I am tired of solving virtualization challenges and figuring out how manage petabytes of data. I'm going to take the next couple of years off and setup a consulting company installing WAPs in schools. That is obviously where the money is at....

When 9/11 was happening in real time, there were multiple news reports of TWO crash sites in Pennsylvania. There was the primary crash site, and then a secondary site a couple of miles away. At the secondary site, it was mentioned that the tail of the plane was found there.

After the first or second day of reporting, that story was squashed and never brought up again.

Yes, EMC.

Oddly enough, the correct answer was down modded to 0. Good to see that the NSA is actively working to keep the details of their operations in the dark.

For those of you who want to get in on the publicly sanitized version of the technology, have a look at..

http://www.emc.com/campaign/gl...

Problem solved.

Next?

I missed that. Any references still around to it?

The 9/11 piece of info that sticks around in my mind is the "second crash site" in Pennsylvania. The site where the tail of the plane landed.

Step 1. Collect all audio
Step 2. Convert speech to text
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit

The IT guy and geek in me gets all excited thinking about all of the cool technology that they are leveraging.

The civil libertarian in me shudders knowing how easily they are able to contextualize and analyze the communications with the intent of subverting public discourse.

The cynical part of me is starting to believe that the average American really does not care because they are so conditioned that they have zero desire to enjoy any sort of true freedom. As long as they have access to shopping malls, housing and alcohol / caffeine / prescription drugs, they will be content.

Want to guess who their storage vendor is?

Hint... they are a three letter agen^H^H^H.. company.

If you want to progress in your IT career, you need to figure out how to automate basic system operations like maintenance and patching. Having to actually be awake at 2:00am to apply patches is rookie status. Sometimes it is unavoidable, but it should not be the default stance.

My environment is virtual, so our workflow is basically snapshot VM, patch, test. If the test fails, rollback the snapshot and try again (if time is available) or delay until later. If the test is successful, we hold onto the snapshot for three days just in case users find something that we missed. If everything is good after three days, we delete the snapshot.

We have a dev environment that mirrors production that we can use for patch testing, upgrade testing, etc. Due to testing, we rarely have problems with production changes. If we do, the junior guys escalate to someone who can sort it out. Our SLAs are defined to give us plenty of time to resolve issues that occur within the allocated window. (Typically ~4 hours)

In the grand scheme of things, my environment is pretty small. We have ~1500 VMs. We manage it with three people and a lot of automation.

..with TRACTOR beams!!

Wisdom right here.

This right here.

Nothing happens in a company of any size without a business case.

To amplify upon what has already been said, you need to show the financial benefit to the company. You need to justify the cost to acquire the technology and train people on it. You need to quantify the ROI so that management can weigh the cost of the technology versus all of the other costs that they have to cover every year.

A good thing to research is whether or not any of your competitors are using what you want to use. Has your company lost out on any project opportunities due to not having those technologies? Or did your competitors win business because they did have those technologies? If your company is large enough, there is probably a department that already has this information. Where I work, we get a weekly email that details all of the new deals and projects that the competition is involved with.

Businesses like predictable revenue and established business models. It makes planning and forecasting easier. Nobody likes a whiner or someone who focuses on the negative. You will not gain any traction with statements that have themes like like, "SAS is holding us back. SAS "sucks" in comparison to other technologies." Unless you can show the positives of a new technology, and those positives come up with a massive financial upside that justifies the CapEx to acquire them... you will never make any progress towards acquiring them.

I got just the opposite from the PDF.

I thought what they are proposing is that "good" companies will sign their executables with certificates that can be revoked in the future if it turns out that the certificate is being used to sign malware.

This is a big win for transparency. I am glad that Facebook did this and that they are being open about it.

Marketers have known this forever. The media has been manipulating the emotions of the American populace for generations. Through their actions, Facebook is bringing the discussion into the open and making people aware of it. I think that by now, most people are aware of the fact that the "news" is just a propaganda tool used to maintain the narrative of the powers that be.

This is also a big win for personal responsibility. It has now been proven that what we focus on and what we choose to share impacts not only our moods, but the moods of those in our network. The question now becomes, "Will you share positive stories that make people feel good, or negative stories that make them feel bad?" Given control over your own information channel, will you continue to parrot the party line and share mainstream propaganda? Or will you amplify alternate signals?

http://socnetmastermind.blogsp... (ignore the other posts, this is just a place for random, social networking related thoughts)

Linguistic bot fairy tales defeat Baysean filterings none of the times

On a related note, I just received an email from Ubisoft this morning offering 20% off of Watch Dogs. The game has been out for a month.