SAS70 has nothing to do with being secure, it's really just a "report on controls placed in operation and tests of operating effectiveness". It's not a checklist audit. What that exactly means varies from company to company (every company's procedures vary) and the firm performing it.
With everything in the cloud, it was as simple as taking down the unresponsive EC2 instances, and spinning up the latest snapshots that I stored in S3.
If we are talking an important site, then change that to: I turned off the EC2 instance in the East, and let the elastic load balancer pass all the traffic to my AWS West instances.
How did that work out during the recent outage? (Not trolling, just curious how you managed if you were affected.)
This is the kind of stuff that makes people and businesses that just don't care about the behind the scenes politics stick with Microsoft Office. Should one move to the fork? Stick with the original? What if the fork falters? What if both suck over time due to talent drain between them? Many businesses will answer these questions with "we don't have time for this, just go buy Office."
Or, you're like me and the majority of the population --- preferring widescreen. I swear that I need to stop reading Slashdot. You guys are completely out of touch with the majority.
I personally don't care if it's widescreen or not - the low resolutions are what's annoying. I am fully aware that the majority is fine with a small workspace and mainly cares that their computer has a widescreen HD like their new TV does. (Although many cheap brands like Visio are less than 1920x1080 as well.)
Because "widescreen HD" means "best and newest" to the uninitiated. They aren't really aware that computers had resolutions far beyond "HD" a long time before the HDTV became common. So while an HD widescreen LCD is a downgrade to those of us who had higher resolution 4x3 monitors (which are now hard to find), it is a perceived upgrade to everyone else.
Also, yes, a lot of people who don't work with a computer - whether it be for a living or for fun - usually do one of three things: Office, Internet Explorer, or watch movies.
No flame, you're right. Consumers want cheap everything, where it comes from be damned. Likewise shareholders want to see short term results, long term be damned.
I just looked at my usage for my Sprint EVO and I'm at 700MB for my billing month ending on the 22nd. I never stream, watch videos, movies, etc. on my phone. I use it primarily for web browsing, email, and work stuff (i.e. ssh and vpn, downloading PDFs for reference). I'll email pictures, too. I also use apps like Fandango, Google Maps, and Parcels to track packages. I hardly use wireless. I don't even really feel like I use my phone all that much.
They're doing a smart meter rollout in my city to be completed by the end of next year. The FAQ says our interval will be 15 minutes:
Q: What is a Smart Meter? A: Smart meters are digital devices that collect energy-use data and, unlike traditional meters, transmit and receive data, too. Electric energy use will be recorded every 15 minutes to provide an accurate view of your daily energy patterns. Information can be accessed via the myaccount web tool on nvenergy.com or through NV Energy's automated voicemail system the day after it is collected. For customers in northern Nevada, natural gas information will be available on a daily basis.
Smart meters can pinpoint time of usage. Of course it's possible to extrapolate the user's living habits from this additional data. The summary makes it sound like the thing is intentionally spying. You could do the same thing with the old analog meters except it would be more along the lines of "they probably went on vacation this month" since the sampling interval by the power company was monthly. Smart meters are like reading the analog dials every 5 minutes (or whatever the sampling interval is).
Or for the paranoid: all someone would need to do is point a camera at your analog meter dials transmitting back to an unmarked van recording the values every 15 minutes.
Eh, unless you're traveling with your laser printer or microwave, converters are mostly a thing of the past. All the stuff I normally travel with (cell phone, possibly laptop, camera chargers, anything electronic) already accept a universal input of 50/60Hz 100-240VAC. The real problem now is physically plugging them in.
Resistive devices like a curling iron or hair dryer that don't have a 120/240 switch still need an adapter though.
No. Frequency is largely irrelevant. The only common (although probably not so much anymore) residential application I can think of are wall clocks with synchronous motors using the line frequency to keep time. Increasing the voltage would give you more usable power out of your common 15/20A household branch circuit, but that's it. Perhaps you could lower the total number of branch circuits by going to higher voltage, but I don't know how many people would really care that they have 1/3 fewer breakers. Or you have crazy ass things like the UK ring circuit.
Take a look at a lot of your electronics and you'll see that they probably accept a "universal input" of 50/60Hz between 100-240VAC. One distinct advantage higher frequency has is allowing smaller size of components like transformers. This is why you'll see things like 115VAC @ 400Hz in aircraft.
And based on the crazy ass examples of PowerShell I've read in other comments, C, Korn, Bourne, Bash, etc. seem to be much more user friendly. (I never thought I'd say that about the unix shell.)
We have to continually give them a polite "Get a real OS" speech.
That's kind of dickish. You could simply tell them there isn't a demand for a Mac version to make it worthwhile. Either it's a sound business decision for the company to create a Mac version or it isn't.
Many vendors want you to use their products 100% end-to-end and will attempt to pin the problem on the equipment that's not theirs. If you're in a mixed environment it's critical to have the in-house skills to deal with vendor BS. This seems to become more of a problem with vendors that are trying to be a one stop shop.
That said, Apple has never taken the server market seriously. As much as I love my Mac workstations, they are just that. I would never consider Apple hardware for server roles. Even back when they still had the Xserve and Xraid, it was clear those product lines weren't taken seriously (the Xserve didn't even have a redundant PSU option for a long time).
3- also, some people do not have a computer connected to their TV, nor any way to read films of a HD. Past a certain age, it's actually *most* people.
Hell, I've got computers everywhere doing everything *except* hooked up to the TV because sometimes I just want to do something in my house that doesn't require fucking with a computer. Sure, I'll stream if I'm lazy or not really caring about quality, but it's via a Roku. Physical media still has the advantage in audio/video quality and the nerdy side of me enjoys that as part of my movie watching experience.
My AT&T DSL was stuck as 3Mbps after they installed the VRAD for uverse in my neighborhood. The only other game in town is Charter and they have a 250GB cap (on the highest package only - hundreds of dollars more expensive than uverse). Ended up settling for uverse. It's actually not that bad. While I still look upon the days of the small local ISPs nostalgically, those days are dead and gone. Don't foolishly think there is competition in a world where giant telco vs. giant cableco are your "choices".
If Netflix still works then it's odd that Portal 2 for PS3 can't simply talk directly to Steam. Unless Sony required Valve to proxy the request via PSN or something stupid.
Comparing my tiny personal server to a larger entity would be silly, but the point was that many companies that are using cloud hosting ignore failover and disaster recovery because the cloud is often pushed as a solution to those problems.
True, not likely a liquidator is going to wipe the drives. I've seen some interesting stuff from eBay. I suppose the only way the company could deal with this is to run all storage encrypted, keep the key on a USB flash, and if they ever go chapter 7 pull all the keys as they walk out the door.
Running in the cloud has the same implications of running any other successful IT operation. The organizations that experienced long term outages during the amazon issue had no failover or disaster plan.
But how many times has "the cloud" been pushed as taking care of that stuff for you and that it couldn't possibly have outages? Move to the cloud! It'll take care of all that pesky need for disaster planning, redundancy, fail over and backups across its multiple datacenters! Can you afford our complex infrastructure? No? Then you must suck and need the cloud to succeed! Yet it failed in exactly the way they said it wouldn't.
Meanwhile, I've seen colocated servers doing fancy stuff and running things like DRBD have far better uptime than "the cloud" (although I guess a bunch of colo servers running DRBD or other clustering would be called "private cloud" now). Even my nothing special colo'd Atom server for personal stuff still works better.
If they still expect you to code as much as you did before being promoted to lead and spending half the day in meetings, that's where the problems begin.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just build it somewhere that doesn't have tornadoes instead?
SAS70 has nothing to do with being secure, it's really just a "report on controls placed in operation and tests of operating effectiveness". It's not a checklist audit. What that exactly means varies from company to company (every company's procedures vary) and the firm performing it.
With everything in the cloud, it was as simple as taking down the unresponsive EC2 instances, and spinning up the latest snapshots that I stored in S3.
If we are talking an important site, then change that to: I turned off the EC2 instance in the East, and let the elastic load balancer pass all the traffic to my AWS West instances.
How did that work out during the recent outage? (Not trolling, just curious how you managed if you were affected.)
This is the kind of stuff that makes people and businesses that just don't care about the behind the scenes politics stick with Microsoft Office. Should one move to the fork? Stick with the original? What if the fork falters? What if both suck over time due to talent drain between them? Many businesses will answer these questions with "we don't have time for this, just go buy Office."
Or, you're like me and the majority of the population --- preferring widescreen. I swear that I need to stop reading Slashdot. You guys are completely out of touch with the majority.
I personally don't care if it's widescreen or not - the low resolutions are what's annoying. I am fully aware that the majority is fine with a small workspace and mainly cares that their computer has a widescreen HD like their new TV does. (Although many cheap brands like Visio are less than 1920x1080 as well.)
Because "widescreen HD" means "best and newest" to the uninitiated. They aren't really aware that computers had resolutions far beyond "HD" a long time before the HDTV became common. So while an HD widescreen LCD is a downgrade to those of us who had higher resolution 4x3 monitors (which are now hard to find), it is a perceived upgrade to everyone else.
Also, yes, a lot of people who don't work with a computer - whether it be for a living or for fun - usually do one of three things: Office, Internet Explorer, or watch movies.
No flame, you're right. Consumers want cheap everything, where it comes from be damned. Likewise shareholders want to see short term results, long term be damned.
I just looked at my usage for my Sprint EVO and I'm at 700MB for my billing month ending on the 22nd. I never stream, watch videos, movies, etc. on my phone. I use it primarily for web browsing, email, and work stuff (i.e. ssh and vpn, downloading PDFs for reference). I'll email pictures, too. I also use apps like Fandango, Google Maps, and Parcels to track packages. I hardly use wireless. I don't even really feel like I use my phone all that much.
I think it's a way of dumping more of that Maple syrup that they have been trying to foist off on the US for years.
Fuck yes, bring that on. Maple syrup is tasty.
Why they drilled that tunnel.
Which is good, because I did, and it didn't say.
They're doing a smart meter rollout in my city to be completed by the end of next year. The FAQ says our interval will be 15 minutes:
Q: What is a Smart Meter?
A: Smart meters are digital devices that collect energy-use data and, unlike traditional meters, transmit and receive data, too. Electric energy use will be recorded every 15 minutes to provide an accurate view of your daily energy patterns. Information can be accessed via the myaccount web tool on nvenergy.com or through NV Energy's automated voicemail system the day after it is collected. For customers in northern Nevada, natural gas information will be available on a daily basis.
Smart meters can pinpoint time of usage. Of course it's possible to extrapolate the user's living habits from this additional data. The summary makes it sound like the thing is intentionally spying. You could do the same thing with the old analog meters except it would be more along the lines of "they probably went on vacation this month" since the sampling interval by the power company was monthly. Smart meters are like reading the analog dials every 5 minutes (or whatever the sampling interval is).
Or for the paranoid: all someone would need to do is point a camera at your analog meter dials transmitting back to an unmarked van recording the values every 15 minutes.
Such reprocessing is already possible but not legal to perform.
Eh, unless you're traveling with your laser printer or microwave, converters are mostly a thing of the past. All the stuff I normally travel with (cell phone, possibly laptop, camera chargers, anything electronic) already accept a universal input of 50/60Hz 100-240VAC. The real problem now is physically plugging them in.
Resistive devices like a curling iron or hair dryer that don't have a 120/240 switch still need an adapter though.
is there some clear advantage to 240v 50hz AC?
No. Frequency is largely irrelevant. The only common (although probably not so much anymore) residential application I can think of are wall clocks with synchronous motors using the line frequency to keep time. Increasing the voltage would give you more usable power out of your common 15/20A household branch circuit, but that's it. Perhaps you could lower the total number of branch circuits by going to higher voltage, but I don't know how many people would really care that they have 1/3 fewer breakers. Or you have crazy ass things like the UK ring circuit.
Take a look at a lot of your electronics and you'll see that they probably accept a "universal input" of 50/60Hz between 100-240VAC. One distinct advantage higher frequency has is allowing smaller size of components like transformers. This is why you'll see things like 115VAC @ 400Hz in aircraft.
Seconded, thirded, or sixthed...
And based on the crazy ass examples of PowerShell I've read in other comments, C, Korn, Bourne, Bash, etc. seem to be much more user friendly. (I never thought I'd say that about the unix shell.)
We have to continually give them a polite "Get a real OS" speech.
That's kind of dickish. You could simply tell them there isn't a demand for a Mac version to make it worthwhile. Either it's a sound business decision for the company to create a Mac version or it isn't.
Many vendors want you to use their products 100% end-to-end and will attempt to pin the problem on the equipment that's not theirs. If you're in a mixed environment it's critical to have the in-house skills to deal with vendor BS. This seems to become more of a problem with vendors that are trying to be a one stop shop.
That said, Apple has never taken the server market seriously. As much as I love my Mac workstations, they are just that. I would never consider Apple hardware for server roles. Even back when they still had the Xserve and Xraid, it was clear those product lines weren't taken seriously (the Xserve didn't even have a redundant PSU option for a long time).
3- also, some people do not have a computer connected to their TV, nor any way to read films of a HD. Past a certain age, it's actually *most* people.
Hell, I've got computers everywhere doing everything *except* hooked up to the TV because sometimes I just want to do something in my house that doesn't require fucking with a computer. Sure, I'll stream if I'm lazy or not really caring about quality, but it's via a Roku. Physical media still has the advantage in audio/video quality and the nerdy side of me enjoys that as part of my movie watching experience.
My AT&T DSL was stuck as 3Mbps after they installed the VRAD for uverse in my neighborhood. The only other game in town is Charter and they have a 250GB cap (on the highest package only - hundreds of dollars more expensive than uverse). Ended up settling for uverse. It's actually not that bad. While I still look upon the days of the small local ISPs nostalgically, those days are dead and gone. Don't foolishly think there is competition in a world where giant telco vs. giant cableco are your "choices".
If Netflix still works then it's odd that Portal 2 for PS3 can't simply talk directly to Steam. Unless Sony required Valve to proxy the request via PSN or something stupid.
Comparing my tiny personal server to a larger entity would be silly, but the point was that many companies that are using cloud hosting ignore failover and disaster recovery because the cloud is often pushed as a solution to those problems.
True, not likely a liquidator is going to wipe the drives. I've seen some interesting stuff from eBay. I suppose the only way the company could deal with this is to run all storage encrypted, keep the key on a USB flash, and if they ever go chapter 7 pull all the keys as they walk out the door.
Running in the cloud has the same implications of running any other successful IT operation. The organizations that experienced long term outages during the amazon issue had no failover or disaster plan.
But how many times has "the cloud" been pushed as taking care of that stuff for you and that it couldn't possibly have outages? Move to the cloud! It'll take care of all that pesky need for disaster planning, redundancy, fail over and backups across its multiple datacenters! Can you afford our complex infrastructure? No? Then you must suck and need the cloud to succeed! Yet it failed in exactly the way they said it wouldn't.
Meanwhile, I've seen colocated servers doing fancy stuff and running things like DRBD have far better uptime than "the cloud" (although I guess a bunch of colo servers running DRBD or other clustering would be called "private cloud" now). Even my nothing special colo'd Atom server for personal stuff still works better.
If they still expect you to code as much as you did before being promoted to lead and spending half the day in meetings, that's where the problems begin.