VC doesn’t need to be the asset class benefiting, does it? Doesn’t most of the cream and benefit of innovation in the startup space end up getting purchased by first the big tech firms (Cisco, Oracle, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google), second the S&P500, and rarely the public markets?
I remember the panic of the ‘90s about the coming disruption from internet technologies, but at best it has been a horizontal revolution, rather than a vertical one, and the same wealth and power centers have survived.
You would think that a new, superior set of technology and process would revolutionize, say, the hiring process. Instead, the brute force of lots of money provides a moat where HR, hiring managers, teams, and candidates are protected from meaningful disruption and progress.
All that said, my comment is almost certainly nonsense. I was referring to the broad sway of competitive advantage and the inertia of inadequate equalibria (more nonsense, surely). If you believe I am not properly building a warrant against the technical meanings on investment analysis terminology, you are right.
Myself, I enjoyed the entire book, but I understand the let down feeling some here are expressing. The first part is immediate, gripping, intense, and hard to go through it (but you don't want to stop, because it is so good).
After all of that resolves, it's pretty hard to emotionally connect with the rest of the story, since you are exhausted from all that came before. The final act is worthwhile and interesting, it's just a pretty big change in direction.
The built-in VPN clients support old broken insecure protocols (PPTP) and expensive, hard to implement and hard to deploy protocols (IPSEC-LLTP), whereas public vpn providers tend to use simple, secure, easy(er) OpenVPN for the bulk of their connections. So you need a addon client to use them for their best features.
Very good question. The answer is, of course, 'it depends'.
What is depends on is how much horizontal scale you expect to have. At a small scale, you can use something like postgres as a centralized broker of sequence. A single postgres cluster can sequence a lot of records in a hurry, no problem.
At a larger scale you might need to decompose your domain into multiple, independently ordered aggregates. Now you have multiple choke point brokers, each of which can handle a lot of records, but which don't block each other.
Step it up another notch, you can use a consensus algorithm (paxos or raft) to get a cluster of machines to agree on the state of the sequence, and perform optimizations such as assigning blocks of sequence by shard and node.
I recommend not over building your event storage architecture until you measure your actual needs. There are cheap ways and huge expensive ways, and building too much is an easy way to make your project fail. Also, one of the nice things about a sequenced set of events is that it is pretty easy to replay into your new, faster event storage later once you've had the happy problem of too much success.
I think in many cases you will be right and 'they' won't be able to secure it. This will force them to contact out those applications to someone who can. Plenty of SaaS providers able to secure a network. Just because my incompetent I.T. Guy can't properly harden a mail server doesn't mean we can't hire Rackspace or Microsoft or someone else who can. Let's incentivize competence, not hide incompetence.
'Game over': I think this is exactly the problem. In all the organizations I've been in, firewalls have been an excuse for negligence. 'We don't need to think about security because we are behind the firewall.'
Right now the compliance world is addicted to firewalls, to the detriment to reasonable appsec. In my fantasy world, I'd like the auditors to be telling companies 'in 5 years, you won't be allowed to firewall your business network, and if you aren't secure without the crutches, then no certification for you.' That would light a fire under management to care about software quality all over the place.
I'm excited to see this. My big outstanding wish is reliable reduplication. My flickr is a mess of duplicate uploads from various attempts at organization and upload.
An idea that I got after reading Guns, Germs, and Steel was that at a basic level, killing other humans is the correct response to most threats, annoyances, or disagreements. Manager wants to micromanage with story points? Kill him. Problem solved.
Now, clearly, if everybody is killing everyone beyond their immediate family, it is hard to have any sort of larger society. Living and collaborating under constant threat of immediate death wouldn't work. So we have a large set of social adaptations to limit the killing and restrain ourselves.
My point here, is that 'why do human kill other humans' is a less interesting question than 'why are the social adaptations that prevent killing not taking affect?' The problem of fighting isn't a moral failing, or some flaw in the human soul. Killing makes sense within the decision making scope of our conscious brains, and is the result of inadequate build up of collective structures of inhibition that are required to have larger groups of people in closer contact with each other, and as the groups get bigger and the contact becomes closer, we need to engineer new schemes for inhibiting the 'lets just kill them off and solve this once and for all' urge.