Re: The New Republic?
The damage Trump, et al., are doing will take decades to repair.
3473 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010
My limited understand of current energy weapons (i.e. lasers) is that they're not strong enough at the moment to do kill shots in a second or two: The beam has to point at the target for a period of time. So I suppose if you detect an energy weapon you might be able to do something to disrupt it before it causes fatal damage.
Post Office aren't pure businesses: They have social benefits too. It's a means for people to collect their benefits, so it has to link back to central government systems to confirm what should be paid out. It also acts a basic bank for people who can't get a normal high street bank account. You can also process some government paperwork through the Post Office (Car tax, identity/passport)
You either have a whole load of different apps for each use case or a bespoke one size fits all front end.
Google, Microsoft & Amazon each spending $75 billion this year on servers.
That's a staggering number of servers. If you assume each server costs $50k (Which I doubt it's that high - even including overheads like network switches) that's still 1.5 million servers. Per Annum.
Further, assume each server is only 1U. That's enough to fill 35,000 42U server racks.
All to stream cat videos and LLM hallucinations.
Bad managers, especially ones that show a lack of respect towards others (& especially their reports), cause more problems than the occasional underperformer
These (allegedly) fly on the wall documentaries from America often have a shouty boss: It sets a bad example of how to behave as a boss.
Those who don't teach don't realise what a skill teaching/coaching is.
One aspect of that is knowing your subject (and not just knowing what someone else's slides say)
Far too many corporate instructors fail on both counts.
On the rare occasions I'm in a course with a teacher who both knows their subject and can teach I really go out of my way to recognise them as they are too few of them.
And now the National Grid confirm there wan't a single point of failure in the electrical supply:
There's rarely a single cause of a failure. I'm sure DEC/Digital's management didn't help with some of their decisions, but the pace of evolution of the humble PC was quite fast. The PC was soon moving up into the midrange server market and, for their low (relative) price, PCs were "good enough".
DEC/Digital, HP, Sun, SGI, etc just couldn't compete. Even IBM with their "big iron" felt the humble PC snapping at their heals.
You usually test turning off one IT system. It's very rare that you test turning off your entire IT estate and then bring it all back online. You usually discover circular dependencies. The classic being you can't login to your SAN/VM farm as authentication is via your local AD - which is hosted on said platform which is offline because you can't login to turn it back on again.
I'm not convinced there's been much change in the fundamentals for desktop O/Ss in the past 20 years. Sure, they're being made more secure through better software engineering techniques, but actual features? The last biggie was hot-plug (Esp USB) which came in XP (And some vendors manually back-ported to Win2k!) And maybe TPM?
Otherwise, all that's happened is they've been painting fresh lipstick on the pig.
I think there are a couple of reasons admins put off upgrades. Many sysadmins have experienced upgrades breaking existing features. (I don't mean planned deprecation, just good old fashioned bugs) Secondly, vendors don't always make upgrades easy. I've come across one application where you had to export the config (as a text file) manually edit it, and load that config back into the freshly installed software. When the config is 20k lines, how confident are you that you've edited all the right bits in the right way?
If upgrades were easier and more reliable sysadmins would be more than happy to regularly upgrade.