Now I can find no way to disagree, except for one little thing.
I'm not a fan of demonizing the misled. Yes, they have vast resources to drive the economics of the people who lead them, and sculpt the course of progress or lack thereof. But they are not inherently, actively evil. They are making the best choices they can within the scope of their experience. They do the best they can with what they have. They just don't know. Ignorance is not evil. To a certain extent the failure of open solutions to sell into this base is equally responsible for the ills that result. Closed systems have faults, but lack of money to do marketing is not one of them. Open solutions lack a profit model that funds this level of marketing - they don't take decisionmakers to lunch, nor have open bar events, holiday "information sessions" in exotic locales and so on. Humans still make decisions based on the choices presented, and if the open alternative is not presented to them they cannot choose it. They choose experiences that they prefer. That is not their fault - that is the human condition.
Dude, I'm not a friend of them nor their practices. I find them vile. I wish them a cruel fate. But I work in the field and the guy who writes those checks: I know him and he will gladly sign that check all day. I wish it weren't so. I wish he knew better. I wish I could educate him about why he's being dumb. But I am not in denial. If I tried that he would not hear me - he would just buy from somebody else who would confirm his delusion to get his check.
I understand. There are days that I just wander the aisles of our warehouse stacked three units high with pallets of these discarded things and reminisce for a while about how awesome it would have been to have this back in the day, how important the managers of this gear were, how much it cost not just for the gear, but the maintenance, software licenses, support, admin salary. These were the totems of a tech religion that ruled all. But now it's just junk that costs money to be rid of. The stuff we drool over today will also be worthless junk after an equal span of time, the high priests defrocked. It gives perspective to appreciate the lifecycle in this way.
Can't do that either. Obligated to store them until Cisco will take them. Apparently they're accepting shipments of crap now, so in 2-3 years the warehouse may have room for other stuff again. A deal is a deal.
I have a local personal vendor for useless metal crap that's PC related. They get paid to take it away from the source and sell it to me for the metal salvage rate because that's better than paying to ship it overseas. It's worth the price to avoid the ethical issues with repurposing surplus outside the agreed terms. They sold me a couple of 48U rolling racks and hardware for cheap, some laptops and a lot of other stuff. Sometimes they take me to school though - recently I bought a PowerMac G5 for $100 there thinking it was a MacPro with dual Xeons because they look the same on the outside. My fault. I'm torn between keeping it as a museum piece or doing a case mod. Linux will run on this but it's not worth the effort - I have far more Linux capable gear that isn't so much trouble than I know what to do with, obviously.
I am a huge fan of repurposing surplus as long as the terms for removal are unambiguous: remove and dispose in the best way, destroy the drives. Unfortunately you don't usually get those terms in my role - I'm not a surplus guy primarily, just incidentally in the course of other work. When you do get that deal also, it's great!
One day maybe I'll work on the surplus side and help hold this gear out of the environment a little while longer. Vendors have been working hard to prevent this though, with "lease" deals that ensure they can take the devices out of the repurpose stream. They knew "good enough" computing was coming. Most of the stuff entering the surplus channel now is just crap even I couldn't make use of - 10/100 switches, VGA-only LCDs, inkjet printers, SCSI scanners and so forth. The last of the CRTs. Servers that say "Compaq" on them.
For most businesses, even small businesses, the issue isn't the cost of Windows Datacenter licenses and CALs. They pay far more for people to administer the thing. One fully loaded dual-socket server can serve an armada of Windows Server instances (any version) with the license included, Linux servers as well, and petabytes of storage. You just need to load up on the RAM and flash storage the instance images are stored on to get around the I/O bottleneck. They're paying more for the software that enables specific services (database, backup, security, CMS, cloud management, dashboards, email, ad infinitum) to run in these instances. Before you need more than three of these tin boxes (and associated Windows Datacenter licenses) for WAN distributed cluster failover you're a Fortune 1000 company, or you are selling online services and using Linux and probably AWS anyway. One box configured correctly literally has the grunt now to service thousands of end users for customary services like file/print, enpoint management, LOB apps. Most actually pay every license twice just to ensure they don't get publicly shamed by the BSA in an audit, that's how much they care about the price.
The real issue is that Windows server instances are not very good at servicing the currently shifting mix of endpoint devices. Windows Server is notoriously poor at recognizing the existence of the non-Windows devices that make up 80% of endpoint sales these days. At the other 20% they're great! Fortunately in the painful extraction from XP/IE6/ActiveX/MSJAVA most learned their lesson and demanded standard web browser based Line Of Business apps and Linux web server instances have abundant packages and connectivity to get the job done so delivering the required business utility to these endpoints is not a problem.
Microsoft's position has been that these new endpoints are toys. They don't even have Active Directory or IE9 for goshsakes, and Office won't run. So they're not worth supporting. They could come around to the opposite point of view and re-engineer their services for "bring any endpoint" but that bites them on the other end by encouraging people to deploy these devices in preference to endpoints running their own client OS, weakening the "synergy" of their web of codependencies. It also blunts the patent licensing bludgeon they have been using to prevent progress in many ways as these non-Windows endpoints have pretty much worked around their patents.
They're being euchred on the patent thing too. For years they used MPEG-LA to halt progress in video: "You can't do video without taking a license". But then Google bought ON2 - maker of Microsoft's own CODEC and Flash's as well, and Motorola Mobility, which is a bigger dog with MPEG-LA than them, so now they can't even ship an OS that can play a DVD without paying Google money. This is why Media Center is a download app suite now, rather than an OS version shipping on devices. Google is pushing their own better free and open CODEC that has a free patent pledge. ActiveSync, the patented proprietary protocol they used to prevent push email and calendaring to mobile devices is on the ropes: they're in the unenviable position of begging Google to implement it so their own Windows Phone devices can sync with Google services rather than demanding that no devices or services can implement it without paying them a fee. And on and on.
I really think they've been strategically outflanked on every other front. Price though? I don't think that's an issue. I think they could double the price of Datacenter and get away with it.
BTW: If I had to pick a nit with Windows Datacenter licensing it is that you cannot fail a Windows Server instance over from one physical Windows Datacenter server to another and then fail it back in under 30 days without violating the license of the Windows Server instance. At least that was the case last time I checked. Clearly that's a licensing oversight and unlikely to be enforced, but the sort of nit that gives license compliance people fits. Maybe some fine Windows licensing blackbelt will correct me on this in reply, with a proper citation.
They are all temps working for subcontractors. And the NSA doesn't even know how many of them there are - or even how many subcontracting companies. Think about that for a minute.
They just told a large number of sysadmins they are going to be discarded like used tissue for no fault of their own. I wonder how many will hold a grudge.
Jesus. Cisco stuff. I had forgot that. We have ten years worth of Cisco trade-ins in our warehouse from every major vendor including Cisco. Worth nothing, can't throw it out.
It was GB, not MB and I am with you. I have three dual Nehalem quadcore rack servers (DL380 with 8 SAS/SATA bays and 6 pcie slots, 1 GB BBWC, redundant power and all that) in a rolling rack in my garage retired from vmware duties with 96GB RAM each. Can't think of anything useful enough to bear the watts and fan noise to do with them. 36 3+ Ghz IA64 Xeon cores, 72 threads and 256 GB of RAM and I can't be bothered to power it up. If you had told me five years ago I could be in this position I would have asked you to check your meds.
When someone else says "the task is not possible" that is a challenge. When you yourself find the task is not possible it is time to try something else.
Of course. Because the ultimate utility of integrating your OS with your office suite is to provide those special secret OS hooks that make your app work better than any other, and the frequent special updates that make competing apps not work at all. Kind of hard for them to get either of those on Android.
I have all of these things too and I only use Linux on my personal PC. It would be nice if Chromecast supported Linux on launch day, but I'm sure somebody will figure that out shortly. But everyone in the house from 4YO up has an Android tablet or phone or iOS device or more than one, and they all connect to the big screen with HDMI or Miricast or adapter or something. It's not like lack for ways to throw stuff onto the screen. None of those other ways have the terminally painful method of interacting with the device as SmartTV. Just putting in a fairly secure password using a TV remote with typical input lag, transmission errors and input echo? Brutal.
I'm starting to think that Google Fiber's idea of including a Nexus 7 as a TV remote was a stroke of brilliance. That's the smarts you need for your TV right there. We may get one to dedicate for TV control duties.
A tablet or phone. We already have those, they already have connections for the TV either wired or wireless, they have every sort of video chat option imaginable and will continue to do so because they number in the billions. And we know when they are looking at us; they turn off.
More likely his teen son borrowed dad's iPad that was logged into Amazon.com and accidentally bought the whole newpaper while trying to look up what a "newspaper" was due to the whole one-click thing. I guess that sort of thing happens. After a stern talking to the teen will probably be sentenced to trying to turn a profit on the purchase as an object lesson to be careful touching around on dad's tablet.
Bad guys run some pretty high traffic sites that oddly enough, require captchas. Their client bots forward the real site captcha to the bad-guy site, which delivers it to a human who wants access to the bad-guy site and answers it - which answer is passed back to the bot and submitted to the legitimate site in real time. They also compromise legitimate captcha-secured sites for the same method. It's the Mechanical Turk method of defeating CAPTCHA. Machine learning of text recognition is not required.
Don't do it! I made it to the mailbox once and there are strange people out there with bumps in the wrong places. Made me dash back and do some deep research. Apparently there's a whole genre about this with memes and everything. It was scary and it made me feel funny. I'm still investigating but apparently the funny feeling gets worse about 45 minutes, and then there's about 30 minutes of less tension. I'm working on a blog report about it, in 30 minute increments.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I can find no way to disagree, except for one little thing.
I'm not a fan of demonizing the misled. Yes, they have vast resources to drive the economics of the people who lead them, and sculpt the course of progress or lack thereof. But they are not inherently, actively evil. They are making the best choices they can within the scope of their experience. They do the best they can with what they have. They just don't know. Ignorance is not evil. To a certain extent the failure of open solutions to sell into this base is equally responsible for the ills that result. Closed systems have faults, but lack of money to do marketing is not one of them. Open solutions lack a profit model that funds this level of marketing - they don't take decisionmakers to lunch, nor have open bar events, holiday "information sessions" in exotic locales and so on. Humans still make decisions based on the choices presented, and if the open alternative is not presented to them they cannot choose it. They choose experiences that they prefer. That is not their fault - that is the human condition.
Dude, I'm not a friend of them nor their practices. I find them vile. I wish them a cruel fate. But I work in the field and the guy who writes those checks: I know him and he will gladly sign that check all day. I wish it weren't so. I wish he knew better. I wish I could educate him about why he's being dumb. But I am not in denial. If I tried that he would not hear me - he would just buy from somebody else who would confirm his delusion to get his check.
I could do better on that with one modern desktop with a reasonably current graphics card, and save on power.
I understand. There are days that I just wander the aisles of our warehouse stacked three units high with pallets of these discarded things and reminisce for a while about how awesome it would have been to have this back in the day, how important the managers of this gear were, how much it cost not just for the gear, but the maintenance, software licenses, support, admin salary. These were the totems of a tech religion that ruled all. But now it's just junk that costs money to be rid of. The stuff we drool over today will also be worthless junk after an equal span of time, the high priests defrocked. It gives perspective to appreciate the lifecycle in this way.
Can't do that either. Obligated to store them until Cisco will take them. Apparently they're accepting shipments of crap now, so in 2-3 years the warehouse may have room for other stuff again. A deal is a deal.
I have a local personal vendor for useless metal crap that's PC related. They get paid to take it away from the source and sell it to me for the metal salvage rate because that's better than paying to ship it overseas. It's worth the price to avoid the ethical issues with repurposing surplus outside the agreed terms. They sold me a couple of 48U rolling racks and hardware for cheap, some laptops and a lot of other stuff. Sometimes they take me to school though - recently I bought a PowerMac G5 for $100 there thinking it was a MacPro with dual Xeons because they look the same on the outside. My fault. I'm torn between keeping it as a museum piece or doing a case mod. Linux will run on this but it's not worth the effort - I have far more Linux capable gear that isn't so much trouble than I know what to do with, obviously.
I am a huge fan of repurposing surplus as long as the terms for removal are unambiguous: remove and dispose in the best way, destroy the drives. Unfortunately you don't usually get those terms in my role - I'm not a surplus guy primarily, just incidentally in the course of other work. When you do get that deal also, it's great!
One day maybe I'll work on the surplus side and help hold this gear out of the environment a little while longer. Vendors have been working hard to prevent this though, with "lease" deals that ensure they can take the devices out of the repurpose stream. They knew "good enough" computing was coming. Most of the stuff entering the surplus channel now is just crap even I couldn't make use of - 10/100 switches, VGA-only LCDs, inkjet printers, SCSI scanners and so forth. The last of the CRTs. Servers that say "Compaq" on them.
For most businesses, even small businesses, the issue isn't the cost of Windows Datacenter licenses and CALs. They pay far more for people to administer the thing. One fully loaded dual-socket server can serve an armada of Windows Server instances (any version) with the license included, Linux servers as well, and petabytes of storage. You just need to load up on the RAM and flash storage the instance images are stored on to get around the I/O bottleneck. They're paying more for the software that enables specific services (database, backup, security, CMS, cloud management, dashboards, email, ad infinitum) to run in these instances. Before you need more than three of these tin boxes (and associated Windows Datacenter licenses) for WAN distributed cluster failover you're a Fortune 1000 company, or you are selling online services and using Linux and probably AWS anyway. One box configured correctly literally has the grunt now to service thousands of end users for customary services like file/print, enpoint management, LOB apps. Most actually pay every license twice just to ensure they don't get publicly shamed by the BSA in an audit, that's how much they care about the price.
The real issue is that Windows server instances are not very good at servicing the currently shifting mix of endpoint devices. Windows Server is notoriously poor at recognizing the existence of the non-Windows devices that make up 80% of endpoint sales these days. At the other 20% they're great! Fortunately in the painful extraction from XP/IE6/ActiveX/MSJAVA most learned their lesson and demanded standard web browser based Line Of Business apps and Linux web server instances have abundant packages and connectivity to get the job done so delivering the required business utility to these endpoints is not a problem.
Microsoft's position has been that these new endpoints are toys. They don't even have Active Directory or IE9 for goshsakes, and Office won't run. So they're not worth supporting. They could come around to the opposite point of view and re-engineer their services for "bring any endpoint" but that bites them on the other end by encouraging people to deploy these devices in preference to endpoints running their own client OS, weakening the "synergy" of their web of codependencies. It also blunts the patent licensing bludgeon they have been using to prevent progress in many ways as these non-Windows endpoints have pretty much worked around their patents.
They're being euchred on the patent thing too. For years they used MPEG-LA to halt progress in video: "You can't do video without taking a license". But then Google bought ON2 - maker of Microsoft's own CODEC and Flash's as well, and Motorola Mobility, which is a bigger dog with MPEG-LA than them, so now they can't even ship an OS that can play a DVD without paying Google money. This is why Media Center is a download app suite now, rather than an OS version shipping on devices. Google is pushing their own better free and open CODEC that has a free patent pledge. ActiveSync, the patented proprietary protocol they used to prevent push email and calendaring to mobile devices is on the ropes: they're in the unenviable position of begging Google to implement it so their own Windows Phone devices can sync with Google services rather than demanding that no devices or services can implement it without paying them a fee. And on and on.
I really think they've been strategically outflanked on every other front. Price though? I don't think that's an issue. I think they could double the price of Datacenter and get away with it.
BTW: If I had to pick a nit with Windows Datacenter licensing it is that you cannot fail a Windows Server instance over from one physical Windows Datacenter server to another and then fail it back in under 30 days without violating the license of the Windows Server instance. At least that was the case last time I checked. Clearly that's a licensing oversight and unlikely to be enforced, but the sort of nit that gives license compliance people fits. Maybe some fine Windows licensing blackbelt will correct me on this in reply, with a proper citation.
They are all temps working for subcontractors. And the NSA doesn't even know how many of them there are - or even how many subcontracting companies. Think about that for a minute.
They just told a large number of sysadmins they are going to be discarded like used tissue for no fault of their own. I wonder how many will hold a grudge.
I do the impossible every day. That is actually the scope of my "special projects" mission. But I am not disposed to tell you how I do it.
I have three xp units left. We will migrate to Linux.
Jesus. Cisco stuff. I had forgot that. We have ten years worth of Cisco trade-ins in our warehouse from every major vendor including Cisco. Worth nothing, can't throw it out.
Well I guess I can close one tab now as I was holding one open to post this.
When icebike endorses an AC, we need to ask if she was the AC.
It was GB, not MB and I am with you. I have three dual Nehalem quadcore rack servers (DL380 with 8 SAS/SATA bays and 6 pcie slots, 1 GB BBWC, redundant power and all that) in a rolling rack in my garage retired from vmware duties with 96GB RAM each. Can't think of anything useful enough to bear the watts and fan noise to do with them. 36 3+ Ghz IA64 Xeon cores, 72 threads and 256 GB of RAM and I can't be bothered to power it up. If you had told me five years ago I could be in this position I would have asked you to check your meds.
When someone else says "the task is not possible" that is a challenge. When you yourself find the task is not possible it is time to try something else.
"The task is not possible" can be a pretty compelling argument for giving it up.
Of course. Because the ultimate utility of integrating your OS with your office suite is to provide those special secret OS hooks that make your app work better than any other, and the frequent special updates that make competing apps not work at all. Kind of hard for them to get either of those on Android.
Microsoft wouldn't want to start looking outdated and monopoloistic.
I have all of these things too and I only use Linux on my personal PC. It would be nice if Chromecast supported Linux on launch day, but I'm sure somebody will figure that out shortly. But everyone in the house from 4YO up has an Android tablet or phone or iOS device or more than one, and they all connect to the big screen with HDMI or Miricast or adapter or something. It's not like lack for ways to throw stuff onto the screen. None of those other ways have the terminally painful method of interacting with the device as SmartTV. Just putting in a fairly secure password using a TV remote with typical input lag, transmission errors and input echo? Brutal.
I'm starting to think that Google Fiber's idea of including a Nexus 7 as a TV remote was a stroke of brilliance. That's the smarts you need for your TV right there. We may get one to dedicate for TV control duties.
A tablet or phone. We already have those, they already have connections for the TV either wired or wireless, they have every sort of video chat option imaginable and will continue to do so because they number in the billions. And we know when they are looking at us; they turn off.
More likely his teen son borrowed dad's iPad that was logged into Amazon.com and accidentally bought the whole newpaper while trying to look up what a "newspaper" was due to the whole one-click thing. I guess that sort of thing happens. After a stern talking to the teen will probably be sentenced to trying to turn a profit on the purchase as an object lesson to be careful touching around on dad's tablet.
I think this transaction was sort of like my wife coming home with a pair of fancy shoes she would never wear in a million years: "They were on sale."
Bad guys run some pretty high traffic sites that oddly enough, require captchas. Their client bots forward the real site captcha to the bad-guy site, which delivers it to a human who wants access to the bad-guy site and answers it - which answer is passed back to the bot and submitted to the legitimate site in real time. They also compromise legitimate captcha-secured sites for the same method. It's the Mechanical Turk method of defeating CAPTCHA. Machine learning of text recognition is not required.
Wait for the Woot.
Don't do it! I made it to the mailbox once and there are strange people out there with bumps in the wrong places. Made me dash back and do some deep research. Apparently there's a whole genre about this with memes and everything. It was scary and it made me feel funny. I'm still investigating but apparently the funny feeling gets worse about 45 minutes, and then there's about 30 minutes of less tension. I'm working on a blog report about it, in 30 minute increments.