Posts by Trevor_Pott 6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010
Well, there are 3 swag bags on the list. That said, I totally wouldn't have though kitsch was what people would be after. Tried to get the sweet stuff. Conference passes, Trainsignal training, licences...maybe I should have hunted the wild coffee mug with more fervour. Ah well, live and learn, eh?
I spent rather a lot of time combing through lawyers only to discover that each jurisdiction wanted somewhere around $2000 to provide a set of T&Cs that I would then have to modify to my requirements. None of that lawyers I spoke to - literally none of them - were willing to work out a harmonized single set of Ts&Cs covering even the US and Canada, let alone multiple countries.
Even if I had $2000/jurisdiction (I don't) that whole effort would be invalidated by rules in various jurisdictions that require you to have harmonised Ts&Cs for the entire event! This is one case where the "experts" aren't able or willing to provide "sound advice" at all.
Sysadmin day has pretty much been hijacked by commercial interests in order to do the sales pitch thing, yes. That's why I decided to do this webex thing. People are always trying to get your eyeballs so they can market you stuff. I wanted to turn that around: I managed to get some brains on tap so that we could ask them uncomfortable questions and basically make them be of more benefit to us than we are likely to be to them.
That's why the CloudPhysics guy is there. He has zero commercial interest in flash in the enterprise. CloudPhysics doesn't actually win or lose a thing if flash fails or succeeds. But he knows enough to call "bullshit" on the other panel members (the amount of research he's done recently for some flash cards in the CloudPhysics product was pretty intense) and just the right amount of "does not care" to actually call bullshit when he hears it.
I realize it isn't as awesome as giving away free space stations to every reader...but my influence is somewhat limited. It's the best I could do for this year.
A) I spent 13 years in French Immersion, thanks. My French isn't the best, but French words are still "first to mine" for most of my thought processes.
B) Doing anything in Quebec means registering with la Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux. The simple truth of the matter is that it took me so long to figure out the legalese that by the time I had done so I was 2 weeks past the deadline to register the contest with la Régie. La Régie wants 30 days before the contest promotion starts - not just the contest - and I just couldn't get the legalese figured out in time. (It didn't help that I was originally trying to run it in 34 countries simultaneously.) In the end, not just Quebec got stiffed; there were a lot of countries I simply couldn't figure out, or I couldn't afford time/money to register with the correct authority.
Oh course, naturally the solution to all ills is to remove from businesses any semblance of oversight, social responsibility or liability for their actions. This will naturally benefit the small, struggling businesses and in no way be twisted into a hammer by large enterprises and used to beat everyone else down.
You sir, are naive.
The best thing the UK could do to encourage small businesses would be to provide access to the resources necessary to start producing one's own widget. The costs are extravagant, but there is absolutely no reason that $small_business cannot evolve into $chaebol.
"Hands off" by the government will do nothing but siphon cash out of the UK to established interests which are largely American at this point. Indeed, UK_Display_Tech_Ltd wont' even fetch the same price as Silicon_Valley_Display_tech_Ltd because American businessmen place a high value on having their workers within bullwhip distance. Anything not within a couple of hours driving distance of headquarters will see a penalty on the amount offered for buyout; anything across the pond will see a pretty steep penalty.
What's more, because there aren't any alternatives - going from small to medium in the UK is nearly impossible because of lack of funds, infrastructure, support, etc - UK firms will gladly lap up the table leavings offered them. Holding out will net them nothing and will in all likelihood drive the offer away.
Crapping capitalism for breakfast and burning hippies isn't going to save your pathetic little island and it's byzantine house-of-cards finances-based economy. What will is carefully supporting local businesses interests to develop a stable collection of diverse "big businesses". The UK needs a few 800lb gorillas of its very own spread across enough sectors to be able to deal with downturns in any given handful of sectors.
That takes planning and care, especially in a global economy. The economy of a town favours only a handful of people in a town. The economy of a nation favours roughly the same %. The unified economy of an entire planet doesn't fundamentally alter the maths and the very few, chosen % of people that the global economy favours?
...is isn't you, or your little island, my limey friend. No matter how inflated the British sense of importance is; the UK just doesn't matter enough for market forced to save it.
I've been on about MS licensing trauma since VMware became a thing and saw the writing on the wall. Oh, but I'm a daft lad spinning madness from the sweet silk of Microsoft's loving EULAs. Or so I've been told.
Seems to me that there is a rash of people telling MS's licensing department to "shove it" right now. Please excuse me while I cackle with glee.
If Microsoft want to have a snowball's chance in a neutron star of surviving the next 15 years as anything other than another has-been niche player they are going to need to stop hiring butt-snorkling yes-men to design their strategy and start hiring their harshest critics. They have lost touch with SMEs, enthusiasts, power users, regular users, desktop users, touch users, partners, developers, systems administrators and are now losing touch with the CIOs of enterprises as well.
I'll not hold my breath; the egos in Redmond are such that they would rather death before admission of fallibility, but I can hope beyond hope that this company my career has been built on will turn itself around. Fleeting and unfulfilled as that dream will ultimately prove to be...
Follow me on Twitter? Cakeis_not_alie. I am sure I'll mention it there. It will also be talked about on The Register and WeBreakTech as well as Trevorpott.com. I'm sure when I have finally finished it that you will hear the gnashing of teeth from the whitepaper brigade so loudly that it will haunt your dreams and prevent sleep.
Then you will know it has been released.
(Actually, If I publish an eBook on how to do the MacGyver-like paranoid systems design that I do, does it suddenly become a "whitepapered approach?" Will CCNA's heads actually explode? Things to find out!)
I have had 10 ASUS P5E-VM-DO motherboards in service as file servers /with 8GB of RAM and Adaptec 3805 RAID quite literally since the veryfirst of these boards hit the distribution channel in Canada. That's what, 5 years now? 6? My home lab is largely composed of vPro ASUS motherboards and a significant chunk of my primary lab as well. (See here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/31/building_it_test_lab/).
In my experience higher end (read vPro or equivalent) profession/workstation-class desktop motherboards fail less than server boards. This is because they are significantly less complex than server boards but manufactured with the same high-quality components.
Lower quality motherboards (Asrock, ECS, bottom-dollar ASUS/Gigabyte/MSI boards) are the worst of the lot. They are still made with liquid caps, have dirty volt regs and the traces are made out of what seems to be easily evaporated pot metal.
I trust a quality manufactured Micro-ITX motherboard designed for a home NAS far more than I do an EATX monstrosity powering a 4U HP superserver. The Micro-ITX is probably made from the same top-bin parts, but is so much less complex that the failure rates are way, way lower. Give me 2x quality desktop boards in the same chassis with literally every conceivable component duplicated, wrapped into a cluster. I will take that before your "statistically unlikely to die, 4 hour service life" enterprise-class server.
My design costs the same (or less) but offers complete redundancy and is statistically less likely to have even one of it's nodes die than the Enterprise version. If I can't shoot one of the nodes and have the overall system still working, then it just isn't good enough.
You mean the test lab that metrics say shouldn't be served by the now defunct technet or the rapidly evaporating Small Business Server?
Good luck with that. I think it's time to move on.
You compete with free by offering something that "free" rarely does.
Convenience, ease-of-use, feature richness, compatibility, speed, heterogeneity (cross-platform support, format support, etc), deep integration with other products, security, a strong/supportive/well resourced community...there are plenty of ways to compete with "free."
Unfortunately, Microsoft seem to have no interest in anything except "feature richness" and "deep integration with other products."
One out of Microsoft's clutches you're unlikely to go back...and it's the licensing that's the bitter pill driving people away. Oh...and Price Matters.
It is of interest to me how when I have been saying the same damned thing for years I'm the crazy whackjob. Now, suddenly, the light goes off and it's time to cope with the things I've been bellyaching about from the start.
Beer, because it's nice to see someone has finally obtained clue at MS. Even if it is only one clue amongst many required.
Multitennant exchange as a separate item? Yes. Multitenanting an entire AD + Exchange + File Storage + Sharepoint + WSUS + SQL environment? No.
Exchange as a standalone application can be multitenanted if you agree to pay through the nose for the privilege (especially when compared to the per user TCO of SBS 2011) but mimicking the full breadth of SBS isn't quite allowed in a multi-tenanted environment.
It's a money play; nothing more. You are "at scale" or you are a burden. There is zero in between with Microsoft.
Step 1) Remove any avenues for SMEs/enthusiasts/power users to affordably use your products.
Step 2) ???
Step 43) Profit!
I'll be sure to leave Microsoft some old underpants so that they feel they have succeeded.
Excepting that the cost of SQL server in your scenario is quite a bit higher (especially per user when looking at 75 users!) than SBS Premium 2011.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea. You can smash your genitals with a clawhammer and call it sex. That doesn't make it a kind of sex that any rational being would enjoy.
Similarly, the ROI of your solution is astoundingly awful compared to the ROI of SBS 2011.
You talked about the MSP running it. Where does that even begin to make financial sense except at hyper scale? How is that even viable for small players? You also don't address the fact that this scenario doesn't address the TCO imbalance nor how broken you have to be in the brainpan to put your SQL server in "the cloud" if you are running things like financials databases on it that tend to blow up if you wink at them strangely. (SQL and financials do not do with with flaky connectivity or having the DB drop out under a transaction for any reason.)
Because you add another point of failure - both internet connections - to the equation that just don't need to be there. Or in your world does every company out there have dual redundant gigabit fibre links? Or are we not using the SBS server for file storage. How much are we paying for that extra file server on site? What are we paying for bandwidth? Your profits are down by the cost of your internet pipe and the bandwidth to sustain it. Your client's profits down by the same on their end.
For what?
Because Microsoft as asshats that want you in the cloud? There is no good business reason to start moving all this stuff into the cloud for SMEs, especially when internet connectivity isn't a 100% guaranteed thing. Believe it or not many - if nor most - companies still get work done when the internet is out. They even use computers to do it.
Zoiks.
Microsoft licensing does not allow you to run a multitennanted environment such as you describe. Different company? Different domain, different physical server. More licences. Separate CALs. Each company pays for it's own CALs, not you.
Microsoft licensing was designed by the dark forces underpinning all evil in the universe.
Both my parents are psych nurses. My family is littered with psychologists, psychiatrists, psych nurses and sociologists. "Fashionable diagnoses" is not nearly the problem you make it out to be, at least not outside of the god 'ol USA. You see, in countries where patient outcomes are the measure of success - not the amount of money that can be charged per incident - this is way less of a problem then you seem to be making it out to be.
There is a very real risk of mental health professionals diagnosing someone with Asperger’s when they meet only some of the criteria and that is indeed something we need to keep pushing education on. That said, however, few people actually want to be diagnosed with this, though you are correct in noting that many here on The Register identify with it.
Why that shocks you I simply don’t understand. Autism spectrum disorders – including Asperger’s – affect only a small portion of our society…but “IT professionals” only make up a small portion of our society. People with disorders like Asperger’s eventually end up somewhere. There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that they disperse throughout the working population with the same statistical frequency as they disperse in the general population.
Quite the opposite: all evidence to hand indicates that individuals with Autism spectrum disorders gravitate in a highly disproportionate manner to the STEM and music disciplines, with IT having taken the lion’s share in the last 25 or so years. (Music is often hypothesised to be a repository of Autistics because of the very mathematical nature of the craft.)
You are diagnosing people without a license. You are accusing them of – for lack of a better term – lacking on to something you view as “fashionable” and self-diagnosing. You don’t have any actual evidence that people here are doing this, but you keep reiterating this. As though by restating your falsehoods over and over you can somehow make them true.
There is a damned good chance of finding a highly disproportionate number of individuals with Asperger’s – or who at least have some traits of Aspergers and live elsewhere on the Autism spectrum – amongst El Reg’s commentardiat. Your personal predjudices and unfulfilled fantasies about “fashionable diagnoses” won’t make individuals with living with Asperger’s any less frequent here, it won’t make them more likely to have self-diagnosed nor will it make real the delusion that people want to be diagnosed with Asperger’s.
You want to know why I’m angry? It’s because I watched my parents devote their lives to dealing with mental illness in the everyday community. I watched them deal with prejudice from the assholes and the well-meaning, even with prejudice from practitioners.
The worst prejudice of all is the very Protestant belief that mental health issues are either non-existent…or so very rare that people who feel they should get checked out once in a while are somehow lazy, unworthy, “seeking a quick out/excuse” or otherwise morally or ethically bankrupt. The worst prejudice that exists regarding mental health is the outright fallacy that you can simply “will yourself normal,” or that there even is a “normal” to will yourself towards!
You say ADHD used to be a “fashionable” diagnoses. Yet outside the US the rates of diagnoses never really dropped off much. We simply learned more about how prevalent it really was. We learned to deal with it in a number of fashions, that is existed on a spectrum of impact and we began to accept it as “normal” within our cultural framework. We are on the cusp of this with Asperger’s today.
The more we learn about the human mind the more we realise that “normal” is an ephemeral myth; one that we keep chasing to no tangible end. We are all so different that the best we can hope for is to establish a relatively arbitrary set of error bars around behaviour, neurotransmitter levels, membrane permeability and so forth then try to keep the bulk of our population within those points.
The very last thing anyone trying to deal with Asperger’s – which entails a lifetime of learning to cope with it so as to be accepted by “normal” society – needs is some asshole accusing them of faking it…or their doctors of misdiagnosing them due to “fashion.”
You sir, are that asshole.
Given the prejudice that my extended family have collectively given lifetimes to combatting, I find your choice of words, your manner, your approach, your lack of empathy and your outright prejudice offensive.
Help, don’t hinder. It’ll make you a better person.
No, actually, I can see both feet. They're down there, far away from my mouth. I reiterate: you've got your head up your ass. The world changed. We became more able to recognize a disease and we also became able to recognize that it isn't black and white; it exists on a spectrum with some people having it worse than others.
You are using it merely as a way to discriminate against others. In this case: those who have (or likely have) some form of Asperger's but isn't "as bad" or "as prominent" as you feel it needs to be in order to be labelled. Well who the fuck are you and why should we give half a bent shit about your opinion on the matter?
More to the point, where - exactly - do you get off diagnosing people over the internet, only through short text comments to say if they do or don't have Asperger's?
Remove cranium from sphincter then talk.
I must dissent. ADHD is not "mild." It may manifest as mild in the overwhelming majority of patients...but the very same thing is true of Asperger's. ADHD can be a crippling, life-altering mental illness that sets you apart from everyone in the world and prevents you from living a normal life. Undiagnosed and untreated it can - and does - lead to depression and suicide.
I have very severe adult ADHD. I was incredibly lucky to have recieved novel, experimental treatments as a child. They changed my life...and the lives of millions of others.
First was a series of therapies that introduced to me meditation - first guided and then unguided - which allowed me to be able to attain a level of functionality that someone with ADHD like mine rarely achieves at such a young age. (I couldn't stand Ritalin or Dexedrine; they made me feel emotionally deadened. They changed my personality and I didn't like it.) This lead to being one of the people testing the early prototypes of the neurofeedback equipment that would eventually go on to become a front-of-line treatment for ADHD that now helps most people manage the illness.
Combined with ritual abuse of coffee (you still need stimulants, damn it!) I am a relatively high-functioning ADHD adult. But I am not - and I never will be - "normal." There's something just slightly "off" about me. I don't follow a single train of thought, certainly not with the intense focus of an Aspie. Instead, I follow hundreds or even thousands of trains of thoughts simultaneously. I examine all outcomes to an event at the same time.
This makes me particularly good at research but terrible in large groups. Understand me when I say I cannot block out stimulus occurring around me. That's the true pain of someone with deep ADHD. The average person can stand in a crowded room and focus only on the conversation they are participating in; look only at the person speaking. I cannot do this.
If you put me in a room with 50 people having 25 conversations then I will hear and simultaneously process all 25 conversations. Worse; my brain will run rampant, running predictive analytics on the conversations around me, analyzing body language, dress, social moores, even lighting cues to see how all of the affects everything from an individuals breathing to their choice of words. Show me a flock of birds and my mind will attempt to establish trajectory and velocity for each member. I can not turn this off. I am lacking that portion of my brain.
Conventions for me are physically painful. This year I am going to PuppetConf, VMworld and Spiceworld. I cannot describe in words how much I do not want to go to these events. They will beunending migraines that I can guarantee you will quite literally reduce me to weeping by the end of each day.
And yet, it's part of the job. This is part of living and working in a "normal" world. I am considered a "high functioning" ADHD individual, so much so that most people would never know that I had it. So for me, it isn't bad. It is something I can live with. Many others have it much worse, often because it went untreated.
ADHD isn't "mild." Not at all. It is something you can learn to live with...but someone with ADHD will never be "normal." That - and the stigma that goes with it - is the most damning thing of all.
Eadon did know when to shut up. He didn't care. That's the difference; being an Aspie isn't a get out of Jail free card. When you keep on keeping on despite multiple warnings then you are making a choice consciously that cannot be excused by any position on the Autism spectrum.
I have some pretty bad ADHD - itself on the autism spectrum - even though I am somewhat high functioning. It has given me a sympathy for Aspies that has lead to many friendships which I hold very dear. Aaron among them.
Despite this, I have no sympathy for Eadon. He made a conscious choice to berate, belittle, use ad homenim attacks and push far beyond the repeatedly defined boundaries of acceptable behaviour. I have no problems with his being reinstated to personhood as a general concept, but such would have to be accompanied by a "come to Jesus"-class discussion about boundaries and a firm agreement on his part to abide by them.
If my read on the matter is correct - that he knowingly and purposefully chose to blow past the lines of acceptable behaviour - then such agreement would not be possible. Being an Aspie can make recognizing boundaries difficult, but it does not preclude the person from just being a douchy troll.
"Fashionable?" Have you ever considered that increased diagnosis of mental disorders comes largely from an increased awareness of the disorder and more accurate tools for performing the diagnosis?
As for you, you do indeed seem to suffer from something quite trendy. It's called crainiorectal inversion.
I give you compliments all the time, and you'll damned well accept them because "YES, SIR!" :)
Seriously though, it's nice to see the vultures around here being so very accepting. You're good people, my friend. I'm glad they see in your writing the same intelligence and potential that I do. Three cheers for Aaron!
Okay, now that I've been the evil friend by complimenting you when I know it makes you flustered, I'll shut up.
I am looking for application "UltraVNC Viewer". I type in: "VNC". Result: "No Results Found".
I am looking for application "LibreOffice Writer". I type in: "Word". Result: "No Results Found".
I am looking for application "LIbreOffice Writer". I type in: "Wordperfect". Result: "No Results Found".
I am looking for application "$any_web_browser". I type in: "Google". Result: "No Results Found".
I am looking for application "Windows Live Messenger". I type in: "MSN". Result: "No Results Found".
I am looking for application "The Gimp". I type in: "Photoshop". Result: "No Results Found".
I am looking for application "Path of Exile". I type in: "Diablo". Result: "No Results Found".
All are fairly common issues where either a subcomponent of a name is not properly brought up in search, a common competitor item is not brought up when the "genericised" name is typed in, a rebranding has occurred or I search for an application category instead of the application name.
Search as the primary user interface not only makes remembering things far more important than it was previously it makes not being "on message" with the latest greatest branding an outright thoughtcrime!
How can you find a competitor's software if the gateway to the interface is a search application that doesn't give equal time to all installed applications of the same category? I think it's far worse than Google's "Google Maps" fiasco. At least Mapquest and Bing Maps showed up in search at some point in the list. Unless you know exactly what you're looking for, the apps installed won't show up in Windows Search.
I wonder what % of the population knows the exact name of the applications installed?
Blind people use screen readers. What you need are versions of your site that are easily read and used by those with screen readers.
It basically means writing two sites; one simple and textual for blind people. No fancy anything, no graphics, no fooferah. The other a pain in the ASCII CSS nightmare for the sighted.
Personally, all my future websites are going to be for the unsighted first. Content is king. The sighted stuff will come later, after we've finished beating the content into whatever is the visual aesthetic of the day. (Though I remain "not a fan" of a steamrollered-flat Metro-fetish of today's designers.)
I don't have a problem with compulsory change. In fact, I prefer it. Someone gives me orders and it is my duty to obey. If it fails catastrophically, it's on their head, not mine. If I see a demand for Windows 8 from my clients, then I will run a Windows 8 box on my desk alongside my CentOS, Windows XP, Windows 7, and various OSX boxes. Just because I don't like the change in question doesn't mean I won't stump up and do the job.
The issue is the not all change is good, and change for change's sake is stupid. Change needs to provide a clear benefit. To me, to my coworkers or to my employer. If the change in question offers no clear benefit then why in $deity's name should we engage in it?
Should we engage in change because a $software_Company blogger or executive tries to shame people through statements like "holding back progress"?
Should we engage in change because that change reduces costs or advances a strategic plan of one of our vendors?
Should we engage in change because of peer pressure, lobbying, marketing or advertorials?
Or should we only engage in change where there is a definable reason to do so that benefits us? I'm not afraid of change at all. I am, however, overworked, exhausted and poor. If you want to foist change upon me you're going to have to demonstrate quite clearly how that change will make my life better. If you can't do it then I will resist.
Are you talking about mail merge fields? Because that's been doable in LibreOffice for some time now. There's even a wizard.
Now, if I am incorrect in what you're asking about, please provide me more information! I like learning new things and I am unsure what exactly you're up to here that LibreOffice won't do.
"only to discover there-after that they came up short in scalability, flexibility, performance, security and lowered value (greater outlay) "
I'm the first to tear Microsoft a new one on pricing and licensing shenanigans, but "scalability, flexibility, performance and security" are all areas that you are going to have a hard time convincing me that Microsoft is not at par with - or is - the industry leader. This isn't the XP era. Microsoft are a legitimate player.
It wasn't just "one" of my articles. Thought admittedly there was one article that was completely over the live and served as the "last straw." He was progressively getting more and more out of hand for months and this just...was the end. I "ignored" him months ago, but even with that his tripe was ultimately hijacking every thread.
Look, I don't have a problem with (most) criticism. You guys want to lay into me or my writing you go right ahead. But there have to be limits. There is a difference between disagreeing with an author and repeated, protracted ad homenim campaigns against an author.
If I disagree with someone often enough I can just ignore them; I think jake is a jackass so he's a great example of someone I just chose not to have to deal with. I have better things to do with my day then listen to his condescending bullshit. For all his arrogant tripe, however, jake knows exactly where the line is and he doesn't cross it.
Eadon, however, has moving way over the red line and trucking deep into the territory of "libel." He was warned - repeatedly - by the powers that be. Eventually they got fed up with his continual attacks on one of their writers (me) and zapped him.
I'm all for free speech. As an internet troll I am doubly cautious about the idea of "censorship from the powers that be" on websites. Gods know I've trolled Andrew O - and others - around here hard enough myself. There are limits to that speech, especially in privately owned fora. If this were Ars Technica he would have been banhammered months ago.
So while making commenttards into digital unpeople makes the troll in me nervous, I have to say that the powers that be showed a remarkable amount of restraint for a long time and that - quite frankly - the bastard had it coming. You can get away with a lot around here but when you start in with the repeated ad homenim attacks against the writers of the website don't be surprised if someone kicks you in the shins. Even if the writer is me.
Gods help the poor sod who goes after someone who's actually worthwhile around here.
The American Way Of Life sucks rotting gorilla balls. Why the fuck would people want to actually defend a nation based on Animal Farm?
They were warnings, guys...not instruction manuals. America should give up trying to "defend it's way of life" and instead aspire to having a "way of life" as good as the many other nations that have since surpassed it.
You can only DEFINE your "pet" server is all elements of the stack - from OS to app to config - comply with that concept. The reason many of us have "pet" servers in the first place is because we are utterly reliant on applications that don't lend themselves to that. In addition: changing applications is a long, tedious, expensive process that most businesses aren't going to undergo just because it advances Microsoft's strategic initiatives or helps one of the nerd pack get a little more sleep once a year.
I see no direct benefit to the SME and you have failed to articulate one.
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