Vista and XP do have standard handlers for USB devices but Apple does not support this. That is why you can't plugin your iPod and iPhone and except your computer to be able to mess with it, that is why it requires special software adding protocols to your networking stack like bonjour and rDNS services. Of course if you configure so, the devices can be used as standard usb mass storage devices but you'll never get access to your music that way.
This is the principle reason why the iPod sucks, it is everything that Apple stands for which is propietary technology which really requires Apple hardware to work with. I can hook up hundreds of other USB based MP3 players out there without added software but the iPod requires specific software to interface with and don't think about going cross platform, many an ipod has been wiped by going from Mac to PC and visa versa.
You're right, iTunes should not require administrative privileges to install but all that DRM means Apple has to dig deep.
Vista doesn't handle driver issues very well but the majority of this particular issue is definitely in Apple's court especially given all the issues with iTunes 8 on both sides of the isle. At least they are mostly getting OS X right now with a lot of the silly defaults getting changed. Samba support was atrocious for the longest time when the Linux camp had it down.
Sorry, my use of the term reporting is any form of output which a controller invariably does unless another box is sitting there reporting on the progress of the controller. In either case you know if your patch was successful or not.
I'm confused, does any admin ever give up his own account password?
In my company we have a blanket policy, never give out passwords, ever... as admin I don't need someone else's password to get into their mailbox and retrieve information that's needed by another employee while the content owner is out of contact. Of course I always notify the mailbox owner that I had to go in as I have to have a specific reason.
Are there environments out there where you would be expected to give up your password? I can understand keeping a password database for service accounts which all admins should be able to access if they manage it but I can't imagine a scenario when I'd need someone else's password. Even if the thing is encrypted, I have the recovery key so again I don't need their password.
Are you implying that we sink billions in tax dollars to new companies so they can compete with the giant corporations that exist today? Who would invest in that company?
The cause of the problem came and went so a different solution has to be proposed. I have no idea what it would be beyond setting pricing publicly like is commonly done with electricity.
It's easy and the American spirit to say government is not the solution and that private entities should pick up the slack but once the government gets involved you can't just uninvolve them and expect things to be equal with newcomers.
I can understand this thought process except that not all patches are security patches which wouldn't be necessary but a great many also improve stability especially as up-times get extended. I just rebooted a Server 2003 box which had it's DNS stop responding about once a month requiring me to restart the DNS service. It just started doing this two months ago. I finally rebooted the whole thing after 500 days of up-time.
As for testing when it comes back online presumably since it is redundant it would come back online and start reporting the same information as the other unit which hadn't been updating. No turning the power plant off, if that is required then a time will come when the thing goes offline unexpectedly. Of course this setup requires triple redundancy so you wouldn't expose yourself to failure while you're updating.
You make a fair point but what happens if one of those machines does fail? Believe me, I've had triple redundant power supplies fail on me before it will happen.
The IT world believe in redundancy and so too I would have thought does the industrial world where uptime has to be 100%. Rebooting your Exchange server should not result in any downtime if email is considered mission critical.
So if there are redundant control systems in place why can't individual machines be brought offline and patched as necessary?
The only argument I can see that holds water here is that an update could theoretically break the tool but if it is properly redundant then it won't come back online when you're done and the problem stops there until the node can be replaced or updated.
How would one do this? How do you encourage free-market competition when tax dollars funded the companies that are already in place. That sets the barrier to entry artificially high so I don't see any free-market way to solve the problem when it's already been manipulated from the start.
Most customers are also locked into long term contracts preventing them from going anywhere. Most people want cheap phones they can replace cheaply every few years to get the latest features and whatnot. Personally I wait for mine to fall apart but most people I know don't do the same.
The problem is that tax dollars created the market being beared by tax payers. Honestly texting is only a small portion of the racket that cellular carriers put everyone through. Most people are paying for unlimited texting rather than paying per message. For instance when it comes to my plan, I was texting maybe 20-30 times per month costing me $6-$15 extra on my bill so it was a no brainer for me to switch to $5 for unlimited. Given that small amount of texting the pricing absurd though.
Voice service is similarly overpriced though so it shouldn't really surprise anyone. Data is even worse.
Your experience echoes mine in that it wasn't Windows fault that the design sucked. You can create perfectly robust systems and if you let them pay you to implement something wrong then you should be fired.
Of course I'm not referring you specifically in my statement. Here's another example for you since it applies to my company. HP sponsors us so we get a lot of money from HP to buy HP equipment. Does that mean we always buy HP even when it's not appropriate? Of course not! We went with a NetApp SAN instead because it fit our needs far better than an EVA would.
The bottom line is that mismanaged projects will not meet goals while well managed projects on most platforms these days are quite capable of staying up. For instance the uptime on my NetApp SAN is 100% for the year due to clustered filers allowing me to upgrade firmware without taking the system down. The same applies to my Windows clusters, take a node down at a time, apply updates, bring it back online and repeat until the cluster is updated.
On a side note, I never understood why so many people were so hard for flash, it's rare to ever see a good use of it.
I don't agree with Microsoft's practices of paying consultants to recommend products but it's up to the company hiring them to perform due diligence to ensure they are getting their money's worth which should guarantee that the consultants would be recommending solutions that would actually work. Of course in reality so much blind faith is put into consultants that it's astounding anything ever gets done at all.Many consultants have been brought in over the years I've been here and ultimately I end up deploying everything instead.
Where are you getting that Windows server sucks? Especially server 2003 which is now 5 years old and quite stable.
Furthermore, you ignore that just because an app is written in.net that all components are Windows. For instance, my mission critical app here is written in.net C# with an Oracle RAC for a back-end running on top of Oracle Linux.
I have not had any downtime since deployment three years ago. When fault tolerance is built from the ground up at all layers then the platform really isn't much of an issue if any at all.
The app we use employs dynamic dll loading for publishing on the fly combined with clustered SQL state servers. In addition to this connections are chained so a failure to connect to one cluster results in the app automatically connecting to another cluster. Proper back-end SAN infrastructure built on NetApp mirroring across sites. The company I work for makes 90% of it's revenue in one week of the year so that time is very carefully guarded. Of course no updates are performed during this time just as an added measure.
The last bit I'll impress upon you is that it is not yet known what caused the problem. If the issue was network congestion causing cascading BGP issues then Windows or Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with this issue. So far it looks like their system made some impressive gains going from 125ms response with Unix to 6ms on Windows with an upgrade said to reduce that further to 3ms and it looks like this is working quite well so far.
I see no difference in Oracle performance on Windows vs Linux. Performance is usually more about architecture than the platform. You can make highly available networks with Windows, people do it all the time, much more often than a lot of Slashdotters seem to think.
Bad admins can ruin any deployment, bad coders can make the admins life hell trying to keep the app alive.
I haven't heard anything to make me think it was a capacity issue, I have heard that this system is an order of magnitude faster than the previous Unix system so I'm unsure of who's right since there doesn't seem to be any actual data yet. Of course one problem with making a system perform faster is that contention can become an issue if database access isn't properly handled. Not a problem with any particular DBMS.
Make no mistake, a project the size of this one is hard to do successfully, a fault in the initial deployment doesn't mean that the system can or should be scrapped.
In my particular case, we converted a mission critical VB app to asp.net C# and boy did we run into problems initially, of course it had nothing to do with the platform as it turns out most of the business rules weren't as solid as we were led to believe leading to literally hundreds of new requirements.
So we agree that Kyoto status doesn't impact whether a country is doing anything about climate change. Good, because you had me confused. The U.S. is doing a lot about climate change and so they have bothered to start along with a great many other countries. The only difference is that the U.S. started 20 years ago implementing stricter and stricter regulations. Tier 2 regs from the EPA are getting tougher and tougher combined with the fact that most states charge a gas guzzler tax on SUVs or anything that gets poor gas mileage including sports cars.
That's news to me, but even so, losing a large customer will still cause a collapse as they are gearing towards increased demand, not a perhaps 40% drop in demand. It makes no sense for them to do it until oil becomes too hard for them to buy.
The U.S. is China's largest buyer. They wouldn't be where they are without all that money flowing that way. If China were to collapse the U.S. economy which is something they could do right now then they would lose a lot of business devastating their own economy in the process. This nearly happened to the U.S. when Japan's market collapsed.
The U.S. exports to China as well.
Buick has a very strong presence with GM Reintroducing cars into China after they have halted production in the U.S.
Hardly balanced but China needs the U.S. as bad as the U.S. needs China. This alone will probably keep the peace.
Your diagram shows half of Europe isn't meeting emissions standards. Trouble for Kyoto
I'll agree that Washington should have offered an alternative but it's safe to say what works for one country won't necessarily work for others in regards to economic impacts. For instance Europeans have a much smaller reliance on cars for transport. There is not a whole lot that can be done in the U.S. at this point about it's main mode of transportation.
So in short, we have some pretty fantastic emissions standards to compensate for the fact that vehicles are less efficient. This was the biggest complaint among auto makers in the 90s as it was hurting performance. They're figuring out how to get that power back now which is why fuel economy has remained flat much to my dismay.
Which tier 2 standard are you referring to? 2004? 2007? 2009? They are drastically different removing less fuel efficient classifications as we move forward meaning that the U.S. is actually doing something and without the requirements of Kyoto.
Standards are also not uniform everywhere. California which has more than a few vehicles has very strict regulations which most cars here in Arizona will also meet since California is our neighbor.
Where do you get that China has stricter standards than the U.S.? I can't control the idiots that buy fuel inefficient vehicles that never use it to its fullest extent. My neighbors for instance though have a truck to pull their boat on weekends and regular passenger cars they drive during the week. This is increasingly common.
I don't see how the Euro 4 is stricter than current Tier 2 regulations, both have the exact same specifications for low sulfur fuels.
Where do you get the impression the U.S. isn't even trying? Methinks you need to at least try to learn about what's going on this way. Recycling is something that's been done in every town I've ever lived in and is practically universal.
Then of course there is ASU which is quite the authority on alternative energy research. They even an entire facility here in town trying out different kinds of solar and various ways of utilizing natural gas as well as geothermal energy.
This attitude is quite pervasive everywhere except for the south which doesn't represent the majority of the population.
Considering many energy saving and alternative sources were initially developed in the U.S. I find your statement bothersome, we aren't starting, we started 20 years ago when I was separating recycling at my elementary school which was also composting producing very little trash. In the coming years this policy spread to every school in the area. Of course Vermont where I grew up has always been environmentally conscious. Even here in Phoenix now it's on everyone's mind and millions are doing something about it as the city of Scottsdale where I live has had universal recycling available for nearly 8 years.
I'm sorry we're not doing more, we will, but to say that we haven't even started is just patronizing and accomplishes nothing.
I have the same system coming to my house, it makes sense to bring recycling into the home rather than requiring people to go to some recycling facility.
We have one garbage bin for per five houses along the service road. Every house has a recycling bin much like the one you are talking about.
It's good to see so many people doing something. I remember my elementary school days when the whole school maintained compost which was used to fertilize a garden and of course everything was recycled with separate bins for each type of material.
I think we can all agree that this is a good course of action. Our trucks do side loading as well so labor is cheap and easy. Of course ASU here in town is one of the foremost universities for green building, alternative energy, and biochemical research.
It's safe to say that people are starting to get the message, the more people do it the more it will pay back. With a few million people doing it here in the valley its becoming quite economical.
Our bison are quite healthy and there are lots of trees here. Where are you referring to exactly? I can buy bison meet at the grocery store for some tasty eating which is healthier than beef.
Despite what you seem to think, more and more people are environmentally conscious. Everyone practically in Arizona as well as Vermont being the two states I know from experience has recycling available to them with even pick-up at the house. We don't even have a trash can dedicated to our house even though we have a recycling bin which we originally thought was a trash can, oops!
There is no reason the countries of today need to repeat the mistakes of American industrialization as we now have clear empirical evidence illustrating the problems it causes down the road. They choose to pollute not because they don't know better, but because it's cheaper. In the late 1800's and early 1900's we simply didn't know better and spent the last 30 years cleaning up the mess. Lakes that were dead are alive and well now. Some places aren't without their problems. Ohio for instance has been extra slow in cleaning up their act despite the demonstrated harm it causes to it's neighbors.
Cuba was an embarassment and Castro liked to talk about it. The guy wasn't personally liked by many American politicians. You're right that it's quite ironic though. Cuba has done some amazing things while not trading with the U.S. though. They've had to work smarter and as a result have a pretty damned decent health-care system in place.
I see trade being opened up to Cuba soon though as our reasons have faded and people realize that it's downright silly at this point especially when we trade with a country like China.
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Vista and XP do have standard handlers for USB devices but Apple does not support this. That is why you can't plugin your iPod and iPhone and except your computer to be able to mess with it, that is why it requires special software adding protocols to your networking stack like bonjour and rDNS services. Of course if you configure so, the devices can be used as standard usb mass storage devices but you'll never get access to your music that way.
This is the principle reason why the iPod sucks, it is everything that Apple stands for which is propietary technology which really requires Apple hardware to work with. I can hook up hundreds of other USB based MP3 players out there without added software but the iPod requires specific software to interface with and don't think about going cross platform, many an ipod has been wiped by going from Mac to PC and visa versa.
You're right, iTunes should not require administrative privileges to install but all that DRM means Apple has to dig deep.
Vista doesn't handle driver issues very well but the majority of this particular issue is definitely in Apple's court especially given all the issues with iTunes 8 on both sides of the isle. At least they are mostly getting OS X right now with a lot of the silly defaults getting changed. Samba support was atrocious for the longest time when the Linux camp had it down.
Sorry, my use of the term reporting is any form of output which a controller invariably does unless another box is sitting there reporting on the progress of the controller. In either case you know if your patch was successful or not.
I'm confused, does any admin ever give up his own account password?
In my company we have a blanket policy, never give out passwords, ever... as admin I don't need someone else's password to get into their mailbox and retrieve information that's needed by another employee while the content owner is out of contact. Of course I always notify the mailbox owner that I had to go in as I have to have a specific reason.
Are there environments out there where you would be expected to give up your password? I can understand keeping a password database for service accounts which all admins should be able to access if they manage it but I can't imagine a scenario when I'd need someone else's password. Even if the thing is encrypted, I have the recovery key so again I don't need their password.
Are you implying that we sink billions in tax dollars to new companies so they can compete with the giant corporations that exist today? Who would invest in that company?
The cause of the problem came and went so a different solution has to be proposed. I have no idea what it would be beyond setting pricing publicly like is commonly done with electricity.
It's easy and the American spirit to say government is not the solution and that private entities should pick up the slack but once the government gets involved you can't just uninvolve them and expect things to be equal with newcomers.
I can understand this thought process except that not all patches are security patches which wouldn't be necessary but a great many also improve stability especially as up-times get extended. I just rebooted a Server 2003 box which had it's DNS stop responding about once a month requiring me to restart the DNS service. It just started doing this two months ago. I finally rebooted the whole thing after 500 days of up-time.
As for testing when it comes back online presumably since it is redundant it would come back online and start reporting the same information as the other unit which hadn't been updating. No turning the power plant off, if that is required then a time will come when the thing goes offline unexpectedly. Of course this setup requires triple redundancy so you wouldn't expose yourself to failure while you're updating.
You make a fair point but what happens if one of those machines does fail? Believe me, I've had triple redundant power supplies fail on me before it will happen.
The IT world believe in redundancy and so too I would have thought does the industrial world where uptime has to be 100%. Rebooting your Exchange server should not result in any downtime if email is considered mission critical.
So if there are redundant control systems in place why can't individual machines be brought offline and patched as necessary?
The only argument I can see that holds water here is that an update could theoretically break the tool but if it is properly redundant then it won't come back online when you're done and the problem stops there until the node can be replaced or updated.
How would one do this? How do you encourage free-market competition when tax dollars funded the companies that are already in place. That sets the barrier to entry artificially high so I don't see any free-market way to solve the problem when it's already been manipulated from the start.
Most customers are also locked into long term contracts preventing them from going anywhere. Most people want cheap phones they can replace cheaply every few years to get the latest features and whatnot. Personally I wait for mine to fall apart but most people I know don't do the same.
The problem is that tax dollars created the market being beared by tax payers. Honestly texting is only a small portion of the racket that cellular carriers put everyone through. Most people are paying for unlimited texting rather than paying per message. For instance when it comes to my plan, I was texting maybe 20-30 times per month costing me $6-$15 extra on my bill so it was a no brainer for me to switch to $5 for unlimited. Given that small amount of texting the pricing absurd though.
Voice service is similarly overpriced though so it shouldn't really surprise anyone. Data is even worse.
The problem is that tax dollars funded in large portions the creation of their network much like they did for POTS lines as well as Internet access.
Your experience echoes mine in that it wasn't Windows fault that the design sucked. You can create perfectly robust systems and if you let them pay you to implement something wrong then you should be fired.
Of course I'm not referring you specifically in my statement. Here's another example for you since it applies to my company. HP sponsors us so we get a lot of money from HP to buy HP equipment. Does that mean we always buy HP even when it's not appropriate? Of course not! We went with a NetApp SAN instead because it fit our needs far better than an EVA would.
The bottom line is that mismanaged projects will not meet goals while well managed projects on most platforms these days are quite capable of staying up. For instance the uptime on my NetApp SAN is 100% for the year due to clustered filers allowing me to upgrade firmware without taking the system down. The same applies to my Windows clusters, take a node down at a time, apply updates, bring it back online and repeat until the cluster is updated.
On a side note, I never understood why so many people were so hard for flash, it's rare to ever see a good use of it.
I don't agree with Microsoft's practices of paying consultants to recommend products but it's up to the company hiring them to perform due diligence to ensure they are getting their money's worth which should guarantee that the consultants would be recommending solutions that would actually work. Of course in reality so much blind faith is put into consultants that it's astounding anything ever gets done at all.Many consultants have been brought in over the years I've been here and ultimately I end up deploying everything instead.
Where are you getting that Windows server sucks? Especially server 2003 which is now 5 years old and quite stable.
Furthermore, you ignore that just because an app is written in .net that all components are Windows. For instance, my mission critical app here is written in .net C# with an Oracle RAC for a back-end running on top of Oracle Linux.
I have not had any downtime since deployment three years ago. When fault tolerance is built from the ground up at all layers then the platform really isn't much of an issue if any at all.
The app we use employs dynamic dll loading for publishing on the fly combined with clustered SQL state servers. In addition to this connections are chained so a failure to connect to one cluster results in the app automatically connecting to another cluster. Proper back-end SAN infrastructure built on NetApp mirroring across sites. The company I work for makes 90% of it's revenue in one week of the year so that time is very carefully guarded. Of course no updates are performed during this time just as an added measure.
The last bit I'll impress upon you is that it is not yet known what caused the problem. If the issue was network congestion causing cascading BGP issues then Windows or Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with this issue. So far it looks like their system made some impressive gains going from 125ms response with Unix to 6ms on Windows with an upgrade said to reduce that further to 3ms and it looks like this is working quite well so far.
I see no difference in Oracle performance on Windows vs Linux. Performance is usually more about architecture than the platform. You can make highly available networks with Windows, people do it all the time, much more often than a lot of Slashdotters seem to think.
Bad admins can ruin any deployment, bad coders can make the admins life hell trying to keep the app alive.
I haven't heard anything to make me think it was a capacity issue, I have heard that this system is an order of magnitude faster than the previous Unix system so I'm unsure of who's right since there doesn't seem to be any actual data yet. Of course one problem with making a system perform faster is that contention can become an issue if database access isn't properly handled. Not a problem with any particular DBMS.
Make no mistake, a project the size of this one is hard to do successfully, a fault in the initial deployment doesn't mean that the system can or should be scrapped.
In my particular case, we converted a mission critical VB app to asp.net C# and boy did we run into problems initially, of course it had nothing to do with the platform as it turns out most of the business rules weren't as solid as we were led to believe leading to literally hundreds of new requirements.
So we agree that Kyoto status doesn't impact whether a country is doing anything about climate change. Good, because you had me confused. The U.S. is doing a lot about climate change and so they have bothered to start along with a great many other countries. The only difference is that the U.S. started 20 years ago implementing stricter and stricter regulations. Tier 2 regs from the EPA are getting tougher and tougher combined with the fact that most states charge a gas guzzler tax on SUVs or anything that gets poor gas mileage including sports cars.
How does not signing the Kyoto treaty result in not even trying?
That's news to me, but even so, losing a large customer will still cause a collapse as they are gearing towards increased demand, not a perhaps 40% drop in demand. It makes no sense for them to do it until oil becomes too hard for them to buy.
The U.S. is China's largest buyer. They wouldn't be where they are without all that money flowing that way. If China were to collapse the U.S. economy which is something they could do right now then they would lose a lot of business devastating their own economy in the process. This nearly happened to the U.S. when Japan's market collapsed.
The U.S. exports to China as well. Buick has a very strong presence with GM Reintroducing cars into China after they have halted production in the U.S.
Hardly balanced but China needs the U.S. as bad as the U.S. needs China. This alone will probably keep the peace.
Your diagram shows half of Europe isn't meeting emissions standards. Trouble for Kyoto
I'll agree that Washington should have offered an alternative but it's safe to say what works for one country won't necessarily work for others in regards to economic impacts. For instance Europeans have a much smaller reliance on cars for transport. There is not a whole lot that can be done in the U.S. at this point about it's main mode of transportation.
California would beg to differ on tougher standards.
So in short, we have some pretty fantastic emissions standards to compensate for the fact that vehicles are less efficient. This was the biggest complaint among auto makers in the 90s as it was hurting performance. They're figuring out how to get that power back now which is why fuel economy has remained flat much to my dismay.
California is not the only state either.
I can speak from experience that most cars sold in Arizona are also compliant with California regs.
Which tier 2 standard are you referring to? 2004? 2007? 2009? They are drastically different removing less fuel efficient classifications as we move forward meaning that the U.S. is actually doing something and without the requirements of Kyoto.
Standards are also not uniform everywhere. California which has more than a few vehicles has very strict regulations which most cars here in Arizona will also meet since California is our neighbor.
California has the strictest standards in the world. For your consideration.
Newer California Emissions expanding to ships as well. The east coast is getting in on it too.
Where do you get that China has stricter standards than the U.S.? I can't control the idiots that buy fuel inefficient vehicles that never use it to its fullest extent. My neighbors for instance though have a truck to pull their boat on weekends and regular passenger cars they drive during the week. This is increasingly common.
I don't see how the Euro 4 is stricter than current Tier 2 regulations, both have the exact same specifications for low sulfur fuels.
Where do you get the impression the U.S. isn't even trying? Methinks you need to at least try to learn about what's going on this way. Recycling is something that's been done in every town I've ever lived in and is practically universal.
Then of course there is ASU which is quite the authority on alternative energy research. They even an entire facility here in town trying out different kinds of solar and various ways of utilizing natural gas as well as geothermal energy.
This attitude is quite pervasive everywhere except for the south which doesn't represent the majority of the population.
Considering many energy saving and alternative sources were initially developed in the U.S. I find your statement bothersome, we aren't starting, we started 20 years ago when I was separating recycling at my elementary school which was also composting producing very little trash. In the coming years this policy spread to every school in the area. Of course Vermont where I grew up has always been environmentally conscious. Even here in Phoenix now it's on everyone's mind and millions are doing something about it as the city of Scottsdale where I live has had universal recycling available for nearly 8 years.
I'm sorry we're not doing more, we will, but to say that we haven't even started is just patronizing and accomplishes nothing.
I for one welcome the return of the TDI.
I have the same system coming to my house, it makes sense to bring recycling into the home rather than requiring people to go to some recycling facility.
We have one garbage bin for per five houses along the service road. Every house has a recycling bin much like the one you are talking about.
It's good to see so many people doing something. I remember my elementary school days when the whole school maintained compost which was used to fertilize a garden and of course everything was recycled with separate bins for each type of material.
I think we can all agree that this is a good course of action. Our trucks do side loading as well so labor is cheap and easy. Of course ASU here in town is one of the foremost universities for green building, alternative energy, and biochemical research.
It's safe to say that people are starting to get the message, the more people do it the more it will pay back. With a few million people doing it here in the valley its becoming quite economical.
Our bison are quite healthy and there are lots of trees here. Where are you referring to exactly? I can buy bison meet at the grocery store for some tasty eating which is healthier than beef.
Despite what you seem to think, more and more people are environmentally conscious. Everyone practically in Arizona as well as Vermont being the two states I know from experience has recycling available to them with even pick-up at the house. We don't even have a trash can dedicated to our house even though we have a recycling bin which we originally thought was a trash can, oops!
There is no reason the countries of today need to repeat the mistakes of American industrialization as we now have clear empirical evidence illustrating the problems it causes down the road. They choose to pollute not because they don't know better, but because it's cheaper. In the late 1800's and early 1900's we simply didn't know better and spent the last 30 years cleaning up the mess. Lakes that were dead are alive and well now. Some places aren't without their problems. Ohio for instance has been extra slow in cleaning up their act despite the demonstrated harm it causes to it's neighbors.
Cuba was an embarassment and Castro liked to talk about it. The guy wasn't personally liked by many American politicians. You're right that it's quite ironic though. Cuba has done some amazing things while not trading with the U.S. though. They've had to work smarter and as a result have a pretty damned decent health-care system in place.
I see trade being opened up to Cuba soon though as our reasons have faded and people realize that it's downright silly at this point especially when we trade with a country like China.