Comment: Uhhh... the one who never existed? (Score 5, Funny) 541
Macgyver
Comment: Change related? (Score 1) 125
I don't necessarily hate the marketing concept of 'The Cloud', but I am fascinated by the business decisions and risk acceptance that organisations are willing to take. ie- the typical: "Demanding high availability and hot failover, instantaneous incident resolution, and 'we are your primary customer'... but also a low cost." I think that Amazon and their competitors *may* get there with their offerings, but until there is a bit more maturity, I expect to see more incidents like this.
My wild guess is that a change triggered this, which of course leads to why has the backout plan failed (and who signed off on the risk)? I can't imagine that this is not change related - otherwise there is a serious architectural design flaw here somewhere.
My wild guess is that a change triggered this, which of course leads to why has the backout plan failed (and who signed off on the risk)? I can't imagine that this is not change related - otherwise there is a serious architectural design flaw here somewhere.
Amazon Cloud Not Big Enough For Feds and WikiLeaks 204
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the get-out-of-town dept.
from the get-out-of-town dept.
theodp writes "Dave Winer was already upset that Amazon Web Services (AWS) pulled the plug on WikiLeaks for posting classified US government documents. So, he wasn't exactly thrilled to receive email three weeks later from an AWS PR flack boasting that 'the US federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments.' Writes Winer: 'It makes perfect sense that the US government is a big customer of Amazon's web services. It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize that business. There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary.' Amazon, which wowed the White House with its ability to scale video slideshow site Animoto, was able to get its foot in the Federal door as a Recovery.gov redesign subcontractor."
Can Windows, OS X and Fedora All Work Together? 375
Posted
by
timothy
from the like-to-buy-the-world-a-coke dept.
from the like-to-buy-the-world-a-coke dept.
greymond writes "In my ever growing job responsibilities, I've recently been tasked with documenting our organization's IT infrastructure, primarily focusing on cost analysis of our hardware leases and software purchases. This is something that has never been done in our organization before and while it's moving along slowly, I'm already seeing some places where we could make improvements. Once completed, I see this as an opportunity to bring up the topic of migrating the majority of our office from Windows 7 to Linux and from Exchange to Gmail. However, this would result in three departments each running a different system: Windows, OS X, and most likely Fedora. Has anyone worked in or tried to set up an environment like this? What roadblocks did you run into? Is this really feasible or should I just continue to focus on the cutbacks that don't require OS changes? (The requirement for having three different systems is that the vast majority of our administration, who rely solely on an install of Microsoft Windows, Word and Excel, are savvy enough that if they came in and saw Gnome running on Fedora with Open Office they'd pick it up fast. However, our marketing department is composed entirely of Apple systems, and the latest Adobe Creative Suite doesn't seem to all work under Wine. The biggest issue is with the Sales department though, as they rely on a proprietary sales platform that is Windows only — and generally, sales personal give the biggest push back when it comes to organizational changes.)"
Google Scares Aussie Banks 150
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the move-over-bunyip dept.
from the move-over-bunyip dept.
mask.of.sanity writes "Google could be the biggest threat to Australia's big four banks because of the trust online users place in it and its ability to engage with customers, banking executives say. They told an audience from the finance sector that companies like Google and PayPal are more responsive and trusted than banks, and cited emerging technology with an emphasis on online applications as a means for the smaller credit unions to challenge the position of incumbent banks. It's welcome news for Australia's credit unions: the nation's banks have taken turns in being the first to lift interest rates above the official reserve bank rate, with others collectively following suit, leading some to speculate they are in collusion."
Red Hat CEO Says Software Vendor Model Is Broken 223
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the for-some-definition-of-broken dept.
from the for-some-definition-of-broken dept.
alphadogg writes "The current model of selling commercial enterprise software is broken, charged the CEO for Red Hat. It is too expensive, doesn't address user needs and, worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems. 'The business models between customer and vendors are fundamentally broken,' said Jim Whitehurst, speaking Wednesday at the Interop conference in New York. 'Vendors have to guess at what [customers] want, and there is a mismatch of what customers want and what they get. Creating feature wars is not what the customer is looking for.' Whitehurst estimated that the total global IT market, not including telecommunications, is about $1.4 trillion a year. Factor in the rough estimates that half of all IT projects fail or are significantly downgraded, and that only half of all features in software packages are actually used, then it would follow that 'easily $500 billion of that $1.4 trillion is fundamentally wasted every year,' he said."
AU National Broadband Network Signs $11 Billion Deal With Telstra 120
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the going-for-the-gusto dept.
from the going-for-the-gusto dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian government has signed an $11 billion deal with the country's largest telco, Telstra, to acquire the telco's physical infrastructure and migrate customers to the National Broadband Network. The NBN is a 100Mbps open access fiber network that will be rolled out to 94% of the Australian population, with wireless and satellite to cover the remainder. The deal marks a large step forward for the new network, as without a deal to bring Telstra's customers onboard, the NBN's viability was in question."
Univ. of California Faculty May Boycott Nature Publisher 277
Posted
by
timothy
from the what-market-will-bear-is-an-empirical-question dept.
from the what-market-will-bear-is-an-empirical-question dept.
Marian the Librarian writes "Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which publishes the prestigious journal Nature along with 67 affiliated journals, has proposed a 400% increase in the price of its license to the University of California. UC is poised to just say no to exorbitant price gouging. If UC walks, the faculty are willing to stage a boycott; they could, potentially, decline to submit papers to NPG journals, decline to review for them and resign from their editorial boards."
BP Buys "Oil Spill" Search Term 439
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the can't-say-i'm-surprised dept.
from the can't-say-i'm-surprised dept.
technology_dude found an unsurprising but amusing little story that BP is buying keywords on Google and Yahoo for things like "Oil Spill" to help spin some damage control. I guess if you can't plug your spill, the least you can do is try to clog the flow of information.
Hardware Companies Team Up To Fight Mobile Linux Fragmentation 47
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the isn't-that-cheating dept.
from the isn't-that-cheating dept.
Nunavut writes with news that a number of hardware companies have banded together to battle the fragmentation of the mobile Linux market. ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments are forming Linaro, a nonprofit organization that plans to focus on "low-level software around the Linux kernel that touches the silicon, key pieces of middleware that enable new markets, and tools that help the developer write and debug code."
"Linaro's chief goal is to reduce the time that it takes to bring a new ARM-powered product to market with Linux. This effort is largely neutral with respect to what software environment and components individual vendors choose to run in user space. Linaro will not compete with existing platforms such as MeeGo and Android. Instead, it will attempt to improve the shared underlying software components that allow those platforms and others to run on ARM SoCs. In principle, this could actually reduce fragmentation at the lower levels of the Linux stack."