Yes I love it when my colo boxes I can't get to for 20 - 30min minimum don't have redundant power supplies, and use drives that the smart hands there probably won't swap for me; can't be hot swapped and there is no *sane* way to do multi path I/O to any other storage. Sounds great, can pay too much while I am at it?
Seriously other than hosting some small personal site I don't get why you'd do this. A VPS or more traditional rack servers are certain to be better. If you really need lots of compute and density is the issue, but you don't want to shell out the bucks to get into the blade center space, HP makes some half width servers, which mount in pairs to a single rack U; without so many expansion constraints.
Lastly its frankly hard to imagine what you could possibly be hosting on Mac OS (not really know for its remote management features) that you could not do just as well and more easily on Linux/BSD/Windows/AS400.
Sure it can. If you do activity X and activity Y, and you get 30% margin on X and 20% margin on Y. You might very well chose to stop doing Y if it means you can do more X.
I would say discussion of if a Turing complete is secure or not is off base. You can express any computable algorithm and if you get it wrong it may or may not behave in undesired ways when presented with input you did not anticipate.
Now if you want to discuss topics if interpreters (byte code or otherwise) that enforce certain memory management contracts, so you don't have to express them as part of your program ultimately offer better security or just move the problems that might be a valid topic.
Java is not insecure; security is not even an attribute you could put a value on with regard to Java. The browser plugins that ship with the most popular interpreter and runtime implementation might be insecure. There may be bugs in the interpreter where it does not properly enforce contracts making otherwise correct programs under it vulnerable. One little mistake in a C/C++ programs might result in the same thing though. The traditional argument is whats more likely to result in the best outcome: every programmer our there writes good code or a team of skilled programs writes a universal memory manager, and set of libraries that are solid so other programers don't have to get some of that hard stuff right?
I guess the issue is we are finding out more often than not even teams of very skilled developers are bound to slip here and there with something as large and complex as the Java runtime.
No very much the opposite actually. Remember you are tcp or Udp inside the tunnel as well. For the inner Udp a lost packet is simply a lost packet like any other, the application will have been designed to handle that because its the nature of Udp. For tcp a lost tunnel packet will result in the inner tcp seeing a lost packet, there will be no ack and it will do what tcp always does a retransmit, the outer tunnel layer will encapsulate it in a new Udp packet and things will work fine.
Often tcp tunneled in tcp performs badly on lossy links. What happens if the stacks have not worked out the window sizes just right you get BOTH the inner and otter tcp doing a retransmit. This results in the inner tcp ultimately experiencing lots of duplicate packets; which it will handle, but you end up sending lots of useless traffic down the tunnel which is just like more overhead.
Either way it would be fun if everyone who gets one of these ( and has not infringed; dont worry it will happen) calls their local prosecuters office and demands their ISP be charged with uttering. Either they are altering a document you understand to be from another party or they are knowing sending an DNS reply that is untrue. Either way it might be possible to convince a court that it fits the definition of uttering. That might have implications for all those wifi registration systems too.
No he just understands balance and equality are not always they same. Sure they can be, but they don't have to be. Imagine a plank on top of a fulcrum at its center. If you put an equal weight on bot ends it will balance and both ends of the plank will be off the ground. Now suppose you move the fulcrum to the left. You will need to put more weight on the left side of the plank for it to wait for it.... Balance.
So they built another ship called Titanic number 2, This time they thought they had a ship to sail the ocean blue, So they christened it with beer and she sunk right off the peer.
It was sad when the great ship went down. To the bottoms of the sea.
Uncles and ants many many lost the pants, It was sad when the great ship went down
Simple Microsoft (rightly so) does not trust ISVs to keep control of their private key. What's harder standing up your own update server for $APP working out its protocol (probably simple) and making the DNS point to your rogue box; or breaking in once swiping their private key (probably left on some internet connected machine by and moron or on some code monkeys laptop he left on the bus), pushing your signed malicious update to Microsoft from the coffee shop two states over?
Yep I am sure this created all kinds job hours over seas keeping the production line printing up router PCBs a little while longer. After being sold at Cisco's (I would guess based on price breaks I have seen them give VARs) 140% markup a whole lot of good US tax payer dollars help fill the deposit capital requirements of a European bank. After all we know Cisco never re-repatriates profits; okay maybe these particular dollars hit US entities and tax roles but they just offset other dollars that would have been brought back for payrolls, dividends, expense otherwise so its wash. Glad Obama is doing so much "investing" in winning our future.
Most equipment has a finite life. Yes we have all see that 15y/o Cisco box in the back room everyone is afraid that if the UPS allowed to power down the fans in the Cisco or its power-supplies would never spin back up. Mostly competent business or state agencies depreciate stuff faster than that and replace it.
You should be able to reasonably estimate the needs of a facility like a library 3-5 years out. Then you build yourself a little head room. Take your most critical estimated capacity requirement multiply by 1.4 and size accordingly. Even that can lead to some over kill; like putting a 2811 where an 1841 might do, but its usually enough prevent any nasty surprises that require replacing equipment before the end of its service life. On balance it works out okay cost wise and may leave you with some residual value in the equipment that you can then resell. No reasonable person would have faulted Cisco for doing what I just described but some of the reports on this clearly show them over specifying by 5 or 10 times and more.
Another thing this will do is tell us allot about how reasonable the Iranian power structure is. If you make it clear to them that the outcome of their continuing to develop nuclear weapons is that after years of costly development, suffering sanctions and other unwanted kinds of international attention they will finally get a bomb and perhaps some sort of surface to air delivery system.
What their enemies get is access to more mature; better tested American weapons at retaliate cost rather than having to do all the R&D and stand up the infrastructure.
If they STILL decide to push forward that says a great deal about how dangerous they really are.
I am not so sure. I really think we should not worry about Iran getting the bomb. What we should do is make it clear to them that IF they do we are going to overtly provide nuclear weapons to Israel, and the Saudi's and possible some of other more stable and friendly region actors. That might actually offer the region real stability for the first time.
Its kinda like the old argument about arming police with guns vs clubs.
A club is an invitation to argue; chances are pretty good there is a similar effective object to be used as bludgeon at hand or tools with which you might defend yourself. A gun on the other hand there is very little you can do about it. There is very little a cop can do to protect themselves either from another citizen caring one; so the incentive is for everyone to be polite and respectful. As you never know who if anyone will survive and exchange of fire if it came to it.
I really think would peace might be enhanced if nukes were distributed more widely. Don't get me wrong I am still anti-proliferation. You still don't want this stuff landing in the hands of non-state actors or states likely to topple from the inside, but Iran having the bomb for example would not need to change the regional power structure; if we chose to arm the others. It might end some of the saber rattling and provocations. Look and India-Pakistan. You can't say really relations have gotten worse since they went nuclear. While they still are not friendly they do maintain mostly civil diplomatic ties, now.
Right and I think this is an important aspect to the problem here.
There is simply no substitute for having all your I's dotted and T's cross with large integrated systems like this. This is a culture problem not a individual screwed up problem. If you just fire the guy, there will be lots of awareness but the take away most of your remaining people will get is "don't forget to check the certificate expiry dates, that'll get you canned" many of them traumatized by the experience will dutifully check certificate dates for the rest of their careers but this will do nothing to prevent your next major outage; because that will almost certainly be the result of something else.
Everyone is pushing this vitalization + "dev ops" + management/monitoring is going to let us have one admin do what was once the work of ten. The fact is it just does not work like that. Management/monitoring like Microsoft Mom for example requires you to have all the failure modes identified and the scripts written to check conditions like expiry dates and trigger the alerts. Unless everyone is really good about all the routine maintenance tasks in there is won't help with something like this. That takes time you ONE admin has not got and discipline that breaks down when someone is overworked.
The "dev ops" and vitalization stuff is all great in terms of how much can be automated. Someone has to develop that automation though. Your ONE guy does not have time to build and test his generic deployment scrip when you promised your customers you'd have their infrastructure stood up last week.
It comes down to the business recognizing its important to have good people, enough people, and willingness to invest in making sure the job is done correctly and completely every time, and that documentation is maintained and in a way everyone knows how to use it. Check lists need to be kept and followed etc. IT got away from plant engineering style discipline when hardware got cheap. You know longer had to worry about that one computer you had failing. As we move back to more consolidated and integrated solutions; management is going to have to get used to the idea again that there is some people time investment that must be made. Its great you can save on power, cooling equipment, and headcount but you can't cut headcount to far because the more consolidated you get the less you can afford for anything to go wrong so it all must be check, doubled checked, and checked again just to be sure. This is if you do it yourself or if you pay your cloud provider to do it. Either way cloud services so far have been mostly a race to the bottom and that is going to cause some to have to learn some very painful lessons if the industry remains on its current trajectory.
To be fair, Obama's approach has been much more effective than GWB so far. I would like to see our forces completely withdrawn from the region and replaced by small specialized forces to hunt down the actual terrorists (yes, even using drones) while NOT shooting up the countryside and generally convincing common people that the terrorists are right about us.
Based on exactly what?
It was the troop surge that worked. Bush pretty much started with the small force go after high value targets strategy we are using now and it failed then. It turned out you had to establish basic control and security before you could move to a precise targeting strategy. To my knowledge none of our military strategists and commanders have gone on record suggesting these strategies would have been viable without doing the surge and many have cautioned against over dependance on special operations. In other words people who make a living studding this stuff still see it as a support role.
The drone program is by many accounts hurting Al Qaeda quite badly but is by many accounts harming lots of civilians, and further endangering the stability of already tenuous various states like Pakistan and Yemen. This may be causing a general break down of society in places as people fear going out because of the drones, seeding the idea their government is not sovereign and dose not represent them but is a US puppet breading contempt for the law by the people there, and finally creating more generalized hatred of the USA. Its likely we are attacking the hydra with sword here, cutting off the Al Qaeda heads in the fashion is growing the terrorists of tomorrow.
Its still very unclear the Federal government in Afghanistan can survive after we complete the troop withdrawal. The Iraqi government slowly moves from one corruption scandal to the next; ever since we left (and somewhat before we did too).
We more or less left the Egyptian public hung out to dry while their society becomes a military dictatorship at worst, one election than permanent theocracy probably, or just another failed state situation. I am not sure what we could have or should have done but what we have done by simply continuing to prop up the military with foreign aide and weapons there is morally bankrupt on all kinds of levels. We should have at the vary lease been "hands off until you all work it out." unless we could come up with something better.
Libya is a slow moving disaster as well. I am not referring to the embassy in Benghazi either, but to the fact that the government is not able to provide basic security to people living there. Various militia groups are the 'law' in many parts; and they don't have a great human rights record. Its not unlikely that Libya will also become a failed state.
All in all I don't see much out there suggesting the quality of life has improved for people living in those regions, basic justice and human rights are not be better protected, American influence in the region has not been enhanced, popular opinion of the USA is not much better. All in all I don't Obama's foreign policy as being much different than Bush's except in the most superficial use of language; and in general no more or less successful. You can argue we only got into some of these messes because of Bush and I will partly concede that point; but I think the Libya intervention and the general aggressive expansion of the drone program servers as a strong indicator that Obama in actually not any less hawkish. Had he been in the Oval Office on Sept 11th I really have strong doubts our national response would have been a whole lot different.
A better question would be: "Why haven't all the people who wrote the laws that make this possible (and legal) been hanged for their deliberate and treasonous jepordization of our food supply?"
I find it personally hypocritical for a slashdotter to pirate software while getting paid writting software from paying customers and then getting angry at GPL copyright violations.
What the grandparent does not understand is we live in a society; where you don't always get to make the rules. There is nothing wrong with things should be different and at the same time playing the current rules to your own maximized advantage. You don't get a choice about not following them when they are detrimental to you after all.
Sometimes you don't get your way all the ballot box or in the halls of the legislature. You must take your lumps when that happens, might as well enjoy the sugar too; you'll be paying for it anyway.
What it comes down to is the those business created brand loyalty thru their marketing efforts. The game studios created lots of series loyalty but not much brand loyalty. Its always easier to blame some external force like "the used market" for ones own failures; then it is to own them. The sad fact is this leads to trying to solve the wrong problems.
Do you know anybody who buys games because Ubisoft made it? Exactly. People might by every "Assassin's Creed" or whatever I would wager a good portion of them could not even name the publisher. On the other hand Ford and Rolex understand its better to bring you into the fold. Maybe you buy a used car or used watch this time; but some day you will likely want to own a new one and might have the economic resources to do it. They understand there is value in having you like owning a Ford or like owning a Rolex now; even if they don't get to sell it to you this time.
They gaming industry screw up. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have it right they have built some loyalty to their brand. The pure software players are hanging themselves. They are turning themselves into a commodity; and missing an opportunity to market themselves down market. The more unware the customers become of who the third party publishers are the more control the three gatekeepers get. Right now Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are the market makers, but a big publishing house can steer their fate buy starving a platform for good AAA titles. Moving more people into the causal space due to lack of affordable AAA titles is the big three's dream, because they can contract anyone to make those titles.
You all have a short memory. Its not the new gamers or even the new hardcore games that have a problem. There were exactly two industries that signaled the public at large was willing to accept degraded use rights to products in the name on content protection. Games and home video.
This goes back to the 80's, when games came with silly little start up questions like "what is the third word on page 20 of the manual." Games usually had substantial dead tree manuals at the time. Then the started coming with little card board decoder rings and such. After that clever ideas like key disk showed up, were the disk they sent had specific problems on some sectors, or perhaps the FAT had been molested in some unique way; so that in theory if you copied it the problems would not be there. So you had to insert this special broken disk every time you wanted to play; even if you had allocated some of your precious 40meg hard disk to it.
Then everyone mindless bought VHS tapes with macro-vision on them that were difficult to duplicate and had an inferior quality as well; without complaint.
The sad fact is most people don't think about this stuff or care. I am not sure what is to be done about it, but considering all the folks clamoring to get hold of the next walled garden device, be it a phone, game console, whatever and at the same time letting facebook be their personal information manager I think the ship has perhaps sailed a long time ago.
It's a war toy, somewhat more up to date than the war toys I played with as a kid, but cap-guns, soldier action figures, grenades, bazookas, model jet fighters, tanks, and battleships... I played with all of these. There's nothing new about this.
There is something new here. All of the real life analogs of the toys you listed require the operators of those things to put themselves in harms way. We could have a separate discussion about if its a good idea to glorify war in the eyes of our children through play or not but there is something different about a drone.
Do we want to teach our children the good guys kill from far away and attack enemies who have no capability to do them any immediate harm?
Children are not going understand the other legal and ethical questions around drones like why all the adults are having intense discussions about what "immediate" means and banding around fancy bullshit terms like "kinetic military action", but they can and will understand the basic question. That is a very different message and may shape early thinking differently than that cap gun where their imaginary enemy is probably shooting back.
The character set limitations are really platform issues not issues with COBOL or even in most cases the programs written it in. Honestly I have never understood all the COBOL hate. Sure it fails to deliver on its promises of letting business folks write code without any domain specific training in software develop. Just like every other language that has approached that challenge mostly BASIC or Object BASIC dialects.
That said I'd be actually pretty surprised if a good C/C++/Java/Ruby/Python/PHP/whatever guy could put together a program to do something like print a fifty million decent looking telephone bill statements with accurate summary lines for transaction-data as quickly as a COBOL programer of similar skill and experience can. There really are some problems COBOL solves well. Bulk record processing and account reconciliation is one of those things because that was pretty much THE commercial and military logistics application for computers in the LATE 40's when COBOL was born. COBOL as you might expect is quite fit for that application.
Its when people start trying to do interactive applications in COBOL be it CICS or web or whatever it gets silly and forced. It brings to mind various analogies about square pegs for round holes, and threaded fasteners to be deployed by hammer. Its sorta like how people tried to CGI applications in C for a long time in the webs early days. Sure it worked and if C was all you knew I suppose you could get the job done. C is good at many things, large amounts of string manipulation is not one of them; but its something you need for a dynamic website. Does that make C a bad tool, no, it just means its the wrong application for it.
No IBM brought us JCL. So after writing you "business friendly" COBOL program. It was certain you would still need to find a wizard of the highest order to run it. Only he could convince the Gods Zeek and Zed to turn your program into a living process instead of some mere bytes on on a virtual tape somewhere
I don't have a problem with being designated a 'civilian' because I am one. I think the problem is that many in our police forces seem themselves as something else; and that is further aggravated by their idea that something else is above 'civilian'
I think this is actually a serious issue; that needs to be looked at in the "gun control" debate. Police and frankly any not uniform military, such as ATF, FBI, etc. I think ought to be restricted from possessing (accept as evidence) any weapon the general public is restricted from owning.
There should be no such thing as a SWAT team. Seriously if special weapons and tactics are required to resolve a situation its not something local PD should be dealing with. It should be considered a rebellion and the Governor should be calling up the Gaurd to handle it. I wonder how many suspects that could be apprehended are killed because cops want to go in guns blazing and can because they have the hardware to do it?
I also think the relationship between the public and police would be improve by finding a new equilibrium where cops have to assume anyone they are harassing is likely to be as well armed as they are.
Military weapons should be for military forces, not policing force.
First of let me state that all the known facts indicate this guy is a murdering lunatic nothing more and nothing less.
Still in the hypothetically speaking if he or someone one were fighting a government than I would argue that civilian police forces, and government personnel and their families could be considered legitimate targets. That might even include people in roles like teacher or librarian if they are spreading pro government propaganda. These people would be collaborators.
You have to demoralize and terrify when you are fighting a better organized and superior force. We attacked the families of British and Hessian officers during our revolution. What exactly do you think Washington was crossing the Delaware to do on the 25th of December?
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Yes I love it when my colo boxes I can't get to for 20 - 30min minimum don't have redundant power supplies, and use drives that the smart hands there probably won't swap for me; can't be hot swapped and there is no *sane* way to do multi path I/O to any other storage. Sounds great, can pay too much while I am at it?
Seriously other than hosting some small personal site I don't get why you'd do this. A VPS or more traditional rack servers are certain to be better. If you really need lots of compute and density is the issue, but you don't want to shell out the bucks to get into the blade center space, HP makes some half width servers, which mount in pairs to a single rack U; without so many expansion constraints.
Lastly its frankly hard to imagine what you could possibly be hosting on Mac OS (not really know for its remote management features) that you could not do just as well and more easily on Linux/BSD/Windows/AS400.
Sure it can. If you do activity X and activity Y, and you get 30% margin on X and 20% margin on Y. You might very well chose to stop doing Y if it means you can do more X.
I would say discussion of if a Turing complete is secure or not is off base. You can express any computable algorithm and if you get it wrong it may or may not behave in undesired ways when presented with input you did not anticipate.
Now if you want to discuss topics if interpreters (byte code or otherwise) that enforce certain memory management contracts, so you don't have to express them as part of your program ultimately offer better security or just move the problems that might be a valid topic.
Java is not insecure; security is not even an attribute you could put a value on with regard to Java. The browser plugins that ship with the most popular interpreter and runtime implementation might be insecure. There may be bugs in the interpreter where it does not properly enforce contracts making otherwise correct programs under it vulnerable. One little mistake in a C/C++ programs might result in the same thing though. The traditional argument is whats more likely to result in the best outcome: every programmer our there writes good code or a team of skilled programs writes a universal memory manager, and set of libraries that are solid so other programers don't have to get some of that hard stuff right?
I guess the issue is we are finding out more often than not even teams of very skilled developers are bound to slip here and there with something as large and complex as the Java runtime.
No very much the opposite actually. Remember you are tcp or Udp inside the tunnel as well. For the inner Udp a lost packet is simply a lost packet like any other, the application will have been designed to handle that because its the nature of Udp. For tcp a lost tunnel packet will result in the inner tcp seeing a lost packet, there will be no ack and it will do what tcp always does a retransmit, the outer tunnel layer will encapsulate it in a new Udp packet and things will work fine.
Often tcp tunneled in tcp performs badly on lossy links. What happens if the stacks have not worked out the window sizes just right you get BOTH the inner and otter tcp doing a retransmit. This results in the inner tcp ultimately experiencing lots of duplicate packets; which it will handle, but you end up sending lots of useless traffic down the tunnel which is just like more overhead.
Either way it would be fun if everyone who gets one of these ( and has not infringed; dont worry it will happen) calls their local prosecuters office and demands their ISP be charged with uttering. Either they are altering a document you understand to be from another party or they are knowing sending an DNS reply that is untrue. Either way it might be possible to convince a court that it fits the definition of uttering. That might have implications for all those wifi registration systems too.
No he just understands balance and equality are not always they same. Sure they can be, but they don't have to be. Imagine a plank on top of a fulcrum at its center. If you put an equal weight on bot ends it will balance and both ends of the plank will be off the ground. Now suppose you move the fulcrum to the left. You will need to put more weight on the left side of the plank for it to wait for it.... Balance.
Hope that helps
So they built another ship called Titanic number 2,
This time they thought they had a ship to sail the ocean blue,
So they christened it with beer and she sunk right off the peer.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
To the bottoms of the sea.
Uncles and ants many many lost the pants,
It was sad when the great ship went down
Simple Microsoft (rightly so) does not trust ISVs to keep control of their private key. What's harder standing up your own update server for $APP working out its protocol (probably simple) and making the DNS point to your rogue box; or breaking in once swiping their private key (probably left on some internet connected machine by and moron or on some code monkeys laptop he left on the bus), pushing your signed malicious update to Microsoft from the coffee shop two states over?
Yep I am sure this created all kinds job hours over seas keeping the production line printing up router PCBs a little while longer. After being sold at Cisco's (I would guess based on price breaks I have seen them give VARs) 140% markup a whole lot of good US tax payer dollars help fill the deposit capital requirements of a European bank. After all we know Cisco never re-repatriates profits; okay maybe these particular dollars hit US entities and tax roles but they just offset other dollars that would have been brought back for payrolls, dividends, expense otherwise so its wash. Glad Obama is doing so much "investing" in winning our future.
Most equipment has a finite life. Yes we have all see that 15y/o Cisco box in the back room everyone is afraid that if the UPS allowed to power down the fans in the Cisco or its power-supplies would never spin back up. Mostly competent business or state agencies depreciate stuff faster than that and replace it.
You should be able to reasonably estimate the needs of a facility like a library 3-5 years out. Then you build yourself a little head room. Take your most critical estimated capacity requirement multiply by 1.4 and size accordingly. Even that can lead to some over kill; like putting a 2811 where an 1841 might do, but its usually enough prevent any nasty surprises that require replacing equipment before the end of its service life. On balance it works out okay cost wise and may leave you with some residual value in the equipment that you can then resell. No reasonable person would have faulted Cisco for doing what I just described but some of the reports on this clearly show them over specifying by 5 or 10 times and more.
Another thing this will do is tell us allot about how reasonable the Iranian power structure is. If you make it clear to them that the outcome of their continuing to develop nuclear weapons is that after years of costly development, suffering sanctions and other unwanted kinds of international attention they will finally get a bomb and perhaps some sort of surface to air delivery system.
What their enemies get is access to more mature; better tested American weapons at retaliate cost rather than having to do all the R&D and stand up the infrastructure.
If they STILL decide to push forward that says a great deal about how dangerous they really are.
I am not so sure. I really think we should not worry about Iran getting the bomb. What we should do is make it clear to them that IF they do we are going to overtly provide nuclear weapons to Israel, and the Saudi's and possible some of other more stable and friendly region actors. That might actually offer the region real stability for the first time.
Its kinda like the old argument about arming police with guns vs clubs.
A club is an invitation to argue; chances are pretty good there is a similar effective object to be used as bludgeon at hand or tools with which you might defend yourself. A gun on the other hand there is very little you can do about it. There is very little a cop can do to protect themselves either from another citizen caring one; so the incentive is for everyone to be polite and respectful. As you never know who if anyone will survive and exchange of fire if it came to it.
I really think would peace might be enhanced if nukes were distributed more widely. Don't get me wrong I am still anti-proliferation. You still don't want this stuff landing in the hands of non-state actors or states likely to topple from the inside, but Iran having the bomb for example would not need to change the regional power structure; if we chose to arm the others. It might end some of the saber rattling and provocations. Look and India-Pakistan. You can't say really relations have gotten worse since they went nuclear. While they still are not friendly they do maintain mostly civil diplomatic ties, now.
Right and I think this is an important aspect to the problem here.
There is simply no substitute for having all your I's dotted and T's cross with large integrated systems like this. This is a culture problem not a individual screwed up problem. If you just fire the guy, there will be lots of awareness but the take away most of your remaining people will get is "don't forget to check the certificate expiry dates, that'll get you canned" many of them traumatized by the experience will dutifully check certificate dates for the rest of their careers but this will do nothing to prevent your next major outage; because that will almost certainly be the result of something else.
Everyone is pushing this vitalization + "dev ops" + management/monitoring is going to let us have one admin do what was once the work of ten. The fact is it just does not work like that. Management/monitoring like Microsoft Mom for example requires you to have all the failure modes identified and the scripts written to check conditions like expiry dates and trigger the alerts. Unless everyone is really good about all the routine maintenance tasks in there is won't help with something like this. That takes time you ONE admin has not got and discipline that breaks down when someone is overworked.
The "dev ops" and vitalization stuff is all great in terms of how much can be automated. Someone has to develop that automation though. Your ONE guy does not have time to build and test his generic deployment scrip when you promised your customers you'd have their infrastructure stood up last week.
It comes down to the business recognizing its important to have good people, enough people, and willingness to invest in making sure the job is done correctly and completely every time, and that documentation is maintained and in a way everyone knows how to use it. Check lists need to be kept and followed etc. IT got away from plant engineering style discipline when hardware got cheap. You know longer had to worry about that one computer you had failing. As we move back to more consolidated and integrated solutions; management is going to have to get used to the idea again that there is some people time investment that must be made. Its great you can save on power, cooling equipment, and headcount but you can't cut headcount to far because the more consolidated you get the less you can afford for anything to go wrong so it all must be check, doubled checked, and checked again just to be sure. This is if you do it yourself or if you pay your cloud provider to do it. Either way cloud services so far have been mostly a race to the bottom and that is going to cause some to have to learn some very painful lessons if the industry remains on its current trajectory.
To be fair, Obama's approach has been much more effective than GWB so far. I would like to see our forces completely withdrawn from the region and replaced by small specialized forces to hunt down the actual terrorists (yes, even using drones) while NOT shooting up the countryside and generally convincing common people that the terrorists are right about us.
Based on exactly what?
It was the troop surge that worked. Bush pretty much started with the small force go after high value targets strategy we are using now and it failed then. It turned out you had to establish basic control and security before you could move to a precise targeting strategy. To my knowledge none of our military strategists and commanders have gone on record suggesting these strategies would have been viable without doing the surge and many have cautioned against over dependance on special operations. In other words people who make a living studding this stuff still see it as a support role.
The drone program is by many accounts hurting Al Qaeda quite badly but is by many accounts harming lots of civilians, and further endangering the stability of already tenuous various states like Pakistan and Yemen. This may be causing a general break down of society in places as people fear going out because of the drones, seeding the idea their government is not sovereign and dose not represent them but is a US puppet breading contempt for the law by the people there, and finally creating more generalized hatred of the USA. Its likely we are attacking the hydra with sword here, cutting off the Al Qaeda heads in the fashion is growing the terrorists of tomorrow.
Its still very unclear the Federal government in Afghanistan can survive after we complete the troop withdrawal. The Iraqi government slowly moves from one corruption scandal to the next; ever since we left (and somewhat before we did too).
We more or less left the Egyptian public hung out to dry while their society becomes a military dictatorship at worst, one election than permanent theocracy probably, or just another failed state situation. I am not sure what we could have or should have done but what we have done by simply continuing to prop up the military with foreign aide and weapons there is morally bankrupt on all kinds of levels. We should have at the vary lease been "hands off until you all work it out." unless we could come up with something better.
Libya is a slow moving disaster as well. I am not referring to the embassy in Benghazi either, but to the fact that the government is not able to provide basic security to people living there. Various militia groups are the 'law' in many parts; and they don't have a great human rights record. Its not unlikely that Libya will also become a failed state.
All in all I don't see much out there suggesting the quality of life has improved for people living in those regions, basic justice and human rights are not be better protected, American influence in the region has not been enhanced, popular opinion of the USA is not much better. All in all I don't Obama's foreign policy as being much different than Bush's except in the most superficial use of language; and in general no more or less successful. You can argue we only got into some of these messes because of Bush and I will partly concede that point; but I think the Libya intervention and the general aggressive expansion of the drone program servers as a strong indicator that Obama in actually not any less hawkish. Had he been in the Oval Office on Sept 11th I really have strong doubts our national response would have been a whole lot different.
A better question would be: "Why haven't all the people who wrote the laws that make this possible (and legal) been hanged for their deliberate and treasonous jepordization of our food supply?"
I find it personally hypocritical for a slashdotter to pirate software while getting paid writting software from paying customers and then getting angry at GPL copyright violations.
What the grandparent does not understand is we live in a society; where you don't always get to make the rules. There is nothing wrong with things should be different and at the same time playing the current rules to your own maximized advantage. You don't get a choice about not following them when they are detrimental to you after all.
Sometimes you don't get your way all the ballot box or in the halls of the legislature. You must take your lumps when that happens, might as well enjoy the sugar too; you'll be paying for it anyway.
What it comes down to is the those business created brand loyalty thru their marketing efforts. The game studios created lots of series loyalty but not much brand loyalty. Its always easier to blame some external force like "the used market" for ones own failures; then it is to own them. The sad fact is this leads to trying to solve the wrong problems.
Do you know anybody who buys games because Ubisoft made it? Exactly. People might by every "Assassin's Creed" or whatever I would wager a good portion of them could not even name the publisher. On the other hand Ford and Rolex understand its better to bring you into the fold. Maybe you buy a used car or used watch this time; but some day you will likely want to own a new one and might have the economic resources to do it. They understand there is value in having you like owning a Ford or like owning a Rolex now; even if they don't get to sell it to you this time.
They gaming industry screw up. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have it right they have built some loyalty to their brand. The pure software players are hanging themselves. They are turning themselves into a commodity; and missing an opportunity to market themselves down market. The more unware the customers become of who the third party publishers are the more control the three gatekeepers get. Right now Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are the market makers, but a big publishing house can steer their fate buy starving a platform for good AAA titles. Moving more people into the causal space due to lack of affordable AAA titles is the big three's dream, because they can contract anyone to make those titles.
You all have a short memory. Its not the new gamers or even the new hardcore games that have a problem. There were exactly two industries that signaled the public at large was willing to accept degraded use rights to products in the name on content protection. Games and home video.
This goes back to the 80's, when games came with silly little start up questions like "what is the third word on page 20 of the manual." Games usually had substantial dead tree manuals at the time. Then the started coming with little card board decoder rings and such. After that clever ideas like key disk showed up, were the disk they sent had specific problems on some sectors, or perhaps the FAT had been molested in some unique way; so that in theory if you copied it the problems would not be there. So you had to insert this special broken disk every time you wanted to play; even if you had allocated some of your precious 40meg hard disk to it.
Then everyone mindless bought VHS tapes with macro-vision on them that were difficult to duplicate and had an inferior quality as well; without complaint.
The sad fact is most people don't think about this stuff or care. I am not sure what is to be done about it, but considering all the folks clamoring to get hold of the next walled garden device, be it a phone, game console, whatever and at the same time letting facebook be their personal information manager I think the ship has perhaps sailed a long time ago.
It's a war toy, somewhat more up to date than the war toys I played with as a kid, but cap-guns, soldier action figures, grenades, bazookas, model jet fighters, tanks, and battleships... I played with all of these. There's nothing new about this.
There is something new here. All of the real life analogs of the toys you listed require the operators of those things to put themselves in harms way. We could have a separate discussion about if its a good idea to glorify war in the eyes of our children through play or not but there is something different about a drone.
Do we want to teach our children the good guys kill from far away and attack enemies who have no capability to do them any immediate harm?
Children are not going understand the other legal and ethical questions around drones like why all the adults are having intense discussions about what "immediate" means and banding around fancy bullshit terms like "kinetic military action", but they can and will understand the basic question. That is a very different message and may shape early thinking differently than that cap gun where their imaginary enemy is probably shooting back.
30 Rock would have run with it.
The character set limitations are really platform issues not issues with COBOL or even in most cases the programs written it in. Honestly I have never understood all the COBOL hate. Sure it fails to deliver on its promises of letting business folks write code without any domain specific training in software develop. Just like every other language that has approached that challenge mostly BASIC or Object BASIC dialects.
That said I'd be actually pretty surprised if a good C/C++/Java/Ruby/Python/PHP/whatever guy could put together a program to do something like print a fifty million decent looking telephone bill statements with accurate summary lines for transaction-data as quickly as a COBOL programer of similar skill and experience can. There really are some problems COBOL solves well. Bulk record processing and account reconciliation is one of those things because that was pretty much THE commercial and military logistics application for computers in the LATE 40's when COBOL was born. COBOL as you might expect is quite fit for that application.
Its when people start trying to do interactive applications in COBOL be it CICS or web or whatever it gets silly and forced. It brings to mind various analogies about square pegs for round holes, and threaded fasteners to be deployed by hammer. Its sorta like how people tried to CGI applications in C for a long time in the webs early days. Sure it worked and if C was all you knew I suppose you could get the job done. C is good at many things, large amounts of string manipulation is not one of them; but its something you need for a dynamic website. Does that make C a bad tool, no, it just means its the wrong application for it.
No IBM brought us JCL. So after writing you "business friendly" COBOL program. It was certain you would still need to find a wizard of the highest order to run it. Only he could convince the Gods Zeek and Zed to turn your program into a living process instead of some mere bytes on on a virtual tape somewhere
I don't have a problem with being designated a 'civilian' because I am one. I think the problem is that many in our police forces seem themselves as something else; and that is further aggravated by their idea that something else is above 'civilian'
I think this is actually a serious issue; that needs to be looked at in the "gun control" debate. Police and frankly any not uniform military, such as ATF, FBI, etc. I think ought to be restricted from possessing (accept as evidence) any weapon the general public is restricted from owning.
There should be no such thing as a SWAT team. Seriously if special weapons and tactics are required to resolve a situation its not something local PD should be dealing with. It should be considered a rebellion and the Governor should be calling up the Gaurd to handle it. I wonder how many suspects that could be apprehended are killed because cops want to go in guns blazing and can because they have the hardware to do it?
I also think the relationship between the public and police would be improve by finding a new equilibrium where cops have to assume anyone they are harassing is likely to be as well armed as they are.
Military weapons should be for military forces, not policing force.
First of let me state that all the known facts indicate this guy is a murdering lunatic nothing more and nothing less.
Still in the hypothetically speaking if he or someone one were fighting a government than I would argue that civilian police forces, and government personnel and their families could be considered legitimate targets. That might even include people in roles like teacher or librarian if they are spreading pro government propaganda. These people would be collaborators.
You have to demoralize and terrify when you are fighting a better organized and superior force. We attacked the families of British and Hessian officers during our revolution. What exactly do you think Washington was crossing the Delaware to do on the 25th of December?