It wouldn't be a normal day of browsing slashdot without seeing the ubiquitous "cloud is the answer to everything" post.
Hosting services, software, and whole environments elsewhere is not a new solution, it just has a new name probably coined by a room full of technical illiterates looking at a visio network diagram.
'The cloud' has pros and cons like it always has, and always will. The primary downfall is of course a loss of control and accountability for your own systems. If you determine the benefits of hosting elsewhere outweigh this as well as the many other downfalls associated with offsite hosting, then do it. But the cloud is not, and never will be, the answer to everything.
Or pirate. Pirating is a better product, quicker, and with less hassle. The more these idiots fight that reality the more popular pirating will become.
Seriously this has to be the Microsoft bonehead move of the year. The obvious move would have been to release the x86 version first, sell the platform on the benefit of working exactly like your bulky office laptop, and then try their hand at trapping people in the walled garden with the iPad style/Microsoft store 4 years too late. Bonehead Ballmer strikes again.
Although it may seem that way I believe they would have seen this decline in innovation and popularity anyways. Apple needs to constantly produce extraordinarily innovative products to trump it's arrogant and draconian business practices. The mobile phone market was controlled by a bunch of lazy fat dinosaurs when apple entered the game flush with iPod cash. They helped move the paradigm for sure, but the market is too competitive for them to continue to innovate on that scale anymore, and it's definitely time for them to go away. We'll all be much better off without them.
"Cloud" is just market speak for hosted service. Hosting services can make a lot of sense in various situations, but not in all. And, IMHO, if you can afford it, it's always better for a company to take ownership. Should a company spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing its own robust CRM? Probably not, but that doesn't mean computers are dead, or there's significantly less need for branded server hardware. There's many needs for software outside of applications like customer management. Active directory, group policy, mail, intranets, file sharing, print services; and doing all of this securely.
I feel, primarily, that some people are getting way too carried away with all this cloud shit. There's a lot of 'what if' situations with the cloud that are completely ignored to favour short term savings.
For example, what if the company hosting my data: loses it, sells it, goes out of business, catches on fire, gives it over to the government (patriot act), or has its security compromised? What if they don't maintain their network and it gets slow, or there's several outages? What if they raise their prices suddenly or they make it difficult for me to get my data out? Etc, etc, etc.
I feel people that are selling 'the cloud' as some magic trend that is going to be the death of the way IT is traditionally done are simply getting ahead of themselves. Hosted services are merely a supplement for internal IT systems, where it makes sense; just as they always have been.
As for insisting on hosted exchange, there's many many reasons why you wouldnt want to do this in any particular case. If your company provides cell phones and wants to enforce enhanced security policies with MDM software, you want to tie mail accounts with AD, you run sharepoint, you cant have mail accessible on non company owned machines, or you just want to control your own data.
There's also situations where hosted exchange, or maybe google apps, does makes sense especially when if you do want to run it yourself... ya... you do need a sysadmin that knows how to administer it.
Oil & Gas. Most are replaced due to old software. 3 years is about the norm as they are both out of warranty at that point and usually won't have the most current version of windows. Sure some can go longer than 3 years but I can't recall a single case of a PC being 10 years old. If that was true I'd still be supporting windows 2000.
I have no idea how this has been voted up. The statements in this post are pure fantasy.
First off, on what planet to people keep their PCs for 10 years? It's more like 3... at the most; for both home and business. And on the business side you're much better off sticking with a vendor like HP both for their warranties and the ease of deploying their OEM images over the network.
Secondly, white boxes are all fine and dandy for large data centers but you're leaving out a pretty big section of the pie there. "The cloud" isn't the blanket solution for everything yet. Virtually all small and medium sized offices run internal windows domains, most still find reasons to need exchange, have internal MDM software, and alot of industries still require older server/client software. Im also seeing more of a desire to have high availability systems which is creating demand for SAN storage.
Computers aren't dead, "the cloud" (aka. web services) is nothing new, and tablets don't replace anything.
What planet do you live on? You'll be waiting a long time if you think you're ever going to live in a world where people will just do the right thing out of principle.
It was Areanet's mistake. Of course people took advantage of it, and you really can't punish them for it.
I am, by no means, a fan of Apple but have you ever bought a replacement battery for a 3-5 year old machine? It's usually somewhere on the order of $150+ and difficult to find. Invariably I find myself using the combination of the dead battery and the exorbitant price for a new one as justification to just go out and purchase a new model of laptop.
I'm not sure why this is still a debate at all. Nothing is alive until it's born and breathing. In Canada you can have an abortion up until something like 20 weeks. After that the health risks are too high for the mother. Simple. Done. If you want to start getting all philisophical over the semantics you might as well call jerking off into a kleenex 1 million first degree murders, or charge a woman with murder every month she ovulates without conception.
Unfortunately I dont believe you understand how android works. Google's android department isnt sitting around waiting for orders from hardware manufacturers and carriers on how to make a particular version of android. Android is OPEN. Therefore, manufacturers and carriers can do with it what they wish. If you dislike a particular brand of android it has nothing to do with android itself, and everything to do with the company/carrier selling the end product.
This is great because it allows the market to work with real choice, and real competition. Don't like what Samsung is doing? Buy HTC, Motorola, Google, HP, LG, Sony, etc, etc. The open nature of android is the most wonderful thing about it. With Apple you're merely stuck with your overloads idea of what the one and only current iphone should be.
I've been saying it for years: The mobile phone wars will play out just like the personal computer wars in the 80's. Ultimately the company with the business practices that are more conducive to building a healthy industry around it will win out (hint: not apple). This time it may even be better as we'll be abandoning a despotic closed system for a completely open one (instead for a slightly better despot like microsoft).
It's good to know apple is at last consistent with their exclusive, introverted, walled-garden approach to personal computing, but the free market will never accept it in the long run.
With android and ios you need a third party MDM (mobile device management) server to implement a security policy. With an MDM you can certainly restrict apps. Also if your company uses google apps instead of exchange there is some light security policy stuff for mobile phones including application auditing... it only works really well with android though.
I seriously died a little inside reading this. You guys should consider firing your entire IT staff.. like... yesterday.
Almost every company I know of has standardized to android recently. The wide range of price points for their devices is a big drawing factor and with a proper MDM and/or google apps infrastructure they are far more secure than iPhones.
My thoughts exactly. Given that steam isnt much beyond a web browser with an e-store I wouldn't think the "port to linux" would be terribly difficult. What's always been the challenge is that almost all commercial games are written using DirectX for which there is no linux support. The bulk of the effort required to realistically "bring gaming to linux" is way out of Valve's hands.
Ummm... no... sorry I can't buy this. There's no way apple's market cap should be higher than both google and microsoft. Plus, quite simply, I'm not making this up. They are well known as one of the most over-valued tech companies on the market.
Negative news for Apple will always hit their stock price hard since all the institutionalized holders know very well how over valued that company is. I think as of right now their market cap is even higher than google... which is absolutely ridiculous. The stocks performance has so far been too good for any fund managers to ignore it, but any APPL holder had better be aware that stock is poised to nose dive sometime in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't be a normal day of browsing slashdot without seeing the ubiquitous "cloud is the answer to everything" post.
Hosting services, software, and whole environments elsewhere is not a new solution, it just has a new name probably coined by a room full of technical illiterates looking at a visio network diagram.
'The cloud' has pros and cons like it always has, and always will. The primary downfall is of course a loss of control and accountability for your own systems. If you determine the benefits of hosting elsewhere outweigh this as well as the many other downfalls associated with offsite hosting, then do it. But the cloud is not, and never will be, the answer to everything.
prq has their best quarter in history!
Wow... Having just received a demo Surface and ATIV S I'd strongly advise the Army / Airforce to consult a second opinion.
Or pirate. Pirating is a better product, quicker, and with less hassle. The more these idiots fight that reality the more popular pirating will become.
Seriously this has to be the Microsoft bonehead move of the year. The obvious move would have been to release the x86 version first, sell the platform on the benefit of working exactly like your bulky office laptop, and then try their hand at trapping people in the walled garden with the iPad style/Microsoft store 4 years too late. Bonehead Ballmer strikes again.
Although it may seem that way I believe they would have seen this decline in innovation and popularity anyways. Apple needs to constantly produce extraordinarily innovative products to trump it's arrogant and draconian business practices. The mobile phone market was controlled by a bunch of lazy fat dinosaurs when apple entered the game flush with iPod cash. They helped move the paradigm for sure, but the market is too competitive for them to continue to innovate on that scale anymore, and it's definitely time for them to go away. We'll all be much better off without them.
Please let the hurricane kill situation....
"Cloud" is just market speak for hosted service. Hosting services can make a lot of sense in various situations, but not in all. And, IMHO, if you can afford it, it's always better for a company to take ownership. Should a company spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing its own robust CRM? Probably not, but that doesn't mean computers are dead, or there's significantly less need for branded server hardware. There's many needs for software outside of applications like customer management. Active directory, group policy, mail, intranets, file sharing, print services; and doing all of this securely.
I feel, primarily, that some people are getting way too carried away with all this cloud shit. There's a lot of 'what if' situations with the cloud that are completely ignored to favour short term savings.
For example, what if the company hosting my data: loses it, sells it, goes out of business, catches on fire, gives it over to the government (patriot act), or has its security compromised? What if they don't maintain their network and it gets slow, or there's several outages? What if they raise their prices suddenly or they make it difficult for me to get my data out? Etc, etc, etc.
I feel people that are selling 'the cloud' as some magic trend that is going to be the death of the way IT is traditionally done are simply getting ahead of themselves. Hosted services are merely a supplement for internal IT systems, where it makes sense; just as they always have been.
As for insisting on hosted exchange, there's many many reasons why you wouldnt want to do this in any particular case. If your company provides cell phones and wants to enforce enhanced security policies with MDM software, you want to tie mail accounts with AD, you run sharepoint, you cant have mail accessible on non company owned machines, or you just want to control your own data.
There's also situations where hosted exchange, or maybe google apps, does makes sense especially when if you do want to run it yourself... ya... you do need a sysadmin that knows how to administer it.
Oil & Gas. Most are replaced due to old software. 3 years is about the norm as they are both out of warranty at that point and usually won't have the most current version of windows. Sure some can go longer than 3 years but I can't recall a single case of a PC being 10 years old. If that was true I'd still be supporting windows 2000.
I have no idea how this has been voted up. The statements in this post are pure fantasy. First off, on what planet to people keep their PCs for 10 years? It's more like 3... at the most; for both home and business. And on the business side you're much better off sticking with a vendor like HP both for their warranties and the ease of deploying their OEM images over the network.
Secondly, white boxes are all fine and dandy for large data centers but you're leaving out a pretty big section of the pie there. "The cloud" isn't the blanket solution for everything yet. Virtually all small and medium sized offices run internal windows domains, most still find reasons to need exchange, have internal MDM software, and alot of industries still require older server/client software. Im also seeing more of a desire to have high availability systems which is creating demand for SAN storage.
Computers aren't dead, "the cloud" (aka. web services) is nothing new, and tablets don't replace anything.
What planet do you live on? You'll be waiting a long time if you think you're ever going to live in a world where people will just do the right thing out of principle.
It was Areanet's mistake. Of course people took advantage of it, and you really can't punish them for it.
I am, by no means, a fan of Apple but have you ever bought a replacement battery for a 3-5 year old machine? It's usually somewhere on the order of $150+ and difficult to find. Invariably I find myself using the combination of the dead battery and the exorbitant price for a new one as justification to just go out and purchase a new model of laptop.
I'm not sure why this is still a debate at all. Nothing is alive until it's born and breathing. In Canada you can have an abortion up until something like 20 weeks. After that the health risks are too high for the mother. Simple. Done. If you want to start getting all philisophical over the semantics you might as well call jerking off into a kleenex 1 million first degree murders, or charge a woman with murder every month she ovulates without conception.
how?
Unfortunately I dont believe you understand how android works. Google's android department isnt sitting around waiting for orders from hardware manufacturers and carriers on how to make a particular version of android. Android is OPEN. Therefore, manufacturers and carriers can do with it what they wish. If you dislike a particular brand of android it has nothing to do with android itself, and everything to do with the company/carrier selling the end product.
This is great because it allows the market to work with real choice, and real competition. Don't like what Samsung is doing? Buy HTC, Motorola, Google, HP, LG, Sony, etc, etc. The open nature of android is the most wonderful thing about it. With Apple you're merely stuck with your overloads idea of what the one and only current iphone should be.
I've been saying it for years: The mobile phone wars will play out just like the personal computer wars in the 80's. Ultimately the company with the business practices that are more conducive to building a healthy industry around it will win out (hint: not apple). This time it may even be better as we'll be abandoning a despotic closed system for a completely open one (instead for a slightly better despot like microsoft).
It's good to know apple is at last consistent with their exclusive, introverted, walled-garden approach to personal computing, but the free market will never accept it in the long run.
With android and ios you need a third party MDM (mobile device management) server to implement a security policy. With an MDM you can certainly restrict apps. Also if your company uses google apps instead of exchange there is some light security policy stuff for mobile phones including application auditing... it only works really well with android though.
I seriously died a little inside reading this. You guys should consider firing your entire IT staff.. like... yesterday.
Almost every company I know of has standardized to android recently. The wide range of price points for their devices is a big drawing factor and with a proper MDM and/or google apps infrastructure they are far more secure than iPhones.
.... Maybe I should go back to reddit... they appreciate a good combo.
Meh... who needs a working camera anyways? :)
FYI the google voice search (read: siri) is phenomenal in JB.
My thoughts exactly. Given that steam isnt much beyond a web browser with an e-store I wouldn't think the "port to linux" would be terribly difficult. What's always been the challenge is that almost all commercial games are written using DirectX for which there is no linux support. The bulk of the effort required to realistically "bring gaming to linux" is way out of Valve's hands.
Ummm... no... sorry I can't buy this. There's no way apple's market cap should be higher than both google and microsoft. Plus, quite simply, I'm not making this up. They are well known as one of the most over-valued tech companies on the market.
What? No, I -
No need to wait. Google: cyanogen mod for samsung s3. - Posted from my s3 running jellybean
Negative news for Apple will always hit their stock price hard since all the institutionalized holders know very well how over valued that company is. I think as of right now their market cap is even higher than google... which is absolutely ridiculous. The stocks performance has so far been too good for any fund managers to ignore it, but any APPL holder had better be aware that stock is poised to nose dive sometime in the future.