If you've seen sites like TechCrunch or Business Insider they are fond of writing articles with salacious titles like the one above. The article titles are deliberately inflammatory and custom-designed to create click-through traffic as well as troll-ridden "comments" where people heatedly argue about the merit or lack of merit (almost always the latter) of the article's poorly-researched content. For those reasons I've deliberately chosen not to follow those sites any more.
The OP assumes so much it's ridiculous. Office is the Sun; QuickOffice is a microscopic dot on the Sun. Of the Fortune 1000 how many, realistically, use Chromebooks? Or Google Apps, even? It's creeping up there surely, but so few it's not even a statistical aberration yet.
Long-term there is no question more and more office functions will move to the web and they will be used by more and more companies - probably mostly the small, sub-1000-5000 employee companies. The apps are getting very good but there will always be a large percentage of corporations who did not want any apps or data sitting outside the company LAN/WAN, period. In 10-15 years we may laugh about how silly we were to use apps installed on our computers but for the foreseeable future it's MS Office for the VAST majority of large-ish companies and the business community out there.
I worked for a small manufacturing company that was acquired by a much larger Fortune 500 multi-national (actually, it was acquired by a larger company and that company was in turn acquired by this F500 corporation).
Right as we were purchased the F500 company hired a new CIO - they'd basically been without a formal C-level IT executive for several months. What was the first thing he did? Outsource the IT help desk. Within 6 weeks of his hire date he had shuttered the entire Austin, TX-based North American help desk in favor of Wipro. Shortly thereafter application support went offshore to Satyam (who some may recall later got embroiled in a major CEO-led accounting scandal).
The company at the same time was also driving its FTEs in IT to telecommute, proclaiming it saved the company money when users telecommuted. When I first went into the IT office building in Silicon Valley most of the people there were FT employees (and, not to be racist but more as a point of contrast, mostly white). About 8 months later when I went down there for a meeting - like everyone else in IT I was by then working 99% of the time from home - the IT building could have passed for a call center in Bangalore. Instead of saving money as they proclaimed they were filling it up with offshore programmers, admins, architects etc. working onshore for different Stateside projects.
California of course is a behemoth of State agencies spread everywhere, not to mention hundreds more various County and Municipal agencies and departments. Just within the scope of the State of California there are massive agencies like the DMV, Health and Human Services (i.e., Welfare), State Parks, Department of Insurance, Franchise Tax Board, and dozens of regulatory agencies and sub-agencies, and the Legislature itself. Across these numerous agencies and departments there are hundreds of thousands of employees and a huge and frequently antiquated technological infrastructure. Most agencies are running independent IT silos and there's very little, if any, connectivity and coordination between these usually very large IT groups. In spite of all this for years the State's CIO was only in his position part-time (huh?) and, while he has since been replaced with a full-time CIO (probably a few times over, by now), none have been successful overhauling the State's horrific IT issues. The State's payroll system is among the most notorious in the nation and believed to be at least 30 years old and running on rock-solid but extremely EXTREMELY antiquated hardware. This is why certain mainframe programmers and administrators will NEVER lose their jobs - lifetime, guaranteed employment maintaining an archaic piece of hardware. It's so bad that when then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened an across-the-board 20% pay cut to State workers to balance the budget (don't laugh; the State HAS to have a balanced budget but you know what it does? Never passes a budget or passes it 6-12 months after it was supposed to). State Controller John Chiang fired back, proclaiming the State's payroll system "couldn't handle" an across-the-board wage adjustment. Can you imagine? Over the last 10-15 years you're easily looking at billions thrown at overhauling California's ancient IT infrastructure, with likely tens if not hundreds of thousands of unique, probably very hard to support applications "vital" to its hundreds of State departments and agencies. The progress it has made with these billions? Save the overhaul of the HHS system - a huge, mega-hundred-million expense that was also fraught with major major problems - the State is showing no signs it is making serious progress to refine its systems and infrastructure.
... and the data center operator literally ran to my cabinet after I fired it up proclaiming I was now well over the 80% of the 20amp circuit I had. Ran it anyways for a couple weeks. I don't think the machine ever really served out its intended purpose - to be a burly web/database server for a product launch that never quite happened - but it was still kind of fun to play with it at the time.
We're using an "avant cello" artist to make a point about how dismal fractional royalties are? Should we also be outraged if a "classical banjo" artist or "neo-Accordionist" also aren't making a sustainable living on completely passive revenue streams like Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, etc. etc.?
While we're at it why doesn't the guy who races dirt-track on the weekends complain that he's not making a sustainable living at what he does. What about painters, sculptors, writers, actors, and other artists... perhaps they should be complaining too that someone isn't providing them with a sustainable living.
Should they, realistically, be making $50-$80K a year selling streaming music? More importantly is there even a remote shot that an "avant cellist" would have made that kind of money in the pre-Internet days? I'd say the chances are essentially zero that an avant cellist would have a break-out year and make even a sustainable living. There's an occasional break-out classical artist - VERY occasional - but most of them make money from performing not from CD sales.
The truth is that artists - even the most talented - from time immemorial have had to do something else to make a real living and pay the bills. Perhaps not the best example but I was watching a little thing on luxury RVs - ah, my idle TV watching habits - and they interviewed Bret Michaels. He spends over 200 days a year on the road performing. THAT is how he makes a living - by working his butt off. If this gal expects to make survival income from just creating music and watching the big bucks flow in from Pandora or Spotify she's just dreaming. If she really wants to make a living she'll have to do it by building a reputation performing and, as the article indicates, that is very, very hard to do.
Honestly $2000 for 6 months of doing absolutely nothing to promote your music - ESPECIALLY "avant cello" - doesn't seem like a bad chunk of change to me.
A fairer perspective might be huge artists like the Rolling Stones or Rihanna or Katy Perry or Justin Bieber - what kind of money are they making on these services? No doubt it is much much more and are they and their business managers content with the revenue streams from these sources? Probably.
I see nothing embedded in the article or Ballmer's statement that smacks at all of what King, who was devolving deeply into socialism toward the end of his life (hence the very unsurprising quote you provided), said. To imply that there is at best short-sighted and foolish, compelled by the same coffee house liberalism King would have been quite fond of today.
Generally I am repulsed by those repulsed by the profit motive, by those who imagine there is some artificial Utopian third way other than capitalism that would advance society in any meaningful way. The pursuit of money to its own end may be evil but with the right motives it is certainly not a bad thing to make money, build companies, provide jobs, etc. etc. Communism and socialism and their numerous derivatives have all proven historically to be unmitigated social, economic, and cultural disasters, yet liberals still cling to this bizarre, unwavering belief that there is a warm fuzzy alternative to capitalism that is a heavy dose of socialism with "just enough" capitalism so that some people can have jobs and the rest of us can live off the work product of those people - or just have the country continually spiral into deeper and deeper loads of debt (i.e., the U.S., France, Italy, Greece, the U.K., among many others) that ultimately kills the country financially and socially, anyway and leads to war, rioting, revolution, etc. Or, perhaps, have everyone just work for the government and/or live off government benefits - or both.
Whom do you believe Ballmer - or indeed any company President or CEO - is protecting when they strive to have their company succeed? Ultimately they are protecting livelihoods and, if they are publicly-traded companies like Microsoft, their shareholders, which ultimately trickles down to individuals and families. And I've been laid off and been out of work enough times to know that there is no grand altruism to almost any corporation. They do what they have to do in tough times and grow in good times. They didn't owe me a job in the first place so if I'm let go, so be it. Move on to the next job the next company and see how it goes.
Very, very few Chinese even have homes that would warrant this. Look at the Australian documentary on China's "ghost cities" to see the sheer volume of unfilled condos that are vastly too expensive for about 99.9% of all Chinese to afford.
Really? I've been in the workplace for almost 20 years now and maybe one position of the many I've held over the years DIDN'T have paid sick leave. Of course I've generally been employed as a salaried employee where benefits packages tended to be pretty decent.
I suppose menial-type positions - Taco Bell, McDonald's, etc. - that don't offer much in the way of benefits may rarely offer paid sick leave.
100% spot-on. You've articulated exactly how I feel about Internet reporting and how it's declined the state of "journalism" terribly (though of course yellow journalism has existed since forever and was basically the same thing). The quantity of inflammatory "link-bait" that links to bloviating and predominantly fictitious and/or editorial reporting has grown exponentially in the last 5 years especially to the point that about 98-99% of all reporting is basically geared to simply attract clicks.
Unions have been irrelevant for a very long time really.
When the U.S. was the global center for industrial manufacturing might - steel, automobiles, electronics, raw materials of all kinds - the confluence and manufacturing hegemony allowed unions to proliferate and create in tandem with big corporations an artificial middle class. Blue collar labor lifted with the waters of America's financial superiority and power into the middle class.
Yet fundamentally this rise was not the product of capitalism but more of communism, which all unions fundamentally derive their labor ideology and history from the American Communist Party.
Now, with globalization and the utter reversal of the U.S.'s fortunes - yes, it is still probably the center of the global economy in most respects, though obviously China, India, and Russia, among others, are coming up quickly - the relevance of unions has substantively disappeared. You can't negotiate a collective bargaining contract demanding middle-class wages and Cadillac health and retirement benefits when the company can either ship the jobs overseas - as they often do, now - or simply shut down the operation (see Hostess' recent bankruptcy and liquidation for an example of a union-fueled demise).
Unions do not innovate nor do they create positive relationships with employers; indeed, they are embedded adversarial relationships with employers. Sure they and the employees can "demand" higher wages and better benefits but the simple truth is that globalization has removed their bargaining chips. Instead, labor becomes just what it should have been all along - market-driven.
I mean, perhaps he tried to, but it doesn't really sound like it. He moans and complains on a public forum then of course MSFT has to respond yet it's quite possible they were willing to help all along. You don't have to like MSFT and they have a huge, huge uphill battle against Android and iOS but they do have very good developer relationships.
... ergo all my old computer equipment has LONG since been tossed.
I've purged closets and garages full of ancient computer junk continuously since I've been married. Now I just have two work laptops, a work LCD at home, and two desktop computers of my own.
... so-called "green/cleantech" I can say unreservedly it was about 99% hype and 1% reality. They dropped at least $2B in their attempt to diversify their portfolio into greentech and acquired a number of companies - including the one I worked for - to buy their credibility in the solar panel marketplace.
As it turned out, said marketplace - and greentech in general - was and is a bust. Rich yuppies are basically the only ones that can afford to purchase, install, and maintain solar panels even with massive State and Federal government subsidies both in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. Given the very poor efficiency of solar panels and their very long term ROI, those yuppies are the only ones with more money than good sense.
For all Al Gore's, the UN, and pro-globalists' hand-wringing over AGW (and I'm not here to get into THAT debate), the reality is that most people and therefore most businesses aren't particularly concerned about climate change. When the economy tanked in the 2008-ish time frame, the corporation I worked for - the world's largest semiconductor equipment company - said they had, in their 30+ years in business, NEVER see demand drop off a cliff the way it did. Consumer demand for electronic gadgets quite literally disappeared and did so almost overnight. It was a stunning hit to the solar plexus of that industry. Needless to say, a year on I was laid off.
Greentech far from saved them - and, thankfully, at least it was mostly THEIR OWN dollars they spent on greentech investments -- and it turns out the vast majority of the dollars they dumped into those investments turned out to be giant loss. It was nearly all hype and very little reality.
On a mundane level I don't have a huge problem with the Federal government taking big bets on cutting-edge technology that private industry typically can't afford. Note: NASA, the Military in general (from whom we have GPS among many other military-to-private sector innovations to thank for), and of course DARPA from whom we may not have this little thing called the Internet.
Even if there was no real skepticism around climate change I don't believe it would matter. The money the UN wants from the major nations to "fix" climate change would end up being a giant slush fund for lavish UN diplomat expenses. I'd bet big money not a dime would go to any good or positive net effect to supposedly fix or even seriously address climate change issues beyond expensive committees filing expensive 500-page reports and jet-setting between Dubai and New York and London and Tokyo to confab with like-minded global elitists. Climate change isn't something that will be fixed on a macro scale. That, among many other reasons (i.e., the general massive corruption and ultimate pointlessness of the UN), is why so many nations are resisting funding this cluster. Many people are struggling to merely survive in this world - in fact, the vast majority of the global population is in that bind - and concern over how many hydrocarbons they're pumping into the environment is of zero to less-than-zero concern.
As someone who never finished college - flunked out of university, twice, but still got about 4 years in, most of them from JuCo - I probably make approximately the same as any college graduate would make who is my age and has my experience. I got in in the mid-90s at a small ISP doing tech support and that was effectively my launching pad for a career in IT. Most of the years in IT it's been as a senior sys/network admin operations-type role.
I am not sure I can honestly and completely say that a college degree would have been worth it for where I am today. It can be difficult to calculate the ROI when you might make only $30-$40K/year to start and have $100-$200k in college debt to pay back (which is what - $800-$1000/mo in loan repayments? At least.). It's an INSANE debt load to have when you haven't even purchased a home and possibly a car yet. And if you go to grad and/or professional school that's another at least 100-200K of debt.
I had only about $8000 to pay down which was manageable when I was making bupkis doing tech. support.
Where it IS beneficial depends on your career path. If you want to end up the Fortune 500/1000-type companies, they have pretty strict codified pathways to management and you pretty much HAVE to have your degree though you'd be surprised that most only care that it is a B.A./B.S. from anywhere school (basically ANY online school or diploma mills like U of Phoenix, Chapman U, etc.) and probably an MBA. If you're really, really lucky your company will pay for at least some of your schooling.
Obviously a place like Google and possibly Facebook wants a B.A./B.S. from a decent college/university. Supposedly your chances are better to get a job there with a degree from Stanford or Berkeley or MIT but clearly not all of their tens of thousands of employees are Ivy League or even top-50 school grads.
And, to be honest, only management is where the serious money is in an F500 company. I'm over 40 now and am only now making what I made over 10 years ago - yes it took that long to claw back from a lay-off from a Bay Area startup, another layoff (that time from a big F500 corporation - at least the severance was good that time!), and getting fired because I was sucking at a job I really hated (and losing our home and filing bankruptcy thrown in there). Chances are best case I'm getting 3-4% per annum increase with maybe a $3000-$4K bonus annually. In short, as a rank-and-file employee I'm just barely keeping up with cost of living increases, especially where I live in the Bay Area. I could go to a San Fran or South Bay company and make $120-$140K probably but then rent is double where I am now, at least, and I'm competing against 4-6 Facebook roomies who are 25 years old.
Where I am today I am pretty "comfortable" but not in any way comfortable financially. If I could make $30-$50k more per year and live here I'd be in good shape. The company is doing well and growing like crazy and has been around over 20 years and is tracking toward a half-billion in sales annually. I am definitely not ready for retirement in roughly 20-25 years as I'm only contributing the minimum to my 401(k). And let's not talk about all the insurance I *should* have - life insurance for me and probably my wife, insurance for my mom's old age, etc. etc.
So... I work little side jobs here and there (I recently had a very good one where I was pulling roughly $1500-$2000/mo additionally down but unfortunately that went away) and am working on big ideas that hopefully I can turn into a viable business. That honestly is the only way I see to finding a pathway to relative financial stability.
All this to say - I would seriously weigh out where you want to be in the next 20-30 years. College is hugely, hugely expensive and if you have the drive to build competencies in valuable technical areas outside a traditional classroom setting and do that throughout your work life you can probably make as much or more than a college graduate would make. If, however, you see yourself heading the traditional pathways to management and envision yourself in a CxO chair where you have a ton of responsibility but you're also making a ton of money then go for college because in all probability it will pay off.
You know there is no universal scientific agreement on when life begins, right? Yes, as a Christian, I realize that there are some Christian groups that that take the extreme point of view that there is NO disagreement - which simply isn't true - and that life begins at the point of conception - but then there's biologists that basically agree with this. Then, there's biologists who don't. The genetic viewpoint of when life begins, for example, who don't believe life begins until we are genetically complete as a human - which is roughly 6 months into gestation.
Anyway, regardless, you'd be wrong to simply dismiss the argument that "life begins at conception" simply because some Christians say this because there are plenty of biologists who fundamentally agree with this perspective as well.
This has to be the second or third pundit I've read thus far that has proclaimed Win8, Surface, and WinRT a "complete and utter failure."
Dude - These products quite literally JUST CAME OUT. And yet, somehow, they have so much insight that they can proclaim that within 2-4 weeks of their introduction, MSFT has totally screwed the pooch this time and it is "dying."
Slow down for a second. No one expected MSFT to do Apple-like business on their tablets. Not like they're going to have people camping out overnight for a Surface. No one, including Microsoft.
It may sound like it but I'm not a slavish MS fan boy. They clearly do a LOT of crap, bu they actually are releasing numerous great products and even if they're disappointing in certain respects in the consumer marketplace - and if you can't hit it into the stratosphere like Apple you apparently can no longer compete, which is absurd - they're still quite successful and deeply entrenched in the corporate and government marketplaces. The Windows Phone is actually quite good but they are playing catch-up after years of Android and iPhones and are a distant, distant third. It doesn't mean the products are bad or that MS is "failing" per se - it just means it's going to take years and years for the Win Phone/WinRT/Win8 application ecosystem to catch up. The Windows Phone could go the way of the Zune (which also was actually quite a good product) but I don't see that happening until Microsoft has put years and years of time and effort into it.
It's unsurprising their steady movement to being an OEM has been a difficult and unpleasant one for their long-entrenched Windows OEMs. Given the very, very long relationship they've had the PC OEM hardware world it's not terribly unusual that they would react unfavorably to what Microsoft is doing.
Yes, tablets and smartphones are taking over the world - from a certain perspective - but the fact is that almost all real work gets done on either a Windows- or OSX-based laptop or desktop- STILL. Things are fundamentally shifting away from laptops and desktops for casual browsing, Facebooking, emailing, IMming, etc. etc. happening on mobile or tablet devices now - but, having said that, it's clear they're not just going to disappear overnight and it's clear more powerful PC-type devices aren't going to be disappearing just because some mouthy pundit thinks so.
Uh, no it's not, dummy. He's not moaning the loss of business class, at all, and therefore the "entire post" is not about about moaning the loss of business class, at all. Read again then complain, if you dare.
Do airline crews really go in and out of airports 3,4,5 times a day? I'd think the vast majority of their days would be going between planes or waiting and therefore they are almost staying inside the security zone. Only time I'd think they leave is to either go home in their home airport or go to the hotel. Either way that only means they've entered an airport security checkpoint once that day, same as the people they're shuttling around. Unless you have air crew that are determined to always leave airport terminals during extended layovers between flights or they just really, really want to go somewhere other than the airport for food (not a bad idea, of course), then I can't see why they'd leave the airport all that much during their typical workday.
.... the Nintendo DS became a non-starter for me. My middle "hyper-active" child destroyed 2 Nintendo DSes then after a Craigslist buy of a used DS went badly - the screen was broken - I had had enough of the overhead of the DS. I would find the cartridges all over the house and each new game was typically $35-$45 a pop (yes I know there are used games that can be had much more cheaply and there's also the flash drive attachment) but the fact was my kids were always losing the carts and/or simply breaking the DS much too easily.
I was almost ready to get a new DS for my eldest child at Costco when I scanned over to the iPod Touch for another $30 or so and it occurred to me it was ultimately way, way cheaper to own the iPod and just use the free app store games - and the occasional $0.99 game as a "treat." I practically started a trend with my friends and relatives as suddenly all their kids had iPod touches after that.
Now roughly 3 years later the Touch is still around - unbroken! - and we never lose games, pay only a buck here or there when we want a bit nicer game, and those paid games are stored in iTunes so we never lose them regardless. The iPod Touch just seems a whole lot sturdier too, if only because it doesn't have a swiveling base. Overall, for a family when you want your kids to have a road trip gadget, the iPod Touch is a way saner and ultimately less expensive choice - not to mention your kids can also have videos and music on the same device, which is also a huge win for those long road trips.
As someone who was once essentially an agnostic and and felt then very much as you do now I can tell you that you really are all in a fuss over nothing.
The "Religious Right" is a bogeyman created by liberals of the Reagan era to give some shape to the Jerry Falwells/Moral Majority-esque as an artificial construct to knock down and to give further clarity to the position of everything liberals are not.
In any case the notion that the religious right is a significant cultural force to be reckoned with is simply false. James Dobson, et. al. have never been kingmakers. They have influence within an ever-diminishing percentage of Americans that identify themselves as Christians in more than name only - less than 15% by my estimation and various statistics that get tossed around estimating how many Americans regularly attend church. Of that percentage fewer still live in what might remotely be called a committed Christian lifestyle - i.e., regularly studying their Bible and praying and living their lives and raising their children in as disciplined a manner as humanly possible, that is, as close to the truly sacrificial model of living that Christ exemplified. Church going Christians often go out of a sense of tradition, obligation, or simply to look proper in their community (esp. in the South).
America is very much a post-Christian society - perhaps not so much as Europe certainly, but definitely post-Christian - but we have this kind of artificial sheen of propriety, derived mainly from propped-up memes like the "Religious Right," which is ironically perpetuated vis-a-vis liberals convinced that there really is someone out there who wants to tear down their freedom to be liberal and godless.
There is no such problem, no fundamental lack of full intellectual freedom on every academic and personal level and in fact the academy is quite invested against the idea that Christians are a cultural and social force of import in our nation. Those that are writing books decrying the "Religious Right" so they can bulk out their CV and make sure they get published occasionally.
If you don't believe me, fine, but just look at abortion if you don't. If even half of America was truly Christian, Roe v. Wade would never have stood this long. The hue and cry would have been so outrageous that Congress would have been unable to ignore its constituency and an amendment or law would have been created to reverse it. But clearly Americans - including "Christian" Americans - want legalized abortion.
After witnessing the long and highly acrimonious battle between Safeway in Southern California and the grocery workers' union, I wouldn't touch a union, ever. The entitlement mentality of unions - i.e., "forcing" employers to give employees golden benefit packages at a huge cost that ends up draining the margins of an industry where margins are microscopically thin anyway - creates an inherently combative employee vs. employer environment. Being a devout Capitalist, it's against my nature to agree with what is basically Communist in origin and design. You compete in the open employment marketplace for your skill set and if you can't get the appropriate salary and benefit package you work hard on improving your skillset to compete - or you start your own company and work hard to generate whatever income you want. Making $60K+ with a hugely loaded pension fund and golden health benefits most even highly skilled professionals never get for an essentially unskilled labor position - i.e., clerking, washing fruit and veggies, stocking shelves, bagging groceries - give me a break. 99% of the people who are similarly unskilled will barely scrape above minimum wage and likely have no health benefits - or have to contribute half their paychecks if they want them. Does this make companies like Wal-Mart "evil" for doing this? This is the prevailing wage, like it or not, and it's up to the individual to strive for better. Perhaps the essentially Communist Utopian ideal of forced wealth redistribution (which is essentially what paying $60K to a fruit-washer amounts to) as a model for creating a better life for every person appeals to some people, but as someone who has seen things both as an employee and an employer I can say I want people to complete for whatever wage they can get and let the marketplace decide and let the individual decide what level they want to be at.
Unfortunately there are no silver bullets to solve this problem, no "remote office in a box" solutions that will solve 100% of your problems. I can pretty much guarantee that.
I work for a company that is committed to WAFS 100%, using Packeteer's iShare solution. They spent several months building their own homebrew iShare (software) on top of Win2K3 Server so they could have iShare and SMS on the same server. This setup was blessed by Packeteer after thorough testing. It is used in over 80 remote offices worldwide over a wide variety of WAN conditions. Some of these WAN conditions are quite bad.
This environment is carefully integrated into DFS so users connecting from remote offices get referrals to the proper regional file server for their WAFS-accelerated files. Obviously they want to avoid users in India getting files from the U.S. or referring through the U.S. if a file server cluster exists in India.
Presently none of the iShare boxes run in-line with the WAN connection, which basically means they're not taking full advantage of iShare's capabilities like TCP, Exchange, and Web acceleration. In a previous incarnation I used Riverbed's WAN accelerator boxes in-line and found that helped our remote sites quite a bit. I never got around to upgrading them to use the Riverbed's WAFS feature set before we were bought out, however, so can't speak to Riverbed's strength or weaknesses there.
All this said, iShare, while helpful, isn't magical. CAD applications in particular haven't been helped much and forget it if you want WAFS to help with any file that does internal locking (e.g., Access DBs). If you have lots of Access DBs across your organization, WAFS, iShare or otherwise I suspect, very likely will not help you. You need to go to enterprise-friendly databases. Access is a very hard habit to break, however, and if you're anything like my company you may have tens of thousands globally to deal with. CAD applications that may have thousands of small files will often bog down in the WAFS world. And CAD (or other) applications that require client-server version control like through PDMWorks or Teamcenter are not helped at all by WAFS. TCP acceleration could likely be helpful here, however.
The print queues remain on the local iShare server for each site since we rolled our own Win2K3 Server environment for iShare. I am not sure how feasible this would be if we used the actual iShare appliance--probably not, I'd wager.
Pure appliances are probably fine if all you need are WAFS and not much else. Beyond that a single box to do it all is more pie-in-the-sky marketing than reality.
Slashdot Mirror
PLEASE.
If you've seen sites like TechCrunch or Business Insider they are fond of writing articles with salacious titles like the one above. The article titles are deliberately inflammatory and custom-designed to create click-through traffic as well as troll-ridden "comments" where people heatedly argue about the merit or lack of merit (almost always the latter) of the article's poorly-researched content. For those reasons I've deliberately chosen not to follow those sites any more.
The OP assumes so much it's ridiculous. Office is the Sun; QuickOffice is a microscopic dot on the Sun. Of the Fortune 1000 how many, realistically, use Chromebooks? Or Google Apps, even? It's creeping up there surely, but so few it's not even a statistical aberration yet.
Long-term there is no question more and more office functions will move to the web and they will be used by more and more companies - probably mostly the small, sub-1000-5000 employee companies. The apps are getting very good but there will always be a large percentage of corporations who did not want any apps or data sitting outside the company LAN/WAN, period. In 10-15 years we may laugh about how silly we were to use apps installed on our computers but for the foreseeable future it's MS Office for the VAST majority of large-ish companies and the business community out there.
I worked for a small manufacturing company that was acquired by a much larger Fortune 500 multi-national (actually, it was acquired by a larger company and that company was in turn acquired by this F500 corporation).
Right as we were purchased the F500 company hired a new CIO - they'd basically been without a formal C-level IT executive for several months. What was the first thing he did? Outsource the IT help desk. Within 6 weeks of his hire date he had shuttered the entire Austin, TX-based North American help desk in favor of Wipro. Shortly thereafter application support went offshore to Satyam (who some may recall later got embroiled in a major CEO-led accounting scandal).
The company at the same time was also driving its FTEs in IT to telecommute, proclaiming it saved the company money when users telecommuted. When I first went into the IT office building in Silicon Valley most of the people there were FT employees (and, not to be racist but more as a point of contrast, mostly white). About 8 months later when I went down there for a meeting - like everyone else in IT I was by then working 99% of the time from home - the IT building could have passed for a call center in Bangalore. Instead of saving money as they proclaimed they were filling it up with offshore programmers, admins, architects etc. working onshore for different Stateside projects.
California of course is a behemoth of State agencies spread everywhere, not to mention hundreds more various County and Municipal agencies and departments. Just within the scope of the State of California there are massive agencies like the DMV, Health and Human Services (i.e., Welfare), State Parks, Department of Insurance, Franchise Tax Board, and dozens of regulatory agencies and sub-agencies, and the Legislature itself. Across these numerous agencies and departments there are hundreds of thousands of employees and a huge and frequently antiquated technological infrastructure. Most agencies are running independent IT silos and there's very little, if any, connectivity and coordination between these usually very large IT groups. In spite of all this for years the State's CIO was only in his position part-time (huh?) and, while he has since been replaced with a full-time CIO (probably a few times over, by now), none have been successful overhauling the State's horrific IT issues. The State's payroll system is among the most notorious in the nation and believed to be at least 30 years old and running on rock-solid but extremely EXTREMELY antiquated hardware. This is why certain mainframe programmers and administrators will NEVER lose their jobs - lifetime, guaranteed employment maintaining an archaic piece of hardware. It's so bad that when then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened an across-the-board 20% pay cut to State workers to balance the budget (don't laugh; the State HAS to have a balanced budget but you know what it does? Never passes a budget or passes it 6-12 months after it was supposed to). State Controller John Chiang fired back, proclaiming the State's payroll system "couldn't handle" an across-the-board wage adjustment. Can you imagine? Over the last 10-15 years you're easily looking at billions thrown at overhauling California's ancient IT infrastructure, with likely tens if not hundreds of thousands of unique, probably very hard to support applications "vital" to its hundreds of State departments and agencies. The progress it has made with these billions? Save the overhaul of the HHS system - a huge, mega-hundred-million expense that was also fraught with major major problems - the State is showing no signs it is making serious progress to refine its systems and infrastructure.
... and the data center operator literally ran to my cabinet after I fired it up proclaiming I was now well over the 80% of the 20amp circuit I had. Ran it anyways for a couple weeks. I don't think the machine ever really served out its intended purpose - to be a burly web/database server for a product launch that never quite happened - but it was still kind of fun to play with it at the time.
We're using an "avant cello" artist to make a point about how dismal fractional royalties are? Should we also be outraged if a "classical banjo" artist or "neo-Accordionist" also aren't making a sustainable living on completely passive revenue streams like Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, etc. etc.?
While we're at it why doesn't the guy who races dirt-track on the weekends complain that he's not making a sustainable living at what he does. What about painters, sculptors, writers, actors, and other artists... perhaps they should be complaining too that someone isn't providing them with a sustainable living.
Should they, realistically, be making $50-$80K a year selling streaming music? More importantly is there even a remote shot that an "avant cellist" would have made that kind of money in the pre-Internet days? I'd say the chances are essentially zero that an avant cellist would have a break-out year and make even a sustainable living. There's an occasional break-out classical artist - VERY occasional - but most of them make money from performing not from CD sales.
The truth is that artists - even the most talented - from time immemorial have had to do something else to make a real living and pay the bills. Perhaps not the best example but I was watching a little thing on luxury RVs - ah, my idle TV watching habits - and they interviewed Bret Michaels. He spends over 200 days a year on the road performing. THAT is how he makes a living - by working his butt off. If this gal expects to make survival income from just creating music and watching the big bucks flow in from Pandora or Spotify she's just dreaming. If she really wants to make a living she'll have to do it by building a reputation performing and, as the article indicates, that is very, very hard to do.
Honestly $2000 for 6 months of doing absolutely nothing to promote your music - ESPECIALLY "avant cello" - doesn't seem like a bad chunk of change to me.
A fairer perspective might be huge artists like the Rolling Stones or Rihanna or Katy Perry or Justin Bieber - what kind of money are they making on these services? No doubt it is much much more and are they and their business managers content with the revenue streams from these sources? Probably.
I see nothing embedded in the article or Ballmer's statement that smacks at all of what King, who was devolving deeply into socialism toward the end of his life (hence the very unsurprising quote you provided), said. To imply that there is at best short-sighted and foolish, compelled by the same coffee house liberalism King would have been quite fond of today.
Generally I am repulsed by those repulsed by the profit motive, by those who imagine there is some artificial Utopian third way other than capitalism that would advance society in any meaningful way. The pursuit of money to its own end may be evil but with the right motives it is certainly not a bad thing to make money, build companies, provide jobs, etc. etc. Communism and socialism and their numerous derivatives have all proven historically to be unmitigated social, economic, and cultural disasters, yet liberals still cling to this bizarre, unwavering belief that there is a warm fuzzy alternative to capitalism that is a heavy dose of socialism with "just enough" capitalism so that some people can have jobs and the rest of us can live off the work product of those people - or just have the country continually spiral into deeper and deeper loads of debt (i.e., the U.S., France, Italy, Greece, the U.K., among many others) that ultimately kills the country financially and socially, anyway and leads to war, rioting, revolution, etc. Or, perhaps, have everyone just work for the government and/or live off government benefits - or both.
Whom do you believe Ballmer - or indeed any company President or CEO - is protecting when they strive to have their company succeed? Ultimately they are protecting livelihoods and, if they are publicly-traded companies like Microsoft, their shareholders, which ultimately trickles down to individuals and families. And I've been laid off and been out of work enough times to know that there is no grand altruism to almost any corporation. They do what they have to do in tough times and grow in good times. They didn't owe me a job in the first place so if I'm let go, so be it. Move on to the next job the next company and see how it goes.
... that bastion of open access to the Internet.
Very, very few Chinese even have homes that would warrant this. Look at the Australian documentary on China's "ghost cities" to see the sheer volume of unfilled condos that are vastly too expensive for about 99.9% of all Chinese to afford.
"Most workplaces don't have paid sick leave"
Really? I've been in the workplace for almost 20 years now and maybe one position of the many I've held over the years DIDN'T have paid sick leave. Of course I've generally been employed as a salaried employee where benefits packages tended to be pretty decent.
I suppose menial-type positions - Taco Bell, McDonald's, etc. - that don't offer much in the way of benefits may rarely offer paid sick leave.
Agreed. It's very, very obvious what a nut McAfee is.
And bugger off dying dead tree industry.
100% spot-on. You've articulated exactly how I feel about Internet reporting and how it's declined the state of "journalism" terribly (though of course yellow journalism has existed since forever and was basically the same thing). The quantity of inflammatory "link-bait" that links to bloviating and predominantly fictitious and/or editorial reporting has grown exponentially in the last 5 years especially to the point that about 98-99% of all reporting is basically geared to simply attract clicks.
Unions have been irrelevant for a very long time really.
When the U.S. was the global center for industrial manufacturing might - steel, automobiles, electronics, raw materials of all kinds - the confluence and manufacturing hegemony allowed unions to proliferate and create in tandem with big corporations an artificial middle class. Blue collar labor lifted with the waters of America's financial superiority and power into the middle class.
Yet fundamentally this rise was not the product of capitalism but more of communism, which all unions fundamentally derive their labor ideology and history from the American Communist Party.
Now, with globalization and the utter reversal of the U.S.'s fortunes - yes, it is still probably the center of the global economy in most respects, though obviously China, India, and Russia, among others, are coming up quickly - the relevance of unions has substantively disappeared. You can't negotiate a collective bargaining contract demanding middle-class wages and Cadillac health and retirement benefits when the company can either ship the jobs overseas - as they often do, now - or simply shut down the operation (see Hostess' recent bankruptcy and liquidation for an example of a union-fueled demise).
Unions do not innovate nor do they create positive relationships with employers; indeed, they are embedded adversarial relationships with employers. Sure they and the employees can "demand" higher wages and better benefits but the simple truth is that globalization has removed their bargaining chips. Instead, labor becomes just what it should have been all along - market-driven.
I mean, perhaps he tried to, but it doesn't really sound like it. He moans and complains on a public forum then of course MSFT has to respond yet it's quite possible they were willing to help all along. You don't have to like MSFT and they have a huge, huge uphill battle against Android and iOS but they do have very good developer relationships.
... ergo all my old computer equipment has LONG since been tossed.
I've purged closets and garages full of ancient computer junk continuously since I've been married. Now I just have two work laptops, a work LCD at home, and two desktop computers of my own.
... so-called "green/cleantech" I can say unreservedly it was about 99% hype and 1% reality. They dropped at least $2B in their attempt to diversify their portfolio into greentech and acquired a number of companies - including the one I worked for - to buy their credibility in the solar panel marketplace.
As it turned out, said marketplace - and greentech in general - was and is a bust. Rich yuppies are basically the only ones that can afford to purchase, install, and maintain solar panels even with massive State and Federal government subsidies both in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. Given the very poor efficiency of solar panels and their very long term ROI, those yuppies are the only ones with more money than good sense.
For all Al Gore's, the UN, and pro-globalists' hand-wringing over AGW (and I'm not here to get into THAT debate), the reality is that most people and therefore most businesses aren't particularly concerned about climate change. When the economy tanked in the 2008-ish time frame, the corporation I worked for - the world's largest semiconductor equipment company - said they had, in their 30+ years in business, NEVER see demand drop off a cliff the way it did. Consumer demand for electronic gadgets quite literally disappeared and did so almost overnight. It was a stunning hit to the solar plexus of that industry. Needless to say, a year on I was laid off.
Greentech far from saved them - and, thankfully, at least it was mostly THEIR OWN dollars they spent on greentech investments -- and it turns out the vast majority of the dollars they dumped into those investments turned out to be giant loss. It was nearly all hype and very little reality.
On a mundane level I don't have a huge problem with the Federal government taking big bets on cutting-edge technology that private industry typically can't afford. Note: NASA, the Military in general (from whom we have GPS among many other military-to-private sector innovations to thank for), and of course DARPA from whom we may not have this little thing called the Internet.
Even if there was no real skepticism around climate change I don't believe it would matter. The money the UN wants from the major nations to "fix" climate change would end up being a giant slush fund for lavish UN diplomat expenses. I'd bet big money not a dime would go to any good or positive net effect to supposedly fix or even seriously address climate change issues beyond expensive committees filing expensive 500-page reports and jet-setting between Dubai and New York and London and Tokyo to confab with like-minded global elitists. Climate change isn't something that will be fixed on a macro scale. That, among many other reasons (i.e., the general massive corruption and ultimate pointlessness of the UN), is why so many nations are resisting funding this cluster. Many people are struggling to merely survive in this world - in fact, the vast majority of the global population is in that bind - and concern over how many hydrocarbons they're pumping into the environment is of zero to less-than-zero concern.
As someone who never finished college - flunked out of university, twice, but still got about 4 years in, most of them from JuCo - I probably make approximately the same as any college graduate would make who is my age and has my experience. I got in in the mid-90s at a small ISP doing tech support and that was effectively my launching pad for a career in IT. Most of the years in IT it's been as a senior sys/network admin operations-type role.
I am not sure I can honestly and completely say that a college degree would have been worth it for where I am today. It can be difficult to calculate the ROI when you might make only $30-$40K/year to start and have $100-$200k in college debt to pay back (which is what - $800-$1000/mo in loan repayments? At least.). It's an INSANE debt load to have when you haven't even purchased a home and possibly a car yet. And if you go to grad and/or professional school that's another at least 100-200K of debt.
I had only about $8000 to pay down which was manageable when I was making bupkis doing tech. support.
Where it IS beneficial depends on your career path. If you want to end up the Fortune 500/1000-type companies, they have pretty strict codified pathways to management and you pretty much HAVE to have your degree though you'd be surprised that most only care that it is a B.A./B.S. from anywhere school (basically ANY online school or diploma mills like U of Phoenix, Chapman U, etc.) and probably an MBA. If you're really, really lucky your company will pay for at least some of your schooling.
Obviously a place like Google and possibly Facebook wants a B.A./B.S. from a decent college/university. Supposedly your chances are better to get a job there with a degree from Stanford or Berkeley or MIT but clearly not all of their tens of thousands of employees are Ivy League or even top-50 school grads.
And, to be honest, only management is where the serious money is in an F500 company. I'm over 40 now and am only now making what I made over 10 years ago - yes it took that long to claw back from a lay-off from a Bay Area startup, another layoff (that time from a big F500 corporation - at least the severance was good that time!), and getting fired because I was sucking at a job I really hated (and losing our home and filing bankruptcy thrown in there). Chances are best case I'm getting 3-4% per annum increase with maybe a $3000-$4K bonus annually. In short, as a rank-and-file employee I'm just barely keeping up with cost of living increases, especially where I live in the Bay Area. I could go to a San Fran or South Bay company and make $120-$140K probably but then rent is double where I am now, at least, and I'm competing against 4-6 Facebook roomies who are 25 years old.
Where I am today I am pretty "comfortable" but not in any way comfortable financially. If I could make $30-$50k more per year and live here I'd be in good shape. The company is doing well and growing like crazy and has been around over 20 years and is tracking toward a half-billion in sales annually. I am definitely not ready for retirement in roughly 20-25 years as I'm only contributing the minimum to my 401(k). And let's not talk about all the insurance I *should* have - life insurance for me and probably my wife, insurance for my mom's old age, etc. etc.
So... I work little side jobs here and there (I recently had a very good one where I was pulling roughly $1500-$2000/mo additionally down but unfortunately that went away) and am working on big ideas that hopefully I can turn into a viable business. That honestly is the only way I see to finding a pathway to relative financial stability.
All this to say - I would seriously weigh out where you want to be in the next 20-30 years. College is hugely, hugely expensive and if you have the drive to build competencies in valuable technical areas outside a traditional classroom setting and do that throughout your work life you can probably make as much or more than a college graduate would make. If, however, you see yourself heading the traditional pathways to management and envision yourself in a CxO chair where you have a ton of responsibility but you're also making a ton of money then go for college because in all probability it will pay off.
You know there is no universal scientific agreement on when life begins, right? Yes, as a Christian, I realize that there are some Christian groups that that take the extreme point of view that there is NO disagreement - which simply isn't true - and that life begins at the point of conception - but then there's biologists that basically agree with this. Then, there's biologists who don't. The genetic viewpoint of when life begins, for example, who don't believe life begins until we are genetically complete as a human - which is roughly 6 months into gestation.
Anyway, regardless, you'd be wrong to simply dismiss the argument that "life begins at conception" simply because some Christians say this because there are plenty of biologists who fundamentally agree with this perspective as well.
This has to be the second or third pundit I've read thus far that has proclaimed Win8, Surface, and WinRT a "complete and utter failure."
Dude - These products quite literally JUST CAME OUT. And yet, somehow, they have so much insight that they can proclaim that within 2-4 weeks of their introduction, MSFT has totally screwed the pooch this time and it is "dying."
Slow down for a second. No one expected MSFT to do Apple-like business on their tablets. Not like they're going to have people camping out overnight for a Surface. No one, including Microsoft.
It may sound like it but I'm not a slavish MS fan boy. They clearly do a LOT of crap, bu they actually are releasing numerous great products and even if they're disappointing in certain respects in the consumer marketplace - and if you can't hit it into the stratosphere like Apple you apparently can no longer compete, which is absurd - they're still quite successful and deeply entrenched in the corporate and government marketplaces. The Windows Phone is actually quite good but they are playing catch-up after years of Android and iPhones and are a distant, distant third. It doesn't mean the products are bad or that MS is "failing" per se - it just means it's going to take years and years for the Win Phone/WinRT/Win8 application ecosystem to catch up. The Windows Phone could go the way of the Zune (which also was actually quite a good product) but I don't see that happening until Microsoft has put years and years of time and effort into it.
It's unsurprising their steady movement to being an OEM has been a difficult and unpleasant one for their long-entrenched Windows OEMs. Given the very, very long relationship they've had the PC OEM hardware world it's not terribly unusual that they would react unfavorably to what Microsoft is doing.
Yes, tablets and smartphones are taking over the world - from a certain perspective - but the fact is that almost all real work gets done on either a Windows- or OSX-based laptop or desktop- STILL. Things are fundamentally shifting away from laptops and desktops for casual browsing, Facebooking, emailing, IMming, etc. etc. happening on mobile or tablet devices now - but, having said that, it's clear they're not just going to disappear overnight and it's clear more powerful PC-type devices aren't going to be disappearing just because some mouthy pundit thinks so.
Uh, no it's not, dummy. He's not moaning the loss of business class, at all, and therefore the "entire post" is not about about moaning the loss of business class, at all. Read again then complain, if you dare.
Can't you read or is a monkey typing for you?
Do airline crews really go in and out of airports 3,4,5 times a day? I'd think the vast majority of their days would be going between planes or waiting and therefore they are almost staying inside the security zone. Only time I'd think they leave is to either go home in their home airport or go to the hotel. Either way that only means they've entered an airport security checkpoint once that day, same as the people they're shuttling around. Unless you have air crew that are determined to always leave airport terminals during extended layovers between flights or they just really, really want to go somewhere other than the airport for food (not a bad idea, of course), then I can't see why they'd leave the airport all that much during their typical workday.
.... the Nintendo DS became a non-starter for me. My middle "hyper-active" child destroyed 2 Nintendo DSes then after a Craigslist buy of a used DS went badly - the screen was broken - I had had enough of the overhead of the DS. I would find the cartridges all over the house and each new game was typically $35-$45 a pop (yes I know there are used games that can be had much more cheaply and there's also the flash drive attachment) but the fact was my kids were always losing the carts and/or simply breaking the DS much too easily.
I was almost ready to get a new DS for my eldest child at Costco when I scanned over to the iPod Touch for another $30 or so and it occurred to me it was ultimately way, way cheaper to own the iPod and just use the free app store games - and the occasional $0.99 game as a "treat." I practically started a trend with my friends and relatives as suddenly all their kids had iPod touches after that.
Now roughly 3 years later the Touch is still around - unbroken! - and we never lose games, pay only a buck here or there when we want a bit nicer game, and those paid games are stored in iTunes so we never lose them regardless. The iPod Touch just seems a whole lot sturdier too, if only because it doesn't have a swiveling base. Overall, for a family when you want your kids to have a road trip gadget, the iPod Touch is a way saner and ultimately less expensive choice - not to mention your kids can also have videos and music on the same device, which is also a huge win for those long road trips.
As someone who was once essentially an agnostic and and felt then very much as you do now I can tell you that you really are all in a fuss over nothing.
The "Religious Right" is a bogeyman created by liberals of the Reagan era to give some shape to the Jerry Falwells/Moral Majority-esque as an artificial construct to knock down and to give further clarity to the position of everything liberals are not.
In any case the notion that the religious right is a significant cultural force to be reckoned with is simply false. James Dobson, et. al. have never been kingmakers. They have influence within an ever-diminishing percentage of Americans that identify themselves as Christians in more than name only - less than 15% by my estimation and various statistics that get tossed around estimating how many Americans regularly attend church. Of that percentage fewer still live in what might remotely be called a committed Christian lifestyle - i.e., regularly studying their Bible and praying and living their lives and raising their children in as disciplined a manner as humanly possible, that is, as close to the truly sacrificial model of living that Christ exemplified. Church going Christians often go out of a sense of tradition, obligation, or simply to look proper in their community (esp. in the South).
America is very much a post-Christian society - perhaps not so much as Europe certainly, but definitely post-Christian - but we have this kind of artificial sheen of propriety, derived mainly from propped-up memes like the "Religious Right," which is ironically perpetuated vis-a-vis liberals convinced that there really is someone out there who wants to tear down their freedom to be liberal and godless.
There is no such problem, no fundamental lack of full intellectual freedom on every academic and personal level and in fact the academy is quite invested against the idea that Christians are a cultural and social force of import in our nation. Those that are writing books decrying the "Religious Right" so they can bulk out their CV and make sure they get published occasionally.
If you don't believe me, fine, but just look at abortion if you don't. If even half of America was truly Christian, Roe v. Wade would never have stood this long. The hue and cry would have been so outrageous that Congress would have been unable to ignore its constituency and an amendment or law would have been created to reverse it. But clearly Americans - including "Christian" Americans - want legalized abortion.
After witnessing the long and highly acrimonious battle between Safeway in Southern California and the grocery workers' union, I wouldn't touch a union, ever. The entitlement mentality of unions - i.e., "forcing" employers to give employees golden benefit packages at a huge cost that ends up draining the margins of an industry where margins are microscopically thin anyway - creates an inherently combative employee vs. employer environment. Being a devout Capitalist, it's against my nature to agree with what is basically Communist in origin and design. You compete in the open employment marketplace for your skill set and if you can't get the appropriate salary and benefit package you work hard on improving your skillset to compete - or you start your own company and work hard to generate whatever income you want. Making $60K+ with a hugely loaded pension fund and golden health benefits most even highly skilled professionals never get for an essentially unskilled labor position - i.e., clerking, washing fruit and veggies, stocking shelves, bagging groceries - give me a break. 99% of the people who are similarly unskilled will barely scrape above minimum wage and likely have no health benefits - or have to contribute half their paychecks if they want them. Does this make companies like Wal-Mart "evil" for doing this? This is the prevailing wage, like it or not, and it's up to the individual to strive for better. Perhaps the essentially Communist Utopian ideal of forced wealth redistribution (which is essentially what paying $60K to a fruit-washer amounts to) as a model for creating a better life for every person appeals to some people, but as someone who has seen things both as an employee and an employer I can say I want people to complete for whatever wage they can get and let the marketplace decide and let the individual decide what level they want to be at.
Are you recusing yourself or are you just happy to see me?
Unfortunately there are no silver bullets to solve this problem, no "remote office in a box" solutions that will solve 100% of your problems. I can pretty much guarantee that.
I work for a company that is committed to WAFS 100%, using Packeteer's iShare solution. They spent several months building their own homebrew iShare (software) on top of Win2K3 Server so they could have iShare and SMS on the same server. This setup was blessed by Packeteer after thorough testing. It is used in over 80 remote offices worldwide over a wide variety of WAN conditions. Some of these WAN conditions are quite bad.
This environment is carefully integrated into DFS so users connecting from remote offices get referrals to the proper regional file server for their WAFS-accelerated files. Obviously they want to avoid users in India getting files from the U.S. or referring through the U.S. if a file server cluster exists in India.
Presently none of the iShare boxes run in-line with the WAN connection, which basically means they're not taking full advantage of iShare's capabilities like TCP, Exchange, and Web acceleration. In a previous incarnation I used Riverbed's WAN accelerator boxes in-line and found that helped our remote sites quite a bit. I never got around to upgrading them to use the Riverbed's WAFS feature set before we were bought out, however, so can't speak to Riverbed's strength or weaknesses there.
All this said, iShare, while helpful, isn't magical. CAD applications in particular haven't been helped much and forget it if you want WAFS to help with any file that does internal locking (e.g., Access DBs). If you have lots of Access DBs across your organization, WAFS, iShare or otherwise I suspect, very likely will not help you. You need to go to enterprise-friendly databases. Access is a very hard habit to break, however, and if you're anything like my company you may have tens of thousands globally to deal with. CAD applications that may have thousands of small files will often bog down in the WAFS world. And CAD (or other) applications that require client-server version control like through PDMWorks or Teamcenter are not helped at all by WAFS. TCP acceleration could likely be helpful here, however.
The print queues remain on the local iShare server for each site since we rolled our own Win2K3 Server environment for iShare. I am not sure how feasible this would be if we used the actual iShare appliance--probably not, I'd wager.
Pure appliances are probably fine if all you need are WAFS and not much else. Beyond that a single box to do it all is more pie-in-the-sky marketing than reality.