4) pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off
This is second hand, but I had friends who worked on the Iridium project, and from what I understand all the Iridium satellites were equipped with a system to take them out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere at the end of life. In fact, I believe that the satellites will deorbit automatically if they loose contact with ground for a certain period of time. I recall this was a concern on a couple of occasions because right after launch they lost contact.
I wont go into excess detail (which, by itself, would be a violation of our security rules) but suffice it to say that if you wanted to steal and get data off an IRS laptop, you'd have to mug the user, get their password list, know their internal ID (which no one writes down because we use it constantly) then mug a different person with local machine administrator credentials, get logons and passwords from that person, then know exactly where to type all of them in without making more than three mistakes to lock up the machine.
What if I find a disenfranchised employee, and offer money?
I have suggested many times that entire departments need to be fired, halved and hire new employees with 20% raises. There is so much bloat in personnel that it is insane, most of the shops have one guy doing the work for 10 people anyway.
You can say this about most IT shops, not just government.
I've been in the Java "Enterprise" domain for nearly ten years now. I first used BEA's weblogics back in 1999 (not even sure if it was owned by BEA yet). It was a good product, respected standards, and seemed to be development friendly. I considered it the best servlet engine at the time.
A couple of years ago I did a contract gig for a fortune 500 company that wanted to create corporate internal and external web portals. The company purchased the entire BEA middleware stack from Weblogics to Portal to Integration. The contract was several million dollars, with a support contract of several hundred thousand dollars a year. What a nightmare, we were working on weblogics 8.X using their workshop IDE (I called it Workswap), at the time you couldn't develop BEA Portal apps in any other IDE. The entire stack was buggy, and unreliable, including the IDE. However, workshop was pretty, and the BEA reps enjoyed demonstrating to the managers how simple it was to visually drop down a portlet, or a webservice, or whatever, and pow! Enterprise ready. The reality of course was much different. I decided then that BEA stopped being a developers company, and became a marketers company. Don't get me wrong, they are not the first, and will probably make bundles of money for a time, but it won't last.
These days I don't see any reason to purchase middle ware in the Java domain. You could make an argument for buying specialized tools or libraries, but not the big heavy applications servers with all the additional cruft that these companies make big money from. I see no advantage these products provide over what is freely available, well established, and standards based. The middle ware companies will preach support, and this strikes a chord with some managers, but it a complete fallacy. I've seen the valuable time of a company's senior developers wasted jumping through the hoops of a support process only to get some patch that works around a bug in the product. It would have taken much less time for the same developers to have been able to simple look at the source, and work the problem themselves. If BEA was smart they would sell now.
Every night netflix.com goes through a few hours of downtime for maintenance
Netflix, a company that makes its living from the netflix.com website, A website that also consistently gets high satisfaction ratings from independent surveys, goes down for a "few" hours EVERY night.. I don't think so.
Netflix went down Monday evening, and just came back up at about 3:45 pacific time. The site was down for a good part of 24 hours! It would be interesting if Netflix shared a postmortem on this event with the public since obviously it was a major failure for a dot com business.
To be fair, who hasn't had an issue where you were SURE it wasn't one thing, when it actually was. I would imagine most of you, like me, have seen issues where you still can't explain how you fixed it.
To be fair, who hasn't had someone blame you, publicly, for a problem that wasn't well understood yet, just to find out later it had nothing to do with you.
The criticism is not for making a mistake, we all do it... But rather for prematurely assigning blame. Saying in so many words, I know it can't be Cisco, the iphone is the only logical conclusion, and Apple isn't cooperating! sniff sniff... smells like agenda.
While many of us know this is silly, many people believe it, and are victimized because of it.
I have a question: Does this statement apply to religion?
Yes, I believe it does, except I would change the phrasing slightly to some of us know this is silly. However, I think most religious people would also agree with this statement since there are many other religions in the world that are different from their own, and therefore must be wrong. I'm probably getting off topic now...
There's a team of online bloggers trying to debunk a magician? Don't they have anything better to do? Come on, some people want to believe in magic, let them. Everyone else knows it's all slight of hand.
Some people also want to believe that that they can make millions from helping out an exiled Nigerian dissident through email. Everyone else knows it's a scam.
Geller does not claim to be a magician, he claims to actually posses mental powers. While many of us know this is silly, many people believe it, and are victimized because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
4) pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off
This is second hand, but I had friends who worked on the Iridium project, and from what I understand all the Iridium satellites were equipped with a system to take them out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere at the end of life. In fact, I believe that the satellites will deorbit automatically if they loose contact with ground for a certain period of time. I recall this was a concern on a couple of occasions because right after launch they lost contact.
What are all these servers used for?
I wont go into excess detail (which, by itself, would be a violation of our security rules) but suffice it to say that if you wanted to steal and get data off an IRS laptop, you'd have to mug the user, get their password list, know their internal ID (which no one writes down because we use it constantly) then mug a different person with local machine administrator credentials, get logons and passwords from that person, then know exactly where to type all of them in without making more than three mistakes to lock up the machine.
What if I find a disenfranchised employee, and offer money?
I have suggested many times that entire departments need to be fired, halved and hire new employees with 20% raises. There is so much bloat in personnel that it is insane, most of the shops have one guy doing the work for 10 people anyway.
You can say this about most IT shops, not just government.
I've been in the Java "Enterprise" domain for nearly ten years now. I first used BEA's weblogics back in 1999 (not even sure if it was owned by BEA yet). It was a good product, respected standards, and seemed to be development friendly. I considered it the best servlet engine at the time.
A couple of years ago I did a contract gig for a fortune 500 company that wanted to create corporate internal and external web portals. The company purchased the entire BEA middleware stack from Weblogics to Portal to Integration. The contract was several million dollars, with a support contract of several hundred thousand dollars a year. What a nightmare, we were working on weblogics 8.X using their workshop IDE (I called it Workswap), at the time you couldn't develop BEA Portal apps in any other IDE. The entire stack was buggy, and unreliable, including the IDE. However, workshop was pretty, and the BEA reps enjoyed demonstrating to the managers how simple it was to visually drop down a portlet, or a webservice, or whatever, and pow! Enterprise ready. The reality of course was much different. I decided then that BEA stopped being a developers company, and became a marketers company. Don't get me wrong, they are not the first, and will probably make bundles of money for a time, but it won't last.
These days I don't see any reason to purchase middle ware in the Java domain. You could make an argument for buying specialized tools or libraries, but not the big heavy applications servers with all the additional cruft that these companies make big money from. I see no advantage these products provide over what is freely available, well established, and standards based. The middle ware companies will preach support, and this strikes a chord with some managers, but it a complete fallacy. I've seen the valuable time of a company's senior developers wasted jumping through the hoops of a support process only to get some patch that works around a bug in the product. It would have taken much less time for the same developers to have been able to simple look at the source, and work the problem themselves. If BEA was smart they would sell now.
Netflix went down Monday evening, and just came back up at about 3:45 pacific time. The site was down for a good part of 24 hours! It would be interesting if Netflix shared a postmortem on this event with the public since obviously it was a major failure for a dot com business.
The criticism is not for making a mistake, we all do it... But rather for prematurely assigning blame. Saying in so many words, I know it can't be Cisco, the iphone is the only logical conclusion, and Apple isn't cooperating! sniff sniff... smells like agenda.
Geller does not claim to be a magician, he claims to actually posses mental powers. While many of us know this is silly, many people believe it, and are victimized because of it.