Re: Hotel Facebook

@Auburnman I've never had an advert about stock trading or cars on Facebook. I filled in my interests with things I genuinely like, and lo and behold I have adverts relevant to me which sometimes tell me about things I was unaware of. If everyone stopped trying to be clever and fighting the system they may find they actually don't mind advertising since it would be relevant to them. If you don't have sufficient hobbies and interests to generate relevant adverts then you won't be happy regardless what Facebook does.

Re: So far as I see it...

That would certainly be true if applications were the only thing people host, but not everyone is a software developer, and not all clouds are a platform solution, neither are they all outsourced.

Re: So far as I see it...

@AC you're thinking of Platform as a Service rather than cloud.

Re: Facebook dull, dull, dull...

While I agree that they have now put too many adverts in the timeline, the crap in between is down to the people you chose as friends and that is your own fault. The fact that almost everyone has this same problem says all you need to know about modern Man, we are all dull in varying amounts for most of the time with 2-3 interesting occurances per year. At 33 that means I have around 141 things to look forward to even assuming I'm more interesting than my mates who send pics of burgers :(

Re: An open letter

"So when does marketing become sales ?"

Never really, marketing are the people who analyse whether your ad campaign worked after you bought it. I think you're thinking of advertising.

Re: Agreed

Oh I completely agree that the hardware is useful and good, my post was more a dig at Intel for being nobbers than a problem with the power of it. If they allowed even 32GB of memory (like most PC motherboards now do) then it would easily replace a lot of SMB kit and reduce power consumption as I would imagine this could run a few useful Windows VMs given sufficient memory.

Re: Can't wait!

Why bother with an illegal torrent when the ISO is freely available from MS?

Re: "Microsoft honcho pleads with media: 'Stop picking on us!'"

@Scarborough Dave the start menu is alive and well in Windows 8 - it's just full screen. Based on user feedback, Microsoft realised that nobody used the area of screen which wasn't the start menu after pressing start and so they full screened it. If you want a vote then stop unticking the customer experience program box when you install, don't whine on web forums!

Re: Hype cycle needs to slow down a little

"Cloud is another. VMs + network + storage, all more flexible than before, either in your place or someone else's. Plus software to tie it all together. That's it. End of story"

Ummmm no, cloud is not just infrastructure...

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf

Re: 640x360?

Ah now you're making sense. I thought it was a silly claim to be making in order to sell a product "biggest pixels ever, buy now!"

Re: Triple Microsoft tax bingo

Well IBM are charging for the Fab equipment, the chip tech, the storage tech, the OS tech, the communications tech, the screen tech etc. etc. so why shouldn't MS get money for their troubles as well?

Re: 640x360?

The screen is virtually 25" high according to the article. 360/25=14.4 pixels per inch. 1/14 inch is around 2mm therefore the screen will appear to have pixels of 2mm in size. Not sure how my maths is wrong as there aren't all that many sums involved here.

Re: I solemnly promise

You're being a bit fast and loose with the word "progress" there. All this is is a bunch of hardware placed in a form factor that will sell to nerds. Nobody seems to have written software, thought of use-cases or even explained why it's better than a head mounted camera. They will probably sell a few to geeks but until it offers a real advantage, the normal people will stay away. This is why most normal people think Apple invented smartphones - they were the ones who thought about the uses, they put maps in and made them easy to use. Others failed before them because they just put a load of tech in a box and let people write their own software.

Re: 640x360?

I thought that, for a virtual 25" screen that's 14.4 ppi or about 2mm wide pixels. Space invaders will be awesome though.

Re: normal apple

You mean normal EU regulations for a 2 year warranty?

Re: Done before and done again...

"then expects IT to sort everything out for them."

In the olden days, yes. These days, and the whole reason for the article, is that the solution they are about to buy doesn't involve the IT department AT ALL. They can buy 100 iPads and start work immediately and get more value from them than the shitty Windows XP box you won't upgrade because you fear the Windows 8 interface might be too hard for them. Yes, there may be security concerns they havn't thought of but it's still the fault of the IT team that pushed them into buying what they need to do their jobs.

They also won't need IT staff for the cloud solution which is automatically updated with no downtime window or overtime bill. They won't need you to implement that SAN you bought because you thought it was cooler than the more appropriate one, and they certainly won't need you to ignore the entire feature list of the SAN you wasted money on because you couldn't be arsed to implement it once you'd unpacked your new toy. If they have a problem in the 21st century you know what they do? They call support at Google or Microsoft who fix the problem for them with no fuss and with an SLA to match what they paid.

I work with lots of companies in my job and the most common thread is that IT don't understand other peoples jobs. Most nerds imagine people sitting in front of MS Office all day where in reality they are out in meetings, on the train, taking notes, reading the latest business news, looking at reports and various other activities which contribute to the company. All of which could be done while on the train using a tablet which IT told them they couldn't have for "security reasons". They may even want to edit a word document on their tablet while on the train but it won't work. You know why it won't work? because that sweaty nerd in IT designed it to look pretty in Word rather than making it cross platform because he thought that would please the boss more and maybe get some respect (it didn't). Guess what though, Mr Sweaty has a solution, we'll run the crappy Windows XP image in VDI and send it over a poor connection to the tablet and that will be more impressive than making the template work on the iPad (it won't kids, it really won't). Of course to get on the internet the geek has set them up to bluetooth to their phone to save £15 a month line rental on a separate 3G connection. Sadly, Mr CEO would have been more than £15 worth of productive in the 20 minutes it took him to get it working and so he binned the cheap tablet provided and bought a proper one with 3G for less than an hour of his time is worth.

In reality when Mr CEO has a problem with the new IT strategy, all the IT people he should be able to rely on actually say "I can't, there's no documentation". when you point to the documentation they say "it's out of date". When you tell them they said they knew the technology on their CV which is why you hired them they say "I need training, it's been updated".

Bring on the sackings and good riddance.

@Irongut

The reason why IT are not in on this decision is that they can't put business cases together but instead always think that people want the cheapest solution. You'd be surprised how much budget is available when you properly explain why you need to spend it.

Re: long cables @fill

You're massively overstating the amount of overhead though. Headers etc. take almost nothing from the overall bandwidth. The usual reason people make the mistake you're thinking of is the 8 to ten change going from b to B.

Re: long cables @fill

If you're running at half duplex maybe or using cheap switches with poor backplanes and insufficient buffers. You'll also be wanting to test with cached data to avoid your storage being the bottleneck, as well as making sure you have the extra 2GB memory per 10GbE port required just to run them. I've found 10GbE quite able to run at 10Gb speed consistently when the other systems can keep up.

Re: Reason's for 2013?

I'd love to know where you got that info from. the Exchange team have gone on record saying they have no intention of relpacing Jet, and it's actively being developed. Yes, Access used it but so does AD among other things. The link you sent is discussing LocalDB replacing SQLExpress which is nothing to do with Exchange or AD.

Re: @Lusty

And you don't think an oil company can afford to keep that info in online storage?

Re: @Lusty

I never have issues with convincing people to remove data, the trick is not to pose it as a question. Do a thorough investigation into the data and then make a recommendation. It's probably your own ass covering tactics which are causing your managers to rely on theirs. If you are confident then they will be confident. Why would you expect a manager to even know what a tmp file is, let alone why it's on YOUR server. The IT staff are in charge of data and should therefore either know what it is or remove it. Removing doesn't need to be permanent, there are ways of safely removing access for a given time before permanently removing it. You could even take a backup before final removal and stash the tape for a year, just label the tape "destroy data after dd/mm/yyyy" to ensure that the person who finds it knows it's useless.

Re: Reason's for 2013?

There's nothing wrong with the database, it's based on Jet which is perfectly suitable for the job. These days it's stable and fast as well as capable of very large sized databases. If you're having issues then it's likely down to your management of the system rather than the software. Generally the database will only have a problem if you have a poor backup solution, lose power, or run it on top of virtualisation with a bad disk configuration (Jet needs writethru for the logs, as does SQL). If you do experience corruption then dial tone recovery is recommended, so "fixing" the DB should be a thing of the past. You also shouldn't be defragging the databases these days so usage of the tools should be very rare indeed.

Re: Wow so he knew about all the chip roadmaps.....

I don't see why he wouldn't have known the chip road maps a couple of years ahead. Especially since they are custom chips made for Apple, I'd have thought Arm would be very open with them.

@Chris Beach

Chris, they are not random numbers at all, otherwise there wouldn't be dots in there. Using the scheme you describe is fine where there is a single build number but why start with a 0.x if you have no mechanism to increment that 0? The x.y.z system is well documented for programming where x is a major version starting with 0 for pre-release then incrementing for major changes such as functionality. Y is a minor version, incrementing for small changes such as a small feature addition. Z is the build number, although more likely an even more minor version than actual build number - this is generally for bug fixes. I don't think anyone actually minds which versioning scheme you use, although firefox are pushing their luck, but don't bastardise one into the other to try and look professional while having a complete lack of understanding.

@Franklin

No idea why you've used the joke icon, version numbering used to be an easy way to tell whether something was usable, useful and stable. Now I sit here using Firefox v19 for no better reason than some developer thought it would be funny to jump major versions with no major changes. Of course in the old days, people used to formally learn how to develop code rather than picking up enough while in their bedroom and then calling themselves programmers because they've written yet another notepad app for Linux...

Re: Apologies

But you could at least list what is and is not included. For instance did you include the cost of man in a van/WAN replication? The cost of media, drives and software a rarely even a consideration for these things in the grand scheme :)

Re: Fastest?

When you're comparing to a System Z (Mainframe) then clock speed it where it's at. You can add all the cores you like but if you have a serial workload then it won't mean a thing. Cores are great for Unix but the article kept mentioning Mainframe...

Re: I don't get it.... "mainframe"?

Well I'm glad someone said this, I was starting to think I was imagining the whole thing!

Re: @Lusty

I think the issue is that people are using Word for things they should be using WordPad to do. If you don't need the added functionality then don't buy or pirate a piece of expensive software with the added functionality. Everything that everyone moans about in Word is already "fixed and working" in WordPad because that's what it is there for. Don't even get me started on the things people misuse Excel for, although that's usually down to some angry nerd telling them not to use Access for their database.

Re: There is a simple explanation

"it just adds big colourful icons to *exactly the same functions"

No, it actually changes what is visible to users and emphasises only the important bits. Note that your beloved basic styling buttons are now as small as they always were yet the style icons are an inch wide. This is partly because many people were not using the style functionality due to either lack of training or simple ignorance, and making the "right way" look a bit fisher price helps to start people off on the right foot rather than get them all muddled by letting them change colour, size, bold, italic etc randomly each time they want to emphasise text.

"So you're going with "you're holding it wrong"? Seriously?"

No, I'll go with "I hope you don't put Word skills on your CV" thanks. We get far too many people claiming they know how to use Word but who then fail miserably when writing documents over a page or two. When preparing hundred page reports it becomes important to use the more advanced features, and not doing so wastes valuable company time where people need to manually reformat whole sections just because some halfwit didn't understand what styles are for.

"If you're trying to feel superior because you know what styles are I seriously think you need to get a life..." No, I wasn't trying to feel superior but your reply has made me feel that way so thanks!

Re: @Lusty

"Enter key -- inserts new line & carriage return charecters into document - if some random half arsed program wants to use it for something else; it is the publishers of said programe who need training"

No it doesn't, the enter key inserts a paragraph mark into the document, shift+enter gives you a line break and carrage return. These are completely different functions in Word and will often give different formatting results. A paragraph often has a larger gap than the line spacing.

"(supposedly) to EASILY and EFFICIENTLY write WELL PRESENTED documents."

What could be more efficient than styles to create a well presented document. You can ensure that all of your text looks the same rather than hoping that you consistently used the same font/size/emphasis throughout. It also means that if you collaborate there is no need for everyone to check their formatting because they can use the same style, and that style can be changed at any time with minimal effort. If you've used the various buttons individually then you'll have to check the entire document to change the font because potentially every paragraph is a different style so there won't be a way to centrally change it.

Re: There is a simple explanation

" A time-tested UI, with which every user was familiar and comfortable, was replaced with something that took up more room and required more clicks to use."

The time tested UI was the cause of the vast majority of users misusing Word. The ribbon bar helps users to learn to use Word properly by presenting styles and other core features to them in a more understandable way. You may disagree with this, but if so then you're probably the sort of person who uses the bold and italic buttons and even the dreaded "text bigger" and "text smaller" buttons rather than creating styles for the whole document.

Sorry, I have to rant. At a previous job I tidied the office manual which had 400+ styles in use when I got to it and many thousand double paragraph marks which were used to space the document for layout. If you don't know that using the enter key for spacing is wrong PLEASE seek training!