What is wrong with Atlas and Delta, both of which are configurable for all sorts of capacities?..... Surely I'm missing something here?
Falcons cost about $10M
Delta 4 cost about $140M to $180M. Ariane 5 about the same.
Space shuttle launch costs about $1500M
All lift "about the same amount", but the costs vary by well over two orders of magnitude.
Standard slashdot car analogy, is that as commuter vehicles, both a KIA and a Ferrari will transport roughly one driver and a briefcase, but there is over two orders of magnitude difference in cost.
How is Space X launching a Falcon 9 under a government contract (that previously included helping with development costs) any different than a Delta or Atlas rocket launch under a government contract?
Here's my interpretation. In the old days, private/public referred to whom owned the company. Now a days its reversed, and public means they own a part of the govt, and private means they're going it alone without owning a part of the govt.
Delta/Atlas is owned by Boeing/Lockheed which are big enough businesses to own a senator or two, maybe a couple reps, so its sort of public.
SpaceX is small enough that I doubt even the local alderman returns their calls, so they're private. In fact its surprising the govt is allowing them to succeed, at least so far, since they aren't getting their "cut".
The temps would have to come down for a notebook battery, for example
In which case the reaction rate trends toward zero.
Now a real hard core gamer type, you know, the kind that gets burns on his lap from the laptop CPU, is not going to be slowed down by a 1000 C fuel cell in his laptop. Running off methane is a benefit, as the typical gamer diet provides that for free.
Ready for another WoW raid yet? Hold on dude, I gotta eat another bean burrito.
That's why they want your kids to go to school regardless of health on the "federal counting days"
In my state, they switched from that to hourly tabulation in 1990/1991.
Before the switchover they were very interested that you showed up in the morning, the rest of the day they didn't care very much.
After the switchover, the school lost a certain amount of money EVERY SINGLE "CLASS" you didn't attend. Including study hall. My parents were ready to skin me alive when they found out about my triple digit truancy record, but thankfully the school provided records that I only skipped out of study hall and occasionally gym class. I was right under the limitation for criminal prosecution also. I think my high GPA helped a bit. Shortly thereafter we got retired people as "guards" and a couple years later they got genuine prison style guards. This in a rather wealthy, basically crime free district.
not having your personal right to privacy violated
They don't have one. They are slaves to the government appointed masters at school.
it's illegal.
Well, duh, but if Silly Sally Cheerleader was putting electrical tape over the camera while she changed clothes at home in her bedroom, and in a "totally separate situation" the IT guy found out about her vandalism she would be threatened until she stopped. If she's dumb enough, the IT guy is back to getting an eye-full.
There is no such thing as a random number generator, only a psuedo-random number generator.
If you allow special hardware this is almost too easy, listen to a geiger counter click using a microphone, etc.
If you insist on off the shelf PC hardware, simply record the sound input (better with a microphone attached, but just the hisssssssssss is OK too) then hash it or otherwise stir well.
the LSB of the timer for each keyboard interrupt works OK too.
There is probably a theoretical proof, that over a long enough congested enough internet path, you can get bits of randomness out of the least sig bits of TCP timers.
Hmmm, let me bust out photoshop or the Gimp, next thing you know your screwing a goat on your desk.
You're missing the truly fun part, which is inserting "interesting" images into the stream, then letting them use the legal system to entrap and destroy themselves.
This could be extremely profitable... Makes me wish I was still in school...
I think you will find it harder to be allowed immigration than you expect. Depending on where you go of course, but your options are probably quite limited.
Generally, quality first world countries, like Canada, let middle class folks in under four classifications:
1) Job offer. How difficult would it be to get a job up there anyway? Especially if you make it clear you're not looking for a long term career or high pay? In the USA you desperately need full time not part time so as to get medical insurance, not so in more advanced countries.
2) Skills. Certain job titles on the resume equals you are in. No need for job offer. They were all highly technical last time I checked, with some skilled trades. Expect the resume/background/reference check from hell for this one.
3) Education. If I recall correctly, you got SO MANY POINTS for a masters degree in Canada, it was pretty much no questions asked you made the threshold. Maybe the points rewarded and/or threshold are different now, and its different at every country.
4) Money. They wanted a fraction of a mil in a cashiers check and they gave it back after a couple years or if you get kicked out. Sounds impossible, but if you're an old guy with an IRA and a house, or a small business owner, maybe not all that unreasonable... Hurry up as the value of the dollar collapses.
So, the slashdot groupthink is exclusively "job offer oriented" but in practice there are a couple other ways to get in.
I remember my mother suggesting that I lie on my application just to see if it was possible to get coverage at all.
In which case they will collect your money, flag your account, and AFTER you make a claim they'll announce you're retroactively canceled and by the way they're keeping the money. You'd be better off keeping the money.
The shuttle was allowed to land despite the threat of bad weather? Whats the new motto at NASA; "Safety last"?
The tiles are delicate, literally flying thru hail or rain could destroy them while they're red hot. That would be a shame if it happened on flight #1. That is no great loss if it happens on the last flight, or second to last, or whatever it is. Just put some bondo and spray paint on that dude before setting up the Smithsonian exhibit, or whatever.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years from this.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years WITHOUT this.
And I still won't have good coverage by my house, and the monthly bill will still be half a car payment, and all I want is a phone to make and receive calls.
It has had some great successes, such as the HST repairs (I don't know how else those would have been feasible)
No, that was a miserable financial failure, not a success. You probably have no idea of the staggering expense of a "reusable" vehicle like the shuttle.
The HST was planned to cost $400M to build and launch. It ended up costing about $2500M because it takes a lot of expensive screwing around to launch on the shuttle. I don't know if the $2500M cost includes the $1500M cost of a shuttle launch.
JWST is going to "cost" about $4500M, but that's a R and D jobs program not a production program. It could be made to cost anything between maybe $1000M and $100000000000000M depending on how many grants they want to farm out (empire building, etc). I also have no idea what they'll use for a launcher based on all the American launcher cancellations. Probably either a Space-X product, or hang the thumb out like a hitchhiker and hope the ESA will bail us out.
Herschel cost about 1100M euros. I don't know if the 1100M euro cost includes the cost of a dirt cheap Ariane 5.
An Ariane 5 only costs about 120M euro, or about one twelfth of a shuttle launch. Or, rephrased, you can launch 12 scopes on an Ariane for the cost of launching 1 scope on the shuttle. Or rephrased, a shuttle launch, with an empty payload bay, costs more than the entire Herschel program, but an Ariane launch is a pretty small line item on any scope launch.
Generally speaking, "partially rebuilding" a space telescope costs about as much as launching a new scope on a launcher thats not a joke.
A partially broken down scope seems like a waste, but if it would cost more to fix than to launch a new one... Of course, if we had a freaking assembly line of space telescopes, sort of like a place that Meade has for earthbound scopes, we could probably launch something like a HST or a Herschel for maybe $250M each, plus about $150M for an Ariane5 launch, which would otherwise only pay for about 1/4 of a shuttle repair mission.
3) They explicitly support SCP... Some people ask for ssh, when they don't really want a login shell, but they want to use SCP for secure uploading. (or secure scheduled backing up, or as a secure "FTP" like site, I guess)
4) I have no connection to he.net other than being a very happy customer years ago, so I certainly can't speak for them. That said, they had it in the past, and their tutorials describe how to use it, and they claim to support it, so it seems very likely.
Be somewhat realistic. Not even Google provides unlimited storage space for their services. You get what you pay for.
I think its bad marketing by the "unlimited" host.
Take this scenario. You got money burning a hole in yer pocket.
One fine establishment has a carnival huckster claiming they'll do anything, everywhere, perfectly, for everyone, instantly, for a buck. Kind of like a weaselly manager sounds. Of course he's got his fingers crossed behind his back while he says it, and more fine print than a telephone book, and even worse, you know it.
Another fine establishment, lets say, he.net, has an honest looking dude saying 2 gigs of space, 125 gigs of xfer, one buck a month, and a big ole list of exactly what you do, and do not, get.
Why send your money to the carnival huckster whom has a story that sounds great but you know is a lie, when the other guy has a story thats not as good, but sounds true and probably is true?
Ha ha ha. That's the kind of fine hosting establishment where two days after the server dies and they finally replace the hardware, it takes ANOTHER three days for all the user accounts to be reentered, by hand, based on accounting's stockpile of credit card receipts, assuming they haven't lost yours. And then you discover your scripts are not compatible with the different language versions installed on the new server, because they have no centralized config system nor a formal changelog procedure. Oh, you're running an online shopping cart, and all your current orders are lost, too bad. You'll be down at least a week, if not outright closed for business.
That's why at least some kind of backup plan is a good idea.
2) Is their name "Hurricane Electric" aka "he.net"?
3) If not, goto step 1 and try again. If so, send yer money and open an account.
Reasonable and honest specifications, experienced, large scale company, professional, responsive, reliable, extremely technically skilled, fair price, gift economy. Really can't do better.
What I mean by gift economy is they give back to the community in terms of free IPv6 tunnel brokers, free BGP looking glass, etc. You get the feeling that your money is, at least in a small part, doing something useful for the community, not just making some MBA richer. Although they are so highly respected, I figure they're absolutely hauling down cash anyway.
I have no connection with them other than having been a customer for many years, until I needed to do something so weird I needed a virtual host at linode.com (as opposed to a webhost).
Note that with web hosting, like any other service, you're worth what you're paying them per month and/or whatever their cost of sales is for your account, minus the headaches you cause them. If you need $50K/mo worth of service, and you're paying $10/mo, you will end up unhappy.
All they need is a display with a gamut equal to or better than typical vision, along with a resolution beyond the Nyquist limit of the eye at the practical viewing distance.
Theres still some issues with dynamic range, which in a way is good. You know how cruddy teen romantic comedies always have the audio mixed with the "music" 30 dB louder than the talking? I dread the day extreme dynamic range is available to our video "artistes".
Why is pop music compressed to 1 dB of dynamic range, but pop movies have the music 30 dB louder than the talking? I hate both.
some well placed bombs could knock the power out for a lot of people really quickly.
The interesting thing is that bombs don't do "much" to power lines. A "sooper soaker" three man sling shot, a couple dozen lengths of chain, and a substation, now you're talking. Transmission towers and cutting torches don't mix very well either.
I have this jewish friend, real jewish like cousins in Israel type of jewish. Anyway, he explains that real terrorists do about a hundred attacks against structures for every time they hit people. Broken glass, molotov fires, graffiti, cut wires, etc. Thats because you never know when a person will whip out an uzi and fight back (well, actually, in the gun control areas in the us, you know they're sitting ducks), but aside from darwin award winners, structures never fight back. Thats how I've always known the "terror threat" in the US is bogus, because no one ever hits our structures.
Now, if we were sitting in the dark, with no water or sewers, no radio or TV, no gas stations, no natural gas, all shop windows broken, all forests on fire, then I'd believe we are under a real terrorist threat... But when its just Reichstag fire acts followed immediately by passage of enabling legislation, followed within a couple years of invasion of multiple innocent countries...
Either way the city's in a world of pain now, but no where near the world of pain the guy that did this is going to be in. Something like this won't be that hard to figure out.
Yes, except that the folks in charge are making desperate efforts to destroy any and all evidence by overwriting, reinstalling, etc, per the article and website.
So, I guarantee a scapegoat has already been determined. In fact, a scapegoat was probably determined before the "incident" occurred, if you know what I mean. The odds that "the guy whom did it" is "the guy that'll be punished/plea bargain" are probably vanishingly low.
Now if the "journalist" was a real journalist, as opposed to a press release rewriter, we'd have an analysis of recent staffing changes in that office. My guess is the "wrong" company got a support contract, or perhaps there are union issues, or perhaps there was an unpopular plan to outsource to India that'll now "unfortunately have to be expedited". Or the IT director's brother or other relative dared to run against the mayor/other local politician. Etc etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
'akin to 3,727 attempts to pick the lock of a secure office and take highly confidential documents.'
Much more like checking 3727 shelves in the public library looking for a copy of "internet security for dummies"
The funny part is both sides are fairly non-technical, meaning some "journalist" probably typed in all 3727 URLs.
What is wrong with Atlas and Delta, both of which are configurable for all sorts of capacities? ..... Surely I'm missing something here?
Falcons cost about $10M
Delta 4 cost about $140M to $180M. Ariane 5 about the same.
Space shuttle launch costs about $1500M
All lift "about the same amount", but the costs vary by well over two orders of magnitude.
Standard slashdot car analogy, is that as commuter vehicles, both a KIA and a Ferrari will transport roughly one driver and a briefcase, but there is over two orders of magnitude difference in cost.
How is Space X launching a Falcon 9 under a government contract (that previously included helping with development costs) any different than a Delta or Atlas rocket launch under a government contract?
Here's my interpretation. In the old days, private/public referred to whom owned the company. Now a days its reversed, and public means they own a part of the govt, and private means they're going it alone without owning a part of the govt.
Delta/Atlas is owned by Boeing/Lockheed which are big enough businesses to own a senator or two, maybe a couple reps, so its sort of public.
SpaceX is small enough that I doubt even the local alderman returns their calls, so they're private. In fact its surprising the govt is allowing them to succeed, at least so far, since they aren't getting their "cut".
The temps would have to come down for a notebook battery, for example
In which case the reaction rate trends toward zero.
Now a real hard core gamer type, you know, the kind that gets burns on his lap from the laptop CPU, is not going to be slowed down by a 1000 C fuel cell in his laptop. Running off methane is a benefit, as the typical gamer diet provides that for free.
Ready for another WoW raid yet? Hold on dude, I gotta eat another bean burrito.
That's why they want your kids to go to school regardless of health on the "federal counting days"
In my state, they switched from that to hourly tabulation in 1990/1991.
Before the switchover they were very interested that you showed up in the morning, the rest of the day they didn't care very much.
After the switchover, the school lost a certain amount of money EVERY SINGLE "CLASS" you didn't attend. Including study hall. My parents were ready to skin me alive when they found out about my triple digit truancy record, but thankfully the school provided records that I only skipped out of study hall and occasionally gym class. I was right under the limitation for criminal prosecution also. I think my high GPA helped a bit. Shortly thereafter we got retired people as "guards" and a couple years later they got genuine prison style guards. This in a rather wealthy, basically crime free district.
That none of the above,
how is it not all of the above?
not having your personal right to privacy violated
They don't have one. They are slaves to the government appointed masters at school.
it's illegal.
Well, duh, but if Silly Sally Cheerleader was putting electrical tape over the camera while she changed clothes at home in her bedroom, and in a "totally separate situation" the IT guy found out about her vandalism she would be threatened until she stopped. If she's dumb enough, the IT guy is back to getting an eye-full.
There is no such thing as a random number generator, only a psuedo-random number generator.
If you allow special hardware this is almost too easy, listen to a geiger counter click using a microphone, etc.
If you insist on off the shelf PC hardware, simply record the sound input (better with a microphone attached, but just the hisssssssssss is OK too) then hash it or otherwise stir well.
the LSB of the timer for each keyboard interrupt works OK too.
There is probably a theoretical proof, that over a long enough congested enough internet path, you can get bits of randomness out of the least sig bits of TCP timers.
Even if it is impossible to turn it off, a piece of black sticky tape on the lens should fix the problem.
Violating computer security requirements / Evading school anti-terrorist threat reduction / Hacking computer violation / intentional vandalism of property
equals
Mandatory expulsion and/or criminal charges and/or financial liability to "fix the damage"
Hmmm, let me bust out photoshop or the Gimp, next thing you know your screwing a goat on your desk.
You're missing the truly fun part, which is inserting "interesting" images into the stream, then letting them use the legal system to entrap and destroy themselves.
This could be extremely profitable... Makes me wish I was still in school...
I think you will find it harder to be allowed immigration than you expect. Depending on where you go of course, but your options are probably quite limited.
Generally, quality first world countries, like Canada, let middle class folks in under four classifications:
1) Job offer. How difficult would it be to get a job up there anyway? Especially if you make it clear you're not looking for a long term career or high pay? In the USA you desperately need full time not part time so as to get medical insurance, not so in more advanced countries.
2) Skills. Certain job titles on the resume equals you are in. No need for job offer. They were all highly technical last time I checked, with some skilled trades. Expect the resume/background/reference check from hell for this one.
3) Education. If I recall correctly, you got SO MANY POINTS for a masters degree in Canada, it was pretty much no questions asked you made the threshold. Maybe the points rewarded and/or threshold are different now, and its different at every country.
4) Money. They wanted a fraction of a mil in a cashiers check and they gave it back after a couple years or if you get kicked out. Sounds impossible, but if you're an old guy with an IRA and a house, or a small business owner, maybe not all that unreasonable... Hurry up as the value of the dollar collapses.
So, the slashdot groupthink is exclusively "job offer oriented" but in practice there are a couple other ways to get in.
Why should money I earn be taxed and used to pay for benefits for you?
I'm guessing this guy is not a fan of his local fire department or the us coast guard.
I remember my mother suggesting that I lie on my application just to see if it was possible to get coverage at all.
In which case they will collect your money, flag your account, and AFTER you make a claim they'll announce you're retroactively canceled and by the way they're keeping the money. You'd be better off keeping the money.
The shuttle was allowed to land despite the threat of bad weather? Whats the new motto at NASA; "Safety last"?
The tiles are delicate, literally flying thru hail or rain could destroy them while they're red hot. That would be a shame if it happened on flight #1. That is no great loss if it happens on the last flight, or second to last, or whatever it is. Just put some bondo and spray paint on that dude before setting up the Smithsonian exhibit, or whatever.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years from this.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years WITHOUT this.
And I still won't have good coverage by my house, and the monthly bill will still be half a car payment, and all I want is a phone to make and receive calls.
It has had some great successes, such as the HST repairs (I don't know how else those would have been feasible)
No, that was a miserable financial failure, not a success. You probably have no idea of the staggering expense of a "reusable" vehicle like the shuttle.
The HST was planned to cost $400M to build and launch. It ended up costing about $2500M because it takes a lot of expensive screwing around to launch on the shuttle. I don't know if the $2500M cost includes the $1500M cost of a shuttle launch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope
JWST is going to "cost" about $4500M, but that's a R and D jobs program not a production program. It could be made to cost anything between maybe $1000M and $100000000000000M depending on how many grants they want to farm out (empire building, etc). I also have no idea what they'll use for a launcher based on all the American launcher cancellations. Probably either a Space-X product, or hang the thumb out like a hitchhiker and hope the ESA will bail us out.
Herschel cost about 1100M euros. I don't know if the 1100M euro cost includes the cost of a dirt cheap Ariane 5.
An Ariane 5 only costs about 120M euro, or about one twelfth of a shuttle launch. Or, rephrased, you can launch 12 scopes on an Ariane for the cost of launching 1 scope on the shuttle. Or rephrased, a shuttle launch, with an empty payload bay, costs more than the entire Herschel program, but an Ariane launch is a pretty small line item on any scope launch.
http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/elvs/ariane5_specs.shtml
A shuttle launch costs about $1500M
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
Generally speaking, "partially rebuilding" a space telescope costs about as much as launching a new scope on a launcher thats not a joke.
A partially broken down scope seems like a waste, but if it would cost more to fix than to launch a new one... Of course, if we had a freaking assembly line of space telescopes, sort of like a place that Meade has for earthbound scopes, we could probably launch something like a HST or a Herschel for maybe $250M each, plus about $150M for an Ariane5 launch, which would otherwise only pay for about 1/4 of a shuttle repair mission.
Do they offer SSH access? I don't seen anything on their site indicating they do on any of their accounts. For some that is a showstopper.
1) They did, back when I was a customer.
2) They claim to on their tutorial page titled "Beginning Unix & SSH Tutorial"
http://www.he.net/faq/tutorials/unix.tutorial/
3) They explicitly support SCP ... Some people ask for ssh, when they don't really want a login shell, but they want to use SCP for secure uploading. (or secure scheduled backing up, or as a secure "FTP" like site, I guess)
http://he.net/web_hosting.html
4) I have no connection to he.net other than being a very happy customer years ago, so I certainly can't speak for them. That said, they had it in the past, and their tutorials describe how to use it, and they claim to support it, so it seems very likely.
Be somewhat realistic. Not even Google provides unlimited storage space for their services. You get what you pay for.
I think its bad marketing by the "unlimited" host.
Take this scenario. You got money burning a hole in yer pocket.
One fine establishment has a carnival huckster claiming they'll do anything, everywhere, perfectly, for everyone, instantly, for a buck. Kind of like a weaselly manager sounds. Of course he's got his fingers crossed behind his back while he says it, and more fine print than a telephone book, and even worse, you know it.
Another fine establishment, lets say, he.net, has an honest looking dude saying 2 gigs of space, 125 gigs of xfer, one buck a month, and a big ole list of exactly what you do, and do not, get.
Why send your money to the carnival huckster whom has a story that sounds great but you know is a lie, when the other guy has a story thats not as good, but sounds true and probably is true?
Hosts don't back up. That's your job.
Ha ha ha. That's the kind of fine hosting establishment where two days after the server dies and they finally replace the hardware, it takes ANOTHER three days for all the user accounts to be reentered, by hand, based on accounting's stockpile of credit card receipts, assuming they haven't lost yours. And then you discover your scripts are not compatible with the different language versions installed on the new server, because they have no centralized config system nor a formal changelog procedure. Oh, you're running an online shopping cart, and all your current orders are lost, too bad. You'll be down at least a week, if not outright closed for business.
That's why at least some kind of backup plan is a good idea.
Well, this is a pretty easy algorithm:
1) Pick a company, any company.
2) Is their name "Hurricane Electric" aka "he.net"?
3) If not, goto step 1 and try again. If so, send yer money and open an account.
Reasonable and honest specifications, experienced, large scale company, professional, responsive, reliable, extremely technically skilled, fair price, gift economy. Really can't do better.
What I mean by gift economy is they give back to the community in terms of free IPv6 tunnel brokers, free BGP looking glass, etc. You get the feeling that your money is, at least in a small part, doing something useful for the community, not just making some MBA richer. Although they are so highly respected, I figure they're absolutely hauling down cash anyway.
I have no connection with them other than having been a customer for many years, until I needed to do something so weird I needed a virtual host at linode.com (as opposed to a webhost).
Note that with web hosting, like any other service, you're worth what you're paying them per month and/or whatever their cost of sales is for your account, minus the headaches you cause them. If you need $50K/mo worth of service, and you're paying $10/mo, you will end up unhappy.
and why were they watching in the first place?
Trolling for cheerleaders changing clothes, obviously.
most of the protocols have no way to validate either the content or the author
you can validate content and author in emails? you must be new to spam, or have been away from the net since 1992.
Anything that is designed for 3D looks like crap if you don't view it using both eyes.
Anything that is designed for 3D is just crap with a gimmick, just like high def.
Same old boring formulaic garbage, now in HiDef and 3D! Same tired old cliche sitcom jokes, now in 5.1 surround!
All they need is a display with a gamut equal to or better than typical vision, along with a resolution beyond the Nyquist limit of the eye at the practical viewing distance.
Already done, more or less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_density
Theres still some issues with dynamic range, which in a way is good. You know how cruddy teen romantic comedies always have the audio mixed with the "music" 30 dB louder than the talking? I dread the day extreme dynamic range is available to our video "artistes".
Why is pop music compressed to 1 dB of dynamic range, but pop movies have the music 30 dB louder than the talking? I hate both.
some well placed bombs could knock the power out for a lot of people really quickly.
The interesting thing is that bombs don't do "much" to power lines. A "sooper soaker" three man sling shot, a couple dozen lengths of chain, and a substation, now you're talking. Transmission towers and cutting torches don't mix very well either.
I have this jewish friend, real jewish like cousins in Israel type of jewish. Anyway, he explains that real terrorists do about a hundred attacks against structures for every time they hit people. Broken glass, molotov fires, graffiti, cut wires, etc. Thats because you never know when a person will whip out an uzi and fight back (well, actually, in the gun control areas in the us, you know they're sitting ducks), but aside from darwin award winners, structures never fight back. Thats how I've always known the "terror threat" in the US is bogus, because no one ever hits our structures.
Now, if we were sitting in the dark, with no water or sewers, no radio or TV, no gas stations, no natural gas, all shop windows broken, all forests on fire, then I'd believe we are under a real terrorist threat... But when its just Reichstag fire acts followed immediately by passage of enabling legislation, followed within a couple years of invasion of multiple innocent countries...
Either way the city's in a world of pain now, but no where near the world of pain the guy that did this is going to be in. Something like this won't be that hard to figure out.
Yes, except that the folks in charge are making desperate efforts to destroy any and all evidence by overwriting, reinstalling, etc, per the article and website.
So, I guarantee a scapegoat has already been determined. In fact, a scapegoat was probably determined before the "incident" occurred, if you know what I mean. The odds that "the guy whom did it" is "the guy that'll be punished/plea bargain" are probably vanishingly low.
Now if the "journalist" was a real journalist, as opposed to a press release rewriter, we'd have an analysis of recent staffing changes in that office. My guess is the "wrong" company got a support contract, or perhaps there are union issues, or perhaps there was an unpopular plan to outsource to India that'll now "unfortunately have to be expedited". Or the IT director's brother or other relative dared to run against the mayor/other local politician. Etc etc etc.