On Wed, 2020-07-22 at 03:39 +0000, Stephen Loosley wrote: > Karl writes, > > As for discarding caution in favour of speed – God > > give me strength, what a stupid, stupid, STUPID idea. > > One does take your perhaps rather dramatically overstated > point Karl
Overstated? Hardly. You should have seen the first draft. > , and for this thoughtful if ambitious article How is a business man, selling cloud solutions, advising us to be less cautious with our IT spend, any kind of credible author? Answer: He's not. I do realise that this is an ad hominem argument, but nonetheless, when the fox advocates less hen-house security one does have to consider motive. > .. when the federal government announced its most recent plan, it > > detailed $72 billion in this kind of infrastructure. They had the chance and they blew it when they didn't build a useful NBN. If they want to get their credentials back from me, they will spend the lot on networking. Only networking. Nothing but networking.[1] Lots and and lots and lots of high-speed networking across the whole country, and no that doesn't mean "Sydney". If they want, they can also spend money on getting people connected at high speed, as far as that is possible with the sad patchwork of underpowered poo that we call the national network. And the guy from the cloud will benefit too. > So, he makes a good point .. in this digital world, is $72 billion > spent on earth-moving, building more now-working-at-home empty roads, > the very best idea for such significant investments? No it's not. But there is also no need at all for risk. Build out the network. It is an utter no-risk-at-all no-brainer that is festooned with upsides everywhere along the timeline from short to long term and has only one single downside, namely expense. But they *want* to spend money, so that downside isn't there any more. That's what should happen, but it would require admitting to the eye- watering scale of their initial HAMFU, so it probably won't. > Why not chance-our-hand in the digital world with a few risky ideas? Because people with NFI and/or dollar-induced myopia are the ones coming up with the ideas, and they are not risking *their* money. The people taking the risks - with OUR MONEY - are more people with NFI. We have seen that the current political class cannot be trusted with any IT project more complex than tic-tac-toe, why on earth should we trust them with another, still less one where we positively urge them to take risks? > Divert our minds from this shit-virus and on to something more > useful. Excellent advice. Key word - useful. Actually useful. Not "might be" useful or "could be" useful or "who knows, maybe if we give that random guy over there a metric shedload of cash he will do something" useful. The network is provably, demonstrably useful. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (ka...@biplane.com.au) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://twitter.com/kauer389 GPG fingerprint: 2561 E9EC D868 E73C 8AF1 49CF EE50 4B1D CCA1 5170 Old fingerprint: 8D08 9CAA 649A AFEF E862 062A 2E97 42D4 A2A0 616D _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
