>Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?
IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.
They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.
Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.
The people distributing software should shut them damn up about how the rest of the system it runs in is configured. (But not you, your job is packaging full systems.)
That said, it seems to me that this is becoming less of a problem.
The UCRT is just the newer, Windows-component version of the MSVCRT, the one they’re worried about. It’s even available for XP.
> will intentionally fail to print to remote print servers
Why would a more secure local print driver refuse to talk to _remote_ print servers? What is so untrustable about what comes over the wire, and if it is, how can they trust the print server is or is not one is claims to be and can be talked to?
Former Exchange Admin here: 1 is easy, I used to do 70k mailboxes in middle of the day only but it requires spare hardware or virtualization with headroom.
Deploy new Server(s), patch, install Exchange, Setup DAGs, migrate everyone mailbox, swing load balancer over to new servers, uninstall Exchange from old, remove old from Active Directory, delete servers.
BTW, Upgrades now suck because Office365 uses method above so upgrade system never gets good Q&A from them.
Same feeling here re: migrations being easy if the Customer isn't a cheapass. Small business Customers who had the competing requirements of spending as little money as possible and having as much uptime as possible were the stressor.
I wouldn't use K8s for local development unless you have some system where there is a dev cluster and you can route traffic for particular pod to your local workstation.
Docker Compose for local development is fine. If your K8s setup is crazy complex that you need to test it locally, please stop.
I have worked on government payroll systems, simplifying those rules is almost impossible from political PoV. They are generally a combo of weird laws, court cases, union contracts and more.
Any time you think about touching them, the people who get those salaries come out in droves and no one else cares so government has every incentive to leave them alone.
Agreed, anyone who just glanced at federal budget would know, it's Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense. Touching anything else is just tinkering at edges.
Social Security comes from its own budget paid by a separate tax. When its savings (accrued by that same dedicated tax) runs dry it has to cut spending. It will not, under current law, deficit spend. The only problem to solve there is whether we want to adjust its funding so benefit levels don’t drop in the nearish future.
People bringing it up in discussions of the general budget usually either don’t understand how it’s funded, or are presenting it inaccurately because they want to end it.
This is part of what I meant by "political problem". People see the mainline deficit number without thinking about the underlying stocks/flows of the system. There are feedback loops embedded in this that are unavoidably political (nobody wants to take grandma's retirement money). There's no "founder's mentality" that can avoid this basic fact.
I “blame” it only in the sense that it’s part of the negative cash flow, even if it has its own dedicated pool of cash. I don’t use the term “entitlement” pejoratively.
But I am not a “panic about the deficit” guy. There’s a lot of trivial things we could do: rethink fee for service, negotiate more w/ providers, raise taxes, etc
> Agreed, anyone who just glanced at federal budget would know, it's Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense.
It's almost a trope/meme to label the US government as "an insurance company with an army":
> Think of the federal government as a gigantic insurance company (with a sideline business in national defense and homeland security), which does its accounting on a cash basis, only counting premiums and payouts as they go in and out the door. An insurance company with cash accounting . . . is an accident waiting to happen.
The U.S. federal budget is now 50 percent consumed by spending for Social Security, a social insurance program; Medicare and Medicaid, two of the largest health insurance programs in the country; and various other social safety net programs which act as insurance plans as well.
Except for one thing. None of these federal insurance programs operate as licensed sanctioned insurance plans as we see in the private sector where money is collected from the individual and invested or managed in a fiduciary manner to build assets to pay for claims in the future.
Voters think they've saved: "I paid my taxes all my life".
But what would it mean for a government to save money over decades?
How else can a government run except on a cash basis?
Aside: I belong to a non-profit health insurance co-op and a non-profit car insurance - they run by matching payouts to premiums and limiting what they cover (e.g. Southern Cross Healthcare is extra healthcare on top of what the NZ government provides). Edit: ooops, I've just noticed my car insurer AMI Insurance which was a mutual insurance company before the Canterbury earthquakes went bust and the government sold it (now part of IAG).
The SSA had actually been collecting 'extra' money (from Baby Boomers) for awhile now and putting off to the side, but that extra income stopped a while ago, and the trust fund where it was stored was being tapped to keep benefits up.
The "shortage" in Social Security that is sometimes in the US news is the estimated time when the 'extra' funds run out, and benefits will only be covered in cashflows.
And this is not sudden thing: many government pension systems in the world are facing similar situations. The politicians in the US have not done anything about (for decades), whereas Canada did decide to change their system:
> when the 'extra' funds run out, and benefits will only be covered in cashflows
The issue is that the necessary delivered services is a kinda fixed amount that the economy should deliver. The economy can't really "save" money. A government can choose to change taxes, change benefits, sell assets (to who?), or burden the next generation with debts (e.g. via mortgages).
Talking about money between generations is often just fictional accounting.
The US has done something about it, they raised the retirement age to 67. But that was more of a band aid.
The real solution is to raise the maximum SSA payment or eliminate it all together.
That said, even if the government does nothing, it's not as if SSA goes away. Instead, the payments are reduced (Last I saw, it was around 75% of current payments). That'd suck, for sure, but it's not the all or nothing framing.
American soldiers I've met overseas seemed to think the defense department is mainly a social healthcare/education/jobs program. Perhaps these need to be split from the defense budget, and applied to the entire population.
IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.
They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.
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