From a person who has had similar international headlines for systems that I can impact. My heart goes out to you. System failures are never fun, failures that affect a lot of customers are just plain stressful. Document processes and learn from this event all the you can. Customers care most what was learned and how to prevent this and future scoped events from occurring again.

Hang in there!

I disagree. If you go before investors you want to make the best case possible. There are plenty of investors out there that would gladly give you their money if you can make a good case for completely raping and pillaging an industry in a legal way. The real trick then is hiding the fact that you have a disruptive business idea from the competition until it is too late. For example Amazon. Yes, they are known for their "catalog sales", an idea that has been around for ever. Anyone remember Sears? What Amazon figured out is how to get around as much tax as possible, logistics, an attractive digital marketplace for anything and everything, finally massive distributed compute. Sears, Walmart, Target, and all of the other big retailers all banked on the "I want it now" factor. Amazon showed the USA and the world that people are willing to wait a few days, even a few weeks, for goods that are significantly cheaper due to logistics and tax discounts.

Innovations, be it a physical gadget, an idea, or now a virtual gadget have always tried to be disruptive. Else it would not be an innovation.

I try to use fixedsys fonts such as system in all of my writing they are widely accepted and have a tested user base. On top of that the system font avoid most modern time based conflicts as it dates back to the 1980's. It takes low resources and low resolution to create on a display device. I would encourage everyone to use system font and avoid all the painful issues of compatibility, performance, and legal ramifications that other much newer fonts can have.

I am curious how they plan to service the town. The town airport doesn't even show up on the list of airports in the country. I would estimate it at 200ft or less. A Beechcraft Kingair, a typical small town cargo plane, requires more runway space. Narvik is the closest large airport and that is 110 miles away through a twisty highway through the fjords. Ships are great for large cargo but not for fast cargo. The DC manager can overcome some vendor issues by having trained/certified intelligent hands that work shifts. But if you are creating the largest datacenter in the world then I hope that you also plan to have a large commercial airport as well and possibly some amount of major vendor buy in. Expect requirements of 4 hours or less vendor presence. 4 hours from Narvik to Ballangen in the winter might be tricky.

Good luck with the logistics!

I have direct experience with this myself.

This is why companies like Akamai have products geared specifically for this problem. However stopping bots is nearly impossible unless you deal with them on a realtime basis. It would be interesting if Linkedin could get the entire world to make website scrapers illegal and then actually enforce that illegality. As of now when a bot owner is shutdown they just move the operation overnight to the ISP that will take their business in the same country or move countries all together. Likely the only way to stop this behavior is in the website transaction process or to make scraping not monetarily feasible.

Given the wealth that most of the cabinet and staff have in the current white house it confuses me why many of them would want to risk image issues or care to face the daily workload and headaches that these positions entail. Though many are earning a comfortable salary, the money pulled in is likely secondary to the access to impact decisions as well as access to information. Given the chaos and drama however we must be left to think carefully about what kind of corruption might be brewing behind this relatively opaque administration. Like a poorly tuned monitoring system there is so much noise in US politics right now it is difficult to pick out where the real harm to the world might be.

This apparently coincides with a crackdown in China. The BBC is running a story about Apple pulling VPN's from its app store.

I just hope that the rest of the world understands that the greater percentage of the USA population does not hate any particular group of people as the current government would lead the world to believe. There are too many people in the country left behind by automation. Those disenfranchised folks look for a conduit for their frustration. It is a bit scary because that is one of the components that led to global political struggles in the 1930's. The difficult part is educating those disenfranchised on how they can improve their position and grow with the world rather than trying to figure out how to get what they had back. Hating another cultural group might make you feel better, but it is unlikely to fix the root cause of your frustration.

Accenture is an Irish company. It has about 33% of its workforce as Indian based labor, 12% United States, and 12.5% Filipino. Since the company is a global operation one could argue that they hire plenty of US Americans. Compared to Wipro and Infosys, both India based companies, Accenture operates under a different business model. Its heritage also stems from a US based company. IBM is a better example of a competitor and business model.

As I grow older I keep on comparing the behaviors of those in their late teens and 20's to my own to best understand how the world, or at least the culture around me, might be changing. "Kids" today take for granted having a personal computer in their pockets at all times. They are not really forced to memorize as much, be quite as creative, or have as much face to face time. I've seen them sitting in the same room staring at their phone texting/instant messaging each other as a form of communication. WotC are latching on to this idea. Though I believe there is a lot lost in not seeing a friend stand up gleefully and make sword thrust motions after rolling a Nat 20 and confirming. I suspect this product will work. The biggest concern will be WotC's ability to be a software/service provider instead of just licensing to other developers as they have done in the past http://www.mobygames.com/compa.... Presumably WotC would use their Magic Online development group to do this.

I will start by saying that I don't support a trial in absentia of Edward Snowden. But I would like that a president also pardon someone who is found guilty. Edward Snowden is as far as I am aware innocent of any crime in the USA per the US constitution. He is a suspect, he may have even publicly admitted guilt or involvement in something that might be a crime. However he has not been brought to trial in person or not in person and been found guilty of a crime. The president doesn't have to pardon Mr. Snowden. Ms. Loretta Lynch the current standing US Attorney General could just submit some kind of legally binding communication that the US would drop any current and not press future charges of Mr. Snowden if he were to return to the USA. Furthermore that the US would not seek revenge for documents Mr. Snowden may have leaked.

I am not suggesting that I agree or disagree with this view. But I would strongly prefer that our law process is followed and not circumvented for convenience. A pardon seems to strong a process and to soon given the current circumstance.

I remember back when I was 17, I drank some very good beer. Wait, that was a Simpsons reference. At 17 you don't think about consequences and largely you don't have much to lose. Still using commercial services in a way the company did not intend might have consequences. My hope is this kid will get a kudos for bringing the fault to light for T-mobile, a slap on the wrist to say be more careful about what you play around with, and later a fun and successful college career and productive life. The failure was to make it public if the fault in the system still exists because it could cause the company monetary damage. That damage would then likely come back to haunt the kid. The correct order for all of you out there who might be in the same boat is to hack politely, cause no damage, report only to an authority and/or owner who can responsibly fix the issue. Yes, there is still the potential for consequences but at least one could argue that they brought the greatest benefit to what was hacked and that they did not bring harm or intended harm to a person or persons.

Though really it is best to hack only things that you own or "have an implied license to own."

Accenture consistently drives high performance and has a history of satisfaction on projects for the worlds top organizations. What sets Accenture apart from the competition are its management. The skill and level of analysts from every contracting company can vary greatly. However Accenture Senior Management staff have shown consistently high levels of skill and communication. Problems can happen with any corporate or government project. Rarely does everything go according to plan and often requirements change mid project. It is how a consulting company handles these changes that count. Accenture sets its self apart in this situation.

It's not the destination that matters but how you get there, Accenture(High Performance Delivered).

Many planes are leased or rotated off of budget after a certain maintenance schedule. Airlines run very thin profit margins despite how it may appear. Think about all the choices you have when flying? The Northwest airlines portion of Delta used to run mainframes in Minnesota. I don't know what they use in Atlanta. Mainframes can be much more efficient than a bunch of Oracle/Microsoft DB's running on VMware. It isn't a trivial task to fail over to DR for most companies. One of the scariest things are DB sync lag. If the database in DR becomes too far behind the primary DB then hundreds if not millions of people that purchased tickets, transfers, baggage logistics etc might be lost. The chaos from that might well outstrip the chaos from delaying all flights until the primary DC might be recovered or at minimum networking from the primary DC/Databases can be restored to the DR site and a 100% sync status can be confirmed. Even if everything seems perfect, going to DR is really scary. Please take everything that a company does in this situation IT and Management wise with a massive grain of salt. One last thing that is really hard to swallow as an airline customer. You don't have the "right" to fly. You have a privilege. Any business has a monetary incentive to give you that privilege. It would be bad business otherwise. But at the end of the day no business has the legal responsibility to serve you. With the exception of health care and health insurance in the US.

I should have seen this before my original posting. It makes perfect sense why they have been down so long. I've experienced this as well only it was at 16:00 instead of 02:00. *sad face*