microsoft = software. amazon = marketing. some companies are smart because amazons IT will never compare to microsofts IT.
Errr, no.
The company I'm consulting with right now has done in-depth studies of AWS, Google, and Azure. They eventually want to have a setup where they can, at will, move their services between any of the big 3 providers.
They've been having all sorts of meetings with reps from all 3 trying to see what they can do, and I've no doubt that eventually they'll be able to do this (easily shift services from provider to provider).
In the most basic terms, this is the way things stand:
First off, in case you didn't know, AWS is IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service while Azure is PaaS - Platform as a Service. (No one knows what the fuck Google is yet.) These two approaches obviously have some serious implications as to how you deploy and manage your stuff, so you'll want to either know what the fuck you're doing or pay someone smart look at your operation and tell you which makes the most sense for you.
AWS is far and away the most flexible and "featurific" of all three. Whatever it is you want to do, AWS can do it. AWS also offers the most bang for the buck, especially at scale. AWS uptime and file persistence is beyond excellent, it practically borders on science-fiction. You could nuke 90% of the world and all of your precious S3 files would still be perfectly safe. Their overall security posture is outstanding. For the moment, AWS is king, end of story.
Azure is getting there, but it's got a long way to go. MS knows this and as a result Azure reps and dev groups will do ANYTHING you ask for. ANYTHING, including happily replicating any AWS features or functionality that you would need in order to get you onboard. And they'll do it on their dime. For example, MS paid a 3rd-party dev team to build (from our specs) an entire service catalog for us in Azure, in the hopes that we may use them in addition to AWS. It was a piece of the puzzle that we needed and MS paid to have it built. Azure is hungry and motivated. Amazon should keep an eye on their rear-view mirror for Azure.
Google is in last place, and they aren't nearly as feverish about developing their cloud as you would expect them to be. We meet with them and it's always a little too relaxed. I honestly have no idea what they've done or delivered.
Not buying cloud services from Amazon is NOT going to keep them from disrupting your business or intruding on your business. "Who buys from us" is not a factor in how Amazon makes decisions as to what they're going to do next. And I'd bet that goes for Google and Microsoft too.
You should buy the best cloud service that fits your mission, period. If that's Amazon, great. If it's Azure or Google, great.
Buy whatever makes the most sense for what you need to do, and then move on to the next thing on your list.
Gates had the backing to succeed pretty much no matter what he did. He had the resources to leverage (connections, money, etc), which most of us don't.
He was born a poor white millionaire and parlayed it into something bigger.
Wordpress is a mess, but there are a few plugins that can drastically reduce the attack surface and the likelihood of an attacker making any headway.
I'd recommend Wordfence and Block Bad Queries, to name just a couple. I wouldn't run a WP site without at least these two plugins, period. There are also some decent guides to hardening a WP site and they're well worth the time to look at.
And to address the inevitable screaming that will occur regarding WP and its mess of spaghetti code, I agree 100% that you shouldn't have to add these plugins just to keep a WP installation safe, but it is what it is.
And FWIW, I have no connection to either of these plugins or to Wordpress itself. I don't generally like using WP but sometimes when all you need is a quick site without any fancy crap, it's okay.
This is awesome- another stupidly-expensive video card that will be obsolete in 6 months. Woo hoo!
Okay, maybe it'll actually be obsolete in 3 months, but hey- for that 90-day window I'll have a video card that my friends won't geek-shame me over. I won't have to hang my head in shame because my video card doesn't have the latest GPU made from genuine imported yak kidneys or whatever.
I find the whole selfie thing to be just odd. How can individuals be that consumed with themselves.
I find it odd and somewhat weird/baffling. It's like suddenly there's a whole fucking generation of narcissists who are obsessed with taking pics of themselves and their food and every goddamn thing their dog or cat does.
Yes, we took pictures of ourselves with our old-fogey cameras, but we didn't take 50 of them every day. It just seems shallow to me.
Do they think that future generations will pore over these old pics and study them for clues as to how we lived? Well, they won't- they'll be too busy taking hundred of 3D Hologram selfies and complaining that the bezel is still too thick.
"Quantum Computer Not Ready To Break Public Key Encryption For At Least 10 Years, Some Experts Say"
That's what they want you to believe.
You know, the mysterious, shadowy "they" that's behind everything- chemtrails, the flat-earth, anti-vaxxers, Reptilians, C++ pointers...it's all them and they. Hopefully they won't delete this post where I blow the lid off of their nefarious activities.
The light in your fridge burned out? They did it. One of your tires suddenly gets low? They did it. Who ate all the ice cream? They did.
Nobody cares what you watch or what platform you like
They may not care what he in particular likes, but they sure care about what 100,000 people in his demographic like. And he's part of the collective, so to speak. So yeah, they care what he likes, just not him specifically.
In other words you're just another data point to be gobbled up. They care enough to collect the data, it's just not personal.
It wouldn't surprise me if you couldn't activate the TV unless it was allowed to phone home at least once.
And then every so often they'd decide that you 'need' a software upgrade (for 'security', of course) and that the TV won't work until you allow it to upgrade or install new spyware or whatever.
Maybe they'll start making sets that *have* to be connected, either all the time or periodically. The lust to advertise is so great that this kind of thing makes perfect sense to the ad companies.
Hell, they'd implant LCDs in our foreheads and show ads on them if they could just find a way. And I don't mean a legal way, I just mean a way.
So...now we'll have to run ad blockers on our TVs?
---------------
Farnsworth: It's very simple. The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg. [He holds up an egg and injects it with liquid. The egg explodes, covering him and Leela in yolk.] Although, in reality, it's not liquid, but gamma radiation.
Fry: That's awful. It's like brainwashing.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No, sir-ee!
Bender: Quit squawking, flesh wad. Nobody's forcing you to buy anything.
Amy: Yeah. I mean we all have commercials in our dreams but you don't see us running off to buy brand-name merchandise at low, low prices.
Windows 7 is probably the last good windows we will ever see.
Yep, that's my feeling too. Win7 had everything I needed and little else, it was perfect for 99.9% of what I need to do on a daily basis. So of course they had to shitcan it.
Too late, I ditched Win7 for Linux Mint a while ago and I'm never going back.
I liked Win7- it was everything I needed and not much else. But the shaky updates and the constant push to upgrade upgrade upgrade upgrade were wearing on me.
The final straw was an 'update' that blasted me off the net and nothing I could do would fix it. I finally had to roll back to a save point, and that was that- no more updates.
So yeah, MS finally pissed me off enough to bail. Linux Mint is good, fairly well done and perfectly usable. Finding replacement programs took a little work, and transferring my data was a bit more, but it was worth it in the end.
Your daddy did it and your granddaddy did it and your great-granddaddy did it and by god it's good enough for you too
Yeah! And not only that, but we should be allowed to die of polio and measles and other preventable diseases, just like my granddaddy and great-granddaddy did too! That'll teach 'em!
If people are that concerned about it, they should convince the schools to change their schedules.
Or teach children not to stand next to the road, which parents should be telling their children anyway.
There is simply no need to screw around with every clock in the entire country twice a year because some parents are too dumb to tell their kids not to stand in the road in the dark.
Slashdot Mirror
microsoft = software. amazon = marketing. some companies are smart because amazons IT will never compare to microsofts IT.
Errr, no.
The company I'm consulting with right now has done in-depth studies of AWS, Google, and Azure. They eventually want to have a setup where they can, at will, move their services between any of the big 3 providers.
They've been having all sorts of meetings with reps from all 3 trying to see what they can do, and I've no doubt that eventually they'll be able to do this (easily shift services from provider to provider).
In the most basic terms, this is the way things stand:
First off, in case you didn't know, AWS is IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service while Azure is PaaS - Platform as a Service. (No one knows what the fuck Google is yet.) These two approaches obviously have some serious implications as to how you deploy and manage your stuff, so you'll want to either know what the fuck you're doing or pay someone smart look at your operation and tell you which makes the most sense for you.
AWS is far and away the most flexible and "featurific" of all three. Whatever it is you want to do, AWS can do it. AWS also offers the most bang for the buck, especially at scale. AWS uptime and file persistence is beyond excellent, it practically borders on science-fiction. You could nuke 90% of the world and all of your precious S3 files would still be perfectly safe. Their overall security posture is outstanding. For the moment, AWS is king, end of story.
Azure is getting there, but it's got a long way to go. MS knows this and as a result Azure reps and dev groups will do ANYTHING you ask for. ANYTHING, including happily replicating any AWS features or functionality that you would need in order to get you onboard. And they'll do it on their dime.
For example, MS paid a 3rd-party dev team to build (from our specs) an entire service catalog for us in Azure, in the hopes that we may use them in addition to AWS. It was a piece of the puzzle that we needed and MS paid to have it built. Azure is hungry and motivated. Amazon should keep an eye on their rear-view mirror for Azure.
Google is in last place, and they aren't nearly as feverish about developing their cloud as you would expect them to be. We meet with them and it's always a little too relaxed. I honestly have no idea what they've done or delivered.
Not buying cloud services from Amazon is NOT going to keep them from disrupting your business or intruding on your business. "Who buys from us" is not a factor in how Amazon makes decisions as to what they're going to do next. And I'd bet that goes for Google and Microsoft too.
You should buy the best cloud service that fits your mission, period. If that's Amazon, great. If it's Azure or Google, great.
Buy whatever makes the most sense for what you need to do, and then move on to the next thing on your list.
There is nothing "long shot" about Gates.
Bingo.
Gates had the backing to succeed pretty much no matter what he did. He had the resources to leverage (connections, money, etc), which most of us don't.
He was born a poor white millionaire and parlayed it into something bigger.
This reminds me of when my son was young and we'd fix something together.
I miraculously always had the tool(s) we needed and my son would say, "It's lucky we had that (insert name of tool), huh dad?"
"Yes, very lucky," I would say, "very lucky that daddy just happened to go out years ago and buy it, huh?"
He got it after a couple of those go-arounds.
Yes, sometimes you do just have blammo-out-of-the-blue luck, but most of the time it's just being prepared.
Yeah, it's weird but preparation often seems to be a super-strong magnet for "luck".
"Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You?"
Not necessarily, but it's definitely naive.
There is a meritocracy, but there's also corruption. Those things aren't mutually exclusive and can both exist in the same space.
Wordpress is a mess, but there are a few plugins that can drastically reduce the attack surface and the likelihood of an attacker making any headway.
I'd recommend Wordfence and Block Bad Queries, to name just a couple. I wouldn't run a WP site without at least these two plugins, period. There are also some decent guides to hardening a WP site and they're well worth the time to look at.
And to address the inevitable screaming that will occur regarding WP and its mess of spaghetti code, I agree 100% that you shouldn't have to add these plugins just to keep a WP installation safe, but it is what it is.
And FWIW, I have no connection to either of these plugins or to Wordpress itself. I don't generally like using WP but sometimes when all you need is a quick site without any fancy crap, it's okay.
Maybe jokes should be funny.
Yeah, but anyone could do it that way.
This is awesome- another stupidly-expensive video card that will be obsolete in 6 months. Woo hoo!
Okay, maybe it'll actually be obsolete in 3 months, but hey- for that 90-day window I'll have a video card that my friends won't geek-shame me over. I won't have to hang my head in shame because my video card doesn't have the latest GPU made from genuine imported yak kidneys or whatever.
I find the whole selfie thing to be just odd. How can individuals be that consumed with themselves.
I find it odd and somewhat weird/baffling. It's like suddenly there's a whole fucking generation of narcissists who are obsessed with taking pics of themselves and their food and every goddamn thing their dog or cat does.
Yes, we took pictures of ourselves with our old-fogey cameras, but we didn't take 50 of them every day. It just seems shallow to me.
Do they think that future generations will pore over these old pics and study them for clues as to how we lived? Well, they won't- they'll be too busy taking hundred of 3D Hologram selfies and complaining that the bezel is still too thick.
Whoops, gotta go- it's almost time for Matlock!
"Quantum Computer Not Ready To Break Public Key Encryption For At Least 10 Years, Some Experts Say"
That's what they want you to believe.
You know, the mysterious, shadowy "they" that's behind everything- chemtrails, the flat-earth, anti-vaxxers, Reptilians, C++ pointers...it's all them and they. Hopefully they won't delete this post where I blow the lid off of their nefarious activities.
The light in your fridge burned out? They did it. One of your tires suddenly gets low? They did it. Who ate all the ice cream? They did.
It's so obvious, sheeple! Wake up!
Nobody cares what you watch or what platform you like
They may not care what he in particular likes, but they sure care about what 100,000 people in his demographic like. And he's part of the collective, so to speak. So yeah, they care what he likes, just not him specifically.
In other words you're just another data point to be gobbled up. They care enough to collect the data, it's just not personal.
It wouldn't surprise me if you couldn't activate the TV unless it was allowed to phone home at least once.
And then every so often they'd decide that you 'need' a software upgrade (for 'security', of course) and that the TV won't work until you allow it to upgrade or install new spyware or whatever.
Maybe they'll start making sets that *have* to be connected, either all the time or periodically. The lust to advertise is so great that this kind of thing makes perfect sense to the ad companies.
Hell, they'd implant LCDs in our foreheads and show ads on them if they could just find a way. And I don't mean a legal way, I just mean a way.
So...now we'll have to run ad blockers on our TVs?
---------------
Farnsworth: It's very simple. The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg. [He holds up an egg and injects it with liquid. The egg explodes, covering him and Leela in yolk.] Although, in reality, it's not liquid, but gamma radiation.
Fry: That's awful. It's like brainwashing.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No, sir-ee!
Bender: Quit squawking, flesh wad. Nobody's forcing you to buy anything.
Amy: Yeah. I mean we all have commercials in our dreams but you don't see us running off to buy brand-name merchandise at low, low prices.
[After a long silence they get up and run out.]
This is modded "Funny" but should be "Insightful".
Obligatory "...and nothing of value was lost" statement.
You can a free version of Win7 from Microsoft that works fine in VirtualBox, which is what I did.
I don't use it much, but every once in a while.
Windows 7 is probably the last good windows we will ever see.
Yep, that's my feeling too. Win7 had everything I needed and little else, it was perfect for 99.9% of what I need to do on a daily basis. So of course they had to shitcan it.
Too late, I ditched Win7 for Linux Mint a while ago and I'm never going back.
I liked Win7- it was everything I needed and not much else. But the shaky updates and the constant push to upgrade upgrade upgrade upgrade were wearing on me.
The final straw was an 'update' that blasted me off the net and nothing I could do would fix it. I finally had to roll back to a save point, and that was that- no more updates.
So yeah, MS finally pissed me off enough to bail. Linux Mint is good, fairly well done and perfectly usable. Finding replacement programs took a little work, and transferring my data was a bit more, but it was worth it in the end.
Oh boy- a bitcoin-type currency from Facebook, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG??
Nothing, nothing could possibly go wrong! Invest now why there's still time for it to disappear and take your (real) money with it!
Wow - you're usually not so intense, my man.
I ran out of Xanax because of the time change!
So, you don't travel, do you?
Not these days so much, but I used to travel a lot and it didn't make any sense then either.
So what you're saying is you literally don't know people representative across the population.
Yes, I am saying that I don't know either of those people.
Your daddy did it and your granddaddy did it and your great-granddaddy did it and by god it's good enough for you too
Yeah! And not only that, but we should be allowed to die of polio and measles and other preventable diseases, just like my granddaddy and great-granddaddy did too! That'll teach 'em!
If people are that concerned about it, they should convince the schools to change their schedules.
Or teach children not to stand next to the road, which parents should be telling their children anyway.
There is simply no need to screw around with every clock in the entire country twice a year because some parents are too dumb to tell their kids not to stand in the road in the dark.