Technology Consulting
We know not all the needs of your church fit into one of these buckets. We want to help you with all the technical needs of your church. Anything from guidance on AV and camera equipment, to network setup or delivering video messages to classrooms. We have helped meet the technical needs of over a hundred churches and would like to help you as well. We do not charge any consulting fees at all. We are not a vendor, we are your ministry partner.
The catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. It’s complex, deeply interconnected, and filled with single points of failure. As we experienced last week, a single problem in a small piece of software can take large swaths of the internet and global economy offline.
The brittleness of modern society isn’t confined to tech. We can see it in many parts of our infrastructure, from food to electricity, from finance to transportation. This is often a result of globalization and consolidation, but not always. In information technology, brittleness also results from the fact that hundreds of companies, none of which you;ve heard of, each perform a small but essential role in keeping the internet running. CrowdStrike is one of those companies.
This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing—as opposed to personal computing—a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.
Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable—at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability.
But brittleness is profitable only when everything is working. When a brittle system fails, it fails badly. The cost of failure to a company like CrowdStrike is a fraction of the cost to the global economy. And there will be a next CrowdStrike, and one after that. The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn’t sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. (Stock prices depress only temporarily. Regulatory penalties are minor. Class-action lawsuits settle. Insurance blunts financial losses.) It’s not even clear that the information technology industry could exist in its current form if it had to take into account all the risks such brittleness causes. //
Imagine a house where the drywall, flooring, fireplace, and light fixtures are all made by companies that need continuous access and whose failures would cause the house to collapse. You’d never set foot in such a structure, yet that’s how software systems are built. It’s not that 100 percent of the system relies on each company all the time, but 100 percent of the system can fail if any one of them fails. But doing better is expensive and doesn’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line. //
This is not something we can dismantle overnight. We have built a society based on complex technology that we’re utterly dependent on, with no reliable way to manage that technology. Compare the internet with ecological systems. Both are complex, but ecological systems have deep complexity rather than just surface complexity. In ecological systems, there are fewer single points of failure: If any one thing fails in a healthy natural ecosystem, there are other things that will take over. That gives them a resilience that our tech systems lack.
We need deep complexity in our technological systems, and that will require changes in the market. Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That;s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.
How do we accomplish this? There are examples in the technology world, but they are piecemeal. Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.
Last week’s update wouldn’t have been a major failure if CrowdStrike had rolled out this change incrementally: first 1 percent of their users, then 10 percent, then everyone. But that’s much more expensive, because it requires a commitment of engineer time for monitoring, debugging, and iterating. And can take months to do correctly for complex and mission-critical software. An executive today will look at the market incentives and correctly conclude that it’s better for them to take the chance than to “waste” the time and money.
Of all the recent trends in automotive technology and design, the adoption of capacitive controls over mechanical switches and buttons—particularly on multifunction steering wheels—is among the most deplorable. One can see the appeal to the designer—slick-looking fiat panels trump dust-attracting seams, for starters. The bean counters love them, too—it takes less time to install the subassemblies, and that means a little more profit per car. It's just that they suck. And now, some Volkswagen drivers say capacitive buttons are to blame for their car crashes.
"What do you mean by routing flapping?"
"Well, say you're catching the tube home to Slough."
"I don't live in Slough."
"Don't you? Well let's say you do. So your plan is to walk to Tottenham Court Road and ride the Central line to Ealing Broadway, change to Elizabeth Line and ride that to Slough."
"I.."
"But on the way up Oxford Street you encounter a group of Vegan Crossfit enthusiasts who are in a piano accordion ensemble. After consulting the internet and not being able to find a local gun shop you're going to avoid the hippies and maybe leg it to Farringdon where you can ride the Elizabeth line direct. On the way there you encounter an old school mate who convinces you to have a quiet pint, which turns into eight quiet pints, a curry and another pint - at which point you find yourself, inexplicably, at Snaresbrook with a road cone under your arm. And it's late. You jump on a central line train not caring WHERE you're going to change at, so long as you're heading in the general direction of Slough."
"I don't live in Slough."
"Yeah, but say you did – and you need to get home. You're back on the Central line, you rest your eyes for a second and wake up at West Ruislip. You quickly consult the tube map and think maybe you could stumble to Ickenham and ride the Picadilly to maybe North Ealing and maybe run to Ealing Broadway and maybe get on the Elizabeth line. You manage to get to Ickenham, rest your eyes and wake up in Cockfosters and find the tube is no longer running. You try and find an Uber driver, but for some reason there isn't anyone remotely local so you walk for an hour and eventually find a minicab company that's still open who take you on a sightseeing tour of unfamiliar roads, dropping you halfway home because that's when your cash runs out. You see a night bus, only you're a bit turned around and get on the wrong one, rest your eyes for a moment, then wake up at St Paul's Cathedral at 4 in the morning. You walk to work, sneak past security and sleep in your office."
"And... that's what's happening to our network?"
"No, that's what happened to the PFY three nights ago."
"What's this got to do with the network? Do we need new network switches with better routing to stop this happening? Is that what you're saying?"
“That’s when we first noticed it, with Woody.”
“[Larry Cutler] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody or Woody’s hat. He looked at the directory and it had like 40 files, and he looked again and it had four files.”
“Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well and we were like, “Oh my god”
“I grabbed the phone… unplug the machine!”” //
“Let’s put the witch hunt away. We’ve got to get the show back first. Let’s not go spend a week of our time trying to kill somebody. Where’s the movie?”
“Obviously, five minutes in the meeting, you’re all sweating and red-faced. And somebody will say, “Let’s go kill somebody and lynch them. Now,” says Jacob, “I support lynching on our agenda. But, number one is, just get the movie back and work on Buzz and Woody again. We’ve lost our friends.”
With this many man-years, or even man-decades, worth of work on a project, the temptation to find someone to blame, to expend effort on hunting down the person responsible, is intense.
But that kind of negative thought process doesn’t help anyone and it just removes focus from what matters most: moving forward. //
Instead of dwelling on pinning the blame or lamenting the loss of time and effort, the team made sure to alter the backup strategy so that something like that didn’t happen again, and it went about making up for lost time. //
The thing that I take away about these experiences is that the spontaneity of the communal support speaks to the culture of Pixar the rest of the time. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen all of a sudden. You can’t have a disaster and instantly develop this kind of community and camaraderie.
It has to seep out. It has to be in the soil. You don’t just plant it and watch it grow in a day. It has to be cultivated over time, as it obviously was at Pixar.
Before smartphones, we had PDAs in our pockets. Palm did them best.
One year prior to Anthony's excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it.
Banks cited Tim Worstall's 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.
But spreadsheets continue to show up where they ought not. Spreadsheet errors in recent years have led to police doxxing, false trainee test failures, an accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely undervalued prices. Spreadsheets are sometimes called the "dark matter" of large organizations, being ever-present and far too relied upon despite 90 percent of larger sheets being likely to have a major error.
So, Excel sheets catch a lot of blame, even if they're just a symptom of a larger issue. Still, it's good to see one no longer connected to the safety of a human heading into a turn at more than 200 miles per hour.
This is a full posting of the short story by Arthur C. Clarke. It is titled “Superiority”. “Superiority” is a science fiction short story by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1951. It depicts an arms race, and shows how the side which is more technologically advanced can be defeated, despite its apparent superiority, because of its own organizational flaws and its willingness to discard old technology without having fully perfected the new.
Evil AuditorSilver badge
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Re: Needless!!
jmch: I would have thought...
Exactly, you would have thought. And hence you wouldn't have moved the rack in the first place.
2 months
John Sager
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Re: Needless!!
Yes, another example of Chesterton's Fence.
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BebuSilver badge
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Big Brother
Re: Needless!!
《Yes, another example of Chesterton's Fence.》
Or in Terry Pratchett's canine latin of Discworld
"Si non confectus, non reficiat" - family motto of the Vetinari.
《standardized perfection》
Any useful standard ought to be prefaced with the Patrician's motto.
When you think about the essential (and insane) concept of perfection anything, process or system etc once it obtains perfection must necessarily be unique to the particular instance which I would think is the antithesis of standard(ized.)
Standardization is formalizing the art of the possible not aspiration to perfection. Engineering v Theology. :)
Antoine St Exupery probably had the most sensible approach to perfection:
"Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." -Terre des Hommes, 1939.
Here, in the extreme, perfection would be the complete absence of anything - the (philosophical) void (sans vacuum fluctuations.) He was more practically claiming a minimalist approach to design would be more likely to lead in the direction of perfection.
Tucker Carlson detailed a “classified briefing” that took place Tuesday with officials from the Department of Justice in attendance, as well as Ocasio-Cortez.
“In a classified briefing this afternoon, attended by officials from the Biden Justice Department, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that Elon committed ‘election interference’ in 2022 by ‘changing the algorithms’ on X to alter the results of the midterms that year,” Carlson posted on X.
X CEO Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 after the satirical website The Babylon Bee had its account suspended for months, responded to the post, saying “Actually, I made the algorithm open source and neutral to all parties, but of course that is ‘election interference’ by her standards.”
AOC’s ire is misdirected. It’s not like Musk suppressed a bombshell report weeks before the 2020 election or shut down the Twitter accounts of journalists and White House officials who posted the story. But she’s right that the people who did that — and who have weaponized Big Tech algorithms in a host of other ways to control discourse — are guilty of “election interference.”
As shown in the below picture, the CAN bus level typically ranges (Common-Mode-Voltage = 0V) between 1.5 (CAN_L during dominant bit) and 3.5 Volts (CAN_H during dominant bit). However, the actual signal status, recessive or dominant, is based on the differential voltage Vdiff between CAN_H and CAN_L.
SAE J1939 Quick Reference
- Higher-Layer Protocol using CAN as the physical layer
- Shielded twisted pair wire
- Max. network length of 40 meters (~120 ft.)
- Standard baud rate of 250 kBit/sec
- Max. 30 nodes (ECUs) in a network
- Max. 253 controller applications (CA) where one ECU can manage several CAs
- Peer-to-peer and broadcast communication
- Support for message length up to 1785 bytes
- Definition of Parameter Groups (Predefined vehicle parameters)
- Network Management[1] (includes address claiming procedure.
It must be emphasized that the maximum network length of 40 m (roughly 120 ft.), the baud rate of 250 kBit/sec and the maximum number of nodes (30) are self-inflicted restrictions by the SAE, most probably with the intention to keep everything on the extreme safe side and thus trying to prevent potential runtime problems.
In all consequence, the network length at 250 kBit/sec, according to ISO 11898, is 250 m (roughly 750 ft).
In this guide we introduce the J1939 protocol basics incl. PGNs and SPNs.
Note: This is a practical intro so you will also learn how to decode J1939 data via DBC files, how J1939 logging works, key use cases and practical tips.
Learn below why this has become the #1 introduction to J1939.
You can also watch our J1939 intro above - or get the PDF
Who would win: the world's fastest computer circa 1976, or a $35 single-board computer from 2012? //
"In 1978, the Cray-1 supercomputer cost $7 million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world," Longbottom writes of the device, designed as the flagship product of Seymour Cray's high-performance computing company. "The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD Card), weighs a few ounces, uses a five watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1." //
The same benchmark tests show even bigger gains for newer devices in the Raspberry Pi family, as you'd expect: the Raspberry Pi 400, the newest device in Longbottom's performance table, showed a performance gain of up to 95.5 times the Cray-1's results — in a device which fits on the palm of your hand, rather than becoming a very expensive piece of uncomfortable office furniture.
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