This story is politically charged and what is never reported is how China and Russia, for the most part, do not have governments that accurately reflect the views of the majority of its' citizens. Much can probably be said about many if not most of the governments in the world. The USA for instance is a very diverse nation culturally and ideologically. It would surprise me greatly if the average Iranian wanted to cause a military nuclear device to be set off in another nation anymore than the average person in the USA. As far as Israel, what I really fail to understand is what reason any Muslim would want to damage the landscape. There are many locations within Israels borders that are considered holy to Muslims, Christians, and Jewish. Beyond that setting off a nuclear device in Israel would have extreme negative consequences for many surrounding Islamic nations! The only reason I can see to not allow a country to have Nuclear warheads is if that country has proven to the world that they are led by mentally unstable leaders that have shown that they don't have respect for their own people. I am not in a position to pass judgement on individuals in other countries without directly interacting with them. So I can not comment on Israel's or Iran's leaders.
Making up educated numbers here but you should be able to push a metric shit ton of traffic for 11 million annually.
~40k per month for an OC3 line 155Mbps.
I'll give you a million for your storage solution.
About 1.2mil for ~2000 or so CPU's and a terabyte of active memory worth of servers.
Figure 100k a sysadmin. Would be a good idea to not have a admin to cpu ratio higher than 1:250 so that nearly a million there
You need cooling and a place to house the servers. I'll give you another million.
Oh networking, ya that is another cool million. Oh you are going with Cisco? maybe a bit more.
I feel that I am really stretching it here but I don't see how hosting costs for a pretty big operation even come close to 11 million. Now the expensive parts are support and app dev but I don't see how a hosting service would need to change or create a complex app. I keep on forgetting "administrative costs" aka a couple people skimming the cream off the top for relatively little effort aka executive management. That is most likely where the other 4 mil went. Hey CEO's have to eat too you know!
Working at a help desk for at least 6 months should be required for entry into any IT job. It will help you hone your people skills and will help you to appreciate your career decision(once you never have to work help desk again).
I'm on the fence as even their 24x7x365 4 hr onsite support bundles requires a fair number of hoops even when you just bought a $30,000 machine. I take that back, especially if you just bought a $30,000 machine. But yes in the end they take care of you much better than if you didn't have a support contract. However I don't think I've ever talked to someone in the Americas, Australia, or Europe, unless it was the person delivering parts or a technician coming out to a DC. I am going to have to go ahead and agree that basic regional customer support would win more kudo's.
This all makes me wonder what would happen if Best Buy were to outsource their sales division to Accenture in addition to their IT. Best Buy is suppose to specialize in technical sales. If their customer service is as bad as everyone says, (I tend to not shop their and when I do I don't ask questions) then I wonder what they consider themselves experts at? Maybe they should outsource their sales and customer service instead of their IT?
Age is one thing, culture is another. On the IT engineering front the old guys tend to be the ones who have seen many different Unix flavors along with Windows, have seen bizarre problems come up and know that the solutions are usually simple answers. They also know to break touch problems down into layers, subsequently throwing out layers in hardware, OS, application that don't make sense to apply to the problem. Windows and Unix Engineers tend to think differently about the problems though by in large your Windows folks will be the young guys and Unix will be the older guys. You also tend to see a greater server to engineer ratio on the Unix, but also on the older side. With virtualization becoming mainstream in many shops you are seeing a 3rd culture of engineering. Interestingly enough though I see the age groups mixed as virtualization, "cloud computing" if you will, is relatively young. The young and old have had to adapt. The young learn, the old use what wisdom they already have and bend it to work with the new thing they need to engineer. To tell you the truth I think there is significant benefit to having a new guy that is always learning and full of piss and vinegar as well the old guy, who constantly see's the faults with the young guy but is reminded from time to time that there are always new ideas and the old way isn't always the best way.
Companies with HR and upper management that don't understand this won't have the most efficient operation. Though business has interesting ways of covering its faults.
The basic VCP VMware Certified Professional is your standard memorize test. The VCAP VMware Certified Advanced Professional is a lab where they make you build it, then they break it, then you fix it. I don't think either are as difficult as my experiences in the real world but they are a starting point. The VCAP at least shows that someone has some problem solving skills.
Hey where is my certified IT problem solver certification? Could be an interesting test. Or better PHd. in IT Architecture? The real geniuses in big business just don't get no respect, no respect at all I tell ya!
I am still waiting for the day when a small Nissan style diesel pickup truck is available in the US. Cars and SUV's both would benefit and meet a lot of efficiency goals in the US if there were diesel options. The number one, imho only, negative issue with small block diesels is that they have poor low speed acceleration and would cause way to may people to be good drivers. I find that my diesel has much better high speed acceleration compared to gas based due to the fact that my car doesn't have to downshift to gain extra torque so I don't lose overall power when stepping on it at 65 to get around that annoying SUV kicking up rocks at my freshly waxed paint job.
Diesel also is far less likely to cause a giant fireball in a crash. The pressure required for it to instantly combust is higher than the tinsel strength of the fuel tank. Try holding a lighter up to a puddle of diesel fuel. It will burn but it takes a lot of heat and a bit of time and it does not burn quickly. Don't try the same with Kerosene (jet A) or Gasoline.
I tip my hat to Minnesota based Gopher. I still think Gopher was a much more efficient way to find factual information and library resources than anything we have today. Because it was text based it was also comparatively faster than any javascript laden systems we have today. Going further it is entirely possible history could have been changed if the U of Mn did attempt to aggressively license the technology before realizing that the web and knowledge should be free (The U eventually GPL'd Gopher in I think 2000). Another cool note about Gopher is that it is support by basically every browser EXCEPT Microsoft IE and Google Chrome. So apparently Google doesn't think information should be free/open, of course they are a business and information is ultimately what they sell.
I've searched many of the other major news agency websites including the AP, BBC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. I have not been able to find this story anywhere else which doesn't mean that it is not true but that it may be that Fox took a few liberties with the story or that they have some secret insider at the FBI. Here in Minneapolis I've checked the Star tribune which is a good source of local MN news and the only thing it has is about how a police officer shot an woman who displayed an handgun during a traffic stop on a major freeway. Now that seems to be a bit more news worthy than some homeless guy in Cali that allegedly, and is 100% innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, was involved or knew of attacks on some corporation. Unfortunately I've found that I just can't take News Corps word on a story until I have read the accounts from at least 2 other news agencies.
It is my belief that any input that sparks communication between you and your SO will ultimately have a positive effect on your relationship. That is that if the two of you both passionately believe that you are in it for the longhaul then it will allow you two to discuss each others desires and frustrations. If there is uncertainty or a major disconnect communication of these things could end the relationship sooner so that each person can move on with their lives.
For those couples where one or both are introverted this type of service could help give feedback without either of the persons feeling like they are exposing themselves. It achieves this because it does not give feedback in a person X did wrong.
CNN and the BBC feel this is such and unimportant story that it is hard to find on their websites. Fox decided that it was so important (and to them probably so exciting) that Jana Winter posted the story twice and it is in extra large, please read before anything else, font on the front page. It is amusing, if not a bit disturbing, that our leading available news outlets are so slanted as to what they feel is important.
It is of my opinion that the Fox article also tries to paint a picture in addition to relaying facts where as the CNN story appears to just lay out known facts and to point out that authorities are not saying that this is in fact related to the group anonymous but rather an on going FBI investigation related to computer hacking. Fox does not report that authorities say this is related to Anonymous either Jana writes "suspected members of Anonymous, FoxNews.com reported". Yes they did report it! I am reading the article on Fox right now, thanks for pointing out the obvious. Oh you mean this is the second article you posted and that quote was linking back to the first article post. This must be extra important!
Engineers are taught and generally have an interest in solving tough problems and finding efficiency once the simple problems are solved. To me it makes sense that Chinese Gov. officials would be engineers. The culture as a whole generally is interested in both dedication to family and efficiency. Lawyers and poly sci theorists generally are interested in determining the best way to obfuscate rules in order to achieve goals. Those may be for the greater good or selfish goals. I think programmers could make good officials, however they generally are not interested in dealing with large numbers of people.
Each society works itself out depending on their culture. Learn the culture and you'll learn why people are who they are and why the masses do what they do.
I have to agree with those that say that cabinet members past career experience and education should reflect their role in US government. Many times they do. But sometimes leaders also just want someone in the position that they can trust. You probably won't find a theologian as secretary of state or interior.
VMware's explanation of events is troubling to me. The company as a whole is responsible for any of its failures. Internally the company could blame an individual but to shareholders and other vested entities an individual employee's failure is not something they care about. A better PR response would be to say that "we" made an unscheduled change or simply an unscheduled change was made to our infrastructure that caused X.
This also outline a major issue with "cloud" technologies. They are only as redundant and stable as the individuals managing them. Also that there is always the opportunity for single point of failure in any system, you just need to go up the support tree high enough. For most companies this is the data center itself as offsite DR can get expensive quick.
For VMware it can be the Virtual Center, a misconfigured vRouter or even vSwitch. Finally putting all your eggs into one basket can increase efficiency and save money. It can also raise your risk profile. An engineer may have caused this outage but I would find it hard to believe that replacing the engineer would make the "risk" go away.
Slashdot Mirror
This story is politically charged and what is never reported is how China and Russia, for the most part, do not have governments that accurately reflect the views of the majority of its' citizens. Much can probably be said about many if not most of the governments in the world. The USA for instance is a very diverse nation culturally and ideologically. It would surprise me greatly if the average Iranian wanted to cause a military nuclear device to be set off in another nation anymore than the average person in the USA. As far as Israel, what I really fail to understand is what reason any Muslim would want to damage the landscape. There are many locations within Israels borders that are considered holy to Muslims, Christians, and Jewish. Beyond that setting off a nuclear device in Israel would have extreme negative consequences for many surrounding Islamic nations! The only reason I can see to not allow a country to have Nuclear warheads is if that country has proven to the world that they are led by mentally unstable leaders that have shown that they don't have respect for their own people. I am not in a position to pass judgement on individuals in other countries without directly interacting with them. So I can not comment on Israel's or Iran's leaders.
Making up educated numbers here but you should be able to push a metric shit ton of traffic for 11 million annually.
~40k per month for an OC3 line 155Mbps.
I'll give you a million for your storage solution.
About 1.2mil for ~2000 or so CPU's and a terabyte of active memory worth of servers.
Figure 100k a sysadmin. Would be a good idea to not have a admin to cpu ratio higher than 1:250 so that nearly a million there
You need cooling and a place to house the servers. I'll give you another million.
Oh networking, ya that is another cool million. Oh you are going with Cisco? maybe a bit more.
I feel that I am really stretching it here but I don't see how hosting costs for a pretty big operation even come close to 11 million. Now the expensive parts are support and app dev but I don't see how a hosting service would need to change or create a complex app. I keep on forgetting "administrative costs" aka a couple people skimming the cream off the top for relatively little effort aka executive management. That is most likely where the other 4 mil went. Hey CEO's have to eat too you know!
Don't forget that Alienware was also fanatically priced.
Working at a help desk for at least 6 months should be required for entry into any IT job. It will help you hone your people skills and will help you to appreciate your career decision(once you never have to work help desk again).
I'm on the fence as even their 24x7x365 4 hr onsite support bundles requires a fair number of hoops even when you just bought a $30,000 machine. I take that back, especially if you just bought a $30,000 machine. But yes in the end they take care of you much better than if you didn't have a support contract. However I don't think I've ever talked to someone in the Americas, Australia, or Europe, unless it was the person delivering parts or a technician coming out to a DC. I am going to have to go ahead and agree that basic regional customer support would win more kudo's.
When you are the source.
Tang?
This all makes me wonder what would happen if Best Buy were to outsource their sales division to Accenture in addition to their IT. Best Buy is suppose to specialize in technical sales. If their customer service is as bad as everyone says, (I tend to not shop their and when I do I don't ask questions) then I wonder what they consider themselves experts at? Maybe they should outsource their sales and customer service instead of their IT?
Age is one thing, culture is another. On the IT engineering front the old guys tend to be the ones who have seen many different Unix flavors along with Windows, have seen bizarre problems come up and know that the solutions are usually simple answers. They also know to break touch problems down into layers, subsequently throwing out layers in hardware, OS, application that don't make sense to apply to the problem. Windows and Unix Engineers tend to think differently about the problems though by in large your Windows folks will be the young guys and Unix will be the older guys. You also tend to see a greater server to engineer ratio on the Unix, but also on the older side. With virtualization becoming mainstream in many shops you are seeing a 3rd culture of engineering. Interestingly enough though I see the age groups mixed as virtualization, "cloud computing" if you will, is relatively young. The young and old have had to adapt. The young learn, the old use what wisdom they already have and bend it to work with the new thing they need to engineer. To tell you the truth I think there is significant benefit to having a new guy that is always learning and full of piss and vinegar as well the old guy, who constantly see's the faults with the young guy but is reminded from time to time that there are always new ideas and the old way isn't always the best way. Companies with HR and upper management that don't understand this won't have the most efficient operation. Though business has interesting ways of covering its faults.
The basic VCP VMware Certified Professional is your standard memorize test. The VCAP VMware Certified Advanced Professional is a lab where they make you build it, then they break it, then you fix it. I don't think either are as difficult as my experiences in the real world but they are a starting point. The VCAP at least shows that someone has some problem solving skills. Hey where is my certified IT problem solver certification? Could be an interesting test. Or better PHd. in IT Architecture? The real geniuses in big business just don't get no respect, no respect at all I tell ya!
I am still waiting for the day when a small Nissan style diesel pickup truck is available in the US. Cars and SUV's both would benefit and meet a lot of efficiency goals in the US if there were diesel options. The number one, imho only, negative issue with small block diesels is that they have poor low speed acceleration and would cause way to may people to be good drivers. I find that my diesel has much better high speed acceleration compared to gas based due to the fact that my car doesn't have to downshift to gain extra torque so I don't lose overall power when stepping on it at 65 to get around that annoying SUV kicking up rocks at my freshly waxed paint job. Diesel also is far less likely to cause a giant fireball in a crash. The pressure required for it to instantly combust is higher than the tinsel strength of the fuel tank. Try holding a lighter up to a puddle of diesel fuel. It will burn but it takes a lot of heat and a bit of time and it does not burn quickly. Don't try the same with Kerosene (jet A) or Gasoline.
Thank you AT&T for Unix System V.
I tip my hat to Minnesota based Gopher. I still think Gopher was a much more efficient way to find factual information and library resources than anything we have today. Because it was text based it was also comparatively faster than any javascript laden systems we have today. Going further it is entirely possible history could have been changed if the U of Mn did attempt to aggressively license the technology before realizing that the web and knowledge should be free (The U eventually GPL'd Gopher in I think 2000). Another cool note about Gopher is that it is support by basically every browser EXCEPT Microsoft IE and Google Chrome. So apparently Google doesn't think information should be free/open, of course they are a business and information is ultimately what they sell.
main(0) { printf("Thanks for everything you did Dennis"); } return main()
I generally don't like Apples, but for Steve I'm having a bowlful.
I've searched many of the other major news agency websites including the AP, BBC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. I have not been able to find this story anywhere else which doesn't mean that it is not true but that it may be that Fox took a few liberties with the story or that they have some secret insider at the FBI. Here in Minneapolis I've checked the Star tribune which is a good source of local MN news and the only thing it has is about how a police officer shot an woman who displayed an handgun during a traffic stop on a major freeway. Now that seems to be a bit more news worthy than some homeless guy in Cali that allegedly, and is 100% innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, was involved or knew of attacks on some corporation. Unfortunately I've found that I just can't take News Corps word on a story until I have read the accounts from at least 2 other news agencies.
It is my belief that any input that sparks communication between you and your SO will ultimately have a positive effect on your relationship. That is that if the two of you both passionately believe that you are in it for the longhaul then it will allow you two to discuss each others desires and frustrations. If there is uncertainty or a major disconnect communication of these things could end the relationship sooner so that each person can move on with their lives. For those couples where one or both are introverted this type of service could help give feedback without either of the persons feeling like they are exposing themselves. It achieves this because it does not give feedback in a person X did wrong.
CNN and the BBC feel this is such and unimportant story that it is hard to find on their websites. Fox decided that it was so important (and to them probably so exciting) that Jana Winter posted the story twice and it is in extra large, please read before anything else, font on the front page. It is amusing, if not a bit disturbing, that our leading available news outlets are so slanted as to what they feel is important. It is of my opinion that the Fox article also tries to paint a picture in addition to relaying facts where as the CNN story appears to just lay out known facts and to point out that authorities are not saying that this is in fact related to the group anonymous but rather an on going FBI investigation related to computer hacking. Fox does not report that authorities say this is related to Anonymous either Jana writes "suspected members of Anonymous, FoxNews.com reported". Yes they did report it! I am reading the article on Fox right now, thanks for pointing out the obvious. Oh you mean this is the second article you posted and that quote was linking back to the first article post. This must be extra important!
Ford SUV - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._J._Simpson Indeed this trial is a circus.
What you love doing or can cope with doing for 40 years in a row.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_(series) http://fallout.bethsoft.com/
I know that Denny Green said "An assumption makes an ass out of you and me an umption." That said I think I can agree with your post 100%
Engineers are taught and generally have an interest in solving tough problems and finding efficiency once the simple problems are solved. To me it makes sense that Chinese Gov. officials would be engineers. The culture as a whole generally is interested in both dedication to family and efficiency. Lawyers and poly sci theorists generally are interested in determining the best way to obfuscate rules in order to achieve goals. Those may be for the greater good or selfish goals. I think programmers could make good officials, however they generally are not interested in dealing with large numbers of people. Each society works itself out depending on their culture. Learn the culture and you'll learn why people are who they are and why the masses do what they do. I have to agree with those that say that cabinet members past career experience and education should reflect their role in US government. Many times they do. But sometimes leaders also just want someone in the position that they can trust. You probably won't find a theologian as secretary of state or interior.
It is fairly amazing what someone can piece together using well known sources. 30 seconds on google maps gave me satellite imagery and many images from the ground including the downed US helicopter.
http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=9294138184493326603&q=Abbott%C4%81bad,+Abbottabad,+Khyber+Pakhtunkhwa,+Pakistan+compound&hl=en&dtab=0&sll=34.169215,73.242433&sspn=0.049606,0.057297&ie=UTF8&ll=34.169848,73.240979&spn=0,0&t=h&z=19&lci=com.panoramio.all
VMware's explanation of events is troubling to me. The company as a whole is responsible for any of its failures. Internally the company could blame an individual but to shareholders and other vested entities an individual employee's failure is not something they care about. A better PR response would be to say that "we" made an unscheduled change or simply an unscheduled change was made to our infrastructure that caused X. This also outline a major issue with "cloud" technologies. They are only as redundant and stable as the individuals managing them. Also that there is always the opportunity for single point of failure in any system, you just need to go up the support tree high enough. For most companies this is the data center itself as offsite DR can get expensive quick. For VMware it can be the Virtual Center, a misconfigured vRouter or even vSwitch. Finally putting all your eggs into one basket can increase efficiency and save money. It can also raise your risk profile. An engineer may have caused this outage but I would find it hard to believe that replacing the engineer would make the "risk" go away.