guns make killing easier period. It's the first killing weapon where you don't have to be within physical contact of your victim to kill them
No, they aren't. We've had these things called ballistic weapons for thousands of years - bows and arrows, spears, catapults, you name it.
Then there are things like poison, which require no intimate contact for the deed to be committed.
Prior to firearms, the weak were preyed upon by the strong. There was no force equalizer: with firearms, the weak - your grandmother or daughter, for instance (presuming you have one), are able to defend themselves. Guns enable 'prey' to not be such.
Predators, on the other hand, will always be predators. Gunpowder is thousands of years old and has been used for just as long as a weapon of offense. Criminals in prisons are able to fashion weapons from pretty much anything (up to and including crude ballistic weapons in maximum security prisons).
If we were to make all firearms simply disappear today, those with malicious intent would have working examples of firearms tomorrow. (The primitive AK47 'factories' found in 3rd world villages are good testament to this capability.) People, even malicious people, are inventive and will be able to
A race which is able to both get to the moon in a couple years of heightened societal research and figure out how to get high off fermented shit is capable of pretty much anything. Outlawing guns, or even removing them outright from a society, does nothing.
You can even ignore the fact that crime rates have been at historic lows during this recession - despite the never-higher firearm ownership rate and almost universal US 'concealed carry' laws allowing the "common grandmother" to pack a man killing weapon under her petticoat.
What you can not ignore is that banning guns and removing them from a society will not remove violence. Something like this could have easily happened without the invention of firearms - as evidenced by the Gunpowder Plot, over 400 years ago.
I agree. In my experience, software jobs are exceedingly difficult, because you're often not defining the project yourself. "This will take roughly 1,400 man hours" is difficult to estimate, and even if you get an accurate estimate, it's not going to be accepted by management.
Since I'm primarily on the systems side of things (though too many software projects for my liking!) I can agree that it falls on this side of the fence, too. We've got the kind of responsibility which, if we fuck up in a minor little way (lacking malice or intent to do harm, even through a small oversight), can land us in deep water (legally, criminally, professionally) and unemployable. Often, we don't have the benefit that other trades who are placed in this situation have (such as architects, engineers, doctors, etc.) where a design decision can be gut-checked by someone else, quickly - and we're certainly not paid on the same level.
Inversely, if I'm not making enough doing something I enjoy, no amount of money would be worth the headache.
Paying someone "not enough" to not have to worry about money (without them spending excessively) is a sure way to sour someone's enjoyment of something they would otherwise enjoy and excel at.
I'd not let a programmer near technology that requires uptime. They're lazy sods, typically, with little "I wonder what would happen if I do this" or "maybe I shouldn't do this" consideration. They're hacks.
A software engineer can generally be trusted to behave in an engineer-like fashion - ie, thinking ahead.
US military spending is also lower now (as it was under Bush) than under Clinton and GHWB - in absolute numbers, after inflation is considered. Granted, that is more or less what you said when mentioning % of GDP.
What people don't consider about the
I'd argue that the social programs and the money spent on them are not, in and of themselves, "the" problem. The problems caused by social programs are actually the result of deeper societal issues which are much more difficult to address than slashing a buearocrat's budget.
The underlying problem behind social programs is that people have no desire to work. They've got no inclination to better themselves, financially, through their own labours. This has a net ill effect on the society's 'moral fabric', resulting in an entitlement attitude and class warfare.
Medicare and medicaid, themselves, are certainly huge problems. Arguably, these programs were hoisted up to support the drug industries. That's certainly debatable, but again, these programs would not be necessary if people ate better food. The FDA has accepted a huge, huge amount of overly-processed food-based products to the consumer market as "food" - things which simply are not good for you, contain no nutritional value, and have been shown through multiple studies to do nothing but harm (both short and long term). (Why is it that the FDA approves potato chips and the like, but won't approve non-irradiated, natural meats and tries to destroy on herbal/vitamin suppliments which (while they may have debatable quality) are at least better than nothing at all - thus inhibiting people's ability to live healthier lifestyles?)
In terms of budget, I think government healthcare should do several things (which involve the FDA and various other subsidy projects as well): * Local grocery subsidies in cities/urban complexes/ghettos to encourage the sale of produce and fresh meats at affordable rates instead of processed, packaged shelf foods * Stop providing free healthcare for lifestyle "diseases" (or, at least, make it a tiered thing, so someone under 40 can't get gov't subscriptions for these things) : diabetes, obesity and blood pressure related drugs. If people are forced to regulate their diets * De-regulate drugs for lifestyle diseases, so these people can, if they so choose, live short and unpleasant, fat lives on cheap medication. (There is no reason for insulin to cost what it does. It's relatively cheap to produce.) * No insurance/gov't co-pay on surgeries which are not life threatening or which result from lifestyle choices (if the gov't is goign to have it's hands on these things, they need to button things down, a bit). Pay out of your own pocket, if you want it. (Insurance is not a panacea! Or, at least, it shouldn't be.)
As a skeptic, what this really means to me is: this guy is looking for a way to fund his retirement.
Half a billion? That's 500 million. Sure, it might cost that much to perform the actual operation, but consider: management and administration costs. Surely there will be a significant portion of that set aside, particularly for the fund management. Say, as a non-profit, it's a 'relatively modest' $175k/year for such a position (if he's fitting in with current gov't standards, at least), and surely that sum would be allocated to him to manage it.
Let's say the project lasts 5 years; he just netted 2/3 or so of a million in income. At that point, the project has gone bankrupt due to lack of interest.
But more then a few games with great potential have shot themselves in the face repetitively by ignoring the forums. They either never were aware of huge game-destroying issues or came up with their own incredibly horrid solutions, when in fact the users had suggested exceptionally good ideas in the forums.
Absolutely. A couple examples:
Community-listening skills fail: Deus Ex: Invisible War
Community-listening skills success: pretty much every CoD game
Microsoft customers are different. Microsoft's main selling point for the last decade, whether it was true or not, was lower TCO.
I'm sure that's part of it, but I think you're missing a big part of the actual "people who use MS and like it" demographic are the geeks who aren't all bent out of shape by paying for something, but still like flexibility (options) and usability. I know a couple of these guys are looking forward to "real Windows on ARM".
I think the main point is that Apple's important customers are largely home end-users. Microsoft's important customers are businesses. Businesses tend to be a bit more conservative.
A couple points about how ARM Windows would actually be beneficial to both home and business customers:
* home users, by and large, won't care. "Facebook? Where do I sign?" * business users (IT managers and the like) won't care (and maybe even appreciate it), because:
* most applications can be virtualized now
* Terminal Services + virtualization = architecture independence, anyway. (I work on Windows machines running on Linux based VMs from a PPC machine... all day.)
* cheap thinclients running a 'full' Windows? The same for laptops? Where do we sign?
Server architecture is so drastically different (in terms of power) from the 'laptop' or 'desktop' architecture these days it's hardly going to make a difference in the corporate world. You've got a huge difference in common capabilities: 8 or 16 core Xeons on your servers vs. 1 or maybe 2 cores in last-generation laptops and PCs.
Additionally: there is no reason for MS to maintain legacy support anymore.
XP is several years out of maintenance, now. Windows 2000, even further out. Any application which specifically requires one or the other, and has no modern versions, will run in a VM just fine.
If it requires specific hardware, you might just well be fucked. But hoisting "this must be supported!" on MS is unreasonable: you can't expect Microsoft (or anyone) to support legacy applications AND hardware for the better part of a decade after the devices were sold. That's beyond unreasonable; it'd be like Ford supporting your after-market disc changer in an '89 model.
You're going to have incompatibility issues.NET has been for a long time now (almost 9 years). Provide binary libraries/interpreters for.NET 1.1 through 4, and you've already killed half your problem.
Provide compilers for all versions of.NET Studio, and you've taken care of almost all of the 3rd party vendors.
Windows 8 is, what? Probably at least 2 years out before we see a beta, I'd Guess. That's a long time for them to provide vendors with the information, particularly if it "Just Works" with old.NET upon release. Microsoft has probably been (internally) building their software for ARM and PPC internally for ages (assists finding bugs).
I know a handful of people who messaged me when this news came out, so excited they almost shit themselves. These were the diehard WinCE users and/or Microsoft types who are (justifiably) displeased with WinPhone 7, the Kin, and so on. They want a "real Windows based phone that lets them do what they want". I have to admit myself that a "full" version (ie no encumberment beyond what Windows causes on the desktop) of Windows on a smartphone would be quite appealing to me as well - moreso than the current lot of Android phones, to be sure.
Combine all these things, and ARM starts looking appealing to Microsoft. They'd be putting a technical superior architecture behind their product - an architecture which has recently become mature enough to hit pretty much every consumer device on the market. Rumor has it that MS is working with Nvidia on this, too. End result: desktops, thinclients, next-generation Xboxes, smartphones, etc. all running the same build version of Windows, on the same hardware to a significantly lower per-item cost to the user.
Not only that, but by jumping architectures, Microsoft gets to abandon their legacy crap. No, Photoshop won't be moving anytime soon (that can keep running on the x86/x64 release of Windows 8, I suspect). But that will hardly matter, as MS has realized that most "users" (let's call them consumers, because that's what they are) only really care about one or two 'fun' apps and being able to Facebook.
Newer "Windows 8 Certified" stuff would probably use a package similar to what OSX did in the earlier days to provide multiple architecture support, I'd imagine (if they went that route). No big deal. They've been talking about supporting a unified package manager and repository for Windows software for some time, anyway.
As I, and others, have been saying for a number of years, it's not surprising that MS would go this route. It's not all that drastic, either (when you consider how big MS is, the turnaround hardly seems all that significant). Conditional compilation is hardly new, after all. Literally: everyone else is leveraging it at multiple levels (Sun/Oracle, Linux, *BSD, Apple, IBM).
The Debian project does have some fairly strict guidelines: they're just not related to content, so much as they are licensing of content. It must be "free" and unencumbered. They also, I suspect, have some guidelines/rules related to functionality, packaging namespace, privacy functionality,
Honestly, aside from the guidelines which mainly pertain to for-pay programs and legal liability (crude content, violence, etc.) I didn't really see anything in the Apple dev guidelines that jumped out at me and said "bad!" It's mostly just "if you want to play ball with us, you have to play by our rules." Exclusionary? Sure, if the dev wants to do something different, sure.
FreeBSD doesn't do 'repositories', so to speak. They do ports, and then FreeBSD. They're conveniently independent (I suspect so that the FreeBSD project can claim superior security to everything else). Even then, ports don't really have 'guidelines'. "I maintain this port and I'll update it as I please, consequences be damned" seems to be the guiding message, though.
Thank you for your knowledgeable and reflective post. You made my a little warmer inside (maybe it was the whiskey?). It sure has been hell, lately, with archaic
Note: the newest machines I've got are in that "3 year" ballpark. They're all critical infrastructure hosts. I can't get replacements.
There is a solution for 1 through 4, and it's not one you'd like (unless you have a shotgun):
Virtualization. Virtualization will give those ancient systems another stay on life, and you will be able to "phase them out" (not really) over the following decade, as other products start to get used.
Virtualization turns your old crap systems into ever-living zombies. "This is old crap, we'll just virtualize it on new hardware". Doing this should last the system itself 1-2 hardware refreshes. By the time it's time to replace them, we'll all be digging in trash cans and fighting each other off with sticks...
The above matches most scenarios. For all others, you're making a fairly good argument for in-house open source development. (What would it cost to employ 5 'decent' programmers to maintain a system they have access to the code for? Somewhat less than dropping $600k every 3-4 years on new systems, I imagine - especially if they've got open source collaboration.)
Forget the risk analysis arguments. If people refuse to see simple logic, hitting them with more of it will do no good. These people will dismiss your reasoning with superstition, thinking along the lines of, "My VCR is 10 years old. It works fine. I see no reason to upgrade our network equipment until my vcr dies."
For things like that, the only reasonable solution is a loose mains wire and some bridging rod to the offending equipment in question. Then, when you get your new equipment overnighted at 20% markup, you're able to perform a Miracle (looking useful in their eyes, as opposed to someone who plans ahead and documents things, who's scuffed off like a scab) by restoring the data from backup.
Companies which have been improving their services and products through better IT practices are actually not doing too poorly. And no, I'm not wholely talking about IT industry companies, either: I know of manufacturing, architectural, and a handful of general 'service' companies (including banks) which have significantly improved their IT utility, both internally and as they face the customers.
No, XP isn't off the desktops at many of these places. (They are at the architectural place.) But many of the machinations have changed because there are people who realize "hey, it's a tight market; we need to leverage our existing assets - the people and their knowledge and connections. How can we do this?"
Silly young grasshoppah. There is no "just do..." in IT. The mythical solution you're referring to is a cruel joke told by vendors.
huge 14 page
So, a little script, then?
Something on my table right now: 15k (in-file - and probably significantly more on the printed page) lines of PHP3 with nasty embedded SQL up the wazoo. It ties into half a dozen (literally, 6) other 'mission critical' applications and is customer facing as well as providing internal network management functionality. And this is small fry compared to some of the crap out there.
You want to know why there is an ever increasing IT debt I'd say that is a BIG part of it. All across the country you have this huge mess of apps written by some Joe Schmo that was bought ages ago and nobody knows how to live without and it DON'T run on anything but what it was written for and even then it is fussy as hell
I couldn't agree more. We've had entirely too many Boy Geniuses in decision making places in IT who think they've got something special and unique which will have Totally Awesome Results. They don't bother to think through their decisions.
The proper approach to something like this isn't to fix it. It's to replace it outright with something that does 90% of the task, better, with 50% fewer inter-dependencies by modularizing things as much as possible. Re-implementing, feature for feature, is quite often quicker. Just make sure you don't make the mistake of so many before you and re-implement it - poorly. If you can't do it, find someone who can.
IMO, the key to a successfully maintainable software infrastructure is to KISS and leave things as White Box as possible. When you can't keep things generic, you keep things isolated and modular. When you need something custom purpose that your users rely upon, you make damn sure it's standards based and that there are alternatives available.
(I don't even want to THINK about where we will be with things like Sharepoint in 3-5 years. Likely, another lengthy, drawn out, and costly migration project. This time, maybe back to something like, oh, NFSv5.)
I can't say I particularly care for DLink, but for the cost of a (used) Cisco, I can pick up two Procurves with better specs and a management interface which anyone with basic networking comprehension can master in a couple hours. I'm not hearing anyone say the Procurves are shit (because they aren't). With d-link, I'm sure the same is true - and I can have a stack of hot spares for the same cost, too - Just In Case.
I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that IT managers read InfoWorld. Some read slashdot, too. Many of them are dropping the ball on this, big time. "We don't have the money this quarter" comes up time and time again, and they don't realize that the decreased maintenance is going
The only people who really realize this kind of thing are sysadmins. Unless the sysadmins have a huge amount of power within the organization (including their own ability to prioritize the budget and 'vision' of the organization, as it relates to IT), this kind of thing doesn't even get looked at. People think of IT infrastructure as a cost to be avoided, not realizing that it's analogous to their phone, power, and data services which keep their company alive.
I'm the Heretic Jerk, to no small degree. I like to dual class.
For a sysadmin, these are (to some degree) important and necessary skills, assuming the person knows when to use moderation and play their cards properly (particularly in a larger organization).
If you're not a jerk sometimes, you'll be walked all over.
If you're not a heretic, people become complacent and then you get hit by the bus - driven by others' incompetencies.
Of course, there's always the option of finding another job while you're ahead. Right?
Personally, I've been the guy who the bus gets held for, and I've been hit by the bus. In the later, it was for the better. I (metaphorically) broke my arm, but it grew back with adamantium infused. Also, the bitch didn't know what she was doing.
Actually, those were DDR era motherboards, mostly (assuming you're thinking of the "bad cap" foxconn debacle around 2003). We're talking 2.4-3GHz P4 era stuff, when 1GB was still considered "a lot", before Vista came to the scene.
I still have (and use) a 550W Antec PSU that has bad, leaked caps in it from that era. The leads test good under load still. Bad caps were/are not a death knell to the hardware. Likewise, I've got a Dell Optiplex 270 which has that problem (and an underclocked CPU) but runs stable enough that it's never gone down from instability or had app stability issues (that I'm aware of).
Yes, that's right. DDR2 is 'over the precipice' - it's old technology at this point.
We're kind of at a point similar to where we were in the mid-90s, where the "last generation" (high end 486) systems were just as fast/comparably fast to "this generation" (early Pentium) processors, but RAM support (and availability, utility, etc.) was more significant.
Right now, any system 3-5 years old is likely to be 'good enough' for most peoples' tasks - all except the most demanding users. The bottleneck will be RAM. On the older systems with only 1-4GB of DDR2 support (or present), this is going to start being a problem.
We ran into the same thing a couple years ago with DDR, and a couple years before that with PC133: smart and/or financially capable people bought as much of the stuff as they conceived they'd need to keep those systems supplied long enough to replace them outright. (In many cases, I know that DDR RAM held those systems out until quite recently.)
In most cases, systems with DDR2 are nearing their EOL anyway. They're a bit aged, and very few have been produced OEM in the last year or so. DDR is "gone", so to speak; DDR2 will be there in a year or so, at this rate.
DDR3 is technically superior to DDR2 in almost every way: it's lower power, runs cooler, and is markedly faster. The chipsets which interface with it are better. Forget DDR2 and move on; it's old tech. Use the systems for what they can do and don't fret it - just replace them if you need to.
Here are a couple good reasons why a company employing IT types might want it: * UAC, as well as the signfiicant improvements in whatever mechanisms are used to authenticate users. It's now not a huge pain in the ass for an 'administrator' (or someone with heightened ACL privileges) to actually work on a domain workstation that's been locked down. (In XP, "locked down" meant "not an Administrator". For many years it was all but impossible do much at all w/o such privileges and/or a headache.) * Improved user interface. Yes, this helps a lot - it's more intuitive to many, and the ability to tell the user "just type what you want" and have it come up is incredible. * Improved administration ability through AD/GP. * Easier to roll an image and maintain them. * Makes better use of the current low-end hardware than XP does (eg. XP is still a dog on a 3GHz machine with 2GB of RAM; W7 is reasonably snappy, even w/o Aero.) * Native virtualization support (as a guest). * Native virtualization support (as a host). * A networking stack that's had a great many of the bugs worked out of it (to 'just work'). * A wireless stack which has had a great many of the bugs worked out (so it's usable now, in more than a 'single location connection', without fucking with it) * Improved CIFS performance. * Relatively sane default security policies, making it not a nightmare for the overworked IT guy who's security focused but manning entirely more non-homogeneous systems than is sane. * Even with a slow disk, the user will not experience nearly as much thrashing and waiting as a result, due to the improved heuristics, or w/e they want to call them, governing VM. * It manages windows better. It's easier to manage your own windows in XP, but for those out there that are confused or scared by new icons on their desktop, it's far superior.
On the other hand, here are some reasons to not upgrade (as opposed to moving wholesale with new hardware): * most old hardware simply doesn't work. Video drivers? You need those? Good luck if it's not a DX10 card. Intel 9xx is out of luck, which means most stuff is going to have shit performance (even for the card). * Disk storage requirements are significant, so the lower-end stuff might not be simply 'upgradable'. * You won't be able to game on the older hardware without significant performance degradation (compared to XP). * Your users won't need you as much for the trivial things which irritate you. * You've got applications which explicitly need other archaic shit, like ERP integration software or something that needs IE6. (On new hardware, these are mitigated through emulation/XP Mode... or doing something novel and moving the archaic shit to application servers, allowing for systemic upgrades to continue.)
That said... why is security a bad reason to upgrade, exactly? The "old NT" architecture was not fixable; it had to be replaced/extended/whatever. We've known this for the better part of a decade.
There's also the (quite obvious) hardware support issue.
Yeah, there is no 'good option', but at the same time our denial of the facts on the ground - it already is a religious/existential/ideological war, and not due to anything we can prevent, with enemies which will keep on fighting until throughly beaten - is preventing the war from ending.
It's not going to end if we just leave, I don't believe (as nice as that sounds). It's got to be Finished. This isn't Germany post-WWII: if we leave, they're just going to come to the West (or continue to do so, rather - in higher numbers).
Uh, the grades of all mentioned are pretty fucking well known. The media (and the liberal bandstand) were laughing about Bush Jr.'s collegiate grades; McCain and Bush both have thoroughly vetted military records. There are pictures of Bush and McCain during these periods, as well as Clinton, doing what their official 'records' show they did.
Hey, fucking look! (The Internet sure is amazing, isn't it?)
(Yeah, I know it's a shit image but I can't be damned to look further for something which was in the news for months a couple years ago. I can find a shitty official picture of a certificate verifying that Obama was, indeed, alive, too, if you'd like. I believe he published that, at least.)
Just a basic list of things which have been legally/officially verified (and you can do too) by Bush and McCain themselves, including collaborative evidence (photos, witnesses) which can not be easily faked:
* military records * college diplomas * college records * citizenry and natural birth
Obama has an additional burden in proving the last, as 1) he's resisted inquiries to this effect and refuses to have official documents released, 2) it's actually possible that he's not a natural born citizen, whereas with the other two (born to two US citizens on US soil) it is not.
Additionally, with Obama, his primary claims to be eligible for the Presidency have all been unverified. Yes, the requirement is that he's a natural born US citizen at least 35 years of age; however:
* no verified evidence that he was ever Harvard Law School President, or anything similar, despite such claims * rarely actually voted on anything in the year that he was a congressman * of questionable national allegiance... and so on. These all add to an additional burden of proof required - just as a man with a verified alibi is often acquitted from a crime with insurmountable evidence, Obama has some 'splainin' to do.
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guns make killing easier period. It's the first killing weapon where you don't have to be within physical contact of your victim to kill them
No, they aren't. We've had these things called ballistic weapons for thousands of years - bows and arrows, spears, catapults, you name it.
Then there are things like poison, which require no intimate contact for the deed to be committed.
Prior to firearms, the weak were preyed upon by the strong. There was no force equalizer: with firearms, the weak - your grandmother or daughter, for instance (presuming you have one), are able to defend themselves. Guns enable 'prey' to not be such.
Predators, on the other hand, will always be predators. Gunpowder is thousands of years old and has been used for just as long as a weapon of offense. Criminals in prisons are able to fashion weapons from pretty much anything (up to and including crude ballistic weapons in maximum security prisons).
If we were to make all firearms simply disappear today, those with malicious intent would have working examples of firearms tomorrow. (The primitive AK47 'factories' found in 3rd world villages are good testament to this capability.) People, even malicious people, are inventive and will be able to
A race which is able to both get to the moon in a couple years of heightened societal research and figure out how to get high off fermented shit is capable of pretty much anything. Outlawing guns, or even removing them outright from a society, does nothing.
You can even ignore the fact that crime rates have been at historic lows during this recession - despite the never-higher firearm ownership rate and almost universal US 'concealed carry' laws allowing the "common grandmother" to pack a man killing weapon under her petticoat.
What you can not ignore is that banning guns and removing them from a society will not remove violence. Something like this could have easily happened without the invention of firearms - as evidenced by the Gunpowder Plot, over 400 years ago.
I agree. In my experience, software jobs are exceedingly difficult, because you're often not defining the project yourself. "This will take roughly 1,400 man hours" is difficult to estimate, and even if you get an accurate estimate, it's not going to be accepted by management.
Since I'm primarily on the systems side of things (though too many software projects for my liking!) I can agree that it falls on this side of the fence, too. We've got the kind of responsibility which, if we fuck up in a minor little way (lacking malice or intent to do harm, even through a small oversight), can land us in deep water (legally, criminally, professionally) and unemployable. Often, we don't have the benefit that other trades who are placed in this situation have (such as architects, engineers, doctors, etc.) where a design decision can be gut-checked by someone else, quickly - and we're certainly not paid on the same level.
Inversely, if I'm not making enough doing something I enjoy, no amount of money would be worth the headache.
Paying someone "not enough" to not have to worry about money (without them spending excessively) is a sure way to sour someone's enjoyment of something they would otherwise enjoy and excel at.
No; no, it is not.
I'd not let a programmer near technology that requires uptime. They're lazy sods, typically, with little "I wonder what would happen if I do this" or "maybe I shouldn't do this" consideration. They're hacks.
A software engineer can generally be trusted to behave in an engineer-like fashion - ie, thinking ahead.
US military spending is also lower now (as it was under Bush) than under Clinton and GHWB - in absolute numbers, after inflation is considered. Granted, that is more or less what you said when mentioning % of GDP.
What people don't consider about the
I'd argue that the social programs and the money spent on them are not, in and of themselves, "the" problem. The problems caused by social programs are actually the result of deeper societal issues which are much more difficult to address than slashing a buearocrat's budget.
The underlying problem behind social programs is that people have no desire to work. They've got no inclination to better themselves, financially, through their own labours. This has a net ill effect on the society's 'moral fabric', resulting in an entitlement attitude and class warfare.
Medicare and medicaid, themselves, are certainly huge problems. Arguably, these programs were hoisted up to support the drug industries. That's certainly debatable, but again, these programs would not be necessary if people ate better food. The FDA has accepted a huge, huge amount of overly-processed food-based products to the consumer market as "food" - things which simply are not good for you, contain no nutritional value, and have been shown through multiple studies to do nothing but harm (both short and long term). (Why is it that the FDA approves potato chips and the like, but won't approve non-irradiated, natural meats and tries to destroy on herbal/vitamin suppliments which (while they may have debatable quality) are at least better than nothing at all - thus inhibiting people's ability to live healthier lifestyles?)
In terms of budget, I think government healthcare should do several things (which involve the FDA and various other subsidy projects as well):
* Local grocery subsidies in cities/urban complexes/ghettos to encourage the sale of produce and fresh meats at affordable rates instead of processed, packaged shelf foods
* Stop providing free healthcare for lifestyle "diseases" (or, at least, make it a tiered thing, so someone under 40 can't get gov't subscriptions for these things) : diabetes, obesity and blood pressure related drugs. If people are forced to regulate their diets
* De-regulate drugs for lifestyle diseases, so these people can, if they so choose, live short and unpleasant, fat lives on cheap medication. (There is no reason for insulin to cost what it does. It's relatively cheap to produce.)
* No insurance/gov't co-pay on surgeries which are not life threatening or which result from lifestyle choices (if the gov't is goign to have it's hands on these things, they need to button things down, a bit). Pay out of your own pocket, if you want it. (Insurance is not a panacea! Or, at least, it shouldn't be.)
As a skeptic, what this really means to me is: this guy is looking for a way to fund his retirement.
Half a billion? That's 500 million. Sure, it might cost that much to perform the actual operation, but consider: management and administration costs. Surely there will be a significant portion of that set aside, particularly for the fund management. Say, as a non-profit, it's a 'relatively modest' $175k/year for such a position (if he's fitting in with current gov't standards, at least), and surely that sum would be allocated to him to manage it.
Let's say the project lasts 5 years; he just netted 2/3 or so of a million in income. At that point, the project has gone bankrupt due to lack of interest.
But more then a few games with great potential have shot themselves in the face repetitively by ignoring the forums. They either never were aware of huge game-destroying issues or came up with their own incredibly horrid solutions, when in fact the users had suggested exceptionally good ideas in the forums.
Absolutely. A couple examples:
Community-listening skills fail: Deus Ex: Invisible War
Community-listening skills success: pretty much every CoD game
Microsoft customers are different. Microsoft's main selling point for the last decade, whether it was true or not, was lower TCO.
I'm sure that's part of it, but I think you're missing a big part of the actual "people who use MS and like it" demographic are the geeks who aren't all bent out of shape by paying for something, but still like flexibility (options) and usability. I know a couple of these guys are looking forward to "real Windows on ARM".
I think the main point is that Apple's important customers are largely home end-users. Microsoft's important customers are businesses. Businesses tend to be a bit more conservative.
A couple points about how ARM Windows would actually be beneficial to both home and business customers:
* home users, by and large, won't care. "Facebook? Where do I sign?"
* business users (IT managers and the like) won't care (and maybe even appreciate it), because:
* most applications can be virtualized now
* Terminal Services + virtualization = architecture independence, anyway. (I work on Windows machines running on Linux based VMs from a PPC machine... all day.)
* cheap thinclients running a 'full' Windows? The same for laptops? Where do we sign?
Server architecture is so drastically different (in terms of power) from the 'laptop' or 'desktop' architecture these days it's hardly going to make a difference in the corporate world. You've got a huge difference in common capabilities: 8 or 16 core Xeons on your servers vs. 1 or maybe 2 cores in last-generation laptops and PCs.
Additionally: there is no reason for MS to maintain legacy support anymore.
XP is several years out of maintenance, now. Windows 2000, even further out. Any application which specifically requires one or the other, and has no modern versions, will run in a VM just fine.
If it requires specific hardware, you might just well be fucked. But hoisting "this must be supported!" on MS is unreasonable: you can't expect Microsoft (or anyone) to support legacy applications AND hardware for the better part of a decade after the devices were sold. That's beyond unreasonable; it'd be like Ford supporting your after-market disc changer in an '89 model.
You're going to have incompatibility issues .NET has been for a long time now (almost 9 years). Provide binary libraries/interpreters for .NET 1.1 through 4, and you've already killed half your problem.
Provide compilers for all versions of .NET Studio, and you've taken care of almost all of the 3rd party vendors.
Windows 8 is, what? Probably at least 2 years out before we see a beta, I'd Guess. That's a long time for them to provide vendors with the information, particularly if it "Just Works" with old .NET upon release. Microsoft has probably been (internally) building their software for ARM and PPC internally for ages (assists finding bugs).
I know a handful of people who messaged me when this news came out, so excited they almost shit themselves. These were the diehard WinCE users and/or Microsoft types who are (justifiably) displeased with WinPhone 7, the Kin, and so on. They want a "real Windows based phone that lets them do what they want". I have to admit myself that a "full" version (ie no encumberment beyond what Windows causes on the desktop) of Windows on a smartphone would be quite appealing to me as well - moreso than the current lot of Android phones, to be sure.
Combine all these things, and ARM starts looking appealing to Microsoft. They'd be putting a technical superior architecture behind their product - an architecture which has recently become mature enough to hit pretty much every consumer device on the market. Rumor has it that MS is working with Nvidia on this, too. End result: desktops, thinclients, next-generation Xboxes, smartphones, etc. all running the same build version of Windows, on the same hardware to a significantly lower per-item cost to the user.
Not only that, but by jumping architectures, Microsoft gets to abandon their legacy crap. No, Photoshop won't be moving anytime soon (that can keep running on the x86/x64 release of Windows 8, I suspect). But that will hardly matter, as MS has realized that most "users" (let's call them consumers, because that's what they are) only really care about one or two 'fun' apps and being able to Facebook.
Newer "Windows 8 Certified" stuff would probably use a package similar to what OSX did in the earlier days to provide multiple architecture support, I'd imagine (if they went that route). No big deal. They've been talking about supporting a unified package manager and repository for Windows software for some time, anyway.
As I, and others, have been saying for a number of years, it's not surprising that MS would go this route. It's not all that drastic, either (when you consider how big MS is, the turnaround hardly seems all that significant). Conditional compilation is hardly new, after all. Literally: everyone else is leveraging it at multiple levels (Sun/Oracle, Linux, *BSD, Apple, IBM).
The Debian project does have some fairly strict guidelines: they're just not related to content, so much as they are licensing of content. It must be "free" and unencumbered. They also, I suspect, have some guidelines/rules related to functionality, packaging namespace, privacy functionality,
Honestly, aside from the guidelines which mainly pertain to for-pay programs and legal liability (crude content, violence, etc.) I didn't really see anything in the Apple dev guidelines that jumped out at me and said "bad!" It's mostly just "if you want to play ball with us, you have to play by our rules." Exclusionary? Sure, if the dev wants to do something different, sure.
FreeBSD doesn't do 'repositories', so to speak. They do ports, and then FreeBSD. They're conveniently independent (I suspect so that the FreeBSD project can claim superior security to everything else). Even then, ports don't really have 'guidelines'. "I maintain this port and I'll update it as I please, consequences be damned" seems to be the guiding message, though.
My GOD, man! Get out of my head!
Thank you for your knowledgeable and reflective post. You made my a little warmer inside (maybe it was the whiskey?). It sure has been hell, lately, with archaic
Note: the newest machines I've got are in that "3 year" ballpark. They're all critical infrastructure hosts. I can't get replacements.
There is a solution for 1 through 4, and it's not one you'd like (unless you have a shotgun):
Virtualization. Virtualization will give those ancient systems another stay on life, and you will be able to "phase them out" (not really) over the following decade, as other products start to get used.
Virtualization turns your old crap systems into ever-living zombies. "This is old crap, we'll just virtualize it on new hardware". Doing this should last the system itself 1-2 hardware refreshes. By the time it's time to replace them, we'll all be digging in trash cans and fighting each other off with sticks...
The above matches most scenarios. For all others, you're making a fairly good argument for in-house open source development. (What would it cost to employ 5 'decent' programmers to maintain a system they have access to the code for? Somewhat less than dropping $600k every 3-4 years on new systems, I imagine - especially if they've got open source collaboration.)
Forget the risk analysis arguments. If people refuse to see simple logic, hitting them with more of it will do no good. These people will dismiss your reasoning with superstition, thinking along the lines of, "My VCR is 10 years old. It works fine. I see no reason to upgrade our network equipment until my vcr dies."
For things like that, the only reasonable solution is a loose mains wire and some bridging rod to the offending equipment in question. Then, when you get your new equipment overnighted at 20% markup, you're able to perform a Miracle (looking useful in their eyes, as opposed to someone who plans ahead and documents things, who's scuffed off like a scab) by restoring the data from backup.
Companies which have been improving their services and products through better IT practices are actually not doing too poorly. And no, I'm not wholely talking about IT industry companies, either: I know of manufacturing, architectural, and a handful of general 'service' companies (including banks) which have significantly improved their IT utility, both internally and as they face the customers.
No, XP isn't off the desktops at many of these places. (They are at the architectural place.) But many of the machinations have changed because there are people who realize "hey, it's a tight market; we need to leverage our existing assets - the people and their knowledge and connections. How can we do this?"
Silly young grasshoppah. There is no "just do..." in IT. The mythical solution you're referring to is a cruel joke told by vendors.
huge 14 page
So, a little script, then?
Something on my table right now: 15k (in-file - and probably significantly more on the printed page) lines of PHP3 with nasty embedded SQL up the wazoo. It ties into half a dozen (literally, 6) other 'mission critical' applications and is customer facing as well as providing internal network management functionality. And this is small fry compared to some of the crap out there.
You want to know why there is an ever increasing IT debt I'd say that is a BIG part of it. All across the country you have this huge mess of apps written by some Joe Schmo that was bought ages ago and nobody knows how to live without and it DON'T run on anything but what it was written for and even then it is fussy as hell
I couldn't agree more. We've had entirely too many Boy Geniuses in decision making places in IT who think they've got something special and unique which will have Totally Awesome Results. They don't bother to think through their decisions.
The proper approach to something like this isn't to fix it. It's to replace it outright with something that does 90% of the task, better, with 50% fewer inter-dependencies by modularizing things as much as possible. Re-implementing, feature for feature, is quite often quicker. Just make sure you don't make the mistake of so many before you and re-implement it - poorly. If you can't do it, find someone who can.
IMO, the key to a successfully maintainable software infrastructure is to KISS and leave things as White Box as possible. When you can't keep things generic, you keep things isolated and modular. When you need something custom purpose that your users rely upon, you make damn sure it's standards based and that there are alternatives available.
(I don't even want to THINK about where we will be with things like Sharepoint in 3-5 years. Likely, another lengthy, drawn out, and costly migration project. This time, maybe back to something like, oh, NFSv5.)
I can't say I particularly care for DLink, but for the cost of a (used) Cisco, I can pick up two Procurves with better specs and a management interface which anyone with basic networking comprehension can master in a couple hours. I'm not hearing anyone say the Procurves are shit (because they aren't). With d-link, I'm sure the same is true - and I can have a stack of hot spares for the same cost, too - Just In Case.
I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that IT managers read InfoWorld. Some read slashdot, too. Many of them are dropping the ball on this, big time. "We don't have the money this quarter" comes up time and time again, and they don't realize that the decreased maintenance is going
The only people who really realize this kind of thing are sysadmins. Unless the sysadmins have a huge amount of power within the organization (including their own ability to prioritize the budget and 'vision' of the organization, as it relates to IT), this kind of thing doesn't even get looked at. People think of IT infrastructure as a cost to be avoided, not realizing that it's analogous to their phone, power, and data services which keep their company alive.
I'm the Heretic Jerk, to no small degree. I like to dual class.
For a sysadmin, these are (to some degree) important and necessary skills, assuming the person knows when to use moderation and play their cards properly (particularly in a larger organization).
If you're not a jerk sometimes, you'll be walked all over.
If you're not a heretic, people become complacent and then you get hit by the bus - driven by others' incompetencies.
Of course, there's always the option of finding another job while you're ahead. Right?
Personally, I've been the guy who the bus gets held for, and I've been hit by the bus. In the later, it was for the better. I (metaphorically) broke my arm, but it grew back with adamantium infused. Also, the bitch didn't know what she was doing.
It's an 8-year-old system with old crap attached. Anything important is NFS mounted. I'm not too concerned.
Actually, those were DDR era motherboards, mostly (assuming you're thinking of the "bad cap" foxconn debacle around 2003). We're talking 2.4-3GHz P4 era stuff, when 1GB was still considered "a lot", before Vista came to the scene.
I still have (and use) a 550W Antec PSU that has bad, leaked caps in it from that era. The leads test good under load still. Bad caps were/are not a death knell to the hardware. Likewise, I've got a Dell Optiplex 270 which has that problem (and an underclocked CPU) but runs stable enough that it's never gone down from instability or had app stability issues (that I'm aware of).
Yes, that's right. DDR2 is 'over the precipice' - it's old technology at this point.
We're kind of at a point similar to where we were in the mid-90s, where the "last generation" (high end 486) systems were just as fast/comparably fast to "this generation" (early Pentium) processors, but RAM support (and availability, utility, etc.) was more significant.
Right now, any system 3-5 years old is likely to be 'good enough' for most peoples' tasks - all except the most demanding users. The bottleneck will be RAM. On the older systems with only 1-4GB of DDR2 support (or present), this is going to start being a problem.
We ran into the same thing a couple years ago with DDR, and a couple years before that with PC133: smart and/or financially capable people bought as much of the stuff as they conceived they'd need to keep those systems supplied long enough to replace them outright. (In many cases, I know that DDR RAM held those systems out until quite recently.)
In most cases, systems with DDR2 are nearing their EOL anyway. They're a bit aged, and very few have been produced OEM in the last year or so. DDR is "gone", so to speak; DDR2 will be there in a year or so, at this rate.
DDR3 is technically superior to DDR2 in almost every way: it's lower power, runs cooler, and is markedly faster. The chipsets which interface with it are better. Forget DDR2 and move on; it's old tech. Use the systems for what they can do and don't fret it - just replace them if you need to.
For users, or administrators?
Here are a couple good reasons why a company employing IT types might want it:
* UAC, as well as the signfiicant improvements in whatever mechanisms are used to authenticate users. It's now not a huge pain in the ass for an 'administrator' (or someone with heightened ACL privileges) to actually work on a domain workstation that's been locked down. (In XP, "locked down" meant "not an Administrator". For many years it was all but impossible do much at all w/o such privileges and/or a headache.)
* Improved user interface. Yes, this helps a lot - it's more intuitive to many, and the ability to tell the user "just type what you want" and have it come up is incredible.
* Improved administration ability through AD/GP.
* Easier to roll an image and maintain them.
* Makes better use of the current low-end hardware than XP does (eg. XP is still a dog on a 3GHz machine with 2GB of RAM; W7 is reasonably snappy, even w/o Aero.)
* Native virtualization support (as a guest).
* Native virtualization support (as a host).
* A networking stack that's had a great many of the bugs worked out of it (to 'just work').
* A wireless stack which has had a great many of the bugs worked out (so it's usable now, in more than a 'single location connection', without fucking with it)
* Improved CIFS performance.
* Relatively sane default security policies, making it not a nightmare for the overworked IT guy who's security focused but manning entirely more non-homogeneous systems than is sane.
* Even with a slow disk, the user will not experience nearly as much thrashing and waiting as a result, due to the improved heuristics, or w/e they want to call them, governing VM.
* It manages windows better. It's easier to manage your own windows in XP, but for those out there that are confused or scared by new icons on their desktop, it's far superior.
On the other hand, here are some reasons to not upgrade (as opposed to moving wholesale with new hardware):
* most old hardware simply doesn't work. Video drivers? You need those? Good luck if it's not a DX10 card. Intel 9xx is out of luck, which means most stuff is going to have shit performance (even for the card).
* Disk storage requirements are significant, so the lower-end stuff might not be simply 'upgradable'.
* You won't be able to game on the older hardware without significant performance degradation (compared to XP).
* Your users won't need you as much for the trivial things which irritate you.
* You've got applications which explicitly need other archaic shit, like ERP integration software or something that needs IE6. (On new hardware, these are mitigated through emulation/XP Mode... or doing something novel and moving the archaic shit to application servers, allowing for systemic upgrades to continue.)
That said... why is security a bad reason to upgrade, exactly? The "old NT" architecture was not fixable; it had to be replaced/extended/whatever. We've known this for the better part of a decade.
There's also the (quite obvious) hardware support issue.
Yeah, there is no 'good option', but at the same time our denial of the facts on the ground - it already is a religious/existential/ideological war, and not due to anything we can prevent, with enemies which will keep on fighting until throughly beaten - is preventing the war from ending.
It's not going to end if we just leave, I don't believe (as nice as that sounds). It's got to be Finished. This isn't Germany post-WWII: if we leave, they're just going to come to the West (or continue to do so, rather - in higher numbers).
Uh, the grades of all mentioned are pretty fucking well known. The media (and the liberal bandstand) were laughing about Bush Jr.'s collegiate grades; McCain and Bush both have thoroughly vetted military records. There are pictures of Bush and McCain during these periods, as well as Clinton, doing what their official 'records' show they did.
Hey, fucking look! (The Internet sure is amazing, isn't it?)
http://2004.georgewbush.org/bios/yale-transcript.asp
(Yeah, I know it's a shit image but I can't be damned to look further for something which was in the news for months a couple years ago. I can find a shitty official picture of a certificate verifying that Obama was, indeed, alive, too, if you'd like. I believe he published that, at least.)
Just a basic list of things which have been legally/officially verified (and you can do too) by Bush and McCain themselves, including collaborative evidence (photos, witnesses) which can not be easily faked:
* military records
* college diplomas
* college records
* citizenry and natural birth
Obama has an additional burden in proving the last, as
1) he's resisted inquiries to this effect and refuses to have official documents released,
2) it's actually possible that he's not a natural born citizen, whereas with the other two (born to two US citizens on US soil) it is not.
Additionally, with Obama, his primary claims to be eligible for the Presidency have all been unverified. Yes, the requirement is that he's a natural born US citizen at least 35 years of age; however:
* no verified evidence that he was ever Harvard Law School President, or anything similar, despite such claims ... and so on. These all add to an additional burden of proof required - just as a man with a verified alibi is often acquitted from a crime with insurmountable evidence, Obama has some 'splainin' to do.
* rarely actually voted on anything in the year that he was a congressman
* of questionable national allegiance