Re: Lies Damn Lies and Advertising
Surely the top thing of truth in the advert is the cost...
471 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Sep 2009
Yes, you are detecting a pattern, but no it's not the pattern you think. The pattern, specifically in the Apple/Samsung spat, has centered on the tendency of non-US courts to look at the facts, while US courts seem to only care about protecting American companies. Like any stereotype, there's sure to be plenty of exceptions.
Not unless you plan to use something other than HP. As a former EDSer, I was thoroughly disgusted when I had to trade in my Latitude D630 for a Elitebook 6930p. Not only was it heavier, it completely lacked a proper RS-232 serial port and the hard drive died within the first 3 months of using the thing.
If HP employees don't want to use HP kit (and those that think for themselves in general don't), perhaps that's a reason to rethink what they produce. I'm sure customers feel the same way as the employees (of course they do!).
"Better pricing" is a business way of saying "stick to our customers". The chief problem is the amount of dead weight at every level, rife with people hanging on to a job with no actually skill to execute. That likely extends as high as Meg's direct reports and probably even to the Board as well. But there's so many people collecting a paycheck, but not busting their collective asses, that I doubt Meg's plan will ever fix the underlying issue.
People make the organization great and almost all the good ones are gone. There are a few that remain, who keep the whole ship afloat and like the responsibility that comes with.
Yes; even coming down from the trees was a bad idea. Personally, I think we should have never left the oceans.
You say that now. But wait until you look like a tasty guppy to some massive ocean predator.
Climate change doesn't matter so much when you won't be around to see it, which is the source of the apathy amongst the general population (despite all the current climate effects present today due to "climate change", allegedly). The chief problem for those wanting more climate research is the appearance that everything in the research process is geared for the sole purpose to obtain more grant money. When the science comes to the same conclusions without the huge public and private sector funds at play, the world will sit up and take notice.
To be fair, they don't live in a bubble, at all. They know precisely what they're doing and saying. So long as consumers put up with it, they'll continue to remain in their positions of power.
Personally, I told Verizon to go fuck themselves long and hard with that $90/month contract ages ago. I moved my and my wife's numbers to T-Mobile for a fraction of the cost. And while service isn't as good, they aren't treating me like an ATM machine or dairy cow either.
Same goes for the notebook. No notebook should have a "720p" screen. At least with a true HD screen, users could choose to run at small resolutions to make things easier to read (or just increase font sizes, as it were). I was hoping the Latitude ultrabook would be closer to the design of the Asus UX31A-DB71.
Definitely a fail.
Inflation has occurred, though not across the board. Correlate the price of gold to the Dollar for an example. The sole reason inflation isn't a rampant problem is that US Treasury securities are viewed as a safe haven by many investors world-wide, keeping interest rates incredibly low. That will change in an instant in January, if the Taxmeggedon isn't addressed (US will raise taxes collectively to the tune of $500B annually). At that point, the economic system of virtually every nation on earth will feel a shock.
But, on the bright side, 15 million more people will get covered by Medicaid (free health care) while the world burns around them.
Is there a socialist country looking for a leader? Hopefully, the US will have one freed up by January.
Tom, you have multiple other options for apps. Case in point: A little searching never hurt anyone.
I'm sure HP feels that they stand to make a lot more money on everything else that goes along with the tablet, which I'm sure isn't too far from the plans of a certain fruity manufacturer either. This is the model that PC OEMs have used for years...who would get into such a low-margin business otherwise?
That said, they're all still fools.
OTV is one way in Cisco's world, but that's really just a way to create a geocluster, where two physical sites (or three or four, etc) look like one logical site to the rest of the world. I don't believe Cisco would recommend it to interconnect sites between the Americas and India, for example. And especially for the reason you mention. Applications, like VMotion, that require LAN connectivity (sub-10ms, high bandwidth) cannot really operate in a widely geographically-distributed environment. The limit is generally within a single local, at 40km or less I would expect (stupid speed of light limitation and all).
I don't mention Nexus because it doesn't offer anything similar. VSS and Stackwise are the only options in Cisco's camp at this point. Neither offer the extensibility of IRF, but it's just dishonest to leave them out of the comparison. Almost every vendor has a similar stacking or clustering technology, but none of them made it into the comparison.
If you're not using STP, I assume you're going pure L3? That's fine until some server goob just HAS to have VMotion or Exchange clustering, etc. There's enough applications that require L2 adjacency that it's really hard to isolate L2 to a single switch in enterprise or service provider environments.
Brilliant bit of marketing, with the network test showing "significantly improved throughput". Of course, the comparison didn't address other, similar configurations (such as Cisco's VSS or Stackwise), instead focusing on the path-limiting features also known as STP and VRRP. It's really disingenuous to make such a comparison, given that STP intends to eliminate loops (i.e. single, shortest network path) and VRRP has no relavance in a VMotion scenario (operates at L2, not L3). I'm sure this demonstrates the hard work at HP to innovate, which is certainly the nicest thing I can say about it without using bollocks, dingus, asshole, fucktard, and many other assorted dirty words.
**Thankfully, "Apples" has not been copyrighted, trademark or (spiritual figment of your imagination forbid) patented by a certain fruity company in that oh-so fruity place called California.
Broadcast domains aren't necessarily the problem they were in the distant, even recent, past. Most switches offer a suppression option to limit the transmission of multicast and broadcast frames and no sane network engineer would deploy ethernet without such safeguards anymore (hopefully). In addition, many of the legacy applications that relied on broadcasts are candidates for virtualization, where they can be fully isolated to broadcast as they see fit without compromising the rest of the infrastructure, providing an RTP, ICA or similar access method to the system. Obviously, that's not a one-size-fits-all description of the "ultimate" solution, to say the very least, though the point still remains that steps can be taken to address the "rage" potential of the broadcast domain that weren't viable 10 or even 5 years ago.
In fact, in the case of the stacked switches that appear as one large, Layer-3-aware device, every device shares a single ARP table, so there's no prolific propagation of ARPs as broadcasts as you would expect (instead, there's a hell of a lot of synchronization of the stack across the interswitch links, which can present it's own set of problems). It doesn't begin to consider of the pros or cons for implementing device stacks, but it's definitely a factor that any engineer worth his/her salt should consider in building their project requirements.
Concerning the article overall, I find it high-level enough to prevent it from being really useful to me, though I suppose that illustrates precisely the sort of audience it was intended to reach. Not sure I would call it terrible though. That's seems a bit too harsh, unless you really expected the article to reflect some expert-level white paper from Radia Perlman or Donald Eastlake.
While it definitely commonplace to collapse the Core and Distribution layers where feasible and practical, I don't understand how one could have any discussion of a large, flat network without a mention of TRILL. Given the love lost over Spanning-Tree Protocol and the subsequent need for Layer 3 routing to segment STP, TRILL provides the defacto hope of collapsing large, distributed networks into a wide, flat topology that can be as interconnected and filled with loops as needed. Especially now, TRILL should be the first feature requirement for any Ethernet switch hardware selection process. Admins the world over will rejoice when they can execute "no spanning-tree" on all the switches.
Regarding stacking switches, there is a flip-side not mentioned by the author in the switch stack argument. The assumption not plainly stated, but inherent to the logic provided, largely holds that the campus network is managed in-house. Generally, if the stack will be managed by a third-party, that third-party will still charge on a physical chassis basis, not per logical device. So, it pays to understand the ramifications of such "simple" choices on the bottom line (or any of the other myriad areas of impact within IT beyond purely financial). There's also a need to evaluate vendor claims about stacking, as not all implementations may be equal (such as Cisco's StackWise or VSS).
"Wall street , slash and burn for next quarters profits! Thats what got HP into trouble in the first place."
Having been in HP first hand in the last five years, I can assure you that the "slash and burn" were needed, given the large number of social loafers throughout the company. Far too many people getting by on the achievements of the few. Unfortunately, there was no culture change to coincide the reductions-in-force, so those loafers remaining never received any motivation to change.
Frankly, the whole thing needs to be blown to bits, because existing management from the front-line to the top are glad to produce mediocre numbers as they have been for years and the remaining employees are completely demoralized. This simple fact particularly eludes HP shareholders, who clearly don't understand what a colossal mongolian cluster-fuck on which they've wasted their capital.
/former-hper-rant
"Hard to say. If they keep up the good work it might be triangular and monochrome."
Or worse, they come up with a "paper" interface, where you can write on a pad that will reflect your choices on screen. I'm sure that will be considered the new design ethic by then.
/vomit
As you correctly pointed out, the fear would be with 0-day exploits. But the dilemna isn't whether upgrading will avert 0-day exploits, but whether you'll ever get a patch to secure them. XP will get ZERO patches after April 2014, so THERE"S your reason to do something.
The rhetoric from MS clearly intends to scare enterprises into upgrading to Windows 7 or 8, but that's not really the important discussion. The more important point is what can be done, because there are ways to isolate the applications so there is zero internet activity (i.e. host-only connections in a virtualized environment). In addition, it's really short-sighted to leave a "mission-critical" application in an unsupported container. As an investor, I would be furious to learn that my appointed directors and executives had shirked their fiduciary responsibilities in the long-term just to slightly boost the corporate earnings in the short-term.
Of course, if they had started the process when XP support was originally extended, there would be no issue now. Instead, they've kept putting off the long-term solution to benefit the short-term to the point where the short-term has become the long-term. Idiots.
I agree with your sentiment, though I now have more doubts about climate science than before. My doubts come not from a presupposition about the validity of AGW or not, but from a true appreciation of just how completely impossible it seems to ever properly account for the circumstances surrounding data collection or to control for the inherent anomalies that are bound to exist.
If the data can never be trusted, how can the science? Personally, I love science in general and appreciate the rigor that the scientific method and peer review maintain. But this seems like such a fool's errand. Better fun would be had jousting with windmills and dreaming the impossible dream.
For me, the earth would have to open up and swallow them both whole. Here's to hoping the judge finds them both guilty and throws it out from the sheer magnitude of disgust the trial will likely generate. This whole thing can't be over quick enough. Aren't we all sick of hearing about this by now?
AC, the root of the problem is that too many people in IT think that the most important aspect of the job is knowing lots of cool, secret techie things so they can move up from Tier1 as quickly as possible. IMHO, the number one aspect should be customer service, because that's the purpose of the job. I actually worked at Walmart for a year as a 20-something before I got my first IT job and the lessons I learned there about how to deal with customers still serve me well on a daily basis, 16 years later.
Being a front-line IT guy sucks ass, but you have to start at the bottom and demonstrate you're worth a damn first. If you take care of your customers, you'll have opportunities to move up. There's no doubt in my mind that those who remain in Tier1 for a long time deserve everything they're getting, though they're customers clearly don't deserve such poor service. Some of my clients now require Tier1 engineers to be promoted within 2 years, so they get sacked. Boffo, in my book!
Or...the very applications which are in common to iOS and Android appear on Apple and Samsung tablets, respectively. Who would have guessed?
P.S. When you're finally sick of such a terrible place to live, with its mentally challenged president and hitler-topping media moguls, I suggest you find the nearest exit so you can abandon ship with all the other rats.
So, those who have small laptop or tablet screens will see the autohidden ribbon and magically want to run out to buy new kit? Facts work better when you have a noggin that you willingly use.
And fuck the ribbon. I would rather eat canned haggis that was stored in the Sahara for 3 months.
Luck will help, but this makes sense on a lot of levels for Yahoo! and for Ms. Mayer. Yahoo! gets to steal a key contributor from a nearby competitor. She gets a challenge that never would have been available at Google, given that they have passed over her before for higher level positions. She had to leave to get a shot at a C-level position and there's a real opportunity at Yahoo!, despite the obvious skepticism that all of us should have. Yes, she'll need a lot of luck, but hopefully she's prepared to kick ass and chew bubble gum, as it were.