Excellent point: does Facebook really really want to get into selectively blocking messages sent through their system because of their content? Did they really think through the consequences of being responsible for a billion user posting a billion messages per day?
Assume a bank in the USA will only track dollars to the second decimal. 0,01 USD is then the smallest amount that can be traded.
A bank in Europe has a similar granularity, tracking 0,01 EUR.
Banks in China, Thailand and Turkey track their currency to an comparable precision, so I'm pretty confident a Thai bank will track amounts as small as 0,25 THB. After all, there are coins in actual circulation for that amount. Maybe they follow the worldwide model and track the THB with two decimals, having 0,01 THB as the smallest transaction possible.
Why is it reasonable for a bank in Thailand to track a transaction comparable to 0,00025 EUR (1 EUR ~ 40 THB) while this is seen as unreasonable for European banks?
If you collected all pennies that were ever cut off from you in your lifetime (assuming it always only cuts off to your disadvantage, instead of the usual 50% rounding up and the other 50% rounding down) - would you be able to buy even one additional gallon of fuel from that? How are those magically lost pennies different from any other transaction cost, namely driving to the gas station in the first place?
Game theory: is it a dominant strategy to abandon cash? Assuming a group forms that accepts and sends electronic payments only, will this present an advantage large enough to present individuals a profitable choice to join them? Will a larger group increase network effects of that group? Will a larger network effect increase benefits for everyone instead of just decreasing inconvenience?
I guess somewhere along these questions, a serious disadvantage arises for people abandoning cash for payments. If that wasn't the case, we would have already seen a slowly increasing population doing so. We would certainly have some businesses accepting electronic payments only if it was a dominant strategy. I don't know of one, unfortunately.
If it's not a dominant strategy, it can never take hold. Even if it actually IS the informal sector and the black market driving it as most cash opponents claim: what car dealer would not sell their flagship luxury vehicle to this dude who's looking like a pimp if he's paying in hard cash upfront?
They do have the right size and innards to contain enough explosive material and ignition mechanism and still be innocuous and portable. Given the fact that all toner cartridges contain 50g to 500g of some fine powder, electronics, copper wiring, maybe some servos, packed in a light-tight shell it sure is able to camouflage a bomb to visual inspection and even x-ray imaging.
First, I never said NPD were conservatives, I clearly stated they are Nazis and don't even try to hide that. Their campaign posters and all advertising designed only and always in black, white and red should confirm this to everyone.
Second, I have mentioned a handful of other parties that I do think are conservative which find it hard to hold a lawful, peaceful meeting or demonstration without getting their members punched to the face.
Third, I disapprove of punching anyone to their face for holding a particular opinion. If it was admissible for punching people in the face for their opinion, no one could walk more than a few meters in public before getting beaten up. Additionally, my fists would be sore on every evening.
If you really think the CDU is even half as "conservative" as the US-GOP, then please please put it in perspective with the rest of the world outside of Europe.
On topics like immigration, taxes, individual freedom, economical freedom and redistribution of wealth, most European parties are very much on the left side of the political spectrum.
That a party like the CDU can actually be perceived as a "conservative" power is more than telling about the political compass in Europe. The CDU may have some conservative members, but the party's leaders including Mrs. Angela Merkel herself are definitely not.
Right-leaning or conservative parties, just to get the compass straight would be the US Republicans, Geert Wilders' "Party for freedom", the "Austrian Freedom Party", maybe the "Swiss People's Party" and maybe the "Sweden Democrats" for example.
Counterarguments, that these parties mentioned are supposed to be all "Nazi" and "right-wing extremists" is a tell-tale sign of a skewed political compass. To contrast that, the "National Democratic Party of Germany", are the real actual Nazis. Several members and even leaders having personally, physically attacked immigrants. I would put into this group *maybe* the French "National Front" but probably also the Dutch "Vlaams Belang".
Compare these to the "conservative" parties and the distinction should become crystal clear: their stance towards people of color, individual freedom and the western world in general are usually very very different, with the opinion on Israel being the easiest litmus test to tell Nazis and Conservatives apart. Conservatives may mention disagreements with Israel's policy, while Nazis will utterly denounce the entire country and all of its inhabitants.
But all parties on the political right from the CDU have severe trouble getting even the most basic rights, up to and including not getting beat up for their opinion.
Renting a venue for a meeting? Buying a building to use as their headquarters? Getting a taxi to and from a big party meeting? Impossible.
Imagine the entire official side of a city the size of Cologne cooperating to prevent a meeting of the Pro Cologne party, including the police turning a blind eye when party members are beaten to a pulp in the streets.
Regardless of political stance, this is unacceptable in a democratic country, yet the Left side will continue to fight and physically attack their enemies, boasting their successes in prohibiting them from moving at all.
Something like the Tea Party movement would be physically beaten everywhere and every time.
Sit-ins are extensively used today all over the world, but curiously almost exclusively by the "left" of the respective country.
But the fact that they are so heavily used everywhere by people who proclaim themselves to be people's or peace activists doesn't exactly make it any more peaceful or respectable.
Sit-ins are peaceful only in a way that it doesn't punch people in the face. Other than that, they're more often than not illegal, that is, trampling someones right to move or use their property, not only the owner of the place they're sitting-in on, but also all the people around them.
In my opinion, it is a key trademark of the political left of any country in the Western hemisphere: they regard their goals as so important and their mind as so pure, that they habitually see themselves in any case above all their political opponents and their interests and opinions - but usually also above issues like the law, that is more often than not regarded as "protecting the enemy" instead of protecting everyone's freedom. It is this mindset that results in seeing all (their own) actions as "peaceful" as long as no one is punched to the face, no matter what other laws and freedoms they may have crossed. On the other hand, the Left - here in Europe - are the political faction most likely to commit violence, if that is of course "justified" in their own opinions.
Athens: have the lowest pension age of the entire western world, the most state officials per inhabitant and for many industries ridiculously low income taxes. Have the state increase the pension age, riot for months, destroy billions in infrastructure, send package bombs to everywhere in Europe France: work in a factory, if 20% of employees must be let off in the worldwide crisis, kidnap and/or murder the boss that is still providing a job and income to the remaining 80%. Germany: prevent any conservative or right-leaning party from ever be able to hold a congress, demonstration or election campaign, no matter what constitution and laws say about it. Beat people from conservative and right-wing parties (see ProKöln and others) to a pulp. People of conservative and right-wing opinions brought it on themselves, right?
The argument seems coherent until we discover phone numbers are not exactly public information that everyone and their dog can see while strolling about on public streets.
Imagine you painted your phone number in big letters over the street-facing side of your house and THEN demand everyone leave out the number from their photos.
Ridiculous.
But most of my fellow Germans are currently riding the hardcore eco-socialist wave and technological innovations don't exactly fall on fertile ground right now in this country. A few more of these "get-off-my-lawn" follies and we've successfully reduced this once-great country to a ecologically superior open-air museum of life in the good old days. If critics of this neo-luddite craze are publicly asking in editorials if automobile and plane, where they invented today, would have a chance of NOT being verboten instantly. Only to receive angry letters that planes and automobiles ought to be made illegal as soon as possible...
I'm just waiting for the XenDesktop bare metal solution getting ready for production use, then we'll give it a try I think.
CPUs and HDDs are probably never used fully, but RAM is, that's why it is usually the most scarce resource on any VDI server side, on ours at least.
And mobile users are usually having their troubles with VDI, especially when travelling around the rural areas.
Having road warriors integrate seamlessly into a VDI infrastructure with the computing resources of the desktops/notebooks utilized fully seems to be the holy grail of desktop management to me, the ultimate panacea.
Swap out the underlying client hardware, pull back the image, get to work. No more beefy VDI servers, just bandwidth for the first download of images, storage for them and some bandwidth back and forth for continous synching. All of which is cheap enough, compared to the oodles of RAM on classic VDI clusters.
And no PHB can ever complain again about not being able to work wherever and whenever they want, with or without network.
I didn't advocate not choosing the best practice, but simply keeping the "CYA-aspect" in mind when doing so.
In any case, building a pool of 1000 machines by hand or replacing the ones that fail with new ones on the go, slowly populating a veritable zoo of machines, is probably not the epitome of technological best practice.
Doing anything that is not the company's objective and core business is always a second line. Second line is usually not at best practice level, but even if it were, that company would not be reaching its full potential.
Idea: a regular office floor with WLAN APs mounted on the ceiling. Calculate the number you'd need for 100% coverage and put a label "primary" on them. Now buy the same number of APs again and label them "secondary". And once again, with a label "Standby/Backup". Wire all primary APs to the primary, high available switch. Wire all secondary APs to the secondary, high-available switch and the same for Standby, you know the drill.
Set the same SSID for all APs. Use a redundant uplink to your RADIUS cluster. APs that cannot reach the RADIUS server would not allow any connections, maybe can be set to disable their wireless as long as RADIUS is unreachable for them.
Have the thin clients link up with WiFi. If one switch, one AP, one whatever goes down, the session will freeze for a second while they connect to the next AP.
With small offices, this can be done with only 3 APs and 3 SOHO switches.
___ On the other hand:
In most cases, a floor-wide network outage will cost a boatload of money, no matter if the company is using thin or fat clients. Let's be honest for a while:
What kind of work can be accomplished when emails, spreadsheets, documents, forms and archived PDFs are not available but the desktops still running? Create a new document and save it on the desktop for a few minutes?
That is not much different from having the entire shop go dark. Executives will be able to work of course, their job can be done with pen and paper, but everyone else is hosed.
Even more: all documents open at the time of LAN disconnect have just hatched into a new local version, not consolidated with the one on the server. Maybe Word or Excel just crashed with their libraries unavailable and took the open document with its unsaved changes with them.
A thin client terminal session that was interrupted by a LAN disconnect will come back as if nothing happened. No hatchlings for office documents, no crashes, no lost data, just lost time. And probably the same amount of time that is lost through updating, virus scanning, deploying, repairing individual fat clients. Time lost on thin clients is just more visible, because if it occurs, it hits everyone hard and everyone the same - not time trickled away for years with no one clearly noticing.
It's not the cost of the hardware. The hardware is chump change.
It is labor to keep all that humming along. A dumb terminal seldom breaks and if it does, can be replaced in seconds with no questions asked. Try to troubleshoot a broken full OS installation on a company laptop instead. Expend a few grand to get that incredibly important customer data back that the careless employee saved on their laptop's HDD instead of the network drive.
Admin access to any machine is a nice idea until you discover a bazillion apps on the premises that either have are pirated, phoning home your company secrets, obsolete or totally unworkable for everyone except the person that originally deployed them, but who's not in that department or company anymore.
Nice try.
I'm not saying a multinational corporation should standardize 100.000 workstations across 5 continents, 10 time zones, 20 industry sectors and 500 local office traditions/customs/cultures. That can be done, but I think it is insane to have one single hardware for everything from building cars to distilling chemicals.
But when every tool in the company can only be worked on by exactly one person, you'll be soon up the creek with no paddle.
Companies are expending money to earn money. IT is their tool to do that. If IT fails, it is lost profits. Time spent building, fixing, replacing is lost profits. People waiting for their machine to boot are losing profit. Engineers cobbling together machines with parts from the bargain bin are saving purchase costs, but expend precious time. Lost profits.
If you don't have a firehose of money handy for whatever size class you're in, that company is not making enough of a profit and should re-think their strategy.
I'm not saying spend like there's no tomorrow, but carefully calculate savings vs. risks. Building 1.000 PCs on company time by less-than-perfect IT engineers is a huge risk unless you're an IT provider yourself.
If your IT engineers are actually perfect, good for you, but then you should instantly start a spin-off. Keeping the perfect engineers on the first line there and selling their expertise for a profit will benefit everyone instead of letting their potential rot away in your second line (and if your mission is not IT provisioning, then the IT engineers would definitely be second line)
Companies can limit their expenditures to stay competitive, but that's only a second line of remedies. I've never heard from companies reaching world domination by cutting costs.
A software that doesn't run on a Citrix or other remote desktop in a plain office environment that cannot reasonably replaced?
What is that?
We only had the bar code scanner for the company's library software. It had a competitor that could. End of story.
Seriously, I would rather spend the same amount of HW design and maintenance server-side than having a large field service running around the country fixing HDDs in every branch office, needing to pacify hundreds of panicked accountants worrying about their data.
Have a data center with all IT specialists around the building so most hard problems can be to solved on the premises. I swear I will never deploy a desktop machine or notebook with local, non-automatically backed-up storage ever again. If you still do, please apply for a job at our competitors:)
On the contrary. "Buying" 100 or 1000 or 100.000 Dell systems is not done overnight and requires considerable skills to do it right.
Most companies I know are always overstretching their employees' time beyond all believable bounds. A decent service contract will remove overtime, not make anyone obsolete.
The cost of stocking replacement parts at your own facility is always either 10% or at least 2 units of all spare parts you could possibly need. If your IT works great, these spares are never needed. If your IT doesn't, these spares are constantly used up and re-ordered. Either way, you lose money for things you don't need.
A service contract will allow you to order new machines in total from somewhere, have them delivered overnight and be back online tomorrow.
We did this for a spin-off company with 15 people recently. Full-service Notebooks, broken today, replaced tomorrow for less than 100 EUR per machine per month. Incremental backups are continuously sent server-side and brought back with the first connect. For that kind of money, we couldn't even dream to do that ourselves. But on the other hand, we're not an IT shop, so why should we have certified IT engineers and the expensive continued education to keep them on top of everything?
That is because the price upfront is less than half the cost of owning and operating the thing.
If you had to pay someone top dollar for every hour spent fixing a thing and every hour this thing is inoperable is costing even more dollars in lost profits, they you'd never think twice about building your own machines unless you really need a special requirements hardware with none available on the corporate market. But even then, there's a high chance that something was wrong with the requirements in the first place. Even number crunchers don't need monstrous workstations below their desks. If they need 1000 cores to do something, they'd have a nice blade center sitting safely in the data center, where 1.000 or 100.000 cores can be allocated to a task with a simply mouse click.
What company would employ their own architects, building engineers and construction workers, highly skilled and in the optimum range of workload to remain efficient to build a few offices? Probably none, except for building companies of course.
Why do people think they can do it for building PCs if they're not a IT provider? Because everyone can buy one at Dell?
A specialized IT provider can be cheaper, better, faster per unit than a make-everything-yourself IT department, even if the IT provider pays MORE per hour than the department.
Post included nearly everything, but I might add a few points:
The upfront costs for building or purchasing the computer would most probably be half the costs incurred for maintenance, support, provisioning of spare parts and replacements. Maybe much less.
Most of the costs of owning that thing, the much-cited TCO, comes from these areas. A generic PC you can re-order from Dell in a heartbeat is going to be extremely cheap even if upfront is double the DIY-solution.
But who orders "bare bone PCs" from their supplier? In my opinion, only companies where IT is truly mission critical or the entire purpose of their company would be wise to build their own machines and OS images.
I would negotiate a contract with an IT outsourcing partner - ie. not Dell the vendor but *maybe* Dell the service provider - to supply working machines with images suitable or customized for me and then simply order "my" machines from them. Spare machines come from the provider's pool (so I will not have x% for spare parts lying around), defective machines go back to the provide (so I will not expend efforts troubleshooting these things) and machines that are not needed anymore go back into the provider's pool as well (so I will not need to care about writing off or re-sale).
Dedicated IT providers can do these things so much better than my company can. But after all, that's why they're company's mission is "IT provider" and ours is not.
No one ever got fired for choosing Dell" (or HP or IBM).
The best possible outcome of IT is that everything works, flawlessly, for years. Which means very few people in the company will notice a perfect IT at all, except for your superiors, of course, contrary to stereotypes they will most probably notice the good things.
But... If you designed and built the machines, anything that breaks will be your fault. Slight problems may not mean anything, but just imagine a model (mainboard, graphics card etc.) you chose is later discovered to have a flaw that affects all units or just has a bad reliability overall (like the DeathStar-HDDs, the graphics cards with the faulty capacitors etc. etc.) - your job will turn to Hell. If you manage to keep it, that is.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point: does Facebook really really want to get into selectively blocking messages sent through their system because of their content? Did they really think through the consequences of being responsible for a billion user posting a billion messages per day?
Assume a bank in the USA will only track dollars to the second decimal. 0,01 USD is then the smallest amount that can be traded.
A bank in Europe has a similar granularity, tracking 0,01 EUR.
Banks in China, Thailand and Turkey track their currency to an comparable precision, so I'm pretty confident a Thai bank will track amounts as small as 0,25 THB. After all, there are coins in actual circulation for that amount. Maybe they follow the worldwide model and track the THB with two decimals, having 0,01 THB as the smallest transaction possible.
Why is it reasonable for a bank in Thailand to track a transaction comparable to 0,00025 EUR (1 EUR ~ 40 THB) while this is seen as unreasonable for European banks?
If you collected all pennies that were ever cut off from you in your lifetime (assuming it always only cuts off to your disadvantage, instead of the usual 50% rounding up and the other 50% rounding down) - would you be able to buy even one additional gallon of fuel from that? How are those magically lost pennies different from any other transaction cost, namely driving to the gas station in the first place?
Game theory: is it a dominant strategy to abandon cash? Assuming a group forms that accepts and sends electronic payments only, will this present an advantage large enough to present individuals a profitable choice to join them? Will a larger group increase network effects of that group? Will a larger network effect increase benefits for everyone instead of just decreasing inconvenience?
I guess somewhere along these questions, a serious disadvantage arises for people abandoning cash for payments. If that wasn't the case, we would have already seen a slowly increasing population doing so. We would certainly have some businesses accepting electronic payments only if it was a dominant strategy. I don't know of one, unfortunately.
If it's not a dominant strategy, it can never take hold. Even if it actually IS the informal sector and the black market driving it as most cash opponents claim: what car dealer would not sell their flagship luxury vehicle to this dude who's looking like a pimp if he's paying in hard cash upfront?
OK, now what is the right way to go about security?
They do have the right size and innards to contain enough explosive material and ignition mechanism and still be innocuous and portable. Given the fact that all toner cartridges contain 50g to 500g of some fine powder, electronics, copper wiring, maybe some servos, packed in a light-tight shell it sure is able to camouflage a bomb to visual inspection and even x-ray imaging.
First, I never said NPD were conservatives, I clearly stated they are Nazis and don't even try to hide that. Their campaign posters and all advertising designed only and always in black, white and red should confirm this to everyone.
Second, I have mentioned a handful of other parties that I do think are conservative which find it hard to hold a lawful, peaceful meeting or demonstration without getting their members punched to the face.
Third, I disapprove of punching anyone to their face for holding a particular opinion. If it was admissible for punching people in the face for their opinion, no one could walk more than a few meters in public before getting beaten up. Additionally, my fists would be sore on every evening.
If you really think the CDU is even half as "conservative" as the US-GOP, then please please put it in perspective with the rest of the world outside of Europe.
On topics like immigration, taxes, individual freedom, economical freedom and redistribution of wealth, most European parties are very much on the left side of the political spectrum.
That a party like the CDU can actually be perceived as a "conservative" power is more than telling about the political compass in Europe. The CDU may have some conservative members, but the party's leaders including Mrs. Angela Merkel herself are definitely not.
Right-leaning or conservative parties, just to get the compass straight would be the US Republicans, Geert Wilders' "Party for freedom", the "Austrian Freedom Party", maybe the "Swiss People's Party" and maybe the "Sweden Democrats" for example.
Counterarguments, that these parties mentioned are supposed to be all "Nazi" and "right-wing extremists" is a tell-tale sign of a skewed political compass. To contrast that, the "National Democratic Party of Germany", are the real actual Nazis. Several members and even leaders having personally, physically attacked immigrants. I would put into this group *maybe* the French "National Front" but probably also the Dutch "Vlaams Belang".
Compare these to the "conservative" parties and the distinction should become crystal clear: their stance towards people of color, individual freedom and the western world in general are usually very very different, with the opinion on Israel being the easiest litmus test to tell Nazis and Conservatives apart. Conservatives may mention disagreements with Israel's policy, while Nazis will utterly denounce the entire country and all of its inhabitants.
But all parties on the political right from the CDU have severe trouble getting even the most basic rights, up to and including not getting beat up for their opinion.
Renting a venue for a meeting? Buying a building to use as their headquarters? Getting a taxi to and from a big party meeting? Impossible.
Imagine the entire official side of a city the size of Cologne cooperating to prevent a meeting of the Pro Cologne party, including the police turning a blind eye when party members are beaten to a pulp in the streets.
Regardless of political stance, this is unacceptable in a democratic country, yet the Left side will continue to fight and physically attack their enemies, boasting their successes in prohibiting them from moving at all.
Something like the Tea Party movement would be physically beaten everywhere and every time.
Sit-ins are extensively used today all over the world, but curiously almost exclusively by the "left" of the respective country.
But the fact that they are so heavily used everywhere by people who proclaim themselves to be people's or peace activists doesn't exactly make it any more peaceful or respectable.
Sit-ins are peaceful only in a way that it doesn't punch people in the face. Other than that, they're more often than not illegal, that is, trampling someones right to move or use their property, not only the owner of the place they're sitting-in on, but also all the people around them.
In my opinion, it is a key trademark of the political left of any country in the Western hemisphere: they regard their goals as so important and their mind as so pure, that they habitually see themselves in any case above all their political opponents and their interests and opinions - but usually also above issues like the law, that is more often than not regarded as "protecting the enemy" instead of protecting everyone's freedom. It is this mindset that results in seeing all (their own) actions as "peaceful" as long as no one is punched to the face, no matter what other laws and freedoms they may have crossed. On the other hand, the Left - here in Europe - are the political faction most likely to commit violence, if that is of course "justified" in their own opinions.
Athens: have the lowest pension age of the entire western world, the most state officials per inhabitant and for many industries ridiculously low income taxes. Have the state increase the pension age, riot for months, destroy billions in infrastructure, send package bombs to everywhere in Europe
France: work in a factory, if 20% of employees must be let off in the worldwide crisis, kidnap and/or murder the boss that is still providing a job and income to the remaining 80%.
Germany: prevent any conservative or right-leaning party from ever be able to hold a congress, demonstration or election campaign, no matter what constitution and laws say about it. Beat people from conservative and right-wing parties (see ProKöln and others) to a pulp. People of conservative and right-wing opinions brought it on themselves, right?
The argument seems coherent until we discover phone numbers are not exactly public information that everyone and their dog can see while strolling about on public streets.
Imagine you painted your phone number in big letters over the street-facing side of your house and THEN demand everyone leave out the number from their photos.
Ridiculous.
But most of my fellow Germans are currently riding the hardcore eco-socialist wave and technological innovations don't exactly fall on fertile ground right now in this country. A few more of these "get-off-my-lawn" follies and we've successfully reduced this once-great country to a ecologically superior open-air museum of life in the good old days. If critics of this neo-luddite craze are publicly asking in editorials if automobile and plane, where they invented today, would have a chance of NOT being verboten instantly. Only to receive angry letters that planes and automobiles ought to be made illegal as soon as possible...
You're preaching to the choir here, I think.
I'm just waiting for the XenDesktop bare metal solution getting ready for production use, then we'll give it a try I think.
CPUs and HDDs are probably never used fully, but RAM is, that's why it is usually the most scarce resource on any VDI server side, on ours at least.
And mobile users are usually having their troubles with VDI, especially when travelling around the rural areas.
Having road warriors integrate seamlessly into a VDI infrastructure with the computing resources of the desktops/notebooks utilized fully seems to be the holy grail of desktop management to me, the ultimate panacea.
Swap out the underlying client hardware, pull back the image, get to work. No more beefy VDI servers, just bandwidth for the first download of images, storage for them and some bandwidth back and forth for continous synching. All of which is cheap enough, compared to the oodles of RAM on classic VDI clusters.
And no PHB can ever complain again about not being able to work wherever and whenever they want, with or without network.
I didn't advocate not choosing the best practice, but simply keeping the "CYA-aspect" in mind when doing so.
In any case, building a pool of 1000 machines by hand or replacing the ones that fail with new ones on the go, slowly populating a veritable zoo of machines, is probably not the epitome of technological best practice.
Doing anything that is not the company's objective and core business is always a second line. Second line is usually not at best practice level, but even if it were, that company would not be reaching its full potential.
Idea: a regular office floor with WLAN APs mounted on the ceiling. Calculate the number you'd need for 100% coverage and put a label "primary" on them. Now buy the same number of APs again and label them "secondary". And once again, with a label "Standby/Backup". Wire all primary APs to the primary, high available switch. Wire all secondary APs to the secondary, high-available switch and the same for Standby, you know the drill.
Set the same SSID for all APs. Use a redundant uplink to your RADIUS cluster. APs that cannot reach the RADIUS server would not allow any connections, maybe can be set to disable their wireless as long as RADIUS is unreachable for them.
Have the thin clients link up with WiFi. If one switch, one AP, one whatever goes down, the session will freeze for a second while they connect to the next AP.
With small offices, this can be done with only 3 APs and 3 SOHO switches.
___
On the other hand:
In most cases, a floor-wide network outage will cost a boatload of money, no matter if the company is using thin or fat clients. Let's be honest for a while:
What kind of work can be accomplished when emails, spreadsheets, documents, forms and archived PDFs are not available but the desktops still running? Create a new document and save it on the desktop for a few minutes?
That is not much different from having the entire shop go dark. Executives will be able to work of course, their job can be done with pen and paper, but everyone else is hosed.
Even more: all documents open at the time of LAN disconnect have just hatched into a new local version, not consolidated with the one on the server. Maybe Word or Excel just crashed with their libraries unavailable and took the open document with its unsaved changes with them.
A thin client terminal session that was interrupted by a LAN disconnect will come back as if nothing happened. No hatchlings for office documents, no crashes, no lost data, just lost time. And probably the same amount of time that is lost through updating, virus scanning, deploying, repairing individual fat clients. Time lost on thin clients is just more visible, because if it occurs, it hits everyone hard and everyone the same - not time trickled away for years with no one clearly noticing.
It's not the cost of the hardware. The hardware is chump change.
It is labor to keep all that humming along. A dumb terminal seldom breaks and if it does, can be replaced in seconds with no questions asked. Try to troubleshoot a broken full OS installation on a company laptop instead. Expend a few grand to get that incredibly important customer data back that the careless employee saved on their laptop's HDD instead of the network drive.
Admin access to any machine is a nice idea until you discover a bazillion apps on the premises that either have are pirated, phoning home your company secrets, obsolete or totally unworkable for everyone except the person that originally deployed them, but who's not in that department or company anymore.
Nice try.
I'm not saying a multinational corporation should standardize 100.000 workstations across 5 continents, 10 time zones, 20 industry sectors and 500 local office traditions/customs/cultures. That can be done, but I think it is insane to have one single hardware for everything from building cars to distilling chemicals.
But when every tool in the company can only be worked on by exactly one person, you'll be soon up the creek with no paddle.
That's why you lease, not purchase them.
You pay for the machines that work, not for one that may or may not.
Companies are expending money to earn money. IT is their tool to do that. If IT fails, it is lost profits. Time spent building, fixing, replacing is lost profits. People waiting for their machine to boot are losing profit. Engineers cobbling together machines with parts from the bargain bin are saving purchase costs, but expend precious time. Lost profits.
If you don't have a firehose of money handy for whatever size class you're in, that company is not making enough of a profit and should re-think their strategy.
I'm not saying spend like there's no tomorrow, but carefully calculate savings vs. risks. Building 1.000 PCs on company time by less-than-perfect IT engineers is a huge risk unless you're an IT provider yourself.
If your IT engineers are actually perfect, good for you, but then you should instantly start a spin-off. Keeping the perfect engineers on the first line there and selling their expertise for a profit will benefit everyone instead of letting their potential rot away in your second line (and if your mission is not IT provisioning, then the IT engineers would definitely be second line)
Companies can limit their expenditures to stay competitive, but that's only a second line of remedies. I've never heard from companies reaching world domination by cutting costs.
A software that doesn't run on a Citrix or other remote desktop in a plain office environment that cannot reasonably replaced?
What is that?
We only had the bar code scanner for the company's library software. It had a competitor that could. End of story.
Seriously, I would rather spend the same amount of HW design and maintenance server-side than having a large field service running around the country fixing HDDs in every branch office, needing to pacify hundreds of panicked accountants worrying about their data.
Have a data center with all IT specialists around the building so most hard problems can be to solved on the premises. I swear I will never deploy a desktop machine or notebook with local, non-automatically backed-up storage ever again. If you still do, please apply for a job at our competitors :)
Corporations that keep outdated computers and "purchase" hardware need an upgrade themselves. They're wasting money by the boatload.
On the contrary. "Buying" 100 or 1000 or 100.000 Dell systems is not done overnight and requires considerable skills to do it right.
Most companies I know are always overstretching their employees' time beyond all believable bounds. A decent service contract will remove overtime, not make anyone obsolete.
"Unless you're a ridiculously tiny company - several miles away from the next human settlement - you will not be able to beat dell at this."
FTFY
The cost of stocking replacement parts at your own facility is always either 10% or at least 2 units of all spare parts you could possibly need. If your IT works great, these spares are never needed. If your IT doesn't, these spares are constantly used up and re-ordered. Either way, you lose money for things you don't need.
A service contract will allow you to order new machines in total from somewhere, have them delivered overnight and be back online tomorrow.
We did this for a spin-off company with 15 people recently. Full-service Notebooks, broken today, replaced tomorrow for less than 100 EUR per machine per month. Incremental backups are continuously sent server-side and brought back with the first connect. For that kind of money, we couldn't even dream to do that ourselves. But on the other hand, we're not an IT shop, so why should we have certified IT engineers and the expensive continued education to keep them on top of everything?
That is because the price upfront is less than half the cost of owning and operating the thing.
If you had to pay someone top dollar for every hour spent fixing a thing and every hour this thing is inoperable is costing even more dollars in lost profits, they you'd never think twice about building your own machines unless you really need a special requirements hardware with none available on the corporate market. But even then, there's a high chance that something was wrong with the requirements in the first place. Even number crunchers don't need monstrous workstations below their desks. If they need 1000 cores to do something, they'd have a nice blade center sitting safely in the data center, where 1.000 or 100.000 cores can be allocated to a task with a simply mouse click.
What company would employ their own architects, building engineers and construction workers, highly skilled and in the optimum range of workload to remain efficient to build a few offices? Probably none, except for building companies of course.
Why do people think they can do it for building PCs if they're not a IT provider? Because everyone can buy one at Dell?
A specialized IT provider can be cheaper, better, faster per unit than a make-everything-yourself IT department, even if the IT provider pays MORE per hour than the department.
Amen.
Post included nearly everything, but I might add a few points:
The upfront costs for building or purchasing the computer would most probably be half the costs incurred for maintenance, support, provisioning of spare parts and replacements. Maybe much less.
Most of the costs of owning that thing, the much-cited TCO, comes from these areas. A generic PC you can re-order from Dell in a heartbeat is going to be extremely cheap even if upfront is double the DIY-solution.
But who orders "bare bone PCs" from their supplier? In my opinion, only companies where IT is truly mission critical or the entire purpose of their company would be wise to build their own machines and OS images.
I would negotiate a contract with an IT outsourcing partner - ie. not Dell the vendor but *maybe* Dell the service provider - to supply working machines with images suitable or customized for me and then simply order "my" machines from them. Spare machines come from the provider's pool (so I will not have x% for spare parts lying around), defective machines go back to the provide (so I will not expend efforts troubleshooting these things) and machines that are not needed anymore go back into the provider's pool as well (so I will not need to care about writing off or re-sale).
Dedicated IT providers can do these things so much better than my company can. But after all, that's why they're company's mission is "IT provider" and ours is not.
No one ever got fired for choosing Dell" (or HP or IBM).
The best possible outcome of IT is that everything works, flawlessly, for years. Which means very few people in the company will notice a perfect IT at all, except for your superiors, of course, contrary to stereotypes they will most probably notice the good things.
But... If you designed and built the machines, anything that breaks will be your fault. Slight problems may not mean anything, but just imagine a model (mainboard, graphics card etc.) you chose is later discovered to have a flaw that affects all units or just has a bad reliability overall (like the DeathStar-HDDs, the graphics cards with the faulty capacitors etc. etc.) - your job will turn to Hell. If you manage to keep it, that is.