I'd advocate for liability for the companies that employ the engineers. In construction, the engineers are often not directly responsible unless you can prove intent, although they may lose a license in cases of severe incompetence. The construction company may be on the line for some of the construction costs, but often the governments involved ends up paying for those sorts of losses. In most cases however, it's not necessarily the engineers but the construction company and/or their subcontractors trying to squeeze out a few dollars in the process that are the problem.
Neither bridge building nor software engineering have mathematically proven models. You can approximate and calculate a lot of it based on years of construction but you still have to have common sense and experience.
The reason we have shitty software is because nobody typically dies when something goes wrong (and in the cases where it does, the instances are so rare the companies behind them often don't care enough). Bridges on the other hand are not nearly as lean and cost effective as they theoretically could be because nobody wants to take that risk, a bridge collapsing is severely more expensive than someone's heart rate monitor halting so if you need to build the largest bridge in the world, you pay the freaking engineers $1M/year in salary, if you need to compete to sell the cheapest heart rate monitor in the world, you get some Indian guy barely out of high school to do it for $1k.
It's why planes (until the Boeing 777X/AirBus A350 at least) have multiple "computer systems" (which are really purpose-built programmable machines) on physically separated networks but medical equipment runs Windows XP with a public IPv4 address on the Internet. 1 person that's already halfway in the casket is an acceptable risk, 100 people dying because of the same sloppy software practices would be a tragedy for the company involved.
How do pickles go bad, they should last for like a decade at least before they start disintegrating. Pickling is one of the most ancient methods of preserving foods and was done for really long boat voyages. I have sauerkraut that has been there for 2 years (covered with brine) that remains edible.
I highly doubt a bad deal with WalMart was the only problem, business deals go two ways and you are not required to make a deal and if you are reliant on one of your buyers not to pull the rug from under you, then you have way overextended.
Those sorts of companies tend to be top-heavy which gets them involved in a lot of large government contracts, large enterprises etc but also makes them very, very expensive. This is great in economic bubbles because companies will tend to throw lots of money at them, smaller companies and during economic downturns (which has pretty much defined the last decade) even bigger companies tend to go with alternatives in these situations and over the past two decades VoIP and Asterisk has been eating Avaya for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I remember interacting with Avaya about 20 years ago, I did an RFQ for a small VoIP solution for a web startup, they had their own VoIP protocols and refused to integrate with others. For the size of the company (about 20 people), they still recommended installing separate digital lines and using ISDN for remote work even though we had a 'brand new' switch installation with VLAN and QoS capability (these days, even home switches have it). That is ultimately what killed them in the long run, insistence on a closed, expensive platform when smaller, much more nimble technologies were already in place.
Not maintenance free. Solar panels require a lot of maintenance to keep them in their optimal conditions. They're also very expensive to produce, don't recycle well and don't last nearly as long as advertised.
How so, solar panels still need maintenance, you need snow removal, cleaning, repairs/replacements of damaged cells and the damned things are very inefficient per square foot so you need more space (and thus more people and energy waste to cover said space) to generate less power.
Gas is sustainable for the foreseeable future, solar panels not so much. Solar thermal is cheaper, more efficient and more sustainable, not as sexy and thus not subsidized though.
The problem is that everybody thinks about direct energy generation with solar panels that are at best ~20% effective. It's far cheaper and more cost effective to generate electricity via solar thermal energy which is at least twice as effective as a solar panel to generate electricity, it's even more effective to use it as a direct heating source but a black box, some plumbing and a turbine is not nearly as 'sexy' as a magic electricity maker.
The "problem" with solar panels is they are cheap due to the export of it's pollution and manufacturing to a particular third world country and the subsidies by said country to keep manufacturing there. They are also infinitely easier to install than a solar thermal plant so although good enough for the home owner, it is neither sustainable nor cost effective for industrial installations as the panels tend to overheat and individuals cells break down very early on in their life span, driving down their true effectiveness even further.
Wind, solar and water are way better used directly than converted. It's why electric cars are so slow to take off, they're about as sustainable as oil making their expense relatively constant and if we had kept driving electrics since the early 1900's like we did with oil-based cars, we'd have run out of precious metals in the 50's instead of running low on oil suppliers. Yes, in theory a lot of it should be recyclable but the energy required to recycle stuff is way higher than we expected so precious metal mining will not be moving towards our trash heaps anytime soon.
What we need is smaller everything, smaller government, smaller vacations, smaller businesses. Keep things more localized, we spend way too much energy on moving stuff (including ourselves), sometimes unnecessarily just to save a few dollars. It has served it's purpose in the last century but I think that we need, at this point, use our ingenuity, not to send people all the way around the world, but to make it so that we all can survive locally without relying on massive imports/exports.
Semiconductors and circuit boards are made by lithography, basically a photography method, you make a design of your circuit including all the traces, then you project that onto an area of a light sensitive substrate, shine a really bright light onto it and then etch out (with chemicals) all the areas that had light on them. It gets more complex as you add layers.
In the end all a circuit board is, is a very fine layer of copper. For small, one-off designs, the masks, the chemicals etc. is relatively time consuming and expensive. At home for very small repairs there are alternatives where you can simply draw traces with a conductive material (such as a pen). Technically, it should be possible to 'print' metal, but I can imagine drawing full, complex circuit boards would be insanely expensive and the machine and substrates themselves would be very rudimentary due to the melting points involved.
It is $4000 to a criminal organization, it's illegal (especially for government agencies like a POLICE department) to make any payment and become complicit in the criminal activity.
On the other hand, $4000 is what they start off with, I heard of a company that got hit with $10k in ransom demands, a few days later they realized their backups weren't working well so they gave them the $10k, by then the criminals realized they were attempting and failed to restore from backup so they quadrupled the demand so the company got the FBI involved, when the criminals realized the FBI got involved, they wiped EVERYTHING. It took them about 3 weeks and about $100k to recover the broken backups by a professional recovery company.
Hell no, a federal government IT department? You mean, a bunch of bureaucrats charging $100k/y for a 10TB storage unit because 'vendors' from the Gartner Triangle recommended it to them and attached a huge IBM and Oracle contract to it.
What these small departments need is to find and hire a local IT person or if they can't afford an IT person (if you have less than 200 devices, you don't need a dedicated IT person), contract with a local company, there are plenty everywhere, they will take care of these sorts of issues for less than the consultancy fee on a government agency contract.
For 40k/year I can easily set up a 200TB storage system, host it in a datacenter and professionally maintain it. $4000 buys you about 20TB which would probably last about 3-5 years without maintenance and that should be sufficient to back up pretty much everything in that police department with 3 months of retention.
Not what backup means, you're describing a RAID or other sort of mirror (even if it is delayed). Redundancy is not the same as a backup.
A backup has history, you could use snapshots or tape rotations or whatever, but older versions cannot be overwritten by newer versions, in most (best) cases, older versions cannot be written to period (the tape could have a physical tab or the storage system does not allow writing). When things change (eg. they are encrypted), you would see a very large backup if you're doing incremental backups (since all files changed simultaneously).
The problem is that Android devices are less securable. All they're doing to these is installing some profiles and apps for remote management, the 'military grade' encryption features are just the OS'es AES-256 device encryption, it's not like they're making their own system. Android binaries and chipmakers are also heavily controlled by Chinese interest.
He's the governor and has been for the last 6 years. He should've signed and paid for it, then started the construction of it. To this point there's only been prototypes though, lots of them have been constructed for millions of euros only to be decommissioned a few months or years later. From what I can find, there's only a company with some ideas which has now been funded for millions by tax payers without any scientific or technical demonstrations, prototypes or results.
I highly doubt they up and replaced the entire system migrating all live data to new systems. The problem with "cloud" file systems is that it's not really a file system, its a database (object store whatever you call it), deleting an "object" does nothing really but leave a hole in the database and such fragmentation cannot easily be resolved unless you devise a fitting algorithm. So most systems never delete anything truly, just mark it deleted and if ever they need space, they could "vacuum" the thing but it's such a pain in the neck or even a risk that it's never done. Even if you replace the underlying disk, the entire database gets replicated onto it including the "dead" space, neither the upper layers have any idea about the media nor does the media have any idea about the upper layers. Most of these "file" systems are very wasteful, fragile moronic thing cobbled together for a 2 year IPO goal not designed by seasoned programmers for the long haul.
Not necessarily, all of Dropbox is approx. 120-200PB. Distributed over thousands of storage servers it's really peanuts to save people's history (which are mostly small delta's). Running a storage system of 200TB myself, people tend not to delete stuff all that much and even so, the entire amount of people's previous storages is encapsulated every time we have to upgrade (every 3 years). 10 years ago we stored close to 10TB, now 10TB is a rounding error on the upgrade.
Net neutrality rules are necessary because of the monopoly/duopoly status many ISP's enjoy due to regulation. If you can cut regulation and don't allow larger ISP's to interfere legally with others, there should be some competition not just from startup commercial ISP's (eg. Google) but also from municipal ISP's. In my area we have a small rollout from an ISP giving 100/20 and at one point Verizon FiOS promised to come by too, however legislation has hindered both of them.
Pretty much any filesystem since before MSDOS only unlinks the file, not really deletes it. Windows 95 came with a Trash can feature that only moved files to the Trash until the user unlinked the files. These days cloud/flash based storage will do pretty much the same, keep the data around until it's either overwritten due to space congestion or deleted by an admin.
The same can happen in the US and EU, especially around the sale of a house or if certain properties have been abandoned although the time periods involved vary wildly based on circumstance and location.
Tariffs are usually levied on imports, and then usually only for items that are available locally as well and that aren't a necessity.
You would be an idiot to tariff your primary exports as a country unless you are trying to keep the resources local (eg. if you don't produce enough grain within your own, you should tariff grain exports).
One of Korea's main exports is semiconductors and computers, they'd be idiots to levy a tax on exporting it. The UK on the other hand should probably tariff fully assembled server racks/containers because there are plenty of local jobs that could do that. And yes, companies then will think twice about (ab)using UK resources and tax breaks (how many jobs did they promise to get free/cheap land?), if they want customers in the UK, they should pay their fair share in taxes and create local jobs.
Quote: Additionally, the Library District plans to upgrade to Windows version 10 in late 2017 at an estimated cost of $20,000 and also upgrade Microsoft Office to version 10 at a cost of $48,500.
They spend about $1M/y on computer technology (~$1500/computer/year) not accounting for staff or digital databases/collections and their computers are 5 years old so they need replacement which is a separate line item. With those sorts of budgets, you'd think they have this figured out.
In comparison, I work in research, our systems last for 7-10 years, cost us an average of ~$1000/year including IT staff costs, licensing and purchasing the computer (or $3-400/year without staffing costs).
You must be joking, public libraries in the US have some of the largest IT budgets except perhaps public schools. On average libraries spend about 10% of revenue on IT systems vs 2-6% for comparable commercial companies, even small sites like my local libraries will spend $100k/year on a dozen computers.
They do not want 40 different people messing with their system, they'll rather spend $300k/y of a $1M budget to a local IT consulting company sending out the 18yo Cisco Certified Senior Network Systems Engineer Analyst Associate Microsoft Technicians and buy some security thing from the Gartner Magic Security App Store.
Cervical cancer didn't get more deadly, statistics have nothing to do with whether or not a certain cancer is more lethal or less susceptible to treatment.
The statistics also no longer apply to 'just' women, they only apply to women who haven't (yet) had their cervix removed, it's a different subset of people. 1/3 of women get hysterectomies (2/3 of those are deemed to be unnecessary).
It's not necessarily true that you can't get cervical cancer after a hysterectomy, even with the cervix removed (not necessarily completely removed in all cases), plenty of people have cervical cancer already spread to nearby organs.
So 'at best' these statistics just identified that you're more susceptible to cervical cancer before treatment/prevention of cervical cancer.
Or give away the software for free and sell support regionally if you want fairness that's the best way, your cost won't affect local economies as heavily and users will be able to afford training on your product for free so the software will be self-marketing.
Obviously you need to then compete on the quality of your software instead of lock-in and inertia.
No, but at least your local economies impact the price. You pay $50k for a Windows Server license anywhere in the world. You pay $120k for a SysAdmin in the US, 20k for one in rural India.
The impact of the license cost results in Windows Server having a TCO twice the amount (compared to local economies) in India than the US (to small businesses at least). With Linux you still need the SysAdmin, but your TCO compared to local economies is equalized.
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I'd advocate for liability for the companies that employ the engineers. In construction, the engineers are often not directly responsible unless you can prove intent, although they may lose a license in cases of severe incompetence. The construction company may be on the line for some of the construction costs, but often the governments involved ends up paying for those sorts of losses. In most cases however, it's not necessarily the engineers but the construction company and/or their subcontractors trying to squeeze out a few dollars in the process that are the problem.
Neither bridge building nor software engineering have mathematically proven models. You can approximate and calculate a lot of it based on years of construction but you still have to have common sense and experience.
The reason we have shitty software is because nobody typically dies when something goes wrong (and in the cases where it does, the instances are so rare the companies behind them often don't care enough). Bridges on the other hand are not nearly as lean and cost effective as they theoretically could be because nobody wants to take that risk, a bridge collapsing is severely more expensive than someone's heart rate monitor halting so if you need to build the largest bridge in the world, you pay the freaking engineers $1M/year in salary, if you need to compete to sell the cheapest heart rate monitor in the world, you get some Indian guy barely out of high school to do it for $1k.
It's why planes (until the Boeing 777X/AirBus A350 at least) have multiple "computer systems" (which are really purpose-built programmable machines) on physically separated networks but medical equipment runs Windows XP with a public IPv4 address on the Internet. 1 person that's already halfway in the casket is an acceptable risk, 100 people dying because of the same sloppy software practices would be a tragedy for the company involved.
How do pickles go bad, they should last for like a decade at least before they start disintegrating. Pickling is one of the most ancient methods of preserving foods and was done for really long boat voyages. I have sauerkraut that has been there for 2 years (covered with brine) that remains edible.
I highly doubt a bad deal with WalMart was the only problem, business deals go two ways and you are not required to make a deal and if you are reliant on one of your buyers not to pull the rug from under you, then you have way overextended.
Those sorts of companies tend to be top-heavy which gets them involved in a lot of large government contracts, large enterprises etc but also makes them very, very expensive. This is great in economic bubbles because companies will tend to throw lots of money at them, smaller companies and during economic downturns (which has pretty much defined the last decade) even bigger companies tend to go with alternatives in these situations and over the past two decades VoIP and Asterisk has been eating Avaya for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I remember interacting with Avaya about 20 years ago, I did an RFQ for a small VoIP solution for a web startup, they had their own VoIP protocols and refused to integrate with others. For the size of the company (about 20 people), they still recommended installing separate digital lines and using ISDN for remote work even though we had a 'brand new' switch installation with VLAN and QoS capability (these days, even home switches have it). That is ultimately what killed them in the long run, insistence on a closed, expensive platform when smaller, much more nimble technologies were already in place.
Not maintenance free. Solar panels require a lot of maintenance to keep them in their optimal conditions. They're also very expensive to produce, don't recycle well and don't last nearly as long as advertised.
How so, solar panels still need maintenance, you need snow removal, cleaning, repairs/replacements of damaged cells and the damned things are very inefficient per square foot so you need more space (and thus more people and energy waste to cover said space) to generate less power.
Gas is sustainable for the foreseeable future, solar panels not so much. Solar thermal is cheaper, more efficient and more sustainable, not as sexy and thus not subsidized though.
The problem is that everybody thinks about direct energy generation with solar panels that are at best ~20% effective. It's far cheaper and more cost effective to generate electricity via solar thermal energy which is at least twice as effective as a solar panel to generate electricity, it's even more effective to use it as a direct heating source but a black box, some plumbing and a turbine is not nearly as 'sexy' as a magic electricity maker.
The "problem" with solar panels is they are cheap due to the export of it's pollution and manufacturing to a particular third world country and the subsidies by said country to keep manufacturing there. They are also infinitely easier to install than a solar thermal plant so although good enough for the home owner, it is neither sustainable nor cost effective for industrial installations as the panels tend to overheat and individuals cells break down very early on in their life span, driving down their true effectiveness even further.
Wind, solar and water are way better used directly than converted. It's why electric cars are so slow to take off, they're about as sustainable as oil making their expense relatively constant and if we had kept driving electrics since the early 1900's like we did with oil-based cars, we'd have run out of precious metals in the 50's instead of running low on oil suppliers. Yes, in theory a lot of it should be recyclable but the energy required to recycle stuff is way higher than we expected so precious metal mining will not be moving towards our trash heaps anytime soon.
What we need is smaller everything, smaller government, smaller vacations, smaller businesses. Keep things more localized, we spend way too much energy on moving stuff (including ourselves), sometimes unnecessarily just to save a few dollars. It has served it's purpose in the last century but I think that we need, at this point, use our ingenuity, not to send people all the way around the world, but to make it so that we all can survive locally without relying on massive imports/exports.
Semiconductors and circuit boards are made by lithography, basically a photography method, you make a design of your circuit including all the traces, then you project that onto an area of a light sensitive substrate, shine a really bright light onto it and then etch out (with chemicals) all the areas that had light on them. It gets more complex as you add layers.
In the end all a circuit board is, is a very fine layer of copper. For small, one-off designs, the masks, the chemicals etc. is relatively time consuming and expensive. At home for very small repairs there are alternatives where you can simply draw traces with a conductive material (such as a pen). Technically, it should be possible to 'print' metal, but I can imagine drawing full, complex circuit boards would be insanely expensive and the machine and substrates themselves would be very rudimentary due to the melting points involved.
It is $4000 to a criminal organization, it's illegal (especially for government agencies like a POLICE department) to make any payment and become complicit in the criminal activity.
On the other hand, $4000 is what they start off with, I heard of a company that got hit with $10k in ransom demands, a few days later they realized their backups weren't working well so they gave them the $10k, by then the criminals realized they were attempting and failed to restore from backup so they quadrupled the demand so the company got the FBI involved, when the criminals realized the FBI got involved, they wiped EVERYTHING. It took them about 3 weeks and about $100k to recover the broken backups by a professional recovery company.
Hell no, a federal government IT department? You mean, a bunch of bureaucrats charging $100k/y for a 10TB storage unit because 'vendors' from the Gartner Triangle recommended it to them and attached a huge IBM and Oracle contract to it.
What these small departments need is to find and hire a local IT person or if they can't afford an IT person (if you have less than 200 devices, you don't need a dedicated IT person), contract with a local company, there are plenty everywhere, they will take care of these sorts of issues for less than the consultancy fee on a government agency contract.
For 40k/year I can easily set up a 200TB storage system, host it in a datacenter and professionally maintain it. $4000 buys you about 20TB which would probably last about 3-5 years without maintenance and that should be sufficient to back up pretty much everything in that police department with 3 months of retention.
Not what backup means, you're describing a RAID or other sort of mirror (even if it is delayed). Redundancy is not the same as a backup.
A backup has history, you could use snapshots or tape rotations or whatever, but older versions cannot be overwritten by newer versions, in most (best) cases, older versions cannot be written to period (the tape could have a physical tab or the storage system does not allow writing). When things change (eg. they are encrypted), you would see a very large backup if you're doing incremental backups (since all files changed simultaneously).
The problem is that Android devices are less securable. All they're doing to these is installing some profiles and apps for remote management, the 'military grade' encryption features are just the OS'es AES-256 device encryption, it's not like they're making their own system. Android binaries and chipmakers are also heavily controlled by Chinese interest.
He's the governor and has been for the last 6 years. He should've signed and paid for it, then started the construction of it. To this point there's only been prototypes though, lots of them have been constructed for millions of euros only to be decommissioned a few months or years later. From what I can find, there's only a company with some ideas which has now been funded for millions by tax payers without any scientific or technical demonstrations, prototypes or results.
I highly doubt they up and replaced the entire system migrating all live data to new systems. The problem with "cloud" file systems is that it's not really a file system, its a database (object store whatever you call it), deleting an "object" does nothing really but leave a hole in the database and such fragmentation cannot easily be resolved unless you devise a fitting algorithm. So most systems never delete anything truly, just mark it deleted and if ever they need space, they could "vacuum" the thing but it's such a pain in the neck or even a risk that it's never done. Even if you replace the underlying disk, the entire database gets replicated onto it including the "dead" space, neither the upper layers have any idea about the media nor does the media have any idea about the upper layers. Most of these "file" systems are very wasteful, fragile moronic thing cobbled together for a 2 year IPO goal not designed by seasoned programmers for the long haul.
Not necessarily, all of Dropbox is approx. 120-200PB. Distributed over thousands of storage servers it's really peanuts to save people's history (which are mostly small delta's). Running a storage system of 200TB myself, people tend not to delete stuff all that much and even so, the entire amount of people's previous storages is encapsulated every time we have to upgrade (every 3 years). 10 years ago we stored close to 10TB, now 10TB is a rounding error on the upgrade.
Net neutrality rules are necessary because of the monopoly/duopoly status many ISP's enjoy due to regulation. If you can cut regulation and don't allow larger ISP's to interfere legally with others, there should be some competition not just from startup commercial ISP's (eg. Google) but also from municipal ISP's. In my area we have a small rollout from an ISP giving 100/20 and at one point Verizon FiOS promised to come by too, however legislation has hindered both of them.
Pretty much any filesystem since before MSDOS only unlinks the file, not really deletes it. Windows 95 came with a Trash can feature that only moved files to the Trash until the user unlinked the files. These days cloud/flash based storage will do pretty much the same, keep the data around until it's either overwritten due to space congestion or deleted by an admin.
The same can happen in the US and EU, especially around the sale of a house or if certain properties have been abandoned although the time periods involved vary wildly based on circumstance and location.
Tariffs are usually levied on imports, and then usually only for items that are available locally as well and that aren't a necessity.
You would be an idiot to tariff your primary exports as a country unless you are trying to keep the resources local (eg. if you don't produce enough grain within your own, you should tariff grain exports).
One of Korea's main exports is semiconductors and computers, they'd be idiots to levy a tax on exporting it. The UK on the other hand should probably tariff fully assembled server racks/containers because there are plenty of local jobs that could do that. And yes, companies then will think twice about (ab)using UK resources and tax breaks (how many jobs did they promise to get free/cheap land?), if they want customers in the UK, they should pay their fair share in taxes and create local jobs.
Quote:
Additionally, the Library District plans to upgrade to Windows version 10 in late 2017 at an estimated cost of $20,000 and also upgrade Microsoft Office to version 10 at a cost of $48,500.
They spend about $1M/y on computer technology (~$1500/computer/year) not accounting for staff or digital databases/collections and their computers are 5 years old so they need replacement which is a separate line item. With those sorts of budgets, you'd think they have this figured out.
In comparison, I work in research, our systems last for 7-10 years, cost us an average of ~$1000/year including IT staff costs, licensing and purchasing the computer (or $3-400/year without staffing costs).
You must be joking, public libraries in the US have some of the largest IT budgets except perhaps public schools. On average libraries spend about 10% of revenue on IT systems vs 2-6% for comparable commercial companies, even small sites like my local libraries will spend $100k/year on a dozen computers.
They do not want 40 different people messing with their system, they'll rather spend $300k/y of a $1M budget to a local IT consulting company sending out the 18yo Cisco Certified Senior Network Systems Engineer Analyst Associate Microsoft Technicians and buy some security thing from the Gartner Magic Security App Store.
Cervical cancer didn't get more deadly, statistics have nothing to do with whether or not a certain cancer is more lethal or less susceptible to treatment.
The statistics also no longer apply to 'just' women, they only apply to women who haven't (yet) had their cervix removed, it's a different subset of people. 1/3 of women get hysterectomies (2/3 of those are deemed to be unnecessary).
It's not necessarily true that you can't get cervical cancer after a hysterectomy, even with the cervix removed (not necessarily completely removed in all cases), plenty of people have cervical cancer already spread to nearby organs.
So 'at best' these statistics just identified that you're more susceptible to cervical cancer before treatment/prevention of cervical cancer.
Or give away the software for free and sell support regionally if you want fairness that's the best way, your cost won't affect local economies as heavily and users will be able to afford training on your product for free so the software will be self-marketing.
Obviously you need to then compete on the quality of your software instead of lock-in and inertia.
No, but at least your local economies impact the price. You pay $50k for a Windows Server license anywhere in the world. You pay $120k for a SysAdmin in the US, 20k for one in rural India.
The impact of the license cost results in Windows Server having a TCO twice the amount (compared to local economies) in India than the US (to small businesses at least). With Linux you still need the SysAdmin, but your TCO compared to local economies is equalized.