Many of the EU member states had aspirations of world domination at various times in history, sadly,for them, none of them worked out.
Ask Greece whether or not Germany controls their economy because they were stupid enough to go onto the Euro, and, recently, stupid enough to stay on the Euro when they had a possible exit that wouldn't cost them EU membership.
Some EU member states *still* have aspirations of world domination; they've just quit using tanks and guns to try and get there...
France is irrational and broke. Pull out, because you should never squabble with fools; they'll bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.
France is not broke.
It sells a lot of electricity to other countries that were stupid, and dismantled, or are in the process of dismantling, their civil nuclear power infrastructure, without the replacements already being online. France gets a lot of money from other countries for the electricity it provides them.
China can outright block sites they don't like. France doesn't have the infrastructure to do that, and probably not the laws either. So while Google could have no corporate presence in France, they could still be a usable site in France by virtue of being accessible on the web.
You are aware that this has to do with the French not getting the taxes they feel they are owed for contracts negotiated in France, but executed in Ireland, right?
If Google does not come down on this like a ton of bricks as soon as the enforcement starts, who wants to bet that the "fine" will be exactly the amount France feels it is owed on those contracts, despite France having willingly signed on to be an EU member state, with all that entails, regarding civil commercial contracts?
The critical text here is: "when offering services in Europe" . No compliance with the directive is needed when offering serivces outside of Europe.
Next stop:
Google is responsible for policing requests made from VPNs for the French, since it's technologically impossible, but the French really hate VPNs, and are hoping Google will find a way of determining the origin country of a VPN through magic pixie dust...
Allllllllll aaaaaabbbbboarrrrd! The insanity train is about to leave the station, and gaze into its naval! Fasten your seat belts, and keep your head, arms, and legs inside the technology ignorance train, until it comes to a complete stop!
How about you look at it this in another way. You communicate for years on a certain medium and now someone has managed to make billions from your communications. You never wanted it to be viewed globally and certainly not with an advertisement next to it.
That was before google entered the marketplace. They took what we wrote and sold it as if it was theirs to sell.
Why do you think I am posting as anonymous coward?
To explicitly disclaim ownership, so that anyone who wants to can grab and make billions from your communications by putting an ad next to it? And so that you won't have legal recourse when they take your copyrighted material and sell it as if it's theirs to sell, since you've explicitly disclaimed any non-repudiable ownership on said content by posting as an AC?
Tell me if I'm at all warm with either of those reasons you're posting as an AC... because I don't see how Google would go about indexing password protected forums, and they uniformly respect robots.txt files as a means of your forum opting out being indexed.
Unless, you know, you're a dumbass for using a forum that wasn't password protected, and expect that to keep your communications private in the same way that closing but not locking your door keeps your TV set in your living room? Or maybe the person running the form is an asshole, and doesn't want to put up a robots.txt file for the site? Or maybe you're an asshole for posting on sites where your postings are not welcome, and the site owner hasn't put up a robots.txt file, or put up one that explicitly allows people to view your postings, just to spite you?
Tell me if I'm warm with the three of those, too...
... why is it that France doesn't just step up to the plate and create a GFW around their own border routers to prevent their citizens from accessing undesirable Google pages?
I think you mean GMF. To be correctly French requires a name in French... "Grande Muraille de Feu".
I cannot believe that there is no discussion about this at higher levels of the EU.
The real problem here is that:
(1) They haven't judicially defined what constitutes public interest -- because they can't because it's subjective, and making such a decision would piss everyone off and demonstrate the absurdity of the law. So there's no legal test for yes/no.
(2) France is still being pissy, and this is retaliation for the whole "media thing" that France had hoped to impose on YouTube and Google Play.
(3) They know that they can't win, so they're dragging their feet. It makes the politicians look like they are doing something, without actually having to really do something.
(4) They are laying the groundwork for a closed-door advisor position, whose job will be to write reports and justify why "it doesn't apply in this case" decisions, and then collect their paycheck.
(5) As soon as the problem is closed door, it effectively goes away, because there's no longer any public leverage.
(6) Then the worst that can happen is "an investigation of the department of investigation", which they can pretend takes as long as they want to/can push off the issue, and then conclude that there was no wrongdoing.
With China being a MUCH bigger market and all, I could see Google just outright leaving France if it came down to it. Maybe Jacques Chirac would finally get his wish of a French owned search engine.
Yes, Google should just close up Google Ireland and forget about the European Union altogether.
The IRS would love that.
I'm pretty sure the IRS would not give a damn.
Google is in full compliance with the U.S. law, and the laws of other countries.
While U.S. politicians would like to get their grubby hands on, and spend some of that tasty, tasty money, the IRS merely enforces the U.S. tax code, up to and including the Criminal Investigation division sending special agents out to interview and conduct searches under search warrant, and to participate in arrests with federal law enforcement, should the U.S. Attorney determine that the evidence supports a federal arrest warrant.
Generally, you'd have to have a lot of criminal wrong-doing, not just tax evasion, and it's a teensy bit hard to arrest a corporation, even if they are technically "people". Typically, they'd seize all assets and shutter the business. However, if you thought some corrupt bankers (who received no jail time) were "too big to fail", you have not seen what "too big to fail" actually means.
In any case, Google is in compliance with all laws, and even should the money be taxed, it won't be double taxed by the U.S. (nor should it be); they will just open up a real estate business, or start "Google Fiber Europe" or something with the funds, since as long as the funds are earned outside the U.S., they can be spent outside the U.S. without incurring a U.S. tax burden; they only become U.S. income when they are brought back.
In other words, even if they shuttered their search business entirely within Europe, and used the money to pay back Greece's debt (or buy all of Greece, like Kim Bassinger bought Braselton, Georgia, and then run the country better; or build ghost cities in Latvia and the Czech Republic, etc.), the money would never be realized as U.S. income.
Also...
Pulling out of France entirely (by blocking all access to Google properties from within France) would put the Righteous Fear Of God into the rest of the E.U., and the decision would be quickly reversed.
Serious question here - I understand that people love to hate Obamacare/ACA. But I don't understand why. What's bad about federally mandated healthcare that says the health insurance companies must offer all people coverage, cannot drop us after they pay out a certain amount (no lifetime maximums), and in general sets a specific lower rung for basic minimum coverage to maintain quality of life?
You've answered the question yourself, and you don't even know it.
The answer is "insurance companies".
What the hell do they have to do with healthcare? In the ACA situation, this is what:
* They charge people for health insurance * They charge doctors for malpractice insurance * They charge nurses for malpractice insurance * They charge hospitals for malpractice insurance * They charge doctors with practices or clinics for liability insurance on the premises * They charge medical equipment manufacturers for liability insurance on their products * They charge hospitals for liability insurance...and then, when they have a claim, they do their damnedest to deny it, so it becomes an out of pocket expense for the insured.
Even better: when they have to pay a claim: most of the money doesn't go to the provider of the insured, it goes to the providers insurance company. Which may or may not be the same company that is paying the claim.
Meanwhile, most of the tort reform that would help limit the damages in any of these cases is held up by the legislators, who get major campaign contributions and endorsements... from the insurance industry.
And the funny part of the last one is that, most of the legislators (including the current president) are lawyers.
And when any of the claims (especially liability or malpractice) get litigated, the people doing it are...the lawyers. Who would make less money if there were tort reform reducing the maximum damages on liability or malpractice claims.
The funniest part of all? Lawyers *also* have to carry malpractice insurance (and liability insurance, if they have a physical premises)... payable to the insurance industry.
Is Obama's increase more than Bush's increase over Clinton?
My health insurer keeps begging for my SSN. I consider them having that to comply with the ACA reporting requirements for the IRS being a substantial invasion of my privacy.
I'm sure most people have just naively called the toll free number and handed it over, so they are pretty screwed, if an industry well known for their lack of information security gets hacked. Again. After the new information is in their system.
"I know Google manufactures their own computers, for the most part."
As a former Google employee, I must say you are full of shit.
Show me Google's manufacturing plants, please.
As a former Google employee myself, I'm bound by my NDA from naming the East Asia contractors who build the actual equipment. Google generally only provides the reference implementation.
Do you think Dell builds their own boards? They don't. The majority of their server class motherboards are manufactured by ASUS, based on Intel reference designs (Intel also no longer manufactures desktop motherboards, as of Haswell -- yields were too low).
If you are curious about who made your motherboard, and run Windows, use the following command: wmic baseboard det product,Manufacturer,version,serialnumber
(If you want a GUI version, download "Speccy", run it, and either look for the "Motherboard" section in the "Summary" view, or click on the "Motherboard" list item to get only that information by itself).
Other OS's have their own commands, as an exercise for the student.
P.S.: If the information has been obfuscated, you can usually back-track by looking at the BIOS vendor and version information, and then using searches for updated/same versions of the BIOS based on that, to see which platforms the BIOS vendor says it's for. You are welcome.
in all fairness, getting off the mainframe is very VERY difficult
True, but HP should have known this based on experience with other mainframe projects or via research on similar projects by other companies.
(1) The contract was made by EDS. HP had nothing to do with it, other than having acquired EDS.
(2) The migration is not just off the mainframe (a VMS system), it's onto a web-based platform instead, so they can get rid of both the mainframe, and the extra VT320 emulator they have to run to talk to the thing.
(3) Getting the same functionality and security of of a non-VMS system is a rather difficult endeavor, even if you use FLASK Linux or a similar purportedly secure computing platform, and add a bunch of them together and try to pretend "it's the same as a mainframe". Of all systems one can get off easily, VMS is not one of them, since it's so much better designed than most modern systems.
Scope of the task is *LARGE*
It's a doable proposition, but it would likely take (expensive to hire) 40+ year olds with experience in both sets of technology, along with people capable of parsing "business rules" out of languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, BLISS, and VAX (or DEC Alpha) assembly language, and whatever the heck else it was coded in at the time it was first deployed (depends on what they meant by "aging mainframe" in 2005).
These people would also have to be either very sophisticated in working over a "Chinese Wall" arrangement with another group doing the new systems development (not a development model most younger coders are familiar with, since you mention "interface contracts" and "unit testing" and "branch path analysis" to most of them, and they blink at you as if you've just taken a polyjuice potion and turned into Mad Eye Moody). Alternately, these old farts would need to have *also* kept current on new technology to allow them to be able to do both sides of the task.
So, you are talking expensive people in their mid 40's to mid 50's to get the job done.
Guess who were the first people let go or offered early retirement packages, to improve the profit-per-employee ratio for EDS to get the highest valuation in the acquisition by HP? Guess who were let go or offered early retirement as "cost reduction" measures in the four or five rounds of that HP has gone through since then?
It's a doable job, but I don't know of a company in the EDS (HPE now) or IBM Global Services space right now that wouldn't just start over an "fix business rules problems as they come up", rather than providing an equivalent (but now web based) system. I don't know experienced people in either of those two, since they've jettisoned all their expensive (talented) old people and replaced them with cheap (untalented) recent grads or offshoring.
If you think that's an unfair comparison on talent... if you were a talented college grad, would *you* go to work at a company which is in the throes of a 30,000+ person layoff (something IBM did earlier this year, BTW: HP is a "late bloomer"), and in the process of spinning out the division you'd be working in? Or would you take that offer from Uber/Facebook/Twitter/Google/[anyone but IBM or HP] instead?
They are likely going to have to hire someone and PM it themselves. States are notoriously bad at that (and at spending money on their own people, as opposed to being willing to spend a lot of money on a contractor company) -- look at how Oregon and Oracle are arguing about the [still] nonfunctional Oregon State Healthcare Exchange to see what comes of hiring your own [unqualified] PM and "doing it yourself".
My cousin, Mark, could do it. Sadly, he is disabled now.
I could do it; so could a dozen or so people I could name off the top of my head (Wes Peters, for one). Sadly, we are all sane now.
They are pretty screwed; they are going to have to do a "second system syndrome" version of things, or settle with HP/HPE and pa
Translation for the dense: The salespeople sold something (wrote a check) his company could not deliver (their ass's cant catch)
That malapropism ("catch" instead of "cash") is even funnier than the one where l0n3s0m3phr34k suggested that HP was "loosing 30,000+ more jobs" ("loosing" implying that there were going to be 30,000+ more open positions -- perhaps as anal catchers? -- as opposed to "losing", which would imply layoffs of 30,000+ existing employees).
P.S.: Translation for the dense: when calling someone dense, don't make mistakes which make you look dense.
It meant some salesman wrote a check so big, that when the bank went to withdraw - his ass was not big enough to handle the withdrawal. It prolapsed, leaving a dreaded pink sock.
Socks to be him...
Thanks, folks, I'll be here in Vegas all week! Remember to try the veal!
Not an option for High Frequency Traders. Geographic diversity means locating your fiber optic connect further way from the transatlantic fiber head ends which make HFT possible.
A week? most data disaster you are down for at least 30 days. Hell you cant get an order for servers in from DELL even on rush faster than 2 weeks.
Do companies actually bulk-order from Dell any more? This is actually the most I've heard about Dell for months.
I know Google manufactures their own computers, for the most part. They do use Dells as build machines for things like Chrome and ChromeOS, and they're a cheap way of throwing CPUs at the problem, instead of making the Ubuntu build process actually effective and efficient, for that matter, but those are pretty specialized use cases.
Google also routinely runs "This data center got destroyed in an earthquake/this data center was destroyed in a sudden military conflict/this data center was destroyed by terrorists/This datacenter was taken offline by a nuclear plant melting down/This data center went offline because it was solar powered, and it was gloomy for 5 days in a row and the batteries ran out/etc." exercises.
The exercises take place on the live network, and if someone screwed up, it's sometimes visible externally (when this happens, the exercise is ended for that service to get it back up and the service/service team is "red tagged"). For the most part, nobody notices except the people inside Google. Which is ready to fly new containerized data centers pretty much anywhere in the world with about 24 hours downtime, max, anyway.
The text on the pages 1 and 3 prior to the reference to the graph.
There are other references on the Internet, but you have to have journal access to get them. There are probably others that don't need the access, but I didn't bother digging them out. The Concorde was particularly badly designed for L/D, being instead designed to minimize the sonic boom profile.
Hydrogen is a lot cheaper as a fuel, unless you source it stupidly, like they did in the article (they assumed no use of methane precursor, only electrolysis), and a Miele design will hit an L/D ratio of ~14 at low Mach numbers (e.g. Mach 2), which compares favorably with the Boeing 747 L/D ratio of 17 at Mach 0.85.
A Miele design will drop to an L/D ratio of about 7, but it takes going Mach 30 to get there. You can easily do an L/D ratio of 8, if you don't plan on going over Mach 5 with the thing -- and methane derived hydrogen fuel is far cheaper than jet fuel.
My take-away on the article was: written by someone who doesn't want sonic booms (he states that the Concorde had booms as loud as 135 dB, but states in the same sentence that booms are 160 dB.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the EU member states had aspirations of world domination at various times in history, sadly ,for them, none of them worked out.
Ask Greece whether or not Germany controls their economy because they were stupid enough to go onto the Euro, and, recently, stupid enough to stay on the Euro when they had a possible exit that wouldn't cost them EU membership.
Some EU member states *still* have aspirations of world domination; they've just quit using tanks and guns to try and get there...
It is, nobody is refuting that. However the US is doing the same.
That's totally bullshit! The U.S. is definitely not applying French Law extraterritorially!
The very moment I had a European based alternative to Google I would jump ship.
I suspect you are a unique, special flower.
If you disagree, and believe other Europeans feel the same, and are right, you have your startup idea.
If you are wrong, you are a unique, special flower with a failed startup.
I say "Go for it!"...
France is irrational and broke. Pull out, because you should never squabble with fools; they'll bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.
France is not broke.
It sells a lot of electricity to other countries that were stupid, and dismantled, or are in the process of dismantling, their civil nuclear power infrastructure, without the replacements already being online. France gets a lot of money from other countries for the electricity it provides them.
China can outright block sites they don't like. France doesn't have the infrastructure to do that, and probably not the laws either. So while Google could have no corporate presence in France, they could still be a usable site in France by virtue of being accessible on the web.
You are aware that this has to do with the French not getting the taxes they feel they are owed for contracts negotiated in France, but executed in Ireland, right?
If Google does not come down on this like a ton of bricks as soon as the enforcement starts, who wants to bet that the "fine" will be exactly the amount France feels it is owed on those contracts, despite France having willingly signed on to be an EU member state, with all that entails, regarding civil commercial contracts?
The critical text here is: "when offering services in Europe" . No compliance with the directive is needed when offering serivces outside of Europe.
Next stop:
Google is responsible for policing requests made from VPNs for the French, since it's technologically impossible, but the French really hate VPNs, and are hoping Google will find a way of determining the origin country of a VPN through magic pixie dust...
Allllllllll aaaaaabbbbboarrrrd! The insanity train is about to leave the station, and gaze into its naval! Fasten your seat belts, and keep your head, arms, and legs inside the technology ignorance train, until it comes to a complete stop!
How about you look at it this in another way. You communicate for years on a certain medium and now someone has managed to make billions from your communications. You never wanted it to be viewed globally and certainly not with an advertisement next to it.
That was before google entered the marketplace. They took what we wrote and sold it as if it was theirs to sell.
Why do you think I am posting as anonymous coward?
To explicitly disclaim ownership, so that anyone who wants to can grab and make billions from your communications by putting an ad next to it? And so that you won't have legal recourse when they take your copyrighted material and sell it as if it's theirs to sell, since you've explicitly disclaimed any non-repudiable ownership on said content by posting as an AC?
Tell me if I'm at all warm with either of those reasons you're posting as an AC... because I don't see how Google would go about indexing password protected forums, and they uniformly respect robots.txt files as a means of your forum opting out being indexed.
Unless, you know, you're a dumbass for using a forum that wasn't password protected, and expect that to keep your communications private in the same way that closing but not locking your door keeps your TV set in your living room? Or maybe the person running the form is an asshole, and doesn't want to put up a robots.txt file for the site? Or maybe you're an asshole for posting on sites where your postings are not welcome, and the site owner hasn't put up a robots.txt file, or put up one that explicitly allows people to view your postings, just to spite you?
Tell me if I'm warm with the three of those, too...
... why is it that France doesn't just step up to the plate and create a GFW around their own border routers to prevent their citizens from accessing undesirable Google pages?
I think you mean GMF. To be correctly French requires a name in French... "Grande Muraille de Feu".
I cannot believe that there is no discussion about this at higher levels of the EU.
The real problem here is that:
(1) They haven't judicially defined what constitutes public interest -- because they can't because it's subjective, and making such a decision would piss everyone off and demonstrate the absurdity of the law. So there's no legal test for yes/no.
(2) France is still being pissy, and this is retaliation for the whole "media thing" that France had hoped to impose on YouTube and Google Play.
(3) They know that they can't win, so they're dragging their feet. It makes the politicians look like they are doing something, without actually having to really do something.
(4) They are laying the groundwork for a closed-door advisor position, whose job will be to write reports and justify why "it doesn't apply in this case" decisions, and then collect their paycheck.
(5) As soon as the problem is closed door, it effectively goes away, because there's no longer any public leverage.
(6) Then the worst that can happen is "an investigation of the department of investigation", which they can pretend takes as long as they want to/can push off the issue, and then conclude that there was no wrongdoing.
Problem solved. Back to business as usual.
With China being a MUCH bigger market and all, I could see Google just outright leaving France if it came down to it. Maybe Jacques Chirac would finally get his wish of a French owned search engine.
Yes, Google should just close up Google Ireland and forget about the European Union altogether.
The IRS would love that.
I'm pretty sure the IRS would not give a damn.
Google is in full compliance with the U.S. law, and the laws of other countries.
While U.S. politicians would like to get their grubby hands on, and spend some of that tasty, tasty money, the IRS merely enforces the U.S. tax code, up to and including the Criminal Investigation division sending special agents out to interview and conduct searches under search warrant, and to participate in arrests with federal law enforcement, should the U.S. Attorney determine that the evidence supports a federal arrest warrant.
Generally, you'd have to have a lot of criminal wrong-doing, not just tax evasion, and it's a teensy bit hard to arrest a corporation, even if they are technically "people". Typically, they'd seize all assets and shutter the business. However, if you thought some corrupt bankers (who received no jail time) were "too big to fail", you have not seen what "too big to fail" actually means.
In any case, Google is in compliance with all laws, and even should the money be taxed, it won't be double taxed by the U.S. (nor should it be); they will just open up a real estate business, or start "Google Fiber Europe" or something with the funds, since as long as the funds are earned outside the U.S., they can be spent outside the U.S. without incurring a U.S. tax burden; they only become U.S. income when they are brought back.
In other words, even if they shuttered their search business entirely within Europe, and used the money to pay back Greece's debt (or buy all of Greece, like Kim Bassinger bought Braselton, Georgia, and then run the country better; or build ghost cities in Latvia and the Czech Republic, etc.), the money would never be realized as U.S. income.
Also...
Pulling out of France entirely (by blocking all access to Google properties from within France) would put the Righteous Fear Of God into the rest of the E.U., and the decision would be quickly reversed.
Serious question here - I understand that people love to hate Obamacare/ACA. But I don't understand why. What's bad about federally mandated healthcare that says the health insurance companies must offer all people coverage, cannot drop us after they pay out a certain amount (no lifetime maximums), and in general sets a specific lower rung for basic minimum coverage to maintain quality of life?
You've answered the question yourself, and you don't even know it.
The answer is "insurance companies".
What the hell do they have to do with healthcare? In the ACA situation, this is what:
* They charge people for health insurance ...and then, when they have a claim, they do their damnedest to deny it, so it becomes an out of pocket expense for the insured.
* They charge doctors for malpractice insurance
* They charge nurses for malpractice insurance
* They charge hospitals for malpractice insurance
* They charge doctors with practices or clinics for liability insurance on the premises
* They charge medical equipment manufacturers for liability insurance on their products
* They charge hospitals for liability insurance
Even better: when they have to pay a claim: most of the money doesn't go to the provider of the insured, it goes to the providers insurance company. Which may or may not be the same company that is paying the claim.
Meanwhile, most of the tort reform that would help limit the damages in any of these cases is held up by the legislators, who get major campaign contributions and endorsements... from the insurance industry.
And the funny part of the last one is that, most of the legislators (including the current president) are lawyers.
And when any of the claims (especially liability or malpractice) get litigated, the people doing it are ...the lawyers. Who would make less money if there were tort reform reducing the maximum damages on liability or malpractice claims.
The funniest part of all? Lawyers *also* have to carry malpractice insurance (and liability insurance, if they have a physical premises)... payable to the insurance industry.
They own us, lock, stock, and barrel.
It cost 100's of millions in Americas corrupt political system to become president.
It's OK; if the Trans Pacific Partnership passes, his debt will be considered paid in full.
Is Obama's increase more than Bush's increase over Clinton?
My health insurer keeps begging for my SSN. I consider them having that to comply with the ACA reporting requirements for the IRS being a substantial invasion of my privacy.
I'm sure most people have just naively called the toll free number and handed it over, so they are pretty screwed, if an industry well known for their lack of information security gets hacked. Again. After the new information is in their system.
That's a pretty steep escalation right there.
Stop supporting the lessor of two evils .... Cthulhu all the way!
I'm the lessor of two evils!
Sadly, both the Democrats and the Republicans have 99 year leases, with an option to renew.
"I know Google manufactures their own computers, for the most part."
As a former Google employee, I must say you are full of shit.
Show me Google's manufacturing plants, please.
As a former Google employee myself, I'm bound by my NDA from naming the East Asia contractors who build the actual equipment. Google generally only provides the reference implementation.
Do you think Dell builds their own boards? They don't. The majority of their server class motherboards are manufactured by ASUS, based on Intel reference designs (Intel also no longer manufactures desktop motherboards, as of Haswell -- yields were too low).
If you are curious about who made your motherboard, and run Windows, use the following command:
wmic baseboard det product,Manufacturer,version,serialnumber
(If you want a GUI version, download "Speccy", run it, and either look for the "Motherboard" section in the "Summary" view, or click on the "Motherboard" list item to get only that information by itself).
Other OS's have their own commands, as an exercise for the student.
P.S.: If the information has been obfuscated, you can usually back-track by looking at the BIOS vendor and version information, and then using searches for updated/same versions of the BIOS based on that, to see which platforms the BIOS vendor says it's for. You are welcome.
True, but HP should have known this based on experience with other mainframe projects or via research on similar projects by other companies.
(1) The contract was made by EDS. HP had nothing to do with it, other than having acquired EDS.
(2) The migration is not just off the mainframe (a VMS system), it's onto a web-based platform instead, so they can get rid of both the mainframe, and the extra VT320 emulator they have to run to talk to the thing.
(3) Getting the same functionality and security of of a non-VMS system is a rather difficult endeavor, even if you use FLASK Linux or a similar purportedly secure computing platform, and add a bunch of them together and try to pretend "it's the same as a mainframe". Of all systems one can get off easily, VMS is not one of them, since it's so much better designed than most modern systems.
Scope of the task is *LARGE*
It's a doable proposition, but it would likely take (expensive to hire) 40+ year olds with experience in both sets of technology, along with people capable of parsing "business rules" out of languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, BLISS, and VAX (or DEC Alpha) assembly language, and whatever the heck else it was coded in at the time it was first deployed (depends on what they meant by "aging mainframe" in 2005).
These people would also have to be either very sophisticated in working over a "Chinese Wall" arrangement with another group doing the new systems development (not a development model most younger coders are familiar with, since you mention "interface contracts" and "unit testing" and "branch path analysis" to most of them, and they blink at you as if you've just taken a polyjuice potion and turned into Mad Eye Moody). Alternately, these old farts would need to have *also* kept current on new technology to allow them to be able to do both sides of the task.
So, you are talking expensive people in their mid 40's to mid 50's to get the job done.
Guess who were the first people let go or offered early retirement packages, to improve the profit-per-employee ratio for EDS to get the highest valuation in the acquisition by HP? Guess who were let go or offered early retirement as "cost reduction" measures in the four or five rounds of that HP has gone through since then?
It's a doable job, but I don't know of a company in the EDS (HPE now) or IBM Global Services space right now that wouldn't just start over an "fix business rules problems as they come up", rather than providing an equivalent (but now web based) system. I don't know experienced people in either of those two, since they've jettisoned all their expensive (talented) old people and replaced them with cheap (untalented) recent grads or offshoring.
If you think that's an unfair comparison on talent ... if you were a talented college grad, would *you* go to work at a company which is in the throes of a 30,000+ person layoff (something IBM did earlier this year, BTW: HP is a "late bloomer"), and in the process of spinning out the division you'd be working in? Or would you take that offer from Uber/Facebook/Twitter/Google/[anyone but IBM or HP] instead?
They are likely going to have to hire someone and PM it themselves. States are notoriously bad at that (and at spending money on their own people, as opposed to being willing to spend a lot of money on a contractor company) -- look at how Oregon and Oracle are arguing about the [still] nonfunctional Oregon State Healthcare Exchange to see what comes of hiring your own [unqualified] PM and "doing it yourself".
My cousin, Mark, could do it. Sadly, he is disabled now.
I could do it; so could a dozen or so people I could name off the top of my head (Wes Peters, for one). Sadly, we are all sane now.
They are pretty screwed; they are going to have to do a "second system syndrome" version of things, or settle with HP/HPE and pa
Translation for the dense:
The salespeople sold something (wrote a check) his company could not deliver (their ass's cant catch)
That malapropism ("catch" instead of "cash") is even funnier than the one where l0n3s0m3phr34k suggested that HP was "loosing 30,000+ more jobs" ("loosing" implying that there were going to be 30,000+ more open positions -- perhaps as anal catchers? -- as opposed to "losing", which would imply layoffs of 30,000+ existing employees).
P.S.: Translation for the dense: when calling someone dense, don't make mistakes which make you look dense.
And the lucite bolo tie with the scorpion in it.
It meant some salesman wrote a check so big, that when the bank went to withdraw - his ass was not big enough to handle the withdrawal. It prolapsed, leaving a dreaded pink sock.
Socks to be him...
Thanks, folks, I'll be here in Vegas all week! Remember to try the veal!
Not an option for High Frequency Traders. Geographic diversity means locating your fiber optic connect further way from the transatlantic fiber head ends which make HFT possible.
A week? most data disaster you are down for at least 30 days. Hell you cant get an order for servers in from DELL even on rush faster than 2 weeks.
Do companies actually bulk-order from Dell any more? This is actually the most I've heard about Dell for months.
I know Google manufactures their own computers, for the most part. They do use Dells as build machines for things like Chrome and ChromeOS, and they're a cheap way of throwing CPUs at the problem, instead of making the Ubuntu build process actually effective and efficient, for that matter, but those are pretty specialized use cases.
Google also routinely runs "This data center got destroyed in an earthquake/this data center was destroyed in a sudden military conflict/this data center was destroyed by terrorists/This datacenter was taken offline by a nuclear plant melting down/This data center went offline because it was solar powered, and it was gloomy for 5 days in a row and the batteries ran out/etc." exercises.
The exercises take place on the live network, and if someone screwed up, it's sometimes visible externally (when this happens, the exercise is ended for that service to get it back up and the service/service team is "red tagged"). For the most part, nobody notices except the people inside Google. Which is ready to fly new containerized data centers pretty much anywhere in the world with about 24 hours downtime, max, anyway.
The text on the pages 1 and 3 prior to the reference to the graph.
There are other references on the Internet, but you have to have journal access to get them. There are probably others that don't need the access, but I didn't bother digging them out. The Concorde was particularly badly designed for L/D, being instead designed to minimize the sonic boom profile.
> and a Miele design will hit an L/D ratio of ~14 at low Mach numbers
Link?
Since you missed it in the first post: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/de...
Meh.
Hydrogen is a lot cheaper as a fuel, unless you source it stupidly, like they did in the article (they assumed no use of methane precursor, only electrolysis), and a Miele design will hit an L/D ratio of ~14 at low Mach numbers (e.g. Mach 2), which compares favorably with the Boeing 747 L/D ratio of 17 at Mach 0.85.
A Miele design will drop to an L/D ratio of about 7, but it takes going Mach 30 to get there. You can easily do an L/D ratio of 8, if you don't plan on going over Mach 5 with the thing -- and methane derived hydrogen fuel is far cheaper than jet fuel.
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/de...
My take-away on the article was: written by someone who doesn't want sonic booms (he states that the Concorde had booms as loud as 135 dB, but states in the same sentence that booms are 160 dB.
One estimate puts the cost one way at €5,000 (£3,700) per seat for a Brussels to Sydney trip.
Does that price include any amortized R&D expenses? I somehow doubt it.
No, but if you read the article, you'll already know that it includes the hydrogen fuel costs, with the hydrogen not being derived from methane.