So in a way, the whole shouting match is because the non-racists are afraid to face an uncomfortable fact or two that might shake their simplified world-view.
I think this is a larger part of the dynamic you described than anyone talks about. It's kind of obvious that 85% of what a garden variety "racist" believes is false or unfair, but 15% is closer to true than not true, which makes the 85% seem *possibly* true and believable.
The anti-racists won't discuss, debate or even acknowledge the 15% and go into full-on denial, name-calling, etc, which reinforces the 15% in the minds of "racists", which in turn reinforces the other 85% as likely true as well, further dividing them.
Like many issues, most people are more in agreement than disagreement but the refusal to even discuss the sliver of things they disagree on widens the gulf.
I agree that a well-structured kind of placement/vocational exam would be a good idea, especially if coupled with heavy subsidies for people who choose an education path that aligns with their test results. We want to encourage and make it easy for people to get into fields (academic or vocational) they're compatible with in some objective way.
I would worry that it would slightly ingrain a caste system, though, where people who could afford it would send their kids to more academic programs anyway even if they didn't test into them, thus insuring the rich maintained a lock on the best paying jobs. You might be able to fix this with just more intensive academic standards in school -- so even if daddy buys you a slot in college, you're still at risk of failing out because you're not good enough.
I think the other thing you need to do is somehow alter wage distribution to make "vocational" fields higher paid with improved working conditions (ie, less of the hostile labor/management style division found even in highly skilled vocations).
The problem is, nobody earns any serious saving money in their 20s. My savings were for shit until I was in my 30s and quite often drained with stupid shit like car repairs, apartment moves or other life situation stuff. I felt like I was doing well not running around with $5k in credit card debt.
Plus today's 20-somethings are not just managing those expenses, but juggling $500 student loan payments.
I just think it's weird how society shits on people who are otherwise responsible parents. Where do they think human beings come from, a store?
You would think that supporting family life and the resulting mostly normal, well-adjusted contributors-to-society it generally produces would be a broadly accepted social value. Instead we seem to have greedy assholes who gripe about people taking care of their kids -- when they're not bitching about problems that result from the shitty family lives they enable by making it tough to raise a family.
A lot of It workers are white males, and making any discrimination claim as a white male is challenging, especially if you're only in your early 50s. You can expect low unemployment figures and high salaries to be trotted out as examples of how you're not really a member of an at-risk class.
What I'd wager is intrinsic to the problem of age discrimination is that older workers often have family commitments, and when combined with spouses working at similar professional careers and children, leads to an apparent decline in workplace engagement. The older employee is less able to devote their lives to the job (learning new tech for free in their own time, or at least less of this, working overtime hours, short-notice travel, etc).
IMHO, it's less "age discrimination" than "life situation discrimination". Younger employees living in rental housing without spouses or children are just more competitive in the workplace because they have nothing to do but work.
I don't really know how you fix it, either. In an ideal world, I'd presume that the *society* would recognize that children come from parents and parents need to engage in their families to produce productive, well-educated children, and that workers of parenting age are going to be less engaged. Thus, labor would be structured in a way that doesn't penalize this kind of natural life cycle.
You know, I think this might be key, especially the family thing.
The 2 people I know who are in their 40s with paid-for houses, good investments (above and beyond 401k, etc) and lots of savings are REALLY cheap people. Relentless coupon clippers. Buy a huge cut of meat at Costco, cook a giant stew and eat it for every meal for a week. Vacation is staying home from work 5 days to paint the house. Can do everything short of an engine rebuild on their car (which they have owned outright for 7+ years). Only watch movies they buy used from the pawn shop. Clothes all bought at discount stores.
And neither one has much of a social life and no spouse or girlfriend.
I don't think living that way would be that hard, but getting other people to put up with it would be. I think women kind of generally look at spending behavior as a kind of signaling -- how well will you take care of me -- and if they see a guy who won't spend on himself, they figure no way, he won't take care of me or will be unpleasantly cheap.
The only *families* I've ever run into that cheap are super religious, scrimping so mom doesn't work or some other kind of lifestyle goal. And I don't think they really are accumulating anything, they just don't have anything because of one income.
The bigger problem is that as great as pumped hydro is, there's a lot of awesome places for windmills and solar panels that also happen to be deserts with no water and many are also flat, with no place uphill to pump it to even if you had the water.
The giant battery farms are interesting, but after 10 years what percentage of the batteries need to be replaced? Because battery tech is so primitive, building lots of battery farms with batteries that burn out after a decade starts to sound like a real problem, especially if it involves massive mining efforts for lithium at 10x the current demand.
Personally, I'd like to see more done with raised mass storage, including some of the novel systems using large concrete "pistons" over a column of water. During the day (or when the wind blows, etc), water is pumped under the mass, raising it up, and at night the water flows the other way, spinning the pump/turbine.and generating power.
It's kind of like pumped hydro, but all you need to do is dig two cylinders for pumping the water from/to the mass, you're not as dependent on pre-existing geography.
You left out the part where the board and Ms. Bresch are stripped of all their assets and relocated to a communal farm on the outskirts of Harlan, Kentucky, where they are forced to rebuild their lives through manual labor and no health insurance.
I've done some subcontracting for engineering firms and most of the "engineers" I worked with did not have PE certification. There were a few senior guys with PEs who signed off everything. I don't know, but after seeing the reams of drawings/plans I find it hard to believe that this system of requiring only PEs to sign off on projects is actually achieving the risk mitigation that is claimed because I don't think the volume of work is realistically reviewable by one guy.
I'm more inclined that PE certification, like so many professional certifications, is mostly about eliminating competition and running a kind of cartel, especially when it gets the kind of self-policing powers that most legislatures grant professional certification boards. If you can obtain a legislative monopoly on your trade *and* gain the power to determine and police who can enter your trade, you're doing pretty well.
I would argue that by making PE certification so complex, thus reducing the number of PEs, engineering is worse off because fewer PEs sign off on the work of non-PEs without truly applying whatever their special magic is to the work (simply too much to check).
It would make sense to make PE certification somewhat easier to obtain without essentially compromising the knowledge required to gain it. You would have a larger pool of people shown competent at engineering, but this would create problems for the engineering business which would face more competition.
"Traditional" NAND flash was much more expensive than spinning rust but came in sizes useful at least for boot disk applications *and* delivered overwhelmingly better performance from the same bus/connection as spinning rust.
IMHO, Intel can't pimp this out as faster than NAND flash for more money. Like CPUs, flash storage has more or less hit the speed levels where more speed simply isn't that useful outside of very narrow use cases.
The angle they needed to work was density and write endurance. There's still a fair use case for spinning rust at certain scales, driven mostly by slot limits in server and storage chassis. If you want 40 TB but only have 10 slots, you have to use spinning rust. Providing a solid state disk at this density with superior write endurance would really be a market disruption.
32 GB of Optane for $77 is $2.40 per GB, Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB is $0.50 per GB. Intel is nearly 5x more expensive.
Hybrid storage systems are common in the enterprise SAN market, but generally to be useful they need something like 20% of capacity to be flash. At ratios of 1-3% of HDD capacity, I don't see the Intel use case as being especially useful.
I had a Seagate 2.5" years ago that was 32 GB flash plus 512GB and it only felt marginally faster than a standard disk drive. You didn't notice serious performance boosts until you went completely flash.
So does Intel have a yield problem or are they still ramping up production facilities to make these in quantity? It's hard to see a system more convoluted than straight SATA or NVMe flash disk being that big of a deal. I think in order to make this product competitive it has to be offered at $/GB competitive with ordinary flash disks or only a small premium.
I've found the IT world (since I've worked full-time in it, about 1990) has always veered slightly libertarian, but not usually hard-core, more freedom oriented than dystopian libertarian.
Slashdot comments have degraded, but it's been years in the making, not a particularly recent phenomenon. IMHO there's too many politically oriented stories and maybe not enough real technology, but on the other hand I also think that real technology has been kind of idling over the last few years, too.
Bahaha, what's this full time Exchange admin you speak of? It's not 1998 and we're not struggling to keep a Exchange 5,5 box running on dedicated hardware anymore.
There is no Exchange admin anymore, at least not at any company under 1000 users or with fewer than a couple of servers. That work is done by the same admin team that manages AD, file sharing, etc, and is mostly part time.
If Exchange was your sample company's only server, then I totally agree O365 is ideal. But in most medium sized companies Exchange server isn't even a drop in the bucket anymore unless you're doing something really stupid with journaling. In the era of virtualization, the data center space, power, hardware, and nearly all the expertise is already purchased.
The marginal cost to run Exchange is trivial if you already have this infrastructure in place. The O365 math is based on these false ideas about "dedicated admins" and a bunch of dedicated hardware that went away years ago. In any organization not run by retards, running Exchange competently shouldn't be a major burden.
If you're running enough mailboxes/servers for Exchange that you can justify a dedicated admin (which I assume would be dozens of servers, many DAGs, a real complex mess) I'm not sure if O365 is a "fix" at that point, either, because now you're talking such a large userbase that the O365 licensing gets into real serious money.
I think it's more of a subtle (and not so subtle) condescending attitude to "the other side". Pick your adjectives -- dishonest, cruel, stupid, immoral, and so on. Even when it's not explicitly stated.
I think those kinds tones are much harder to pull off in face-face encounters. People are forced to be more accommodating in person.
I agree with your logic, but the problem is that automation won't arrive all at once and the taxation burden isn't shifting to capital.
As long as the capital class continues to manipulate the tax code to fund government on the backs of wage earners, they will be able to continue to demonize people who aren't working as "stealing from working people." Capital will be successful at maintaining this Potemkin Village political economy because of lobbying and low political participation by the poor and unemployed.
The jobs will disappear slowly until there's a large, unemployed underclass, a for-display-only middle class, mostly made up of the police forces necessary to keep the underclass in line and defend capital's wealth.
Look at how bought into the "work ethic" we are and how many people justify what amounts to luck (if not outright criminality) as "hard work" and thus entitlement to moral superiority (up to and including control of others).
We already treat people who can't work for various reasons as worthless and disposable, I just can't see any transition to robotic work that requires fewer workers resulting in the people who own the robots willing giving away their added profit from automation to displaced workers.
"Surely they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just as I pulled myself up by the straps on my hand-made Italian leather boots bought with my family inheritance money."
There are times where it feels like free software has an effect similar to a democracy that votes for authoritarianism. It's made it easier and simpler for people to develop DRM and mass spying.
I can think of two people I know on social media. One is very academic/intelligent (specialty pediatrician) and very left wing, one is very practical/intelligent but extremely right wing.
But I find myself turned off by both. Despite the former's reasonableness, they come off snide and elitist. The latter just comes off dumbed-down, parroting a lot of right wing nonsense.
What's kind of fascinating to me is that it's less their *ideas* that bother me. I agree with the pediatrician some of the time. I agree (conceptually, at least) with some of the right wing ideas.
It's the *presentation* and tone of both that turn me off, and neither person comes off that way in person. I think that's what contributes to the corrosiveness of social media, it's less about the ideas than their presentation and tone.
However....backup, anti-virus, spam filtering, and a DR solution drives up the cost very quickly.
The marginal cost of backup and DR when you're *already* doing those things for an on-prem server environment is pretty close to zero, and if you're already virtualized and have a virtual-oriented backup software you probably already have DR integrated into your backup. AV and anti-spam are almost always done best these days by a third party service and the good ones do both anyway.
From the numbers I've run, it usually is cheaper to do it on prem above about 50 users with a 3 year benchmark. If you time the upgrade right, you can probably get 5 years out of it without falling more than a rev behind and cut the 50 user number way down.
It's pretty obvious Microsoft is heading subscription-only for everything. Since 2013, Exchange has lost much of its GUI which I think has been a way to scare on-prem admins away. They will ultimately either price on prem high enough that only a few compliance/security focused large organizations will consider it or support hybrid only (meaning you're paying for O365, used or not).
Cloud is about permanent vendor-lock in and rent-seeking, not economics. The marginal cost of a 5-9s commercial data center for hosting cloud services is greater than the marginal savings to users, which is why hosted systems always end up being so expensive unless you're doing something really trivial like a static web site.
OwnCloud is almost there. IMHO, the devs should have a team which focuses on packaging a complete "appliance" images like pfSense capable of managing the storage subsytem from a web gui.
When I last looked at it, someone had done this themselves but it took some shell work to manage the OS storage side of things, certificates, etc.
There are canned EC2 instances, but for storage intensive versions the cost is approaching or over $1/hr.
I'm curious how big companies justify anything over $5 a month.
Most companies of any size have virtualization which almost always means that running Exchange amounts to software licensing and a fairly thin amount of admin time.
A single Exchange server should scale to 500 users pretty easily -- at $35 month, you're making a $175,000 commitment or $525,000 over 3 years. The office and Exchange licensing for on-prem isn't $525,000.
I know some organizations have struggled with Exchange reliability, but I've worked in the managed services and consulting space and the vast majority of on-prem installs I've worked with have been extremely reliable and problems have usually been the result of some really bad admin decisions.
I've laid the costs out side by side for customers who have run on-prem, including admin costs, and almost none have chosen 365.
I remember those 16 oz returnable bottles and how carrying two 8 packs back to the dorm two blocks damn near killed my hands they were so heavy.
I have a hard time believing that germaphobes, and not cost, had anything to do with the death of "Coke bottles". Unless you only eat fast food, EVERY ITEM ON YOUR RESTAURANT TABLE except the food has been used before, and that's just ONE example.
Those returnable bottles were extremely heavy, 12 ounces empty when they held 16 ounces of liquid. An eight pack weighs 6 pounds empty, 14 pounds full. The fuel cost alone of hauling around tons of glass bottles is enough to justify switching to cans and plastic bottles.
And this is in fact what's been driving the craft beer industry to adopt canning over bottles. The weight and volumetric inefficiency of bottles is very high. Cans are highly recyclable and the linings are good enough that the flavor isn't compromised. They stack denser and weigh less than bottles. They don't break as easily.
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So in a way, the whole shouting match is because the non-racists are afraid to face an uncomfortable fact or two that might shake their simplified world-view.
I think this is a larger part of the dynamic you described than anyone talks about. It's kind of obvious that 85% of what a garden variety "racist" believes is false or unfair, but 15% is closer to true than not true, which makes the 85% seem *possibly* true and believable.
The anti-racists won't discuss, debate or even acknowledge the 15% and go into full-on denial, name-calling, etc, which reinforces the 15% in the minds of "racists", which in turn reinforces the other 85% as likely true as well, further dividing them.
Like many issues, most people are more in agreement than disagreement but the refusal to even discuss the sliver of things they disagree on widens the gulf.
I agree that a well-structured kind of placement/vocational exam would be a good idea, especially if coupled with heavy subsidies for people who choose an education path that aligns with their test results. We want to encourage and make it easy for people to get into fields (academic or vocational) they're compatible with in some objective way.
I would worry that it would slightly ingrain a caste system, though, where people who could afford it would send their kids to more academic programs anyway even if they didn't test into them, thus insuring the rich maintained a lock on the best paying jobs. You might be able to fix this with just more intensive academic standards in school -- so even if daddy buys you a slot in college, you're still at risk of failing out because you're not good enough.
I think the other thing you need to do is somehow alter wage distribution to make "vocational" fields higher paid with improved working conditions (ie, less of the hostile labor/management style division found even in highly skilled vocations).
The problem is, nobody earns any serious saving money in their 20s. My savings were for shit until I was in my 30s and quite often drained with stupid shit like car repairs, apartment moves or other life situation stuff. I felt like I was doing well not running around with $5k in credit card debt.
Plus today's 20-somethings are not just managing those expenses, but juggling $500 student loan payments.
I just think it's weird how society shits on people who are otherwise responsible parents. Where do they think human beings come from, a store?
You would think that supporting family life and the resulting mostly normal, well-adjusted contributors-to-society it generally produces would be a broadly accepted social value. Instead we seem to have greedy assholes who gripe about people taking care of their kids -- when they're not bitching about problems that result from the shitty family lives they enable by making it tough to raise a family.
A lot of It workers are white males, and making any discrimination claim as a white male is challenging, especially if you're only in your early 50s. You can expect low unemployment figures and high salaries to be trotted out as examples of how you're not really a member of an at-risk class.
What I'd wager is intrinsic to the problem of age discrimination is that older workers often have family commitments, and when combined with spouses working at similar professional careers and children, leads to an apparent decline in workplace engagement. The older employee is less able to devote their lives to the job (learning new tech for free in their own time, or at least less of this, working overtime hours, short-notice travel, etc).
IMHO, it's less "age discrimination" than "life situation discrimination". Younger employees living in rental housing without spouses or children are just more competitive in the workplace because they have nothing to do but work.
I don't really know how you fix it, either. In an ideal world, I'd presume that the *society* would recognize that children come from parents and parents need to engage in their families to produce productive, well-educated children, and that workers of parenting age are going to be less engaged. Thus, labor would be structured in a way that doesn't penalize this kind of natural life cycle.
The access point, not the phone!
I read both the Robot series and the Foundation series and was never quite satisfied with the "end" of robotics and the robotic-free Galactic Empire.
I enjoyed the books, but never quite accepted the lack of robots in the Galactic Empire.
Or even better, zero family or friends.
You know, I think this might be key, especially the family thing.
The 2 people I know who are in their 40s with paid-for houses, good investments (above and beyond 401k, etc) and lots of savings are REALLY cheap people. Relentless coupon clippers. Buy a huge cut of meat at Costco, cook a giant stew and eat it for every meal for a week. Vacation is staying home from work 5 days to paint the house. Can do everything short of an engine rebuild on their car (which they have owned outright for 7+ years). Only watch movies they buy used from the pawn shop. Clothes all bought at discount stores.
And neither one has much of a social life and no spouse or girlfriend.
I don't think living that way would be that hard, but getting other people to put up with it would be. I think women kind of generally look at spending behavior as a kind of signaling -- how well will you take care of me -- and if they see a guy who won't spend on himself, they figure no way, he won't take care of me or will be unpleasantly cheap.
The only *families* I've ever run into that cheap are super religious, scrimping so mom doesn't work or some other kind of lifestyle goal. And I don't think they really are accumulating anything, they just don't have anything because of one income.
The bigger problem is that as great as pumped hydro is, there's a lot of awesome places for windmills and solar panels that also happen to be deserts with no water and many are also flat, with no place uphill to pump it to even if you had the water.
The giant battery farms are interesting, but after 10 years what percentage of the batteries need to be replaced? Because battery tech is so primitive, building lots of battery farms with batteries that burn out after a decade starts to sound like a real problem, especially if it involves massive mining efforts for lithium at 10x the current demand.
Personally, I'd like to see more done with raised mass storage, including some of the novel systems using large concrete "pistons" over a column of water. During the day (or when the wind blows, etc), water is pumped under the mass, raising it up, and at night the water flows the other way, spinning the pump/turbine.and generating power.
It's kind of like pumped hydro, but all you need to do is dig two cylinders for pumping the water from/to the mass, you're not as dependent on pre-existing geography.
You left out the part where the board and Ms. Bresch are stripped of all their assets and relocated to a communal farm on the outskirts of Harlan, Kentucky, where they are forced to rebuild their lives through manual labor and no health insurance.
I've done some subcontracting for engineering firms and most of the "engineers" I worked with did not have PE certification. There were a few senior guys with PEs who signed off everything. I don't know, but after seeing the reams of drawings/plans I find it hard to believe that this system of requiring only PEs to sign off on projects is actually achieving the risk mitigation that is claimed because I don't think the volume of work is realistically reviewable by one guy.
I'm more inclined that PE certification, like so many professional certifications, is mostly about eliminating competition and running a kind of cartel, especially when it gets the kind of self-policing powers that most legislatures grant professional certification boards. If you can obtain a legislative monopoly on your trade *and* gain the power to determine and police who can enter your trade, you're doing pretty well.
I would argue that by making PE certification so complex, thus reducing the number of PEs, engineering is worse off because fewer PEs sign off on the work of non-PEs without truly applying whatever their special magic is to the work (simply too much to check).
It would make sense to make PE certification somewhat easier to obtain without essentially compromising the knowledge required to gain it. You would have a larger pool of people shown competent at engineering, but this would create problems for the engineering business which would face more competition.
"Traditional" NAND flash was much more expensive than spinning rust but came in sizes useful at least for boot disk applications *and* delivered overwhelmingly better performance from the same bus/connection as spinning rust.
IMHO, Intel can't pimp this out as faster than NAND flash for more money. Like CPUs, flash storage has more or less hit the speed levels where more speed simply isn't that useful outside of very narrow use cases.
The angle they needed to work was density and write endurance. There's still a fair use case for spinning rust at certain scales, driven mostly by slot limits in server and storage chassis. If you want 40 TB but only have 10 slots, you have to use spinning rust. Providing a solid state disk at this density with superior write endurance would really be a market disruption.
32 GB of Optane for $77 is $2.40 per GB, Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB is $0.50 per GB. Intel is nearly 5x more expensive.
Hybrid storage systems are common in the enterprise SAN market, but generally to be useful they need something like 20% of capacity to be flash. At ratios of 1-3% of HDD capacity, I don't see the Intel use case as being especially useful.
I had a Seagate 2.5" years ago that was 32 GB flash plus 512GB and it only felt marginally faster than a standard disk drive. You didn't notice serious performance boosts until you went completely flash.
So does Intel have a yield problem or are they still ramping up production facilities to make these in quantity? It's hard to see a system more convoluted than straight SATA or NVMe flash disk being that big of a deal. I think in order to make this product competitive it has to be offered at $/GB competitive with ordinary flash disks or only a small premium.
I've found the IT world (since I've worked full-time in it, about 1990) has always veered slightly libertarian, but not usually hard-core, more freedom oriented than dystopian libertarian.
Slashdot comments have degraded, but it's been years in the making, not a particularly recent phenomenon. IMHO there's too many politically oriented stories and maybe not enough real technology, but on the other hand I also think that real technology has been kind of idling over the last few years, too.
Bahaha, what's this full time Exchange admin you speak of? It's not 1998 and we're not struggling to keep a Exchange 5,5 box running on dedicated hardware anymore.
There is no Exchange admin anymore, at least not at any company under 1000 users or with fewer than a couple of servers. That work is done by the same admin team that manages AD, file sharing, etc, and is mostly part time.
If Exchange was your sample company's only server, then I totally agree O365 is ideal. But in most medium sized companies Exchange server isn't even a drop in the bucket anymore unless you're doing something really stupid with journaling. In the era of virtualization, the data center space, power, hardware, and nearly all the expertise is already purchased.
The marginal cost to run Exchange is trivial if you already have this infrastructure in place. The O365 math is based on these false ideas about "dedicated admins" and a bunch of dedicated hardware that went away years ago. In any organization not run by retards, running Exchange competently shouldn't be a major burden.
If you're running enough mailboxes/servers for Exchange that you can justify a dedicated admin (which I assume would be dozens of servers, many DAGs, a real complex mess) I'm not sure if O365 is a "fix" at that point, either, because now you're talking such a large userbase that the O365 licensing gets into real serious money.
I would always have ignored screaming lunatics.
I think it's more of a subtle (and not so subtle) condescending attitude to "the other side". Pick your adjectives -- dishonest, cruel, stupid, immoral, and so on. Even when it's not explicitly stated.
I think those kinds tones are much harder to pull off in face-face encounters. People are forced to be more accommodating in person.
I agree with your logic, but the problem is that automation won't arrive all at once and the taxation burden isn't shifting to capital.
As long as the capital class continues to manipulate the tax code to fund government on the backs of wage earners, they will be able to continue to demonize people who aren't working as "stealing from working people." Capital will be successful at maintaining this Potemkin Village political economy because of lobbying and low political participation by the poor and unemployed.
The jobs will disappear slowly until there's a large, unemployed underclass, a for-display-only middle class, mostly made up of the police forces necessary to keep the underclass in line and defend capital's wealth.
Look at how bought into the "work ethic" we are and how many people justify what amounts to luck (if not outright criminality) as "hard work" and thus entitlement to moral superiority (up to and including control of others).
We already treat people who can't work for various reasons as worthless and disposable, I just can't see any transition to robotic work that requires fewer workers resulting in the people who own the robots willing giving away their added profit from automation to displaced workers.
"Surely they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just as I pulled myself up by the straps on my hand-made Italian leather boots bought with my family inheritance money."
There are times where it feels like free software has an effect similar to a democracy that votes for authoritarianism. It's made it easier and simpler for people to develop DRM and mass spying.
I can think of two people I know on social media. One is very academic/intelligent (specialty pediatrician) and very left wing, one is very practical/intelligent but extremely right wing.
But I find myself turned off by both. Despite the former's reasonableness, they come off snide and elitist. The latter just comes off dumbed-down, parroting a lot of right wing nonsense.
What's kind of fascinating to me is that it's less their *ideas* that bother me. I agree with the pediatrician some of the time. I agree (conceptually, at least) with some of the right wing ideas.
It's the *presentation* and tone of both that turn me off, and neither person comes off that way in person. I think that's what contributes to the corrosiveness of social media, it's less about the ideas than their presentation and tone.
However....backup, anti-virus, spam filtering, and a DR solution drives up the cost very quickly.
The marginal cost of backup and DR when you're *already* doing those things for an on-prem server environment is pretty close to zero, and if you're already virtualized and have a virtual-oriented backup software you probably already have DR integrated into your backup. AV and anti-spam are almost always done best these days by a third party service and the good ones do both anyway.
From the numbers I've run, it usually is cheaper to do it on prem above about 50 users with a 3 year benchmark. If you time the upgrade right, you can probably get 5 years out of it without falling more than a rev behind and cut the 50 user number way down.
It's pretty obvious Microsoft is heading subscription-only for everything. Since 2013, Exchange has lost much of its GUI which I think has been a way to scare on-prem admins away. They will ultimately either price on prem high enough that only a few compliance/security focused large organizations will consider it or support hybrid only (meaning you're paying for O365, used or not).
Cloud is about permanent vendor-lock in and rent-seeking, not economics. The marginal cost of a 5-9s commercial data center for hosting cloud services is greater than the marginal savings to users, which is why hosted systems always end up being so expensive unless you're doing something really trivial like a static web site.
OwnCloud is almost there. IMHO, the devs should have a team which focuses on packaging a complete "appliance" images like pfSense capable of managing the storage subsytem from a web gui.
When I last looked at it, someone had done this themselves but it took some shell work to manage the OS storage side of things, certificates, etc.
There are canned EC2 instances, but for storage intensive versions the cost is approaching or over $1/hr.
I'm curious how big companies justify anything over $5 a month.
Most companies of any size have virtualization which almost always means that running Exchange amounts to software licensing and a fairly thin amount of admin time.
A single Exchange server should scale to 500 users pretty easily -- at $35 month, you're making a $175,000 commitment or $525,000 over 3 years. The office and Exchange licensing for on-prem isn't $525,000.
I know some organizations have struggled with Exchange reliability, but I've worked in the managed services and consulting space and the vast majority of on-prem installs I've worked with have been extremely reliable and problems have usually been the result of some really bad admin decisions.
I've laid the costs out side by side for customers who have run on-prem, including admin costs, and almost none have chosen 365.
I can't use coal to heat the forge for the metal for a boiler that will produce the coal-fired steam that will drive my 24/7 electric generator?
I kind of think that sounds like the industrial revolution in a single sentence.
a screwdriver could have a hammer on the other end. it doesn't. you don't want it to.
I met a farmer who had welded sockets of his two most common sizes to the tips of the handles on a pair of slip-joint pliers.
He said it saved him lots of trips to the toolbox.
I remember those 16 oz returnable bottles and how carrying two 8 packs back to the dorm two blocks damn near killed my hands they were so heavy.
I have a hard time believing that germaphobes, and not cost, had anything to do with the death of "Coke bottles". Unless you only eat fast food, EVERY ITEM ON YOUR RESTAURANT TABLE except the food has been used before, and that's just ONE example.
Those returnable bottles were extremely heavy, 12 ounces empty when they held 16 ounces of liquid. An eight pack weighs 6 pounds empty, 14 pounds full. The fuel cost alone of hauling around tons of glass bottles is enough to justify switching to cans and plastic bottles.
And this is in fact what's been driving the craft beer industry to adopt canning over bottles. The weight and volumetric inefficiency of bottles is very high. Cans are highly recyclable and the linings are good enough that the flavor isn't compromised. They stack denser and weigh less than bottles. They don't break as easily.