While FTTH everywhere is laudable, it might turn out to be impractical in the more rural areas and existing dense housing.

VDSL+ _should_ be enough for most uses if priced appropriately.

The larger problem isn't the actual contractor, it's in the selection process.

At least, the companies that get these huge jobs are the ones that can successfully navigate the bidding process, as well as those that have a track record of complying with that process.

It's a matter of the metrics used not matching the result desired.

ACA/Obamacare health exchanges have had a lot of screwups, but I don't know if it'd work any other way initially (based on the fact that there are hundreds of agencies and different systems to interact with,. any end to end testing would have to be on "friendly" / fake results.

I may or may not agree with their mission and goals, but given the fact that the government shutdown was more or less known about for months ahead of occurring, I'd like to think that the bureaucrats at the pentagon were simply doing their job by making these large contract awards instead of pretending that the shutdown wasn't going to happen.

e.g. it's a lot easier to deal with a delay in paying for spare parts on the tail end than it is to do without those parts on the front end.

Somehow I'd doubt the US would commit an international incident to get one guy.

To my knowledge, the US doesn't have ad-hoc military access to Russian airspace. To say nothing of the loss of life for what would at that point be an extrajudicial killing (aka - murder).

Probably depends on the nature of the business.

Some types are business are inherently more IT dependent than others.

At least, once upon a time I contracted to/ in an industrial factory making insulation.

The permanent IT staff was 7 for a workforce of around 1200 .. and most of those were dedicated to the production control systems in the plant (ancient honeywell machines).

Most of the workers were union tradesmen .. whom responded to the new email system training materials was to circular file them before I had left (and tried to use the shared computer to access playboy.com (mid 90s).

Contrast that to today, where my job and industry is essentially all IT ((what with people carrying a network enabled computer in their pocket that happens to make phone calls and is still called a phone).

I don't know about the incompetent doctors being rural .. There are programs around my part of Kansas practically begging doctors and dentists to locate in rural areas, offering signing bonuses, accelerated payoff of student loans (as part of the compensation package),

There are companies that make a living refurbishing PDP11 machines.

I know of a couple companies that keep them around for their call center ACD controllers (Rockwell Galaxy - PDP11/94).

A lot of these machines still use discrete components .. so fixing them is economically feasible.

ACD integration has a funny way of becoming very very customized. The nominal savings of going to a newer platform is outweighed by the changes required in support and IVR systems that feed into it.

err, the US has no shortage of backhaul capacity .. we have dark fiber going every which way that has not needed to be utilized due to DWDM advances of the last decade or two.

The problem has been in getting that capacity to the consumer, the "last mile".

At least, our phone companies have generally been spending the absolute minimum on infrastructure that they can get away with for the last 15 years .. our cable companies doing likewise, and our wireless ISPs of last resort (aka Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mo) charge such a premium so as to make true broadband "living" economically impossible.

There are other efforts of course, such as Google Fiber, Verizon FIOS and regional FTTH services like SureWest .. but those tend to cherry pick neighborhoods and municipalities that are likely to be very profitable, rather than the near-utility requirements broadband has become for many americans .. and again, mainly in urban / dense areas.

e.g. not everyone can pick from 4 different broadband providers as I can (Google Fiber, Surewest, AT&T, Time Warner).

Depending on _how_ deep they go into these countries, I think the larger issue will be simply getting backhaul into these areas, and working through the bureaucracy to get it done.

Near as I can tell, some of these countries regulations are on the level of "I thought it up when you asked the question".

They might have more success with setting up in-nation intranets for instruction and governance purposes (the society change that comes with instant communications, without necessarily, the buybuybuy aspects, at least initially or exclusively).

Wouldn't this be two different things?

At least if the lease agreement is written to the _potential_ power consumption, rather than the actual power used, that is a fundamentally different proposition than taking power and marking it up, or otherwise being registered as a utility.

e.g. you could potentially increase your power draw to the maximum provisioned, and the data center would be contractually bound to be able to provide that level of power, certainly on a particular circuit if there is a redundant power supply failure or other sudden spike in load.

I know in my space (telecom), the logistics of ensuring the correct provisioning of power (access to 48V power, cooling, not overdrawing power slack batteries) can be as complicated as the provisioning of other, more typical server services.

Snarky comment aside, it is true that most of any ordinance from that era would be malfunctioning, the problem is that not _all_ of it would.

Little in the way of actual damage to infrastructure, but it would still rattle the residents of SK knowing that it could cause damage.

I think the larger issue with Solaris is that Oracle is intentionally murdering the "mindshare" of their users.

At least part of vendor support is aftermarket support .. right now you can't get patch clusters, bug reports or documentation without a current support contract.

Same with downloading of Solaris media .. if you want to run solaris sparc on your old blade 1500 to compile/debug stuff before moving it to a production machine .. you can't, not without a hardware contract .. at least not easily.

Oracle/Sun has always been a premium value proposition .. nobody gets them because they were the cheapest, but shutting out your users entirely is more than counterproductive for the amount of revenue realized.

As far as Solaris x86 .. IDK, back when it was a going concern, Sun was dabbling in linux, was competing with a half dozen unix on x86 vendors, and was pushing JAVA as a "run anywhere" / platform agnostic environment.

in other words, very few people were hampered by the lack of a Solaris/86 version of their application.

Unfortunately, even in (sizable) niches like telecom, the days of exclusively SPARC shops are long over.

There will be some markets that continue to use Oracle hardware for business continuity sake (Sun/Oracle has ridiculously long hardware lifecycles by industry standards). But as a mass (server) market influence, I think Oracle is done.

Small point, but the main reason for preferring sea salt is that it tastes different than "normal" table salt.

Whether that is a good or bad thing is up to the individual

Why does this sound like Weyland-Yutani?

Perhaps the company had humble roots as a Linux graphical toolkit developer instead of heavy industry.