A more interesting figure that pertains to the rest of us is how much more did it cost us to have those soldiers dying in Iraq, than it would have cost us to have them die here in the States? I doubt it costs us billions of dollars a month to keep those guys on bases here in the States.
Thanks for the depth to your reply. I have been wondering about the realities of over committing RAM in production environments. With applications that use it to cache, like database servers, I would imagine that the ratio of used to unused RAM makes it one of the less optimal candidates for virtualization. Has that been your experience?
So far I've only worked with the free version of ESXi and virtualized about a dozen workloads. They're mostly web with a small amount of database, both MS and OSS (Apache / MySQL). Although it's SAN backed, I haven't had to mess with passing RDMs into the guests yet. The user counts on the guests aren't requiring enough IOPS to really optimize the disk geometries and RAID levels yet.
Threads like this are why I like/. and why I think this site will remain relevant for a while. For any given technical thread, there are experts in the field who are qualified to comment on it. Very few communities can count on participation on that level.
Both VMware and KVM are overkill. How many hosts have enough RAM to give each guest 1TB, much less 2TB? Wake me up when the hardware catches up to the point where those capabilities matter.
Yet in this case the SEC had an agreement with (I believe) the National Archives to maintain all of the documents that they destroyed. In fact they had to make special requests to have the documents destroyed earlier than they otherwise would have been. The details are in the Rolling Stone article.
I doubt there was much in the way of malicious activity.
You're way off. Read the original article that details the specifics. In short, the SEC was required by law to maintain the records that they destroyed and they failed to do so. Then after destroying the records, they came up with some weasel word definition of what a "record" really is.. a la Bill Clinton.
I should have read the comments before I made my own. You hit the nail right on the head. I think it is going to be another couple of years before the rest of the world catches up with VDI and device independence.
Most of the IT people I know, have to know at least something about the job someone is doing, in order to recommend, support, show and otherwise train people how IT can enhance their job performance and productivity with technology. We may not be intimate with the details of their job, but we know way more about what they do, than they know about we do.
Beyond the good points you have already made, IT knows how the entire organization works. We work with everyone in the organization, from the C level executives down to the personal assistants and everyone in between. We know what systems people use and we know why people use those systems. When people need new functionality, we understand the business needs that drive the requirements. In most organizations, the head of IT is probably one of the most clued in people in the organization by the simple virtue of needing to be in order to do their job. (Jokes about IT being the last to know aside)
Argument 4: What would be gained by mouse-enabling an iPad? Who uses an iPad with mouse to access a PC via Remote Desktop? How is that working out for you?
I know people who do and it works just fine. Linux admins get SSH. Windows admins get RDP or Powershell. RDP works fine on an iPad / iPhone. Obviously it is not a full blown interface but for quick tasks where you don't want to fire up a full blown VPN connection on a laptop / netbook, it works fine.
Bob Lewis has obviously not heard of Citrix, or if he has he conveniently ignores it. I am by no means an Apple fanboy and I do not own an iPad, but a few people in my organization do. I can present all of their apps to them via Citrix, from RDP to our Line of Business applications. Now obviously anything that is input intensive would be better done with a keyboard. Having said that, a Citrix session is just a Terminal Services session so for all intents and purposes, their applications is running on Windows Server 2008 R2. Being Windows it is fully locked down with Group Policy and is as controlled as anything Apple provides.
From what I have seen, an iPad is just another device to present applications to. With Citrix, there is no need to re-invent the wheel or develop the application all over again. Just run the app on the server and present it to the client.
I stopped playing WoW because I can't sit in front of the computer for the hours upon hours that it takes to raid. As a healer (holy priest), I found the changes to Cataclysm to be exactly as Blizzard advertised them. They introduced challenge to healing again. I cannot speak to other healing classes, but for the priest they made Heal the primary spell again. Before Cata, the primary spell was Flash Heal with the occasional Greater Heal. In Cata, Flash Heal cost too much mana so you had to use Heal instead. It healed as much as Flash Heal, but took three times as long to cast.
They modified the gear and made Haste very important for priests (and other healers I'd assume). It became very important to be able to cast those spells as quickly as possible.
The game became a challenge again for healers. Instead of being able to rely on a couple of spells I found myself having to use all of them as the situation dictated.
As for PVP and healing, is it really a problem? I used to PVP pretty heavily before arenas were introduced, and I PVP'd a bit in Cataclysm. As a healer, I'm the target. I don't last very long. If I'm healing myself, my party is dying. If I'm healing the party, I'm dying.
Even though I canceled my subscription, I miss the game. Blizzard seems to do a good job of keeping it as fresh as they can within the limits of what the game is. Some of the boss fights I was in required a lot of coordination. They were not the kind of fights that you could just stumble through with a bunch of random strangers, no matter how well geared people were.
Where did you find information that the FCC let the ISPs know which subscribers are participating? I also took part in the study and I was expecting that sort of thing to happen, but I never saw anything to confirm it.
I guess my submission was not significantly negative enough to make it through the moderator filter. I was surprised to see that the large majority of the ISPs are able to give 90% of their advertised rate during peak times. I'm with Charter and despite being on their lowest tier, I get close to 20Mb on a regular basis.
As much as people like to bitch and moan on here, I think you're all a bunch of babies. Mod me flamebait all you want. If you're getting more than 15Mb and still whining about it not being fast enough, you need to get a life. Go outside.
The real story is that ISPs who are selling internet service with speeds "up to" are getting 90% of those speeds nearly 100% of the time. If you want a guaranteed rate, pay for a dedicated circuit. Otherwise, STFU and admit that the speeds really are there.
For those who don't want to read the article or haven't seen the actual results, the only ISP who exceeded their advertised rates is Verizon with their FiOS service. Everyone else comes up short.
What do they expect? Law enforcement officers are trained to stay one level above the people they are dealing with. If the person threatens them with their fists, the officers will pull their baton (or more recently, their taser). If the person pulls a knife, they will pull a gun.
I'm not trying to justify police brutality, but come on now. If a person pulls a knife on the police they had better count on being shot.
At this point in your career you know enough about PROGRAMMING to mentor the next generation. No matter what language a team is using, there are best practices that should be followed. Developing software involves a lot more than just writing code. Companies need people who have been through the entire development life cycle to mentor those who haven't. Make the move into management and help the next generation. Extricate yourself from the minutiae of the code itself and focus on everything else that goes into developing software.
I am at a similar point in my career, although I am a sysadmin. I'm getting tired of keeping up with having to learn new interfaces and new tools. The basics are all the same. Keep the systems online, keep them backed up, make sure they are redundant, keep the data safe, etc. I've done the work for the last fifteen years and I understand it well enough to mentor people who are doing the grunt work, hacking at the configs, racking the gear, etc.
First off, well played. Your hypothetical examples are spot on.
As for Portland and being more active, how does the study account for the fact that the weather is pretty miserable up there and a large percentage of the population probably want to stay dry? Given the choice between riding a bike and getting soaked in the rain, versus spending a bit more time in my car and staying dry, I will pick the car. The same goes for standing in a downpour while waiting for the bus, versus driving my own car.
People were talking about this at the pool on Saturday night. FWIW someone mentioned that the Verizon network had the same IPSEC key for all of their towers. The attack vector was probably along those lines.
As a Verizon user with a Blackberry I wasn't particularly concerned. If someone is interested in my SMS messages, more power to them. The only other app running on my phone besides email is Gmail, and that uses SSL. I suppose they could capture the login session and crack it at their leisure, but I went ahead and changed my password after the con.
I don't think the OP was suggesting ongoing unrest. The message I got from it was that the FBI and DHS could setup people and then catch them before they became violent, then use the arrests to further an agenda of implementing more controls over the population. It is not that far fetched. They already find impressionable Muslims at mosques, offer to provide them with weapons, encourage them to plan an attack, and then arrest them for doing so.
Microsoft gets attacked because the Line of Business applications run on Windows. How many large accounting systems, ERP systems, etc. run on OSX? Know anyone running a factory on OSX? How about a firm doing R&D and drafting blueprints and other technical documents on OSX?
OSX is not a target because there are very few people running OSX who have access to the systems with information that dedicated, skilled attackers want to get to. With Apple's incessant focus on the consumer space, little is likely to change in that regard. Likewise, the developers who develop those large scale systems are never going to target OSX because the install base is too small. As applications continue to move toward the cloud and distributed systems that are accessed via a web browser, there will be even less reason to run them on OSX. They will continue to run on Windows and *nix boxes.
People buy Windows because of the software that runs on Windows. Windows systems can be made secure. More often than not, security comes at the cost of useability and few organizations are willing to make the trade off. Even organizations that should be secure (Lockheed Martin for example) still get hacked because it is tough to do security well, and it is even tougher without buy in from the rest of the organization.
Security has been mostly solved. Between diskless workstations, Citrix-esque VDI for known good clean boots and software white listing, it is possible to spin up secure application environments. The trouble comes in when a person wants to work on their business application, and also check email, or browse the web, or, or, or. Every other task a user demands their workstation be able to do opens them up to another exploitation vector.
You're right. The problem is that we have laws to protect the powerful from physical violence. I'm not a big fan of mob rule or general lawlessness. Yet if the people who make the decisions that lead to things like nuclear meltdowns were subject to an ass whopping, they would think twice about making decisions based on greed. Once a person has had to deal with a few broken bones, they tend to develop an appreciation for the body and just how precious good health really is.
Google is being extorted and they think that they can get out from under it. In the end, they are going to pay more money than they would have if they had just gone along with the program. Principles are expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
http://news.change.org/stories/the-600-billion-challenge-time-for-steve-jobs-to-start-donating
You can't take it with you Steve.
A more interesting figure that pertains to the rest of us is how much more did it cost us to have those soldiers dying in Iraq, than it would have cost us to have them die here in the States? I doubt it costs us billions of dollars a month to keep those guys on bases here in the States.
Thanks for the depth to your reply. I have been wondering about the realities of over committing RAM in production environments. With applications that use it to cache, like database servers, I would imagine that the ratio of used to unused RAM makes it one of the less optimal candidates for virtualization. Has that been your experience?
So far I've only worked with the free version of ESXi and virtualized about a dozen workloads. They're mostly web with a small amount of database, both MS and OSS (Apache / MySQL). Although it's SAN backed, I haven't had to mess with passing RDMs into the guests yet. The user counts on the guests aren't requiring enough IOPS to really optimize the disk geometries and RAID levels yet.
Threads like this are why I like /. and why I think this site will remain relevant for a while. For any given technical thread, there are experts in the field who are qualified to comment on it. Very few communities can count on participation on that level.
I'm very thankful for vSphere and such solutions to manage my hardware with 36 GB ram per node and a 480 gb SAN.
I think you mean TB and not GB?
So vSphere sees the entire blade chassis as a single host?
Both VMware and KVM are overkill. How many hosts have enough RAM to give each guest 1TB, much less 2TB? Wake me up when the hardware catches up to the point where those capabilities matter.
Yet in this case the SEC had an agreement with (I believe) the National Archives to maintain all of the documents that they destroyed. In fact they had to make special requests to have the documents destroyed earlier than they otherwise would have been. The details are in the Rolling Stone article.
I doubt there was much in the way of malicious activity.
You're way off. Read the original article that details the specifics. In short, the SEC was required by law to maintain the records that they destroyed and they failed to do so. Then after destroying the records, they came up with some weasel word definition of what a "record" really is.. a la Bill Clinton.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/is-the-sec-covering-up-wall-street-crimes-20110817
I should have read the comments before I made my own. You hit the nail right on the head. I think it is going to be another couple of years before the rest of the world catches up with VDI and device independence.
Most of the IT people I know, have to know at least something about the job someone is doing, in order to recommend, support, show and otherwise train people how IT can enhance their job performance and productivity with technology. We may not be intimate with the details of their job, but we know way more about what they do, than they know about we do.
Beyond the good points you have already made, IT knows how the entire organization works. We work with everyone in the organization, from the C level executives down to the personal assistants and everyone in between. We know what systems people use and we know why people use those systems. When people need new functionality, we understand the business needs that drive the requirements. In most organizations, the head of IT is probably one of the most clued in people in the organization by the simple virtue of needing to be in order to do their job. (Jokes about IT being the last to know aside)
Argument 4: What would be gained by mouse-enabling an iPad? Who uses an iPad with mouse to access a PC via Remote Desktop? How is that working out for you?
I know people who do and it works just fine. Linux admins get SSH. Windows admins get RDP or Powershell. RDP works fine on an iPad / iPhone. Obviously it is not a full blown interface but for quick tasks where you don't want to fire up a full blown VPN connection on a laptop / netbook, it works fine.
Bob Lewis has obviously not heard of Citrix, or if he has he conveniently ignores it. I am by no means an Apple fanboy and I do not own an iPad, but a few people in my organization do. I can present all of their apps to them via Citrix, from RDP to our Line of Business applications. Now obviously anything that is input intensive would be better done with a keyboard. Having said that, a Citrix session is just a Terminal Services session so for all intents and purposes, their applications is running on Windows Server 2008 R2. Being Windows it is fully locked down with Group Policy and is as controlled as anything Apple provides.
From what I have seen, an iPad is just another device to present applications to. With Citrix, there is no need to re-invent the wheel or develop the application all over again. Just run the app on the server and present it to the client.
I stopped playing WoW because I can't sit in front of the computer for the hours upon hours that it takes to raid. As a healer (holy priest), I found the changes to Cataclysm to be exactly as Blizzard advertised them. They introduced challenge to healing again. I cannot speak to other healing classes, but for the priest they made Heal the primary spell again. Before Cata, the primary spell was Flash Heal with the occasional Greater Heal. In Cata, Flash Heal cost too much mana so you had to use Heal instead. It healed as much as Flash Heal, but took three times as long to cast.
They modified the gear and made Haste very important for priests (and other healers I'd assume). It became very important to be able to cast those spells as quickly as possible.
The game became a challenge again for healers. Instead of being able to rely on a couple of spells I found myself having to use all of them as the situation dictated.
As for PVP and healing, is it really a problem? I used to PVP pretty heavily before arenas were introduced, and I PVP'd a bit in Cataclysm. As a healer, I'm the target. I don't last very long. If I'm healing myself, my party is dying. If I'm healing the party, I'm dying.
Even though I canceled my subscription, I miss the game. Blizzard seems to do a good job of keeping it as fresh as they can within the limits of what the game is. Some of the boss fights I was in required a lot of coordination. They were not the kind of fights that you could just stumble through with a bunch of random strangers, no matter how well geared people were.
I'm in a similar situation. I have the basic Charter internet connection. I think they promise up to 8Mb or 10Mb. I consistently get close to 20Mb.
Where did you find information that the FCC let the ISPs know which subscribers are participating? I also took part in the study and I was expecting that sort of thing to happen, but I never saw anything to confirm it.
I guess my submission was not significantly negative enough to make it through the moderator filter. I was surprised to see that the large majority of the ISPs are able to give 90% of their advertised rate during peak times. I'm with Charter and despite being on their lowest tier, I get close to 20Mb on a regular basis.
As much as people like to bitch and moan on here, I think you're all a bunch of babies. Mod me flamebait all you want. If you're getting more than 15Mb and still whining about it not being fast enough, you need to get a life. Go outside.
The real story is that ISPs who are selling internet service with speeds "up to" are getting 90% of those speeds nearly 100% of the time. If you want a guaranteed rate, pay for a dedicated circuit. Otherwise, STFU and admit that the speeds really are there.
For those who don't want to read the article or haven't seen the actual results, the only ISP who exceeded their advertised rates is Verizon with their FiOS service. Everyone else comes up short.
What do they expect? Law enforcement officers are trained to stay one level above the people they are dealing with. If the person threatens them with their fists, the officers will pull their baton (or more recently, their taser). If the person pulls a knife, they will pull a gun.
I'm not trying to justify police brutality, but come on now. If a person pulls a knife on the police they had better count on being shot.
At this point in your career you know enough about PROGRAMMING to mentor the next generation. No matter what language a team is using, there are best practices that should be followed. Developing software involves a lot more than just writing code. Companies need people who have been through the entire development life cycle to mentor those who haven't. Make the move into management and help the next generation. Extricate yourself from the minutiae of the code itself and focus on everything else that goes into developing software.
I am at a similar point in my career, although I am a sysadmin. I'm getting tired of keeping up with having to learn new interfaces and new tools. The basics are all the same. Keep the systems online, keep them backed up, make sure they are redundant, keep the data safe, etc. I've done the work for the last fifteen years and I understand it well enough to mentor people who are doing the grunt work, hacking at the configs, racking the gear, etc.
First off, well played. Your hypothetical examples are spot on.
As for Portland and being more active, how does the study account for the fact that the weather is pretty miserable up there and a large percentage of the population probably want to stay dry? Given the choice between riding a bike and getting soaked in the rain, versus spending a bit more time in my car and staying dry, I will pick the car. The same goes for standing in a downpour while waiting for the bus, versus driving my own car.
People were talking about this at the pool on Saturday night. FWIW someone mentioned that the Verizon network had the same IPSEC key for all of their towers. The attack vector was probably along those lines.
As a Verizon user with a Blackberry I wasn't particularly concerned. If someone is interested in my SMS messages, more power to them. The only other app running on my phone besides email is Gmail, and that uses SSL. I suppose they could capture the login session and crack it at their leisure, but I went ahead and changed my password after the con.
I don't think the OP was suggesting ongoing unrest. The message I got from it was that the FBI and DHS could setup people and then catch them before they became violent, then use the arrests to further an agenda of implementing more controls over the population. It is not that far fetched. They already find impressionable Muslims at mosques, offer to provide them with weapons, encourage them to plan an attack, and then arrest them for doing so.
The EU needs to court favor with Turkey. The Turks are going to be a serious military and economic force in the coming decades.
Microsoft gets attacked because the Line of Business applications run on Windows. How many large accounting systems, ERP systems, etc. run on OSX? Know anyone running a factory on OSX? How about a firm doing R&D and drafting blueprints and other technical documents on OSX?
OSX is not a target because there are very few people running OSX who have access to the systems with information that dedicated, skilled attackers want to get to. With Apple's incessant focus on the consumer space, little is likely to change in that regard. Likewise, the developers who develop those large scale systems are never going to target OSX because the install base is too small. As applications continue to move toward the cloud and distributed systems that are accessed via a web browser, there will be even less reason to run them on OSX. They will continue to run on Windows and *nix boxes.
People buy Windows because of the software that runs on Windows. Windows systems can be made secure. More often than not, security comes at the cost of useability and few organizations are willing to make the trade off. Even organizations that should be secure (Lockheed Martin for example) still get hacked because it is tough to do security well, and it is even tougher without buy in from the rest of the organization.
Security has been mostly solved. Between diskless workstations, Citrix-esque VDI for known good clean boots and software white listing, it is possible to spin up secure application environments. The trouble comes in when a person wants to work on their business application, and also check email, or browse the web, or, or, or. Every other task a user demands their workstation be able to do opens them up to another exploitation vector.
You're right. The problem is that we have laws to protect the powerful from physical violence. I'm not a big fan of mob rule or general lawlessness. Yet if the people who make the decisions that lead to things like nuclear meltdowns were subject to an ass whopping, they would think twice about making decisions based on greed. Once a person has had to deal with a few broken bones, they tend to develop an appreciation for the body and just how precious good health really is.
Google is being extorted and they think that they can get out from under it. In the end, they are going to pay more money than they would have if they had just gone along with the program. Principles are expensive.
They wouldn't come out and actually say it. That would be illegal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion