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Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

thehill.com

81–90 of 208 posts

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#81
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you mean zero, right? There's no evidence benchmark for a party taking legal action in a civil matter. Saying "you'll be hearing from my lawyer" doesn't strengthen an argument.

I don't know what evidence they have. Not sure why you decided that it's zero.

I decided based on your statement:

> There's enough evidence for Amazon to take legal action.

The "enough" here is zero. They may have more, but you argued for at least zero.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#82
post #74

After 15 years of being a DoD contractor, it is frustrating to see yet another sole source entity getting the contract. Prices will inflate and there is no competition. HP and Oracle have been reaping the benefits of this for at least two decades now. We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. We would buy useless HP software because we were a HP shop. I fought…

> We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. I mean, if you’ve already budgeted the CapEx for some additional Oracle licenses, the OpEx efficiencies of having unified tooling and a unified ops doctrine are no joke. I haven’t worked with an Oracle DBMS, but I think this is analogous: I’d sure hate to have to manage a cloud infrastructure where parts were on AWS,…

I'm sure that these deals are complicated at the size they're going at and maybe laymens pricing models just get tossed aside, but one of the biggest things I spend time on in cloud architecting is all around data ingress/egress in order to control costs. I simply don't understand how it's possible to go multi-cloud and control those costs, I feel like you'd either blow costs out not caring, or blow costs out throwing engineers at very complex solutions.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question shouldn't be whether it's standard, but if the office has the authority to intervene. You can then work backwards to legislative hot fixes to governance deficiencies.

Unfortunately, the question of how much authority the office has depends on which party currently occupies the office and who's asking.

Yes, I've noticed this too: whenever the party I favor is in office, the office is a lame duck, unable to lift a finger without Congressional approval. Whenever the enemy party is in office, they're absolute tyrants answerable to no-one. This sure is convenient, as it saves me from all kinds of cognitive dissonance!

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#84
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.

The thing is, we spend that much and we're not even good imperialists. When was the last time we annexed any territory? Declared a lesser state a protectorate? Or established a new colony? We spend trillions/year to be the world police so our "allies" don't have to while they mock us on twitter.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all defense-related work complicit in murder? Do we not need a military? Nothing is perfect, but we are trapped on a planet with a bunch of violent, highly intelligent apes. Certainly the military does things I disagree with, and things could always be improved, but generally what is the alternative?

There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.

Sure, there can be a middle ground in spending. But that doesn't change the GP's point: whether it's a massive military or a modest one, the purpose of a military lies in its potential to injure & kill people. As such, so long as you agree that some level of military is needed, you've already crossed the "no killing" line.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#88

"The cloud" is such a scam - of course a "war cloud" - why not, just triple the security billing invoice and collect obscene cash and power. Every sucker buys into "the cloud" when running a server yourself is elementary. We are doomed.

One server is elementary, yes, but hundreds of thousands working together is an entirely different beast. There’s nothing easy about cloud computing and there’s a definite reason why it’s worth buying into.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#89
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.

The thing is, we spend that much and we're not even good imperialists. When was the last time we annexed any territory? Declared a lesser state a protectorate? Or established a new colony? We spend trillions/year to be the world police so our "allies" don't have to while they mock us on twitter.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#90
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder. DoD uses a lot of linux and other open source software. Should we stop working on that too since, according to you, it's "enabling murder"?

Last I checked, Torvalds wasn't getting billions of dollars from the DoD to install Linux on servers. That's a false comparison, and a lazy one at that.

Almost every government lab I've seen has a rule that says you aren't allowed to use free software in the lab. Everything was supposed to have a vendor that was responsible for it that you were paying.

Development labs end up using Linux and other open source software all over the place, but it gets a bit more iffy when you're going into production.

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