Absolutely correct. WinCE was a mistake and Slab RT (or whatever it was called) was WinCE Mistake version 2.0. Using the same kernel is actually a smart idea. Trying to shoehorn the same GUI across all platforms wasn't.
I think we're in agreement that it was a different world back then. My point was that Microsoft should have realized that the pace couldn't possibly continue.
And yes, it's all a mess that a certain chair thrower made, that someone else is going to have to clean up. I suspect they will, eventually, but it's chaos right now. I support end users on Windows platforms, and I haven't been having a lot of fun, and frankly, it's made me grouchy.
I'm not trying to play with words, really, but it's also a democracy until it's not. It used to be that our leaders govern with the permission of the governed. There seems to be a shift occurring to a situation where they don't need our permission anymore.
I think you misunderstand what a libertarian is. It's not about whether one believes in free elections or not. I'm not at all sure where that came from. If a classic liberal is socially liberal and fiscally liberal, and a classic conservative is both socially and fiscally conservative, a libertarian wants to see government be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I would argue that being socially liberal would necessitate being fiscally conservative, because reducing a person's discretionary income by tax and fee diminishes their choices. (Which is why some libertarians speak of "economic freedom" on that axis, instead of "fiscal conservatism".) But that's just me. Fascism (dictators) operate at the other end of the spectrum, about as far away from libertarianism as you can get and stay on the same plane.
Some libertarians are true anarchists. Libertarianism is a journey, not a destination, and person A may get off the bus at an earlier point than person B, and say ok, I believe in less government involvement in our lives, but not *that* much less. It's hard to get true libertarians to agree on anything, (they're roughly evenly split on abortion, for instance) but they generally agree that we should have more liberties and less government spending than wherever we are now. How much more or less and what form that takes makes for lively debates. Keep in mind that any position can be made to look stupid by taking it to extremes (reducto ad absurdum). There are extremists in any party, but as a whole, people tend towards reasonableness. I personally know an anarchist whom I would not fear to have as a roommate. They don't all throw bombs and try to destroy public works. (Generally only the ones who make the news.)
Oddly enough, although classic libertarians have something in common with classic Democrats (socially liberal), and something in common with classic Republicans, (fiscally conservative) you'd think the Big Two would find common ground with libertarians. Instead, libertarians tend to be hated equally by both major parties. The misconceptions (libertarians have a soft spot for dictators? Really?) are truly baffling sometimes.
I'm pretty sure that in Seattle the rule is "friends don't let friends drink at Starbucks"
Ironic, since it was founded and is based in Seattle.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I'm just telling you what I was told when I did a contract up there. That Starbucks is considered generic, passe, the Coors of coffee, and real seattleites go to little coffee stands that nobody has heard of. Personally, I think it might be a hipster thing, and hipsters in the rest of the country just haven't twigged yet that standing in a Starbucks describing a ridiculously complicated drink in a whiny nasal voice has become passe.
> Moving from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was at least as much UI change as going from XP straight to 8, skipping Vista and 7. If we made that exact same transition after people spent the better part of a decade getting familiar with 3.1, we would have the same "it was good enough" arguments.
My opinion, of course, but no we really wouldn't. 3.1 clearly was *not* good enough, especially in networking, which was starting to become a defining technology. Anyone trying to keep 3.1 happy on a TCP/IP network would reach for 95 like a drowning man reaches for something that looks like it might float. Moreover, 95 had excellent conveyance -- you knew by looking at it what to press to make stuff happen -- that Windows 8 is sorely lacking. Yes, I'll grant you that 3.1 to 95 is about the same amount of difference as XP to 8, but the latter feels more like going from XP to a certain video game.
> Windows 7 is not a suitable tablet OS
Agreed.
> and developing a wholly separate OS for mobile/tablet would be a massive waste of resources.
Enh. I'm sure this sounded logical in the boardroom, but as a practical matter it gave us Windows 8, which doesn't fit well on either PCs or tablets. Nobody really enjoys using it, except the people on Hawaii 5-0 (who are after all, actors) and employees at Redmond, who smile through gritted teeth. What Microsoft created was the classic "neither fish nor fowl". Yet another operating system that most people are skipping over. It succeeded at the "radically different" paradigm (3.1 -> 95 -> 2000/nt4 -> XP) but at a time when the interface really didn't *need* to be radically different -- they had already made an acceptable KVM GUI with XP, and they shouldn't have screwed with that. In a desperate effort to capture a marketplace where they had previously not been a player and still don't completely understand, they're crapping on their base. It's the worst of all possible worlds.
Sure, Republicans are universally disliked, but don't be too sure about libertarians. There is a very strong group of the "Socially Liberal, Fiscal Conservative" libertarians in Seattle. Pot, Same Sex Marriage, and Firearms are all legal, hence a libertarian's paradise. In a liberal's paradise only the first two would be legal.
And then, only until the government decided otherwise.
Dunno about Seattle precisely, but it seemed like the people fleeing California to Oregon were looking for affordable housing in a place where they could also hold down a high tech job, and the tendency is towards liberal, because there are so many of them in California that it skews the results. I'm told that California immigrants can't understand why we're so hostile towards sales tax, for instance. Instead of blending into the culture here (as I tried to do) they instead try to force their environment to be just like home, not recognizing the irony of this. (Yeah, it's just like California, except it rains a lot. Bonus.)
The problem with awesome weather is that everyone wants to live there. Traffic here is an order of magnitude better than the major metropolitan areas down there, despite the constant rain and occasional ice storms.
I will agree with you on food with caveats -- the Mexican, Cuban and Indian food in California is much better than in the PNW. (Boy, do I miss Gaylord and Jose's in Palo Alto.) But we have better seafood.
Actually this really is true. There is a general dislike of people from Cal. They blame people moving in from Cal for the outrageous cost of housing. And they think of people from Cal as being slackers.
Same thing in Portland, Oregon. I experienced a little hostility when I first moved here from California. It helped that I married a local (so I'm an Oregonian by marriage now) and that I refer to myself as a refugee, not a transplant. It also helps to learn the local politics and culture. (In Oregon, "bottle bill == good, sales tax == bad".) For instance, I'm pretty sure that in Seattle the rule is "friends don't let friends drink at Starbucks", which is considered "the Coors of coffee". You're supposed to drink lots of coffee, purchased exclusively from privately owned carts. (Extra points if they roast their own beans.)
And never ever EVER try to clean up Chief Seattle, no matter how green he gets.
I am just taking a stab in the dark here as I don't really know, but maybe there are a lot of "MS Stack software" developers in the home of MS. If they got a ton of them already in town why import more?
Good point. It'd be like applying for a job as a surf instructor at Venice Beach. Or being a hipster in San Francisco. "Hey, if we're supposed to be new and different, how come we're all dressed identically?"
Same thing happened to me, at work. I finally gave up and went back to my old USB mouse, which I've been using ever since.
Incidentally, I *hate* the Microsoft wireless keyboard that the company has issued me. Besides running out of battery after an astonishingly short time, it will lose contact with the PC periodically, or drop characters if I type too fast. It acts like it's just on the edge of the wireless range, but the PC is right under the desk less than a yard away. I think for Christmas I'm going to buy myself a wired keyboard and replace it when nobody is looking.
Well, wait a minute, part of that was that in the old days, we were on the steep end of the curve on operating systems and office suites. People snapped up the next version in the (sometimes vain) hope that it would fix significant bugs in the old, or add much needed capabilities, or support new PC data connection types and hardware, which were also on the steeper end of the curve. Windows 3.1 was a huge update from Dos. Window 95 was a huge update from 3.1. Win98SE gave us USB support. Windows 2000 gave us a much more stable kernel. And so forth.
I submit that right around Windows 2000 / Office 2000, the curve started flattening out. We reached the point of diminishing returns. Windows XP was a sweet spot -- stable enough for daily use, compatible enough to run almost anything, with a rich enough collection of peripherals. (I submit that Office 2000 is good enough for most people -- I still use it now, on Win7.)
Windows 7 was attractive to me on my main workststion because the 64 bit version was very stable and for my work I need large amounts of memory. But for most people, 32 bit XP is good enough. Wife and daughter's machines still run XP, they're fine with it. Daughter has a touch screen ASUS running Win8, but I don't think she's powered it up in months. She doesn't like Win8, and XP meets her needs.
At my work, we are just now pushing Win7 (not not NOT Win8) on the XP users, and there is huge resistance. Because XP is good enough, and the users just want to get work done. They don't want to play with operating systems. I've said this before --- the OS is not the application. The OS loads applications.
One could say a similar thing about the PC industry as a whole. There was a time when most of us hungered for the next faster chip. But generic PCs have gotten fast enough that most users couldn't take full advantage of them. This reduces the need to pick up a new machine at every iteration. We're on the flat end of the curve.
Microsoft's mistake was in believing that this rush to buy whatever new iteration they happen to crap out would continue forever. $$PROFIT. They couldn't see that the knee of the curve was approaching. So now they're struggling to find other ways to stay relevant.
Parenthetically, I wasn't aware that the going was in any way good for Windows 8.
Of course, there's a big wide range between "cheap crap" and boutique items. "I bought a generic replacement and it broke, so all generic replacements are cheap crap" is a rhetorical gimmick, not a hard and fast rule. There's even a good chance that some generic copies were made in the same Chinese factory, by some of the same people, as the "real" item.
This is true in general and doesn't just apply to storage devices that you think no one else here has ever managed.
I understand that... but it all depends on how you define "enterprise".
Running a NAS box for 100 people versus running big huge storage for an actual 'enterprise' application spanning hundreds of terabytes (and being business critical to a multi-billion dollar company) is a different thing entirely.
In my experience, the people doing the latter pay for the 'pampering' because the outage is ridiculously expensive to your business and trumps the cost of the support agreement. As in, your company will lose millions of dollars for every hour you have a disruption, so the support contract is considered cheap compared to the consequences of a failure.
I've certainly known people who say they work on enterprise class systems who would be laughed at by people who run some really large systems. I've known a few people who call what they do 'enterprise', but which I would call 'departmental'. It's all a matter of scale, and where it fits in your business.
And, at a certain scale, using cheap consumer drives and acting like you've got an enterprise solution is considered a business risk. Which is precisely why on the higher end of this there are such systems and vendors with support contracts and all the pampering.
I know people who do storage for companies where if the storage was to go offline, production halts until it's fixed. As in, entire plants sitting idle and losing product (and revenue) because they can't track and process it.
This all looks good on paper, and is a good sell for upper management, but our experience has been ("we" being a 10,000+ employee company that amongst other things sells web services to other companies, having hundreds of terabytes in-house that feeds applications on several different platforms) that premium outsourcing of storage management (with the storage appliances in-house but completely managed by an external company) always, ALWAYS fell short of what we could do in-house in (a) initial response time, (b) time to fix, and (c) overall system uptime. In actual practice, outsourced support has significant lag from issue to response, ("response" in this case being defined -- by me -- as someone actually being on site with the correct part, not just an email saying "we acknowledge that you are having an issue") has no business context (often mislabeling severity despite our best efforts to nail down exactly what is critical and what isn't) and seemingly suffers no consequences for stupid mistakes as long as they are "following the process". For instance, mandatory firmware updates that brick the appliance, resulting in a severity one outage. Or when the tech arrived an hour and a half after the failure (which was still within the service level) with the wrong part.
I would opine that "enterprise level" storage support serves two purposes: (1) It gives managers the ability to say "we have enterprise class storage management" and (2) when something goes TU, say "it's not our fault". What it is not is an effective replacement for highly motivated, knowledgeable internal support with adequate spares.
Again, I don't know what your experience has been, but in ours, doing a morning walk through the server room looking for warning lights, adequate alerts on storage appliances, and in-house spares beats any external support we've yet experienced. For in-house appliances, of course. For cloud support, you pretty much have to take whatever the cloud provider gives you. But cloud services (documented extensively here and elsewhere) has its own set of problems.
He asked what we would do. In the spirit of that, I would (and have, in a previous job) do what houbou says above, and then take everything to the appropriate higher authority. Considering that things are most probably going to go TU anyway, what do you have to lose? (This assumes you have a high degree of confidence that you understand the issue and your analysis is correct.)
In my case, it caused an internal upheaval which resulted in some things getting fixed, but not enough, and when crap hit fan some months later, the company barely survived, and then only by becoming a much smaller company.
I was one of the employees laid off in the debacle, but I figure that had I not spoken up, the collapse would have been worse if anything, and I would still have been laid off, and I take comfort in the fact that at least I gave it my best effort. In fairness, I wasn't the only person who raised alarms. I guess what I learned is that companies have a powerful inertia, and it's not easy to correct a massive mistake in an acceptable amount of time. I can sympathize with people who see the approaching wall, say "oh well" and start updating their resume.
There are, but there's always a risk of this sort of thing, as has been pointed out delivery drivers aren't immune from theft either.
Absolutely true, as anyone who delivers pizzas for a living can tell you. I wonder if part of the equation might be that the penalty for stealing/destroying a drone may be less than robbing/injuring a human? (Probably true, as long as the drone is non-military.)
And it didn't take long at all for the cables to commodify, to the point now where there are bins of very inexpensive cable/charger components near the cash register at Walgreens, and ridiculously cheap bulk-purchase options on eBay.
Apple made sure to step away from that possibility for THEIR cables. There's always a bin of the older iPod/iPhone chargers with the others at the Walgreens counter, but never for the new Apple charging scheme.
Exactly. Micro-USB cables and compatible chargers are so common that we haven't thought about what accessories we need to take with us on trips in a very long time. The charger in every vehicle (including the one plugged into the accessory outlet on my motorcycle) will fit every portable device we own, with the single exception of my daughter's ipod touch, and she doesn't use that anymore (her Galaxy Note has more storage and plays music just fine). If someone forgets their charger, they just use someone else's or buy a new one for the cost of a soda at the nearest quickie mart.
That said, Apple is absolutely brilliant in this regard. That they can make cables/chargers a high margin, boutique item, and that people will actually put up with it, is a stellar piece of marketing. Nothing says "exclusive" and "cool" like paying extra for a trendy product when everyone else is buying generic commodity items, even if they serve the same purpose. (I think this is called the "Monster Cable phenomenon".)
> At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor.
Not everyone that does "Enterprise Storage" wants to pay for that kind of pampering. This is true in general and doesn't just apply to storage devices that you think no one else here has ever managed.
Indeed. Moreover, there are other solutions, some included as a perk with commercial hardware, that do (in my experience) just as good a job at notifying in-house admins, who have much better business context, can make better decisions and respond much MUCH faster. You don't outsource storage support because it's more effective. You outsource storage support in the misguided belief that it's much cheaper [1], and that paying for someone else's generic process is somehow better than your own, more experienced, business-aware process.
[1] And you will find that it is cheaper. And you will discover that "cheaper" is entirely different from "less expensive".
> Do you actually do Enterprise Storage? Because I know people who do.
> At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor. The vendor then dispatches someone to replace the faulty bit within the SLA.
Yes, I deal directly with that, with Big Company and Really Big Company, and I have to say the process doesn't work very well, for many reasons that I won't enumerate here for keep-my-job reasons. In all honesty, we had better uptime and much faster response when we stocked our own spares and hired someone to walk through the machine room daily looking for yellow lights. Sorry, but that has been my experience. After outsourcing storage, the lag from warning light to replacement is significant, with many hilarious hijinks along the way. (My favorite being when they remotely updated the firmware during the same service call as disk replacement and bricked the device.) It's a great example of not getting what you pay for, except the ability to check off managerial line items.
But consumer hard drives are so much cheaper that it's not really cost effective anymore to buy Enterprise drives. You may need to replace them more often, but as SATA are hot swappable and everyone is using some variation of RAID these days, one could argue that buying Enterprise drives is an unnecessary expense. In a down economy, that might be significant.
I tell you, Apple marketeers are absolute genius. That first they can say "branded cable" with a straight face, and that consumers actually buy into it... it's an amazing thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely correct. WinCE was a mistake and Slab RT (or whatever it was called) was WinCE Mistake version 2.0. Using the same kernel is actually a smart idea. Trying to shoehorn the same GUI across all platforms wasn't.
I think we're in agreement that it was a different world back then. My point was that Microsoft should have realized that the pace couldn't possibly continue.
And yes, it's all a mess that a certain chair thrower made, that someone else is going to have to clean up. I suspect they will, eventually, but it's chaos right now. I support end users on Windows platforms, and I haven't been having a lot of fun, and frankly, it's made me grouchy.
I'm not trying to play with words, really, but it's also a democracy until it's not. It used to be that our leaders govern with the permission of the governed. There seems to be a shift occurring to a situation where they don't need our permission anymore.
I think you misunderstand what a libertarian is. It's not about whether one believes in free elections or not. I'm not at all sure where that came from. If a classic liberal is socially liberal and fiscally liberal, and a classic conservative is both socially and fiscally conservative, a libertarian wants to see government be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I would argue that being socially liberal would necessitate being fiscally conservative, because reducing a person's discretionary income by tax and fee diminishes their choices. (Which is why some libertarians speak of "economic freedom" on that axis, instead of "fiscal conservatism".) But that's just me. Fascism (dictators) operate at the other end of the spectrum, about as far away from libertarianism as you can get and stay on the same plane.
Some libertarians are true anarchists. Libertarianism is a journey, not a destination, and person A may get off the bus at an earlier point than person B, and say ok, I believe in less government involvement in our lives, but not *that* much less. It's hard to get true libertarians to agree on anything, (they're roughly evenly split on abortion, for instance) but they generally agree that we should have more liberties and less government spending than wherever we are now. How much more or less and what form that takes makes for lively debates. Keep in mind that any position can be made to look stupid by taking it to extremes (reducto ad absurdum). There are extremists in any party, but as a whole, people tend towards reasonableness. I personally know an anarchist whom I would not fear to have as a roommate. They don't all throw bombs and try to destroy public works. (Generally only the ones who make the news.)
Oddly enough, although classic libertarians have something in common with classic Democrats (socially liberal), and something in common with classic Republicans, (fiscally conservative) you'd think the Big Two would find common ground with libertarians. Instead, libertarians tend to be hated equally by both major parties. The misconceptions (libertarians have a soft spot for dictators? Really?) are truly baffling sometimes.
Ironic, since it was founded and is based in Seattle.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I'm just telling you what I was told when I did a contract up there. That Starbucks is considered generic, passe, the Coors of coffee, and real seattleites go to little coffee stands that nobody has heard of. Personally, I think it might be a hipster thing, and hipsters in the rest of the country just haven't twigged yet that standing in a Starbucks describing a ridiculously complicated drink in a whiny nasal voice has become passe.
Hmm. I thought the coffee at the Monorail cart was pretty good, for whatever that's worth. I agree about the pretension, though.
Agreed, but it might be easier to get a gig in Corpus Christi.
> Moving from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was at least as much UI change as going from XP straight to 8, skipping Vista and 7. If we made that exact same transition after people spent the better part of a decade getting familiar with 3.1, we would have the same "it was good enough" arguments.
My opinion, of course, but no we really wouldn't. 3.1 clearly was *not* good enough, especially in networking, which was starting to become a defining technology. Anyone trying to keep 3.1 happy on a TCP/IP network would reach for 95 like a drowning man reaches for something that looks like it might float. Moreover, 95 had excellent conveyance -- you knew by looking at it what to press to make stuff happen -- that Windows 8 is sorely lacking. Yes, I'll grant you that 3.1 to 95 is about the same amount of difference as XP to 8, but the latter feels more like going from XP to a certain video game.
> Windows 7 is not a suitable tablet OS
Agreed.
> and developing a wholly separate OS for mobile/tablet would be a massive waste of resources.
Enh. I'm sure this sounded logical in the boardroom, but as a practical matter it gave us Windows 8, which doesn't fit well on either PCs or tablets. Nobody really enjoys using it, except the people on Hawaii 5-0 (who are after all, actors) and employees at Redmond, who smile through gritted teeth. What Microsoft created was the classic "neither fish nor fowl". Yet another operating system that most people are skipping over. It succeeded at the "radically different" paradigm (3.1 -> 95 -> 2000/nt4 -> XP) but at a time when the interface really didn't *need* to be radically different -- they had already made an acceptable KVM GUI with XP, and they shouldn't have screwed with that. In a desperate effort to capture a marketplace where they had previously not been a player and still don't completely understand, they're crapping on their base. It's the worst of all possible worlds.
Sure, Republicans are universally disliked, but don't be too sure about libertarians. There is a very strong group of the "Socially Liberal, Fiscal Conservative" libertarians in Seattle. Pot, Same Sex Marriage, and Firearms are all legal, hence a libertarian's paradise. In a liberal's paradise only the first two would be legal.
And then, only until the government decided otherwise.
Dunno about Seattle precisely, but it seemed like the people fleeing California to Oregon were looking for affordable housing in a place where they could also hold down a high tech job, and the tendency is towards liberal, because there are so many of them in California that it skews the results. I'm told that California immigrants can't understand why we're so hostile towards sales tax, for instance. Instead of blending into the culture here (as I tried to do) they instead try to force their environment to be just like home, not recognizing the irony of this. (Yeah, it's just like California, except it rains a lot. Bonus.)
The problem with awesome weather is that everyone wants to live there. Traffic here is an order of magnitude better than the major metropolitan areas down there, despite the constant rain and occasional ice storms.
I will agree with you on food with caveats -- the Mexican, Cuban and Indian food in California is much better than in the PNW. (Boy, do I miss Gaylord and Jose's in Palo Alto.) But we have better seafood.
Actually this really is true. There is a general dislike of people from Cal. They blame people moving in from Cal for the outrageous cost of housing. And they think of people from Cal as being slackers.
Same thing in Portland, Oregon. I experienced a little hostility when I first moved here from California. It helped that I married a local (so I'm an Oregonian by marriage now) and that I refer to myself as a refugee, not a transplant. It also helps to learn the local politics and culture. (In Oregon, "bottle bill == good, sales tax == bad".) For instance, I'm pretty sure that in Seattle the rule is "friends don't let friends drink at Starbucks", which is considered "the Coors of coffee". You're supposed to drink lots of coffee, purchased exclusively from privately owned carts. (Extra points if they roast their own beans.)
And never ever EVER try to clean up Chief Seattle, no matter how green he gets.
MS Stack software developer
I am just taking a stab in the dark here as I don't really know, but maybe there are a lot of "MS Stack software" developers in the home of MS. If they got a ton of them already in town why import more?
Good point. It'd be like applying for a job as a surf instructor at Venice Beach. Or being a hipster in San Francisco. "Hey, if we're supposed to be new and different, how come we're all dressed identically?"
You're from California. That's the problem.
Same thing happened to me, at work. I finally gave up and went back to my old USB mouse, which I've been using ever since.
Incidentally, I *hate* the Microsoft wireless keyboard that the company has issued me. Besides running out of battery after an astonishingly short time, it will lose contact with the PC periodically, or drop characters if I type too fast. It acts like it's just on the edge of the wireless range, but the PC is right under the desk less than a yard away. I think for Christmas I'm going to buy myself a wired keyboard and replace it when nobody is looking.
Well, wait a minute, part of that was that in the old days, we were on the steep end of the curve on operating systems and office suites. People snapped up the next version in the (sometimes vain) hope that it would fix significant bugs in the old, or add much needed capabilities, or support new PC data connection types and hardware, which were also on the steeper end of the curve. Windows 3.1 was a huge update from Dos. Window 95 was a huge update from 3.1. Win98SE gave us USB support. Windows 2000 gave us a much more stable kernel. And so forth.
I submit that right around Windows 2000 / Office 2000, the curve started flattening out. We reached the point of diminishing returns. Windows XP was a sweet spot -- stable enough for daily use, compatible enough to run almost anything, with a rich enough collection of peripherals. (I submit that Office 2000 is good enough for most people -- I still use it now, on Win7.)
Windows 7 was attractive to me on my main workststion because the 64 bit version was very stable and for my work I need large amounts of memory. But for most people, 32 bit XP is good enough. Wife and daughter's machines still run XP, they're fine with it. Daughter has a touch screen ASUS running Win8, but I don't think she's powered it up in months. She doesn't like Win8, and XP meets her needs.
At my work, we are just now pushing Win7 (not not NOT Win8) on the XP users, and there is huge resistance. Because XP is good enough, and the users just want to get work done. They don't want to play with operating systems. I've said this before --- the OS is not the application. The OS loads applications.
One could say a similar thing about the PC industry as a whole. There was a time when most of us hungered for the next faster chip. But generic PCs have gotten fast enough that most users couldn't take full advantage of them. This reduces the need to pick up a new machine at every iteration. We're on the flat end of the curve.
Microsoft's mistake was in believing that this rush to buy whatever new iteration they happen to crap out would continue forever. $$PROFIT. They couldn't see that the knee of the curve was approaching. So now they're struggling to find other ways to stay relevant.
Parenthetically, I wasn't aware that the going was in any way good for Windows 8.
Of course, there's a big wide range between "cheap crap" and boutique items. "I bought a generic replacement and it broke, so all generic replacements are cheap crap" is a rhetorical gimmick, not a hard and fast rule. There's even a good chance that some generic copies were made in the same Chinese factory, by some of the same people, as the "real" item.
I understand that ... but it all depends on how you define "enterprise".
Running a NAS box for 100 people versus running big huge storage for an actual 'enterprise' application spanning hundreds of terabytes (and being business critical to a multi-billion dollar company) is a different thing entirely.
In my experience, the people doing the latter pay for the 'pampering' because the outage is ridiculously expensive to your business and trumps the cost of the support agreement. As in, your company will lose millions of dollars for every hour you have a disruption, so the support contract is considered cheap compared to the consequences of a failure.
I've certainly known people who say they work on enterprise class systems who would be laughed at by people who run some really large systems. I've known a few people who call what they do 'enterprise', but which I would call 'departmental'. It's all a matter of scale, and where it fits in your business.
And, at a certain scale, using cheap consumer drives and acting like you've got an enterprise solution is considered a business risk. Which is precisely why on the higher end of this there are such systems and vendors with support contracts and all the pampering.
I know people who do storage for companies where if the storage was to go offline, production halts until it's fixed. As in, entire plants sitting idle and losing product (and revenue) because they can't track and process it.
This all looks good on paper, and is a good sell for upper management, but our experience has been ("we" being a 10,000+ employee company that amongst other things sells web services to other companies, having hundreds of terabytes in-house that feeds applications on several different platforms) that premium outsourcing of storage management (with the storage appliances in-house but completely managed by an external company) always, ALWAYS fell short of what we could do in-house in (a) initial response time, (b) time to fix, and (c) overall system uptime. In actual practice, outsourced support has significant lag from issue to response, ("response" in this case being defined -- by me -- as someone actually being on site with the correct part, not just an email saying "we acknowledge that you are having an issue") has no business context (often mislabeling severity despite our best efforts to nail down exactly what is critical and what isn't) and seemingly suffers no consequences for stupid mistakes as long as they are "following the process". For instance, mandatory firmware updates that brick the appliance, resulting in a severity one outage. Or when the tech arrived an hour and a half after the failure (which was still within the service level) with the wrong part.
I would opine that "enterprise level" storage support serves two purposes: (1) It gives managers the ability to say "we have enterprise class storage management" and (2) when something goes TU, say "it's not our fault". What it is not is an effective replacement for highly motivated, knowledgeable internal support with adequate spares.
Again, I don't know what your experience has been, but in ours, doing a morning walk through the server room looking for warning lights, adequate alerts on storage appliances, and in-house spares beats any external support we've yet experienced. For in-house appliances, of course. For cloud support, you pretty much have to take whatever the cloud provider gives you. But cloud services (documented extensively here and elsewhere) has its own set of problems.
He asked what we would do. In the spirit of that, I would (and have, in a previous job) do what houbou says above, and then take everything to the appropriate higher authority. Considering that things are most probably going to go TU anyway, what do you have to lose? (This assumes you have a high degree of confidence that you understand the issue and your analysis is correct.)
In my case, it caused an internal upheaval which resulted in some things getting fixed, but not enough, and when crap hit fan some months later, the company barely survived, and then only by becoming a much smaller company.
I was one of the employees laid off in the debacle, but I figure that had I not spoken up, the collapse would have been worse if anything, and I would still have been laid off, and I take comfort in the fact that at least I gave it my best effort. In fairness, I wasn't the only person who raised alarms. I guess what I learned is that companies have a powerful inertia, and it's not easy to correct a massive mistake in an acceptable amount of time. I can sympathize with people who see the approaching wall, say "oh well" and start updating their resume.
There's a firmware difference. Enterprise drives will stop retrying sooner as to not get dropped from the array.
But doesn't SMART in consumer drives detect retrys?
There are, but there's always a risk of this sort of thing, as has been pointed out delivery drivers aren't immune from theft either.
Absolutely true, as anyone who delivers pizzas for a living can tell you. I wonder if part of the equation might be that the penalty for stealing/destroying a drone may be less than robbing/injuring a human? (Probably true, as long as the drone is non-military.)
And it didn't take long at all for the cables to commodify, to the point now where there are bins of very inexpensive cable/charger components near the cash register at Walgreens, and ridiculously cheap bulk-purchase options on eBay.
Apple made sure to step away from that possibility for THEIR cables. There's always a bin of the older iPod/iPhone chargers with the others at the Walgreens counter, but never for the new Apple charging scheme.
Exactly. Micro-USB cables and compatible chargers are so common that we haven't thought about what accessories we need to take with us on trips in a very long time. The charger in every vehicle (including the one plugged into the accessory outlet on my motorcycle) will fit every portable device we own, with the single exception of my daughter's ipod touch, and she doesn't use that anymore (her Galaxy Note has more storage and plays music just fine). If someone forgets their charger, they just use someone else's or buy a new one for the cost of a soda at the nearest quickie mart.
That said, Apple is absolutely brilliant in this regard. That they can make cables/chargers a high margin, boutique item, and that people will actually put up with it, is a stellar piece of marketing. Nothing says "exclusive" and "cool" like paying extra for a trendy product when everyone else is buying generic commodity items, even if they serve the same purpose. (I think this is called the "Monster Cable phenomenon".)
> At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor.
Not everyone that does "Enterprise Storage" wants to pay for that kind of pampering. This is true in general and doesn't just apply to storage devices that you think no one else here has ever managed.
Indeed. Moreover, there are other solutions, some included as a perk with commercial hardware, that do (in my experience) just as good a job at notifying in-house admins, who have much better business context, can make better decisions and respond much MUCH faster. You don't outsource storage support because it's more effective. You outsource storage support in the misguided belief that it's much cheaper [1], and that paying for someone else's generic process is somehow better than your own, more experienced, business-aware process.
[1] And you will find that it is cheaper. And you will discover that "cheaper" is entirely different from "less expensive".
> Do you actually do Enterprise Storage? Because I know people who do.
> At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor. The vendor then dispatches someone to replace the faulty bit within the SLA.
Yes, I deal directly with that, with Big Company and Really Big Company, and I have to say the process doesn't work very well, for many reasons that I won't enumerate here for keep-my-job reasons. In all honesty, we had better uptime and much faster response when we stocked our own spares and hired someone to walk through the machine room daily looking for yellow lights. Sorry, but that has been my experience. After outsourcing storage, the lag from warning light to replacement is significant, with many hilarious hijinks along the way. (My favorite being when they remotely updated the firmware during the same service call as disk replacement and bricked the device.) It's a great example of not getting what you pay for, except the ability to check off managerial line items.
But consumer hard drives are so much cheaper that it's not really cost effective anymore to buy Enterprise drives. You may need to replace them more often, but as SATA are hot swappable and everyone is using some variation of RAID these days, one could argue that buying Enterprise drives is an unnecessary expense. In a down economy, that might be significant.
I tell you, Apple marketeers are absolute genius. That first they can say "branded cable" with a straight face, and that consumers actually buy into it... it's an amazing thing.