It's likely that there was nothing that Bush could have done on 9/11. But when he received the first news of it he didn't know that. Surely he should have as a matter of extreme urgency taken steps to find out as much about the situation as possible and whether there was anything he could do.
This is so clearly NOT an insult to the USA. If anything, you people should be proud that your government has the courage to open things up to external scrutiny.
I think that a democracy should welcome independent observers at ALL elections. Since there were a lot of complaints and concerns about your previous presidential election then you should be actively encouraging close inspection of your procedures, hopefully to demonstrate to US voters that any problems have been fixed.
This is not for our, (rest of the world) benefit - personally I'm happy for you to manage/mismanage things however you see fit - but for your own.
In order to hinder any preventative measures, I predict that cyber-terrorists, in conjunction with conventional terrorists and the Russain mafia may or may not lunch a concerted campaign of assasination on security analysts.
This may or may not go un-noticed by the rest of us.
I always find it re-assuring that just about ALL politicians, corporations and special-interest groups seem to dislike the BBC's news programmes; particularly Radio 4's "Today" and "PM", and "Newsnight" and "Panorama" on the TV. They must be doing something right!
IBM's AIX boxes have been using Power/PowerPC chips since the very beginning.
Anything which came from the SVR4 source would be in AIX5L. But the imnportant stuff in AIX 5 - i.e. over and above AIX 4 - is all hardware related and pretty much has to have been IBM's own work.
There's the 64-bit kernel; RSCT, (which actually originated before AIX 5); support for the Power4 and Power5 chips; LPAR support; loads of recent virtualization stuff in AIX 5.3. I really can't see what SystemV could have done to help with this.
There was some talk in the Forbes article of the significant increase in IBM's share of UNIX servers, but again that's all hardware related. Provided the OS is adequate, very few people reallky care what particular flavour of UNIX it is. They just want powerful, reliable hardware at a good price. IBM have been supplying that, so they;'ve shifted a lot of boxes.
The French do a much better job of doing away with Gatsos etc, I believe. Some of them get taken out in the UK, but it's not terribly common where I live (Gloucestershire). Still: common enough that I do see damaged cameras a couple of times a year.
I don't think anyone is saying that electronic patient records are inherently a bad thing. But this particular project has made no efforts to show how the new systems will improve matters: it's just "Oh, it'll all be computerised so that must be good".
There's also been very little attention paid to the very real risks of security. We're not talking about skilled crackers getting in from outside, but people inside having far too much access to information they don't need, and being able to pass that on to other people without any checks.
Just to make matters worse, the UK health services have an especially poor record when it comes to large IS projects. This one looks like costing an enormous amount of money, to provide something which isn't actually any better for the medical staff than the existing system and removes any trace of patient confidentiality.
There's obviously a lot of momentum behind DVDs and CDs. People are used to them and don't want to have to change to a new format, (although the record companies would love that).
I don't think a new physical format is at all likely - ever! The replacement for pre-recorded CDs and DVDs will be your computer, and/or whatever storage medium you fancy. The important thing will be the file format and the software to play it. Store it on DVD if you want, or flash memory, or have it on some Internet server to download whenever you want it: whatever's convenient at the time.
The technology for this is available now, (subject to high-bandwidth network access being rolled out to everybody). The difficulty is with the business model and the licensing to support it, and perhaps robust but fair DRM. Given what we've seen from the RIAA and their ilk so far, that's going to take some time to resolve. But I'd think ten years would be enough to at least make a start on it.
With music, we've gone from file-sharing to commercial downloads in less than a decade. Movies are just getting started on that road.
Even if this was true, Sharia law prescribes the death penalty for appostates. Even claiming to convert to the Church of the Red Breast would get the scammer a stoning so I doubt he'd try to use it.
There are all sorts of laws which either get abused or just don't work the way they're supposed to. Almost anything relating to technology, for a start!
I wonder if a "BetaLaw" would be possible? Pass it as usual but then after a set period - two years, perhaps - it has to go through again, with the opportunity to make revisions or junk it entirely.
I think you've highlighted why this is likely to back-fire on StorageTek. It is quite easy to see the lock-in to vendor servicing being a restrictive practice. If they insist on using DMCA, they may be obliged to sell products where DMCA cannot apply. i.e. Open up their firmware.
At the least, they're going to be left with a nasty mess with loads of different firmware versions for different legal regimes.
Commercial kit is likely to be SCSI attached (of some sort), or fibre, for the real high-end stuff. Worth bearing in mind if you're looking for a cheap backup solution: the cost of an extra SCSI card could bump the price up significantly.
I've got 20 years of mistakes in various environments. Fortunately, few of them really serious. Things like powering off the wrong server, ("an excellent test of the HA system"), or re-wiring the external disks so that they weren't actually connected to ANY server, (the wonders of SSA).
The worst mistake I ever made was back in my mainframe days. We had a test partition which was a complete copy of a production partition. In order to do some regression testing, I recorded a full days worth of activity in the production TP sysem (CICS), ready to be played back in the test partition. Unfortunately, I got interrupted by a 'phone call and then in a bit of a rush I replayed the entire workload in the production system. We had to shut it all down and lost nearly a full days work.
The most boneheaded mistake I've witnessed - fortunately I wasn't responsible for this - was when we had a small fire at one of our sites. Nothing serious, but it took out the main power supply. Everything cut over to the UPS without problems, though. Lots of alarms going off in the machine room, so someone walks through to switch them off, and mistakenly hits the emergency cut-off switch for the UPS. Took us about six hours to get everything back up again and fix all the corrupt filesystems.
Well, so did I but I'm pretty happy with it. Most recently, my Inspiron survived having hald a bowl of cereal poured over it whilst I was reading Usenet.
A couple of days in the airing cupboard and it's OK, although it's a bit sticky and I still haven't gotten all of the bits of grain out of the keyboard.
I don't wish to seem petty, but the examples you give are NOT software. They're mathematical algorithms which could be implemented in software if you wanted. Or you could build dedicated hardware to do it, or you could work it all out by hand, (in theory), or anything else you fancy.
BT have acted very slowly on DSL and local-loop unbundling, but that's because they didn't want to make it easy for their competitors, not because they were incapable of doing it. (Not helped by OfTel being so wimpish.)
They have some fairly smart people working for them so I think there's a fair chance of of them succeeding with a project that they actually want to do.
I agree. When people look ahead a few hundred years they're hailed as long-term visionaries. But "long term" as far as the Earth is concerned is a few hundred MILLION years. Short of the cold-wars worst thermonuclear nightmares it's hard to imagine we can have a truly lasting effect on our planet. In a million years we'll be long gone; in a billion we'll have been replaced by a new intellignet life-form evolved from a Chihuahua.
In a lot of industries, a significant proportion of the pay packet comes from overtime. Many employees would suffer immensely if this were denied to them.
I believe that there are some industries where failure to "volunteer" for overtime will have a deleterious effect on ones job prospects. Stagecoach is one well known/rumoured example. (For the non-UK readers: They're a bus company, which got started when a lot of municpal bus companies were privatised some years ago. I think they have interests in some train operating companies as well. Their wages are shit and their contracts require them to provide late bus services and the like.)
Personally I'm very carefull about not holding the secure doors open for anyone who I don't personally know, or who doesn't have an ID-badge in clear sight.
In some of our offices we have mechanical ways of preventing this, with revolving doors/turnstiles which only let one person through, so every individual has to display their badge. Always in plain view of a security person so that one person doesn't badge a bunch of others through one at a time.
Somewhat extreme, perhaps, but we've had plenty of cases of people walking in and wondering around the buildings, looking for unattended laptops.
In one of our sites it became a safety issue after a break-in overnight. The shift operators were quite understandably uncomfortable with the idea of thieves roaming the building late at night when they were the only legitimate people there, and in an area packed with valuable computer equipement to boot.
I find that hard to believe. In these days of monitoring would anyone really be stupid enough to use a compasny email account if they were involved in anything illegal?
I'm increasingly unsure of the point of SPAM - at least, the sort of stuff I see.
Plenty of people discard the stuff immediately, and SPAM companies have responded by putting more and more bizarre subjects, weird headers and anything else they can think of, just so that their mail threads its way through my filters and makes its way to my inbox.
Where I spot it as SPAM and delete it unread.
Just what is the fucking point?
They'd be better off putting a clearly recognisable flag in the subject or headers. Anyone who doesn't want it can discard it, those strange individuals who like the stuff can leave it alone.
Sure: there'd still be the bandwidth issue but I bet most people wouldn't care a great deal if there was a simple way of filtering it out.
I think the travel time issue - mentioned by many people - is a bit over-stated.
If you want to make a single, ad hioc query then it's very unlikely that the library will be the quickest option.
However, if you're expecting to do extensive research - a writer working on a new book, perhaps - you might choose to work in a good library. Karl Marx, for example, did a lot of his writing in the British Library. Apart from being a nice quiet place free from distractions it gave him access to extensive research resources.
I used the library extensively some years ago when unemplyed and hunting for work. There were various considerations - no distractions; easier to discipline myself - but one of them was for the books and periodicals. It was easy to find out what jobs were available and to research the companies offerring them - always a good idea when applying for a job.
More likely, you're in the library, you don't waste your time with the catalogue but simply pull the big red book out of the reference section and flip to the "M"s.
For this sort of thing an understanding of the contents of soime general reference works is invlauable. Just like it helps to know about the CIA World Factbook and various other useful web sites.
Free Windows wouldn't make any difference. The articel pointed out that the software costs weren't an issue in the first place. Ease of management might be addressed by WindowsXP, but the other big factor, being able to continue using older PCs, would be blown away.
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It's likely that there was nothing that Bush could have done on 9/11. But when he received the first news of it he didn't know that. Surely he should have as a matter of extreme urgency taken steps to find out as much about the situation as possible and whether there was anything he could do.
This is so clearly NOT an insult to the USA. If anything, you people should be proud that your government has the courage to open things up to external scrutiny.
I think that a democracy should welcome independent observers at ALL elections. Since there were a lot of complaints and concerns about your previous presidential election then you should be actively encouraging close inspection of your procedures, hopefully to demonstrate to US voters that any problems have been fixed.
This is not for our, (rest of the world) benefit - personally I'm happy for you to manage/mismanage things however you see fit - but for your own.
In order to hinder any preventative measures, I predict that cyber-terrorists, in conjunction with conventional terrorists and the Russain mafia may or may not lunch a concerted campaign of assasination on security analysts.
This may or may not go un-noticed by the rest of us.
I always find it re-assuring that just about ALL politicians, corporations and special-interest groups seem to dislike the BBC's news programmes; particularly Radio 4's "Today" and "PM", and "Newsnight" and "Panorama" on the TV. They must be doing something right!
IBM's AIX boxes have been using Power/PowerPC chips since the very beginning.
Anything which came from the SVR4 source would be in AIX5L. But the imnportant stuff in AIX 5 - i.e. over and above AIX 4 - is all hardware related and pretty much has to have been IBM's own work.
There's the 64-bit kernel; RSCT, (which actually originated before AIX 5); support for the Power4 and Power5 chips; LPAR support; loads of recent virtualization stuff in AIX 5.3. I really can't see what SystemV could have done to help with this.
There was some talk in the Forbes article of the significant increase in IBM's share of UNIX servers, but again that's all hardware related. Provided the OS is adequate, very few people reallky care what particular flavour of UNIX it is. They just want powerful, reliable hardware at a good price. IBM have been supplying that, so they;'ve shifted a lot of boxes.
The French do a much better job of doing away with Gatsos etc, I believe. Some of them get taken out in the UK, but it's not terribly common where I live (Gloucestershire). Still: common enough that I do see damaged cameras a couple of times a year.
I don't think anyone is saying that electronic patient records are inherently a bad thing. But this particular project has made no efforts to show how the new systems will improve matters: it's just "Oh, it'll all be computerised so that must be good".
There's also been very little attention paid to the very real risks of security. We're not talking about skilled crackers getting in from outside, but people inside having far too much access to information they don't need, and being able to pass that on to other people without any checks.
Just to make matters worse, the UK health services have an especially poor record when it comes to large IS projects. This one looks like costing an enormous amount of money, to provide something which isn't actually any better for the medical staff than the existing system and removes any trace of patient confidentiality.
There's obviously a lot of momentum behind DVDs and CDs. People are used to them and don't want to have to change to a new format, (although the record companies would love that).
I don't think a new physical format is at all likely - ever! The replacement for pre-recorded CDs and DVDs will be your computer, and/or whatever storage medium you fancy. The important thing will be the file format and the software to play it. Store it on DVD if you want, or flash memory, or have it on some Internet server to download whenever you want it: whatever's convenient at the time.
The technology for this is available now, (subject to high-bandwidth network access being rolled out to everybody). The difficulty is with the business model and the licensing to support it, and perhaps robust but fair DRM. Given what we've seen from the RIAA and their ilk so far, that's going to take some time to resolve. But I'd think ten years would be enough to at least make a start on it.
With music, we've gone from file-sharing to commercial downloads in less than a decade. Movies are just getting started on that road.
Even if this was true, Sharia law prescribes the death penalty for appostates. Even claiming to convert to the Church of the Red Breast would get the scammer a stoning so I doubt he'd try to use it.
There are all sorts of laws which either get abused or just don't work the way they're supposed to. Almost anything relating to technology, for a start!
I wonder if a "BetaLaw" would be possible? Pass it as usual but then after a set period - two years, perhaps - it has to go through again, with the opportunity to make revisions or junk it entirely.
I think you've highlighted why this is likely to back-fire on StorageTek. It is quite easy to see the lock-in to vendor servicing being a restrictive practice. If they insist on using DMCA, they may be obliged to sell products where DMCA cannot apply. i.e. Open up their firmware.
At the least, they're going to be left with a nasty mess with loads of different firmware versions for different legal regimes.
Commercial kit is likely to be SCSI attached (of some sort), or fibre, for the real high-end stuff. Worth bearing in mind if you're looking for a cheap backup solution: the cost of an extra SCSI card could bump the price up significantly.
I've got 20 years of mistakes in various environments. Fortunately, few of them really serious. Things like powering off the wrong server, ("an excellent test of the HA system"), or re-wiring the external disks so that they weren't actually connected to ANY server, (the wonders of SSA).
The worst mistake I ever made was back in my mainframe days. We had a test partition which was a complete copy of a production partition. In order to do some regression testing, I recorded a full days worth of activity in the production TP sysem (CICS), ready to be played back in the test partition. Unfortunately, I got interrupted by a 'phone call and then in a bit of a rush I replayed the entire workload in the production system. We had to shut it all down and lost nearly a full days work.
The most boneheaded mistake I've witnessed - fortunately I wasn't responsible for this - was when we had a small fire at one of our sites. Nothing serious, but it took out the main power supply. Everything cut over to the UPS without problems, though. Lots of alarms going off in the machine room, so someone walks through to switch them off, and mistakenly hits the emergency cut-off switch for the UPS. Took us about six hours to get everything back up again and fix all the corrupt filesystems.
Well, so did I but I'm pretty happy with it. Most recently, my Inspiron survived having hald a bowl of cereal poured over it whilst I was reading Usenet.
A couple of days in the airing cupboard and it's OK, although it's a bit sticky and I still haven't gotten all of the bits of grain out of the keyboard.
I don't wish to seem petty, but the examples you give are NOT software. They're mathematical algorithms which could be implemented in software if you wanted. Or you could build dedicated hardware to do it, or you could work it all out by hand, (in theory), or anything else you fancy.
I don't entirely agree.
BT have acted very slowly on DSL and local-loop unbundling, but that's because they didn't want to make it easy for their competitors, not because they were incapable of doing it. (Not helped by OfTel being so wimpish.)
They have some fairly smart people working for them so I think there's a fair chance of of them succeeding with a project that they actually want to do.
I agree. When people look ahead a few hundred years they're hailed as long-term visionaries. But "long term" as far as the Earth is concerned is a few hundred MILLION years. Short of the cold-wars worst thermonuclear nightmares it's hard to imagine we can have a truly lasting effect on our planet.
In a million years we'll be long gone; in a billion we'll have been replaced by a new intellignet life-form evolved from a Chihuahua.
In a lot of industries, a significant proportion of the pay packet comes from overtime. Many employees would suffer immensely if this were denied to them.
I believe that there are some industries where failure to "volunteer" for overtime will have a deleterious effect on ones job prospects. Stagecoach is one well known/rumoured example. (For the non-UK readers: They're a bus company, which got started when a lot of municpal bus companies were privatised some years ago. I think they have interests in some train operating companies as well. Their wages are shit and their contracts require them to provide late bus services and the like.)
Personally I'm very carefull about not holding the secure doors open for anyone who I don't personally know, or who doesn't have an ID-badge in clear sight.
In some of our offices we have mechanical ways of preventing this, with revolving doors/turnstiles which only let one person through, so every individual has to display their badge. Always in plain view of a security person so that one person doesn't badge a bunch of others through one at a time.
Somewhat extreme, perhaps, but we've had plenty of cases of people walking in and wondering around the buildings, looking for unattended laptops.
In one of our sites it became a safety issue after a break-in overnight. The shift operators were quite understandably uncomfortable with the idea of thieves roaming the building late at night when they were the only legitimate people there, and in an area packed with valuable computer equipement to boot.
I find that hard to believe. In these days of monitoring would anyone really be stupid enough to use a compasny email account if they were involved in anything illegal?
I'm increasingly unsure of the point of SPAM - at least, the sort of stuff I see.
Plenty of people discard the stuff immediately, and SPAM companies have responded by putting more and more bizarre subjects, weird headers and anything else they can think of, just so that their mail threads its way through my filters and makes its way to my inbox.
Where I spot it as SPAM and delete it unread.
Just what is the fucking point?
They'd be better off putting a clearly recognisable flag in the subject or headers. Anyone who doesn't want it can discard it, those strange individuals who like the stuff can leave it alone.
Sure: there'd still be the bandwidth issue but I bet most people wouldn't care a great deal if there was a simple way of filtering it out.
If I'm not in a hurry for an answer then my third port of call - after my own reference books and Google - is often Usenet.
Of course, some care is needed. I've known people to give detailed, technical answers which are complete nonsense.
I think the travel time issue - mentioned by many people - is a bit over-stated.
If you want to make a single, ad hioc query then it's very unlikely that the library will be the quickest option.
However, if you're expecting to do extensive research - a writer working on a new book, perhaps - you might choose to work in a good library. Karl Marx, for example, did a lot of his writing in the British Library. Apart from being a nice quiet place free from distractions it gave him access to extensive research resources.
I used the library extensively some years ago when unemplyed and hunting for work. There were various considerations - no distractions; easier to discipline myself - but one of them was for the books and periodicals. It was easy to find out what jobs were available and to research the companies offerring them - always a good idea when applying for a job.
More likely, you're in the library, you don't waste your time with the catalogue but simply pull the big red book out of the reference section and flip to the "M"s.
For this sort of thing an understanding of the contents of soime general reference works is invlauable. Just like it helps to know about the CIA World Factbook and various other useful web sites.
Free Windows wouldn't make any difference. The articel pointed out that the software costs weren't an issue in the first place. Ease of management might be addressed by WindowsXP, but the other big factor, being able to continue using older PCs, would be blown away.