On 9/7/2012 3:24, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> Ironically, I'm really quite bad with numbers. I'm good with /equations/...

That's what finance is about.

> You're telling me there are more than three people on Earth who actually
> design ciphers?

There's a lot more to security than designing the cyphers. And yes, Bellcore 
had, for example, a 250 person department doing just that sort of stuff. 
Ever hear of the NSA? Is it MI6 where you are, or some other part?

> I would have thought that querying the data to get the numbers you want is
> the /easy/ part.

It's really not, because the numbers aren't in one place. The number you 
want is "what percentage of what I spent on each project (ad, program, etc) 
actually turned into profit money?"

> The hard part, surely, is figuring out what questions to
> ask in the first place. And that is out of my league.

Nope. The easy part is asking the question.  "If I buy the new lab analysis 
machine for $100K, how long before I make that money back, and how much more 
will I make over its lifetime?"

Or "how frequently should we make backups? If we make them too frequently, 
then the amount of effort we spend making backups we never restore outweighs 
the amount of effort it would take to reproduce the results from the time of 
the last back up to the time of the crash where we needed the restoration."

> OK. But those robots already exist. Why would you ever need to design more?

The robotics for making space stations don't really exist. Nor do the 
robotics for manufacturing flying automobiles.

>>>> marketing
>>>
>>> There's technical expertise in that?
>>
>> Yes. Writing marketing copy that actually convinces technical people
>> requires technical expertise.
>
> You must be looking at very different "marketing copy" than the stuff I've
> seen.

That's because you're not looking at marketing copy for products marketed to 
technical people. Look at some ads for computers on Amazon.

> In particular, such material is utterly devoid of even the slightest hint of
> technical detail. Lots of hand-waving about "total cost of ownership" and
> "return on investment" and so forth, but no technical specifications, and no
> prices.

Because that's the numbers the business people want to know. See above.

Now, go look at an ad for a scuba computer. Or a camera.

> Or rather, it requires technical skill to design the data center correctly
> in the first place. By the time a disaster actually occurs, it should be
> easy enough that a trained monkey could do the actual recovery part...

It depends how big your data center is. Trust me, when something "goes 
wrong" at a google data center, and they start seeing 15-second drops of 4% 
packet loss every hour or so over various inter-center data connections, 
figuring out wtf is going on is quite technical.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "They're the 1-800-#-GORILA of the telecom business."

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