Posts by Doogie Howser MD 221 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2008
Whilst I agree with your comment on them not really supporting customer choice (I mean, none of them do), in the interests of balance it's worth pointing out that dividends from stocks also play a large part in pension funds, so not just flash Wall St types but also butchers, bakers and candle stick makers. It's just the way the money circle works.
Speaking purely for myself, after all that woke Gemini nonsense from the other week I decided to ditch Google as much as possible and I decided to go with Brave, with it being based on Chromium. I have to say so far I've been very happy with my choice - everything just works and I'm loosening myself from Google's tentacles.
I probably didn't read the article properly but what did this failed project cost in the end then? I know there will always be commenters who think that some command line Linux and vi is good enough, but that's just not the reality. Instead I've often wondered why more public sector bodies don't band together and get better bulk licensing deals out of vendors? I remember back in the dim and distant past the NHS had one giant licensing agreement with MS that gave them a better discount than hundreds of piecemeal agreements negotiated locally and then the coalition government came along and decided that was a crap idea and scrapped it.
Regardless of your ideologies on software/vendors/etc, you'd think the best policy where taxpayers' money is involved is to get the best possible discount whilst getting the maximum level of coverage.
You might not think of Fortinet as being "cheap" per se, but at the enterprise level they always win on price (I know this from experience). Problem is, you get what you pay for and the amount of fairly nasty CVEs seems to disproportionately affect Fortinet more than the others in this space and we always seem to be scrambling to play catch up. Buy cheap, buy twice.
This article is timely for me as I took delivery of a new iPhone 14 yesterday to replace the 12 I had on my old contract. Needless to say it looks exactly the same (the same case and screen protector fits the 14!) and the software is the same. Innovation in mobile phones flat lined years ago and it's no great surprise that people are keeping hold of their handsets for longer now. I think I'll stick with the 14 longer than my current 2 year upgrade cycle, as long as I keep getting software updates and the handset holds a reasonable charge, the rest I don't care about.
There's nothing "amazing" or "incredible" about anything in this market, just rehashing the same old shit from years ago.
You're wasting your time with the people on here. It's usually a binary argument of cloud == expensive and bad. The discussion is far more nuanced and broader than that, but it's all commentards seem to care about these days, so this website keeps pumping out the content to wind people up, maintain engagement and sell ads.
The inevitable deluge of down votes will serve to illustrate my point!
More often than not I think the status quo is kept because Fujitsu are too big to fail. Yeah, it would be great if the work was given out to a "proper" UK company with a specific focus on these types of projects, but they often lack the financial wherewithal to weather any kind of legal storms. Sad but true.
I'm not defending any current politicians, but if Wikipedia can be relied upon for facts, the genesis of this project was in 1996, so many politicians of all stripes have had the opportunity to bask in the warm glow of a stuffed brown envelope or two along the way.
I thought exactly the same - most times orgs just plough on regardless and hope for the best. Just goes to show though that requirements analysis is a dying art form and the cause of most public sector project failures (in my experience). Quite often the mass tangle of stakeholders don't really know what they want and end up chasing a shiny dream that just doesn't materialise, conflating functional and non-functional requirements and looking for a CV booster before they move on.
The fact that it seems to be small businesses bearing the brunt of this makes it even harder to accept because they are the sort of organisations who can ill afford to have a day of downtime, let alone three weeks. Rackspace has been dropping in quality like a stone for years and their indifferent response to this problem makes me want them to finally disappear into a big black hole and never surface again.
You can't take analysts opinions as gospel, those that do should be beaten. I love a bit of public cloud as much as the next man, but it has to be appropriate in the use case and be fully thought through. Talk of K8S in the article also reminds me of that XKCD strip about the use of buzz words. Just because you say it doesn't make it the silver bullet.
Finally, as for VMware not innovating as much once Broadcom take them over. Don't make me laugh, they haven't innovated in years. Like Apple, they just keep rehashing existing features and claiming "further and faster" every time.
I've seen both monolithic contracts and also the "tower" model, either way, you're never going to get the result you want. The best part of tower arrangements is that the tower owners refuse to speak to each other and/or drag their heels because it might mean them losing money further down the line. Self preservation is the most basic instinct of all.
Based on other anecdotal evidence I've seen, MU will be strong armed into going onto OCI whether they really want to or not. Oracle are offering very "competitive" pricing to move stuff into their bit barns, past history would suggest you will be gouged in year 4 at renewal time.
All in all, make sure you know OCI if you're bidding for this.
There's not now and there will never be a perfect solution to this, we live in an imperfect world. Where there is networking, storage, compute and a whole gamut of plumbing from different vendors making it all work, something will break at some stage.
That being said, I remember the last fairly major Azure AD meltdown and it turned out that the bulk of requests went to a Texas DC which fell over. Since then, Microsoft claim to have improved this but remember that underneath the hood, AAD is nothing more than a custom build of ADAM. It's not the same as "conventional" AD and so the usual rules don't apply.
Some people prefer on prem, and that's fine. Some people prefer cloud, that's fine. Pick the appropriate tool for the job, don't just follow dogma.
I consider myself a big cynic of Apple, especially their "magical and revolutionary" schtick, but the main reason I moved to iPhone from Android is what is spelled out in this article - a clear lifespan for a device and regular OS updates. None of this garbage where a carrier has to certify it first and then add their own crapware.
I know we have Android One etc and Nokia kept up to date quite well, but it was still patchy in terms of device support in at timely manner.
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