Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of western governments get lots done efficiently. Parent comment was about US practices.
Did you even read the last sentence of the parent comment?
Did you read the first?
Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
111–120 of 208 posts
Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The "enough" here is zero. No, it isn't. Legally it might be zero, but multi-billion dollar companies don't enter legal processes that last years and cost them millions just for the sake of it. This isn't the same as "you'll hear from my lawyer".
>This isn't the same as "you'll hear from my lawyer".
How isn't it? You keep speaking authoritatively on this; where is your evidence? And any derivation of "Amazon is a big company and they don't enter lawsuits they won't win" isn't evidence.
Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
#113This thread is kind of chilling, because everyone within is treating it like it's just chat software or something. With quotes from this thread like "in the meantime the work doesn't get done," and "bid for contracts that [enable] government to make some real progress," you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder. So many people were focusing on how Microsoft Ɛ> Linux or Open Source or wh…
Here's a talk by someone who worked on software for the military, that echoes some of your feelings from an inside perspective.
Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
#114After 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…
Not just governments. I worked at a F100 company that had a special type of internal funding called SQP for spending on (mostly) IT people-hours on projects. Year after year, the biz would penny-pinch on their SQP to the point that we struggled to keep core contractors on staff. Then around Oct/Nov, biz would come to us begging to spend their SQP on anything (else they could lose it next year) as long as that project stop billing at fiscal year end (not a day afterwards; as that would be charged to next year's SQP). That meant we now struggled because we didn't have enough people on staff to burn up all the SQP. Famine then feast! I would suggest (half jokingly) that we should head over to the nearest retirement home and get a bus load of old folks to join us at $150/hr for two months to just sit there doing nothing but burn SQP.
Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
#115This thread is kind of chilling, because everyone within is treating it like it's just chat software or something. With quotes from this thread like "in the meantime the work doesn't get done," and "bid for contracts that [enable] government to make some real progress," you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder. So many people were focusing on how Microsoft Ɛ> Linux or Open Source or wh…
Differing views I suppose. To me I look at the new type of weaponized technologies coming out of China (that we know about) such as hypersonic missiles able to defeat most conventional mission defenses. Then I look at the salary differences between “defense” work and adtech, and I worry that our best and brightest are not working on deterrents the same way our rivals are. Combine that with a persistent stigma against…
"What will our rivals decide to do once that happened?"
Nothing, you have a capacity to turn Earth into a glass fields. Also the work to improve said capacity seems to have started.
Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
#116Amazon's reaction seems quite defensive, and constantly keeps reminding us how Microsoft is seen as the better overall provider to be trusted in this case. Tech wise they are both capable, no doubt.
I think Amazon should have just acknowledged it, congratulate Microsoft and move on - plenty of other growth ahead in cloud computing. That's what Satya Nadella would have done.
Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
#117This thread is kind of chilling, because everyone within is treating it like it's just chat software or something. With quotes from this thread like "in the meantime the work doesn't get done," and "bid for contracts that [enable] government to make some real progress," you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder. So many people were focusing on how Microsoft Ɛ> Linux or Open Source or wh…
Reality is such that militaries are necessary both for self defense and defense of the weak and vulnerable. The US military has ensured peace and prosperity for billions around the world for decades given its formidable global presence. Imagine the chaos and crime that would descends on a community without police or law enforcement. The world operates the exact same way. There will always be a most powerful country e…
I prefer that to be a UN. This "ensured piece and prosperity" - you can try to explain it to a Middle East, Vietnam etc.
Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand that the existing approach results in a worse and more expensive product, but doesn't this approach also allow agencies to focus their efforts on assuring the vendors of their critical infrastructure aren't comprimised by bad actors etc...? (This isn't my area expertise, so I'm open to the idea of being super wrong)
You can lock down YOUR infrastructure, but then are 100% dependent on the cloud environment to maintain and patch theirs. Since you have no insight to what the underlying infrastructure consists of you really have no way of knowing if they are secure. Do their storage arrays have open CVE's? are they employing people who are mentally sane? You just need to trust them. So in the cloud just migrates the a lot of the se…
Considering AWS already has 2 entire airgapped dataceters for the US government, I'm pretty sure this contract will entail microsoft building entirely separate airgapped datacenters for the DOD and thus they probably will be able to just show up to their datacenter because nobody else is going to be running anything in those datacenters.
Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
#119Why can't the government run its own computers? I mean, shouldn't it?
The federal government cannot compete with private industry salaries and benefits for rare technical talent because of caps on federal salaries. Federal salaries are capped because attacking "government waste" and "lazy overpaid government workers" is popular with politicians and the electorate. So instead the government outsources technical projects to private contractors... which means ultimately the government is…
I've worked with federal government, and I can say is if rather that they pay private contractors. I used to find all paid government devs sleeping in toilet cubicles all the time. If rather Amazon or the squeeze on its employees to perform than shirt unmotivated public sector management.
And this comes from an unabashed hard left big government voter.
Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Annexed? In 2020, there is no need to annex a country to get everything you want from them - on the contrary, it's an administrative nightmare to annex a country when you can stick your military bases there, export your goods there, and make their economy dependent on your country's and your money without it.
That's interesting, Crimea and Tibet would like a word with your stupid nonsense.