OK, Let's say you were running ZDnet when the decision came on whether to pursue this deal.
Option 1: Say no because morally you don't feel right about supporting censorship. Bzzzz, you are now being personally sued for not looking after the best interests of your shareholders (which by law, is limited to financial concerns). You will also likely get fired and replaced by a CEO who will do the deal and thank his lucky stars that he got the opportunity to be promoted because his prior boss had a conscience. So, you lose your job and deal gets done anyway. Great work.
Option 2: Do the deal. Unless you can phrase your objections to the deal in financial terms, you really don't have any other option. Really.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that: a) companies themselves are neither bad nor good and it makes zero sense to demonize any of them for pursuing shareholder interests b) the ceo's of these companies shouldn't be blamed for the choices either (if they should be blamed for anything, it is for accepting a job in the first place after being informed by their lawyer about the legal requirements for pursuing shareholder interests.)
If we want to stop these type of things from happening, than what we really need to be doing is finding a way to help, not hurt, executives of these companies. Change laws so it is harder to sue them for considering anything other than financial aspects in decisions. Of course, the problem is that it is very hard to determine how to do this right. If you give the CEO's too much leeway, the impact could be equally severe -- companies that deliver horrible financial performance year after year, which means all the families that invested end up with sharply reduced retirement savings because they lost a few critical percent of growth to their savings for every year for an extended period.
You apparently missed the the announcement from Cisco that they've released their own virtual switch with enterprise features to replace the limited capabilities in VMware's. And, yes, vmware will fully support it and it will be plug and play compatible. Furthermore, on a cluster of ESX hosts, you can have multiple Cisco supervisor appliances running for HA/management, while a Cisco switch configuration/etc is shared across all nodes and ports being logically linked to each vm, regardless of where vm is located and even during vmotion.
uhm, have you actually been keeping up with the news? Hint: You won't find it on the dailyshow/etc.
The republicans have been asking for a vote, any vote, on energy legislation this session. Instead of allowing, the democrats have been refusing to allow any amendments to legislation....and limiting all bills that come to the floor to simple yes/no votes on non-critical matters. The democrats aren't even going to try to pass critical funding bills for the fiscal year, which is really the only legislation they are required to pass during a session.
So, the story here is about more than one day or silly stunt...It's essentially about whether congress intends to do run away from its responsibilities over a sustained interval to avoid a single vote on an issue that might be embarrassing to the party in charge.
I'm not saying that whatever legislation the republicans want passed is a good idea, but when the leaders of congress turn into cowards...I think we should be honest about it.
I thought Europeans paid less in general for medicine/etc (Ensuring that the USA drug companies get high profits from the US Market and allowing US consumers to subsidize health care for the rest of the world). The papers in the USA are full of stories about European companies buying US companies on the cheap due to the current low exchange rate. Suddenly, we are all supposed to be outraged that there is a discrepancy in software pricing? If this was a big issue wouldn't whatever office that was responsible for overseeing trade between the USA and Europe be trying to fix it? Or, have they consciously made the decision to let certain things go in exchange for others? Without a comprehensive review of the situation, this article is more of a troll than a serious source of discussion.
No...you know there are at least 2-3 stories a day that come out in the blogosphere which are embarrassing to congress, political parties, government, etc...maybe 1/3 of those have a big spending component.
The only reasons this article reached the front page of slashdot is that: a) It sounded a little exotic ( e.g. wth is this military capsule) b) It was safely not exposing anything that could embarrass the party/people (democrats-obama) supported by a majority of Slashdot users c) By focusing on what appears to be stupid american military spending, the article allows the international audiance of Slashdot to get their daily dose of "feeling superior".
Yes, in an ideal world and possibly as recently as 5 years ago the editors of Slashdot wouldn't have let this story reach the main page, but the internet is maturing like all other media and you can no longer count on getting the real news from big sites like Slashdot...articles are filtered for what the international readership wants. I'm still looking for an alternative.
Being a professional means following certain rules of conduct even if you know of dysfunctions in an organization:
a) Both the network admin and the managers should have required documentation to be delivered and maintained. If the network admin couldn't trust the city to be responsible with the documentation than the project should never have been started or he should have avoided becoming involved with was apparently a doomed system. Likewise, any management that lets a new network be deployed for any reasonable amount of time w/o receiving and verifying documentation is incompetent and should be replaced. Rather than blaming either party, it seems both brought this problem about and they should just admit it. Blaming and withholding knowledge is what junior engineers do, not heads of departments or senior IT people.
b) When the owner of a system demands password access, you give it to them....end of story. No matter what. Just like any property owner can destroy what they own...it's not the technicians responsibility to stop the owner from shooting themselves in the foot. Of course, this assumes the employee warned management and argued substantially against improper acts. I mean, he could have just said....."OK, I completely disagree with letting individual A have administrative access to the network. I believe it would cause a total disaster and I've spent the last X months and Y dollars building the network, all of which may be lost by this action. In fact, I feel so strongly against this act, that if you request me to give you root passwords...I will comply but immediately quit and not be available w/o a substantial fee to fix any mess the individual creates". That would normally send appropriate warning signals to management and may have ended the matter right there.
c) Lastly, I can't make head or tails of why the admin didn't write the router/switch config files to flash. Any equipment anywhere can fail at any time. Unlike servers, routers in certain situations can not depend on having network access to retrieve configuration files if they fail...and even downtime in seconds can be horribly painful to an organization....so, I think any good cisco engineer writes config files to flash, copies the config files regularly to a backup flash, and then makes a third backup to a remote file server. If this guy wasn't doing this, than I am finding it hard to believe that he was as much an expert as is portrayed.
I think that about covers the professional side of the matter.
OK, let's analyze the arguments you make against cloud computing again:
a) centralization verse decentralization waves with Mainframe as metaphor
Mainframes were replaced by PC's because of affordability/cost. People who had very limited access to a $100K - $1M mainframe could suddenly have unlimited access to a PC for under $5K. The economics drove the change.
Let's look at the cost of an extremely minimal cloud: 3 Server Class PC's with extensive networking/ram/cpu and virtualization software ($15K), San Storage ($10K), Management Station/Software ($5K), Network Infrastructure ($10K), SysAdmin Setup ($10K?) which combined means that a small business would need to spend ~$50K to begin to have something they could work with locally to gain a minimal comparative environment to an external cloud. This doesn't include ongoing maintenance, staff time, and power/cooling/etc. I'm guessing startup time with this approach would be a minimum of 30 days and probably 90.
Or, they could start immediately with an external cloud for probably no setup fee and a few K/month with almost zero long term commitments. So, it may be true that eventually clouds will be everywhere, at the moment...the economics is strongly against it. In fact, I think most companies deploying internal clouds today are seeing costs >$100K for just the initial stage.
b) control of data
This is a much better argument. On the other hand, it can be used against any outsourcing proposal and is nothing specific to clouds. I've certainly been in situations where businesses with absolutely zero in house technical and/or security talent insist data be kept at home, even after being shown that they're already leaking it everywhere and are likely to be forced out of business by regulators because they won't trust anyone to fix the infrastructure for them or outsource the security aspects to a proven supplier. In the end, external clouds are a tools like anything else and smart businesses will make the appropriate decisions on what they can and can not deploy on them.
Note that I'm not a big fan of all the marketing of clouds at the moment. I'm also skeptical of amazon/et all, but that doesn't mean there isn't some real technical worth to the ideas that brought clouds into being or that many small and some medium sized businesses wouldn't be better served by avoiding large internal infrastructure purchases and outsourcing the responsibilities to professional MSP's/hosting facilities.
Hrm, maybe it's just my background in systems administration, but I thought cloud computing was just an inevitable combination of large scale web hosting with virtualization.
In late 1990's, businesses generally had their own internet server(s) in a colo facility.
In the early 2000's, some companies outsourced their internet infrastructure to managed service providers - other companies built their own in-house data centers to keep up with escalating application requirements.
In the mid 2000's, server sprawl started to impact practically everyone...the first 100 boxes you deploy can be somewhat interesting, but after that... you're entire admin staff (outsourced or not) ends up spending all its time dealing with faults in existing hardware rather than deploying new services...plus electricity/cooling/etc all get more expensive so everyone starts to figure out ways to avoid putting in new boxes. Poof, in comes with virtualization that's actually reliable and actually interesting when it disassociates the virtual machines from worrying about hardware at all and allows them to move from system to system w/o any need for sysadmins to press the "fail over" or "load balance" buttons.
Now, in 2007, smart marketing and product development people at amazon and elsewhere decide they can take over the web hosting industry by heavily commercializing the large virtualization clusters amazon has already deployed...and poof, wrappers to allow developers to create virtual machines and access back end San storage for the clusters are written, along with other stuff that will appeal to anyone who doesn't have a large existing infrastructure..and it's called "cloud computing". To avoid losing out, everyone else says they have their own cloud computing plans/etc...
Now, I guess this is all there and good...but I always thought that what differentiated good hosting facilities from each other was the quality of the admin staff, customer service, defined SLA's and 24/7 emergency response, comprehensive application monitoring, combined with general availability of senior system architects...all of which I don't think amazon/et al have seriously addressed. That means good managed service or web hosting companies can still succeed by either building their own large virtualization clusters and calling them clouds or rebranding and adding value on top of amazon and other cloud providers.
The history of the US during the last 40+ years has been to continually spend more money, so much so that the government has made promised social benefits over the next 10-30 years in the future that no reasonable tax rate can pay for it w/o killing off the business engine that drives its growth. Whenever a hard problem comes around, the politicians essentially argue over how much more $$ to borrow and avoid thinking about the generation down the line that will have to pay the debt. Hint: The decline of the dollar is not because we aren't taxing enough, it's that no one believes we'll pay off our debts. Instead, the treasury will just print more and more dollars each year which dilutes the value of anyone holding cash or assets priced in US dollars.
So, the solution to the problem is to stop thinking about taxes. Cut spending massively over the long term to the minimal possible, and than adjust taxes _after spending cuts are done_ just enough to pay for any leftover debt (progressively, of course). To those who object to the spending cuts, I'd argue that they are not aware of how little of the government spending actually goes to education/social services/welfare/military/nasa etc. The vast majority of our spending is not voted on by congress or in the hands of the president.....social security checks, debt interest payments, medicare, etc -- all of which are growing much faster than the country can reasonably afford to pay, even if it wanted to.
Unfortunately, the populace prefers to keep electing anyone who promises to solve their economic problems by simply spending more $$ and adjusting tax rates.
I used to think that we would just keep plodding down the same path until generations down the line got fed up with it and forced the government to slash its size and future benefits. Unfortunately, with the exception of generation X, it appears that our newest citizens prefer to make government bigger, expand long term benefits, and magically pay for it with "hope."
I'm worried what country my 5 year old son will inherit.
Can I use Spacewalk to sync my entitlements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat software products?
No. At this time, in order to be able to connect to rhn.redhat.com and satellite-sync Red Hat software content, you will need the Satellite product with an active Satellite certificate.
Now that Spacewalk is available, does this affect Satellite pricing?
Basing the Satellite product on a free & open source project will not affect the product's pricing. However, we are currently considering alternative ways of packaging the product based on studies we have done on the usage of the product as well as feedback from our valued customers.
These considerations are unrelated to the product becoming free & open source, though. If you have feedback on this please contact your Red Hat sales representative or if applicable your Technical Account Manager.
If you look at the table/figures on the FAQ page, you'll also see that RedHat is discouraging use of spacewalk for RHEL.
Furthermore, if you look at the roadmap, you'll see support for various Fedora and CentOS versions listed but nothing for RHEL.
Note that their blog entry states that they still expect all real redhat customers to continue purchasing the satellite service from RedHat rather than using this newly released software which is targeted for Fedora primarily with some support for centos. That's a little painful as I know several small businesses that pay for direct redhat updates/support and could use a local satellite install, but just can't afford the pricing and must continue to deal with the clunky/slow rhn web interface.
Professional SysAdmins don't snoop.......come on, the level of responsibility we take on for our clients or employers business requires absolute integrity, so much so that even if an employer requires me to snoop on an employee I wouldn't do it w/o a formal signed request with a limitation on what was being searched and for how long along with a justification for the search (e.g. employee suspected of passing on confidential data to competitor). Also, keep in mind that there are substantial complications that might arise when professionals find out information they don't want to know about clients or other employees.....If I find out someone is doing something unethical or illegal I maybe required to immediately report it possibly costing me a client, colleague, or job. A good sysadmin sort of has to act like a lawyer and his goal is to assist his client and only know what he needs to know.
I don't know how this study was put together, but it sounds like they weren't interviewing professionals or experienced admins.
TV hasn't really had a respectable moderate/independent American news show since the late 90's.
I think FOX started it by going way right, and then CNN decided to counter by going left.
PBS tried to stay in the center, and they still do a bunch of stuff well, but they've been tilting slightly leftward the last few years - not so much in the content of their articles as much as the selection of what to cover.
The BBC also used to be the gold standard for neutrality, but after the various scandals relating to their reporters coverage - I stopped watching. I don't think I'll start again -- BBC is naturally going to have a somewhat "europe" centered view of news, and I think USA and Europe are heading in opposite directions/perspectives.
Charlie Rose and C-SPAN are still good wonderful places to get unbiased direct reporting. More and more, this is where my tv dial is tuned. But, neither c-span or charlie rose try to cover more than a small percent of what is going on in the world.
Strangely enough, as someone who has regularly read the new york times, washington post, la times, etc the last 15 years....the only somewhat neutral comprehensive coverage of whats going on seems to be in the wall street journal print edition. I guess while business people may be more conservative in general than the populace, they still are willing to pay a premium to know really is going on, and the perspectives of all sides.
I've read all 3 of Sanderson's prior books and honestly believe they couldn't have chosen a better author to complete the series.
Regarding the concern about his ability to wrap the story up -- all of Sanderson's prior novels are essentially self contained. The books in his mistborn trilogy build on each other, but have their own major and minor plotlines which are fully resolved by the end (minus whatever single mystery is needed to be built upon in the next novel). Sanderson is about 100% opposite of Jordan in this regard.
I'd be surprised if Sanderson, building on whatever Jordan left, couldn't complete and resolve the entire series in a single final 800 page book if he wanted.
Any talk about budget discipline that doesnt include paying off the national debt and/or reforming entitlements is just pissing in the wind. So far, none of the candidates have really put any effort into the matter, so quit using financials to justify your own political opinions. Certainly, the democrats have zero credibility here.
We're spending twice as much just on the interest associated the national debt as we are on Iraq each year. And, the debt continues to grow. Going forward, if entitlements aren't under control, in a worst case scenario 75 years from now, about 95% of the entire net worth of america would have to be sold off to pay for social security, medicare, etc.
And, the numbers get worse each year we delude ourselves into thinking iraq/etc are the major financial issues.
Why should we care if you're going to travel to the US? Slashdot is tiring enough w/ all the anti-usa drivel articles to have to read more "as a european, bush sucks, usa go to hell" comments all the time. All this stuff does is make americans not want to have anything to do with europe.
That is BS. Did you know that it is actually possible for students to be in a situation where a) they are not eligible for need based financial aid b) they can not take out student loans (taking out a loan requires the parent to sign, or at least it did while I was in school and not all parents will sign) and c) some parents will not pay a dime for their childrens college education. What do you expect the student to do? Even if the student tries to legally seperate himself from his parents, the schools typically require that a court approve it and that the student wait an additional 2-3 years before receiving any AID or loans. Don't laugh. It's happened. As much as the current financial aid system may work for some people, it makes alot of assumptions.
I believe cisco gets bashed too much by the linux/open-source community. While the particular incident in this article certainly deserves condemnation, it is far from typical of the cisco experience. If we go incessently after even the best of the proprietery software/hardware companies on every little point, how does that improve the image of Linux/Open Source?
My experience with cisco: - as a system administrator in NY in the mid 90's I was suddenly placed in charge of several cisco routers handling t-1 uplinks for a small corporate datacenter. I called up Cisco, explained that I knew nothing about the equipment but I wanted to make sure I could responsibly manage them - they sent out about 3,000 pages of documentation across 10 bound volumes overnight at no charge and informed me that since at least one of the routers was under support contract, I could call them on regarding router anytime if an issue occured. I studied those manuals for a year or two and developed substantial expertise eventually getting various certifications and becoming a cisco reseller.
When I later switched to one company and then another, I purchased more cisco equipment. In the 10 years since, I've probably managed 50+ cisco routers and switches from the 800 to 7500 series and never has one failed on me in a way that I didn't think Cisco handled it well. And, given the quality and reliability of the equipment, I've never felt that I've had to overpay.
When a problem occurs that neither I or other network engineers can handle, we call up Cisco and are connected to a senior engineer there within 5-10 minutes and they have someone stay online to keep working on the problem - even if it takes 3 8hr shifts of their staff. They provide this quality of support as long as you have a single support contract with them. On their low end routers, the support contracts are only a hundred bucks or so. I can't imagine a linux sysadmin team providing that support for the price.
Furthermore, as long as you have one support contract, their entire support database is available online 24/7 including all software updates. Yes, I try to have smartnet contracts for all my equipment and my customers, but its nice to know that I never have to worry about getting these updates.
Furthermore, there are constant improvements to the software and daily emails with updates on every change to the product lines, software releases, and documentation.
The low end hardware is cheaper than setting up a dedicated pc system and the high end software just can't be matched with Linux yet (although I am a major linux fan and have deployed nearly 700 linux servers). I've funded some efforts at different companies to replace cisco firewalls with Linux systems, none of them was ever so convincing to me that I wouldn't feel more comfortable trusting my customers to Cisco - although the PIX line sucks(consequently the funding). The only area where I think Linux totally outperforms Cisco on the network engineering level is in loadbalancers, LVS and Heartbeat totally rock over the arrowpoint and localdirector generation of products.
I'd really feel more comfortable if the open source community showed more appreciation for the technical companies (even the proprietary ones) that really try to get things right. It would show more class. Eventually, I'm sure, we will have open-source products that compete extremely well with Cisco,
But given there are so many companies with shoddy products that overcharge their customers, it really isn't worth our time to keep bashing cisco now?
In my mind, Sun is 100-1000 times worse - you can't even justify the pricing difference, let alone the incompatibilities and the lack of innovation in their products. And, most of the complaints about Cisco are from sysadmins who really haven't taken enough time to try to understand the Cisco system or even get a simple basic support contract from them. Cisco is different, it's not bad...
Slashdot Mirror
OK, Let's say you were running ZDnet when the decision came on whether to pursue this deal.
Option 1:
Say no because morally you don't feel right about supporting censorship. Bzzzz, you are now being personally sued for not looking after the best interests of your shareholders (which by law, is limited to financial concerns). You will also likely get fired and replaced by a CEO who will do the deal and thank his lucky stars that he got the opportunity to be promoted because his prior boss had a conscience. So, you lose your job and deal gets done anyway. Great work.
Option 2:
Do the deal. Unless you can phrase your objections to the deal in financial terms, you really don't have any other option. Really.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that:
a) companies themselves are neither bad nor good and it makes zero sense to demonize any of them for pursuing shareholder interests
b) the ceo's of these companies shouldn't be blamed for the choices either (if they should be blamed for anything, it is for accepting a job in the first place after being informed by their lawyer about the legal requirements for pursuing shareholder interests.)
If we want to stop these type of things from happening, than what we really need to be doing is finding a way to help, not hurt, executives of these companies. Change laws so it is harder to sue them for considering anything other than financial aspects in decisions. Of course, the problem is that it is very hard to determine how to do this right. If you give the CEO's too much leeway, the impact could be equally severe -- companies that deliver horrible financial performance year after year, which means all the families that invested end up with sharply reduced retirement savings because they lost a few critical percent of growth to their savings for every year for an extended period.
Only on slashdot are there any easy answers.
You apparently missed the the announcement from Cisco that they've released their own virtual switch with enterprise features to replace the limited capabilities in VMware's. And, yes, vmware will fully support it and it will be plug and play compatible. Furthermore, on a cluster of ESX hosts, you can have multiple Cisco supervisor appliances running for HA/management, while a Cisco switch configuration/etc is shared across all nodes and ports being logically linked to each vm, regardless of where vm is located and even during vmotion.
Cisco details at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9902/index.html
uhm, have you actually been keeping up with the news? Hint: You won't find it on the dailyshow/etc.
The republicans have been asking for a vote, any vote, on energy legislation this session. Instead of allowing, the democrats have been refusing to allow any amendments to legislation....and limiting all bills that come to the floor to simple yes/no votes on non-critical matters. The democrats aren't even going to try to pass critical funding bills for the fiscal year, which is really the only legislation they are required to pass during a session.
So, the story here is about more than one day or silly stunt...It's essentially about whether congress intends to do run away from its responsibilities over a sustained interval to avoid a single vote on an issue that might be embarrassing to the party in charge.
I'm not saying that whatever legislation the republicans want passed is a good idea, but when the leaders of congress turn into cowards...I think we should be honest about it.
oh, you probably want a link....there are hundreds out there over the last month, but here's a rather recent one:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/dems_stop_approps_bills_to_blo.html
I thought Europeans paid less in general for medicine/etc (Ensuring that the USA drug companies get high profits from the US Market and allowing US consumers to subsidize health care for the rest of the world). The papers in the USA are full of stories about European companies buying US companies on the cheap due to the current low exchange rate. Suddenly, we are all supposed to be outraged that there is a discrepancy in software pricing? If this was a big issue wouldn't whatever office that was responsible for overseeing trade between the USA and Europe be trying to fix it? Or, have they consciously made the decision to let certain things go in exchange for others? Without a comprehensive review of the situation, this article is more of a troll than a serious source of discussion.
No...you know there are at least 2-3 stories a day that come out in the blogosphere which are embarrassing to congress, political parties, government, etc...maybe 1/3 of those have a big spending component.
The only reasons this article reached the front page of slashdot is that:
a) It sounded a little exotic ( e.g. wth is this military capsule)
b) It was safely not exposing anything that could embarrass the party/people (democrats-obama) supported by a majority of Slashdot users
c) By focusing on what appears to be stupid american military spending, the article allows the international audiance of Slashdot to get their daily dose of "feeling superior".
Yes, in an ideal world and possibly as recently as 5 years ago the editors of Slashdot wouldn't have let this story reach the main page, but the internet is maturing like all other media and you can no longer count on getting the real news from big sites like Slashdot...articles are filtered for what the international readership wants. I'm still looking for an alternative.
Being a professional means following certain rules of conduct even if you know of dysfunctions in an organization:
a) Both the network admin and the managers should have required documentation to be delivered and maintained. If the network admin couldn't trust the city to be responsible with the documentation than the project should never have been started or he should have avoided becoming involved with was apparently a doomed system. Likewise, any management that lets a new network be deployed for any reasonable amount of time w/o receiving and verifying documentation is incompetent and should be replaced. Rather than blaming either party, it seems both brought this problem about and they should just admit it. Blaming and withholding knowledge is what junior engineers do, not heads of departments or senior IT people.
b) When the owner of a system demands password access, you give it to them....end of story. No matter what. Just like any property owner can destroy what they own...it's not the technicians responsibility to stop the owner from shooting themselves in the foot. Of course, this assumes the employee warned management and argued substantially against improper acts. I mean, he could have just said....."OK, I completely disagree with letting individual A have administrative access to the network. I believe it would cause a total disaster and I've spent the last X months and Y dollars building the network, all of which may be lost by this action. In fact, I feel so strongly against this act, that if you request me to give you root passwords...I will comply but immediately quit and not be available w/o a substantial fee to fix any mess the individual creates". That would normally send appropriate warning signals to management and may have ended the matter right there.
c) Lastly, I can't make head or tails of why the admin didn't write the router/switch config files to flash. Any equipment anywhere can fail at any time. Unlike servers, routers in certain situations can not depend on having network access to retrieve configuration files if they fail...and even downtime in seconds can be horribly painful to an organization....so, I think any good cisco engineer writes config files to flash, copies the config files regularly to a backup flash, and then makes a third backup to a remote file server. If this guy wasn't doing this, than I am finding it hard to believe that he was as much an expert as is portrayed.
I think that about covers the professional side of the matter.
OK, let's analyze the arguments you make against cloud computing again:
a) centralization verse decentralization waves with Mainframe as metaphor
Mainframes were replaced by PC's because of affordability/cost. People who had very limited access to a $100K - $1M mainframe could suddenly have unlimited access to a PC for under $5K. The economics drove the change.
Let's look at the cost of an extremely minimal cloud: 3 Server Class PC's with extensive networking/ram/cpu and virtualization software ($15K), San Storage ($10K), Management Station/Software ($5K), Network Infrastructure ($10K), SysAdmin Setup ($10K?) which combined means that a small business would need to spend ~$50K to begin to have something they could work with locally to gain a minimal comparative environment to an external cloud. This doesn't include ongoing maintenance, staff time, and power/cooling/etc. I'm guessing startup time with this approach would be a minimum of 30 days and probably 90.
Or, they could start immediately with an external cloud for probably no setup fee and a few K/month with almost zero long term commitments. So, it may be true that eventually clouds will be everywhere, at the moment...the economics is strongly against it. In fact, I think most companies deploying internal clouds today are seeing costs >$100K for just the initial stage.
b) control of data
This is a much better argument. On the other hand, it can be used against any outsourcing proposal and is nothing specific to clouds. I've certainly been in situations where businesses with absolutely zero in house technical and/or security talent insist data be kept at home, even after being shown that they're already leaking it everywhere and are likely to be forced out of business by regulators because they won't trust anyone to fix the infrastructure for them or outsource the security aspects to a proven supplier. In the end, external clouds are a tools like anything else and smart businesses will make the appropriate decisions on what they can and can not deploy on them.
Note that I'm not a big fan of all the marketing of clouds at the moment. I'm also skeptical of amazon/et all, but that doesn't mean there isn't some real technical worth to the ideas that brought clouds into being or that many small and some medium sized businesses wouldn't be better served by avoiding large internal infrastructure purchases and outsourcing the responsibilities to professional MSP's/hosting facilities.
Hrm, maybe it's just my background in systems administration, but I thought cloud computing was just an inevitable combination of large scale web hosting with virtualization.
In late 1990's, businesses generally had their own internet server(s) in a colo facility.
In the early 2000's, some companies outsourced their internet infrastructure to managed service providers - other companies built their own in-house data centers to keep up with escalating application requirements.
In the mid 2000's, server sprawl started to impact practically everyone...the first 100 boxes you deploy can be somewhat interesting, but after that... you're entire admin staff (outsourced or not) ends up spending all its time dealing with faults in existing hardware rather than deploying new services...plus electricity/cooling/etc all get more expensive so everyone starts to figure out ways to avoid putting in new boxes. Poof, in comes with virtualization that's actually reliable and actually interesting when it disassociates the virtual machines from worrying about hardware at all and allows them to move from system to system w/o any need for sysadmins to press the "fail over" or "load balance" buttons.
Now, in 2007, smart marketing and product development people at amazon and elsewhere decide they can take over the web hosting industry by heavily commercializing the large virtualization clusters amazon has already deployed...and poof, wrappers to allow developers to create virtual machines and access back end San storage for the clusters are written, along with other stuff that will appeal to anyone who doesn't have a large existing infrastructure..and it's called "cloud computing". To avoid losing out, everyone else says they have their own cloud computing plans/etc...
Now, I guess this is all there and good...but I always thought that what differentiated good hosting facilities from each other was the quality of the admin staff, customer service, defined SLA's and 24/7 emergency response, comprehensive application monitoring, combined with general availability of senior system architects...all of which I don't think amazon/et al have seriously addressed. That means good managed service or web hosting companies can still succeed by either building their own large virtualization clusters and calling them clouds or rebranding and adding value on top of amazon and other cloud providers.
The history of the US during the last 40+ years has been to continually spend more money, so much so that the government has made promised social benefits over the next 10-30 years in the future that no reasonable tax rate can pay for it w/o killing off the business engine that drives its growth. Whenever a hard problem comes around, the politicians essentially argue over how much more $$ to borrow and avoid thinking about the generation down the line that will have to pay the debt. Hint: The decline of the dollar is not because we aren't taxing enough, it's that no one believes we'll pay off our debts. Instead, the treasury will just print more and more dollars each year which dilutes the value of anyone holding cash or assets priced in US dollars.
So, the solution to the problem is to stop thinking about taxes. Cut spending massively over the long term to the minimal possible, and than adjust taxes _after spending cuts are done_ just enough to pay for any leftover debt (progressively, of course). To those who object to the spending cuts, I'd argue that they are not aware of how little of the government spending actually goes to education/social services/welfare/military/nasa etc. The vast majority of our spending is not voted on by congress or in the hands of the president.....social security checks, debt interest payments, medicare, etc -- all of which are growing much faster than the country can reasonably afford to pay, even if it wanted to.
Unfortunately, the populace prefers to keep electing anyone who promises to solve their economic problems by simply spending more $$ and adjusting tax rates.
I used to think that we would just keep plodding down the same path until generations down the line got fed up with it and forced the government to slash its size and future benefits. Unfortunately, with the exception of generation X, it appears that our newest citizens prefer to make government bigger, expand long term benefits, and magically pay for it with "hope."
I'm worried what country my 5 year old son will inherit.
Also from the website:
Can I use Spacewalk to sync my entitlements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat software products?
No. At this time, in order to be able to connect to rhn.redhat.com and satellite-sync Red Hat software content, you will need the Satellite product with an active Satellite certificate.
Now that Spacewalk is available, does this affect Satellite pricing?
Basing the Satellite product on a free & open source project will not affect the product's pricing. However, we are currently considering alternative ways of packaging the product based on studies we have done on the usage of the product as well as feedback from our valued customers.
These considerations are unrelated to the product becoming free & open source, though. If you have feedback on this please contact your Red Hat sales representative or if applicable your Technical Account Manager.
If you look at the table/figures on the FAQ page, you'll also see that RedHat is discouraging use of spacewalk for RHEL.
Furthermore, if you look at the roadmap, you'll see support for various Fedora and CentOS versions listed but nothing for RHEL.
Note that their blog entry states that they still expect all real redhat customers to continue purchasing the satellite service from RedHat rather than using this newly released software which is targeted for Fedora primarily with some support for centos. That's a little painful as I know several small businesses that pay for direct redhat updates/support and could use a local satellite install, but just can't afford the pricing and must continue to deal with the clunky/slow rhn web interface.
Professional SysAdmins don't snoop.......come on, the level of responsibility we take on for our clients or employers business requires absolute integrity, so much so that even if an employer requires me to snoop on an employee I wouldn't do it w/o a formal signed request with a limitation on what was being searched and for how long along with a justification for the search (e.g. employee suspected of passing on confidential data to competitor). Also, keep in mind that there are substantial complications that might arise when professionals find out information they don't want to know about clients or other employees.....If I find out someone is doing something unethical or illegal I maybe required to immediately report it possibly costing me a client, colleague, or job. A good sysadmin sort of has to act like a lawyer and his goal is to assist his client and only know what he needs to know.
I don't know how this study was put together, but it sounds like they weren't interviewing professionals or experienced admins.
TV hasn't really had a respectable moderate/independent American news show since the late 90's.
I think FOX started it by going way right, and then CNN decided to counter by going left.
PBS tried to stay in the center, and they still do a bunch of stuff well, but they've been tilting slightly leftward the last few years - not so much in the content of their articles as much as the selection of what to cover.
The BBC also used to be the gold standard for neutrality, but after the various scandals relating to their reporters coverage - I stopped watching. I don't think I'll start again -- BBC is naturally going to have a somewhat "europe" centered view of news, and I think USA and Europe are heading in opposite directions/perspectives.
Charlie Rose and C-SPAN are still good wonderful places to get unbiased direct reporting. More and more, this is where my tv dial is tuned. But, neither c-span or charlie rose try to cover more than a small percent of what is going on in the world.
Strangely enough, as someone who has regularly read the new york times, washington post, la times, etc the last 15 years....the only somewhat neutral comprehensive coverage of whats going on seems to be in the wall street journal print edition. I guess while business people may be
more conservative in general than the populace, they still are willing to pay a premium to know really is going on, and the perspectives of all sides.
I've read all 3 of Sanderson's prior books and honestly believe they couldn't have chosen a better author to complete the series.
Regarding the concern about his ability to wrap the story up -- all of Sanderson's prior novels are essentially self contained. The books in his mistborn trilogy build on each other, but have their own major and minor plotlines which are fully resolved by the end (minus whatever single mystery is needed to be built upon in the next novel). Sanderson is about 100% opposite of Jordan in this regard.
I'd be surprised if Sanderson, building on whatever Jordan left, couldn't complete and resolve the entire series in a single final 800 page book if he wanted.
Any talk about budget discipline that doesnt include paying off the national debt and/or reforming entitlements is just pissing in the wind. So far, none of the candidates have really put any effort into the matter, so quit using financials to justify your own political opinions. Certainly, the democrats have zero credibility here.
c le/2007/06/20/AR2007062002342.html
We're spending twice as much just on the interest associated the national debt as we are on Iraq each year. And, the debt continues to grow.
Going forward, if entitlements aren't under control, in a worst case scenario 75 years from now, about 95% of the entire net worth of america would have to be sold off to pay for social security, medicare, etc.
And, the numbers get worse each year we delude ourselves into thinking iraq/etc are the major financial issues.
Read up and get informed, then send this on to your friends:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Why should we care if you're going to travel to the US? Slashdot is tiring enough w/ all the anti-usa drivel articles to have to read more "as a european, bush sucks, usa go to hell" comments all the time. All this stuff does is make americans not want to have anything to do with europe.
That is BS. Did you know that it is actually possible for students to be in a situation where a) they are not eligible for need based financial aid b) they can not take out student loans (taking out a loan requires the parent to sign, or at least it did while I was in school and not all parents will sign) and c) some parents will not pay a dime for their childrens college education. What do you expect the student to do? Even if the student tries to legally seperate himself from his parents, the schools typically require that a court approve it and that the student wait an additional 2-3 years before receiving any AID or loans. Don't laugh. It's happened. As much as the current financial aid system may work for some people, it makes alot of assumptions.
** begin rambling **
I believe cisco gets bashed too much by the linux/open-source community. While the particular incident in this article certainly deserves condemnation, it is far from typical of the cisco experience. If we go incessently after even the best of the proprietery software/hardware companies on every little point, how does that improve the image of Linux/Open Source?
My experience with cisco:
- as a system administrator in NY in the mid 90's I was suddenly placed in charge of several cisco routers handling t-1 uplinks for a small corporate datacenter. I called up Cisco, explained that I knew nothing about the equipment but I wanted to make sure I could responsibly manage them - they sent out about 3,000 pages of documentation across 10 bound volumes overnight at no charge and informed me that since at least one of the routers was under support contract, I could call them on regarding router anytime if an issue occured. I studied those manuals for a year or two and developed substantial expertise eventually getting various certifications and becoming a cisco reseller.
When I later switched to one company and then another, I purchased more cisco equipment. In the 10 years since, I've probably managed 50+ cisco routers and switches from the 800 to 7500 series and never has one failed on me in a way that I didn't think Cisco handled it well. And, given the quality and reliability of the equipment, I've never felt that I've had to overpay.
When a problem occurs that neither I or other network engineers can handle, we call up Cisco and are connected to a senior engineer there within 5-10 minutes and they have someone stay online to keep working on the problem - even if it takes 3 8hr shifts of their staff. They provide this quality of support as long as you have a single support contract with them. On their low end routers, the support contracts are only a hundred bucks or so. I can't imagine a linux sysadmin team providing that support for the price.
Furthermore, as long as you have one support contract, their entire support database is available online 24/7 including all software updates. Yes, I try to have smartnet contracts for all my equipment and my customers, but its nice to know that I never have to worry about getting these updates.
Furthermore, there are constant improvements to the software and daily emails with updates on every change to the product lines, software releases, and documentation.
The low end hardware is cheaper than setting up a dedicated pc system and the high end software just can't be matched with Linux yet (although I am a major linux fan and have deployed nearly 700 linux servers). I've funded some efforts at different companies to replace cisco firewalls with Linux systems, none of them was ever so convincing to me that I wouldn't feel more comfortable trusting my customers to Cisco - although the PIX line sucks(consequently the funding). The only area where I think Linux totally outperforms Cisco on the network engineering level is in loadbalancers, LVS and Heartbeat totally rock over the arrowpoint and localdirector generation of products.
I'd really feel more comfortable if the open source community showed more appreciation for the technical companies (even the proprietary ones) that really try to get things right. It would show more class. Eventually, I'm sure, we will have open-source products that compete extremely well with Cisco,
But given there are so many companies with shoddy products that overcharge their customers, it really isn't worth our time to keep bashing cisco now?
In my mind, Sun is 100-1000 times worse - you can't even justify the pricing difference, let alone the incompatibilities and the lack of innovation in their products. And, most of the complaints about Cisco are from sysadmins who really haven't taken enough time to try to understand the Cisco system or even get a simple basic support contract from them. Cisco is different, it's not bad...
** end rambling **