That would be amusing. It would also be almost impossible to blame anything on the previous administration. It could work, but I think you could only afford to change government only once a generation...
This isn't about illegal matters. There will be many near misses and hidden details, things that only your support staff and civil servants will know. Details that are on a need to know basis. An insider can know enough to discredit a politician with carefully worded questions that force them to expose some of these near misses or hidden details. An insider working for or against you, can make or break you politically.
You've actually just described much better than I could the reasons why you have to be politically neutral. Civil Servants remain when the individual elected members change, therefore you must effectively close your trap and not get involved in politics, except where you are permitted such as the polling booth.
You are kind of also overlooking the point that civil servants have a unique opportunity to advise and guide the politicians. Sure it might not be appropriate for you to speak out on twitter, but you would certainly be able to use your position to influence.
Just think of the power a civil servant would have if you could influence in the office, vote in the polling booth, as well as undermine in public using information that is not in the public domain. That's far too much power.
Well in Government that's what whistleblowing procedures are for. You do not blog about it and expect to keep your job.
The best analogy is insider trading. When you are supposed to be supporting elected politicians, you need to keep some neutrality. If you have different political views you could undermine the government / elected officials through what you pick up behind closed doors and then expose. This isn't fair to the elected official and trust is breached.
How can you have a working relationship with your employer, when in your free time you are actively working against them. You can't. Sacking is the right thing to do. As she works in the communications department and seems to be from a legal background she should have known what she was getting in for, there are no excuses.
She has freedom of speech, they have freedom to sack incompatible employees. Case closed.
I think you've mis-calculated.. $1764 gets your 4 VMs. $12310 gets you unlimited VMs. So it's under 24 VMs (12 CPU licenses) that you might be better off running with many essential licenses. Of course the one advantage to running with multiple standard licenses is that you could having many more CPUs in the server than you could afford with Datacentre.
I expect this is what the plan is, this new pricing makes 4 way servers possibly interesting again and one wa or the other increases Windows licensing revenue.
What's also nice is they finally done away with the crippled standard vs enterprise nonsense. Paying almost double for one tiny feature (like ts session balancing) gets a bit annoying on a large TS farm. There are some silver linings here.
Well it's too late. If you need a Windows Datacenter licenses (e.g. for new hardware) then you don't really have a lot of choice, even if you do want to use 2012 or 2008. We have ours on SA. Even with a price hike, it's still a pretty good deal. What's more newsworthy is they have reduced the virtualisation count for Enterprise (down from 4 to 2) and gone to a per-CPU price.
Those businesses that are using Datacenter probably wont notice the actual price hike so much... You only run Datacenter on some serious hardware. (e.g. 20 core, 512GB RAM etc. and there are relatively few requirements in a single org), which is why I think the price hike is overdue. This is the Microsoft equivilant of the VMWare VSphere 5 VMEM fiasco... Something tells me Microsoft are in a better position than VMWARE though.
Your example is different to what you think it is.
Child with care services by court order, abducted by parents is very different to a father denied visitation by mother takes children to park without permission.
I get occassional slight buzzy shocks from certain Dell Laptops when on the mains, particularly if I touch low surface area aprts such as the speaker grills.
Youtube for education requires a sign-up process for the school or destrict. You then have to add a cookie as a custom header. Assuming Microsoft do something similar then this will probably be tougher to do at home than installing an ad blocker add-on.
I'm using that setup. I'm using a cheap, but high Capacity OCZ drive (960GB), with a software raid 1 mirror to a SATA replacement. I'm running this on Windows, which crucially always uses the FIRST drive for reads. So reads are at SSD speeds, writes are at SAS speeds.
It's working well enough. I've not benchmarked this. We have had 1 drive failure, I suggest keeping 1 cold-spare to hand. Delivery times on SSDs are pretty variable, you won't want your entire DB running on a SAS drive for too long.
Let's say this Gov Department is DVLA,. who maintain the database of vehicles and drivers registrations and licensing. They probably have a call centre / processing staff of a few thousand users. plus some management etc.
If you included the cost of maintaining that rather sensitive and important database as "IT" and divided it by the 2000 users and get £6000 then you get something like £12M a year. Which quite frankly for that sort of database is pretty cheap. I'd imagine this system has pretty high CIA impact levels. Something like a 444. So the security and high availability costs around this are going to be astronomical.
All these figures were pulled out of the air, but you get the idea. The actual IT costs as in PC hardware, access networking etc. are probably achieved at around £600-700 a year.
Dell tried a very similar thing with a "Linux button" on it's windows consumer laptops. The idea was that a very fast booting Linux distribution designed as a media player could be used, instead of completing a full windows boot.
I don't think it was very successful. There are parallels to Metro.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be amusing. It would also be almost impossible to blame anything on the previous administration. It could work, but I think you could only afford to change government only once a generation...
Jason.
You are CEO of Big Business Inc... Your wife is working for your competitor under her maiden name, she is feeding you insider information.
She is caught, what would happen ?
Jason.
This isn't about illegal matters. There will be many near misses and hidden details, things that only your support staff and civil servants will know. Details that are on a need to know basis. An insider can know enough to discredit a politician with carefully worded questions that force them to expose some of these near misses or hidden details. An insider working for or against you, can make or break you politically.
Jason
You've actually just described much better than I could the reasons why you have to be politically neutral. Civil Servants remain when the individual elected members change, therefore you must effectively close your trap and not get involved in politics, except where you are permitted such as the polling booth.
You are kind of also overlooking the point that civil servants have a unique opportunity to advise and guide the politicians. Sure it might not be appropriate for you to speak out on twitter, but you would certainly be able to use your position to influence.
Just think of the power a civil servant would have if you could influence in the office, vote in the polling booth, as well as undermine in public using information that is not in the public domain. That's far too much power.
Jason.
Well in Government that's what whistleblowing procedures are for. You do not blog about it and expect to keep your job.
The best analogy is insider trading. When you are supposed to be supporting elected politicians, you need to keep some neutrality. If you have different political views you could undermine the government / elected officials through what you pick up behind closed doors and then expose. This isn't fair to the elected official and trust is breached.
Jason.
How can you have a working relationship with your employer, when in your free time you are actively working against them. You can't. Sacking is the right thing to do. As she works in the communications department and seems to be from a legal background she should have known what she was getting in for, there are no excuses.
She has freedom of speech, they have freedom to sack incompatible employees. Case closed.
Jason.
It's legal and inexpensive, better in two ways.
Jason.
SO, how would you use this with Hotmail without giving them (ie. Microsoft) your private key? Assuming that they even support S/MIME?
Jason
I think you've mis-calculated.. $1764 gets your 4 VMs. $12310 gets you unlimited VMs. So it's under 24 VMs (12 CPU licenses) that you might be better off running with many essential licenses. Of course the one advantage to running with multiple standard licenses is that you could having many more CPUs in the server than you could afford with Datacentre.
I expect this is what the plan is, this new pricing makes 4 way servers possibly interesting again and one wa or the other increases Windows licensing revenue.
What's also nice is they finally done away with the crippled standard vs enterprise nonsense. Paying almost double for one tiny feature (like ts session balancing) gets a bit annoying on a large TS farm. There are some silver linings here.
Jason
I read my Kindle Books on my iPhone 4, I don't find it a miserable experience at all.
Jason.
Well it's too late. If you need a Windows Datacenter licenses (e.g. for new hardware) then you don't really have a lot of choice, even if you do want to use 2012 or 2008. We have ours on SA. Even with a price hike, it's still a pretty good deal. What's more newsworthy is they have reduced the virtualisation count for Enterprise (down from 4 to 2) and gone to a per-CPU price.
Those businesses that are using Datacenter probably wont notice the actual price hike so much... You only run Datacenter on some serious hardware. (e.g. 20 core, 512GB RAM etc. and there are relatively few requirements in a single org), which is why I think the price hike is overdue. This is the Microsoft equivilant of the VMWare VSphere 5 VMEM fiasco... Something tells me Microsoft are in a better position than VMWARE though.
Jason
Redhat don't sell Windows licenses last time I checked.
Jason.
Datacentre allows unlimited virtualization and consolidation ratios are climbing.
We run around 300 Windows VMs on 16 CPUs, that was a major saving over Windows Server Enterprise Licenses.
Still, the pain.
Jason.
I tend to find "Working closely" = "We have given them a quote 6 months ago"
Jason
Your example is different to what you think it is.
Child with care services by court order, abducted by parents is very different to a father denied visitation by mother takes children to park without permission.
Jason.
Was your laptop plugged into the mains?
I get occassional slight buzzy shocks from certain Dell Laptops when on the mains, particularly if I touch low surface area aprts such as the speaker grills.
Probably nothing to do with the iPhone.
Jason
Typing "pressure cooker" lists pressure cooker bomb as the 3rd suggestion in Google.
Jason.
Or caffeine withdrawal.
Known Child Porn is blocked by all or most UK ISPs anyway. There is no opt-out of this.
Jason.
Probably relief that your not having to pay for all the infrastructure and transit to host Youtube. 20%+ of that traffic is probably Youtube.
I'm sure Microsoft have 5% of NA traffic in Windows updates?
Jason.
Youtube for education requires a sign-up process for the school or destrict. You then have to add a cookie as a custom header. Assuming Microsoft do something similar then this will probably be tougher to do at home than installing an ad blocker add-on.
Jason..
Google Apps / Office 365 are free in education anyway.
But.. What K12 student is going to purchase anything anyway?
Jason.
I'm using that setup. I'm using a cheap, but high Capacity OCZ drive (960GB), with a software raid 1 mirror to a SATA replacement. I'm running this on Windows, which crucially always uses the FIRST drive for reads. So reads are at SSD speeds, writes are at SAS speeds.
It's working well enough. I've not benchmarked this. We have had 1 drive failure, I suggest keeping 1 cold-spare to hand. Delivery times on SSDs are pretty variable, you won't want your entire DB running on a SAS drive for too long.
Jason.
This is more like it.
Let's say this Gov Department is DVLA,. who maintain the database of vehicles and drivers registrations and licensing. They probably have a call centre / processing staff of a few thousand users. plus some management etc.
If you included the cost of maintaining that rather sensitive and important database as "IT" and divided it by the 2000 users and get £6000 then you get something like £12M a year. Which quite frankly for that sort of database is pretty cheap. I'd imagine this system has pretty high CIA impact levels. Something like a 444. So the security and high availability costs around this are going to be astronomical.
All these figures were pulled out of the air, but you get the idea. The actual IT costs as in PC hardware, access networking etc. are probably achieved at around £600-700 a year.
Jason.
Dell tried a very similar thing with a "Linux button" on it's windows consumer laptops. The idea was that a very fast booting Linux distribution designed as a media player could be used, instead of completing a full windows boot.
I don't think it was very successful. There are parallels to Metro.
Jason.