But you'll note only 2% of that money went to IBM. A 25 million final cost on a 10 million dollar project is only a 150% overrun, and quite reasonable given the spec churn that occurs in government. The specs are never final at the time of bidding, and everyone knows that.
It would seem the bigger consumer of resources was by far the "out of scope" costs that the goobermint conveniently ignored while setting the initial budget. There are always costs involved with large deployments, and they usually dwarf the cost of development, especially if hardware and infrastructure costs get rolled into it, such as upgrading everyone's PCs from XP at the same time, but "sneaking" that expense into the budget of the large project. And that happens All The Time.
Given that people buy machines with 8 and 16 gigs of RAM nowadays (if not more), isn't it more cost effective to just let the OS use that extra memory for caching instead of pushing the memory down to the drive? After all, the OS is making block level IO requests and has far more knowledge about what data it's going to use than the drive ever could.
And if they're not making 7200 rpm drives any more, then I'm not buying Seagate drives any more. I do not want laptop quality drives in my box -- I run databases and compilers and other such IO intensive loads far too often.
By the way, when I *rebuild* my projects, it takes about half the time of the initial build because all the source has been loaded into cache by Linux, so all it needs to do is *write* the outputs.
Perhaps I've answered my question about RAM cache vs. disk cache if and only if it's faster to write to SSD cache than it is to write to physical disk.
As most assaults are performed by mindless script kiddies running the hack tools of the week, it's sound advice. There are very few actual black hats creating those tools, but thousands upon thousands of ignorant kids who think themselves l33t because they can download something and click "run".
Yes, but a reboot forces a complete OS reset including all memory and variables.
Persistent memory would require that people write specific routines to reset the variables, and that's as fraught with risk of errors and omissions as C/C++ memory allocators are.
Somehow, somewhere, you need to have an "initial state" memory image for a program that can be reloaded in order to keep resets simple and relatively error free. Whether that's in a RAM disk or on a physical disk makes no difference -- the key is that the OS has to be able to completely terminate a process and reload the known state.
There is also the issue of inter-program and inter-library dependencies that get resolved during the load process. This idea of having a complete image of an initial state for a program would presume that there is no need for a linker, which would imply there is no way to update libraries to apply security fixes, for example.
The continual removal of configuration options from Firefox is not only insulting, it's pointless. I seriously doubt it reduces the amount of code for the browser by any significant amount.
The day Firefox removes the ability to set client-side font overrides is the day I switch to Chrome. Currently that is the only feature left in Firefox that keeps me using it. For me, it's an invaluable feature, and I'm really annoyed that Firefox seems to be the only browser that supports the concept. After all, the whole point of HTML was that the client is supposed to control rendering, not the server.
I've contracted in the US a few times. I worked closely with the consulting companies I dealt with.
And when it came time to search for more work, they let me in on some of the keywords to watch out for when perusing ads. Those keywords mean they're postings to meet the legal obligation of advertising for a position before bringing someone in on a work visa.
There is no point applying for those jobs -- 99% of the time they already have an overseas candidate in mind and they're just filling in the blanks for the paperwork by posting the ad.
And that was way back in the late 1980's. From what I can see of the situation, it has not changed. Most ads placed in newspapers and online nowadays seem to be to meet the paperwork requirements for bringing in cheap overseas labour.
By the way, I was quite qualified for many of those jobs, and applied anyhow. I had a few interviews, but despite years as an Oracle performance tuner and DBA, it seemed that the cheap Indian offshore workers always got the jobs. Same old, same old.
The US doesn't need H1-B programmers at this point in time -- there are too many unemployed people out there. It's all a scam to save money.
If this is such an issue for accessability, how much worse are Flash media,.jpeg'd text messages/media, and AJAX?
None of those technologies lend themselves to text reader applications nor to braille translation.
Nor have I ever seen a Captcha on an actual useful web site -- instead they use little things like manual verification of new accounts, especially things like IBM's developer web sites and my bank account. In fact both my bank account access and my government tax account access required snail mail verification codes for the initial log-in.
Methinks someone over-rates the importance of websites that rely on CAPTCHAs.
The idea that the spying means balkanization must happen is a false premise.
Anyone with a functioning brain cell who relies on cloud services already knows they're insecure and open to data theft. Those who bought into the hype of cloud services who thought otherwise were only deluding themselves that they could trust a vendor.
You've never been able to trust a vendor with data. If you have/had data that needed to be truly secure, you implemented and maintained your own infrastructure to deal with it; in fact most government and high security contracts require you to do so.
Or did you think someone like a bank would ever rely on something like AWS?
I presume you had an issue with the guitar being shipped up that was used for the recent music videos, too.
Every astronaut has an allocation of personal weight allowed. How they use that weight is up to them and their government.
Remember these people are often up there for months at a time. They have a right to some entertainment and amusement, whatever form that may take and however "useless" that might be to the research done by the missions.
The governments of the entire world need to unify and rise up against this illegal intrusion into the private lives of their citizens, which violates the Charter of Rights here in Canada and equivalent legislation around the globe. Contrary to their self-righteous beliefs, the US is not the world police.
Furthermore, we need to hold our own governments to task for allowing our intelligence agencies to use information collected by the US as a means of bypassing the rights legislation that is supposed to protect our own citizens. CSIS is complicit in this, relying on US feeds of intelligence that are based on this illegally collected data.
But give them an inch, and they have already taken a league.
Now the other "police" agencies want access to the information, again in clear violation of our civil rights.
This will not end on it's own. It will only end if the people of the world unite in condemnation of this illegal activity. It is not up to the US citizens alone to protest. We all have to.
If that seems to be a milder tone than my rant, it's because I was under investigation for several months once already for my "colourful phrasing" which the PMO and the RCMP interpreted as a "threat".
I am extremely disturbed that not only has the Canadian government failed to take the US to task for their illegal and blatant spying upon our citizens, but that apparently CSIS is using information gleaned by the US to circumvent the protections of our own Charter of Rights.
I call upon you as the representative of this nation to hold the United States to account.
Slashdot Mirror
But you'll note only 2% of that money went to IBM. A 25 million final cost on a 10 million dollar project is only a 150% overrun, and quite reasonable given the spec churn that occurs in government. The specs are never final at the time of bidding, and everyone knows that.
It would seem the bigger consumer of resources was by far the "out of scope" costs that the goobermint conveniently ignored while setting the initial budget. There are always costs involved with large deployments, and they usually dwarf the cost of development, especially if hardware and infrastructure costs get rolled into it, such as upgrading everyone's PCs from XP at the same time, but "sneaking" that expense into the budget of the large project. And that happens All The Time.
Given that people buy machines with 8 and 16 gigs of RAM nowadays (if not more), isn't it more cost effective to just let the OS use that extra memory for caching instead of pushing the memory down to the drive? After all, the OS is making block level IO requests and has far more knowledge about what data it's going to use than the drive ever could.
And if they're not making 7200 rpm drives any more, then I'm not buying Seagate drives any more. I do not want laptop quality drives in my box -- I run databases and compilers and other such IO intensive loads far too often.
By the way, when I *rebuild* my projects, it takes about half the time of the initial build because all the source has been loaded into cache by Linux, so all it needs to do is *write* the outputs.
Perhaps I've answered my question about RAM cache vs. disk cache if and only if it's faster to write to SSD cache than it is to write to physical disk.
As most assaults are performed by mindless script kiddies running the hack tools of the week, it's sound advice. There are very few actual black hats creating those tools, but thousands upon thousands of ignorant kids who think themselves l33t because they can download something and click "run".
This time they didn't use the acronym in hopes of garnering more posts.
Yes, but a reboot forces a complete OS reset including all memory and variables.
Persistent memory would require that people write specific routines to reset the variables, and that's as fraught with risk of errors and omissions as C/C++ memory allocators are.
Somehow, somewhere, you need to have an "initial state" memory image for a program that can be reloaded in order to keep resets simple and relatively error free. Whether that's in a RAM disk or on a physical disk makes no difference -- the key is that the OS has to be able to completely terminate a process and reload the known state.
There is also the issue of inter-program and inter-library dependencies that get resolved during the load process. This idea of having a complete image of an initial state for a program would presume that there is no need for a linker, which would imply there is no way to update libraries to apply security fixes, for example.
However, I do not speak "code". Do you have any idea how long it would take to say "public int f( int x ) { return( x * 2 ); }". Let's see:
Public int letter-f left-paren int x right-paren left-brace return left-paren x star two right-paren semicolon right-brace
Yeah, that would work *real* well. *LMAO*
The continual removal of configuration options from Firefox is not only insulting, it's pointless. I seriously doubt it reduces the amount of code for the browser by any significant amount.
The day Firefox removes the ability to set client-side font overrides is the day I switch to Chrome. Currently that is the only feature left in Firefox that keeps me using it. For me, it's an invaluable feature, and I'm really annoyed that Firefox seems to be the only browser that supports the concept. After all, the whole point of HTML was that the client is supposed to control rendering, not the server.
Just to make sure you see the right article, I searched it myself. Here's one of the first ones that interviews the whistle blower who started the ball rolling on holding RBC to task for the issue: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/04/05/bc-rbc-foreign-workers.html
Before you give us kudos for the points system, you might want to search for "Royal Bank of Canada" and "outsourcing" and possibly "job loss."
They were recently spanked by their former IT workers and the public for pulling exactly the same kind of outsource-Canadian-jobs stunt.
I've contracted in the US a few times. I worked closely with the consulting companies I dealt with.
And when it came time to search for more work, they let me in on some of the keywords to watch out for when perusing ads. Those keywords mean they're postings to meet the legal obligation of advertising for a position before bringing someone in on a work visa.
There is no point applying for those jobs -- 99% of the time they already have an overseas candidate in mind and they're just filling in the blanks for the paperwork by posting the ad.
And that was way back in the late 1980's. From what I can see of the situation, it has not changed. Most ads placed in newspapers and online nowadays seem to be to meet the paperwork requirements for bringing in cheap overseas labour.
By the way, I was quite qualified for many of those jobs, and applied anyhow. I had a few interviews, but despite years as an Oracle performance tuner and DBA, it seemed that the cheap Indian offshore workers always got the jobs. Same old, same old.
The US doesn't need H1-B programmers at this point in time -- there are too many unemployed people out there. It's all a scam to save money.
If this is such an issue for accessability, how much worse are Flash media, .jpeg'd text messages/media, and AJAX?
None of those technologies lend themselves to text reader applications nor to braille translation.
Nor have I ever seen a Captcha on an actual useful web site -- instead they use little things like manual verification of new accounts, especially things like IBM's developer web sites and my bank account. In fact both my bank account access and my government tax account access required snail mail verification codes for the initial log-in.
Methinks someone over-rates the importance of websites that rely on CAPTCHAs.
One-click micro-transaction articles. :P
Good.
Maybe now you'll be as upset as we foreigners are about the NSA surveilling us.
If these cloud service and web service providers tank and lose money, does that mean they'll sue the NSA and FBI for damages?
Just wondering... :)
Everyone can imagine the benefits.
But only the paranoid can fear the sky falling on their old business models and security through obscurity.
The idea that the spying means balkanization must happen is a false premise.
Anyone with a functioning brain cell who relies on cloud services already knows they're insecure and open to data theft. Those who bought into the hype of cloud services who thought otherwise were only deluding themselves that they could trust a vendor.
You've never been able to trust a vendor with data. If you have/had data that needed to be truly secure, you implemented and maintained your own infrastructure to deal with it; in fact most government and high security contracts require you to do so.
Or did you think someone like a bank would ever rely on something like AWS?
I'd hardly call any industry that uses a physical key "high security" in an age of individually-revokable key card technologies.
How secure can a facility be when the loss of one key means that everyone's keys have to be replaced in order to recode the lock?
I presume you had an issue with the guitar being shipped up that was used for the recent music videos, too.
Every astronaut has an allocation of personal weight allowed. How they use that weight is up to them and their government.
Remember these people are often up there for months at a time. They have a right to some entertainment and amusement, whatever form that may take and however "useless" that might be to the research done by the missions.
The governments of the entire world need to unify and rise up against this illegal intrusion into the private lives of their citizens, which violates the Charter of Rights here in Canada and equivalent legislation around the globe. Contrary to their self-righteous beliefs, the US is not the world police.
Furthermore, we need to hold our own governments to task for allowing our intelligence agencies to use information collected by the US as a means of bypassing the rights legislation that is supposed to protect our own citizens. CSIS is complicit in this, relying on US feeds of intelligence that are based on this illegally collected data.
But give them an inch, and they have already taken a league.
Now the other "police" agencies want access to the information, again in clear violation of our civil rights.
This will not end on it's own. It will only end if the people of the world unite in condemnation of this illegal activity. It is not up to the US citizens alone to protest. We all have to.
A protest! There has been a protest!
Not one word in the US "mainstream" media, but according to Russia Times there have been activists demanding a return of the fourth amendment: http://rt.com/usa/1984-protest-us-surveillance-034/.
Is Japanese easier to process for voice recognition than English?
Correction. The Taliban were trained.
Which, as far as I know, spawned Al Queda's original operatives. Same people, different name.
If that seems to be a milder tone than my rant, it's because I was under investigation for several months once already for my "colourful phrasing" which the PMO and the RCMP interpreted as a "threat".
Specifically sent to the PMO:
And what do you propose I do? Walk from Canada to the White House to plant a picket sign?
I wrote my own government with my concerns.
What have you done?