No doubt everything you say is true. But, you stated that this should be easily fixable. I simply theorized that it isn't quite so easy to fix (or they would have done it), because of those poor decisions.
A good question here is: Should vendors be held to a standard of responsibility or is it the RFP writer's responsibility to ask for these things? If we decide to hold Northrop Grumman to a standard of responsibility, what is that standard and how is it enforced? What happens if all of the potential vendors turn out to be just as irresponsible?
Yes, should. I imagine the reason it isn't simple is because some of the platforms are out of support, others are locked down and the vendor has no interest in fixing them, some require a development tool that only runs on Windows 95, and they lost the source code for the rest. Then there's the ones they probably bricked while updating.
Windows as a service would have been widely available ten years ago if Microsoft hadn't thrown up licensing hurdles that made it pretty much impossible. This has never been an issue of whether anyone wants it or if it's possible, it has always been an issue of how Microsoft would charge for it. There's plenty of pent up demand and lots of sales will happen as soon as this becomes available. But, don't take that as a sign that everyone wants it or that the desktop market is dead.
The summary and the article are clearly calling out naive GitHub users, not GitHub itself. They chose to dredge GitHub because it's popular, not because they suspected any wrongdoing on Github's behalf.
I've been managing developer for many years. You'd probably be amazed how many developers simply blindly commit and pray that someone else set all of the ignore rules up correctly. I have this conversation at least once per month: "Why did you commit X"... "I didn't do that, [git/hg/svn/cvs/tfs] did that." I occasionally get "Why did you deleted Bob's code"... "I didn't, there were no merge conflicts".
Or the worst version of this... "Ohhh, you mean I shouldn't have checked code in that will overwrite the production database next time one of the automated tests runs?"
Every old man standing on his porch, waving his cane, and screaming "Get off my lawn!", is technically correct. He's also a douchebag. A little civil disobedience is necessary to call attention to things, and you don't get to say when that happens.
Gotta pick your priorities. Either pranksters get off lightly or vendors fix their security problems. I'd happily vote for immunity for playful morons before protection for incompetent hardware vendors. NetFlix hardens their infrastructure by writing software that essentially vandalizes their own systems.
We recently had a redundant system fail at work because redundancy wasn't considered as the system was added to. I seriously considered fixing the problem and instituting a "reboot a node on Tuesday at 2:00pm" policy. Nothing makes you think about redundancy like knowing the weekly failure is approaching.
I don't know, security guys know that IoT vendors won't get off their asses unless a demonstration is made that makes the news. With the current "hush it up" climate, it's the only thing that works.
If there ever was an encryption algorithm that whose creators were realistic about how it would be attacked and the real threat posed, it was DES.
They knew that 56 bits was "right" for the algorithm. That's why you see triple-DES, but not quadruple-DES. It only works well under very specific circumstances and the creators knew those circumstances well. They also knew enough to harden it against differential cryptanalysis, before differential cryptanalysis was publicly discussed.
This isn't a very useful definition of "meddling". By this definition, someone who is an American but can't vote (e.g. has a felony is their past), and expresses a political opinion, is meddling.
every politician would be tripping over themselves to hire these guys to help them run their future ad campaigns
The things the Russians are accused of wouldn't be tolerated in American campaigns. That's actually one of the points of the Mueller investigation - if the Russians were working for the Trump campaign is did do some of the things that have been discussed, then someone is going to jail.
Yes, twenty years ago, you were taught to "reduce, reuse, and recycle", and then taught to be an evangelist for the least effective of the three. Water from the tap, run through a filter, and consumed in glasses that last a lifetime is better for the environment than recycling your plastic water bottles.
The most green person in your neighborhood is probably an old lady that recycles almost nothing and only has a half-filled bag of trash every week. Contrast this with the busy-body soccer mom that is always telling everyone to recycle, but somehow manages to produce six bags of trash along side that blue bin.
My community is worse than that. They gave us one 64 gallon refuse container and one 96 gallon recycling container. Then, they tell us that they won't dump the refuse container if it's overfilled and won't take any more than fits in it. Meanwhile, they'll take a casual look in the recycling container and take it unless it's an egregious offense, and also take any extra recyclable material next to the container.
So, houses that produce a lot of garbage simply put everything that's even remotely close to recyclable at the bottom of the bin, and put genuine recyclables next to the bin, all to get as much trash as possible in the 64 gallon container. In an effort to reduce costs by encouraging recycling, they've cost themselves a ton of money by devaluing their recyclables stream. It would be cheaper to pick up 96 gallons of refuse than to turn 96 gallons of recyclables into refuse via contamination.
You've never seen how half of the corporate stuff comes into existence. It starts as an amalgamation of whatever the most tech-savvy employee managed to piece together. They pieced it together on whatever they run on their desktop.
I've seen 32-bit servers kept around to run something that has an ancient emailer program embedded in it that won't cooperate with 64-bit operating systems. It's not that there aren't any 64-bit email clients, it's that no one has the time to figure out how to replace an internal part of this ball-of-mud that runs the company.
I've seen Windows XP in data centers because some ancient piece of software that runs the door locks hasn't been updated in twenty years and it has a driver that doesn't play well with anything newer.
Slightly off topic, but similar, was the time when we had trouble buying a server because the software specs were written in 2001 and stated a minimum processor clock frequency of 3.2GHz, but the world had moved on to the Core architecture and clock speeds went way down (but performance went way up).
It would be great if the copyright office declared dances copyrightable, and then the DOJ aggressively pursued attendees of wedding receptions for doing the Chicken Dance, the Electric Slide, and the Macarena. Remember, everything copyrightable is protected by default.
To me, this is like buying a car vs leasing. I'd rather pay off my car and drive it 5-10 more years with no payment. If you want to have a new car smell every 2 years, (and worry about excess mileage on road trips) - go ahead and pay more.
You are mixing two things into one argument. It's always cheaper to acquire new cars less often, but that has nothing to do with leasing vs buying. A buyer can cycle through cars as often as a typical leaser if he/she chooses, and a leaser can finance the residual if he/she chooses to not get a new car. A wise buyer considers several different ways of paying for a vehicle and chooses the one that costs less.
The simple fact is that I know G mail and Google Calendar and I think Office 365 email and their meeting service (whatever they're calling it this week) are enough of an improvement to be worth a few bucks. I have no "sword of Damocles" because the desktops apps don't go read-only without first giving plenty of warning and plenty of time to clear up any issues. If I decide to not purchase in the future, I am in no worse of a position than I am today.
Just don't tell me it's cheaper.
I didn't, I said "it probably only costs me $50 a year". That's more expensive and I provided my rationale for why I think it's worth it. You don't have to agree with me.
Here's where the real confusion sets in. Office 365 is both a unique set of products/services and a unique way of paying. I use Office 365 - and I have the normal versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my computer. I don't save anything to Microsoft's cloud, and I don't use the cloud version of the apps. After factoring in the online meeting functionality and the excellent hosted email services that I would have to buy from someone anyways, it probably only costs me $50 a year. For that, I get to install Office on every PC and laptop in my house (limit 5).
So, for many people Office 365 is simply a subscription plan for good-old-Office. For others, it's a cloud service. For others, it's a combination of both. But, if I miss one payment, all I lose is the ability to edit files. And I can always choose to switch to LibreOffice as long as I'm using the subset of functionality it supports.
what do you do when the experts disagree or don’t have good answer themselves.
A good leader can build a team that's smarter than he is. If two of your experts disagree, then get them each to write up support for their position and get comments from other experts. If the community can't come up with a clear winner (or shred them both to bits), then they are probably both good ideas.
If your experts don't have an answer, send it to your research department.
This stuff isn't hard... "Minister of" positions aren't the most capable people in their respective fields, they're managers.
Your prognostication is no more logical than mine. You just believe 'past performance is predictive'.
I said no such thing. All I said was that incumbents have a huge advantage. I never said they couldn't lose, or that they wouldn't lose, or made any other prediction for the future of any of the tech giants. You equated my statement that they had a "huge advantage" to a prediction... and I've been trying all day to inform you that it was the little man in your head that said that, not me.
What I did say (huge advantage) is simply the network effect and is believed by pretty much anyone that has given this more than ten seconds of thought. There's no way you can spin this as "you're wrong too".
Dunno. I think they did have a huge advantage, but that was overcome by several factors. First, the market was growing, so a competitor could gain fewer users, but still gain a measurable amount. Second, Facebook focused on higher education only, so they were able to become the dominant social network for a specific market segment, then counted on those users to want to continue to communicate with the people they knew back in college.
In summary, you can have a "huge advantage" and still lose. The evidence that Myspace lost is not evidence that incumbents don't have a huge advantage where network effects are significant. Your logic is flawed. You saying it again and telling me the story of Myspace doesn't fix your logic error. A single contrary event is not evidence of the non-existence of a trend.
If you could produce some sort of evidence that shows that competing against Facebook is no harder than competing against the TV repair shop down the street, then you would be on the right track from a logic perspective.
Yes, I totally said that. Thank you for translating to the world that "That's a huge advantage to incumbents" is exactly the same thing as "Incumbents can never be defeated".
If there is a monopoly that forms, it won't stay a monopoly for long. At some point, it's profits will reflect its monopoly, and new entrants will raise the necessary capital to compete with it, based on a stronger value proposition (sacrificing those profits in the industry for market share).
The big tech companies often benefit from "network effects". Facebook's value comes from the people you can connect to on Facebook. Social platforms have an inherent tendency to reward technologies with more users. Add to that the fact that software development is expensive, but is only done once and the cost is divided across all participants, and you get a market where large companies earn more dollars per new head and software improvements cost fewer dollars per head. That's a huge advantage to incumbents.
Natural monopolies do not need to exist. We just got jinxed into believing they need to. Power companies are a great example. In Texas you can purchase power from any producer you choose, and the rates are pretty good.
I hope you realize that the only reason you can buy power from the producer of your choice is because the state of Texas mandates that distributors must deliver power from any supplier - and that is done by regulation. Without regulation, you would buy electricity from whoever your last mile provider said you would buy it from. Texas did go through "deregulation" in 2002, but that only refers to suppliers - the entire market only exists because of the regulation placed on the distributors and those in charge of the large-scale transmission lines.
Serves me right for saying two things. That allowed you to respond to the one that's less damaging and harder to prove and stay away from the glaring technical error that you based your story on.
American lost to the Japanese in the 1970s because before the oil crisis, there was no incentive to make efficient cars in the US, but there was in Japan (mostly because big cars didn't fit on Japanese roads, but also because America was already a car culture and we were OK shelling out a sizeable chunk of our earnings to drive). When the oil crisis hit, the Japanese were in a better position to take advantage of it than the Americans were. Painting it as American engineers being inferior is untrue.
It's not a myth. When you recycle steel, it gets harder. You can put carbon back into it to make it softer, but that costs money. American cars of the 1950s were made out of mild steel. That steel eventually got recycled and shipped to Japan. Then the Japanese didn't add more carbon to it — instead, they designed vehicles around the materials.
You can look at any of a hundred sources, but here's one. Mild steel has little carbon, adding carbon makes it harder (up to 0.77%, but no one uses hypereutectic steel for cars).
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt everything you say is true. But, you stated that this should be easily fixable. I simply theorized that it isn't quite so easy to fix (or they would have done it), because of those poor decisions.
A good question here is: Should vendors be held to a standard of responsibility or is it the RFP writer's responsibility to ask for these things? If we decide to hold Northrop Grumman to a standard of responsibility, what is that standard and how is it enforced? What happens if all of the potential vendors turn out to be just as irresponsible?
... should have been easily fixable...
Yes, should. I imagine the reason it isn't simple is because some of the platforms are out of support, others are locked down and the vendor has no interest in fixing them, some require a development tool that only runs on Windows 95, and they lost the source code for the rest. Then there's the ones they probably bricked while updating.
Windows as a service would have been widely available ten years ago if Microsoft hadn't thrown up licensing hurdles that made it pretty much impossible. This has never been an issue of whether anyone wants it or if it's possible, it has always been an issue of how Microsoft would charge for it. There's plenty of pent up demand and lots of sales will happen as soon as this becomes available. But, don't take that as a sign that everyone wants it or that the desktop market is dead.
The summary and the article are clearly calling out naive GitHub users, not GitHub itself. They chose to dredge GitHub because it's popular, not because they suspected any wrongdoing on Github's behalf.
I've been managing developer for many years. You'd probably be amazed how many developers simply blindly commit and pray that someone else set all of the ignore rules up correctly. I have this conversation at least once per month: "Why did you commit X"... "I didn't do that, [git/hg/svn/cvs/tfs] did that." I occasionally get "Why did you deleted Bob's code"... "I didn't, there were no merge conflicts".
Or the worst version of this... "Ohhh, you mean I shouldn't have checked code in that will overwrite the production database next time one of the automated tests runs?"
Every old man standing on his porch, waving his cane, and screaming "Get off my lawn!", is technically correct. He's also a douchebag. A little civil disobedience is necessary to call attention to things, and you don't get to say when that happens.
Gotta pick your priorities. Either pranksters get off lightly or vendors fix their security problems. I'd happily vote for immunity for playful morons before protection for incompetent hardware vendors. NetFlix hardens their infrastructure by writing software that essentially vandalizes their own systems.
We recently had a redundant system fail at work because redundancy wasn't considered as the system was added to. I seriously considered fixing the problem and instituting a "reboot a node on Tuesday at 2:00pm" policy. Nothing makes you think about redundancy like knowing the weekly failure is approaching.
I don't think you understand just how negligent most software makers are in the realm of security. This stuff isn't hard, it just has zero priority.
I don't know, security guys know that IoT vendors won't get off their asses unless a demonstration is made that makes the news. With the current "hush it up" climate, it's the only thing that works.
If there ever was an encryption algorithm that whose creators were realistic about how it would be attacked and the real threat posed, it was DES.
They knew that 56 bits was "right" for the algorithm. That's why you see triple-DES, but not quadruple-DES. It only works well under very specific circumstances and the creators knew those circumstances well. They also knew enough to harden it against differential cryptanalysis, before differential cryptanalysis was publicly discussed.
This isn't a very useful definition of "meddling". By this definition, someone who is an American but can't vote (e.g. has a felony is their past), and expresses a political opinion, is meddling.
every politician would be tripping over themselves to hire these guys to help them run their future ad campaigns
The things the Russians are accused of wouldn't be tolerated in American campaigns. That's actually one of the points of the Mueller investigation - if the Russians were working for the Trump campaign is did do some of the things that have been discussed, then someone is going to jail.
Yes, twenty years ago, you were taught to "reduce, reuse, and recycle", and then taught to be an evangelist for the least effective of the three. Water from the tap, run through a filter, and consumed in glasses that last a lifetime is better for the environment than recycling your plastic water bottles.
The most green person in your neighborhood is probably an old lady that recycles almost nothing and only has a half-filled bag of trash every week. Contrast this with the busy-body soccer mom that is always telling everyone to recycle, but somehow manages to produce six bags of trash along side that blue bin.
My community is worse than that. They gave us one 64 gallon refuse container and one 96 gallon recycling container. Then, they tell us that they won't dump the refuse container if it's overfilled and won't take any more than fits in it. Meanwhile, they'll take a casual look in the recycling container and take it unless it's an egregious offense, and also take any extra recyclable material next to the container.
So, houses that produce a lot of garbage simply put everything that's even remotely close to recyclable at the bottom of the bin, and put genuine recyclables next to the bin, all to get as much trash as possible in the 64 gallon container. In an effort to reduce costs by encouraging recycling, they've cost themselves a ton of money by devaluing their recyclables stream. It would be cheaper to pick up 96 gallons of refuse than to turn 96 gallons of recyclables into refuse via contamination.
You've never seen how half of the corporate stuff comes into existence. It starts as an amalgamation of whatever the most tech-savvy employee managed to piece together. They pieced it together on whatever they run on their desktop.
I've seen 32-bit servers kept around to run something that has an ancient emailer program embedded in it that won't cooperate with 64-bit operating systems. It's not that there aren't any 64-bit email clients, it's that no one has the time to figure out how to replace an internal part of this ball-of-mud that runs the company.
I've seen Windows XP in data centers because some ancient piece of software that runs the door locks hasn't been updated in twenty years and it has a driver that doesn't play well with anything newer.
Slightly off topic, but similar, was the time when we had trouble buying a server because the software specs were written in 2001 and stated a minimum processor clock frequency of 3.2GHz, but the world had moved on to the Core architecture and clock speeds went way down (but performance went way up).
It would be great if the copyright office declared dances copyrightable, and then the DOJ aggressively pursued attendees of wedding receptions for doing the Chicken Dance, the Electric Slide, and the Macarena. Remember, everything copyrightable is protected by default.
To me, this is like buying a car vs leasing. I'd rather pay off my car and drive it 5-10 more years with no payment. If you want to have a new car smell every 2 years, (and worry about excess mileage on road trips) - go ahead and pay more.
You are mixing two things into one argument. It's always cheaper to acquire new cars less often, but that has nothing to do with leasing vs buying. A buyer can cycle through cars as often as a typical leaser if he/she chooses, and a leaser can finance the residual if he/she chooses to not get a new car. A wise buyer considers several different ways of paying for a vehicle and chooses the one that costs less.
The simple fact is that I know G mail and Google Calendar and I think Office 365 email and their meeting service (whatever they're calling it this week) are enough of an improvement to be worth a few bucks. I have no "sword of Damocles" because the desktops apps don't go read-only without first giving plenty of warning and plenty of time to clear up any issues. If I decide to not purchase in the future, I am in no worse of a position than I am today.
Just don't tell me it's cheaper.
I didn't, I said "it probably only costs me $50 a year". That's more expensive and I provided my rationale for why I think it's worth it. You don't have to agree with me.
Here's where the real confusion sets in. Office 365 is both a unique set of products/services and a unique way of paying. I use Office 365 - and I have the normal versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my computer. I don't save anything to Microsoft's cloud, and I don't use the cloud version of the apps. After factoring in the online meeting functionality and the excellent hosted email services that I would have to buy from someone anyways, it probably only costs me $50 a year. For that, I get to install Office on every PC and laptop in my house (limit 5).
So, for many people Office 365 is simply a subscription plan for good-old-Office. For others, it's a cloud service. For others, it's a combination of both. But, if I miss one payment, all I lose is the ability to edit files. And I can always choose to switch to LibreOffice as long as I'm using the subset of functionality it supports.
what do you do when the experts disagree or don’t have good answer themselves.
A good leader can build a team that's smarter than he is. If two of your experts disagree, then get them each to write up support for their position and get comments from other experts. If the community can't come up with a clear winner (or shred them both to bits), then they are probably both good ideas.
If your experts don't have an answer, send it to your research department.
This stuff isn't hard... "Minister of" positions aren't the most capable people in their respective fields, they're managers.
Your prognostication is no more logical than mine. You just believe 'past performance is predictive'.
I said no such thing. All I said was that incumbents have a huge advantage. I never said they couldn't lose, or that they wouldn't lose, or made any other prediction for the future of any of the tech giants. You equated my statement that they had a "huge advantage" to a prediction... and I've been trying all day to inform you that it was the little man in your head that said that, not me.
What I did say (huge advantage) is simply the network effect and is believed by pretty much anyone that has given this more than ten seconds of thought. There's no way you can spin this as "you're wrong too".
They thought like you do.
Dunno. I think they did have a huge advantage, but that was overcome by several factors. First, the market was growing, so a competitor could gain fewer users, but still gain a measurable amount. Second, Facebook focused on higher education only, so they were able to become the dominant social network for a specific market segment, then counted on those users to want to continue to communicate with the people they knew back in college.
In summary, you can have a "huge advantage" and still lose. The evidence that Myspace lost is not evidence that incumbents don't have a huge advantage where network effects are significant. Your logic is flawed. You saying it again and telling me the story of Myspace doesn't fix your logic error. A single contrary event is not evidence of the non-existence of a trend.
If you could produce some sort of evidence that shows that competing against Facebook is no harder than competing against the TV repair shop down the street, then you would be on the right track from a logic perspective.
MySpace will never be defeated?
Yes, I totally said that. Thank you for translating to the world that "That's a huge advantage to incumbents" is exactly the same thing as "Incumbents can never be defeated".
If there is a monopoly that forms, it won't stay a monopoly for long. At some point, it's profits will reflect its monopoly, and new entrants will raise the necessary capital to compete with it, based on a stronger value proposition (sacrificing those profits in the industry for market share).
The big tech companies often benefit from "network effects". Facebook's value comes from the people you can connect to on Facebook. Social platforms have an inherent tendency to reward technologies with more users. Add to that the fact that software development is expensive, but is only done once and the cost is divided across all participants, and you get a market where large companies earn more dollars per new head and software improvements cost fewer dollars per head. That's a huge advantage to incumbents.
Natural monopolies do not need to exist. We just got jinxed into believing they need to. Power companies are a great example. In Texas you can purchase power from any producer you choose, and the rates are pretty good.
I hope you realize that the only reason you can buy power from the producer of your choice is because the state of Texas mandates that distributors must deliver power from any supplier - and that is done by regulation. Without regulation, you would buy electricity from whoever your last mile provider said you would buy it from. Texas did go through "deregulation" in 2002, but that only refers to suppliers - the entire market only exists because of the regulation placed on the distributors and those in charge of the large-scale transmission lines.
Serves me right for saying two things. That allowed you to respond to the one that's less damaging and harder to prove and stay away from the glaring technical error that you based your story on.
American lost to the Japanese in the 1970s because before the oil crisis, there was no incentive to make efficient cars in the US, but there was in Japan (mostly because big cars didn't fit on Japanese roads, but also because America was already a car culture and we were OK shelling out a sizeable chunk of our earnings to drive). When the oil crisis hit, the Japanese were in a better position to take advantage of it than the Americans were. Painting it as American engineers being inferior is untrue.
It's not a myth. When you recycle steel, it gets harder. You can put carbon back into it to make it softer, but that costs money. American cars of the 1950s were made out of mild steel. That steel eventually got recycled and shipped to Japan. Then the Japanese didn't add more carbon to it — instead, they designed vehicles around the materials.
You can look at any of a hundred sources, but here's one. Mild steel has little carbon, adding carbon makes it harder (up to 0.77%, but no one uses hypereutectic steel for cars).