You were brought on as Linux SysAdmin; you now know that the job is nothing of the sort, and getting things up to speed will require massive investments in technology, personnel, and many sleepless nights on your part, should you choose to perform this task.
If you want to do this at all (and it sounds like you do), you need to demand a raise and quit if you don't get it.
One thing the article forgot to mention was that rental titles could not be rewound. You could pause, but not back up (much less watch it more than once during your rental period.)
Steve Jobs' cancer was more amenable to treatment, meaning you get to live for several years after diagnosis instead of several months. Which is exactly what happened. (In fact, since he lived more than five years after diagnosis, technically he was a cancer "survivor" by most metrics.)
Certainly the quackery he tried prior to actual medicine didn't help things, and it's entirely possible (even probable) his lifespan would have been extended at least somewhat further with real treatment, it was never "easily" treated.
No, the local warlords would totally not be OK with just handing over land. But I'm sure both the local population and the world at large would be perfectly fine with it if Libertopia was as great as libertarians claim it would be; it would certainly be an improvement over the current state of affairs, which is essentially anarchy.
According to libertarian doctrine apparently the citizens will band together effectively to defend their newly-claimed territory, and this defense will somehow magically occur with a tax base near zero, because an all-volunteer force will be both well-equipped and well-organized, even with nobody on the hook to actually pay for any of it.
Yes, they would totally encounter some sort of outside force (and probably inside forces) that would try to destroy the fledgling nation. Defending your borders and providing for internal security is what makes a nation a nation; it's kind of silly for libertarians to argue that their ideas would work great if only they didn't need to do those things. Yeah, and communism would work great if only people would produce what was needed with no incentive to do so. And fascism would work wonderfully as long as it could be ensured that no raving lunatics could take charge, etc.
I've never seen a serious, credible libertarian advocate pure absolute 100% anarchy, just like I've never seen a serious, credible businessperson advocate 100% unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism.
This is mostly true; few libertarians are anarchists. But there are LOTS of "serious, credible libertarians" that argue for a government the size of the one in Somalia, and assume that reasonable (yet strong) structures created by private citizens acting independently will magically arise to pick up the slack and create an orderly, just, society. Curiously, none of these libertopias ever seem to actually happen. If a bunch of libertarians want to lay claim over a chunk of Somalia and show the rest of us How It's Done, it's not like anybody is going to stop them.
Every single employee of your company is either an engineer or high-school grad? (Or a liberal arts major paid like a minimum-wage drone.)
I seriously doubt that.
And if you think liberal arts majors aren't trained to think logically, I don't know what to tell you. A decent liberal arts program most certainly covers that, just like any decent engineering program has some soft-skills in there.
Tech companies will certainly hire fresh liberal-arts grads for the same sorts of jobs liberal-arts grads fill in any company, and have for years. They will not (absent extraordinary extra-curricular experience) hire them for jobs requiring specialized skills like programming.
There's no need to pay engineer salaries to people not requiring engineering expertise.
The Fire phone was almost certainly a process of a bunch of executives and engineers sitting in a room and trying to one-up each other for "revolutionary" features. And not once did they apparently take a break to ask some actual consumers if they'd actually find these features useful.
At the time it was released, all it was was some pretty UI enhancements and a bunch of features that did nothing more than make it easier to buy things from Amazon. If they had sold it for a bargain price, I think that, like the Fire tablet, it would have established a decent foothold. But at the price of a "flagship" phone from Apple or Samsung? How on earth was that ever going to work? I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how they figured their silly additional feature set would make it worth being locked into the Amazon ecosystem. (After all, they don't price the Fire tablet like an iPad, so why did they price the Fire phone like an iPhone?)
(None of this really concerns the Kindle Reader, for which tight integration into a store for filling it with books is a really useful feature.)
Project Gutenberg makes their books available in the.mobi format, which the Kindles reads natively (the.azw format is based on.mobi, which Amazon picked up when they bought Mobipocket many years ago.)
The whole bit about Google using links as an integral part of PageRank (and this being different from AltaVista, et al) has been public information since around the day Google went live. Google, for all their secretiveness, has never been shy about that bit. (And, of course, it led to the creation of the SEO industry, since AltaVista-baiting by simply stuffing keywords colored white past the article over and over stopped working.)
You can't have an uber-schpiffy S/W front end with all the proper auditing options, and then just shove the back-end up to a generic public cloud; that would never pass muster; a defense lawyer would have a field day with it, and a judge would toss that evidence out on it's sorry tuchus. Too many people that are not the ones that would be testifying as to the chain-of-custody would have full R/W access to it.
There ARE ways to construct a cloud to have all the proper legal-compliance features, which is EXACTLY what Taser has sold the dept. mentioned in the summary.
There are entire industries built around data storage and administration solutions for regulatory compliance; it's not a trivial matter to create a system that will pass legal muster. This is far more than just a simple file repository; there's some initial software design, and also high ongoing administration costs (lots of paperwork inevitably involved.) Farming out this responsibility to a 3rd-party is a perfectly reasonable decision.
If take into account the "Razors and Razorblades" business model for the storage, the costs don't sound too far out of line. While certainly this is far more expensive than just buying some JBODs of near-line disk, such an installation would not be nearly good enough for legal evidence.
That said, for larger departments, this is just begging for a short-term local disk (with some sort of certified software) along with swift duplication to WORM LTO cartridges.
WiFi is by no means the only wireless communication technology. There are plenty of candidates (with pretty decent bandwidth even) designed to work over long distances.
Google will work with Netflix and Amazon to produce whatever that triumvirate wants, and Mozilla and Cisco will just be along for the ride. (I notice Microsoft isn't even listed here; they don't have anything even vaguely resembling any market power here, since the only platform of consequence they control is IE, and they know it.)
In rural areas unlikely to expand, there are high-speed wireless technologies that could be plausibly used. In even suburbs? No. Once you reach a certain level of density, you need to set up so many base stations that you might as well just run cable (not necessarily fiber) to every house and be done with it.
Outside of the currency use-case, I don't see any problem that a blockchain solves that could not also be solved with a chain of simple digital signatures, and a central repository for contracts. The whole sorta-collaborative "mining" process at the core of the blockchain just isn't applicable to most of the examples listed.
An analog version of a signature chain can be found at your local government office that handles land records. Any problems with said records usually aren't with the records themselves, they involve fraud before the records get there.
MUMPS - A horrific health-record management specific language inexplicably still in wide use.
JCL and REXX - Used for Mainframe scripting. Few mainframe shops will be without a JCL guru. (JCL is used for non-interactive scripting, REXX is used for the sorts of things you might use Perl for everywhere else.)
JOVIAL - An IAL offshoot that still runs much of the US ATC system until the FAA finally finishes replacing the systems that run it.
There's no law saying that somebody suddenly wealthy has to quit their job, buy a nice car, a mansion, a private jet, etc. Certainly you need to do all the Estate and Tax things anybody with a lot of money needs to do. (The tax part doesn't have to be hard, if you don't mind paying a lot of taxes, the tax forms work just as well even if you enter very large numbers onto them, and the IRS will happily cash your very large check.)
If you manage to come by your money in a relatively anonymous fashion, you don't even have to tell anybody you are secretly rich.
If you just want to camp out of your car and go hiking on the weekends, then bringing up survivalist TV shows was more than a bit confusing, because car camping is the opposite of wilderness survival. Buy whatever living facilities you want, park them in an area with cell access, and you are all set. A small generator if you have a pop-up, or just your car if you don't, is fine for juice.
Your question is bizarre. You talk about being really into the whole survivalist thing, but the infrastructure necessary to hold down a tech job while in the deep wilderness living off your wits is a complete non-starter. (Pedaling for power? Seriously?)
Simply put, your biggest problem is power. (You'll need a LOT less power if you can figure out how to work with a tablet and bluetooth keyboard instead of a full laptop.) That means you are going to need a "base camp". That base camp will need supplies of food and fuel, and a large sunny clearing to collect power whether you are there or not. You can periodically return to swap out batteries/machines and pick up fresh supplies of food and fuel.
You'll need to (obviously) work within an area with cell phone coverage. But there are plenty of fairly remote places that fit that bill, so it's not a big problem.
Discard any idea of hunting for food or cooking with a fire... if you are hungry and in the middle of hunting something or gathering much-needed wood, you are going to get even hungrier when, inevitably, your phone starts to ring with a new problem. You can certainly go several days without seeing another soul, but "living off the land" is just not going to work.
Also consider what you are going to do in bad weather. I'm guessing that once your phone rings, it means something is broken. You'll need to start working pretty quickly, and likely will not have time to make camp if you were in transit at the time. (Please don't say it's realistic to work outside in the middle of a rainstorm, no matter how tough your gear is.) Do you really want to be holed up in a tent (or lean-to, cave, whatever) for days on end when the weather is bad? No, you don't; that's boring as $hit.
Really, if I were in your place, I'd have a base camp (at a regular campground) with a pop-up camper and small and quiet generator (and secure locks!) and go on hikes of one or two days (those small lithium power packs and an iPad would work great!) when the weather looked good. It ain't "roughing it", but trying to get work done in lousy weather when you are hungry and tired is just silly; your work will inevitably suffer as a result.
An architect (and one that is trying to be forward thinking and implement all sorts of fascinating new gear) is wasting time learning the admin interface for every box he/she specifies.
And if an architect is having trouble getting away from daily ops, not having any access to the boxes at all will help with that transition. (Not to mention that the architect will inevitably get pulled into ops problems, leaving less time to do the actual job.)
If you are logging on to boxes, you are getting too close to operations and too far away from architecture. You get the admins to pull reports and logs you need, but you don't really need logins to the entire infrastructure. What on earth would you do with it that you can't get from the admins? I'm an IT architect for a DR outsourcing company; I wouldn't even have the least clue HOW to login to the gear I'm buying by the truckload (much less do anything useful with it), so obviously I don't have the ability to do so either.
An architect need not have admin rights or even the knowledge an admin must know. (And likewise, it's not important for an admin to know things an architect must.)
P.S. Errr, 1500 VM's for 3000 employees? I sense that a lot of these (and whatever massive amounts of stale data they are attached to) sit utterly disused.
P.S.S. And your historical analogy isn't even valid. Cartographers are generally not surveyors.
It's sort of like saying "we could improve our security by banning all incoming traffic from China and Russia". Well, sure, if you're willing to just block lots of legitimate users in the meantime. It would be far better to try to implement better technologies and policies that actually improve computer security, rather than feel-good measures like this.
Yes, in a perfect world, companies would have perfect device security and it wouldn't matter from which direction an attack came.
But here in the real world, there is no such thing as perfect security, and every little bit helps. They aren't suggesting you block TOR and ignore your firewall and stop updating patches, just that among other security measures, this might help.
Anyway, what possible legitimate use could TOR have in a corporate environment outside of a media organization?
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You were brought on as Linux SysAdmin; you now know that the job is nothing of the sort, and getting things up to speed will require massive investments in technology, personnel, and many sleepless nights on your part, should you choose to perform this task.
If you want to do this at all (and it sounds like you do), you need to demand a raise and quit if you don't get it.
One thing the article forgot to mention was that rental titles could not be rewound. You could pause, but not back up (much less watch it more than once during your rental period.)
Steve Jobs' cancer was more amenable to treatment, meaning you get to live for several years after diagnosis instead of several months. Which is exactly what happened. (In fact, since he lived more than five years after diagnosis, technically he was a cancer "survivor" by most metrics.)
Certainly the quackery he tried prior to actual medicine didn't help things, and it's entirely possible (even probable) his lifespan would have been extended at least somewhat further with real treatment, it was never "easily" treated.
No, the local warlords would totally not be OK with just handing over land. But I'm sure both the local population and the world at large would be perfectly fine with it if Libertopia was as great as libertarians claim it would be; it would certainly be an improvement over the current state of affairs, which is essentially anarchy.
According to libertarian doctrine apparently the citizens will band together effectively to defend their newly-claimed territory, and this defense will somehow magically occur with a tax base near zero, because an all-volunteer force will be both well-equipped and well-organized, even with nobody on the hook to actually pay for any of it.
Yes, they would totally encounter some sort of outside force (and probably inside forces) that would try to destroy the fledgling nation. Defending your borders and providing for internal security is what makes a nation a nation; it's kind of silly for libertarians to argue that their ideas would work great if only they didn't need to do those things. Yeah, and communism would work great if only people would produce what was needed with no incentive to do so. And fascism would work wonderfully as long as it could be ensured that no raving lunatics could take charge, etc.
I've never seen a serious, credible libertarian advocate pure absolute 100% anarchy, just like I've never seen a serious, credible businessperson advocate 100% unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism.
This is mostly true; few libertarians are anarchists. But there are LOTS of "serious, credible libertarians" that argue for a government the size of the one in Somalia, and assume that reasonable (yet strong) structures created by private citizens acting independently will magically arise to pick up the slack and create an orderly, just, society. Curiously, none of these libertopias ever seem to actually happen. If a bunch of libertarians want to lay claim over a chunk of Somalia and show the rest of us How It's Done, it's not like anybody is going to stop them.
Every single employee of your company is either an engineer or high-school grad? (Or a liberal arts major paid like a minimum-wage drone.)
I seriously doubt that.
And if you think liberal arts majors aren't trained to think logically, I don't know what to tell you. A decent liberal arts program most certainly covers that, just like any decent engineering program has some soft-skills in there.
Tech companies will certainly hire fresh liberal-arts grads for the same sorts of jobs liberal-arts grads fill in any company, and have for years. They will not (absent extraordinary extra-curricular experience) hire them for jobs requiring specialized skills like programming.
There's no need to pay engineer salaries to people not requiring engineering expertise.
The Fire phone was almost certainly a process of a bunch of executives and engineers sitting in a room and trying to one-up each other for "revolutionary" features. And not once did they apparently take a break to ask some actual consumers if they'd actually find these features useful.
At the time it was released, all it was was some pretty UI enhancements and a bunch of features that did nothing more than make it easier to buy things from Amazon. If they had sold it for a bargain price, I think that, like the Fire tablet, it would have established a decent foothold. But at the price of a "flagship" phone from Apple or Samsung? How on earth was that ever going to work? I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how they figured their silly additional feature set would make it worth being locked into the Amazon ecosystem. (After all, they don't price the Fire tablet like an iPad, so why did they price the Fire phone like an iPhone?)
(None of this really concerns the Kindle Reader, for which tight integration into a store for filling it with books is a really useful feature.)
Project Gutenberg makes their books available in the .mobi format, which the Kindles reads natively (the .azw format is based on .mobi, which Amazon picked up when they bought Mobipocket many years ago.)
The whole bit about Google using links as an integral part of PageRank (and this being different from AltaVista, et al) has been public information since around the day Google went live. Google, for all their secretiveness, has never been shy about that bit. (And, of course, it led to the creation of the SEO industry, since AltaVista-baiting by simply stuffing keywords colored white past the article over and over stopped working.)
You can't have an uber-schpiffy S/W front end with all the proper auditing options, and then just shove the back-end up to a generic public cloud; that would never pass muster; a defense lawyer would have a field day with it, and a judge would toss that evidence out on it's sorry tuchus. Too many people that are not the ones that would be testifying as to the chain-of-custody would have full R/W access to it.
There ARE ways to construct a cloud to have all the proper legal-compliance features, which is EXACTLY what Taser has sold the dept. mentioned in the summary.
There are entire industries built around data storage and administration solutions for regulatory compliance; it's not a trivial matter to create a system that will pass legal muster. This is far more than just a simple file repository; there's some initial software design, and also high ongoing administration costs (lots of paperwork inevitably involved.) Farming out this responsibility to a 3rd-party is a perfectly reasonable decision.
If take into account the "Razors and Razorblades" business model for the storage, the costs don't sound too far out of line. While certainly this is far more expensive than just buying some JBODs of near-line disk, such an installation would not be nearly good enough for legal evidence.
That said, for larger departments, this is just begging for a short-term local disk (with some sort of certified software) along with swift duplication to WORM LTO cartridges.
WiFi is by no means the only wireless communication technology. There are plenty of candidates (with pretty decent bandwidth even) designed to work over long distances.
Google will work with Netflix and Amazon to produce whatever that triumvirate wants, and Mozilla and Cisco will just be along for the ride. (I notice Microsoft isn't even listed here; they don't have anything even vaguely resembling any market power here, since the only platform of consequence they control is IE, and they know it.)
In rural areas unlikely to expand, there are high-speed wireless technologies that could be plausibly used. In even suburbs? No. Once you reach a certain level of density, you need to set up so many base stations that you might as well just run cable (not necessarily fiber) to every house and be done with it.
Outside of the currency use-case, I don't see any problem that a blockchain solves that could not also be solved with a chain of simple digital signatures, and a central repository for contracts. The whole sorta-collaborative "mining" process at the core of the blockchain just isn't applicable to most of the examples listed.
An analog version of a signature chain can be found at your local government office that handles land records. Any problems with said records usually aren't with the records themselves, they involve fraud before the records get there.
MUMPS - A horrific health-record management specific language inexplicably still in wide use.
JCL and REXX - Used for Mainframe scripting. Few mainframe shops will be without a JCL guru. (JCL is used for non-interactive scripting, REXX is used for the sorts of things you might use Perl for everywhere else.)
JOVIAL - An IAL offshoot that still runs much of the US ATC system until the FAA finally finishes replacing the systems that run it.
There's no law saying that somebody suddenly wealthy has to quit their job, buy a nice car, a mansion, a private jet, etc. Certainly you need to do all the Estate and Tax things anybody with a lot of money needs to do. (The tax part doesn't have to be hard, if you don't mind paying a lot of taxes, the tax forms work just as well even if you enter very large numbers onto them, and the IRS will happily cash your very large check.)
If you manage to come by your money in a relatively anonymous fashion, you don't even have to tell anybody you are secretly rich.
If you just want to camp out of your car and go hiking on the weekends, then bringing up survivalist TV shows was more than a bit confusing, because car camping is the opposite of wilderness survival. Buy whatever living facilities you want, park them in an area with cell access, and you are all set. A small generator if you have a pop-up, or just your car if you don't, is fine for juice.
Your question is bizarre. You talk about being really into the whole survivalist thing, but the infrastructure necessary to hold down a tech job while in the deep wilderness living off your wits is a complete non-starter. (Pedaling for power? Seriously?)
Simply put, your biggest problem is power. (You'll need a LOT less power if you can figure out how to work with a tablet and bluetooth keyboard instead of a full laptop.) That means you are going to need a "base camp". That base camp will need supplies of food and fuel, and a large sunny clearing to collect power whether you are there or not. You can periodically return to swap out batteries/machines and pick up fresh supplies of food and fuel.
You'll need to (obviously) work within an area with cell phone coverage. But there are plenty of fairly remote places that fit that bill, so it's not a big problem.
Discard any idea of hunting for food or cooking with a fire... if you are hungry and in the middle of hunting something or gathering much-needed wood, you are going to get even hungrier when, inevitably, your phone starts to ring with a new problem. You can certainly go several days without seeing another soul, but "living off the land" is just not going to work.
Also consider what you are going to do in bad weather. I'm guessing that once your phone rings, it means something is broken. You'll need to start working pretty quickly, and likely will not have time to make camp if you were in transit at the time. (Please don't say it's realistic to work outside in the middle of a rainstorm, no matter how tough your gear is.) Do you really want to be holed up in a tent (or lean-to, cave, whatever) for days on end when the weather is bad? No, you don't; that's boring as $hit.
Really, if I were in your place, I'd have a base camp (at a regular campground) with a pop-up camper and small and quiet generator (and secure locks!) and go on hikes of one or two days (those small lithium power packs and an iPad would work great!) when the weather looked good. It ain't "roughing it", but trying to get work done in lousy weather when you are hungry and tired is just silly; your work will inevitably suffer as a result.
An architect (and one that is trying to be forward thinking and implement all sorts of fascinating new gear) is wasting time learning the admin interface for every box he/she specifies.
And if an architect is having trouble getting away from daily ops, not having any access to the boxes at all will help with that transition. (Not to mention that the architect will inevitably get pulled into ops problems, leaving less time to do the actual job.)
If you are logging on to boxes, you are getting too close to operations and too far away from architecture. You get the admins to pull reports and logs you need, but you don't really need logins to the entire infrastructure. What on earth would you do with it that you can't get from the admins? I'm an IT architect for a DR outsourcing company; I wouldn't even have the least clue HOW to login to the gear I'm buying by the truckload (much less do anything useful with it), so obviously I don't have the ability to do so either.
An architect need not have admin rights or even the knowledge an admin must know. (And likewise, it's not important for an admin to know things an architect must.)
P.S. Errr, 1500 VM's for 3000 employees? I sense that a lot of these (and whatever massive amounts of stale data they are attached to) sit utterly disused.
P.S.S. And your historical analogy isn't even valid. Cartographers are generally not surveyors.
It's sort of like saying "we could improve our security by banning all incoming traffic from China and Russia". Well, sure, if you're willing to just block lots of legitimate users in the meantime. It would be far better to try to implement better technologies and policies that actually improve computer security, rather than feel-good measures like this.
Yes, in a perfect world, companies would have perfect device security and it wouldn't matter from which direction an attack came.
But here in the real world, there is no such thing as perfect security, and every little bit helps. They aren't suggesting you block TOR and ignore your firewall and stop updating patches, just that among other security measures, this might help.
Anyway, what possible legitimate use could TOR have in a corporate environment outside of a media organization?
I also typed "know" instead of "no"...