* Posts by Cliffwilliams44

841 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2019

Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

Avoid Oracle like the plaque!

Our UK division went through he same thing back in the 00's. The (rather stupid) decision was to move from separate Construction specific Finance systems (yes we are construction) to Oracle Business System. Just like this municipality OBS had no presence int eh Construction industry and ABSOLUTELY no expertise in out business. The project was an unmitigated disaster! A decade later it is still not (as my British friends like to say) "Fit for Purpose!"

Here in the US we are on JDE, another Oracle acquisition. Now they are blackmailing is with Licensing fees! If we move to to their Cloud ERP (not gonna happen!) or move our workflows from AWS to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure they will cut out cost by 40%! After much negotiations now they will accept if we move "some" of our workflows to OCI. So we are moving out least important workflows over their, certainly NOT our JDE infrastructure, (I am sure we will regret it) and they will give us the discount! I am quite sure our costs will go backup very quickly.

It's like dealing with the Mafia! Shitty products and services and deceitful pricing!

Supreme Court leaves warrantless camera surveillance an open book

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Splitting electronic hairs

"This is not the same as a pair of cops staking out an apartment," he said.

How is it not the same?

They occupy an apartment or home, or park a van then setup cameras and eat pizza and watch TV while the cameras record!

Ads for lucrative jobs in Asia fail to mention chance of slavery as crypto-scammer

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The modern slave trade

It is happening right here in the good ol' US of A and is being facilitated but our own government.

Migrant children, women and men are being forced into indentured servitude by the Cartels and our government is actively making this all possible.

But those of us who want to stop the flow of illegal migrants are called cruel and racist!

In a stand against authoritarianism, Montana bans TikTok downloads

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If you were to see the stark difference between TikTok for kids in China and TikTok for kids in the rest of the world you'd be shocked.

If TikTok just made the same restriction on content and time limitations they impose on Chinese kids the same world wide they would allay a lot of suspicions.

Also, how hard is it to prove data from non-Chinese devices is not stored or transmitted to China?

But, as most of you are correct, this law will not survive!

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Re: I just did an SBD, officer. Am I under arrest?

The morons are already starting to make farts illegal, and starving the human race in the process.

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

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Still not understanding the point?

After reading all the "always knowledgeable" post of the commentards, I still don't know, other than gleaning money out of companies to prevent squatting, what the actual purpose to problem these TLD are intended to solve?

If the object is to open up domain names for more personal use, then why not something like .self?

'Strictly limit' remote desktop – unless you like catching BianLian ransomware

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Re: Working in Gloves

I am sorry but this infuriates me!

"Executives and marketers, the people least-likely to tolerate "working in gloves", tend to have access to the most-valuable corporate data."

Why would executives have full on access to things like your finance system, same with marketers? This is what good reporting/Business Intelligence in for?

Principal of Least Access is your most effective defense against ransonware!

MariaDB CEO: People who want things free also want to have very nice vacations

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"Musicians make money from concerts."

You would think, but it is not the case in a lot of situations. It is better today, but in years past, concerts, ended up costing the performers more than they were aware of.

Many recording contracts offset the costs of live concerts with the proceeds from record sales/downloads. In many cases those costs are inflated by the record company to deliberately drain the proceeds. Many artists find themselves in a 2 album contract where they make absolutely no money from the 1st 2 albums and any profits they see are all dependent on the 3rd album. This can be a recipe for disaster and bankruptcy!

If you are an established act, you can make a lot of money on concerts, if you are starting out, you can get seriously screwed by the scumbag record companies. Also remember, in a lot of these contracts the artist does not own the music, the record company does!

Like I said things are better today, many artist are aware of the terrible practices of these companies. Streaming has allowed many artist to circumvent the record companies completely.

Sonatype axes 14 percent of staff, reminds them not to talk to the press

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Those instructions were for the retained employees, which is normal policy for most corporations.

They cannot tell ex-employees who to talk to.

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

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This is just stupid!

As someone who lives in an area where disasters happen regularly, i.e. hurricanes, Your phone IS NOT a device to keep you informed in a prolonged emergency. In the majority of real emergencies that will effect cell service the power will be out. Your phone will eventually lose charge. Emergency AM/FM radios are dirt cheap, I assume they are dirt cheap in India as they are all made in China. You buy one with a crank charger to charge the battery. Problem solved.

We had an idiot politician make this same argument a few years ago here in Florida. He was resoundingly laughed at!

I realize that in most areas of the world where you don't have to deal with these things on a recurring basis, preparedness in not a first thought. It should be. My co-workers in other parts of the US found it odd that I own 2 gas generators. I explained that in a prolonged power outage that can happen after a hurricane, 1 generator is not strong enough to power all you need to keep things going. You cannot power 2 refrigerators and a freezer with 1 generator and have enough for lights and to cook (portable stove). running our of food is NOT an option.

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Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

Sort of like Climate Change "Give is all you money, live line 12th century sefs while we live like royalty and we will save you from the impending end of the world."

Then when nothing happens "See, we saved you!"

India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck

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This nonsense always reminds me of Goodfellas~

"Paulie hated phones. He wouldn't have one in his house. He used to get all his calls second hand, then you'd have to call the people back from an outside phone. There were guys, that's all they did all day long was take care of Paulie's phone call."

Twitter's API paywall crumbles (but only for those saving lives, predicting weather, etc.)

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Re: Big question here

Because most of the people who worked there didn't actually "work"!

It's the same at other Big Tech companies. Like the recruiter at Meta (Facebook) making a 6 figure salary for 2 years who never actually did any work.

Tesla ran over worker rights, again, US labor judge finds

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Re: Interesting postions

"*That* said, just look at the layoff/staff cut rates across the entirety of the labour forces in the US, Canada, Mexico, EU, Japan, India etc. Its quite clear that profitability, dividends, executive bonuses and C suite salaries are the single priority of business these days, and the labour laws can go fuck themselves apparently."

And you've completely missed all the people who got laid off from their "high paying job with nothing to do" positions at many of these tech companies!

It's like people complaining about WalMart here in the US. You can go to any WalMart and observe the employees. You will notice that at least 40% of them are doing absolutely nothing! They are not on break, they are just screwing off! WalMart knows this, they are not going to fire them. They know that most of these people are not going to be able to find a job anywhere else where they will be expected to actually work for 8 hours!

Cloud slowdown hits Amazon as orgs look to rein in cost

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It's not for everyone, when it is MANAGE YOUR COST!

Moving to the cloud is not for every Company/Organization. That is a decision you have to make. Will it save you money now, will it reduce cost long term?

Once you make that decision you have to manage costs! If you are not using a cloud auditing system you are setting yourself up for a painful bill one day! We use CloudChecker and it has resulted in finding unknown expenditure we were not aware of.

For example:

A project setup by a vendor had multiple AWS Backup jobs backing up the same resources twice. These jobs had no life cycle to archive or remove old snapshots.

S3 buckets with no life cycle policies, years of data sitting in Standard storage.

Vastly under utilized EC2 instances.

Lastly, if you allow your staff to have unfettered access to services like EC2 or S3 they will create things that eventually cost you money that you are unaware of that will increase your bill.

Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in

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Union = Legalized extortion ring

Maybe, just maybe, RedHat/IBM are realizing what a lot of other US tech companies are realizing. That they have a certain amount of employees that are not actually producing anything of value for the company. (In our company we call it the fired egg. The yolk are all the peoples that produce results, the white are all the people that just "exist"!)

But oh yes, form a Union, then the Union decides what you will be paid. The union will decide that you will be paid the same as the slacker in the next desk no matter if you produce 10x more results than he does because, well, equity!

If you are/were productive you will find a new job, possibly making more that you did before. if you're not, well, sucks to be you!

Online Safety Bill age checks? We won't do 'em, says Wikipedia

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Don't tell them what to to, tell them what will happen if they don't!

1. Children: It is the responsibility of the Parents to protect their children. Parental controls are easily and inexpensively available. Exposing or allowing exposure of pornography to children should and is a crime. Inform parents what the penalties are and will be.

2. Companies/Organizations: They are responsible for protecting their customers data/privacy. Make them aware that the penalties for not doing will be severe! Not only financially but criminally.

3. Enforce the laws! Far to often we see these companies not made responsible for these serious breaches.

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

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Re: Easily solvable....

Simpler, don't own a car with any of this nonsense.

I own a car build in 2014 jointly by Toyota and Suburu. Of course it has an ECU, it also has a Bluetooth capable sound system, but nothing else! No hands free start, no lane departure, nothing!

As defense tech goes commercial, does national security miss out?

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When governments become charities

"I think we've seen a significant change in the last 15–20 years where we've really moved from where government was the owner and controller of the best technology because they had deep pockets and things cost a lot"

This is because western governments have, over the last 70 years, changed from being governments concerned with the safety and sovereignty of their nations and promoting conditions that secure the prosperity of their people, into giant charities whose primary goal is the keep those dependent on the charity dependent and the money flowing into the charity to finance the lifestyles of the charities leadership!

This is why the Chinese will defeat the west without firing a shot!

'Slow AI' needed to stop autonomous weapons making humans worse

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ZARDOZ

This also reflects the result of immortality in the movie ZARDOZ!

Humans after achieving immortality (which was reserved only for the elites of society) had become lazy, complacent, men had lost interest in sex, reproduction came to a halt, innovation had stopped.

What will happen when there is no new human created knowledge fed into the LLM? Will all new knowledge only be machine created knowledge?

Thankfully, I will not live to see this.

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

Don't shoot the Sheriff!

As the Sheriff told Mr. Marley, "Kill it before it grows!"

Mankind, thinking they can control this technology, especially once quantum computing becomes a real thing, is delusionally suicidal!

Australian bank stops handling cash at the counter in some branches

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Re: Opening hours

Doing something like this is very difficult in the US also. Any transaction over $20K gets flagged for money laundering investigation and mountains of documentation must be done to prevent the Feds from paying you a visit.

"It wasn't helped by the fact that the mortgage company wanted it paid off in a single lump sum (unable to make more than one out-of-band payment per year), but could only give me a settlement balance valid for 48 hours."

Of course not! God forbid they lose out on that $0.003% of interest!

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

Re: Government decisions

And the copper penny is actually worth more, based on the price of copper, that the domination on its face.

Which is one of the reason pennies are becoming scarce.

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

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Re: Calamity Jen

This still happens today!

We have one, and her name is actually Jen!

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

And ware low cut blouses and short skirts to hide their incompetence!

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Re: Autistic People too

A few years ago when we were building our new InfoSec Team we promoted one person from our Infrastructure team to head the group. Then ran ads to fill his team. After 3 months we never got anyone applying for the jobs. We looked at the job postings and went to HR and asked why, "You are asking for requirements higher that the Director of the department possesses and offering a salary no one with those qualification would accept, it's no wonder you are not getting any candidates." It took quite a struggle to get them to change those requirements.

ChatGPT is coming for your jobs – the terrible ones, at least

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Fear the rise of the drudge!

Oh, just lovely!

Yes, let's eliminate all the drudge work that the drudges do so that the drudges become the idle, supported masses supported by the dwindling productive.

Because the world will always have the drudges, they will not learn how to not be a drudge, especially when they are being supported to NOT learn to not be a drudge.

Then when the cost of supporting the idle drudges gets too expensive because the number of people who are productive drops far below the number of idle drudges, the benefits that supports the idle drudges must be cut. Queue the riots and violence from the drudges as they now believe they are entitled to the fruits of "other people's" labor!

We are building the foundations of our DOOM through our misplaced compassion. The misplaced idea that some work is "demeaning", that poverty should be addressed with unearned income only created the seeds of our own destruction.

Vietnam threatens to cut off two million mobile subscribers

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Re: Security vs Privacy

Replace "number" with "firearm" in your post and you will realize why we in the US are so opposed to any policy that institutes a firearms registry.

It WILL be abused!

TikTok: Is this really a national security scare or is something else going on?

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Re: TikTok is a smokescreen

This is the digital equivalent of the "Enabling Act!"

UK seeks light-touch AI legislation as industry leaders call for LLM pause

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Re: AI MPs?

You laugh, but combine a Deep Fake video with an AI LLM and we have the new Big Brother!

The Dear Leader that never dies! That never appears in Person!

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Before its too late

We should follow the advice the Sheriff gave Mr. Marley.

"Kill it, before it grows!"

Gone in 120 seconds: Tesla Model 3 child's play for hackers

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Re: Discriminatory?

So you saying all those iPhones out there owned by black women don't work with facial recognition?

Sorry, not buying it! This is just more of the "equity" BS going on.

Attackers hit Bitcoin ATMs to steal $1.5 million in crypto cash

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

Crypto ATM

"What could possibly go wrong!?"

-- Timmy Turner

Are you ready to go all-in, head-first, on a laptop? ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X asks for that commitment

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Re: Keyboard angle

Correct any angle between the wrist and the fingers restricts the carpel tunnel and can cause irritation. This will produce a less than optimal angle!

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

Nice, but!

Nice laptop, I can see that Keyboard breaking, and as the writer said, all kinds of gunk getting under there. If you've seen the condition of some of our corporate laptops, you'd agree. (we are construction, and it's not just the job site laptops the end up looking disgusting!)

As far as all the other nonsense, does anyone even use a laptop as a laptop anymore? We give everyone a laptop, no matter their position, as far as I know only the people who need to use them while traveling use the as a "laptop" and business travel has been cut by almost 90%! Everyone had monitors, keyboard & mouse both in the office and at home! We could probably replace these with a cheap desktop both in office and at home and save money but they'd all cry and it's not worth hearing all the bitching!

IT depts struggle with skills shortages despite Big Tech layoffs

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Maybe they are not the "cream of the crop"

Maybe, just maybe, those being let go from the "big tech firms" weren't the highly skilled, highly motivated people we are led to believe. Maybe they were not producing the quality work and were just the bloat the big companies could afford to carry. (Seems Twitter is running just fine without the bloat!)

And maybe, just maybe, having Google, FaceBook, Amazon, Twitter, etc. listed as your previous employer isn't the golden ticket some think. Maybe, just maybe, the woke, snowflake, bovine excrement that's gone on at said "big tech firms" by their employees isn't something other companies want from their new employees!

Remember, put those "preferred pronouns" on your resume (CV to you right pondians) and watch those offers NOT arrive!

You've been pwned, how much will each stolen customer SSN cost you? How about $7.5k?

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Re: SSN theft

This is the idiocy of left leaning governments

When Social Security was created there were several concerns that those against it presented that were discounted by it's advocates as "scare mongering".

1. That this is the establishment of a national identity card. Something Americans have traditionally been vehemently against.

2. That businesses would start using this as a single identifier for their customers and start asking for customers to reveal it.

3. That stolen SS Numbers would be use for fraudulent purposes.

4. That the government would steel the money and use for purposes totally unrelated to Social Security.

All of which came true!

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

Re: Change window - cue the drums

When my oldest grandson was a toddler, we put hook and eye latches high up on the exterior doors. (He'd already figured out how to unlock the doors) Easily reachable for us but (we thought) not him.

One morning we wake up to him playing on the swing set in the back yard. Hmm, how did he get out? We must have forgot to latch the door.

Another morning I was up and heard the closet in the kitchen open, I go onto the kitchen to see him using the broom handle to pop the latch off the door.

The little buggers are ingenious!

He's now a student at Florida Polytechnic Institute studying to follow Gramps into the IT profession!

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

Re: Why would one ...

And I supposed there was never such a thing as a phone with a spinning dial with 10 holes?

Yes Virginia, there is a toaster oven.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=best+toaster+ovens&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIqeXQvenJ_QIVRJJbCh0mDAh9EAAYAiAAEgJr6PD_BwE&hvadid=241605243063&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9011476&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=17488923620972302402&hvtargid=kwd-137373896&hydadcr=13934_10209289&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_463c6m72c5_e

Datacenters still a boys' club, staffing shortages may change that

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Woman and technology are like oil and water

I've known 3 women in my 30 years in IT that I would consider high level professionals, that you could count on the produce.

All the other were either those who never rise above their current position (i.e. service desk), we just ride-alongs, or they rose into technologically clueless management.

I am sure there are plenty of awesome women in technology out there, but the percentage compared to the general population is just low!

JMO

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

I've said for many years, "Women's rights lasts only until the heavy listing starts!"

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

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Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

Correct, silicon logic gate can have true, false, nothing else. But a quantum qubit ban have true, false, and unknown (or maybe, possible). This is where the possibility of a self aware machine becomes more and more possible. Maybe, quantum logic is how the human brain has achieved sentience?

I am sorry but we need to end this before it begins. We cannot derive laws, regulations, or rules that will keep this under control.

It was the second clause of the first law of Robotics that causes the catastrophe in Azimov's novel. " or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm"! Humans know you don't protect people from harm by restricting their freedom. But a machine only sees the end result and any means to get there is justified under the laws!

"Thou shalt not create a machine in the image of the human mind!"

Words to (literally) live by!

Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

If ChatGPT is being fed source material from the internet I'd not be surprised is the code you asked for was completely wrong! There is so much bullshit code out there, people telling people the absolute wrong way to do things.

I'm almost tempted to ask ChatGPT this question: "I gave a program I need to get working on Fedora Linux but I keep getting an error that SELinux is blocking it. How can I fix this?"

Would ChatGPT's response be "Here is how to disable SELinux,..."

Because that's the majority of the response you would get searching the internet.

Biden wants chipmakers to provide childcare if they want billions in free money

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Re: Backwards

Minimum wage laws just make jobs illegal, and everything more expensive, or drive jobs overseas.

Twitter rewards remaining loyal staff by decimating them

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What country do these people think they live in?

"A class-action lawsuit was filed against the Tesla tycoon, who was accused of breaking America's employment laws by laying off employees without having given them sufficient notice."

There is not law in the US that requires notice for office worker layoff. The W.A.R.N. act only covers plant closings, i.e. factory workers and it only covers the closing of facilities, not layoffs for down turns

So either these people are stupid or they hired one stupid or sleazy lawyer!

Bitcoin mining rig found stashed in school crawlspace

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Amatures!

Why set something up where someone could find it and see the giant power bill!

Just search source code on GitHub! There is a treasure trove of clear test AWS access keys. Collect a lot of keys (many have global admin access). Set up a miner, run it for 30 says, shut it down and delete it. Move on to the next account, rinse-repeat! Script the whole thing with Cloud Formation!

Not that I would do such a thing!

Google destroyed evidence for antitrust battle, Feds complain

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Re: the BOFH method

You just do that is you think Orange is a good color for you!

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Re: Being Googley

You joke by that is actually the bets policy Your employees are your greatest liability. They will so and say things that, when discovered, can hurt you in litigation. It's best to only keep things for as long as you are legally obligates to do so.

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Not Surprised by this

Most companies don't know how to handle chat. We are going thought this now, realizing that chat message "are not" covered by our legal retention settings. It is an oversight that is wide spread across many businesses. With Teams it even gets weirder. If you set your teams chat to 15 days but your email retention is 5 years, teams stores chat history in a hidden folder in the users email. So the chats are retained for 5 years and ARE discoverable! This could be an unpleasant surprise to the Corporate Council.

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

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It's not the cloud, it's you!

The cloud is not always more expensive than running your own kit.

We've cut our data center costs by 40% going to AWS. But if your not managing your cost proactively an manage what I ca;; "Cloud Creep" your going to wake up one day with a massive bill!

Example: When I took over SQL Servers after merging 2 of out operating companies I instituted proper SQL backups. One step was to copy SQL backup files to S3 for long term storage. Surprise! On the next quarter spend audit we saw S3 cost jump up by a big margin. We were not routing S3 traffic over our VPC so we were incurring internet ingress costs on those buckets.

If your not proactive watching where your costs are increasing, if your compute is over provisioned, are you using compute instead of server-less, you costs are going to skyrocket!

There are many services or apps that can help you manage costs. The cloud isn't the answer to every need.

But if your serious about 24/7 availability without a lot of the headaches and unforeseen costs that go along with it, a cloud provider is a far better solution.