This story was mildly interesting to me, because my COBOL teacher met Rear Admiral Hopper in person.
Did you know she coined the term "debug", because that was how she fixed an errant program? Found the relay that wasn't connecting, and removed a moth? Taped it into the log book with "Debugged the computer".
I have seen two articles that I think should have been kept; but some asshole that Mr. Wales trusts decided that they should be deleted. Seems like deleting articles is a power trip to me.
So whenever Mr. Wales asks for money, I am reminded to say no because he allows power tripping editors to ruin Wikipedia. Why would I donate money to these people?
You have a point. ActiveSync is free. But you get what you pay for - no protection from data leakage.
If the BB OS could be a virtual machine image (encrypted, sandboxed) inside an iPhone or Android phone, I would suggest that RIM pitch the idea of having control over the corporate data as Cost Of Doing Business. I'm pretty sure a large number of corporate users would be willing to pay for that.
But yeah, if Microsoft or Apple or Google decided to implement the same and give it away for free, RIM would be even more screwed than they are now.
It is a plus, but it's not nearly enough. Due to a stupid IRS ruling, we're being pushed toward people buying their own phone and we give them a stipend for corporate use. I don't see my end users opting for a BB (or BB + PlayBook) when they can get an iPhone or Galaxy or Hero or Droid.
I hate that the company data is going to be mixed with the user's personal data.
We're going to be dumping our BlackBerrys and our BES CALs because the Android and IOS devices can do almost as much, with far less security. The reality is that the big bosses want the latest high-tech jewelry, and the BB is The Old Stuff.
But RIM is fixated on selling the hardware of it's BB phone. The PlayBook is a large screen and keyboard for the BB phone. Your corporate email is still kept in the BB phone - not the PlayBook. I've got bad news for you RIM: no-one wants to wear two phones, one for work and one for personal. Even though the personal phones aren't nearly as good as the BB from a security standpoint, they are good enough. And frankly they are better at email/calendar/PIM/chat. Bye bye BB. And with that, I don't need a PlayBook either.
As an admin who has the duty to protect our information assets, I would far prefer to have those assets protected by our BES. It's an established solution and works well.
Instead of trying to make the PlayBook drag the BB along as the second phone (three devices total (are you serious RIM???)), they should be trying to give me the protection of the BES in my IOS or Android device. One device plus high security - that is an easy sell. At least this way they could keep that BES CALs revenue coming in.
Another thing wrong with switching over to personal phones is the mixing of personal data with the corporate data. But it will happen because the personal phone apps see integration as a good thing - it increases the data mining potential.
RIM is trying to make the walled garden larger by importing Android apps. I would far far prefer that my IOS or Android be able to launch the tiny walled (fortified with extreme prejudice) garden of my corporate data protected by the BES.
Revision 9 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure state that if a party has reason to believe that evidence may be subpoenaed, the party must keep the data (or face sanction). It's a lose-lose situation either way, and this way Google doesn't look like a place that is trying to hide a crime.
I have also learned that there is something called "in camera" which means that during a trial, you can show your data to the judge in person (he can view it with his eyes) and then make a decision whether the data should become a part of the official record. So evidence can make a difference in a trial but still be kept private.
So, I agree with you. For these exact reasons, I'm not connecting my personal phone to the system, and I carry a company supplied BlackBerry with remote-wipe capability. However, there is a wrinkle.
Tax law in the USA is such that if you make personal phone calls on your company phone, then that (the subsidy that covers the cost) is considered income for you. It is absolutely insane, and every year I hear from the phone reps "Bill XYZ was introduced to remove phone calls from taxable income status." Don't know that the bills ever got passed, though.
So if your accounting department wants to keep it's nose clean with the IRS, having a company issued phone is a horrible records keeping nightmare. Every single phone call needs to be checked for business or personal. Gah! The answer? Have the employee get a personal phone, and supply a monthly stipend. Tax-accounting-wise, it is simple.
But yeah, as someone who needs to protect the company information assets, it is horrible. You're going to retire after 30 years of service? Here's a going away present: lose all the pictures of your grandkids you took on your personal phone. It truly sucks.
Microsoft has a history of writing code to screw over customers of non-Microsoft products. It's a position you can take only if you are so big that fucking over a few small customers doesn't hurt you in the long run.
But some of us small customers still have long memories.
We just converted from Xiotech to NetApp, and the NetApp is crap. "High end" isn't how we would describe NetApp. And their sales people lied to us (er, said things that may technically be true but are about as honest as 'pigs CAN fly with sufficient initial velocity'). They also claimed that de-dupe would save us 50% storage space. Lies.
It was a huge mistake. If it weren't for the political loss of face of having spent so much money, we would scrap it all and start over with any vendor other than NetApp.
A sixteen year ROI is never worth it. In fifteen years, the technology to replace it will be FAR advanced, and cheaper, and you will still have another year left to break even on this sucker.
The only saving grace to blowing this sort of money on a project, is that you are funding R&D for the company to develop it - assuming that the NEXT consumer gets a price break because the development has already been paid for. Otherwise, you are just lining the pockets of the Friends Of Bureaucrats.
I've used "Navigate to (name of store or gas station brand)" many times (probably more than a hundred, and I'm no road warrior). It is amazingly good at this three word task. Speaking home addresses is less successful, but that is partly because your average street address in another city is six terms, and pauses in speaking are interpreted as a 'finished' signal. With a person over the phone, the practice is to pause after the street, so the person digests it before you move on to the town. The machine wants to get on with it, and does.
I agree with you - it is nice to see the manufacturer design it in (and supposedly figure out how to extend the design in a way that makes computing pervasive within the cabin). However, I would prefer some sort of docking station for my Droid / iPod. My Droid will soon be a MiFi, and is already a super GPS. And speech-to-SMS box. And car radio. And law-enforcement-style video recorder. And eventually, a Hulu streamer.
My point is that with a dock for a general purpose device, I could do far more, and, not be locked into a monthly fee for a service my general purpose device (will soon) already provide.
I need a dock that provides a charging station without clumsy cables, line of sight to the GPS, a place where I can see the on-screen map, provide aux-in to the stereo, and an unobstructed view out the front windshield, and cooling. If you want to route an HDMI cable to the back passenger media station(s), that's a good idea too.
I mention cooling because in GPS mode my device tends to run hot. It is doing a lot, so this makes sense. I don't think it needs refrigeration, per se, but a fan might be nice. It is probably overheating due to the car mount, which wraps around the box and traps heat.
I've been on Multiply for a while now, since the migration of The Circle. I'm reasonably impressed. It hasn't been perfect, but it really has been pretty good. I spend more time there than I do Facebook. Though Facebook has the draw of more popularity. I would like it if my high-school friends found Multiply instead of Facebook.
dang it, have an error: "power down those blades for power savings" should be "power down the empty blades for power savings". Where's the 'edit my post button'?
It is one of those things that once you start using it, the benefits become apparent.
Here are some:
1) One application on one machine. No more wondering if application X has somehow messed up application Y. The writers of the software probably developed the application in a clean environment, and this lets you run it in a clean environment. Gets rid of vendor finger-pointing, too.
2) One application on one machine. If application X fouls the nest, you can reboot it and know that you are not also terminating applications Y, Z, A, and B.
3) Machine portability. The drivers in a VM guest are generic -and- uniform. Nothing inside the (guest) machine changes if you move the machine from a host with an Intel NIC to a host with a Broadcom NIC. The benefit here is that when hardware fails (and it will), it is pretty quick and easy to assign the boot disk to a different host, and boot the machine up. Think 10 - 30 minutes (per machine) to recover from a burned up power supply*.
4) Machine portability. There are some solutions that let you auto-fail-over to a new host when the guest stops responding. That burned up power supply could now be a two minute outage and NO emergency notification call.
5) Machine portability. Platespin lets you auto-migrate machines on a schedule to a few blades at night, power down those blades for power savings, and then power them up a little before business hours and migrate back. In a large data center, the electricity savings is enough to make it worth it.
6) Machine flexibility. Does application X not need much in the way of processing power? With the VM manager software, assign it one CPU and 256 MB RAM. Later find out that wasn't enough? Up the specs and reboot.
7) Reboot speed. In paravirtualized environments, the OS is already loaded in the host VM, so the guest VM just links and loads. I've seen entire machine reboots that take 16 seconds.
For what it is worth, when a doctor commits thievery by submitting false claims to the government, the government pays them anyway. Because if we didn't, they wouldn't work for us, and that would eliminate our reason for being....
Private insurance needs to worry about remaining in business if they give all their cash away to thieves.
True reform is only possible if we vastly increase the number of doctors. Then the thieves could be left out in the cold, while new just-graduated-from-school doctors compete for the business.
60 Minutes did a story on this system a few months ago. As best I recollect:
1) The initial plan was vague. If you don't have an actual plan, then you won't ever have to call call the project done. This is good for Boeing, bad for the people paying the bills.
2) They finally decided that the plan would be that computers and cameras should surveil the area between towers, and, alert the people running the dispatch center of suspicious activity. "Suspicious activity" = people in the area. No person would be walking in these areas unless they were trying to cross the border illegally.
3) Boeing designed and delivered the initial system. THEN sat down the dispatch people at the consoles. Who promptly said it sucked and was worthless. You heard that right: Boeing did NOT bother to bring in the users who would use the system during the design phase. Also, it was here that the 'discovery' was made that the optics and cameras were WAY more expensive than Boeing originally said (because a web-cam is one thing, and camera that can resolve a clear picture at two miles is another). Of course, better optics means (a lot) more data (which the networks couldn't handle), larger storage requirements for the DVR, etc.
4) Re-work time.
5) Finally the trial tests. Oops. The heat seeking portion doesn't work in the heat of a desert. The radar kept triggering on wind-blown bushes and the occasional Rocket J. Squirrel. The radar didn't work for people sized targets in the rain. If you are a group of bad guys and see that that the camera is swiveling toward you, freeze for a bit (drop to your hands and knees and pretend to be the authorized Bullwinkle J. Moose). The camera will move on. The electronics equipment couldn't handle the heat. The electronics equipment couldn't handle the dust. The dust clogged gear was on the wrong end of very tall / difficult to climb towers.
6) In-truck computers. The Border Patrol was supposed to chase down people being guided by laptops hooked back to base. Except it is essentially impossible to drive around in the (extremely bumpy) desert AND work a computer at the same time.
Did I mention that a single World-War One style trench subverts the whole thing?
Nine towers and 28 miles in, the problems seem insurmountable. Boeing keeps saying they could deliver a system that works though. Just throw gobs more billion at it.... It's a 2,000 mile border.
Yeah - depends on your valuation of 'good'. "Better to make stronger products Good" - yes, Microsoft needs the competition. "Easier to rake in the money Good" - Microsoft would prefer to have less competition.
Although it would be good for consumers if the DOJ applied pressure to Microsoft, I don't see it happening in any administration in the next eight years.
You are correct - I meant the word systematic. Thanks.
The thing with Microsoft went further though. Specific coding by Microsoft to crash or hinder Novell software. Somewhere there is a list of five coding changes Microsoft did to make various Novell products crash or appear to fail.
I agree. It is all gain for Microsoft when Novell burns.
No more competition in the user directory space: Active Directory for the ultimate win. (Local data center) Email is down to Exchange versus Domino. MS SMS no longer has to compete with ZENworks. (Note that Novell has ZENworks for Linux now, too). The Google Wave server that Novell is working on will go down in the flames too.
Most of the migrations will be from SuSE to Red Hat - but some will be from SuSE to Windows. And all those Red Hat users will have to authenticate to Active Directory. It won't be any surprise when the Windows clients get right in to Windows servers, but the Red Hat boxen have inexplicable delays, random timeouts, and "what we have here... is a failure to... authenticate".
It's all win for Microsoft when their potential (hold-out) customers lose an alternative.
Novell was under systemic attack by Microsoft for decades. It worked, too.
When Novell is gone, Microsoft's only real competitors left in the corporate data center will be Red Hat and Solaris. Those people currently running SuSE will migrate to Red Hat, making them a bigger target for MS. Solaris is still there, but seems to be floundering a bit under Oracle. So one is a rising star, and the other, not. (I say that, but I don't know. OpenSolaris may be way more popular than I think).
Luckily for Red Hat, Microsoft is more worried about Google and the cloud at the moment. But that can easily change, if Microsoft has a few extra-lean quarters. Particularly if it is found that some large portions of the cloud run Red Hat.
The other lucky thing for Red Hat is that the hard-charging leader of Microsoft is gone, and the resultant internal squabbling keeps the MS VPs distracted. But that too can easily change, if Microsoft has a few extra-lean quarters. Taking it to extremes... if Bill Gates gets bored with the charity thing and comes back to 'rescue' Microsoft, I'd take short-sell positions on Red Hat.
This was a really big part of it. The other aspect that people seem to ignore was the back-and-forth sales calls on big customers by both Novell and Microsoft.
Novell: "We've got this great OS now, and it is inexpensive, and if you later want to part ways, there's Red Hat and other companies who you can turn to for support. It's the new thing, and Microsoft is 'Legacy'. You want the newest and the best, don't you?"
Customer: "Well Microsoft does kind of suck, and is expensive."
Microsoft: "So Novell is telling you to become the next AutoZone, hmmm? They got sued for running an OS with patent problems you know."
Customer: "Dang. We're already a big company that attracts frivolous lawsuits. Novell - we are not interested."
The Novell sales reps goes back to their bosses. They hatch a plan. Microsoft takes the bait.
Novell: "Remember how Microsoft was warning you about Linux? Well, they sell Linux now. Ours! You interested?"
What is Microsoft going to counter with? "Uh, we'll take your money, but we might sue you later." What would that do to their future sales (of all types)?
You are 100% correct that Novell did think about Red Hat as a competitor, and that drove a big part of the decision. It was a huge mistake to turn on Red Hat. When you try to feed your teammates to the alligator, all you are really doing is trying to be eaten last. With your teammates, you could have slain the alligator.
But they did choose to say "We and Microsoft are buddies now, and you won't have any trouble running Windows VMs under SLES, or SLES VMs under Hyper-V. Neener neener neener Red Hat." It may have gotten them a few sales, but the taunting of a beloved teammate sure pissed a lot of people off. Not to mention becoming best buds with the alligator.
And then leave the movie / conference / restaurant / dinner party for some place outside where your conversation isn't going to bother everyone else.
The caller chose to interrupt whatever it was you are doing. For that, they get "Hang on" and silence until you can relocate to a place where their interruption isn't so annoying to the rest of us.
It gets worse. Xerox wants a consulting division, so they are planning to buy Affiliated Computer Services. If Dell and HP can buy consulting companies, why shouldn't Xerox?
Problem is, ACS is in the bottom 25 of worst places to work. (Entry #21). The former head of ACS left due to a back-dating-stock-options scandal, and as a part of his golden parachute, the ACS Board gave him a $1 million per year salary allowance for security services. He needs $1 million per year in bodyguards, and the Board gave it to him. Oh yeah, they are a class act with the utmost integrity.
And Xerox wants to marry them.
In my opinion, if you have Xerox stock, sell it. Sell it now.
Slashdot Mirror
As of four days ago, they went to /dev/null.
This story was mildly interesting to me, because my COBOL teacher met Rear Admiral Hopper in person.
Did you know she coined the term "debug", because that was how she fixed an errant program? Found the relay that wasn't connecting, and removed a moth? Taped it into the log book with "Debugged the computer".
I feel they are a problem.
I have seen two articles that I think should have been kept; but some asshole that Mr. Wales trusts decided that they should be deleted. Seems like deleting articles is a power trip to me.
So whenever Mr. Wales asks for money, I am reminded to say no because he allows power tripping editors to ruin Wikipedia. Why would I donate money to these people?
You have a point. ActiveSync is free. But you get what you pay for - no protection from data leakage.
If the BB OS could be a virtual machine image (encrypted, sandboxed) inside an iPhone or Android phone, I would suggest that RIM pitch the idea of having control over the corporate data as Cost Of Doing Business. I'm pretty sure a large number of corporate users would be willing to pay for that.
But yeah, if Microsoft or Apple or Google decided to implement the same and give it away for free, RIM would be even more screwed than they are now.
It is a plus, but it's not nearly enough. Due to a stupid IRS ruling, we're being pushed toward people buying their own phone and we give them a stipend for corporate use. I don't see my end users opting for a BB (or BB + PlayBook) when they can get an iPhone or Galaxy or Hero or Droid.
I hate that the company data is going to be mixed with the user's personal data.
We're going to be dumping our BlackBerrys and our BES CALs because the Android and IOS devices can do almost as much, with far less security. The reality is that the big bosses want the latest high-tech jewelry, and the BB is The Old Stuff.
But RIM is fixated on selling the hardware of it's BB phone. The PlayBook is a large screen and keyboard for the BB phone. Your corporate email is still kept in the BB phone - not the PlayBook. I've got bad news for you RIM: no-one wants to wear two phones, one for work and one for personal. Even though the personal phones aren't nearly as good as the BB from a security standpoint, they are good enough. And frankly they are better at email/calendar/PIM/chat. Bye bye BB. And with that, I don't need a PlayBook either.
As an admin who has the duty to protect our information assets, I would far prefer to have those assets protected by our BES. It's an established solution and works well.
Instead of trying to make the PlayBook drag the BB along as the second phone (three devices total (are you serious RIM???)), they should be trying to give me the protection of the BES in my IOS or Android device. One device plus high security - that is an easy sell. At least this way they could keep that BES CALs revenue coming in.
Another thing wrong with switching over to personal phones is the mixing of personal data with the corporate data. But it will happen because the personal phone apps see integration as a good thing - it increases the data mining potential.
RIM is trying to make the walled garden larger by importing Android apps. I would far far prefer that my IOS or Android be able to launch the tiny walled (fortified with extreme prejudice) garden of my corporate data protected by the BES.
Revision 9 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure state that if a party has reason to believe that evidence may be subpoenaed, the party must keep the data (or face sanction). It's a lose-lose situation either way, and this way Google doesn't look like a place that is trying to hide a crime.
I have also learned that there is something called "in camera" which means that during a trial, you can show your data to the judge in person (he can view it with his eyes) and then make a decision whether the data should become a part of the official record. So evidence can make a difference in a trial but still be kept private.
So, I agree with you. For these exact reasons, I'm not connecting my personal phone to the system, and I carry a company supplied BlackBerry with remote-wipe capability. However, there is a wrinkle.
Tax law in the USA is such that if you make personal phone calls on your company phone, then that (the subsidy that covers the cost) is considered income for you. It is absolutely insane, and every year I hear from the phone reps "Bill XYZ was introduced to remove phone calls from taxable income status." Don't know that the bills ever got passed, though.
So if your accounting department wants to keep it's nose clean with the IRS, having a company issued phone is a horrible records keeping nightmare. Every single phone call needs to be checked for business or personal. Gah! The answer? Have the employee get a personal phone, and supply a monthly stipend. Tax-accounting-wise, it is simple.
But yeah, as someone who needs to protect the company information assets, it is horrible. You're going to retire after 30 years of service? Here's a going away present: lose all the pictures of your grandkids you took on your personal phone. It truly sucks.
Microsoft has a history of writing code to screw over customers of non-Microsoft products. It's a position you can take only if you are so big that fucking over a few small customers doesn't hurt you in the long run.
But some of us small customers still have long memories.
We just converted from Xiotech to NetApp, and the NetApp is crap. "High end" isn't how we would describe NetApp. And their sales people lied to us (er, said things that may technically be true but are about as honest as 'pigs CAN fly with sufficient initial velocity'). They also claimed that de-dupe would save us 50% storage space. Lies.
It was a huge mistake. If it weren't for the political loss of face of having spent so much money, we would scrap it all and start over with any vendor other than NetApp.
A sixteen year ROI is never worth it. In fifteen years, the technology to replace it will be FAR advanced, and cheaper, and you will still have another year left to break even on this sucker.
The only saving grace to blowing this sort of money on a project, is that you are funding R&D for the company to develop it - assuming that the NEXT consumer gets a price break because the development has already been paid for. Otherwise, you are just lining the pockets of the Friends Of Bureaucrats.
I've used "Navigate to (name of store or gas station brand)" many times (probably more than a hundred, and I'm no road warrior). It is amazingly good at this three word task. Speaking home addresses is less successful, but that is partly because your average street address in another city is six terms, and pauses in speaking are interpreted as a 'finished' signal. With a person over the phone, the practice is to pause after the street, so the person digests it before you move on to the town. The machine wants to get on with it, and does.
I agree with you - it is nice to see the manufacturer design it in (and supposedly figure out how to extend the design in a way that makes computing pervasive within the cabin). However, I would prefer some sort of docking station for my Droid / iPod. My Droid will soon be a MiFi, and is already a super GPS. And speech-to-SMS box. And car radio. And law-enforcement-style video recorder. And eventually, a Hulu streamer.
My point is that with a dock for a general purpose device, I could do far more, and, not be locked into a monthly fee for a service my general purpose device (will soon) already provide.
I need a dock that provides a charging station without clumsy cables, line of sight to the GPS, a place where I can see the on-screen map, provide aux-in to the stereo, and an unobstructed view out the front windshield, and cooling. If you want to route an HDMI cable to the back passenger media station(s), that's a good idea too.
I mention cooling because in GPS mode my device tends to run hot. It is doing a lot, so this makes sense. I don't think it needs refrigeration, per se, but a fan might be nice. It is probably overheating due to the car mount, which wraps around the box and traps heat.
I've been on Multiply for a while now, since the migration of The Circle. I'm reasonably impressed. It hasn't been perfect, but it really has been pretty good. I spend more time there than I do Facebook. Though Facebook has the draw of more popularity. I would like it if my high-school friends found Multiply instead of Facebook.
dang it, have an error: "power down those blades for power savings" should be "power down the empty blades for power savings". Where's the 'edit my post button'?
It is one of those things that once you start using it, the benefits become apparent.
Here are some:
1) One application on one machine. No more wondering if application X has somehow messed up application Y. The writers of the software probably developed the application in a clean environment, and this lets you run it in a clean environment. Gets rid of vendor finger-pointing, too.
2) One application on one machine. If application X fouls the nest, you can reboot it and know that you are not also terminating applications Y, Z, A, and B.
3) Machine portability. The drivers in a VM guest are generic -and- uniform. Nothing inside the (guest) machine changes if you move the machine from a host with an Intel NIC to a host with a Broadcom NIC. The benefit here is that when hardware fails (and it will), it is pretty quick and easy to assign the boot disk to a different host, and boot the machine up. Think 10 - 30 minutes (per machine) to recover from a burned up power supply*.
4) Machine portability. There are some solutions that let you auto-fail-over to a new host when the guest stops responding. That burned up power supply could now be a two minute outage and NO emergency notification call.
5) Machine portability. Platespin lets you auto-migrate machines on a schedule to a few blades at night, power down those blades for power savings, and then power them up a little before business hours and migrate back. In a large data center, the electricity savings is enough to make it worth it.
6) Machine flexibility. Does application X not need much in the way of processing power? With the VM manager software, assign it one CPU and 256 MB RAM. Later find out that wasn't enough? Up the specs and reboot.
7) Reboot speed. In paravirtualized environments, the OS is already loaded in the host VM, so the guest VM just links and loads. I've seen entire machine reboots that take 16 seconds.
Along these lines, an anecdote from my life: How to add RAM to a server so nobody notices: virtualize
Hope this helps explain why some people are such a fan of virtualization.
*This is really a benefit that comes from disconnecting the machine from its disks, but VM and SAN go exceptionally well together.
For what it is worth, when a doctor commits thievery by submitting false claims to the government, the government pays them anyway. Because if we didn't, they wouldn't work for us, and that would eliminate our reason for being....
Private insurance needs to worry about remaining in business if they give all their cash away to thieves.
True reform is only possible if we vastly increase the number of doctors. Then the thieves could be left out in the cold, while new just-graduated-from-school doctors compete for the business.
60 Minutes did a story on this system a few months ago. As best I recollect:
1) The initial plan was vague. If you don't have an actual plan, then you won't ever have to call call the project done. This is good for Boeing, bad for the people paying the bills.
2) They finally decided that the plan would be that computers and cameras should surveil the area between towers, and, alert the people running the dispatch center of suspicious activity. "Suspicious activity" = people in the area. No person would be walking in these areas unless they were trying to cross the border illegally.
3) Boeing designed and delivered the initial system. THEN sat down the dispatch people at the consoles. Who promptly said it sucked and was worthless. You heard that right: Boeing did NOT bother to bring in the users who would use the system during the design phase. Also, it was here that the 'discovery' was made that the optics and cameras were WAY more expensive than Boeing originally said (because a web-cam is one thing, and camera that can resolve a clear picture at two miles is another). Of course, better optics means (a lot) more data (which the networks couldn't handle), larger storage requirements for the DVR, etc.
4) Re-work time.
5) Finally the trial tests. Oops. The heat seeking portion doesn't work in the heat of a desert. The radar kept triggering on wind-blown bushes and the occasional Rocket J. Squirrel. The radar didn't work for people sized targets in the rain. If you are a group of bad guys and see that that the camera is swiveling toward you, freeze for a bit (drop to your hands and knees and pretend to be the authorized Bullwinkle J. Moose). The camera will move on. The electronics equipment couldn't handle the heat. The electronics equipment couldn't handle the dust. The dust clogged gear was on the wrong end of very tall / difficult to climb towers.
6) In-truck computers. The Border Patrol was supposed to chase down people being guided by laptops hooked back to base. Except it is essentially impossible to drive around in the (extremely bumpy) desert AND work a computer at the same time.
Did I mention that a single World-War One style trench subverts the whole thing?
Nine towers and 28 miles in, the problems seem insurmountable. Boeing keeps saying they could deliver a system that works though. Just throw gobs more billion at it.... It's a 2,000 mile border.
Yeah - depends on your valuation of 'good'. "Better to make stronger products Good" - yes, Microsoft needs the competition. "Easier to rake in the money Good" - Microsoft would prefer to have less competition.
Although it would be good for consumers if the DOJ applied pressure to Microsoft, I don't see it happening in any administration in the next eight years.
You are correct - I meant the word systematic. Thanks.
The thing with Microsoft went further though. Specific coding by Microsoft to crash or hinder Novell software. Somewhere there is a list of five coding changes Microsoft did to make various Novell products crash or appear to fail.
I agree. It is all gain for Microsoft when Novell burns.
No more competition in the user directory space: Active Directory for the ultimate win. (Local data center) Email is down to Exchange versus Domino. MS SMS no longer has to compete with ZENworks. (Note that Novell has ZENworks for Linux now, too). The Google Wave server that Novell is working on will go down in the flames too.
Most of the migrations will be from SuSE to Red Hat - but some will be from SuSE to Windows. And all those Red Hat users will have to authenticate to Active Directory. It won't be any surprise when the Windows clients get right in to Windows servers, but the Red Hat boxen have inexplicable delays, random timeouts, and "what we have here... is a failure to... authenticate".
It's all win for Microsoft when their potential (hold-out) customers lose an alternative.
Novell was under systemic attack by Microsoft for decades. It worked, too.
When Novell is gone, Microsoft's only real competitors left in the corporate data center will be Red Hat and Solaris. Those people currently running SuSE will migrate to Red Hat, making them a bigger target for MS. Solaris is still there, but seems to be floundering a bit under Oracle. So one is a rising star, and the other, not. (I say that, but I don't know. OpenSolaris may be way more popular than I think).
Luckily for Red Hat, Microsoft is more worried about Google and the cloud at the moment. But that can easily change, if Microsoft has a few extra-lean quarters. Particularly if it is found that some large portions of the cloud run Red Hat.
The other lucky thing for Red Hat is that the hard-charging leader of Microsoft is gone, and the resultant internal squabbling keeps the MS VPs distracted. But that too can easily change, if Microsoft has a few extra-lean quarters. Taking it to extremes... if Bill Gates gets bored with the charity thing and comes back to 'rescue' Microsoft, I'd take short-sell positions on Red Hat.
This was a really big part of it. The other aspect that people seem to ignore was the back-and-forth sales calls on big customers by both Novell and Microsoft.
Novell: "We've got this great OS now, and it is inexpensive, and if you later want to part ways, there's Red Hat and other companies who you can turn to for support. It's the new thing, and Microsoft is 'Legacy'. You want the newest and the best, don't you?"
Customer: "Well Microsoft does kind of suck, and is expensive."
Microsoft: "So Novell is telling you to become the next AutoZone, hmmm? They got sued for running an OS with patent problems you know."
Customer: "Dang. We're already a big company that attracts frivolous lawsuits. Novell - we are not interested."
The Novell sales reps goes back to their bosses. They hatch a plan. Microsoft takes the bait.
Novell: "Remember how Microsoft was warning you about Linux? Well, they sell Linux now. Ours! You interested?"
What is Microsoft going to counter with? "Uh, we'll take your money, but we might sue you later." What would that do to their future sales (of all types)?
You are 100% correct that Novell did think about Red Hat as a competitor, and that drove a big part of the decision. It was a huge mistake to turn on Red Hat. When you try to feed your teammates to the alligator, all you are really doing is trying to be eaten last. With your teammates, you could have slain the alligator.
But they did choose to say "We and Microsoft are buddies now, and you won't have any trouble running Windows VMs under SLES, or SLES VMs under Hyper-V. Neener neener neener Red Hat." It may have gotten them a few sales, but the taunting of a beloved teammate sure pissed a lot of people off. Not to mention becoming best buds with the alligator.
And then leave the movie / conference / restaurant / dinner party for some place outside where your conversation isn't going to bother everyone else.
The caller chose to interrupt whatever it was you are doing. For that, they get "Hang on" and silence until you can relocate to a place where their interruption isn't so annoying to the rest of us.
I'm not sure why this isn't rule #1.
It gets worse. Xerox wants a consulting division, so they are planning to buy Affiliated Computer Services. If Dell and HP can buy consulting companies, why shouldn't Xerox?
Problem is, ACS is in the bottom 25 of worst places to work. (Entry #21). The former head of ACS left due to a back-dating-stock-options scandal, and as a part of his golden parachute, the ACS Board gave him a $1 million per year salary allowance for security services. He needs $1 million per year in bodyguards, and the Board gave it to him. Oh yeah, they are a class act with the utmost integrity.
And Xerox wants to marry them.
In my opinion, if you have Xerox stock, sell it. Sell it now.