, and then you would no longer need to explain it anymore to him (though that doesn't mean you wouldn't need to explain it to the boss's boss... but usually at that level you start getting more into the "this is the problem, this is my solution, it will cost X amount of developer hours/$$$ and provides XYZ benefits").
Which is what happens when you have political appointees trying to be in charge of an engineering process that should have no politics involved what-so-ever in policy that is set. However, because of the politics, you have one group trying to let the energy companies do whatever they want cause it will cost money to enact regulations, another group calling for super strict measures against the industry because they don't like the fact that there is a nuclear plant near their multi-million $ homes, another group trying to actually protect the people, etc., etc....
It is worse than this to be honest. Essentially Best Buy/Futureshop has for years been selling returns, in many cases very noticeably in used condition and saying it is new. A friend of mine bought a laptop at Best Buy and when he got it home and turned it on, it already had accounts setup on it. Best Buy didn't care, all they cared about is that they still sold it at the new price and not the open-box price.
And this isn't the first time that they have had complaints of selling items which didn't have what was said to be contained in it. This happened with a whole lot of video cards a while back at multiple store locations. People were buying top of the line video cards with cash, taking them home and putting in crappy several year old cards from the same vendor back into the box and returning them for refunds. Even when the customer service guys checked, most of them didn't know the difference anyway and basically figured it was right since pretty much the only thing on the old cards was the brand name. This also happened with a bunch of Intel CPU's (but that one I believe happened at the supplier/warehouse).
All you do there with the VM is move the place that the data can be manipulated from the individual voting machine to the server, and even then, it doesn't stop a hack of the live running VM from affecting the rests it stores to the server.
The reason VMs work for the ATM machines is that the people were physically stealing the ATM machine and then getting the data off the internal memory. This works because when they steal the machine, it losses power and connection to the network where the VM's backstore was located. Once it is off the net, it can not access that data.
This doesn't work for securing a voting machine except from people stealing the voting machine to then get the votes and any other information stored locally from that machine. It still would not prevent someone from having the vote tabulation software from counting all votes for a particular candidate as votes for someone else, or a small portion, or counting each vote twice for someone, etc., etc.... That can only be fixed by having a voter verified printout which then gets stored separately (and can be cross checked later by the voter to verify that his/her particular vote was counted correctly).
Too bad the current AT&T isn't the AT&T from the 1970's. It is SBC, which was one of the baby-bell spinoffs from when AT&T was broken up. They bought a bunch of the other spinoffs and splits, etc., over the years, and a couple years back, bought AT&T, and then renamed themselves AT&T since it was the more widely known name (and they owned it so they could do whatever they wanted). So, the current AT&T is actually one of the spin offs that AT&T that you hated was broken up into....
They have extremely high fail rates on their "Green" and "Blue" lines of drives. Most "Green" drives are lucky to last 2 years without failing. I personally own 4 of their 2tb "Green" drives, and have had 9 failures and counting (in other words, I have had failures of replacements for replacements...).
They are still screwed for the week or two that it will take the new hire to get up to speed on how that first single box is configured, what it connects to, what applications run on it, etc., let alone the other hundreds of systems which will take the better part of 6 months to 2 years to learn (even with people there to mentor), and a heck of a lot longer when all the IT guys have left. Being down for extended periods of time will cost a heck of a lot more than it would have to simply pay the people who keep the critical infrastructure that your company needs running appropriately.
Pretty simply solution. Oh the stock exchange servers are down? Oh wait, I'm sorry you have reached your limit for my hours this week. Have fun trying to fix it yourself, and go back and read the memo's I sent saying that there was a hardware problem that I detected, but you didn't want to spend the money to replace the system, and told me to simply scrounge around for spare parts and work you magic.
There is a reason why they can't upgrade, money. Go have your manager find budget to give to IT so they can:
1) Hire more people to support all the new calls that will come in and deal with researching the new problems and how to integrate with the existing system.
2) Get existing staff training on the new applications and services so they can support calls which will happen that such and such isn't working.
3) Have staffing levels so that they can have people be able to strategically study, design, plan, and implement the rollout of new software.
4) Have the budget to keep existing staff that are knowledgeable about the internal setup, designs, and functioning of the hardware/software/configuration/backup/security at the company.
Those are the problems that you are dealing with. Quite frankly, it costs money. You want to put in linux on several systems, fine, get the money to pay for training existing IT staff on linux (assuming you have staff that are not simply from paper/cert mills, and actually have a brain), or the money to hire said personnel. Also plan on having the money to up the pay of the existing staff who get trained, as they are now more valuable, and can gladly take a 10-20% pay increase leaving your company, which will set back your IT department months of time in investment in training a new hire on policies, configuration, and detailed personal knowledge that just walked out the door when the IT department didn't have the budget to compete on salary.
New software is expensive to support. I am sorry to be the one to tell you that. Things don't "just work", they always require tweaking, and they will always be a problem that comes up. IT is placed in the role of protecting the data. Sure, I know you want to install the latest version of this application, but did you test it to see if it is even compatible with your existing software? Did you scan it to verify there is no "backdoor", "reverse terminal", or "call home" functionality built into it leaving your internal documents, intellectual property, and business secrets open for your competitors to see? Did you have your legal department screen the EULA and licensing agreements to verify that by using the software you are not opening your company to lawsuits, exposing you to possible patent infringements, or conflicting with other binding legal agreements your company has already made? These are just a few of the things. Then there are the questions of how does this system store data? How is it backed up? Does this software have a support contract that the local IT can call if there is a problem with the software? How much does it cost to keep that support contract over the expected lifetime that we need to continue using this software? How much does the software license cost, and how long does that license last? Are there different licensing costs based on the type of hardware it will be deployed onto, and if there are, who will be paying the cost down the road in 3-4 years when the existing hardware platform that it is installed on is at its end of life and the software needs to be moved onto a new hardware platform which happens to fall under a different licensing category and will cost another $500,0000 to work on that platform (that one just happened to us, so don't say that is unrealistic)?
That is just some of the stuff that has to happen ahead of time for a new piece of software. And it all costs time, and time costs money.
How does that help a single stand-alone system that someone came in and rooted and then covered up their tracks? The purpose of these changes is to fix all the cases. Sure there are work arounds for some of the flaws, but that is just it, they are work arounds. This is a true fix.
As stated probably 50 or 60 times by now. The best you can do is get the last GPL'ed version and then essentially fork it to add whatever features/fixes you want. If they required people who contributed code changes to sign over ownership of the code (see MySQL as an example), then they own the code outright and can choose to continue providing it in GPL'ed form or not for future versions. MySQL has both free and proprietary parts and versions. Due to the Oracle ownership, and Oracle's (and even previously Sun's) mishandling of the project, it was forked in fact several times, with probably the main fork being MariaDB.
I am sorry, but this device simply won't work. I have to agree 100% with the article. People are not going to buy a device more expensive or even at the same price point of the iPad 2 without something that blows the iPad 2 away. Windows 7 on an atom most certainly WON'T do that (I know since I have attempted to do that for HTPC's). The performance will be abysmal. On top of that, Win 7 is not really designed for tablets. There is no "app store" where users can easily find all the applications they can installed on the device. And priced at the same point as the 32GB iPad 2 with 3G wireless data connectivity, it has no hope of competing. Even at $100 less, people would still buy the 16GB iPad 2 given the choice. It needs either to have twice the performance, or be priced less than the cheapest iPad 2 in order to get market-share.
The court has an issue with the fact that they have WiFi built into them. I don't know why they can't simply let him disable the WiFi since it should be pretty easy to do so (on the original PS3 60GB "Fat" models, you can remove the wifi/bluetooth board/card and that would disable it. The only downside is that you need to connect your controllers via USB cable as they used the bluetooth connection for their signals).
Yeah, but there is a nice extradition agreement between there and many countries like the US, EURO block, and elsewhere since they all have their troops there trying to keep the country together. He could try his hand in the autonomous regions, but if you are not a muslim (and of the correct sect), you had better start learning....
Slashdot Mirror
I would be all for this as long as if someone else sends in a patent application for the same/similar invention both are then considered "obvious for those practicing the art", and thus, unpatentable.
I mean come on. We keep our data center staffed 24x7 and do not need anyone sleeping there to do it. This is called simply not paying for what they need. If they need 24x7 support, they simply need 3 shifts of workers.
Sure, if he is talking about on a windows machine, but on linux/unix/bsd/osx, this already exists in sudo. If you need "root" privileges for something, you setup a sudo rule for that individual user for running that individual command.
You set some basic parameters, such as min/max filesizes to use, stepping size between files, how many processes/threads to use in the test, etc., etc.,... It will run a gambit of tests reading/writing files, sequential, random, varying read/write sizes, and sizes of the files it is creating. It outputs nice graphs so you can see where the peek performance values are in terms of the storage dealing with different sized files and read/write sizes.
http://www.iozone.org/
You will see it much more in private schools than in public ones. The main reason is the base assumption of wealth of the family. You can't expect a family that can barely afford food and housing to have a computer and internet connection at home. Many people take these things for granted (especially people who read Slashdot), but the reality is that there are many school districts where 20% or more of the students qualify for free breakfast and lunch because those might be the only meals they have for the day.
In private schools, you will see systems like you mentioned in use. Case in point, my cousin's school uses one. His parents can see every homework assignment, every memo/note every night. They can see what class he is in at that moment, what readings they are doing in class that day, what grades he received on every quiz, test, and assignment as soon as they are marked. They know if he is in danger of not getting an "A" for the term while he still has a chance to fix things. It IS an advantage, and one he would have unfairly over other students at the school if their parents did not have computer and internet access. It is why most public schools will not implement it. That said, the reality being what it is, statistically, the parents/families who can not afford a computer and internet access are already hurting the child's performance by not having access to materials which could help teach their child things that he/she is struggling with, especially given the fact that statistically, those parents themselves are least capable of knowing the subject themselves well enough to help.
And then he really owns AT&T with a breach of privacy, emotional trauma, slander of character, breach of contract case, and probably wins several million.
Are we talking USA vs China in space? Or are we talking planet Earth vs ET?
In the fist scenario, (i.e. country vs country all on planet Earth), space combat would simply be small unmanned drones and/or other small craft with maybe 1-5 crew members. There are simply no reasons as of now for anything more than that until we start talking fighting that spans the solar system, and even then, autonomous/semi-autonomous drones would probably be the choice at greater distances.
As for Earth vs ET, it would depend on propulsion technology requirements. If simply defense, same as for country to country, as distances involved would still mean they are the best solution. Things change if we are talking an offensive campaign on unknow types of targets at some general location (i.e. we narrowed down what solar system the attacks are comming from). Obviously drone scouts would help, but for the actual attack, you would probably need some type of human presence to lead the attack as history has proven time and time again that plans do not withstand contact with the enemy.
If you have been with that company for a long time, you might be able to take the position your boss has (well maybe not his exact position, but similar within the company). Being that you are tired of explaining things over and over to your revolving bosses, you could probably become one, and then you would no longer need to explain it anymore to him (though that doesn't mean you wouldn't need to explain it to the boss's boss... but usually at that level you start getting more into the "this is the problem, this is my solution, it will cost X amount of developer hours/$$$ and provides XYZ benefits").
Which is what happens when you have political appointees trying to be in charge of an engineering process that should have no politics involved what-so-ever in policy that is set. However, because of the politics, you have one group trying to let the energy companies do whatever they want cause it will cost money to enact regulations, another group calling for super strict measures against the industry because they don't like the fact that there is a nuclear plant near their multi-million $ homes, another group trying to actually protect the people, etc., etc....
It is worse than this to be honest. Essentially Best Buy/Futureshop has for years been selling returns, in many cases very noticeably in used condition and saying it is new. A friend of mine bought a laptop at Best Buy and when he got it home and turned it on, it already had accounts setup on it. Best Buy didn't care, all they cared about is that they still sold it at the new price and not the open-box price.
And this isn't the first time that they have had complaints of selling items which didn't have what was said to be contained in it. This happened with a whole lot of video cards a while back at multiple store locations. People were buying top of the line video cards with cash, taking them home and putting in crappy several year old cards from the same vendor back into the box and returning them for refunds. Even when the customer service guys checked, most of them didn't know the difference anyway and basically figured it was right since pretty much the only thing on the old cards was the brand name. This also happened with a bunch of Intel CPU's (but that one I believe happened at the supplier/warehouse).
Or jobs that pay well....
All you do there with the VM is move the place that the data can be manipulated from the individual voting machine to the server, and even then, it doesn't stop a hack of the live running VM from affecting the rests it stores to the server.
The reason VMs work for the ATM machines is that the people were physically stealing the ATM machine and then getting the data off the internal memory. This works because when they steal the machine, it losses power and connection to the network where the VM's backstore was located. Once it is off the net, it can not access that data.
This doesn't work for securing a voting machine except from people stealing the voting machine to then get the votes and any other information stored locally from that machine. It still would not prevent someone from having the vote tabulation software from counting all votes for a particular candidate as votes for someone else, or a small portion, or counting each vote twice for someone, etc., etc.... That can only be fixed by having a voter verified printout which then gets stored separately (and can be cross checked later by the voter to verify that his/her particular vote was counted correctly).
Too bad the current AT&T isn't the AT&T from the 1970's. It is SBC, which was one of the baby-bell spinoffs from when AT&T was broken up. They bought a bunch of the other spinoffs and splits, etc., over the years, and a couple years back, bought AT&T, and then renamed themselves AT&T since it was the more widely known name (and they owned it so they could do whatever they wanted). So, the current AT&T is actually one of the spin offs that AT&T that you hated was broken up into....
They have extremely high fail rates on their "Green" and "Blue" lines of drives. Most "Green" drives are lucky to last 2 years without failing. I personally own 4 of their 2tb "Green" drives, and have had 9 failures and counting (in other words, I have had failures of replacements for replacements...).
They are still screwed for the week or two that it will take the new hire to get up to speed on how that first single box is configured, what it connects to, what applications run on it, etc., let alone the other hundreds of systems which will take the better part of 6 months to 2 years to learn (even with people there to mentor), and a heck of a lot longer when all the IT guys have left. Being down for extended periods of time will cost a heck of a lot more than it would have to simply pay the people who keep the critical infrastructure that your company needs running appropriately.
Pretty simply solution. Oh the stock exchange servers are down? Oh wait, I'm sorry you have reached your limit for my hours this week. Have fun trying to fix it yourself, and go back and read the memo's I sent saying that there was a hardware problem that I detected, but you didn't want to spend the money to replace the system, and told me to simply scrounge around for spare parts and work you magic.
There is a reason why they can't upgrade, money. Go have your manager find budget to give to IT so they can:
1) Hire more people to support all the new calls that will come in and deal with researching the new problems and how to integrate with the existing system.
2) Get existing staff training on the new applications and services so they can support calls which will happen that such and such isn't working.
3) Have staffing levels so that they can have people be able to strategically study, design, plan, and implement the rollout of new software.
4) Have the budget to keep existing staff that are knowledgeable about the internal setup, designs, and functioning of the hardware/software/configuration/backup/security at the company.
Those are the problems that you are dealing with. Quite frankly, it costs money. You want to put in linux on several systems, fine, get the money to pay for training existing IT staff on linux (assuming you have staff that are not simply from paper/cert mills, and actually have a brain), or the money to hire said personnel. Also plan on having the money to up the pay of the existing staff who get trained, as they are now more valuable, and can gladly take a 10-20% pay increase leaving your company, which will set back your IT department months of time in investment in training a new hire on policies, configuration, and detailed personal knowledge that just walked out the door when the IT department didn't have the budget to compete on salary.
New software is expensive to support. I am sorry to be the one to tell you that. Things don't "just work", they always require tweaking, and they will always be a problem that comes up. IT is placed in the role of protecting the data. Sure, I know you want to install the latest version of this application, but did you test it to see if it is even compatible with your existing software? Did you scan it to verify there is no "backdoor", "reverse terminal", or "call home" functionality built into it leaving your internal documents, intellectual property, and business secrets open for your competitors to see? Did you have your legal department screen the EULA and licensing agreements to verify that by using the software you are not opening your company to lawsuits, exposing you to possible patent infringements, or conflicting with other binding legal agreements your company has already made? These are just a few of the things. Then there are the questions of how does this system store data? How is it backed up? Does this software have a support contract that the local IT can call if there is a problem with the software? How much does it cost to keep that support contract over the expected lifetime that we need to continue using this software? How much does the software license cost, and how long does that license last? Are there different licensing costs based on the type of hardware it will be deployed onto, and if there are, who will be paying the cost down the road in 3-4 years when the existing hardware platform that it is installed on is at its end of life and the software needs to be moved onto a new hardware platform which happens to fall under a different licensing category and will cost another $500,0000 to work on that platform (that one just happened to us, so don't say that is unrealistic)?
That is just some of the stuff that has to happen ahead of time for a new piece of software. And it all costs time, and time costs money.
How does that help a single stand-alone system that someone came in and rooted and then covered up their tracks? The purpose of these changes is to fix all the cases. Sure there are work arounds for some of the flaws, but that is just it, they are work arounds. This is a true fix.
As stated probably 50 or 60 times by now. The best you can do is get the last GPL'ed version and then essentially fork it to add whatever features/fixes you want. If they required people who contributed code changes to sign over ownership of the code (see MySQL as an example), then they own the code outright and can choose to continue providing it in GPL'ed form or not for future versions. MySQL has both free and proprietary parts and versions. Due to the Oracle ownership, and Oracle's (and even previously Sun's) mishandling of the project, it was forked in fact several times, with probably the main fork being MariaDB.
I am sorry, but this device simply won't work. I have to agree 100% with the article. People are not going to buy a device more expensive or even at the same price point of the iPad 2 without something that blows the iPad 2 away. Windows 7 on an atom most certainly WON'T do that (I know since I have attempted to do that for HTPC's). The performance will be abysmal. On top of that, Win 7 is not really designed for tablets. There is no "app store" where users can easily find all the applications they can installed on the device. And priced at the same point as the 32GB iPad 2 with 3G wireless data connectivity, it has no hope of competing. Even at $100 less, people would still buy the 16GB iPad 2 given the choice. It needs either to have twice the performance, or be priced less than the cheapest iPad 2 in order to get market-share.
The court has an issue with the fact that they have WiFi built into them. I don't know why they can't simply let him disable the WiFi since it should be pretty easy to do so (on the original PS3 60GB "Fat" models, you can remove the wifi/bluetooth board/card and that would disable it. The only downside is that you need to connect your controllers via USB cable as they used the bluetooth connection for their signals).
Yeah, that 1% really does a whole lot.
Yeah, but there is a nice extradition agreement between there and many countries like the US, EURO block, and elsewhere since they all have their troops there trying to keep the country together. He could try his hand in the autonomous regions, but if you are not a muslim (and of the correct sect), you had better start learning....
What country do you live in? Because in the USA everyone is guilty of some crime because that is the way the system works.
Since you didn't put up the sarcasm tags, it stands for (P)ublic (S)ervice (A)nnouncement....