I think it's important to realize that companies are run for the interest of their shareholders. Google, Apple and Microsoft have all had their good and bad moments. A lot of people make a point of Apple being for or against standards, or a walled garden. Microsoft made you pay for DOS/windows with every computer purchased, even if you had no intention of running either. It was only stopped after the courts said it's an illegal tying agreement, but even then they were able to exert such pressure on their 'partners' that Gasse couldn't even give the BeOS away. Maybe in the great pantheon of evil business practices MS gets a 3.5 out 5 (they never killed anyone), Apple gets a 3.3. I don't know if I have a score for Google yet, but some times they're pushing 3.0 at least.

Keep in mind that both the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber were stopped after they unsuccessfully tried to light their bombs. Had they succeeded the "passengers will stop them" argument would show itself to be the non-starter it really is. They may never attempt to take over another plane, but they will probably try to bring one down.

I'm not going to argue we didn't get what we needed. What we got was a mutant hybrid that may not be producing no better an outcome than the old system. A lot of people recognized the old system was a large, potential security hole. Low paid, under trained people with no job security are ripe for social engineering. Trained, reasonably paid, people with a measure of job security are less likely (although not immune) from social engineering. Professionalizing screeners should improve the situation from that end. Having national guardsmen standing by screening checkpoints was a reaction. Improving the screening process seems like a logical, even necessary idea. Hopefully, the combination of decent standards, training, and professionalism would lead to a better outcome. It hasn't and no one is arguing that.

Second, if someone does try to hijack a plane and the hijack is foiled, or just downs a plane, you will have people questioning the safety of air travel. When Richard Reed tried to light is shoe on fire, or Abdulmutallab tried to ignite his underwear, people questioned 'how did they get on the plane, in the first place.' The next question is if they can get that on a plane, are planes safe? Should I be flying? People are horrible and judging risk and even if the odds of dying from dozens of other, more realistic, events many times more likely than dying from a terrorist attack, they will react by not flying. Airline safety isn't so high because of the altruism of the airlines or the aircraft makers (although many care very deeply about the safety of their products) but because airline crashes are bad for business. Even as rare an event as they are, they cause people to not fly.

Having passengers and crew overreact because they feel that security is 'up to them,' is not a good idea. Passenger reactions are important, but only after all the other mechanisms failed. Simple screening of passengers seems like a perfectly reasonable idea. Applying technology, such as sniffing for organic materials (explosives) seems like a perfectly reasonable idea. The problem is the execution of these perfectly reasonable ideas has been a disaster. I wouldn't say a complete and total disaster, but, it's not a 'win.' The larger problem is the political intransigence that will saddle us with this mess for many years to come, and maybe even exacerbate it.

So, the TSA was formed, in part, because after 9/11 we found out that many of the airports relied on contractors that were borderline. Little to no training. Enormous turnover. Effectively no ability to arrest or detain people. Subject to pressure from the airlines, etc. So someone had, what was probably a good idea, hire people as full time, highly trained screeners that could server or coordinate with law enforcement. Sure, it might cost a little more in the short run, but less than if people viewed airlines as unsafe and refused to fly. Much like the movie "The Fly" that idea morphed into the mess that we have now. With congressmen saying that "agent" should not be used to refer to a TSA worker because that demeans other law enforcement agents. But let's say, for sake of argument, that the Obama administration tries to do something about it. "He's soft on terror" or "He's making us less safe," or "He's helping the terrorists". Likewise, if Romney wins and his administration tries to do something: "He's in the pocket of the airlines," or "He's making us less safe because it's costing the airlines money." Those are both ridiculous claims, but they will be made.

It's not the individual so much as the process. If it were the fault of the individual, then we'd see some cases where the policies got fixed and other cases where the policies don't get fixed. Unfortunately, we see a lot more 'stay the course' simply because we don't have the kind of political environment that accepts new thinking or even modest amounts of 'risk' taking. That's the shame of the whole situation. We want people to bring forward solutions but it can't be solution 'X' because that's unpopular with voters, or solution 'Y' because the other party will crucify us, or solution 'K' because the company that makes the scanners has plants in key congressional districts, etc. So we're going to continue with the current, sub-optimal, likely counter-productive strategy. Make a change to the screening process and a terrorist attack happens, the first thing they'll rake you over the coals for is the change in the screening procedure and how that allowed the attack to happen. In part its the fault of the agency, in part it's the fault of congress, in part its the fault of a hyperactive media that focuses on trivialities and jumps to conclusions. Like you, the whole situation make me sick.

The processing and storage requirements for a system are inversely proportional to the mean value of the information managed by the system.

Def 1. Mean value of information - the total sum of the value of the information, divided by the number of users of the system.

For example, a popular social networking site may require 10's of thousands of CPU cores and petabytes of data storage. Whereas the same number of bank accounts are handled on the low 100's of mainframes with 100's of terabytes of storage.

Another example, really, really important information is generally small. The design and maintenance is managed by a professional staff which carefully manages changes, copies, and access to that information. You can fill up petabytes of storage with click histories and other (largely) useless data, which is then duplicated into reporting databases, copied to data warehouses, copied to BI data marts, and then versioned (should anyone ever want to know who clicked on the "Contact Us" link back in 2007).

I don't think he was talking about physical availability. He was talking about spending. The perfect storm he's talking about is the inability of Moore's law to keep pace with increased demand at the same time financial services companies are getting squeezed by lower profits. So, what would have been 12% of revenues in 2010 will be 18% or more of revenues in 2015 (or whatever). That may seem like no big deal, but it may be a good chunk of profit (what's left after all expenses are deducted from revenue). The acceleration in demand is a result of Jevon's paradox which basically says that even though you can get more work out of a unit of input (greater efficiency), the improved efficiency stimulates greater demand faster than the increase in efficiency reduces pressure on supply. I think the comparison to coal is unfortunate because is is confusing and makes people think it's a physical shortage.

If you mean 1000bt to be 1 GigE, that's sooooo 2000's. Welcome to the 10 GigE era, boys.

The voyager spacecraft popping a plasma bubble and sending it to Earth, requiring a heard drinking high school physics teacher (played by Stephen Baldwin) and a heart-of-gold exotic dancer, but former Navy Seal (played by an anonymous starlet), to save the day.

The first, diversity, was mentioned in the article. In the last 20 years (1990 to 2010) we've had countless "core enterprise technologies of the future" spring forth. Some of these concepts or technologies are still in wide spread use, but others have fallen out of favor or have been overcome by events. Many shops have hodge-podge systems with tough to find skill sets. It's hard to staff these positions and the average tenure of an IT person is about 2 years. With a contractor, it's now the HR problem, not your problem, to find someone who knows Delphi, COM, and DB2 to patch your in house app.

By contrast, the CICS was developed in 1969, System 360 1964, and COBOL 1959?. Anyway, you can take a 30 year period from the mid sixties to the mid 1990's and find almost the exact same mix of products. The versions and features evolved, and some additional COTS products were introduced, but there is an amazing consistency. Even the terminal technology for the mainframe was fairly slow to change, with serial terminals in wide spread use until fairly recently. I think the lack of diversity makes it more economical for companies to train and manage an in-house staff. When it's time to find new staff, you used to be able to find an ample supply of people who had COBOL/CICS on their resume.

But I think this problem could be overcome if senior management saw their IT as delivering a competitive advantage relative to their competitors. Even in the mainframe days there was a lot of outsourcing. If we're all using the same COTS packages and building the same applications on the same platforms, it's more about not screwing up than it is about doing something excellent. Companies are more likely to keep their "secret sauce" in house but take the stuff everyone has to do and outsource it to try to reduce cost. That's not to say that companies don't use consultants to help with projects.

You sometimes see this as "know your knitting," meaning understand what makes your company great, it's core competencies and what makes it special. Don't get distracted by the other stuff and just focus on that. If IT isn't something that makes your company special - why would you spend one nickel more than you had to?