Why would we even want that, the whole point is to break the monoculture and single vendor dependency not to create an new mostly irrelevant one to be stuffed with has-been and rejects from the national levels the way most of EU's big prestige projects end up being run.
One of the thing that sets EU apart from most federations is that it kind of enables a lot more regional independence in how things are actually implemented while still guaranteeing the rights of the individual citizens, this lead to a lot of dynamism at the local level despite the failings of the central level, and allow this kind of projects to succeed and create paths for others to follow at their own pace.
Maybe both? The EU could have a reference implementation, without mandating its use. The current EU model requires each member state to implement everything from scratch, obviously with subtle incompatibility that never gets fixed.
But doesn't the codeless "infrastructure as code" kind of smell like cargo cult practices, i mean there might be places where having your infrastructure defined as data is a really good thing, but at least in my work i keep hitting roadblocks where i really wish i was writing actual logic in a modern scripting language rather then trying to make data look like code and code look like data, which is what a lot of devops tutorials seem to be teaching.
The problem with the linux desktop was usually that most hardware companies were either not spending any time/effort on non-windows drivers/compatibility or when they did it was a tiny fraction of the effort that went into working around bugs in the windows driver API's.
Today with the failure of windows in both the mobile and industrial control space we now see vendors actually giving a damn about the quality of their Linux drivers.
Today the main factor keeping the enterprise marked locked on windows is the fat clients written around the turn of the millennium, and that's as much a problem for mac adaptation as it is Linux adaptation.
The macs are slick well designed devices that speaks to a huge segment of the consumer market so will eventually find the way into the high cost niches where no specific dependency on legacy software exists but they are too expensive and inflexible to replace all of the wintel system so for Microsoft and it's partners to have their license to screw over the enterprise sector revoked Linux(or FreeBSD) will have to play a role too.
All of those are product that creates huge risks when deployed to mission critical environments and this is exactly the problem.
The entire wintel ecosystem depends on people putting their heads in the sand and repeating "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/crowdstrike/IBM" and neglecting to run even the most trivial simulation of what happens when the very well understood design flaws of those platforms gets triggered by a QA department you have no control over drops the ball.
The problem is that as long as nobody dares recognizing that the current mono culture around the "market leading providers" this kind of event will remain really likely even if nobody is trying to break it and and extremely likely once you insert well funded malicious actors(ranging from bored teenagers to criminal gangs and geopolitical rivals).
The problem is that adding fair weather product that gives the illusion of control though fancy dashboards on the days they work is not really an substitute for proper reliance testing and security hardening but far less disruptive to companies that don't really want to leave the 90ies PC metaphor behind.
You have 100,000 devices to manage. How do you handle that efficiently without creating a monoculture?
It's not a "90ies PC metaphor" problem. Swap Chromebooks for PCs and you still have the problem-- how do you handle centralized management of that "fleet"?
Should every employee "bring their own device" leaving corporate IT "hands-off"? There are still monocultures within that world.
Poor quality assurance on the part of software providers is the root cause. The monocultures and having software that treats the symptoms of bad computing metaphors aren't good either, but bad software quality assurance is the reason this happened today.
> Swap Chromebooks for PCs and you still have the problem-- how do you handle centralized management of that "fleet"?
Simplicity (and hence low cost) of fleet management, OS boot-verification, no third-party kernel updates, and A/B partitions for OS updates are among the major selling points of Chromebooks.
It's a big reason they have become so ubiquitous in primary education, where there is such a limited budget that there's no way they could hire a security engineer.
The OP was deriding monoculture. My point was that pushing out only Chromebooks is still perpetuating a monoculture. You're just shifting your risk over to Google instead of Crowdstrike / Microsoft.
re: Chromebooks themselves - The execution is really, really good. The need for legacy software compatibility limits their corporate penetration. I've done enough "power washes" to know that they're not foolproof, though.
ChromeOS is just Linux, isn't it? It's going to suffer from the same problem as NT re: a buggy kernel mode driver tanking the entire OS.
Google gets a pass because their Customers are okay with devices with limited general purpose ability. Google is big enough that the market molds product offerings to the ChromeOS limitations. I think MSFT suffers from trying to please everybody whereas Google is okay with gaining market share by usurping the market norms over a period of years.
> ChromeOS is just Linux, isn't it? It's going to suffer from the same problem as NT re: a buggy kernel mode driver tanking the entire OS.
ChromeOS is not just Linux. It uses the Linux kernel and several subsystems (while eschewing others), but it also has a security and update model that prevents third parties (or even the user themselves) from updating kernel space code and the OS's user space code, so basically any code that ships with the OS.
Therefore, the particular way that the Crowdstrike failure happened can't happen on ChromeOS.
However, Google themselves could push a breaking change to ChromeOS. That, however would be no different than Apple or Microsoft doing the same with their OS's.
I am familiar with Google's walled garden w/ ChromeOS. I didn't mean to give the impression that I was not.
It's "just Linux" in the sense that it has the same Boolean kernel mode/user mode separation that NT has. ChromeOS doesn't take advantage of the other processor protection rings, for example. A bad kernel driver can crash ChromeOS just as easily as NT can be crashed.
Hopefully Google just doesn't push bad kernel drivers. Crowdstrike can't, of course, because of the walled garden. That also means you can't add a kernel driver for useful hardware, either. That limits the usefulness of ChromeOS devices for general purpose tasks.
> That also means you can't add a kernel driver for useful hardware, either. That limits the usefulness of ChromeOS devices for general purpose tasks.
It's target market isn't niche hardware but rather the plethora of use cases that use bog standard hardware, much like many of the use cases that CS broke a few days ago.
Yes. I said that in a post up-thread. Google is making the market mold itself to their offering, rather than being like Microsoft and molding their offering to the market. Google is content to grow their market share that way.
If crowdsource QA department is all that stands between you and days of no operations then you chose to live with the near certainty that you will have days rather then hours of unplanned company wide downtime.
And if you cannot actually abandon someone like microsoft that consistantly screws up their QA then it's basically dishonest for you to claim that reliability is even a concern for your desktop platform.
And that's essentially what i say when i accuse the modern enterprise it's client device teams of being stuck in the 90ies as those risk were totally acceptable back when the stakes were low and outages only impacted non time critical back office clerical work. but what we saw today was that those high risk cost optimized systems got deployed into roles where the risk/consequence profile is entirely different.
So what you do is that you keep the low impact data entry clerks and spreadsheet wranglers on the windows platform but threat the customer facing workers dealing with time sensitive task something a bit less risky.
It's might not be as easy as just deploying the same old platform designed back in the 90ies to everyone but once you leave the Microsoft ecosystem dual sourcing based on open standards become totally feasible, at costs that might not be prohibitive as everything in the unix like ecosystem including web browsers have multiple independent implementations so you basically just have to standardize of 2-4 rather then one platform which again isnt unfeasible.
It's telling that an Azure region failed this news cycle without anyone noticing because companies just don't tolerate the kind of risk people takes with their wintel desktop for their backends so most critical services hosted in microsofts Iowa datacenter had and second site on standby.
>And if you cannot actually abandon someone like microsoft that consistantly screws up their QA
The last outage I can remember due to an ms update was 7 or 8 years ago. Desktops got stuck on 'update 100% complete'. After a couple of minutes I pressed ctrl+alt+del and it cleared. Before that...I don't remember. Btw MS provides excellent tools to manage updates, and you can apply them on a rolling basis.
> If crowdsource QA department is all that stands between you and days of no operations ...
For companies of a certain large size, I guess. For all but the largest companies, though, there's no choice but to outsource software risks to software manufacturers. The idea that every company is going to shoulder the burden of maintaining their own software is ridiculous. Companies use off-the-shelf software because it makes good financial sense.
> And if you cannot actually abandon someone like microsoft that consistantly screws up their QA then it's basically dishonest for you to claim that reliability is even a concern for your desktop platform.
When a company has significant software assets tied to a Microsoft platform there's no alternative. A company is going to use the software that best-suits their needs. Platform is a consideration, however I've never seen it be the dominant consideration.
Today's issue isn't a Microsoft problem. The blame rests squarely on Crowdstrike and their inability to do QA. The culture of allowing "security software" to automatically update is bad, but Crowdstrike threw the lit match into that tinderbox by pushing out this update globally.
As another comment points out, Microsoft has good tools for rolling update releases for corporate environments. They're not perfect but they're not terrible either.
> It's might not be as easy as just deploying the same old platform ...
When a company doesn't control their software platform they don't have this choice. Off-the-shelf software is going to dictate this.
In some fantasy world where every application is web-based and legacy code is all gone maybe that's a possibility. I have yet to work in that environment. Companies aren't maintaining the "wintel desktop" because they want to.
Blaming crowdstikes QA might feel good but the problem is that no company in the history of the world have been good enough at QA for it not to be reckless to allow day one patching of critical systems, or for that matter to allow single vendor, single design, critical systems in the first place. and yet the cyber security guidelines required to allow the pretense that windows can be used securely all but demand that companies take that risk.
It's also fundamentally a problem of Danial, everyone knows there will not be an good solution to any issue around security and stability that does not require that the assets tied up inside fragile monopoly operated ecosystems to be eventually either extracted or written off but nobody want to blaze new trails.
Claiming powerlessness is just lazy yes it might take an decade to get out from under the yokel of an abusive vendor, we saw this with IBM, but as IBM is now an footnote in the history of computing it's pretty clear that it can be done once people start realizing there is an systematic problem and not just a serious of one-off mistakes.
And we know how to design reliable systems, it's just that doing so is completely incompatible with allowing any of America's Big IT Vendors to remain big and profitable, and thats scary to every institution involved in the current market.
To be fair, IBM products back in the day when that saying made sense never had these kinds of problems. It's straight up insulting to compare them to somebody like Crowdstrike.
Wintel won by being cheaper and shittier and getting a critical mass of fly by night OEMs and software vendors on board.
IBM was more analogous to the way Apple handles things. Heavy vertical integration and premium price point with a select few software and hardware vendors working very closely with IBM when software and hardware analogous to Crowdstrike in terms of access was created.
Even Excel is beginning to be regarded as a dangerous piece of software that gives the illusion of power while silently bankrupting departments who depend on the idea that large spreadsheets is an accurate and reliable way to analyze large/complex datasets.
the 90ies are over but for some reason average enterprise department have a problem internalizing the fact that the demands today is different then they were 25 years ago.
Meanwhile, while HN bubble imagines people doing big data jobs on Excel, in the real world 10s or 100s of millions of people are perfectly satisfied doing small data jobs in Excel.
The problem is that without tools and processes to systematically validate those result's people might be perfectly happy about completely inaccurate results.
I know i have had to correct one in three excel sheet i have ever gone over using pen and paper in order to validate the results but i am a paranoid sod who actually do this kind of exercise on a regular basis.
almost all of the disciplines known to rely on excel have a serous issue with repeatability of results either because nobody ever attempts it, or because it's a messy field without a well defined methodology.
I work in finance. We have double entry accounting and literal checks and balances to validate our results. It is not a messy field, and has a well defined methodology. We have been the biggest spreadsheet users at many of the companies I have worked with.
Going directly after the executives would at the very least be better theater then letting a company pay the government with the governments own money.
It probably wont fix the issue but this kind of non-action is why most people have lost all trust in the American Governments ability to regulate corporations at all.
It's very likely that the current court structure would be extremely reluctant to issue any guilty verdict against a member of the executive class for simply chasing short term profit at the cost of the public good/safety so that this is the best that could be do but if that's true it's basically demonstrating that the technocratic center have lost it's ability to be effective technocrats and that can/will have severe implications for who is considered electable to the point where we might not see another centrist government for a while.
And even if they do fail it's rarely the end as the bankruptcy process do totally allow for the critical/valuable aspects of an company to continue under new ownership, and the state could easily ensure that that process happens by buying up the parts they have an interest in doing the bankruptcy proceedings.
All the current model of Bailouts do is protect the shareholders from having their share value wiped out as a part of the process, and of cause keep up the appearance that the stock market can keep going to the moon(which a lot of retirement funds depend on).
The liquidation is the company being stripped of assets, who then gets sold of to highest bidder in order to pay the creditors, some of those assets might very well be fully operational business units that someone else(a competitor or the government) want to buy whole.
I known that the us chapter 11 is kind of a bad way to do bankruptcy as it don't really wipe out the whole but allows the previous executives way to much of a stake in the process where as other countries replaces the leadership with a bunch of court/creditor appointed outsiders on day one.
The solution is probably going to involve dropping our dangerous utopian ideals about how complexity and deviation from perfection is problems that must be solved by any means necessary.
The world is a complex place where nearly nothing fit into an simplistic vision of simplicity and virtually no other engineering discipline shy away from gradual improvements and complexity management the way the IT sector does.
There is plenty of examples of real world road, water and sewage infrastructure where the system as a whole have continuity dating back centuries where every problem occurring was fixed in place without anyone ever redesigning the system by wiping and redesigning, and this is a source of pride not shame for the people working with those infrastructures.
The sooner we go away from the idea that just one more redesign using X tools in just the right way width the right team will finally crate an system that don't need constant maintenance and refactoring to keep serve the needs of it's users.
In a lot of ways this is a problem creating itself.
The reason Home Ownership is desirable is that the pricing of houses go up faster then both inflation and depreciation caused by wear decreases the utility value of a dwelling, and the reason that houses are expensive is that the state actors are invested enough in this cycle to make sure it never really breaks.
In a real functional market there would be no real benefit to house ownership over long term leases. but were dealing with a market thats been deliberately broken by policies promoting home ownership for reasons that's fundamentally religious/dogmatic in nature.
You talk about demand for home ownership as if it is entirely induced via economics rather than inherently valuable. I don’t understand why? There are reasons why home ownership is desirable neglecting economics entirely. Owning a home gives you more control over the space you live in, in terms of the ability to customize the space.
That's again a false argument, made a complete lie by the existence of Home Ownership associations and other contract covenants.
Rights come from your contract with whoever hold power not "property ownership"
There is yes some cases where owning is giving you a better deal then leasing in terms of rights and obligations but this is not an universal truth and not the reason house prices consistently rises faster then inflation and average disposable incomes that have nothing to do with the utility value of property as an dwelling.
Ie if we were to go back to an scenario where home properties lost value as the loans were paid off and things got old and worn there would be no crisis, the issue is that the way that currency and banking intersect makes prices keep rising.
And your property rights come from the contract you have with the state. It's all in the formal and informal contract that govern society, and you can(as most suburbanites have) sign away all of the "control" that you seem to argue property gives you to some collective body.
In the same vain the government(and some wery much do) can set pretty strict rules on what restrictions a private landlord can put in rental agreements and that's before you remember that the government itself have historically been the largest owner of rental properties.
In the old days before the idea that owning a house was a ticket into a higher strata in the class system a lot of the problems now caused by unreasonable housing prices was solved by the government acting as the reasonable landlord, essentially curtailing the amount of shenanigans some wannabe aristocrat could get away with before going bankrupt from people not putting up with the abuse.
In a pure "realty don't matter" libertarian mindset your of cause right that property rights are always supreme but in the real world it's always a balance of power and negotiations especially once we deal with urban communities(which is the only ones where property prices are a problem).
> In a real functional market there would be no real benefit to house ownership over long term leases.
More precisely, there would be no net financial benefit to home ownership over long term leases, so people would use the free market as a tool to naturally sort themselves according to their non-financial preferences: people who valued the non-financial benefits of home ownership over the non-financial benefits of renting would own homes, those whose preferences were the reverse would rent. That would not mean nobody would own the homes they live in.
> The reason Home Ownership is desirable is that the pricing of houses go up faster...
No.
No.
The reason it's desirable it that I've lived in three flats in three years because subsequent landlords wanted to sell their property. I don't want to buy because it's a good investment, I want to buy so I can actually settle down in an area, and not be constantly moving.
