It always takes longer and costs more than anyone ever thought possible. The results are not always what you had in mind It often ends up in court You definitely don't want to be around while its happening
Include all the awesome features everyone wants on the box art, and put an insert inside that reads something like "By the way, we disabled all those nice features for uh, security reasons or something. What did you expect? We're Sony, and that's the Sony Style."
Then they can include a root kit virus on the pack-in demo disc.
Finally. It was a stupid idea to begin with. I should be able to time-shift all my content without renting a crippleware box from the cableco. 2 months for china to make capture hardware, 6 month for an open source driver to mature, another 6 months for support to stabalize in mythtv, plus some time for it to make it into the distros. Maybe a year and a half before I can refresh my mythboxen. Yeah.
Every time I kill off my "last" Symantec app, they buy something else I'm using. It takes them 12-18 months to kill a product, and it takes me 24 months to swap it out.
Read your mail from a VM. Hand them a jump drive with your.vmdx &.vmx files, and see if they can figure out what to do with it.
Note this is purely for entertainment value, since that is about all an 1d10t wanna-be it staffer is good for. The reality is, they either A: want you to work from home, and will provide whatever is required to do so, or B: They don't want you to work from home, so don't work from home.
First off, no redundant PSU because they "don't have the capacity"? You not only need a UPS, you need an electrician.
Second, no sizing data? What is the peak load at startup per rack? What is the average running load per rack?
What would be your ideal runtime?
How many racks?
Peak Load will tell you how large a UPS you need (in KVA), Average load and run time will tell you how many expansion batteries you need to buy.
Buy the management card for your UPS and configure it to send you email alerts. While you're at it load the client software on your VMs so they know when to gracefully shutdown.
Ask your electrician if you need 3phase or 2phase (my money's on 2 for you)
Then get the electrician to install enough dedicate power circuits to drive your new UPS(s). While you're at it, ground the racks.
Then call your AC guy, because once you've done enough math to buy a UPS you'll have enough data to correctly size the AC in your server room.
When you find out management doesn't care about extended recovery time and data loss, and they shoot down the CAPEX for your UPS project, you can focus on things that really matter: good backups and your resume.
I see this happen all the time, just not usually with something as high profile as a new movie release.
Usually its some CAD/CAM or engineering package secured by some vendor customized variation on FlexLM. Every time they buy a new seat, rev the version, or a product comes up for renewal, we can expect an extended service outage while the vendor tries to issue a valid set of keys. More often than not, the first set they issue doesn't work, the support group isn't authorized to issue keys, and the group/individual that can issue keys doesn't work on days that end in Y, or only during banking hours in india.
Windows 7 will be a huge success for home users that bought Vista boxes and are in desperate need of relief.
I've been running it in an experimental vm since RC, and now thats its RTM I can honestly say it doesn't suck as bad as Vista.
However, it still has the same core flaw that kept Vista from passing our initial predeployment testing. IT staff can't run it. Sure, you can surf the net on it, or RDP into a machine you can actually do work on, but as an IT person its a pretty useless environment to try to work in. adminpak hacks from vista aren't as useful as they used to be, and the rsat is pretty limited unless you've magically replaced every last server with windows2008R2 since last week. (which BTW, you can't because Windows2008R2 doesn't support ANY shipping version of exchange).
If you can somehow bypass IT and give it to end users, particularly the dolts that only run 3-4 apps in their entire work day yet somehow have fantastically overpowered workstations, they might just like it. But then you get back to the original problem: how do you support an OS in deployment that you can't run in IT.
Its not a mistake, its a horrifically misguided design decision.
They went through a reasonable design process based on data collected by the user experience program, the problem is anyone with a 3 digit IQ unchecked the box to send all their usage data to microsoft when they installed office. If you work in a company that installed it for you, the geeks with triple digit IQs disabled it for you. Who does that leave?
Stupid people mostly, along wIth a few lazy people that couldn't be bothered to uncheck the box.
They designed the interface for stupid people.
To make matters worse, Jensen Harris realized that if they gave users the option, they would instantly disable his masterpiece. Even some of the stupid people would have disabled it, so they removed that choice. No alternatives, no customizations.
The last time I found myself in that position, I surveyed the environment, documented the gap in compliance and put together a risk assessment.
When they saw the cost of compliance vs the punitive penalties for non-compliance and factored in the risk that any disgruntled employee could report them with a phone call, I had the support of executive management. It took time for the accountants to "finance the compliance initiative", but in the end they came around.
On the other hand, I have seen it go the other way. An IT person was fired after suggesting the company come into compliance. Shortly thereafter they were "mysteriously" caught and audited, settled with the BSA for about $1 million, and agreed to a really strange monthly audit where every PC had to have a binder next to it with original media for every installed application. This was late 90's, but still an odd settlement.
That's a different game of "find a working driver".
When a user drops a Vista laptop on your desk and begs for an XP install, you'll find that not all laptops shipped with Vista have readily available XP drivers.
The high (resource) demand users are the easy ones. "you prove you need it and I'll give you 4 procs and 16g of ram" As long as they aren't doing cad or video production, they are covered, and I've got the historical performance data for their VMs captured in a SQL database to prove or disprove their point.
On a rollout of that scale, you'd use a connection broker with automated provisioning to group and assign the floaters.
You're still going to have desktop PCs and laptops for "high value" end users, but the masses don't need them and its a waste of both resources and capital to give them desktop PCs.
There will be opposition. You're in IT, grow a pair. If you are that thin skinned you've probably still got individual desktop printers, maybe even hundreds of them.
Giving employees PCs is a bad idea. Letting employees manage their own PCs is a horrible idea. Everyone gets a thinclient unless they have a high end graphics requirement such as CAD.
Not only is everyone a restricted user, they live on a thinclient with no moving parts, no CD reader, no floppy reader, and disabled USB ports unless specifically authorized with an approved business use case. Their real desktops are XP VMs on an ESX cluster node.
The XP VMs just don't break, and even if a restricted user managed to break one, it can be reprovisioned in less than 10 minutes.
The thin client hardware has no moving parts and nothing for them to misconfigure. Most laptop users get a thinclient laptop and a 3g card, there is no data on them to be lost or stolen. PC techs can focus their time on supporting the high value CAD users and executives.
By now, everyone knows vista sucks. Its not the quirky rantings of the slashdot crowd, its the warnings from mainstream consumer media and magazines. Besides, Vista is for home users. The ones stuck with a retail PC, too dumb to pirate XP (since it will not be available at retail for much longer), and too afraid to use Ubuntu. For corporate users, Vista with SA has one (and only one) good feature - Downgrade Rights! Long live XP.
Corporate users will kick the tires again with SP1, and then stick with XP until the next version of Windows comes out. SP1 will fail our predeployment testing at the same point RTM failed, because Microsoft's own admin tools for exchange (ESM) and windows server 2003 (adminpak.msi) will neither install nor run. It will never make it out of the test lab. But its pretty.
I do feel sorry for those home users, so I always keep (K)Ubuntu discs on hand.
I don't think I can make this any simpler: Stop Buying Music from RIAA Members. Its easy, they don't seem to want you to buy their product anyway. Music CDs might or might not play, just like they might or might not infect your PC with rootkits. Legal downloads might or might not play on whatever portable device you have, and they probably wont play on your next one, or your next PC, so what are you spending your money on anyway? Stop Buying Music from RIAA Members.
The RIAA gets its funding from the big labels in addition to these racketeering activities. As SCO has so thoroughly demonstrated, suing your customers is not a sustainable business plan. Cut off the other source of revenue: Music Sales, and they will eventually wither away and die. I am not condoning piracy here, and as a musician its hard to advocate intentionally killing off an industry I've spent a significant part of my life studying, but it simply must be done. It is the only way to rid the planet of what has become a blight on the world. Only then can something better rise up to fill the void. It is a sacrifice we all have to make for the greater good.
Theres a theme here: Stop Buying Music from RIAA Members.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats the equivalent of what they are asking for in the world of physical security, and slightly less secure than a zip tie.
should upgrade to an operating system.
It always takes longer and costs more than anyone ever thought possible.
The results are not always what you had in mind
It often ends up in court
You definitely don't want to be around while its happening
Word substitution is a common ESL problem.
really.
" its stock price remains remarkably resilient and the company continues to turn a healthy profit"
That's not success, that's momentum. Under the current leadership, entropy will continue to take its toll.
Include all the awesome features everyone wants on the box art, and put an insert inside that reads something like "By the way, we disabled all those nice features for uh, security reasons or something. What did you expect? We're Sony, and that's the Sony Style."
Then they can include a root kit virus on the pack-in demo disc.
Finally. It was a stupid idea to begin with. I should be able to time-shift all my content without renting a crippleware box from the cableco. 2 months for china to make capture hardware, 6 month for an open source driver to mature, another 6 months for support to stabalize in mythtv, plus some time for it to make it into the distros. Maybe a year and a half before I can refresh my mythboxen. Yeah.
Noooo.....
Every time I kill off my "last" Symantec app, they buy something else I'm using. It takes them 12-18 months to kill a product, and it takes me 24 months to swap it out.
Read your mail from a VM. Hand them a jump drive with your .vmdx & .vmx files, and see if they can figure out what to do with it.
Note this is purely for entertainment value, since that is about all an 1d10t wanna-be it staffer is good for. The reality is, they either A: want you to work from home, and will provide whatever is required to do so, or B: They don't want you to work from home, so don't work from home.
First off, no redundant PSU because they "don't have the capacity"? You not only need a UPS, you need an electrician.
Second, no sizing data? What is the peak load at startup per rack? What is the average running load per rack?
What would be your ideal runtime?
How many racks?
Peak Load will tell you how large a UPS you need (in KVA), Average load and run time will tell you how many expansion batteries you need to buy.
Buy the management card for your UPS and configure it to send you email alerts. While you're at it load the client software on your VMs so they know when to gracefully shutdown.
Ask your electrician if you need 3phase or 2phase (my money's on 2 for you)
Then get the electrician to install enough dedicate power circuits to drive your new UPS(s). While you're at it, ground the racks.
Then call your AC guy, because once you've done enough math to buy a UPS you'll have enough data to correctly size the AC in your server room.
When you find out management doesn't care about extended recovery time and data loss, and they shoot down the CAPEX for your UPS project, you can focus on things that really matter: good backups and your resume.
I see this happen all the time, just not usually with something as high profile as a new movie release.
Usually its some CAD/CAM or engineering package secured by some vendor customized variation on FlexLM. Every time they buy a new seat, rev the version, or a product comes up for renewal, we can expect an extended service outage while the vendor tries to issue a valid set of keys. More often than not, the first set they issue doesn't work, the support group isn't authorized to issue keys, and the group/individual that can issue keys doesn't work on days that end in Y, or only during banking hours in india.
Keepass works well, and has been ported to almost every platform. Win, Lin, Mac, iphone, droid, winmo, even the old fashioned blackberry.
http://keepass.info/
Windows 7 will be a huge success for home users that bought Vista boxes and are in desperate need of relief.
I've been running it in an experimental vm since RC, and now thats its RTM I can honestly say it doesn't suck as bad as Vista.
However, it still has the same core flaw that kept Vista from passing our initial predeployment testing. IT staff can't run it. Sure, you can surf the net on it, or RDP into a machine you can actually do work on, but as an IT person its a pretty useless environment to try to work in. adminpak hacks from vista aren't as useful as they used to be, and the rsat is pretty limited unless you've magically replaced every last server with windows2008R2 since last week. (which BTW, you can't because Windows2008R2 doesn't support ANY shipping version of exchange).
If you can somehow bypass IT and give it to end users, particularly the dolts that only run 3-4 apps in their entire work day yet somehow have fantastically overpowered workstations, they might just like it. But then you get back to the original problem: how do you support an OS in deployment that you can't run in IT.
Its not a mistake, its a horrifically misguided design decision.
They went through a reasonable design process based on data collected by the user experience program, the problem is anyone with a 3 digit IQ unchecked the box to send all their usage data to microsoft when they installed office. If you work in a company that installed it for you, the geeks with triple digit IQs disabled it for you. Who does that leave?
Stupid people mostly, along wIth a few lazy people that couldn't be bothered to uncheck the box.
They designed the interface for stupid people.
To make matters worse, Jensen Harris realized that if they gave users the option, they would instantly disable his masterpiece. Even some of the stupid people would have disabled it, so they removed that choice. No alternatives, no customizations.
But thats really just Word, which fell on the ribbon sword.
The main outlook window escaped relatively unscathed, but only because they ran out of time butchering the rest of office.
The last time I found myself in that position, I surveyed the environment, documented the gap in compliance and put together a risk assessment.
When they saw the cost of compliance vs the punitive penalties for non-compliance and factored in the risk that any disgruntled employee could report them with a phone call, I had the support of executive management. It took time for the accountants to "finance the compliance initiative", but in the end they came around.
On the other hand, I have seen it go the other way. An IT person was fired after suggesting the company come into compliance. Shortly thereafter they were "mysteriously" caught and audited, settled with the BSA for about $1 million, and agreed to a really strange monthly audit where every PC had to have a binder next to it with original media for every installed application. This was late 90's, but still an odd settlement.
I've never understood how they stayed in business this long.
Their loss leaders were over retail, they lost their shirt on DivX, and their service and selection have always been miserable.
I had always assumed the whole thing was a tax shelter or some large scale money laundering scheme.
Didn't they try this on the Yorktown in 1997 and have to tow the ship back to port?
That's a different game of "find a working driver".
When a user drops a Vista laptop on your desk and begs for an XP install, you'll find that not all laptops shipped with Vista have readily available XP drivers.
After the first time, why would anybody hold, much less attend, a technology trade show in Germany?
The high (resource) demand users are the easy ones.
"you prove you need it and I'll give you 4 procs and 16g of ram"
As long as they aren't doing cad or video production, they are covered, and I've got the historical performance data for their VMs captured in a SQL database to prove or disprove their point.
On a rollout of that scale, you'd use a connection broker with automated provisioning to group and assign the floaters.
You're still going to have desktop PCs and laptops for "high value" end users, but the masses don't need them and its a waste of both resources and capital to give them desktop PCs.
There will be opposition. You're in IT, grow a pair. If you are that thin skinned you've probably still got individual desktop printers, maybe even hundreds of them.
Giving employees PCs is a bad idea. Letting employees manage their own PCs is a horrible idea.
Everyone gets a thinclient unless they have a high end graphics requirement such as CAD.
Not only is everyone a restricted user, they live on a thinclient with no moving parts, no CD reader, no floppy reader, and disabled USB ports unless specifically authorized with an approved business use case. Their real desktops are XP VMs on an ESX cluster node.
The XP VMs just don't break, and even if a restricted user managed to break one, it can be reprovisioned in less than 10 minutes.
The thin client hardware has no moving parts and nothing for them to misconfigure. Most laptop users get a thinclient laptop and a 3g card, there is no data on them to be lost or stolen. PC techs can focus their time on supporting the high value CAD users and executives.
For the rank and file, everything just works.
By now, everyone knows vista sucks. Its not the quirky rantings of the slashdot crowd, its the warnings from mainstream consumer media and magazines. Besides, Vista is for home users. The ones stuck with a retail PC, too dumb to pirate XP (since it will not be available at retail for much longer), and too afraid to use Ubuntu. For corporate users, Vista with SA has one (and only one) good feature - Downgrade Rights! Long live XP.
Corporate users will kick the tires again with SP1, and then stick with XP until the next version of Windows comes out. SP1 will fail our predeployment testing at the same point RTM failed, because Microsoft's own admin tools for exchange (ESM) and windows server 2003 (adminpak.msi) will neither install nor run. It will never make it out of the test lab. But its pretty.
I do feel sorry for those home users, so I always keep (K)Ubuntu discs on hand.
I don't think I can make this any simpler: Stop Buying Music from RIAA Members. Its easy, they don't seem to want you to buy their product anyway. Music CDs might or might not play, just like they might or might not infect your PC with rootkits. Legal downloads might or might not play on whatever portable device you have, and they probably wont play on your next one, or your next PC, so what are you spending your money on anyway? Stop Buying Music from RIAA Members.
The RIAA gets its funding from the big labels in addition to these racketeering activities. As SCO has so thoroughly demonstrated, suing your customers is not a sustainable business plan. Cut off the other source of revenue: Music Sales, and they will eventually wither away and die. I am not condoning piracy here, and as a musician its hard to advocate intentionally killing off an industry I've spent a significant part of my life studying, but it simply must be done. It is the only way to rid the planet of what has become a blight on the world. Only then can something better rise up to fill the void. It is a sacrifice we all have to make for the greater good.
Theres a theme here: Stop Buying Music from RIAA Members.