Back in the olden days, when my kid was very small and most phones didn't have GPS, she carried one of those mountaineer walkie-talkies with GPS when we were on vacation. She had fun playing with it and it helped guarantee that we could find her when she got lost in a crowd. Later when she got better at identifying her position, she carried a smaller walkie-talkie strapped to her wrist. (The first day she wore it, she wandered off during a parade and got separated from us. She called and said she was by "the big lemon" -- a lemonaid cart a few blocks away.)
Later, she carried a smartphone with GPS turned on. I periodically looked her up in Latitude, called her when her position was not where I expected. I did this because she traveled a lot between 12 and 18, to tutors, night classes, and various school functions.
Now she's 18, has her own car, and the GPS in her Bionic is routinely turned off, because, apparently, it's no longer my business to know where she is. I have learned to accept this. She will turn on the GPS if she gets lost or has an equipment failure, and I can then pinpoint her position and send help or go myself.
Regarding having the satisfaction of getting un-lost yourself, there is truth to that. At six or seven, she was quite proud of the fact that she was able to identify her position (the big lemon) well enough for us to reconnect with her. (That may not be the best example.) She liked knowing where *I* was (I keep gps on all the time) through Latitude, and enjoyed using this knowledge to find me. More recently, she called me, said she was lost trying to drive to a friend's house, was very frustrated, and wanted me to go get her. As it was 11:00 PM on a work night, I was reluctant to do this, as she had gas and wasn't in danger. She figured it out on her own and was quite proud of herself afterwards. (The solution, by the way, was quite clever: The problem was a hiccup in Google Maps, which steered her to the wrong place when she entered a certain address. She tried an address close to her goal, and that worked well enough to find her goal.)
So yeah, I recognized very early on that my daughter doesn't have the instinct to cling to a parent, and as a result, we were early adopters of technological solutions, upgrading as new solutions became available. These days it's hard to find a phone that *doesn't* have GPS. Parenthetically, I'm all for giving a kid a cell phone (one of the cheap ones) at an early age. For her to be able to contact me in emergencies trumps other considerations.
Buys it... picks over the corpse... you say toMAEto, I say toMAHto...
Re:Support both Win and Android--on the same phone
on
Can Nokia Save Itself?
·
· Score: 1
Calm down. I was being facetious. Besides, I don't think original poster was talking about dual-booting, but an environment that merged the best features of both environments, and including the ecosystem necessary to run both Win8 and Android apps simultaneously.
> The one thing missing in the market is a waterproof or water resistant rugged touch phone.
That is absolutely brilliant. Or at very least, water sealed so you could take it out in the rain without it self-destructing. Add a range of docking stations for car, motorcycle, bicycle. A good maps app with programmable presets. A good, intuitive, extensible hands free setup. I'd buy one. I know a lot of people who would buy one.
Re:Support both Win and Android--on the same phone
on
Can Nokia Save Itself?
·
· Score: 1
...and the phone would be the size of an egg carton...
I agree with most of what you say, but in the back of my mind is a little voice saying "just because Microsoft is really really REALLY serious this time, doesn't mean it won't still suck at first."
The problem is the way corps shit all over IT they'll just go "Hey, one more job we can dump on them without raising their pay!" and that will be that.
Lets face it folks, we are gonna end up with critical shortages of IT and infrastructure workers because between the offshoring, the H1-Bs, and the PHBs treating IT as this money pit that doesn't give them any profits? IT has been shat upon for the good part of the last decade.
I know myself and most of the old guard guys I knew ended up getting out of corporate IT for just this reason, piling more and more work upon us while expecting everything to be done with less help and a shrinking budget...now you want to add coding to the requirements? You gonna add a pay raise and pay for the classes? Yeah, thought not.
You're right, with caveats, which I will get to in a moment.
I'm not entirely sure, but I strongly suspect that this situation you describe will turn around, at least a little. There's been some high profile fails in the news associated with outsourcing, either personnel or relying on cloud services, and as more and more outsourcing is done, I think these fails will get more spectacular and more common. You can already see a few companies swimming against the current. I read I think yesterday that GM is insourcing from HP, and trying to poach 3K of HPs admins.
But on coding, I'd really recommend that you rise to the challenge, even if you intend to stay in the dwindling (at least for now) pool of onshore admins. For a couple reasons: (a) Some moderate ability to code makes you more valuable, and valuable people are more likely to be retained or rebadged, not just laid off. (b) It possibly gives you some place to go (app development, app maintenance, system programming) should the admin field dry up completely. Or, I dunno, you could go into sales. A friend of mine, an admin with 20 years experience, never did learn to code, and moved into sales when his admin job was made redundant. On the other hand, not everyone is cut out for that, and it's a pretty cutthroat field.
Parenthetically, those of us who are still working, should keep in mind that if we find ourselves looking for a job, we will have as competition all those admins that were laid off in the last few years, and are perhaps hungrier than us. The safe bet, if you're going to stay in this line of work, is to hang onto your job tooth and nail, which could mean learning the programming thing.
PS: Mind you, I would never have said this about any previous release of Windows except perhaps 2000, which is still in use (twelve years after release!) in a few environments where it still does the job. When those boxes are finally retired, the replacements will probably run 7. They will almost certainly not run 8.
What does not upgrading a 5 year old OS have to do with running a 10 year old one?
It's not really a matter of years. The issues are the same. Is it necessary to upgrade? What does upgrading buy you? What are the likely issues with upgrading?
We've stopped our (outsourced) Linux support team from upgrading RHEL unnecessarily. They would do this as part of the regular patch cycle, and we found that (a) often this would bring us out of certification compliance with the application, (b) in the case of burn-it-to-the-ground-and-rebuild, we'd always be missing a dozen system settings and necessary packages. (And yes, we do have a build template. It doesn't help.) and C, the various support groups don't do a good job communicating with each other, and often find themselves out of supported alignment with their various system packages. Which often leads to scenarios that would be hilarious were they happening to someone else.
Red Hat Linux didn't even exist when XP was released. Now they're on version 6. Obviously, one is intended to upgrade.
Intended by whom?
Sure, there are reasons to upgrade. Features or bug fixes you really need. That certification matrix mentioned above, has a minimum certified version, and you don't want to get too close to that. But upgrading every release? That puts you in a permanent state of Upgrade Hell, and I don't know about you, but I have better things to do.
When we *do* upgrade, it's usually to the most recent version certified for the application, -1 minor revision. Which means we routinely jump over a bunch of interim releases. This is usually accompanied by a major app release and/or a hardware refresh, because if you're going to be in hell, you might as well spend the time in the most roasty part, and get it over with.
In the case of migrating off XP, there really is no need. XP still works, no Windows XP instance is outward facing and they're all behind a series of firewalls, and XP still works. When you have six thousand workers running apps who don't give a crap what the OS looks like as long as their app works, you mess with that at your peril.
Now, caveat, a development environment may be different, if you're developing Windows applications. (Our development environments don't do that, and they all still work on XP.) But for people for whom Windows is not an end in itself, XP is still fine.
Um, yeah, this isn't really about Vista. It wasn't compatibility that stopped us moving to Vista. It was mostly because it's UNNECESSARY. The OS is just a program loader and a manager of resources. Say it with me please: The OS is not an application. Now, as the OS gets more mature, changes are made to the work environment, compatibility with devices, new interfaces, and so forth, most of which aren't interesting in the enterprise world, where ops personnel log on and run three or four apps and that's it. Sometimes just two apps: Email and browser. Or Email and 3179 emulation. Or Email and CIS app. These people don't need or want a new OS -- they want to be able to do their job unhindered by whether their windows have rounded corners or what tiles are.
We didn't migrate to Vista because (1) we did not need to, and (2) there is no 2.
Now, the fact that Vista was having some issues -- performance, speed of file transfers, compatibility with existing hardware, and all that, helped the decision along. Not to mention, changes in the GUI, which OS-philes think are so wonderful, are actually a detriment in Customer Service, in a depot, or anywhere where people need to get routine work done. Not to mention having to re-certify all mission critical applications.
And so, new equipment arrived with Vista Home, and was re-imaged with the corporate copy of XP Pro, and everyone had the same environment, everything worked and was administrated the same, and we could get work done.
When the decision was made to upgrade, 7 was mature, and experiments showed that Windows 7 Pro's XP compatibility was sufficient that minimal things had to be done to get it to work in the corporate environment.
And even THEN, there was and will not be a mass upgrade to 7. Why? See (1) above. Rather, the upgrade to 7 is a gradual thing, with new hardware gradually replacing the old, reimaged with the corporate copy of Win 7 and all the settings that make it work for us.
And this condition will continue until it's impractical to continue any more. And WE get to decide what "impractical" means, not Microsoft.
And so, current plans are to skip 8. There are arguably various reasons for this, including none of our stuff being qualified for the-gui-formerly-known-as-metro, having to field a new set of hardware requirements, and having to retrain users and admins on a new version of the OS. Even if you think this is all trivial, it is still work.
But for the MAIN reason, the PRIMARY reason why we are not migrating to 8, see (1) above. The rest is fine for water cooler discussions, but this is a sufficient reason in and of itself.
We aren't exactly upgrading to 7. All legacy machines will still run XP, because there's really no reason to upgrade them. New machines will run 7. This decision was only made after an extensive pilot program to make sure 7 would run everything important to the business. 7 passed. We are fairly certain that 8 will fail.
I occasionally chat with a few Microsoft SDEs who are directly involved in the development of native RT apps, and it usually goes something like this: "ARM is fucking terrible, it's weak and powerless!" "How come other platforms, including Linux, can run on ARM successfully?" "ARM isn't powerful enough to run Windows applications, that's what we mean. That's why we have to rewrite everything to be more highly optimized for these few Windows RT apps." "So, the reason Windows RT can't run Windows apps is because most Windows software is so bad, it wouldn't perform acceptably on something being run at its limits?" "Pretty much."
Well, yeah, but haven't we known this for, like, decades? The only thing that hasn't absolutely crushed the Windows experience is that the hardware has somehow managed to keep up with the requirements of the OS. When the netbook phenomena started, Microsoft had a very difficult time playing in that space until the netbook was re-imagined as a low-ish end laptop. Even though the early netbooks ran Linux just fine.
> Over at The Verge, the intrepid Sean Hollister asked eight Microsoft Store representatives about the differences between Windows 8 and Windows RT, and received several confusing responses.
And I would submit that this is intentional. The more the waters are muddied about the differences between the two operating systems, the larger the potential launch volume. And then you have a bunch of people out there who already own the product and are trying to make it work, giving additional motivation to vendors to port to it.
It's genius, although the kind of genius you pour out of a bottle.
Understood. But the robocalls have a purpose, usually to get you to do business with some company. (Legit or not.) Play along until you get a contact, then sue the living crap out of the company.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the olden days, when my kid was very small and most phones didn't have GPS, she carried one of those mountaineer walkie-talkies with GPS when we were on vacation. She had fun playing with it and it helped guarantee that we could find her when she got lost in a crowd. Later when she got better at identifying her position, she carried a smaller walkie-talkie strapped to her wrist. (The first day she wore it, she wandered off during a parade and got separated from us. She called and said she was by "the big lemon" -- a lemonaid cart a few blocks away.)
Later, she carried a smartphone with GPS turned on. I periodically looked her up in Latitude, called her when her position was not where I expected. I did this because she traveled a lot between 12 and 18, to tutors, night classes, and various school functions.
Now she's 18, has her own car, and the GPS in her Bionic is routinely turned off, because, apparently, it's no longer my business to know where she is. I have learned to accept this. She will turn on the GPS if she gets lost or has an equipment failure, and I can then pinpoint her position and send help or go myself.
Regarding having the satisfaction of getting un-lost yourself, there is truth to that. At six or seven, she was quite proud of the fact that she was able to identify her position (the big lemon) well enough for us to reconnect with her. (That may not be the best example.) She liked knowing where *I* was (I keep gps on all the time) through Latitude, and enjoyed using this knowledge to find me. More recently, she called me, said she was lost trying to drive to a friend's house, was very frustrated, and wanted me to go get her. As it was 11:00 PM on a work night, I was reluctant to do this, as she had gas and wasn't in danger. She figured it out on her own and was quite proud of herself afterwards. (The solution, by the way, was quite clever: The problem was a hiccup in Google Maps, which steered her to the wrong place when she entered a certain address. She tried an address close to her goal, and that worked well enough to find her goal.)
So yeah, I recognized very early on that my daughter doesn't have the instinct to cling to a parent, and as a result, we were early adopters of technological solutions, upgrading as new solutions became available. These days it's hard to find a phone that *doesn't* have GPS. Parenthetically, I'm all for giving a kid a cell phone (one of the cheap ones) at an early age. For her to be able to contact me in emergencies trumps other considerations.
Almost certainly.
Will they do the necessary things to save themselves? Almost certainly not.
Buys it... picks over the corpse... you say toMAEto, I say toMAHto...
Calm down. I was being facetious. Besides, I don't think original poster was talking about dual-booting, but an environment that merged the best features of both environments, and including the ecosystem necessary to run both Win8 and Android apps simultaneously.
> There is only one possibility: Nokia spirals down the toilet, and MS buys it when it becomes a good enough deal.
Personally, I believe that was always the plan.
> The one thing missing in the market is a waterproof or water resistant rugged touch phone.
That is absolutely brilliant. Or at very least, water sealed so you could take it out in the rain without it self-destructing. Add a range of docking stations for car, motorcycle, bicycle. A good maps app with programmable presets. A good, intuitive, extensible hands free setup. I'd buy one. I know a lot of people who would buy one.
I thought MS products *were* the hammer.
I agree with most of what you say, but in the back of my mind is a little voice saying "just because Microsoft is really really REALLY serious this time, doesn't mean it won't still suck at first."
The problem is the way corps shit all over IT they'll just go "Hey, one more job we can dump on them without raising their pay!" and that will be that.
Lets face it folks, we are gonna end up with critical shortages of IT and infrastructure workers because between the offshoring, the H1-Bs, and the PHBs treating IT as this money pit that doesn't give them any profits? IT has been shat upon for the good part of the last decade.
I know myself and most of the old guard guys I knew ended up getting out of corporate IT for just this reason, piling more and more work upon us while expecting everything to be done with less help and a shrinking budget...now you want to add coding to the requirements? You gonna add a pay raise and pay for the classes? Yeah, thought not.
You're right, with caveats, which I will get to in a moment.
I'm not entirely sure, but I strongly suspect that this situation you describe will turn around, at least a little. There's been some high profile fails in the news associated with outsourcing, either personnel or relying on cloud services, and as more and more outsourcing is done, I think these fails will get more spectacular and more common. You can already see a few companies swimming against the current. I read I think yesterday that GM is insourcing from HP, and trying to poach 3K of HPs admins.
But on coding, I'd really recommend that you rise to the challenge, even if you intend to stay in the dwindling (at least for now) pool of onshore admins. For a couple reasons: (a) Some moderate ability to code makes you more valuable, and valuable people are more likely to be retained or rebadged, not just laid off. (b) It possibly gives you some place to go (app development, app maintenance, system programming) should the admin field dry up completely. Or, I dunno, you could go into sales. A friend of mine, an admin with 20 years experience, never did learn to code, and moved into sales when his admin job was made redundant. On the other hand, not everyone is cut out for that, and it's a pretty cutthroat field.
Parenthetically, those of us who are still working, should keep in mind that if we find ourselves looking for a job, we will have as competition all those admins that were laid off in the last few years, and are perhaps hungrier than us. The safe bet, if you're going to stay in this line of work, is to hang onto your job tooth and nail, which could mean learning the programming thing.
Tell you what; let's meet back here in a year, and compare notes.
> I'm fairly certain that if all I did was write Perl, I'd go insane.
Especially Perl.
PS: Mind you, I would never have said this about any previous release of Windows except perhaps 2000, which is still in use (twelve years after release!) in a few environments where it still does the job. When those boxes are finally retired, the replacements will probably run 7. They will almost certainly not run 8.
What does not upgrading a 5 year old OS have to do with running a 10 year old one?
It's not really a matter of years. The issues are the same. Is it necessary to upgrade? What does upgrading buy you? What are the likely issues with upgrading?
We've stopped our (outsourced) Linux support team from upgrading RHEL unnecessarily. They would do this as part of the regular patch cycle, and we found that (a) often this would bring us out of certification compliance with the application, (b) in the case of burn-it-to-the-ground-and-rebuild, we'd always be missing a dozen system settings and necessary packages. (And yes, we do have a build template. It doesn't help.) and C, the various support groups don't do a good job communicating with each other, and often find themselves out of supported alignment with their various system packages. Which often leads to scenarios that would be hilarious were they happening to someone else.
Red Hat Linux didn't even exist when XP was released. Now they're on version 6. Obviously, one is intended to upgrade.
Intended by whom?
Sure, there are reasons to upgrade. Features or bug fixes you really need. That certification matrix mentioned above, has a minimum certified version, and you don't want to get too close to that. But upgrading every release? That puts you in a permanent state of Upgrade Hell, and I don't know about you, but I have better things to do.
When we *do* upgrade, it's usually to the most recent version certified for the application, -1 minor revision. Which means we routinely jump over a bunch of interim releases. This is usually accompanied by a major app release and/or a hardware refresh, because if you're going to be in hell, you might as well spend the time in the most roasty part, and get it over with.
In the case of migrating off XP, there really is no need. XP still works, no Windows XP instance is outward facing and they're all behind a series of firewalls, and XP still works. When you have six thousand workers running apps who don't give a crap what the OS looks like as long as their app works, you mess with that at your peril.
Now, caveat, a development environment may be different, if you're developing Windows applications. (Our development environments don't do that, and they all still work on XP.) But for people for whom Windows is not an end in itself, XP is still fine.
Um, yeah, this isn't really about Vista. It wasn't compatibility that stopped us moving to Vista. It was mostly because it's UNNECESSARY. The OS is just a program loader and a manager of resources. Say it with me please: The OS is not an application. Now, as the OS gets more mature, changes are made to the work environment, compatibility with devices, new interfaces, and so forth, most of which aren't interesting in the enterprise world, where ops personnel log on and run three or four apps and that's it. Sometimes just two apps: Email and browser. Or Email and 3179 emulation. Or Email and CIS app. These people don't need or want a new OS -- they want to be able to do their job unhindered by whether their windows have rounded corners or what tiles are.
We didn't migrate to Vista because (1) we did not need to, and (2) there is no 2.
Now, the fact that Vista was having some issues -- performance, speed of file transfers, compatibility with existing hardware, and all that, helped the decision along. Not to mention, changes in the GUI, which OS-philes think are so wonderful, are actually a detriment in Customer Service, in a depot, or anywhere where people need to get routine work done. Not to mention having to re-certify all mission critical applications.
And so, new equipment arrived with Vista Home, and was re-imaged with the corporate copy of XP Pro, and everyone had the same environment, everything worked and was administrated the same, and we could get work done.
When the decision was made to upgrade, 7 was mature, and experiments showed that Windows 7 Pro's XP compatibility was sufficient that minimal things had to be done to get it to work in the corporate environment.
And even THEN, there was and will not be a mass upgrade to 7. Why? See (1) above. Rather, the upgrade to 7 is a gradual thing, with new hardware gradually replacing the old, reimaged with the corporate copy of Win 7 and all the settings that make it work for us.
And this condition will continue until it's impractical to continue any more. And WE get to decide what "impractical" means, not Microsoft.
And so, current plans are to skip 8. There are arguably various reasons for this, including none of our stuff being qualified for the-gui-formerly-known-as-metro, having to field a new set of hardware requirements, and having to retrain users and admins on a new version of the OS. Even if you think this is all trivial, it is still work.
But for the MAIN reason, the PRIMARY reason why we are not migrating to 8, see (1) above. The rest is fine for water cooler discussions, but this is a sufficient reason in and of itself.
Right, but I bet you still have a server running RHEL 5. And I'm pretty sure Red Hat isn't in a panic for you to switch to 6.3.
How else can they sell new copies?
We aren't exactly upgrading to 7. All legacy machines will still run XP, because there's really no reason to upgrade them. New machines will run 7. This decision was only made after an extensive pilot program to make sure 7 would run everything important to the business. 7 passed. We are fairly certain that 8 will fail.
You are my new favorite person.
I occasionally chat with a few Microsoft SDEs who are directly involved in the development of native RT apps, and it usually goes something like this: "ARM is fucking terrible, it's weak and powerless!" "How come other platforms, including Linux, can run on ARM successfully?" "ARM isn't powerful enough to run Windows applications, that's what we mean. That's why we have to rewrite everything to be more highly optimized for these few Windows RT apps." "So, the reason Windows RT can't run Windows apps is because most Windows software is so bad, it wouldn't perform acceptably on something being run at its limits?" "Pretty much."
Well, yeah, but haven't we known this for, like, decades? The only thing that hasn't absolutely crushed the Windows experience is that the hardware has somehow managed to keep up with the requirements of the OS. When the netbook phenomena started, Microsoft had a very difficult time playing in that space until the netbook was re-imagined as a low-ish end laptop. Even though the early netbooks ran Linux just fine.
> Over at The Verge, the intrepid Sean Hollister asked eight Microsoft Store representatives about the differences between Windows 8 and Windows RT, and received several confusing responses.
And I would submit that this is intentional. The more the waters are muddied about the differences between the two operating systems, the larger the potential launch volume. And then you have a bunch of people out there who already own the product and are trying to make it work, giving additional motivation to vendors to port to it.
It's genius, although the kind of genius you pour out of a bottle.
Understood. But the robocalls have a purpose, usually to get you to do business with some company. (Legit or not.) Play along until you get a contact, then sue the living crap out of the company.
It's the only way to be sure.