Posts by Jim Noeth

Sounds like someone wants to sell a new 'silver bullet'

This dribble sounds just like all the other sales pitches for the newest silver bullet that will save the IT industry. Now, I may be wrong, but if I write a program (or system of programs) that have the functionality to support the concept for a project, then the code (be it C, C++, assembler, fortran, cobol, java, C#, etc) must also embrace the concept.

How do they know the files were encrypted

How do they know that the files are actually encrypted and not just an unencrypted file containing random data (such as some kind of test samples)? In that case there is no decryption key, so now the guy goes to jail for not providing something that doesn't exist.

The cost of the players is not the only problem

Even if they gave the players away for free, there's another part of the equation, the cost of the movies. If I get an inexpensive player for format 'X' and start buying movies in that format, but, format 'Y' wins out, guess what I get to do? Re-buy the movies if my format 'X' player dies at some point in the future. For people who only rent the movies, this isn't as big a problem.

I have to agree with Simon Pamenter

When I got into this business 30 plus years ago, there were very few TLA's (Three [sometimes more/less] Letter Acronyms). We understood the business, the data, how the data was used, and how computing systems worked. Some of those databases and applications that I wrote long ago are still running. What is the most important is that the people who are doing the task (what ever it is) understand what they are doing and how its going to be used.

I never thought of it from the Green perspective

The problem that I've seen with the cost of computing hardware going down is that much of the computing resource is wasted. In our case, we have about 3000 servers of various types. Most of these support a single application, and are virtually idle most of the time. The other problem is that the common solution for performance problems is to just 'throw hardware at it', rather than actually trying to tune things.

We used to have most of the space in our data center consumed by the mainframe, now, the mainframe just sits in the corner in a couple cabinets, while we have racks and racks of servers.