Looking around there are basically two operating systems (Linux/Unix and Windows) that hold much interest in the marketplace or in mind-share. Unix is over 40. Linux and Windows are both over 20 years old. Most hardware vendors are focused on building better boxes to run Linux or Windows based on one processor architecture. Some operating systems died because they were tightly tied to their hardware (like the PDP based operating systems), others seem to be holding on to dear life because their customers seem trapped. I think of other technologies, like automobile engines, where there was an initial flurry of innovation (including steam and electric), but for around 100 years you had your choice of gasoline or diesel. Are we done with major operating system innovation? Is it now going to be about a slightly better scheduler or maybe a better filesystem? Are the days of a company putting out a new operating system and a novel hardware platform dead?
As I read the comments I find it surprising that people somehow object to this idea because 1) they don't like the terminology, 2) the say the existing emulator is just fine, 3) Apple sucks, 4) If you just do these 37 steps, it works awesome on my machine and 5) did I mention Apple sucks?
I don't program professionally but I am a tinkerer and I did try my hand at both iOS and Android development. As a noob in both, I found the Apple environment much easier in terms of usability. This is not a plug for Apple, but an observation about how fast the tool chain is able to launch the simulator and step into live, running code. There are obviously things that won't work, but I was able to get going quickly and play with the examples. It was also relatively painless (although there was a lot of hoop jumping) to get the code onto my phone and running.
I like the Jet Brains based Android development environment. It's really nice to work it but when it comes to actually running the code you wrote, you basically need a real device. The emulator start up time is horrible and the performance while running is terrible. I've tried to get the x86 ABI running on my machine but I didn't notice much of an improvement. Yes, yes, I know, but Apple sucks. I would call the emulator borderline unusable for development and almost not usable for testing because of its bad performance.
I'd like to try some of the resources he mentioned in the article, but I only found out about them two minutes ago when I read the article. As a noob, I didn't even know they existed. Tools do matter. As Microsoft and Apple have found out, creating really nice development environments is important in capturing mind share. At some point every developer is a noob at something and making easier for the noobs to get going is part of making a platform sticky.
So let the grammar corrections, the Microsoft sucks, the Apple sucks comments come. It doesn't change the fact that being productive isn't just about which APIs you can memorize, but also about the toolchains and environments you use to write code.
I've worked on projects where half the staff were female software developers. (4 out of 8). I don't speak for any women, and am only expressing my observations. What seemed to attract the female engineers I worked with to the company where:
1) Professionalism - It was not a frat house culture. People dressed and behaved professionally. I've worked in places where the developers were allowed to behave like we were still in college. 2) A strong work-life balance approach. Many of the women I worked with had children or were married and thinking about having children. 12 hour days, six day a week jobs were not what they wanted. This did not mean 39 hours a week, but 8 hours on the job and then maybe 2 or 3 after they put their kids to bed. 3) Strong support. If someone got into a jam the team rallied to help them out. It meant risk taking was not penalized. You could be less than 100% confident you knew how to get it done because someone was always there to back you up. 4) Good communications. Lots of face to face communication, feedback, discussion, etc. It meant that we talked things through before we ran off and write 10klocs of code. We explained our decisions and communicated them to the broader team.
I don't think that these attributes are specific to women, but I think the women I worked with responded well to an environment with these attributes. A lot of times we like to work in a kind of frat house/cowboy culture. If you're a real developer you'll work 12 hour days, slouched down into your hoodie, expect people to sink or swim, and tell people if they have questions to stop being such a bitch and 'read the code.' I think that turns some people off.
While these are certainly not the only reasons women don't get into computer science or engineering at the same rates as men, I think if you do want to hire qualified female engineers you need to 1) not lower the bar because no one wants to be seen as a quota hire, and 2) understand that the environment you create can determine who you attract.
I sometimes thought the iWatch rumor was just a plant by Apple to get everyone else in the industry to trip over themselves trying to get the watch out before Apple.
I've got two comments for you. The first is being able to recognize diversity of ability. While a lot of people focus on raw talent, there's a lot more to getting ahead in a job. Some people bring strong technical skills and some people bring soft skills and some people bring a balance. (And some people bring nothing and fill up a chair - but that's another story). A good manager will see that people are in the role for which they are suited, and if that means you're the 'go to' guy for hard to solve issues - great. Try looking at your co-workers and see if you can learn from them some of the other skills that they bring to the table. Be broad minded about your co-workers.
Now, for the other story. As a rule of thumb, only about 10% of the employees in a given environment actually pull the organization forward. Most people are the very necessary 'average' cogs in the machine. Some people are truly dead weight and should be doing something else as a job. Because you've got great attitude and you have drive, there's a good chance you're going to find yourself in that 10%. Keep doing what you're doing. Try working with your boss to find out what you're doing well and where you can improve. I don't know you personally, so I'm just speculating, but it could be that you aren't sensitive to some cultural issues and might need to work on how you deliver the information. You might also let the average cogs just be average. Not everyone is an A player and that's something you'll have to deal with. If you're truly surrounded by a 'confederacy of dunces,' and your boss doesn't have the interest, this may not be the place for you. That doesn't mean quit tomorrow, but it does mean figure out what would be a good fit for you and start lining yourself up for that role.
High performance people can get demoralized in environments where they are poorly managed. The same skills that can make someone a high performer are also the same skills that allow people to accurately evaluate their competency. A good manager will make sure those people are recognized and will spend time to groom those people for more responsibility. It's one thing to work in an environment where you are pulling much more than your weight but treated the same as the person who sits in a cube reading Yahoo (of all things), playing solitaire, and moaning all day about having to stay an extra 5 minutes past 4:30. And it's a totally different experience when your manager understands your potential and is sending you to training, giving your more responsibility, bringing you in to meetings with more senior leadership because you can contribute, or just throwing cash at you to try to keep you happy. In the former example, I would say that's a dead end. The latter example indicates you need to finish 'cooking' for a while so you can move up to the next level.
I can't mod you up more, but totally agree. The enlightenment beliefs underly to the US constitution believed that sharing scientific and industrial information would allow for greater progress.
That's a little like saying it's up to the victim to secure their safety. If that same person walked into a patient's room and started fiddling with their heart pump or dialysis machine, I could see charging them with attempted murder. We don't say 'gee, we'd better not charge him because the hospital didn't put a lockable steel cage over the panel to the dialysis machine to keep people out.' Just because the network is the means of intrusion, as opposed to going into the room, doesn't give someone a pass if there are security holes in the software. You're still f**king with someone's life. That being said, it is *is* incumbent upon the hospital to ensure your safety, especially when you cannot react (i.e. unconscious). It is up to the device manufacturer to make a safe product. In both those instances I think you should be able to take the manufacturer or hospital to court. From that standpoint, fear of losing their shorts in a law-suit and subsequent bad press, I think that they may pay more attention to security.
But you could say that about a lot of things. For example, buying an inexpensive car, like a Honda fit, as opposed to an SUV. Or spending money on games, etc. What's missing is the good but affordable option so that a decent option is available at lower price points. It seems like a lot of phone plans or cable plans are almost bait and switch. It might have a cheap plan but only if you order the more expensive bundle.
It depends on where you live. $200 a month is 2,400 a year. When it's 1-2% of your income, it probably doesn't matter. So, you do a little less saving. When it's more like 10%, then it's a problem because you greatly reduce your ability to save.
I think it's important to realize that companies are run for the interest of their shareholders. Google, Apple and Microsoft have all had their good and bad moments. A lot of people make a point of Apple being for or against standards, or a walled garden. Microsoft made you pay for DOS/windows with every computer purchased, even if you had no intention of running either. It was only stopped after the courts said it's an illegal tying agreement, but even then they were able to exert such pressure on their 'partners' that Gasse couldn't even give the BeOS away. Maybe in the great pantheon of evil business practices MS gets a 3.5 out 5 (they never killed anyone), Apple gets a 3.3. I don't know if I have a score for Google yet, but some times they're pushing 3.0 at least.
Keep in mind that both the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber were stopped after they unsuccessfully tried to light their bombs. Had they succeeded the "passengers will stop them" argument would show itself to be the non-starter it really is. They may never attempt to take over another plane, but they will probably try to bring one down.
I'm not going to argue we didn't get what we needed. What we got was a mutant hybrid that may not be producing no better an outcome than the old system. A lot of people recognized the old system was a large, potential security hole. Low paid, under trained people with no job security are ripe for social engineering. Trained, reasonably paid, people with a measure of job security are less likely (although not immune) from social engineering. Professionalizing screeners should improve the situation from that end. Having national guardsmen standing by screening checkpoints was a reaction. Improving the screening process seems like a logical, even necessary idea. Hopefully, the combination of decent standards, training, and professionalism would lead to a better outcome. It hasn't and no one is arguing that.
Second, if someone does try to hijack a plane and the hijack is foiled, or just downs a plane, you will have people questioning the safety of air travel. When Richard Reed tried to light is shoe on fire, or Abdulmutallab tried to ignite his underwear, people questioned 'how did they get on the plane, in the first place.' The next question is if they can get that on a plane, are planes safe? Should I be flying? People are horrible and judging risk and even if the odds of dying from dozens of other, more realistic, events many times more likely than dying from a terrorist attack, they will react by not flying. Airline safety isn't so high because of the altruism of the airlines or the aircraft makers (although many care very deeply about the safety of their products) but because airline crashes are bad for business. Even as rare an event as they are, they cause people to not fly.
Having passengers and crew overreact because they feel that security is 'up to them,' is not a good idea. Passenger reactions are important, but only after all the other mechanisms failed. Simple screening of passengers seems like a perfectly reasonable idea. Applying technology, such as sniffing for organic materials (explosives) seems like a perfectly reasonable idea. The problem is the execution of these perfectly reasonable ideas has been a disaster. I wouldn't say a complete and total disaster, but, it's not a 'win.' The larger problem is the political intransigence that will saddle us with this mess for many years to come, and maybe even exacerbate it.
So, the TSA was formed, in part, because after 9/11 we found out that many of the airports relied on contractors that were borderline. Little to no training. Enormous turnover. Effectively no ability to arrest or detain people. Subject to pressure from the airlines, etc. So someone had, what was probably a good idea, hire people as full time, highly trained screeners that could server or coordinate with law enforcement. Sure, it might cost a little more in the short run, but less than if people viewed airlines as unsafe and refused to fly. Much like the movie "The Fly" that idea morphed into the mess that we have now. With congressmen saying that "agent" should not be used to refer to a TSA worker because that demeans other law enforcement agents. But let's say, for sake of argument, that the Obama administration tries to do something about it. "He's soft on terror" or "He's making us less safe," or "He's helping the terrorists". Likewise, if Romney wins and his administration tries to do something: "He's in the pocket of the airlines," or "He's making us less safe because it's costing the airlines money." Those are both ridiculous claims, but they will be made.
It's not the individual so much as the process. If it were the fault of the individual, then we'd see some cases where the policies got fixed and other cases where the policies don't get fixed. Unfortunately, we see a lot more 'stay the course' simply because we don't have the kind of political environment that accepts new thinking or even modest amounts of 'risk' taking. That's the shame of the whole situation. We want people to bring forward solutions but it can't be solution 'X' because that's unpopular with voters, or solution 'Y' because the other party will crucify us, or solution 'K' because the company that makes the scanners has plants in key congressional districts, etc. So we're going to continue with the current, sub-optimal, likely counter-productive strategy. Make a change to the screening process and a terrorist attack happens, the first thing they'll rake you over the coals for is the change in the screening procedure and how that allowed the attack to happen. In part its the fault of the agency, in part it's the fault of congress, in part its the fault of a hyperactive media that focuses on trivialities and jumps to conclusions. Like you, the whole situation make me sick.
The processing and storage requirements for a system are inversely proportional to the mean value of the information managed by the system.
Def 1. Mean value of information - the total sum of the value of the information, divided by the number of users of the system.
For example, a popular social networking site may require 10's of thousands of CPU cores and petabytes of data storage. Whereas the same number of bank accounts are handled on the low 100's of mainframes with 100's of terabytes of storage.
Another example, really, really important information is generally small. The design and maintenance is managed by a professional staff which carefully manages changes, copies, and access to that information. You can fill up petabytes of storage with click histories and other (largely) useless data, which is then duplicated into reporting databases, copied to data warehouses, copied to BI data marts, and then versioned (should anyone ever want to know who clicked on the "Contact Us" link back in 2007).
I don't think he was talking about physical availability. He was talking about spending. The perfect storm he's talking about is the inability of Moore's law to keep pace with increased demand at the same time financial services companies are getting squeezed by lower profits. So, what would have been 12% of revenues in 2010 will be 18% or more of revenues in 2015 (or whatever). That may seem like no big deal, but it may be a good chunk of profit (what's left after all expenses are deducted from revenue). The acceleration in demand is a result of Jevon's paradox which basically says that even though you can get more work out of a unit of input (greater efficiency), the improved efficiency stimulates greater demand faster than the increase in efficiency reduces pressure on supply. I think the comparison to coal is unfortunate because is is confusing and makes people think it's a physical shortage.
The voyager spacecraft popping a plasma bubble and sending it to Earth, requiring a heard drinking high school physics teacher (played by Stephen Baldwin) and a heart-of-gold exotic dancer, but former Navy Seal (played by an anonymous starlet), to save the day.
The first, diversity, was mentioned in the article. In the last 20 years (1990 to 2010) we've had countless "core enterprise technologies of the future" spring forth. Some of these concepts or technologies are still in wide spread use, but others have fallen out of favor or have been overcome by events. Many shops have hodge-podge systems with tough to find skill sets. It's hard to staff these positions and the average tenure of an IT person is about 2 years. With a contractor, it's now the HR problem, not your problem, to find someone who knows Delphi, COM, and DB2 to patch your in house app.
By contrast, the CICS was developed in 1969, System 360 1964, and COBOL 1959?. Anyway, you can take a 30 year period from the mid sixties to the mid 1990's and find almost the exact same mix of products. The versions and features evolved, and some additional COTS products were introduced, but there is an amazing consistency. Even the terminal technology for the mainframe was fairly slow to change, with serial terminals in wide spread use until fairly recently. I think the lack of diversity makes it more economical for companies to train and manage an in-house staff. When it's time to find new staff, you used to be able to find an ample supply of people who had COBOL/CICS on their resume.
But I think this problem could be overcome if senior management saw their IT as delivering a competitive advantage relative to their competitors. Even in the mainframe days there was a lot of outsourcing. If we're all using the same COTS packages and building the same applications on the same platforms, it's more about not screwing up than it is about doing something excellent. Companies are more likely to keep their "secret sauce" in house but take the stuff everyone has to do and outsource it to try to reduce cost. That's not to say that companies don't use consultants to help with projects.
You sometimes see this as "know your knitting," meaning understand what makes your company great, it's core competencies and what makes it special. Don't get distracted by the other stuff and just focus on that. If IT isn't something that makes your company special - why would you spend one nickel more than you had to?
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I was hoping they continue releasing an English language version ;)
Looking around there are basically two operating systems (Linux/Unix and Windows) that hold much interest in the marketplace or in mind-share. Unix is over 40. Linux and Windows are both over 20 years old. Most hardware vendors are focused on building better boxes to run Linux or Windows based on one processor architecture. Some operating systems died because they were tightly tied to their hardware (like the PDP based operating systems), others seem to be holding on to dear life because their customers seem trapped. I think of other technologies, like automobile engines, where there was an initial flurry of innovation (including steam and electric), but for around 100 years you had your choice of gasoline or diesel. Are we done with major operating system innovation? Is it now going to be about a slightly better scheduler or maybe a better filesystem? Are the days of a company putting out a new operating system and a novel hardware platform dead?
Actually I do program professionally. What I mean to say is I don't write iPhone/Android or other Mobile apps professionally.
As I read the comments I find it surprising that people somehow object to this idea because 1) they don't like the terminology, 2) the say the existing emulator is just fine, 3) Apple sucks, 4) If you just do these 37 steps, it works awesome on my machine and 5) did I mention Apple sucks?
I don't program professionally but I am a tinkerer and I did try my hand at both iOS and Android development. As a noob in both, I found the Apple environment much easier in terms of usability. This is not a plug for Apple, but an observation about how fast the tool chain is able to launch the simulator and step into live, running code. There are obviously things that won't work, but I was able to get going quickly and play with the examples. It was also relatively painless (although there was a lot of hoop jumping) to get the code onto my phone and running.
I like the Jet Brains based Android development environment. It's really nice to work it but when it comes to actually running the code you wrote, you basically need a real device. The emulator start up time is horrible and the performance while running is terrible. I've tried to get the x86 ABI running on my machine but I didn't notice much of an improvement. Yes, yes, I know, but Apple sucks. I would call the emulator borderline unusable for development and almost not usable for testing because of its bad performance.
I'd like to try some of the resources he mentioned in the article, but I only found out about them two minutes ago when I read the article. As a noob, I didn't even know they existed. Tools do matter. As Microsoft and Apple have found out, creating really nice development environments is important in capturing mind share. At some point every developer is a noob at something and making easier for the noobs to get going is part of making a platform sticky.
So let the grammar corrections, the Microsoft sucks, the Apple sucks comments come. It doesn't change the fact that being productive isn't just about which APIs you can memorize, but also about the toolchains and environments you use to write code.
I've worked on projects where half the staff were female software developers. (4 out of 8). I don't speak for any women, and am only expressing my observations. What seemed to attract the female engineers I worked with to the company where:
1) Professionalism - It was not a frat house culture. People dressed and behaved professionally. I've worked in places where the developers were allowed to behave like we were still in college.
2) A strong work-life balance approach. Many of the women I worked with had children or were married and thinking about having children. 12 hour days, six day a week jobs were not what they wanted. This did not mean 39 hours a week, but 8 hours on the job and then maybe 2 or 3 after they put their kids to bed.
3) Strong support. If someone got into a jam the team rallied to help them out. It meant risk taking was not penalized. You could be less than 100% confident you knew how to get it done because someone was always there to back you up.
4) Good communications. Lots of face to face communication, feedback, discussion, etc. It meant that we talked things through before we ran off and write 10klocs of code. We explained our decisions and communicated them to the broader team.
I don't think that these attributes are specific to women, but I think the women I worked with responded well to an environment with these attributes. A lot of times we like to work in a kind of frat house/cowboy culture. If you're a real developer you'll work 12 hour days, slouched down into your hoodie, expect people to sink or swim, and tell people if they have questions to stop being such a bitch and 'read the code.' I think that turns some people off.
While these are certainly not the only reasons women don't get into computer science or engineering at the same rates as men, I think if you do want to hire qualified female engineers you need to 1) not lower the bar because no one wants to be seen as a quota hire, and 2) understand that the environment you create can determine who you attract.
I sometimes thought the iWatch rumor was just a plant by Apple to get everyone else in the industry to trip over themselves trying to get the watch out before Apple.
I've got two comments for you. The first is being able to recognize diversity of ability. While a lot of people focus on raw talent, there's a lot more to getting ahead in a job. Some people bring strong technical skills and some people bring soft skills and some people bring a balance. (And some people bring nothing and fill up a chair - but that's another story). A good manager will see that people are in the role for which they are suited, and if that means you're the 'go to' guy for hard to solve issues - great. Try looking at your co-workers and see if you can learn from them some of the other skills that they bring to the table. Be broad minded about your co-workers.
Now, for the other story. As a rule of thumb, only about 10% of the employees in a given environment actually pull the organization forward. Most people are the very necessary 'average' cogs in the machine. Some people are truly dead weight and should be doing something else as a job. Because you've got great attitude and you have drive, there's a good chance you're going to find yourself in that 10%. Keep doing what you're doing. Try working with your boss to find out what you're doing well and where you can improve. I don't know you personally, so I'm just speculating, but it could be that you aren't sensitive to some cultural issues and might need to work on how you deliver the information. You might also let the average cogs just be average. Not everyone is an A player and that's something you'll have to deal with. If you're truly surrounded by a 'confederacy of dunces,' and your boss doesn't have the interest, this may not be the place for you. That doesn't mean quit tomorrow, but it does mean figure out what would be a good fit for you and start lining yourself up for that role.
High performance people can get demoralized in environments where they are poorly managed. The same skills that can make someone a high performer are also the same skills that allow people to accurately evaluate their competency. A good manager will make sure those people are recognized and will spend time to groom those people for more responsibility. It's one thing to work in an environment where you are pulling much more than your weight but treated the same as the person who sits in a cube reading Yahoo (of all things), playing solitaire, and moaning all day about having to stay an extra 5 minutes past 4:30. And it's a totally different experience when your manager understands your potential and is sending you to training, giving your more responsibility, bringing you in to meetings with more senior leadership because you can contribute, or just throwing cash at you to try to keep you happy. In the former example, I would say that's a dead end. The latter example indicates you need to finish 'cooking' for a while so you can move up to the next level.
As long as the missiles we're defending against are inoperable, our defenses should be iron clad.
The contents of this comment are secret for national security purposes.
I can't mod you up more, but totally agree. The enlightenment beliefs underly to the US constitution believed that sharing scientific and industrial information would allow for greater progress.
That's a little like saying it's up to the victim to secure their safety. If that same person walked into a patient's room and started fiddling with their heart pump or dialysis machine, I could see charging them with attempted murder. We don't say 'gee, we'd better not charge him because the hospital didn't put a lockable steel cage over the panel to the dialysis machine to keep people out.' Just because the network is the means of intrusion, as opposed to going into the room, doesn't give someone a pass if there are security holes in the software. You're still f**king with someone's life. That being said, it is *is* incumbent upon the hospital to ensure your safety, especially when you cannot react (i.e. unconscious). It is up to the device manufacturer to make a safe product. In both those instances I think you should be able to take the manufacturer or hospital to court. From that standpoint, fear of losing their shorts in a law-suit and subsequent bad press, I think that they may pay more attention to security.
But you could say that about a lot of things. For example, buying an inexpensive car, like a Honda fit, as opposed to an SUV. Or spending money on games, etc. What's missing is the good but affordable option so that a decent option is available at lower price points. It seems like a lot of phone plans or cable plans are almost bait and switch. It might have a cheap plan but only if you order the more expensive bundle.
It depends on where you live. $200 a month is 2,400 a year. When it's 1-2% of your income, it probably doesn't matter. So, you do a little less saving. When it's more like 10%, then it's a problem because you greatly reduce your ability to save.
Were you the only person who got the reference to impending doom?
There are some judges who have a clue.
I think it's important to realize that companies are run for the interest of their shareholders. Google, Apple and Microsoft have all had their good and bad moments. A lot of people make a point of Apple being for or against standards, or a walled garden. Microsoft made you pay for DOS/windows with every computer purchased, even if you had no intention of running either. It was only stopped after the courts said it's an illegal tying agreement, but even then they were able to exert such pressure on their 'partners' that Gasse couldn't even give the BeOS away. Maybe in the great pantheon of evil business practices MS gets a 3.5 out 5 (they never killed anyone), Apple gets a 3.3. I don't know if I have a score for Google yet, but some times they're pushing 3.0 at least.
Keep in mind that both the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber were stopped after they unsuccessfully tried to light their bombs. Had they succeeded the "passengers will stop them" argument would show itself to be the non-starter it really is. They may never attempt to take over another plane, but they will probably try to bring one down.
I'm not going to argue we didn't get what we needed. What we got was a mutant hybrid that may not be producing no better an outcome than the old system. A lot of people recognized the old system was a large, potential security hole. Low paid, under trained people with no job security are ripe for social engineering. Trained, reasonably paid, people with a measure of job security are less likely (although not immune) from social engineering. Professionalizing screeners should improve the situation from that end. Having national guardsmen standing by screening checkpoints was a reaction. Improving the screening process seems like a logical, even necessary idea. Hopefully, the combination of decent standards, training, and professionalism would lead to a better outcome. It hasn't and no one is arguing that.
Second, if someone does try to hijack a plane and the hijack is foiled, or just downs a plane, you will have people questioning the safety of air travel. When Richard Reed tried to light is shoe on fire, or Abdulmutallab tried to ignite his underwear, people questioned 'how did they get on the plane, in the first place.' The next question is if they can get that on a plane, are planes safe? Should I be flying? People are horrible and judging risk and even if the odds of dying from dozens of other, more realistic, events many times more likely than dying from a terrorist attack, they will react by not flying. Airline safety isn't so high because of the altruism of the airlines or the aircraft makers (although many care very deeply about the safety of their products) but because airline crashes are bad for business. Even as rare an event as they are, they cause people to not fly.
Having passengers and crew overreact because they feel that security is 'up to them,' is not a good idea. Passenger reactions are important, but only after all the other mechanisms failed. Simple screening of passengers seems like a perfectly reasonable idea. Applying technology, such as sniffing for organic materials (explosives) seems like a perfectly reasonable idea. The problem is the execution of these perfectly reasonable ideas has been a disaster. I wouldn't say a complete and total disaster, but, it's not a 'win.' The larger problem is the political intransigence that will saddle us with this mess for many years to come, and maybe even exacerbate it.
So, the TSA was formed, in part, because after 9/11 we found out that many of the airports relied on contractors that were borderline. Little to no training. Enormous turnover. Effectively no ability to arrest or detain people. Subject to pressure from the airlines, etc. So someone had, what was probably a good idea, hire people as full time, highly trained screeners that could server or coordinate with law enforcement. Sure, it might cost a little more in the short run, but less than if people viewed airlines as unsafe and refused to fly. Much like the movie "The Fly" that idea morphed into the mess that we have now. With congressmen saying that "agent" should not be used to refer to a TSA worker because that demeans other law enforcement agents. But let's say, for sake of argument, that the Obama administration tries to do something about it. "He's soft on terror" or "He's making us less safe," or "He's helping the terrorists". Likewise, if Romney wins and his administration tries to do something: "He's in the pocket of the airlines," or "He's making us less safe because it's costing the airlines money." Those are both ridiculous claims, but they will be made.
It's not the individual so much as the process. If it were the fault of the individual, then we'd see some cases where the policies got fixed and other cases where the policies don't get fixed. Unfortunately, we see a lot more 'stay the course' simply because we don't have the kind of political environment that accepts new thinking or even modest amounts of 'risk' taking. That's the shame of the whole situation. We want people to bring forward solutions but it can't be solution 'X' because that's unpopular with voters, or solution 'Y' because the other party will crucify us, or solution 'K' because the company that makes the scanners has plants in key congressional districts, etc. So we're going to continue with the current, sub-optimal, likely counter-productive strategy. Make a change to the screening process and a terrorist attack happens, the first thing they'll rake you over the coals for is the change in the screening procedure and how that allowed the attack to happen. In part its the fault of the agency, in part it's the fault of congress, in part its the fault of a hyperactive media that focuses on trivialities and jumps to conclusions. Like you, the whole situation make me sick.
The processing and storage requirements for a system are inversely proportional to the mean value of the information managed by the system.
Def 1. Mean value of information - the total sum of the value of the information, divided by the number of users of the system.
For example, a popular social networking site may require 10's of thousands of CPU cores and petabytes of data storage. Whereas the same number of bank accounts are handled on the low 100's of mainframes with 100's of terabytes of storage.
Another example, really, really important information is generally small. The design and maintenance is managed by a professional staff which carefully manages changes, copies, and access to that information. You can fill up petabytes of storage with click histories and other (largely) useless data, which is then duplicated into reporting databases, copied to data warehouses, copied to BI data marts, and then versioned (should anyone ever want to know who clicked on the "Contact Us" link back in 2007).
I don't think he was talking about physical availability. He was talking about spending. The perfect storm he's talking about is the inability of Moore's law to keep pace with increased demand at the same time financial services companies are getting squeezed by lower profits. So, what would have been 12% of revenues in 2010 will be 18% or more of revenues in 2015 (or whatever). That may seem like no big deal, but it may be a good chunk of profit (what's left after all expenses are deducted from revenue). The acceleration in demand is a result of Jevon's paradox which basically says that even though you can get more work out of a unit of input (greater efficiency), the improved efficiency stimulates greater demand faster than the increase in efficiency reduces pressure on supply. I think the comparison to coal is unfortunate because is is confusing and makes people think it's a physical shortage.
If you mean 1000bt to be 1 GigE, that's sooooo 2000's. Welcome to the 10 GigE era, boys.
The voyager spacecraft popping a plasma bubble and sending it to Earth, requiring a heard drinking high school physics teacher (played by Stephen Baldwin) and a heart-of-gold exotic dancer, but former Navy Seal (played by an anonymous starlet), to save the day.
The first, diversity, was mentioned in the article. In the last 20 years (1990 to 2010) we've had countless "core enterprise technologies of the future" spring forth. Some of these concepts or technologies are still in wide spread use, but others have fallen out of favor or have been overcome by events. Many shops have hodge-podge systems with tough to find skill sets. It's hard to staff these positions and the average tenure of an IT person is about 2 years. With a contractor, it's now the HR problem, not your problem, to find someone who knows Delphi, COM, and DB2 to patch your in house app.
By contrast, the CICS was developed in 1969, System 360 1964, and COBOL 1959?. Anyway, you can take a 30 year period from the mid sixties to the mid 1990's and find almost the exact same mix of products. The versions and features evolved, and some additional COTS products were introduced, but there is an amazing consistency. Even the terminal technology for the mainframe was fairly slow to change, with serial terminals in wide spread use until fairly recently. I think the lack of diversity makes it more economical for companies to train and manage an in-house staff. When it's time to find new staff, you used to be able to find an ample supply of people who had COBOL/CICS on their resume.
But I think this problem could be overcome if senior management saw their IT as delivering a competitive advantage relative to their competitors. Even in the mainframe days there was a lot of outsourcing. If we're all using the same COTS packages and building the same applications on the same platforms, it's more about not screwing up than it is about doing something excellent. Companies are more likely to keep their "secret sauce" in house but take the stuff everyone has to do and outsource it to try to reduce cost. That's not to say that companies don't use consultants to help with projects.
You sometimes see this as "know your knitting," meaning understand what makes your company great, it's core competencies and what makes it special. Don't get distracted by the other stuff and just focus on that. If IT isn't something that makes your company special - why would you spend one nickel more than you had to?