I think the general answer is that budget != performance, especially where governments are concerned.
Yep, which is why we clearly need to give our military a higher budget to make up for this shortfall.
This is somewhat off topic, but I was discussing the F-35 project with a friend just this morning. If you've been following on, you probably know that the product itself is in serious trouble, almost like the Ryugyong Hotel, and clearly should be overhauled or canceled. What makes that impossible is the project is now "too big to fail". There's too many manufacturers and jobs at stake, in too many states (and other countries) for it to be allowed to die.
I think I could make a case that the US government lost the ability to manage large projects with anything remotely like efficiency since the turn of the century.
Given that for the sake of argument, I really wonder what would happen if General Atomics or Scaled Composits were given the F35, and it was (again, for the sake of argument) for some reason in their best interest to make it work efficiently, what would we end up with? And at what cost relative to what the government is spending?
> I've been taking online courses for two years(*), and my conclusion is: it's not the subject, it's the presentation.
The last class I took online, the students were having a difficult time understanding the instructor, who was simply reading the overheads to us and deferring difficult questions. While the class was in session, I did a linkedin search on the instructor's name, saw that he was a contractor in India. Yes, the online curriculum had been outsourced.
So yes, it is not the subject, it really is the presentation. And a substandard presentation makes it much more likely that the students are wasting their time.
I've been in effective online classes, where the tools work, the instructor is sharp, discussion is lively, and I ended up really learning the subject. That's not always the case, and it's not always the students' fault.
I was all set to agree unconditionally, but you kinda went off the rails at the end there. It may be a lack of confidence, which isn't necessarily the same as a lack of education or intelligence. Or it could be a less costly way to audit a class. Or, it could be someone trying to retrain for a different career, who isn't comfortable in a classroom where the students are young enough to be his children -- or grandchildren.
Personally, I like taking classes in person so I can leer at... wait am I still talking out loud?
On the plus side it may breed a whole new generation of engineers specializing in avionics, ballistics and signal jamming techniques.
Hmmm radar guided, computer controlled, surface to air paintball canon...
Not only that, but there's a bunch of retired or near-retired old fogeys out there with skills in this arena, left over from the cold war. (Don't ask how I know.)
But the paintball cannon -- funny you should mention that, I had the same idea. You'd need a compressor with fairly large capacity with some alterations, a long tube on a gimbal, and some sort of aiming mechanism.
Maybe some intelligence for auto-targeting? Raspberry Pi project, perhaps?
My suspicion is that once drones start to become more ubiquitous in US Airspace, pecople here will come up with ways to interfere with them. In other countries directly targeted by the drones, they haven't been very successful, but in the US all it will take will be a few backyard hobbyists who really really really have issues with drones, and they will come up with an easy way to interfere/take over/destroy/ shoot down said drones...and this technology, whatever it is, will be then used by people in other countries to take out OUR drones.
So putting drones in US airspace is actually a stupid counterproductive thing, on many fronts.
Large app servers, database back-ends, and outward facing servers remain physical. Just about everything else is a candidate for virtualization. It so happens that my responsibilities are primarily with big physical servers.
But let's talk virtualization... you haven't seen a mess until you've seen a firmware update pushed out that takes three-quarters of your VM farm offline. Virtualization allows you to be responsible, by migrating off a few servers at a time, upgrading them, and if successful, move the instances back. But if anything a big VM farm gives the irresponsible an even greater opportunity to shoot one's self in the foot. Since most the hardware is identical, why not patch them all at once and save time? And then... oops.
I knew an admin who was so scared of updates breaking something and getting called up to London at 6 PM to fix it he just never bothered. Every time the staff infected the RDP server with a virus because they were stuck with IE7 he blamed them, and one even lost her job over it.
Eventually the company got fed up, ditched us and found another support company. The first thing they did was install all the updates and virtualize all the servers.
Right, but there is a huge space between "being cautious about updates" and "never installing and update". System updates, and most especially firmware updates need to be staged just like any application update. You apply them to non-critical systems first, test, and then cautiously apply them to up the line to your most critical system. Even then, you have to watch your application support matrix. We've had issues where drive-by updates (installed over the weekend by offshore admins) brought us to an unsupported OS version. So great... you're on the latest OS version... You're also out of compliance with your service contract, and any application issue tickets may be blown off by tech support.
So what we get, is an email in the middle of the night that the following two hundred machines are going to have firmware, driver and OS updates applied, with absolutely no thought put into which of these machines are mission critical.
But, it appears that "it was the latest update" is a valid excuse when a half dozen servers are bricked and a mission critical application is offline until motherboards can be replaced. It's really no way to run a business.
And mass midnight patch sessions are a way to generate metrics showing what a wonderful job the outsourced admins are doing. Because the metrics don't include the collateral damage of blind patching.
The very specific problem with Internet Explorer is that in the early days of the net web applications were coded very specifically for IE eccentricities, and these apps only work with those early versions. (IE6 usually.) Often the original developers are long gone, or the vendor has been acquired or gone out of business, and there are never going to be any updates to the app that allow usage of a modern browser. And it's hard for IT people to make a business case because the executives' impression is "it works now". Because they can't see the collateral damage of hundreds of employees stuck with an ancient browser. Mass upgrading the browser is a real good way to lose your job if it makes a critical web app unavailable. This is not an excuse to never patch, but like anything, you have to use a bit of sense.
Offtopic, sort of, but never have I seen, in about 8 years or so, a computer component being toasted by static discharge, and here nobody ever uses grounding when they work with hardware.
There are ways to handle computer components safely without a grounding strap. For instance, putting bare forearms against the chassis frame when removing or inserting components.
One could argue that the ground strap is there to insure that you are always statically grounded even if you forget, or don't know about, other precautionary measures. I'd like to posit that someone with absolutely no hardware training probably doesn't know to touch the chassis before handling components, but apparently this also means they don't know (or forget) about connecting the gator clip to the frame. So it's a lose-lose situation.
That's a different, and probably more appropriate definition of "offshore". That also sounds like a very good procedure. I would have added "we only upgrade firmware to solve specific problems and vulnerabilities appropriate to our environment, not just because it's 'the latest'". But I'm told I'm too conservative.
Here, the admins are offshore (as in, physically on the other side of the world) but the machines are still local. They've rebadged former mainframe operators to be "hands and eyes" in case a button has to be pushed or a memory stick changed out. Of course, "hands and eyes" have had no hardware training whatsoever. I made some fuss recently when I caught one of them changing out a memory stick with the gator clip on their wrist strap dangling in the air. The response was to raise the issue as to why I still had access to the computer room? Geh.
Every time the offshore admins want to apply an update, I ask them "what is your contingency plan should you brick the server?" and they always answer "Call the vendor". Sigh.
According to TFA, Aragon in his rebuttal argues correctly that correlation != causation, but then goes on to "most probably" correlate the increase in illness to a world wide increase in the same type of illness, appearing to be making the same correlation leap as Klick and Wright.
Moreover, Aragon's theory (which is arguably plausible on the surface) does not explain why the uptick in illness in San Francisco is not reflected in the surrounding counties. As he's arguing that the uptick is international, it might be plausible that SF, being a travel hub, could be more likely to have someone passing through that has the illness.
Except, none of the three airports in the SF Bay Area are in San Francisco county, where the biggest bump in illnesses occurred. SFO is in San Mateo (unincorporated), OAK is in Alameda county, and SJC is way down in Santa Clara country. If this is passed by food, you'd think that janitors and food handlers would be most susceptible, and they're least likely to be living in more-expensive San Francisco.
So, it seems like the original study is at least incomplete, but it also seems like the rebuttal has logical holes.
And finally, I don't know how the bill in San Francisco was written. A similar bill was passed in Portland, OR but since I live in the suburbs, I still get to use plastic bags, [1] and my only experience with the ban has been that segment on Portlandia. I've read that in some versions of the plastic bag bans that are cropping up here and there, you still can use plastic bags for an additional fee, or get a paper bag for an additional fee. If this is also true in SF, Aragon's point that the authors must correlate illness to reusable bags is valid. But if it's an outright ban on bags in SF, it seems that anyone buying stuff they couldn't conveniently carry in their arms would be using a reusable bag, which suggests a possible correlation.
Caveat: I am not an epidemiologist.
[1] My wife makes crafts out of the leftover plastic bags. She cuts them into strips and then knits them into things like hats and purses. We're usually short plastic bags and have to scrounge from friends. I want to assure you we're not just dumping them directly into wetlands as apparently everyone else is. It occurs to me as I write this that it could easily be a skit on Portlandia, but I swear it's true.
> The question is, if all of you can see how obvious it is that the editors here are misleading people to sell a few ad clicks, why are you still visiting the site?
The same reason I sometimes read the mail in my spam folder. Because it's amusing.
> If you feel otherwise, and think that freedom expression is not a fundamental right, but rather a privilege that can be withdrawn in some cases, then you are entitled to your opinion (for now), but you should be honest about what you are advocating.
...and you should pay very special attention to the for now. When the government's power to withdraw the "privilege" of freedom of expression becomes irrevocable, the government gets to use that power no matter what party happens to be in office. When the government transitions to something with which you fundamentally disagree, you might find yourself regretting having granted it those powers.
Some of the comments are the standard comment drivel you get anywhere, but many are really well written. I haven't had so much fun reading reviews since three wolf moon.
Slashdot Mirror
if you "don't know much about WebOS", then how do you know HP's mismanagement was to blame?
Oooh oooh I know. Because "HP" and "mismanagement" are in the same sentence.
Wow, that was a no-brainer.
I think the general answer is that budget != performance, especially where governments are concerned.
Yep, which is why we clearly need to give our military a higher budget to make up for this shortfall.
This is somewhat off topic, but I was discussing the F-35 project with a friend just this morning. If you've been following on, you probably know that the product itself is in serious trouble, almost like the Ryugyong Hotel, and clearly should be overhauled or canceled. What makes that impossible is the project is now "too big to fail". There's too many manufacturers and jobs at stake, in too many states (and other countries) for it to be allowed to die.
I think I could make a case that the US government lost the ability to manage large projects with anything remotely like efficiency since the turn of the century.
Given that for the sake of argument, I really wonder what would happen if General Atomics or Scaled Composits were given the F35, and it was (again, for the sake of argument) for some reason in their best interest to make it work efficiently, what would we end up with? And at what cost relative to what the government is spending?
I think the general answer is that budget != performance, especially where governments are concerned.
> I've been taking online courses for two years(*), and my conclusion is: it's not the subject, it's the presentation.
The last class I took online, the students were having a difficult time understanding the instructor, who was simply reading the overheads to us and deferring difficult questions. While the class was in session, I did a linkedin search on the instructor's name, saw that he was a contractor in India. Yes, the online curriculum had been outsourced.
So yes, it is not the subject, it really is the presentation. And a substandard presentation makes it much more likely that the students are wasting their time.
I've been in effective online classes, where the tools work, the instructor is sharp, discussion is lively, and I ended up really learning the subject. That's not always the case, and it's not always the students' fault.
I was all set to agree unconditionally, but you kinda went off the rails at the end there. It may be a lack of confidence, which isn't necessarily the same as a lack of education or intelligence. Or it could be a less costly way to audit a class. Or, it could be someone trying to retrain for a different career, who isn't comfortable in a classroom where the students are young enough to be his children -- or grandchildren.
Personally, I like taking classes in person so I can leer at... wait am I still talking out loud?
This. And then change the SSID to a long random string.
> How many have considered purposefully interfering with surveillance drones?
Oh, pretty much everyone here.
On the plus side it may breed a whole new generation of engineers specializing in avionics, ballistics and signal jamming techniques.
Hmmm radar guided, computer controlled, surface to air paintball canon...
Not only that, but there's a bunch of retired or near-retired old fogeys out there with skills in this arena, left over from the cold war. (Don't ask how I know.)
But the paintball cannon -- funny you should mention that, I had the same idea. You'd need a compressor with fairly large capacity with some alterations, a long tube on a gimbal, and some sort of aiming mechanism.
Maybe some intelligence for auto-targeting? Raspberry Pi project, perhaps?
My suspicion is that once drones start to become more ubiquitous in US Airspace, pecople here will come up with ways to interfere with them. In other countries directly targeted by the drones, they haven't been very successful, but in the US all it will take will be a few backyard hobbyists who really really really have issues with drones, and they will come up with an easy way to interfere/take over/destroy/ shoot down said drones...and this technology, whatever it is, will be then used by people in other countries to take out OUR drones.
So putting drones in US airspace is actually a stupid counterproductive thing, on many fronts.
This, for instance?
I thought it was Eurasia.
I don't know whether to mod this funny or insightful....
I'm almost certain I've read this story before.
Large app servers, database back-ends, and outward facing servers remain physical. Just about everything else is a candidate for virtualization. It so happens that my responsibilities are primarily with big physical servers.
But let's talk virtualization... you haven't seen a mess until you've seen a firmware update pushed out that takes three-quarters of your VM farm offline. Virtualization allows you to be responsible, by migrating off a few servers at a time, upgrading them, and if successful, move the instances back. But if anything a big VM farm gives the irresponsible an even greater opportunity to shoot one's self in the foot. Since most the hardware is identical, why not patch them all at once and save time? And then... oops.
I knew an admin who was so scared of updates breaking something and getting called up to London at 6 PM to fix it he just never bothered. Every time the staff infected the RDP server with a virus because they were stuck with IE7 he blamed them, and one even lost her job over it.
Eventually the company got fed up, ditched us and found another support company. The first thing they did was install all the updates and virtualize all the servers.
Right, but there is a huge space between "being cautious about updates" and "never installing and update". System updates, and most especially firmware updates need to be staged just like any application update. You apply them to non-critical systems first, test, and then cautiously apply them to up the line to your most critical system. Even then, you have to watch your application support matrix. We've had issues where drive-by updates (installed over the weekend by offshore admins) brought us to an unsupported OS version. So great... you're on the latest OS version... You're also out of compliance with your service contract, and any application issue tickets may be blown off by tech support.
So what we get, is an email in the middle of the night that the following two hundred machines are going to have firmware, driver and OS updates applied, with absolutely no thought put into which of these machines are mission critical.
But, it appears that "it was the latest update" is a valid excuse when a half dozen servers are bricked and a mission critical application is offline until motherboards can be replaced. It's really no way to run a business.
And mass midnight patch sessions are a way to generate metrics showing what a wonderful job the outsourced admins are doing. Because the metrics don't include the collateral damage of blind patching.
The very specific problem with Internet Explorer is that in the early days of the net web applications were coded very specifically for IE eccentricities, and these apps only work with those early versions. (IE6 usually.) Often the original developers are long gone, or the vendor has been acquired or gone out of business, and there are never going to be any updates to the app that allow usage of a modern browser. And it's hard for IT people to make a business case because the executives' impression is "it works now". Because they can't see the collateral damage of hundreds of employees stuck with an ancient browser. Mass upgrading the browser is a real good way to lose your job if it makes a critical web app unavailable. This is not an excuse to never patch, but like anything, you have to use a bit of sense.
Offtopic, sort of, but never have I seen, in about 8 years or so, a computer component being toasted by static discharge, and here nobody ever uses grounding when they work with hardware.
There are ways to handle computer components safely without a grounding strap. For instance, putting bare forearms against the chassis frame when removing or inserting components.
One could argue that the ground strap is there to insure that you are always statically grounded even if you forget, or don't know about, other precautionary measures. I'd like to posit that someone with absolutely no hardware training probably doesn't know to touch the chassis before handling components, but apparently this also means they don't know (or forget) about connecting the gator clip to the frame. So it's a lose-lose situation.
Man, that's a big hat.
That's a different, and probably more appropriate definition of "offshore". That also sounds like a very good procedure. I would have added "we only upgrade firmware to solve specific problems and vulnerabilities appropriate to our environment, not just because it's 'the latest'". But I'm told I'm too conservative.
Here, the admins are offshore (as in, physically on the other side of the world) but the machines are still local. They've rebadged former mainframe operators to be "hands and eyes" in case a button has to be pushed or a memory stick changed out. Of course, "hands and eyes" have had no hardware training whatsoever. I made some fuss recently when I caught one of them changing out a memory stick with the gator clip on their wrist strap dangling in the air. The response was to raise the issue as to why I still had access to the computer room? Geh.
Every time the offshore admins want to apply an update, I ask them "what is your contingency plan should you brick the server?" and they always answer "Call the vendor". Sigh.
Another batch of liberals trying to justify their existence. Heard it before.
According to TFA, Aragon in his rebuttal argues correctly that correlation != causation, but then goes on to "most probably" correlate the increase in illness to a world wide increase in the same type of illness, appearing to be making the same correlation leap as Klick and Wright.
Moreover, Aragon's theory (which is arguably plausible on the surface) does not explain why the uptick in illness in San Francisco is not reflected in the surrounding counties. As he's arguing that the uptick is international, it might be plausible that SF, being a travel hub, could be more likely to have someone passing through that has the illness.
Except, none of the three airports in the SF Bay Area are in San Francisco county, where the biggest bump in illnesses occurred. SFO is in San Mateo (unincorporated), OAK is in Alameda county, and SJC is way down in Santa Clara country. If this is passed by food, you'd think that janitors and food handlers would be most susceptible, and they're least likely to be living in more-expensive San Francisco.
So, it seems like the original study is at least incomplete, but it also seems like the rebuttal has logical holes.
And finally, I don't know how the bill in San Francisco was written. A similar bill was passed in Portland, OR but since I live in the suburbs, I still get to use plastic bags, [1] and my only experience with the ban has been that segment on Portlandia. I've read that in some versions of the plastic bag bans that are cropping up here and there, you still can use plastic bags for an additional fee, or get a paper bag for an additional fee. If this is also true in SF, Aragon's point that the authors must correlate illness to reusable bags is valid. But if it's an outright ban on bags in SF, it seems that anyone buying stuff they couldn't conveniently carry in their arms would be using a reusable bag, which suggests a possible correlation.
Caveat: I am not an epidemiologist.
[1] My wife makes crafts out of the leftover plastic bags. She cuts them into strips and then knits them into things like hats and purses. We're usually short plastic bags and have to scrounge from friends. I want to assure you we're not just dumping them directly into wetlands as apparently everyone else is. It occurs to me as I write this that it could easily be a skit on Portlandia, but I swear it's true.
> The question is, if all of you can see how obvious it is that the editors here are misleading people to sell a few ad clicks, why are you still visiting the site?
The same reason I sometimes read the mail in my spam folder. Because it's amusing.
Brilliant.
> If you feel otherwise, and think that freedom expression is not a fundamental right, but rather a privilege that can be withdrawn in some cases, then you are entitled to your opinion (for now), but you should be honest about what you are advocating.
Some of the comments are the standard comment drivel you get anywhere, but many are really well written. I haven't had so much fun reading reviews since three wolf moon.