Out of curiosity, what area is experiencing cooling? Parent lives in the arctic and I live in the southwest. Both places are getting warmer on average. Of course it could just be the sick of summer me talking. It was 116F here last week and no matter what they say, that's hot! Especially when you go from 75 degree AC.
I agree, everyone needs to stop arguing about the cause and move on to arguing about what we're going to do to prepare for the inevitable. The Earth will heat back up whether we're here or not, the only question is whether we want to slow it down to extend the time frames for building cities in safer locations. Who's to say frying the southwest even more won't result in far more crop growth further up north. The growing season is getting longer and that could have positive impact on our agriculture.
In short, I think you don't give humans enough credit on their impact on the Earth but you're right that alarmist on the other side aren't being genuine either. The world won't end tomorrow or in the next 100 years but I'd rather we take steps to be more sustainable now to extend the time period before we have to deal with some impressive environmental changes that will change our way of life.
First of all, the question isn't if global warming is caused by humans and the ice record indicates that Earth goes in cycles and it's about time for things to heat up. The average temp during the time of the dinosaurs was almost 130F. That's significantly warmer than the average temp now. So the Earth will heat up on its own regardless of the level of CO2 we pump into the air. The difference is that if we slow our emissions we can prolong the length of time it will take to warm up and reduce the catastrophic damage from it happening at an accelerated rate. Can humans reduce global warming? We know for a fact that we can impact temperatures. You need only look at 9/11/01 to see that when all jets were grounded, temperatures dropped. That is but one example of course. You even raise the cow issue which primarily live because we breed them and feed them crap by the millions.
You are right that the Earth is in a state of flux and at certain times it is more hospitable to human life than others. The people of Florida may have to forgo their homes along with many other heavily populated regions. We will adapt, it will be expensive, it will cost a lot of lives, and we simply need to stop arguing about what we're seeing and move on to arguing about what we're going to do about it. It's not the end of the world, just probably an end to it being nice to live on. Of course who the hell knows how long it will take to get to a point where we run extremely low on fresh water. Technology will allow us to survive if we prepare for it rather than wait for it to arrive.
The problem with treating nature with respect is that nature doesn't care if you live or die. The reason nature deserves our respect is because it has produced incredible amounts of biodiversity accommodating almost any environment and providing an example for us in creating sustainable environments. If we want to live we will have to domesticate nature like we can do with most animals to make it work for us. This has huge potential to be disastrous as political motives can and do color what we understand about the world in which we live. We throw out variables because we don't think they are important and that is quite dangerous. Tough times ahead, I just hope I'm long dead before mankind has to face the hard realities. I think we're up for the challenge technologically, so its more of a social, economic, and political problem.
I work for a car company with 50 employees, not only do we have a full time sysadmin, me, we have an it director, help desk guy, pbx guy, and dedicated programmer.
Of course I'll admit we are unusually tech heavy due to the nature of our business.
With SaaS you are pretty much right except for what happens when that managed router dies. It's never a question of if, but when. There's also the fact that unless people stop using computers anytime you'll still need to manage them even if they are doing simpler tasks you'll still have employees browsing the web. Then there's the issue of tracking email problem and managing extranet access with other companies.
Naturally all of this depends on the type of business being run, it's entirely possible and indeed likely that a 50 person office doesn't need a full time IT guy. You'll still need a local presence though, what happens when employees are hired or fired? Someone has to give them access to the "cloud" and someone has to remove it and audit it.
Then of course there are the problems the big providers have had. EC2 has gone offline on more than one occasion. Even though I expect reliability will improve as the platform matures I don't imagine every business will want to put the fate of their company in the hands of a 3rd party.
haha... you sound like me, always end up in the oddball situations. A rain storm had blooded the basement of a hotel I was working on. We had to wade through a foot of water pouring out of the main power cabinet! We figured since it hadn't shorted the power we were safe.
I was pulling a storage server out once, half way out the rails gave way and to my stupidity I put my foot out to slow it down breaking a toe but saving the server!
This is still nothing to the tent guys that work for us that climb 300 feet in the air to tighten bolts during a windstorm with 8000 people below none-the-wiser. We had a tent guy fall from the top of the tent, needless to say, he didn't survive.
There is no way IT is blue collar. Maybe certain aspects can be like call center support or helpdesk type stuff but certainly not the sysadmin or programming worlds.
As a sysadmin myself I feel confident in saying that you're way off base particularly because of SaaS. When you depend on a 3rd party entity to provide you with access to applications that means your local infrastructure needs to be rock solid because you can't afford to wait for some contractor to come out and fix whatever broke. This is especially true for those businesses that currently get by with one IT guy, this will still not enable those 5 person shops to grow to 50 without needing a full time sysadmin. At that level, you can't afford to have 50 people sitting idle because they can't access their applications.
As companies grow in size they invariably require more and more technology to assist them and so it's very important that some of it is local even when you use 3rd party services if for any other reason than performance since the last mile at least here in the U.S. is still pretty pathetic. Of course I have it good here as an ISP is a sponsor of ours, they were kind enough to run fiber straight into our building. It's great, 20meg commit and I can ramp up to 1gig when I need it through a simple phone call. Of course even that's not fast enough once you get to a certain level if you're using a 3rd party service provider. SaaS definitely has a place but it will not end anything. Taking the administrative work out of Office sounds like a great deal to me for instance as long as I can locally cache the application and files.
Shut the old machine down? XenMotion and Vmotion allow you to migrate to new hardware without evening dropping a packet!
Shocked me the first time I did a XenMotion migration as I was recursively pinging the host to see if it would drop anything and indeed it didn't. Of course it helps to have a really fast back-end storage mechanism. NetApp has done well by us for this as my slowest NetApp unit is what I've been doing my testing with. This also means I can do volume snapshots with NetApp, then mirroring the snapshots to another NetApp and backup is taken care of without the need for Backup Exec.
You're definitely right in that most companies don't see the need for virtualization but that is precisely because they are unaware of how much more productive they can be with modern software. There is a balance to strike between bleeding edge and horse and buggy but most small businesses without dedicated IT staff never upgrade until something breaks not knowing any better. The reality is that most companies don't see IT as a revenue generator and as long as they see it that way it will never be treated with the respect it deserves. Good luck marketing without computers, phones, emails, and Internet access. Good luck selling your merchandise when your POS terminal doesn't have Internet access. They enable profit to be made, they don't hinder it!
You're definitely right, when multi-core processors hit mainstream no one was terribly impressed, they were aware of SMP already but it enabled a whole new world of virtualized computing and densities that made it prohibitive before.
Suddenly one server really can do the work of 8 old servers and without any sacrifices. This even makes clustering cheaper which is something not nearly enough companies employ given how reliant many companies are on their IT infrastructure.
I went to an HP tech conference a month ago and everything was cloud this and cloud that and it was rather irritating for those of us that understand it's just a clustered OS in a virtual environment. With Cisco and HP creating switches that integrate with XenServer, HyperV, and of course VMWare it's just further abstraction of more and more components of the network. Of course you still need all the same hardware you used before as well as all the same software. You just need more software and more hardware to create what people expect from a "cloud."
What got worse, the IT Director, my immediate boss is all about clouds to the owner and I had to speak up saying that we already have a XenServer based cloud, why would we need to waste even more money on outsourcing something that has had lots of issues with reliability, security, and of course requires all new programming. The owner has a problem with outsourcing thankfully as he has been burned by it on more than one occasion. Of course the real issue with outsourcing is that you still need people around that are directly employed to manage the projects you're outsourcing. This means people like me will be around for quite some time to come.
You are under the mistaken impression that it takes up any amount of time. I have to go to lunch anyway, why not go to lunch with a company that I want to do business with? The bonus of having them pay for it is great too.
You sound like someone that thinks you can either be smart or social when the two are far from mutually exclusive.
For me, it netted me a 50% pay raise as the company saw me as much more valuable as they feel they can get any geek off the street to manage the millions in equipment that I manage and the reality is that they are probably right in that a large number of people can do my job but not a lot of people can do it the way I do it. Expanding my network has actually netted the company profit because I've made relationships which turned to sponsorships funding my expansions. It's real easy to get the boss to say yes to a 500k NetApp deal when 100k is sponsored.
I feel for you though, I hate office politics but I live in the real world and in the real world you have to play a little no matter where or who you work for and that includes yourself. When I ran my own consulting company you better believe there was politics involved when courting new clients. In short, you have to understand your audience AND be good at your job. That is why I manage over 60 servers and hundreds of workstations all by myself. Believe it or not, tech is easy, and politics is hard because you have variables you can't manage as opposed to my network where I practically have complete control if I choose to exercise it. Fortunately for me our employees are well behaved so I can let them roam mostly free.
I neglected to review my post. Verizon started receiving money 20 years prior to deployment and only acted when certain legislators started getting pressure for us to modernize our infrastructure which of course was far too late meaning it will cost more money now than it would have if they had done with the money what they were supposed to do to begin with. The American public is much worse off because of this as we no longer have the edge in the last mile when compared to other countries.
While I understand that much of the movie was taken out of context you should watch the movie Sicko.
Contrast what you see in the movie with experiences you've had in your own life and you begin to see why people think corporations are unaccountable. Do you think the big tobacco lawsuit wasn't special? Or the other massive civil suits that you are referring to? How much had to go wrong from within these large companies for these suits to go all the way through to a loss for the company? It is exceedingly hard to take down a large organization behaving badly. Look at Microsoft and see how accountable they have been? How about AT&T with warrantless wiretaps that had to made into law after the fact, and Verizon with billions in tax payer money to fund fiber which only saw deployment two years after the fact, or Comcast with out and out advertising fraud, or IBM with it's chemical processing causing employee health issues? How about MediaSentry with it's illegal evidence gathering?
Sorry, the list goes on and on and on... large companies wield too much power and that makes them unaccountable when their actions only serve the most profit. Yes, they are doing right by their shareholders but they are often doing wrong by the American people.
And as someone who grew along the Canadian border can attest that health-care is not in any way consistent. Some provinces are much richer than others as I'm sure you know and Quebec gets a lot of federal money but the consequence is that in some areas you experience long wait times and in other areas you get right in. This is not unlike the state of the current health-care system in the US. Health-care in BC or Alberta is better than most of the provinces in the east.
While I'll agree that health-care should be locally managed I have absolutely no problem with the programs being federally funded with loose guidelines much like the education system has and much like the system you describe.
Really? If your local hospital sucks you can go to another one several hours away? Good luck with that while dealing with a heart attack or stroke.
Same thing with schools, where I grew up you only had two choices, one public school, and one private school and they were both pretty much the same.
Free market only works when there is healthy competition and in both health care and education there is no such competition.
Even as it is, a friend of mine with cancer has to drive two hours to see her doctor because her local hospital proved to be grossly incompetent. This is a huge problem for her. Voting with your wallet I'm afraid only works in retail these days and even then the market is simply too large for your vote to make any difference. Did people stop buying Chinese toys when it was discovered that a number contained lead? No they didn't even blink.
The only valid point you could possibly have here is that politics can screw with your results but I'll argue that politics already does screw the situation anyways. Abortion was illegal and then became legal. This will happen regardless of who administers either program.
Really? Who are we going to get in a dog fight with? Are you suggesting that the 180 planes we already have wouldn't be sufficient? Or that the F-35 isn't up to the task?
I guess it depends who your supplier is. I've had lots of Cisco hardware die on me which is why we're not mostly an HP shop. This is of course also because Cisco likes to make what should be simple tasks for more difficult than it needs to be. VLAN management on Catalysts sucks when you're used to HP where they make it as simple as I believe it should be.
I also came across a command reference for the Catalyst 3020 that I used in my HP blade chassis that had lists of unsupported commands. I asked myself why? Why would the interface allow me to do something unsupported? I could imagine having a parameter somewhere enabling the interface to support running unsupported commands for those times when you need to do something funky although in my experience if you're doing something funky then there is usually something wrong with the design of the network.
In non-traveling rigs I just don't understand solid state anything having high failure rates unless there are electrical problems or some sort of firmware problem.
Not discounting your experience, I've heard it else where too but I just haven't seen it.
I'll agree with you to the point that increasingly repairing cars requires repairing computers so a mechanic has to know a little about both.
That said cars are mostly visual so 90% of issues are usually obvious to a mechanic that knows the components of a car. In my family and circle of friends you'll find a lot of us know a bit of both and specialize in one or the other. They look at me like I'm doing some magic when removing some malware and I look at that in wonderment over replacing my motor mounts without having to remove the engine. I would say they are pretty well on par given the different car manufacturers all having different names and technologies, it is quite similar to sysadmins such as myself utilizing multiple technologies and having to keep up with the latest and greatest.
I have a lot of respect for mechanics as they can come up with some pretty creative fixes. Bottom line is that a smart tech is a smart tech whether it's computers or cars. I drove one of my friends in my car and within two minutes he had the problem narrowed to two areas and a visual inspection of the first led him to believe it was the second and when he replaced the motor mounts for me sure enough he was right. He's seen it before and so he recognizes the problem much like I've seen hundreds of issues before. Experience always wins.
That's happened to me with all sorts of computers from desktops to servers to laptops. People kick the thing or too much dust piles up. Usually the step to troubleshooting BSODs is a software update, if that doesn't correct the problem then you reseat everything! Or even sometimes take everything out and place one component in at a time until you find the problem component. I've had cdrom drives go bad enough to prevent booting from hard drives and I know most have run into IDE cables that had gone bad. SATA connections like to break the sides of the mobo connectors for those installers that aren't the slightest bit careful.
I've taken courses where they try to trick you with components but it never worked on me because I always approached all hardware problems the same. Malware gets fun and those reinstall happy guys I understand given that properly cleaning a box can be quite time consuming but thats more of an exercise in time management.
I don't believe the guys looking through other people's stuff though. Maybe its something about how I grew up but I respect the privacy of others and I won't go snooping even if its a girl I like. Sure, I'll want to but ultimately I made a name for myself through my integrity. Integrity seems to be something lacking these days in all fields.
You're definitely right here which is why I took every opportunity I could to make those connections and guess what? Now I'm making what the surveys say I should be making. It was definitely frustrating for the longest time because I never accepted help from people always preferring to do it myself. Then somewhere along the line a pretty lady came into my life and made me realize that asking for or accepting help doesn't make you weak and it often makes the other person feel good. This is like going to the owner's house to fix a DR server and accepting a drink when he offers even if you don't want one. It makes him feel more comfortable and then you get to make the connections to people.
Sometimes those connections mean you have to help people when you're swamped but ultimately they do indeed pay off. Of course as always you wanna play to your audience. The owner of a company I worked for was what I consider a redneck so you dress down when you want to hammer out strategy and dress up when you want to write the big checks. Works everytime as he associated well dressed people with authority and casual dressed people with friends.
I went to a tech school to get that piece of paper, they gave me a bs in 2 years so I was all about it even if it meant school all year round. Almost everyone I studied with was an engineer of some form, ironically chemical engineering was the most common.
Is that so? I've never had a fiber GBIC go bad on me and my rig is a traveling rig with over 60 switches and at least as many GBICs. We role in the dust and our biggest problem is patch cables which you sometimes have to rub on your shirt to clean up. GBICs themselves can be blown out with compressed air, not the canned kind of course.
Given that HP has a lifetime warranty on them I wonder if anyone else has had that experience? I don't think solid state lasers are nearly as unreliable as you claim but I'll freely admit I could be wrong since my experience is just anecdotal.
I didn't mean to imply that HyperV only could be installed on core, I simply meant that a core installation of Windows isn't all that different from XenServer. I use yum to install software on Xenserver for managing SAN connectivity. They aren't all that different. The core installation is very much stripped down although I will grant not quite to the same level and so you do indeed have a point.
I was merely replying to the post stating that it is crazy to run Linux guests on a Windows host and I don't see that as the case.
As for HyperV linux support, that is indeed why I went with XenServer. I have a small VMWare setup but they screwed up my licensing when I asked for a quote and wanted me to go back to the owner and ask for an additional 30k after I had started the installation. Needless to say I didn't even try.
Licensing I think is the biggest push in the direction of Linux and open-source based solutions. Microsoft and VMWare have made their licensing schemes too complicated. They are far from alone, Adobe even does it too.
Sounds to me like you're quite behind the times given that Hyper-V only runs on server 2008 with a core installation you get a stripped down version of Windows that is every bit as annoying as Ubuntu server to get running something useful.
Server 2008 in head-less mode is quite easy to manage as long as you have a Vista workstation or a full server 2008 install somewhere on the network. For me, I was testing Hyper-V, VMWare, and XenServer on my HP blade chassis to see which would work best for my environment which includes SAN support which is much easier to manage on a Windows box than it is on a Linux box.
I ultimately went with XenServer because I need Linux guests as well as Windows guests and at the time Hyper-V didn't support Linux so that pretty much ended that discussion.
I don't think it's crazy to use a Server core installation as a host for VMs, especially if you already have management infrastructure like SCCM or Operations Manager which a lot of larger shops have.
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Out of curiosity, what area is experiencing cooling? Parent lives in the arctic and I live in the southwest. Both places are getting warmer on average. Of course it could just be the sick of summer me talking. It was 116F here last week and no matter what they say, that's hot! Especially when you go from 75 degree AC.
I agree, everyone needs to stop arguing about the cause and move on to arguing about what we're going to do to prepare for the inevitable. The Earth will heat back up whether we're here or not, the only question is whether we want to slow it down to extend the time frames for building cities in safer locations. Who's to say frying the southwest even more won't result in far more crop growth further up north. The growing season is getting longer and that could have positive impact on our agriculture.
In short, I think you don't give humans enough credit on their impact on the Earth but you're right that alarmist on the other side aren't being genuine either. The world won't end tomorrow or in the next 100 years but I'd rather we take steps to be more sustainable now to extend the time period before we have to deal with some impressive environmental changes that will change our way of life.
First of all, the question isn't if global warming is caused by humans and the ice record indicates that Earth goes in cycles and it's about time for things to heat up. The average temp during the time of the dinosaurs was almost 130F. That's significantly warmer than the average temp now. So the Earth will heat up on its own regardless of the level of CO2 we pump into the air. The difference is that if we slow our emissions we can prolong the length of time it will take to warm up and reduce the catastrophic damage from it happening at an accelerated rate. Can humans reduce global warming? We know for a fact that we can impact temperatures. You need only look at 9/11/01 to see that when all jets were grounded, temperatures dropped. That is but one example of course. You even raise the cow issue which primarily live because we breed them and feed them crap by the millions.
You are right that the Earth is in a state of flux and at certain times it is more hospitable to human life than others. The people of Florida may have to forgo their homes along with many other heavily populated regions. We will adapt, it will be expensive, it will cost a lot of lives, and we simply need to stop arguing about what we're seeing and move on to arguing about what we're going to do about it. It's not the end of the world, just probably an end to it being nice to live on. Of course who the hell knows how long it will take to get to a point where we run extremely low on fresh water. Technology will allow us to survive if we prepare for it rather than wait for it to arrive.
The problem with treating nature with respect is that nature doesn't care if you live or die. The reason nature deserves our respect is because it has produced incredible amounts of biodiversity accommodating almost any environment and providing an example for us in creating sustainable environments. If we want to live we will have to domesticate nature like we can do with most animals to make it work for us. This has huge potential to be disastrous as political motives can and do color what we understand about the world in which we live. We throw out variables because we don't think they are important and that is quite dangerous. Tough times ahead, I just hope I'm long dead before mankind has to face the hard realities. I think we're up for the challenge technologically, so its more of a social, economic, and political problem.
In the U.S. at least, a lot of cable companies are owned by content producers. Time warner for instance.
I work for a car company with 50 employees, not only do we have a full time sysadmin, me, we have an it director, help desk guy, pbx guy, and dedicated programmer.
Of course I'll admit we are unusually tech heavy due to the nature of our business.
With SaaS you are pretty much right except for what happens when that managed router dies. It's never a question of if, but when. There's also the fact that unless people stop using computers anytime you'll still need to manage them even if they are doing simpler tasks you'll still have employees browsing the web. Then there's the issue of tracking email problem and managing extranet access with other companies.
Naturally all of this depends on the type of business being run, it's entirely possible and indeed likely that a 50 person office doesn't need a full time IT guy. You'll still need a local presence though, what happens when employees are hired or fired? Someone has to give them access to the "cloud" and someone has to remove it and audit it.
Then of course there are the problems the big providers have had. EC2 has gone offline on more than one occasion. Even though I expect reliability will improve as the platform matures I don't imagine every business will want to put the fate of their company in the hands of a 3rd party.
haha... you sound like me, always end up in the oddball situations. A rain storm had blooded the basement of a hotel I was working on. We had to wade through a foot of water pouring out of the main power cabinet! We figured since it hadn't shorted the power we were safe.
I was pulling a storage server out once, half way out the rails gave way and to my stupidity I put my foot out to slow it down breaking a toe but saving the server!
This is still nothing to the tent guys that work for us that climb 300 feet in the air to tighten bolts during a windstorm with 8000 people below none-the-wiser. We had a tent guy fall from the top of the tent, needless to say, he didn't survive.
There is no way IT is blue collar. Maybe certain aspects can be like call center support or helpdesk type stuff but certainly not the sysadmin or programming worlds.
As a sysadmin myself I feel confident in saying that you're way off base particularly because of SaaS. When you depend on a 3rd party entity to provide you with access to applications that means your local infrastructure needs to be rock solid because you can't afford to wait for some contractor to come out and fix whatever broke. This is especially true for those businesses that currently get by with one IT guy, this will still not enable those 5 person shops to grow to 50 without needing a full time sysadmin. At that level, you can't afford to have 50 people sitting idle because they can't access their applications.
As companies grow in size they invariably require more and more technology to assist them and so it's very important that some of it is local even when you use 3rd party services if for any other reason than performance since the last mile at least here in the U.S. is still pretty pathetic. Of course I have it good here as an ISP is a sponsor of ours, they were kind enough to run fiber straight into our building. It's great, 20meg commit and I can ramp up to 1gig when I need it through a simple phone call. Of course even that's not fast enough once you get to a certain level if you're using a 3rd party service provider. SaaS definitely has a place but it will not end anything. Taking the administrative work out of Office sounds like a great deal to me for instance as long as I can locally cache the application and files.
Shut the old machine down? XenMotion and Vmotion allow you to migrate to new hardware without evening dropping a packet!
Shocked me the first time I did a XenMotion migration as I was recursively pinging the host to see if it would drop anything and indeed it didn't. Of course it helps to have a really fast back-end storage mechanism. NetApp has done well by us for this as my slowest NetApp unit is what I've been doing my testing with. This also means I can do volume snapshots with NetApp, then mirroring the snapshots to another NetApp and backup is taken care of without the need for Backup Exec.
You're definitely right in that most companies don't see the need for virtualization but that is precisely because they are unaware of how much more productive they can be with modern software. There is a balance to strike between bleeding edge and horse and buggy but most small businesses without dedicated IT staff never upgrade until something breaks not knowing any better. The reality is that most companies don't see IT as a revenue generator and as long as they see it that way it will never be treated with the respect it deserves. Good luck marketing without computers, phones, emails, and Internet access. Good luck selling your merchandise when your POS terminal doesn't have Internet access. They enable profit to be made, they don't hinder it!
You're definitely right, when multi-core processors hit mainstream no one was terribly impressed, they were aware of SMP already but it enabled a whole new world of virtualized computing and densities that made it prohibitive before.
Suddenly one server really can do the work of 8 old servers and without any sacrifices. This even makes clustering cheaper which is something not nearly enough companies employ given how reliant many companies are on their IT infrastructure.
I went to an HP tech conference a month ago and everything was cloud this and cloud that and it was rather irritating for those of us that understand it's just a clustered OS in a virtual environment. With Cisco and HP creating switches that integrate with XenServer, HyperV, and of course VMWare it's just further abstraction of more and more components of the network. Of course you still need all the same hardware you used before as well as all the same software. You just need more software and more hardware to create what people expect from a "cloud."
What got worse, the IT Director, my immediate boss is all about clouds to the owner and I had to speak up saying that we already have a XenServer based cloud, why would we need to waste even more money on outsourcing something that has had lots of issues with reliability, security, and of course requires all new programming. The owner has a problem with outsourcing thankfully as he has been burned by it on more than one occasion. Of course the real issue with outsourcing is that you still need people around that are directly employed to manage the projects you're outsourcing. This means people like me will be around for quite some time to come.
You are under the mistaken impression that it takes up any amount of time. I have to go to lunch anyway, why not go to lunch with a company that I want to do business with? The bonus of having them pay for it is great too.
You sound like someone that thinks you can either be smart or social when the two are far from mutually exclusive.
For me, it netted me a 50% pay raise as the company saw me as much more valuable as they feel they can get any geek off the street to manage the millions in equipment that I manage and the reality is that they are probably right in that a large number of people can do my job but not a lot of people can do it the way I do it. Expanding my network has actually netted the company profit because I've made relationships which turned to sponsorships funding my expansions. It's real easy to get the boss to say yes to a 500k NetApp deal when 100k is sponsored.
I feel for you though, I hate office politics but I live in the real world and in the real world you have to play a little no matter where or who you work for and that includes yourself. When I ran my own consulting company you better believe there was politics involved when courting new clients. In short, you have to understand your audience AND be good at your job. That is why I manage over 60 servers and hundreds of workstations all by myself. Believe it or not, tech is easy, and politics is hard because you have variables you can't manage as opposed to my network where I practically have complete control if I choose to exercise it. Fortunately for me our employees are well behaved so I can let them roam mostly free.
I neglected to review my post. Verizon started receiving money 20 years prior to deployment and only acted when certain legislators started getting pressure for us to modernize our infrastructure which of course was far too late meaning it will cost more money now than it would have if they had done with the money what they were supposed to do to begin with. The American public is much worse off because of this as we no longer have the edge in the last mile when compared to other countries.
While I understand that much of the movie was taken out of context you should watch the movie Sicko.
Contrast what you see in the movie with experiences you've had in your own life and you begin to see why people think corporations are unaccountable. Do you think the big tobacco lawsuit wasn't special? Or the other massive civil suits that you are referring to? How much had to go wrong from within these large companies for these suits to go all the way through to a loss for the company? It is exceedingly hard to take down a large organization behaving badly. Look at Microsoft and see how accountable they have been? How about AT&T with warrantless wiretaps that had to made into law after the fact, and Verizon with billions in tax payer money to fund fiber which only saw deployment two years after the fact, or Comcast with out and out advertising fraud, or IBM with it's chemical processing causing employee health issues? How about MediaSentry with it's illegal evidence gathering?
Sorry, the list goes on and on and on... large companies wield too much power and that makes them unaccountable when their actions only serve the most profit. Yes, they are doing right by their shareholders but they are often doing wrong by the American people.
And as someone who grew along the Canadian border can attest that health-care is not in any way consistent. Some provinces are much richer than others as I'm sure you know and Quebec gets a lot of federal money but the consequence is that in some areas you experience long wait times and in other areas you get right in. This is not unlike the state of the current health-care system in the US. Health-care in BC or Alberta is better than most of the provinces in the east.
While I'll agree that health-care should be locally managed I have absolutely no problem with the programs being federally funded with loose guidelines much like the education system has and much like the system you describe.
Really? If your local hospital sucks you can go to another one several hours away? Good luck with that while dealing with a heart attack or stroke.
Same thing with schools, where I grew up you only had two choices, one public school, and one private school and they were both pretty much the same.
Free market only works when there is healthy competition and in both health care and education there is no such competition.
Even as it is, a friend of mine with cancer has to drive two hours to see her doctor because her local hospital proved to be grossly incompetent. This is a huge problem for her. Voting with your wallet I'm afraid only works in retail these days and even then the market is simply too large for your vote to make any difference. Did people stop buying Chinese toys when it was discovered that a number contained lead? No they didn't even blink.
The only valid point you could possibly have here is that politics can screw with your results but I'll argue that politics already does screw the situation anyways. Abortion was illegal and then became legal. This will happen regardless of who administers either program.
If this is the case then the 187 we'll have should be more than sufficient to replace the 600 or so F-15s we have.
Really? Who are we going to get in a dog fight with? Are you suggesting that the 180 planes we already have wouldn't be sufficient? Or that the F-35 isn't up to the task?
I guess it depends who your supplier is. I've had lots of Cisco hardware die on me which is why we're not mostly an HP shop. This is of course also because Cisco likes to make what should be simple tasks for more difficult than it needs to be. VLAN management on Catalysts sucks when you're used to HP where they make it as simple as I believe it should be.
I also came across a command reference for the Catalyst 3020 that I used in my HP blade chassis that had lists of unsupported commands. I asked myself why? Why would the interface allow me to do something unsupported? I could imagine having a parameter somewhere enabling the interface to support running unsupported commands for those times when you need to do something funky although in my experience if you're doing something funky then there is usually something wrong with the design of the network.
In non-traveling rigs I just don't understand solid state anything having high failure rates unless there are electrical problems or some sort of firmware problem.
Not discounting your experience, I've heard it else where too but I just haven't seen it.
I'll agree with you to the point that increasingly repairing cars requires repairing computers so a mechanic has to know a little about both.
That said cars are mostly visual so 90% of issues are usually obvious to a mechanic that knows the components of a car. In my family and circle of friends you'll find a lot of us know a bit of both and specialize in one or the other. They look at me like I'm doing some magic when removing some malware and I look at that in wonderment over replacing my motor mounts without having to remove the engine. I would say they are pretty well on par given the different car manufacturers all having different names and technologies, it is quite similar to sysadmins such as myself utilizing multiple technologies and having to keep up with the latest and greatest.
I have a lot of respect for mechanics as they can come up with some pretty creative fixes. Bottom line is that a smart tech is a smart tech whether it's computers or cars. I drove one of my friends in my car and within two minutes he had the problem narrowed to two areas and a visual inspection of the first led him to believe it was the second and when he replaced the motor mounts for me sure enough he was right. He's seen it before and so he recognizes the problem much like I've seen hundreds of issues before. Experience always wins.
That's happened to me with all sorts of computers from desktops to servers to laptops. People kick the thing or too much dust piles up. Usually the step to troubleshooting BSODs is a software update, if that doesn't correct the problem then you reseat everything! Or even sometimes take everything out and place one component in at a time until you find the problem component. I've had cdrom drives go bad enough to prevent booting from hard drives and I know most have run into IDE cables that had gone bad. SATA connections like to break the sides of the mobo connectors for those installers that aren't the slightest bit careful.
I've taken courses where they try to trick you with components but it never worked on me because I always approached all hardware problems the same. Malware gets fun and those reinstall happy guys I understand given that properly cleaning a box can be quite time consuming but thats more of an exercise in time management.
I don't believe the guys looking through other people's stuff though. Maybe its something about how I grew up but I respect the privacy of others and I won't go snooping even if its a girl I like. Sure, I'll want to but ultimately I made a name for myself through my integrity. Integrity seems to be something lacking these days in all fields.
You're definitely right here which is why I took every opportunity I could to make those connections and guess what? Now I'm making what the surveys say I should be making. It was definitely frustrating for the longest time because I never accepted help from people always preferring to do it myself. Then somewhere along the line a pretty lady came into my life and made me realize that asking for or accepting help doesn't make you weak and it often makes the other person feel good. This is like going to the owner's house to fix a DR server and accepting a drink when he offers even if you don't want one. It makes him feel more comfortable and then you get to make the connections to people.
Sometimes those connections mean you have to help people when you're swamped but ultimately they do indeed pay off. Of course as always you wanna play to your audience. The owner of a company I worked for was what I consider a redneck so you dress down when you want to hammer out strategy and dress up when you want to write the big checks. Works everytime as he associated well dressed people with authority and casual dressed people with friends.
I went to a tech school to get that piece of paper, they gave me a bs in 2 years so I was all about it even if it meant school all year round. Almost everyone I studied with was an engineer of some form, ironically chemical engineering was the most common.
Is that so? I've never had a fiber GBIC go bad on me and my rig is a traveling rig with over 60 switches and at least as many GBICs. We role in the dust and our biggest problem is patch cables which you sometimes have to rub on your shirt to clean up. GBICs themselves can be blown out with compressed air, not the canned kind of course.
Given that HP has a lifetime warranty on them I wonder if anyone else has had that experience? I don't think solid state lasers are nearly as unreliable as you claim but I'll freely admit I could be wrong since my experience is just anecdotal.
Cisco routers and switches do this as well although they at least let you continue anyways.
I didn't mean to imply that HyperV only could be installed on core, I simply meant that a core installation of Windows isn't all that different from XenServer. I use yum to install software on Xenserver for managing SAN connectivity. They aren't all that different. The core installation is very much stripped down although I will grant not quite to the same level and so you do indeed have a point.
I was merely replying to the post stating that it is crazy to run Linux guests on a Windows host and I don't see that as the case.
As for HyperV linux support, that is indeed why I went with XenServer. I have a small VMWare setup but they screwed up my licensing when I asked for a quote and wanted me to go back to the owner and ask for an additional 30k after I had started the installation. Needless to say I didn't even try.
Licensing I think is the biggest push in the direction of Linux and open-source based solutions. Microsoft and VMWare have made their licensing schemes too complicated. They are far from alone, Adobe even does it too.
Sounds to me like you're quite behind the times given that Hyper-V only runs on server 2008 with a core installation you get a stripped down version of Windows that is every bit as annoying as Ubuntu server to get running something useful.
Server 2008 in head-less mode is quite easy to manage as long as you have a Vista workstation or a full server 2008 install somewhere on the network. For me, I was testing Hyper-V, VMWare, and XenServer on my HP blade chassis to see which would work best for my environment which includes SAN support which is much easier to manage on a Windows box than it is on a Linux box.
I ultimately went with XenServer because I need Linux guests as well as Windows guests and at the time Hyper-V didn't support Linux so that pretty much ended that discussion.
I don't think it's crazy to use a Server core installation as a host for VMs, especially if you already have management infrastructure like SCCM or Operations Manager which a lot of larger shops have.