I used to have a coworker who complained a lot about the price of car insurance. Then at some point he complained that he could not find insurance at all. I found it bizarre because I had no problem whatsoever with car insurance and we were practically neighbours.
Apparently he was "extremely unlucky" (his words) because idiots kept stopping without warning in front of him on the street so he got in accidents all the time. Obviously these accidents had nothing to do with the fact that while driving he was also watching movies on his portable DVD because he "wanted to keep his mind busy". I also remember him submitting a bug fix from his laptop while driving.
On a completely unrelated matter: this guy recently went back to visit his hometown... in China.
> And why so much hostility for green energy initiatives? Are we just going to keep on burning oil and coal for power? I mean, clearly we need to start coming up with alternatives, right?
The problem is that for years the greeners went unchecked, cheated on facts and generally cried wolf. The problem is that it is becoming more and more obvious that some of the stuff they claimed (like a lot of the global warming thing) is blown out of proportions, and some of the solutions they proposed (like promoting bottled water instead of soft drink, or fabric grocery bags instead of expandable plastic ones) are having some serious side effects. And what about Ethanol, a fiasco that probably caused as much damage to the economy as it did to the environment.
It's just like the ban on DEET - a bunch of greeners made it a much bigger problem that it was (allegedly 4 people died because of DEET) and the outcome of this "successful campaign" is the countless people who died of malaria, which was about to be extinct until western governments put pressure on third-world countries to stop using the evil DEET (whose actual danger has yet to be proven).
Environment issues are very complex, and the simple solutions proposed by the greeners are backfiring across the board. The truth is that cleaning the environment is not a realistic project; it's like a crash diet, with no chance of being a viable, long-term solution. What is needed is to create and support healthy habits - like the bikes rentals in Montreal - but without trying to demonize or destroy everything else, and without trying to fight lies and fud with lies and fud. Only with decades of continuous positive support of better habits can the world become free from pollution.
What you propose is to boycott an american company because it drives other american companies out of business with their low prices. Obviously if the prices are so low, it's because [insert something evil here] not because they have created the most efficient distribution network and inventory system in America. (if by something evil you were thinking "getting their low-price stuff in china" then what about your iPad?)
Following your logic, we should boycott Ford because they hurt GM, and Apple because they hurt Dell, and McDonalds because they hurt Burger King.
Seriously, the only reason not to go to Wal-mart is because of the fat ladies in leggings that smell like seaweed and the occasional crossdresser trying out shoes, but I see no problem with purchasing their stuff online, unless their website gets hijacked and redirects people to goatse or rick.
I have a friend working for Hydro-Quebec (the power company in Quebec) and he told me that some people throw chains in power lines to short them and create a outage, then they try to cut the wires - but once in a while the breakers comes back on at the power company before the wire is cut. Every year they find a body or two because of that.
> To be fair, Dell is limited with driver support by what their vendors provide.
When you have some equipment installed and "certified" by Dell, you don't expect them to use obsolete drivers while there are three or for more recent versions on their own website. This happened to me twice, and almost a third time but then I knew the drill so when the setup was completed I asked for a complete driver inventory and did the comparison with the available versions myself - thankfully I catched them before they left. If this was for a video card or a usb port it would not be so bad, but when it is for a storage adapter it is another ballgame.
This does not happen with IBM. Before they certify a setup they will do extensive tests and validation. What sucks is that when you have a problem with a new equipement at IBM you end up in the support queue with everyone else, while with Dell usually having a technician on-site will speed things up.
A price-driven selection is an incentive for bidders to go in very lowball, and this only leads to nightmares for both parties. It's a silly practice based on obsolete purchasing practices (such as requiring three quotes for any important purchase - which over the long run drives off the vendors who usually don't win; those could be a very good match in a specific situation but after a while they won't even bother try to win a business because they know that most of the time they are contacted just to make the quota).
This is why more and more organizations are doing a selection process where the price is sealed at first, so they can identify which bids are a match for the requirement and score them accordingly. Then when the prices are revealed a simple dollars per point formula shows which bids are off, and the ratio helps the selection committee to justify not taking the lowest bid if they feel it does not offer good value. In such situation, IBM will shine because they can offer a lot of value without cutting prices like a flea market operator.
Netscape was a crime against the internet and especially against web developers of late 90s early 2000s. If you ever had to design a form in Netscape 4.7 you know what I mean - having textboxes that can only be sized in characters is significantly painful. And I won't even talk about layers because already my blood pressure is getting too high.
My experience with IBM is that every new software or equipment setup is painful, complicated and goes over-budget, but once things are up and running, it is rock-solid, so in the long run it is still the vendor I would trust the most for enterprise projects. Knowing them, I always take into account the extra oil and time that will be needed to make things go smoothly at first.
This is very different from a vendor like Dell, who takes good care of its new customers (especially the ones with deep pockets) and make sure that the delivery is on time and budget, but after a while problems start to appear (wrong firmware, obsolete drivers, etc) and pretty soon they tend to ignore you if they feel you won't bring new business in the next quarter.
In this case with the NCSA thing, it's a typical situation where budgets have no room for the fudge factor because the organization has a price-driven selection process, which is wrong.
What do you mean by that? From my experience both products are now pretty close.
I've done a lot of work with both, using all kinds of mid- and high-end hardware, and performance-wise there is no clear winner. Also there is no feature in one that the other does not have (vMotion, dynamic resource allocation, failover, virtual and pass-thru disks, name it). SCVMM is about the same as VC. Both have robust scripting and automation capabilities. Support for hypervisor hardware is a bit more flexible with Hyper-V, and virtual hardware is equivalent. And lab management from Microsoft is not as popular as Lab Manager but it's still pretty close and personnally I found it significantly more reliable, because with Lab Manager it's not possible to easily pick VMs from VC, one has to import and process them and it takes forever - while on Hyper-V discovery is done instantly.
In some ways VMWare has better third-party offerings, such as virtual networking with the Nexus 1000v from Cisco or hypervisor-based anti-malware from TrendMicro. Also vCloud is pretty cool, but it's not for a typical company, it's mostly for webhosting and cloud business. And so far it does not support delta disk, which is a complete bummer.
What I noticed from working closely with both products is that the organizations are quite different. Microsoft are being pretty honest about what the product can or can't do; they will tell you when to use pass-thru disks instead of virtual ones, and they will happily give you what kind of load you can expect from a single host. With VMWare there is a lot of marketing and sometimes it's hard to get an actual answer even when you pay top dollar for a TAM. Sometimes VMWare looks a lot like a mom & pop shop that grew too fast, like Dell or SAP used to be. Some of their flagship products (like VC) have very disturbing bugs, and when you try to get support you end up on the phone with people who don't know the product more than the customer.
It is my opinion that the best thing that could happen to VMWare would be an acquisition from a company like IBM where it could get the proper support and QA. As for Hyper-V, I think it is following a path similar to SQL Server, becoming an enterprise-ready solution as long as you can accept the limitations and lock-in that comes with Windows.
For storage, EMC is pretty much dead in the water; it was a leader ten years ago but it's over now. With SSD and SAS drives price dropping quickly, the name of the game is now sub-volume tiering, a technology that EMC promised (and licensed) a long time ago with FAST2, but has yet to actually deliver, while the competition is already there (like the impressive Compellent, now part of Dell).
For large enteprise, the top dogs are now IBM (with the V7000 that has built-in storage virtualization) and Hitachi (who also has storage virtualization but is the only vendor that offers a 100% uptime in the SLA); there is also HP 3PAR which is completely awesome. For mid-range again IBM is strong with XIV, but HP, Dell and Pillar are also pretty good. And for entry-level, there are very good iSCSI products (HP Lefthand and Dell Equallogic).
Where does that leave EMC? With existing customers who think that VMAX is still the sh*t... but many of them are switching to HP or IBM who actually have new technology.
From your insults (such as "wank") I would guess you are a shiny gem from UK. With you being so emotional, I would even suspect that you were involved in that University of East Anglia scam where people were cooking the global warming numbers to help their buddy Al Gore get a Nobel Prize for his fictional PowerPoint masterpiece.
The sad thing is that there are actual problems with the environment, such as the smog in big cities. It's just too bad that a bunch of scammers are hijacking the greeners groups and make the focus on something more dramatic because it makes it easier to leech on public money.
You should leave those complicated matters to serious people. Why don't you go to the pub and get a pint or a pack of crisps, and then get involved in a brawl with other people wearing tracksuits and gold chains while watching football? Ok, mate?
From the article: > Another candidate could be IBM's choice of Bill Gates over Gary Kildall to supply the operating system for its personal computer. The damage from this decision is still accumulating at breakneck speed [...]
This is the kind of factual, objective and unbiased content that gives credibility to an article.
Republicans: -lobby: military, big oil -what your vote gives you: war, pollution -what is the legacy: everybody hates america, and global warming con artists like Al Gore get Nobel Prize
Democrats: -lobby: wall street, big pharma, hollywood -what your vote gives you: empty 401(k), cancer and/or diabete, and you pay 20$ to rent a movie -what is the legacy: a debt that does not fit in a Excel spreadsheet, and shameless people like Sarah Palin exploit historical moments like the Tea Party to gain political clout
Republicans are funnier (can't wait to see President Palin's foreign policy) but Democrats are better at beating records. Clinton gave away (some would say "sold") more pardons than the sum of all previous presidents in the history of USA. Obama is burying the country in a deficit bigger than the sum of all previous deficits in the history of USA. Yes we can!
Now what the USA really need is a straight arrow like the one we got in Canada (Harper), to which journalists cannot ask questions but who is always available to jam with rockstars in his living room in Ottawa. We used to have liberals too, but they left to make money with their boats after changing tax laws relevant to boats.
Allow me a curling analogy. When you don't have the advantage of the last play (the "hammer" in curling), then it is better to first build up your defense, then attack.
Now suppose that you find a weakness in a hardware component (such as a battery) and because of some dark agenda you want to use this to do extensive damage to a lot of computers. If you release your best attack immediately, you will do some damage, but then the vendor (or antivirus companies) will work on a fix and use their existing distribution channels to send this patch as quickly as possible to as many computers as possible. They have the "hammer". So instead what you do? You work on your defense first; you create a worm to disable the patch delivery (such as Windowsupdate.com), and once the patches cannot be delivered anymore, then you release your masterpiece and you do a lot more damage because the opponent cannot use its hammer.
Now did this actually happen with Blaster? I don't know. But it's the way to go, according to the curling handbook.
> Naturally, no one would admit to such. It would confirm that they were wrong and create more intolerable cognitive dissonance.
Admitting such a thing would be possible only for someone who was not in the first place a candidate to get caught in this marketing ploy. I call this iCatch-22.
This is a common misconception that backups and archives are the same thing. What is described here is an archiving solution. This does not address backup.
This being said, if one was to use a deduplication unit, he would also use the proper software and not perform replication blindly. There is a lot to consider when you replicate information; as an example you must take into account the processes that could be using the data. Good replication software is designed to handle this kind of stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to have a coworker who complained a lot about the price of car insurance. Then at some point he complained that he could not find insurance at all. I found it bizarre because I had no problem whatsoever with car insurance and we were practically neighbours.
Apparently he was "extremely unlucky" (his words) because idiots kept stopping without warning in front of him on the street so he got in accidents all the time. Obviously these accidents had nothing to do with the fact that while driving he was also watching movies on his portable DVD because he "wanted to keep his mind busy". I also remember him submitting a bug fix from his laptop while driving.
On a completely unrelated matter: this guy recently went back to visit his hometown... in China.
> And why so much hostility for green energy initiatives? Are we just going to keep on burning oil and coal for power? I mean, clearly we need to start coming up with alternatives, right?
The problem is that for years the greeners went unchecked, cheated on facts and generally cried wolf. The problem is that it is becoming more and more obvious that some of the stuff they claimed (like a lot of the global warming thing) is blown out of proportions, and some of the solutions they proposed (like promoting bottled water instead of soft drink, or fabric grocery bags instead of expandable plastic ones) are having some serious side effects. And what about Ethanol, a fiasco that probably caused as much damage to the economy as it did to the environment.
It's just like the ban on DEET - a bunch of greeners made it a much bigger problem that it was (allegedly 4 people died because of DEET) and the outcome of this "successful campaign" is the countless people who died of malaria, which was about to be extinct until western governments put pressure on third-world countries to stop using the evil DEET (whose actual danger has yet to be proven).
Environment issues are very complex, and the simple solutions proposed by the greeners are backfiring across the board. The truth is that cleaning the environment is not a realistic project; it's like a crash diet, with no chance of being a viable, long-term solution. What is needed is to create and support healthy habits - like the bikes rentals in Montreal - but without trying to demonize or destroy everything else, and without trying to fight lies and fud with lies and fud. Only with decades of continuous positive support of better habits can the world become free from pollution.
Which would make you what?
I would have said: what are obsolete things that phony people say they still use?
But do this kind of amplifier sound better?
> Though most people who 'use' those, just 'use' it as a conversation piece.
Like a iPad at Starbucks?
What you propose is to boycott an american company because it drives other american companies out of business with their low prices. Obviously if the prices are so low, it's because [insert something evil here] not because they have created the most efficient distribution network and inventory system in America. (if by something evil you were thinking "getting their low-price stuff in china" then what about your iPad?)
Following your logic, we should boycott Ford because they hurt GM, and Apple because they hurt Dell, and McDonalds because they hurt Burger King.
Seriously, the only reason not to go to Wal-mart is because of the fat ladies in leggings that smell like seaweed and the occasional crossdresser trying out shoes, but I see no problem with purchasing their stuff online, unless their website gets hijacked and redirects people to goatse or rick.
I have a friend working for Hydro-Quebec (the power company in Quebec) and he told me that some people throw chains in power lines to short them and create a outage, then they try to cut the wires - but once in a while the breakers comes back on at the power company before the wire is cut. Every year they find a body or two because of that.
> To be fair, Dell is limited with driver support by what their vendors provide.
When you have some equipment installed and "certified" by Dell, you don't expect them to use obsolete drivers while there are three or for more recent versions on their own website. This happened to me twice, and almost a third time but then I knew the drill so when the setup was completed I asked for a complete driver inventory and did the comparison with the available versions myself - thankfully I catched them before they left. If this was for a video card or a usb port it would not be so bad, but when it is for a storage adapter it is another ballgame.
This does not happen with IBM. Before they certify a setup they will do extensive tests and validation. What sucks is that when you have a problem with a new equipement at IBM you end up in the support queue with everyone else, while with Dell usually having a technician on-site will speed things up.
A price-driven selection is an incentive for bidders to go in very lowball, and this only leads to nightmares for both parties. It's a silly practice based on obsolete purchasing practices (such as requiring three quotes for any important purchase - which over the long run drives off the vendors who usually don't win; those could be a very good match in a specific situation but after a while they won't even bother try to win a business because they know that most of the time they are contacted just to make the quota).
This is why more and more organizations are doing a selection process where the price is sealed at first, so they can identify which bids are a match for the requirement and score them accordingly. Then when the prices are revealed a simple dollars per point formula shows which bids are off, and the ratio helps the selection committee to justify not taking the lowest bid if they feel it does not offer good value. In such situation, IBM will shine because they can offer a lot of value without cutting prices like a flea market operator.
Netscape was a crime against the internet and especially against web developers of late 90s early 2000s. If you ever had to design a form in Netscape 4.7 you know what I mean - having textboxes that can only be sized in characters is significantly painful. And I won't even talk about layers because already my blood pressure is getting too high.
My experience with IBM is that every new software or equipment setup is painful, complicated and goes over-budget, but once things are up and running, it is rock-solid, so in the long run it is still the vendor I would trust the most for enterprise projects. Knowing them, I always take into account the extra oil and time that will be needed to make things go smoothly at first.
This is very different from a vendor like Dell, who takes good care of its new customers (especially the ones with deep pockets) and make sure that the delivery is on time and budget, but after a while problems start to appear (wrong firmware, obsolete drivers, etc) and pretty soon they tend to ignore you if they feel you won't bring new business in the next quarter.
In this case with the NCSA thing, it's a typical situation where budgets have no room for the fudge factor because the organization has a price-driven selection process, which is wrong.
From the link:
> Send an email to manifest-analysis-request@analysis.no.net with the word "subscribe" in the body text (not subject) to participate.
I guess the good ol' Majordomo is being revived. Can't wait to see if they also setup a webring or at least put up a guestbook that I could sign!
> HyperV is still way too far behind right now
What do you mean by that? From my experience both products are now pretty close.
I've done a lot of work with both, using all kinds of mid- and high-end hardware, and performance-wise there is no clear winner. Also there is no feature in one that the other does not have (vMotion, dynamic resource allocation, failover, virtual and pass-thru disks, name it). SCVMM is about the same as VC. Both have robust scripting and automation capabilities. Support for hypervisor hardware is a bit more flexible with Hyper-V, and virtual hardware is equivalent. And lab management from Microsoft is not as popular as Lab Manager but it's still pretty close and personnally I found it significantly more reliable, because with Lab Manager it's not possible to easily pick VMs from VC, one has to import and process them and it takes forever - while on Hyper-V discovery is done instantly.
In some ways VMWare has better third-party offerings, such as virtual networking with the Nexus 1000v from Cisco or hypervisor-based anti-malware from TrendMicro. Also vCloud is pretty cool, but it's not for a typical company, it's mostly for webhosting and cloud business. And so far it does not support delta disk, which is a complete bummer.
What I noticed from working closely with both products is that the organizations are quite different. Microsoft are being pretty honest about what the product can or can't do; they will tell you when to use pass-thru disks instead of virtual ones, and they will happily give you what kind of load you can expect from a single host. With VMWare there is a lot of marketing and sometimes it's hard to get an actual answer even when you pay top dollar for a TAM. Sometimes VMWare looks a lot like a mom & pop shop that grew too fast, like Dell or SAP used to be. Some of their flagship products (like VC) have very disturbing bugs, and when you try to get support you end up on the phone with people who don't know the product more than the customer.
It is my opinion that the best thing that could happen to VMWare would be an acquisition from a company like IBM where it could get the proper support and QA. As for Hyper-V, I think it is following a path similar to SQL Server, becoming an enterprise-ready solution as long as you can accept the limitations and lock-in that comes with Windows.
For storage, EMC is pretty much dead in the water; it was a leader ten years ago but it's over now. With SSD and SAS drives price dropping quickly, the name of the game is now sub-volume tiering, a technology that EMC promised (and licensed) a long time ago with FAST2, but has yet to actually deliver, while the competition is already there (like the impressive Compellent, now part of Dell).
For large enteprise, the top dogs are now IBM (with the V7000 that has built-in storage virtualization) and Hitachi (who also has storage virtualization but is the only vendor that offers a 100% uptime in the SLA); there is also HP 3PAR which is completely awesome. For mid-range again IBM is strong with XIV, but HP, Dell and Pillar are also pretty good. And for entry-level, there are very good iSCSI products (HP Lefthand and Dell Equallogic).
Where does that leave EMC? With existing customers who think that VMAX is still the sh*t... but many of them are switching to HP or IBM who actually have new technology.
> Slashdot is a Microsoft shop now.
Baghdad Bob, is that you?
From your insults (such as "wank") I would guess you are a shiny gem from UK. With you being so emotional, I would even suspect that you were involved in that University of East Anglia scam where people were cooking the global warming numbers to help their buddy Al Gore get a Nobel Prize for his fictional PowerPoint masterpiece.
The sad thing is that there are actual problems with the environment, such as the smog in big cities. It's just too bad that a bunch of scammers are hijacking the greeners groups and make the focus on something more dramatic because it makes it easier to leech on public money.
You should leave those complicated matters to serious people. Why don't you go to the pub and get a pint or a pack of crisps, and then get involved in a brawl with other people wearing tracksuits and gold chains while watching football? Ok, mate?
From the article:
> Another candidate could be IBM's choice of Bill Gates over Gary Kildall to supply the operating system for its personal computer. The damage from this decision is still accumulating at breakneck speed [...]
This is the kind of factual, objective and unbiased content that gives credibility to an article.
Republicans:
-lobby: military, big oil
-what your vote gives you: war, pollution
-what is the legacy: everybody hates america, and global warming con artists like Al Gore get Nobel Prize
Democrats:
-lobby: wall street, big pharma, hollywood
-what your vote gives you: empty 401(k), cancer and/or diabete, and you pay 20$ to rent a movie
-what is the legacy: a debt that does not fit in a Excel spreadsheet, and shameless people like Sarah Palin exploit historical moments like the Tea Party to gain political clout
Republicans are funnier (can't wait to see President Palin's foreign policy) but Democrats are better at beating records. Clinton gave away (some would say "sold") more pardons than the sum of all previous presidents in the history of USA. Obama is burying the country in a deficit bigger than the sum of all previous deficits in the history of USA. Yes we can!
Now what the USA really need is a straight arrow like the one we got in Canada (Harper), to which journalists cannot ask questions but who is always available to jam with rockstars in his living room in Ottawa. We used to have liberals too, but they left to make money with their boats after changing tax laws relevant to boats.
> Radio grew 6% this year
Do you mean "radioactivity"?
Allow me a curling analogy. When you don't have the advantage of the last play (the "hammer" in curling), then it is better to first build up your defense, then attack.
Now suppose that you find a weakness in a hardware component (such as a battery) and because of some dark agenda you want to use this to do extensive damage to a lot of computers. If you release your best attack immediately, you will do some damage, but then the vendor (or antivirus companies) will work on a fix and use their existing distribution channels to send this patch as quickly as possible to as many computers as possible. They have the "hammer". So instead what you do? You work on your defense first; you create a worm to disable the patch delivery (such as Windowsupdate.com), and once the patches cannot be delivered anymore, then you release your masterpiece and you do a lot more damage because the opponent cannot use its hammer.
Now did this actually happen with Blaster? I don't know. But it's the way to go, according to the curling handbook.
After Windowsupdate.com, now it will be Batteryupdate.com.
Somewhere in a basement in Guangdong or Beijing, keyboards are already at work to create a new Blaster.
We were never at war with IBM.
> Naturally, no one would admit to such. It would confirm that they were wrong and create more intolerable cognitive dissonance.
Admitting such a thing would be possible only for someone who was not in the first place a candidate to get caught in this marketing ploy. I call this iCatch-22.
This is a common misconception that backups and archives are the same thing. What is described here is an archiving solution. This does not address backup.
This being said, if one was to use a deduplication unit, he would also use the proper software and not perform replication blindly. There is a lot to consider when you replicate information; as an example you must take into account the processes that could be using the data. Good replication software is designed to handle this kind of stuff.