"Please continue to show your ignorance. A "backup" has many definitions especially those used for maintenance."
It might be the general case but certainly it is not the current one, CTO stating that the backup was used to cover for the mains failure -and failing at that, so it is not a "maintenance-only" setup.
"Anyway I'm out. This conversation is going nowhere. I suggest you maybe enrol in a project management"
That's true. You just stay saying the same stupid things, babbling out some disconected concepts you probably read about in wikipedia, despite of *you* being the one implying things you don't have a damn clue about.
"They say right in the article "Given enough hands" well that's the entire point of the game! You don't give the opponent enough hands to win."
So you just played once, but still playing once was enough to master the game, you won by chance and then you don't return to the game never again?
Correction: you _may_ not give AN opponent enough hands to win, but of course you return to the game. That's what pros do, after all: they win sometimes and lose sometimes, it's only they tend to win more than lose. That's exactly the claim: that the bot not only will win more times than not, but that there's no better player in the long run than the bot.
"What happens if someone else creates an identicly perfect robotic player and joins the table?"
Not that I know so much about Texas Hold'em but, by the look of the text, "...Given enough hands, it will never, ever lose, regardless of what its opponent does or which cards it is dealt." these researchers have discovered the equivalent of a Nash equilibrium in the game.
"If these two robots played each other wouldn't the winner be determined by pure luck?"
Key words here are "given enough hands". This means that given enough hands, they would tie.
"being Christian is defined by your actions, not your label."
I'm not knowledgeable on all Christian derivatives but certainly Catholics and probably all other that accept baptism as the way to enter the club *do* get to be Christians by their label, not their actions.
Of course I do. The investment of a backup, whatever the investment plan is, is to cover for the time when the mains is in failing or maintenance mode. Here the mains went nuts and the backup was not there to cover it. It's no need for more "intimate familiarity" than that.
"Why are you looking at the aircon? You should be looking at the customers."
No, I shouldn't. The air conditioner was an already paid for expenditure which was approved upon a -now demonstrated, failed ROI. And the fact the CTO mixes apples to oranges makes the clear case that he is just in CYA mode, both about himself and his company.
"You're assuming a true N+1 system was what was designed."
I do, because that is exactly what the CTO himself said: "Our Perth data centre was subject to a partial failure of both the mains and backup air-conditioning systems yesterday".
"Not everything needs to be gold plated, and not everything needs to be N+1."
Quite true. But here there *was* a N+1 system just to allow the "+1" part to fail, which begs the question of why the expenditure on the "+1" part was allowed.
"I would rather see the CTO get fired if he spend countless dollars gold plating a system"
How do you call, then, paying for an aircon system bigger than needed that demonstrates that it doesn't work when needed? He was doing exactly what you claim he shouldn't do.
"Because a customer's internet went down due to equipment failure during record breaking weather conditions"
No, the problem didn't come from record-breaking conditions but because the N+1 high avaliability system designed to cope with those conditions not only failed, but failed in the most expectable way due to lack of forethought.
Exactly. And more times than not, it's not only he doesn't know better but that he doesn't care. These failures come from expending more time into politics and CYA than pressing for making a good job.
"Basically both main and backup aircon went down."
Which is only, oh, so unsual.
There're two (basic) kinds of high avaliability: load balancing and redundancy with their typical failure modes: 1) load balancing: the surviving part can't cope with the aggregated load and it also goes down. 2) redundancy: once the main fails, either the migration protocol fails or the reserve doesn't work.
This is HA 101 knowledge but as long as CTOs can go with an "oh! who could expect two failures in a row!" instead of being fired on the spot we'll see this kind of things happening once and again.
The URL above should have been his resignation letter.
Given that Java is older than C# by more than a decade I have problems accepting your assertion that C# has historically been years ahead of Java at nothing.
Exactly. The grand parent is the kind of guy that falling off a skyscrapper would say "well, it's been 100 floors by now and nothing wrong has happened. You are an alarmist".
But maybe there's kind of a pyrrhic hope: there already are a lot of jobs that could be automated in, say, China which are not automated simply because the work force payed peanuts and living in the verge of slavery is still cheaper. Current automation even in first world countries will slow its motion once they have destroyed enough employment that people accepts working for peanuts in almost slavery conditions too.
"His predecessors neglected their responsibility and allowed a mess to be made. GP came in, found the mess, cleaned it up, and provided a useful alternative"
Back to square one. From his own words, first he did was "...make sure that no computer had any file sharing or any other services running on it", which is what I blamed him for.
First you do is understand the situation, not closing useful services. Once you understand the situation you go and close unsecure services *once* you are in the position to offer valid alternatives at the same time, not before.
"Folks who look at productivity as not having to log in"
I'll take this as an example. In my not so short experience, people usually have no problem to log in; people do have a problem having to log in half a dozen times to different systems within the same company, when they already provided their credentials to their computers at the begining of their work day. And they do have a problem with having to change every 30 days their passwords in crazy ways on those half a dozen different systems.
To follow on the example, provide them with proper single sign-on, let them change their password no more frecuently than every three months, with a policy of allowing them a last log in to change their password instead of blocking them out and having to rise a ticket to IT and educate them into passphrases instead of passwords and the "problem" will vanish all of a sudden.
"set up a dropbox, or really want to use thumbdrives"
And then you research a bit on why they are doing that and then you discover that they need to go through seven hops to reach the fileserver instead of the fileserver path to be the default to save in for their office apps, and then the performance of the fileserver is awful and their quota forces them to expend half a day cleaning their data every fortnight and then they still need to share files with customers or providers and since the company IT doesn't provide solutions for their use cases but the "this is verbotten" standard policy, they find their workarounds which are, of course, awfully insecure but still the best they knew to make their ends to meet.
"Having a few people hate you might be an indicator that you are doing your job."
Never is. Most you can say is that sometimes *despite of your qualified efforts*, you can't find a solution for them to work comfortably and efficiently.
That explains why IT is on average the miserable nightmare that it is.
On the other hand, I'm the kind of guy that first looks to understand why the users do what they do and then I go to provide secure alternatives that, in many cases, just go transparent to said end users. They just still do their stuff in the easiest way for them and I produce for them an environment where the easiest way happens to be the secure enough one.
"They were sharing their drives because they knew no better"
No, they were sharing their drives because they knew no better *and* they still find cases when sharing files is useful for their work.
"Providing a central server..."
Blah, blah, blah... you still didn't address the main point: *Why* users shared their local drives instead of using the central server (or ask for administrative privileges on their computers, or you find they are using something like dropbox, etc.). I've more than 20 years in this industry and every single time I've seen an environment like that has been because of incompetent IT.
Slashdot Mirror
"Please continue to show your ignorance. A "backup" has many definitions especially those used for maintenance."
It might be the general case but certainly it is not the current one, CTO stating that the backup was used to cover for the mains failure -and failing at that, so it is not a "maintenance-only" setup.
"Anyway I'm out. This conversation is going nowhere. I suggest you maybe enrol in a project management"
That's true. You just stay saying the same stupid things, babbling out some disconected concepts you probably read about in wikipedia, despite of *you* being the one implying things you don't have a damn clue about.
"Youngsters don't take up arms and blow themselves up because they're impressionable."
Yes. They most certainly do.
"Still doesn't make it OK to be a dick."
When somebody else gets killed because of his right to speech like a dick then, yes, it becomes OK and even necessary to be a dick.
"What's right and wrong is not always clear cut."
Yes, there's a shadow of grey both sides of the frontier. Killing somebody because of what he said is as far from the frontier as Lebanon, KS, though.
"They say right in the article "Given enough hands" well that's the entire point of the game! You don't give the opponent enough hands to win."
So you just played once, but still playing once was enough to master the game, you won by chance and then you don't return to the game never again?
Correction: you _may_ not give AN opponent enough hands to win, but of course you return to the game. That's what pros do, after all: they win sometimes and lose sometimes, it's only they tend to win more than lose. That's exactly the claim: that the bot not only will win more times than not, but that there's no better player in the long run than the bot.
"What happens if someone else creates an identicly perfect robotic player and joins the table?"
Not that I know so much about Texas Hold'em but, by the look of the text, "...Given enough hands, it will never, ever lose, regardless of what its opponent does or which cards it is dealt." these researchers have discovered the equivalent of a Nash equilibrium in the game.
"If these two robots played each other wouldn't the winner be determined by pure luck?"
Key words here are "given enough hands". This means that given enough hands, they would tie.
"Most Christians don't believe that. They believe that Christianity is defined by faith, and faith alone."
_sola fide_ is about God's pardon, not Christianity belonging. That's accrued by baptism.
"being Christian is defined by your actions, not your label."
I'm not knowledgeable on all Christian derivatives but certainly Catholics and probably all other that accept baptism as the way to enter the club *do* get to be Christians by their label, not their actions.
"That said, the Paris terrorists went inside a building to kill their targets, so long range wasn't really a factor."
Maybe because of the lack of rifle able to aim from a mile afar and, at the same time, broadcasting it live to the Internet.
Oh, wait!
"You seem to know it failed it's ROI"
Of course I do. The investment of a backup, whatever the investment plan is, is to cover for the time when the mains is in failing or maintenance mode. Here the mains went nuts and the backup was not there to cover it. It's no need for more "intimate familiarity" than that.
"I've got it on my server. When you absolutely need a display"
Can you please point out some examples of these needs?
"Why are you looking at the aircon? You should be looking at the customers."
No, I shouldn't. The air conditioner was an already paid for expenditure which was approved upon a -now demonstrated, failed ROI. And the fact the CTO mixes apples to oranges makes the clear case that he is just in CYA mode, both about himself and his company.
"You're assuming a true N+1 system was what was designed."
I do, because that is exactly what the CTO himself said: "Our Perth data centre was subject to a partial failure of both the mains and backup air-conditioning systems yesterday".
"Not everything needs to be gold plated, and not everything needs to be N+1."
Quite true. But here there *was* a N+1 system just to allow the "+1" part to fail, which begs the question of why the expenditure on the "+1" part was allowed.
"CTO/CIO IS a political position. CTO sits at the table with the CEO and the board."
It _is_ a political role. But it is not *only* a political role. This comes from forgetting where the T comes from.
"I would rather see the CTO get fired if he spend countless dollars gold plating a system"
How do you call, then, paying for an aircon system bigger than needed that demonstrates that it doesn't work when needed? He was doing exactly what you claim he shouldn't do.
"Because a customer's internet went down due to equipment failure during record breaking weather conditions"
No, the problem didn't come from record-breaking conditions but because the N+1 high avaliability system designed to cope with those conditions not only failed, but failed in the most expectable way due to lack of forethought.
"Because he was supposed to have known better"
Exactly. And more times than not, it's not only he doesn't know better but that he doesn't care. These failures come from expending more time into politics and CYA than pressing for making a good job.
"Basically both main and backup aircon went down."
Which is only, oh, so unsual.
There're two (basic) kinds of high avaliability: load balancing and redundancy with their typical failure modes:
1) load balancing: the surviving part can't cope with the aggregated load and it also goes down.
2) redundancy: once the main fails, either the migration protocol fails or the reserve doesn't work.
This is HA 101 knowledge but as long as CTOs can go with an "oh! who could expect two failures in a row!" instead of being fired on the spot we'll see this kind of things happening once and again.
The URL above should have been his resignation letter.
"Are those stars or just noise?"
It's really full of stars, Bowman.
"C# has historically been years ahead of Java"
Given that Java is older than C# by more than a decade I have problems accepting your assertion that C# has historically been years ahead of Java at nothing.
"Until now"
Exactly. The grand parent is the kind of guy that falling off a skyscrapper would say "well, it's been 100 floors by now and nothing wrong has happened. You are an alarmist".
But maybe there's kind of a pyrrhic hope: there already are a lot of jobs that could be automated in, say, China which are not automated simply because the work force payed peanuts and living in the verge of slavery is still cheaper. Current automation even in first world countries will slow its motion once they have destroyed enough employment that people accepts working for peanuts in almost slavery conditions too.
"His predecessors neglected their responsibility and allowed a mess to be made. GP came in, found the mess, cleaned it up, and provided a useful alternative"
Back to square one. From his own words, first he did was "...make sure that no computer had any file sharing or any other services running on it", which is what I blamed him for.
First you do is understand the situation, not closing useful services. Once you understand the situation you go and close unsecure services *once* you are in the position to offer valid alternatives at the same time, not before.
"Folks who look at productivity as not having to log in"
I'll take this as an example. In my not so short experience, people usually have no problem to log in; people do have a problem having to log in half a dozen times to different systems within the same company, when they already provided their credentials to their computers at the begining of their work day. And they do have a problem with having to change every 30 days their passwords in crazy ways on those half a dozen different systems.
To follow on the example, provide them with proper single sign-on, let them change their password no more frecuently than every three months, with a policy of allowing them a last log in to change their password instead of blocking them out and having to rise a ticket to IT and educate them into passphrases instead of passwords and the "problem" will vanish all of a sudden.
"set up a dropbox, or really want to use thumbdrives"
And then you research a bit on why they are doing that and then you discover that they need to go through seven hops to reach the fileserver instead of the fileserver path to be the default to save in for their office apps, and then the performance of the fileserver is awful and their quota forces them to expend half a day cleaning their data every fortnight and then they still need to share files with customers or providers and since the company IT doesn't provide solutions for their use cases but the "this is verbotten" standard policy, they find their workarounds which are, of course, awfully insecure but still the best they knew to make their ends to meet.
"Having a few people hate you might be an indicator that you are doing your job."
Never is. Most you can say is that sometimes *despite of your qualified efforts*, you can't find a solution for them to work comfortably and efficiently.
"I'd fire your ass in a heartbeat."
Probably yes.
And probably you'd be in the majority.
That explains why IT is on average the miserable nightmare that it is.
On the other hand, I'm the kind of guy that first looks to understand why the users do what they do and then I go to provide secure alternatives that, in many cases, just go transparent to said end users. They just still do their stuff in the easiest way for them and I produce for them an environment where the easiest way happens to be the secure enough one.
"They were sharing their drives because they knew no better"
No, they were sharing their drives because they knew no better *and* they still find cases when sharing files is useful for their work.
"Providing a central server..."
Blah, blah, blah... you still didn't address the main point: *Why* users shared their local drives instead of using the central server (or ask for administrative privileges on their computers, or you find they are using something like dropbox, etc.). I've more than 20 years in this industry and every single time I've seen an environment like that has been because of incompetent IT.