* Posts by Trevor_Pott

6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010

UPDATE: GAGA team hunts down grass-smoking ROBOT

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Happy

Now I just have a mental picture of a bobby chasing a roomba down the street.

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RFID real-time location system. Put the tag on the ROBOT, ring the yard with the detectors.

http://rfid.net/basics/rtls/241-how-to-install-a-real-time-location-system-rtls

Microsoft accused of leaking RDP attack code

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Facepalm

Well

That's my weekend then.

*ring*

"Oh god, oh god, oh god, are we patched?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

“How can you possibly be 100% sure?”

"Because I didn't sleep on Tuesday. I checked every single system on every single network. I emailed you the report that shows the patch level of all your systems."

"Well, but...something this important you can't trust to e-mail!"

"According to the operations panel you have 43 unchecked voicemails..."

"Voicemail isn't proper either!"

"I will endeavor to do better next time."

"Good!"

*click*

*ring*

Charge of the Metro brigade: Did Microsoft execs plan to take a hit?

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Re: Big Change, Total Change?

Cinnamon!

Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer

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@AC Re: PowerShell

You write an article that says "Metro is stupid and prevents me from adequately multitasking under these scenarios" and you are "publish[img] articles here whose sole point is to demonstrate that you failed to learn how to organise windows (and work) using workspaces." (Neither workspaces not windows being a feature of Metro...)

Whereas when I write an article that says "hey guys, Server 8 is actually looking like it might be pretty good!" then I am a sycophant and a Microsoft shill.

The ones I love are the seething rage about how I must either be a paid shill, or totally wedded to Microsoft (with added blinders on!) It doesn’t make me upset. These sorts of internet piranhas don’t hurt me in the sad place. They make me laugh at the supreme idiocy of their statements!

I have spent the past two days popping my head up for air from the middle of trying to unpack a .deb so I can gank the source, edit it, compile it into a .rpm and then run distribute the thing to my many and varied CentOS servers – only to have the damned thing blow up on some obscure dependency or other that is normally installed in Ubuntu but not RHEL – just so that I can answer comments.

Comments about how deeply in love with Microsoft I am.

Then I go home, where I am ass-deep in some obscenely long bit of python that I am hoping to turn into a cascading firewall supplement to my IDS. I am building this to deal with the RDP bug. (Mostly it works, I am now at the point of trying to slap a nice PHP interface on it.) I have to do this because there is an absolute requirement to have a Server 2000 system’s RDP port on the net. (Not on 3390, thank $deity.) So I need to put something out in front of it that will detect attempts to compromise it. IP restrictions at the firewall only help so much: you can spoof IPs.

But hey, I don’t know about scripting, or the power of a “real shell” or any of that crap. Because I’m a “junior admin” who “can’t live without his GUI” and so forth.

In this context, participating in the thread is probably closer to trolling on my part. I am absolutely fascinated by all the diatribes. By the flat out fallacious statements and by the seething hatred. There are so many various prejudices in play here it’s hard to know which way is up.

If there is one thing that makes me sad about all of this, it is the realisation that the very same people reasoning in this thread with such vehement hatred are probably a representative sample of why we can’t have nice things. One guy asks “why would Microsoft cater to it’s own know-nothing developers instead of to people like me, who use real operating systems?”

Because he’s an asshole. That’s why.

Why would anyone expend time and money catering to a religious fanatic who is avowedly bent on your destruction, and is a douche about the whole thing besides? Especially when the opportunity is “make something for the people who treat us nice and give us money?”

I’ve written about it before. The attitude of the open source community is one of the major reasons why individuals and companies don’t want to engage with them. Even when there is a commercial advantage to be had in promoting interoperability (and there has been since ~2005), in my opinion, this exact attitude is why it has taken so long for Microsoft to create an operating system that is “open,” and why it took meta-governmental entities to push them into it.

There comes a point where herding cats and taking shit all the time isn’t worth the relatively minor increase in revenue.

So yes, this makes Server 8 a big deal. In spite of all the shit that they have taken, Microsoft have produced a stable, feature rich and (if you ignore the completely unusable interface) good operating system that is as open as one could possibly expect whilst still being closed source. That isn’t going to set a religious zealot’s world alight.

But I like it. It will make my life easier, and provide a good ROI to my customers. In spite of – not because of – the many and varied packs of piranhas that lurk in the forums on the internets.

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Pint

Re: Hmm

Not at all! Here's the straight, honest poop: how my dinky little 15-man companies can have real virtualisation. Something resembling a SAN, with replication, and some form of HA.

Two servers, both identical. Each with a Raid 1 for the OS, a RAID 10 for the VMs, and a RAID 6 for bulk data storage.

Light up all your VMs on server 1. Have server 1 replicate all data with DFSR, and do Hyper-V replica with the VHDs over to Server 2. Server 2 sits there and does nothing excepting accept the file transfers. Something kills server 1. Server 2 picks up immediately, lights up its duplicate copies of the VMs and we are up and rocking in no time.

Microsoft is even working with Dell to ship single units that have two servers with all of this baked right in. So yes, that changes everything for my SME customers. They are finally getting enterprise-level computing, including HA-(ish) virtualisation for less than the cost of a sysadmin’s salary.

My mid-level customers (250-ish bodies) will be able to deploy entire private clouds with push-button simplicity that basically look after themselves. No need to babysit them at all.

Have people been able to do this for ages with VMWare? Sure! But drop the cost of something by an order of magnitude and it really does change everything. Look what happened when cars became affordable…

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Re: Microsoft Virtual Academy

It isn't optimal. But it might just be "good enough." I was floored when I actually learned something from one of the MVA tracks. They've come a long way since they started that site.

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Re: seems a bit arse about face to me

For eveyrthing except searching Microsoft properties (technet, MSDN, MVA, Microsoft.com, etc.) Bing returns (on average) better results to me than Google. I noticed this started happening about 8 months ago.

So now I use Bing. *shrug*

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Facepalm

Re: Apple in the enterprise

"Who in its right mind..."

Photographers mostly. 3D render types, video editing types and every single graphic design anything I have ever run across. There is a strong loyalty to Apple amongst this group that I cannot even begin to understand. There is also a persistent sense amongst them (fuelled I suspect by trade magazines) that "Apple is what everyone else who does X uses."

But for all the flapping about “Macs are toys,” the things can and do participate in an enterprise network quite well.

Especially if you aren’t a died-in-the-wool GUI admin who is terrified of a little scripting and some command line. Puppet works great for enterprise Mac deployments. Windows provides stable servers that the onsite tech can use for minor updates and change. (Although I am starting to deploy more CentOS with Webmin, as people become less afraid of web-based management tools.)

So frankly, I don’t see the issue. If you want Mac on the desktop…fine. I can support that. I have the tools available to me to manage Apple desktops. Those same tools (or similar) can be used to support Windows, Linux or anything else you want.

The better question is “who in their right mind” gets religious about computers for $deity’s sake? Some folks need to get laid, methinks. It's a tool. I don't exactly see the comments section on my local Rona filled with jihads over the details of various different hammers...

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Re: By whom? Do tell.

Separately by two Microsoft MVPs who focused on PowerShell, and in two separate interviews, one with the one of the folks in charge of the storage division and another with one of the upper-mid-level dudes in the server division. That's enough independant corroboration for me.

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Re: @Trevor_Pott PowerShell

Oh, you'll get no disagreement from me here. MS is anti-open from a philosophical standpoint, no question. But they have discovered that there is money to be made in openness, and that has reflected in their approaches to their recent server products.

Make no mistake, Microsoft is not “the good guy” in any sense. But quite frankly, which enterprise software companies are?

You are correct, Microsoft have done very bad things, and have behaved like a pack of vicious assholes. Great. Every single person in these forums knows that. BUt it is entirely irrelevant to the conversation at hand.

The issue is the openness of Server 8, and the 2012 series of server software. Regardless of the moral reasons behind choosing an “open” path, it was chosen. This results in some very easy-to-use and powerful software.

Does that make Microsoft the good guys? Hell no. They have at least another decade of behaving not like multi-billion-dollar dongs to go before they earn anything like “trust.” (Which they are busy eroding by not listening to their customer base re: ribbon && metro, AFAIC.)

But that doesn’t change the value of the products on the table, nor the easy of using the things. Nor the fact that having such a product out is going to be a huge change in IT. Here is the first Microsoft Server OS that really and truly can be completely managed by, interoperated with and otherwise integrated into a fully heterogeneous environment. Not because people reverse engineered everything, but because the ability to do so was designed into the product.

Don’t mistake anticipation of a specific product for condoning decades of douchebaggery.

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Re: Windows 7 is probably the fastest EVER generalist UI

Sure, but very soon here you won't be able to buy it. The world marches on. Apple and Linux are not the go-to operating systems for "getting things done" because they have magically become better. They are thus because Windows got a hell of a lot worse.

You can hold up Windows 7 as "la la, example of whosawhatsit" all you want, but in a very short time, it's gone. You won't be buying your home PC with it, and the downgrade rights will only apply to VLK/SA customers, and so on and so forth. As with XP, so too Win 7.

$deity have mercy on us all.

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Re: @Trevor_Pott (no s)

It's an article I'm working on, to be honest. But I think the numbers (especially in SMBs) that are moving away from traditional x86 software would surprise you. The Register for example, is almost entirely run using cloud-based services.

And it isn’t simply a question of “cloud based.” Lots of applications are cross platform. Microsoft Office – as one example – has a Mac version. LibreOffice works on all sorts of things. So on and so forth.

Additionally, lots of companies are porting software to Apple. Those Win32 apps you might still need…use App-V or – at worst – VDI. Start investing the money in moving your data out of these backwards applications and into something that offers more choice.

It won’t work for everyone. Some companies legitimately have industry-specific software that is now and will forever be Windows-based. But the lock-in isn’t nearly as strong – or as all encompassing widespread – as it was 10 or even 5 years ago.

What I would like to see is not just a survey of “how many admins feel they could live without Windows,” but a right proper Freeform Dynamics uber survey that looks at the size of the organisations, the age of the organisations etc.

Start ups for example don’t tend to get trapped into that kind of legacy. And I suspect that larger organisations are far more likely to have a collections of applications that intuitional inertia doesn’t allow them to ditch.

But it all starts somewhere. My clients are predominantly SMEs. And here there is a remarkable movement away from MS on the desktop. More so than I would have thought possible even two years ago.

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Re: PowerShell

“Yes, you like MS and Windows. It is the only solution for you, WE GET IT. I'm in a hederogeneus enviroment. I have Linux, Solaris, BSD, MacOS, Windows (server and desktop), and ESXi; best tool for the job, wouldn't have it any other way.”

Actually, I loathe MS something fierce. They’ve never done me any favours, and their licensing shenanigans that are very anti small and medium enterprise. You know, pretty much my entire client base. Doesn’t prevent me from recognising when they make a good product. As to heterogenous environment, well…yeah. For the past 10 years.

“I never assumed malice. I assumed ANOTHER case of NIH-syndrome, but now that you mention it, MS's busness case is for getting users onto their platform and keeping them there. Promoting skills which are useful outside of their platform is not something which, long term, is useful for them.

I've used it, It's an okay scripting language, BUT I can see no compelling advantage to useing it over any number of other languages, except MS has taken care of the API-bindings for me (that IS a compelling reason to use it (in the windows enviroment), but not enough to justify it's existance). It also means I CANNOT reuse ANY code from other platforms, nor as effecently use my existing staff.”

All good points. But I would have to say that you are wrong about the NIH syndrome. It wasn’t invented just for the sake of inventing something in house. They had their own reasons that made sense given the extant customer base. And frankly they didn’t give much of a damn about catering to all the *nix admins who weren’t paying them money anyways. Why would they?

“Funny, that's EXACTLY the reason why writing an entirely new scripting language to expose these features makes no sense. MS isn't looking after me with this, they are trying to get me to aquire a MS-excluseive skill. I'll admit, It did work, although I am still nowhere near as fast in PS then in any number of other scripting languages.”

Microsoft had the choice: cater to their own customers for whom PowerShell was a natural evolution, or cater to the people who don’t pay them money for software because…why?

“PLEASE call me when MS provides this in the virtualization space. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE. I have been hearing MS claim to be the best platform for vitrtualization since they where trying to bribe us with 1USD chips at VMWorld '08. The weren't then. They may be getting more useable, but I'm not yet convenced. As it stands, the last time I needed a fix because MS screwed something up, the responce I got from support (at my cost, both monitarily and a couple weeks of my time, mind you) was: Yep that's a bug. The fix will require massive disruption to you're entire user-base with and hundreds of man-hours of downtime for your userbase to fix.”

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. I will be the very first person to stand up and say that Hyper-V is pretty pants. And SCVMM releases to date have sucked pretty bad. But when you really start using SCVMM 2012, (and Hyper-V in Server 8 has some shiny blue crystals worth a boo as well!) it starts to fall into the realm of “well holy shit, it just works!”

With one caveat: their entire notion of how to do this pretty much relies on your having a mid-sized deployment. Now, if you have a big enough setup that you can do neat things like “have the hosts evacuate all the VMs to another host, then update in sequence,” the Microsoft “private cloud” hullabaloo works like a hot damn.

For smaller deployments, we get into the licenceing issues that form the basis of my seething hatred for pretty much everything to do with Microsoft. They have fantastic stuff in the Server 8/various things that are 2012 lineup. Really, truly awesome offering.

And outside the lab I probably will never get to use them as they were intended. I just don’t have customers that large. Still, I was glad to have had a week to run this stuff in the lab. I have another three weeks worth of articles that will rely on playing around with this test lab, and I look forward to it.

But after that, it’s back to the world of KVM and VMWare 4. 4, because VMWare ESXi 5 licenceing guts its use as a production hypervisor, and the V-tax priced it out of the SMB market. (If it weren’t for KVM, I’d be a wreck about now.)

MS have done a good thing with Server 8 and the 2012 suite of server products. Can we please try to take them on their own merits instead of spraying our collective prejudices around like they meant something? Microsoft are deserving of a great deal of finger wagging for a great many things.

PowerShell isn’t one of them. It’s one of the things they did right.

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Re: Impressive...

Don't know about you, but when I tend to do silly things like ask the folks who made the software I'm using "why did you do this?" Especially when after long sessions of "sweating over a product." Experience has taught me that as valuable as "figuring it out for yourself" can be, having the logic behind an application explained to you can save a great deal of time.

Even better is taking the time out to do both. That's why I didn't write up my reviews of Windows 8 and Server 8 the day the betas dropped. I spent a week breaking them repeatedly. But yes: "the way it was explained to me," by the good folks who make the thing. So that I am not making assumptions based on nothing more than cynicism and personal prejudice.

I’m funny that way.

Oh, and as to the "latest and greatest" jibe...I suspect you'd get a good laugh from most people who know me at all, sir. I am about as anti-"new because it is new" as a person can possibly get. To level that particular accusation at an individual known for their "get of my goddamned lawn" attitude about nearly everything demonstrates noting excepting a lack of research on your part, sir.

I stand by the hard work and research I’ve done regarding Server 8. It is a damned fine product. Frankly, that’s not something I can say about too many things these days.

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Re: Server - Ha!

SMB != CIFS!

Why you should never again utter "CIFS": http://t.co/ZgTej3NU

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Re: ...and in a short post Microsofts success is explained

Bizarrely...Microsoft Virtual Academy is proving to be actually useful for this role. They had a bunch of really pants tracks, but the newer stuff has proven to be really good. You should really check out the SCVMM 2012 tracks to see what I mean.

You will walk away being able to use the thing.

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Re: PowerShell

My time is worth money. The time of my staff are worth money. If you save me so much time by making you product easy to use that you offset the cost of "proprietary," then there is a damned good reason to buy that product. (And is it really proprietary when the APIs are well documented, available, and future developments are being done in the open?)

"Free as in beer" software is only "automatically better" than "proprietary" if you place zero value on the time of the people who must use and administer it. Any and every piece of software has to be looked at from a multitude of angles to find a realistic TCO.

In many cases, proprietary is cheaper than not. In many other cases the reverse is true. An open standard/language/interface/source code/whatever that can only be understood after having 50 years of theory injected directly into your eyeball then jacking into the matrix whilst whistling the Dr. Who theme in exactly the right pitch is completely useless. Whereas an application that costs me $750, takes 5 minutes to set up, and just works for the next ten years pays for itself in no time.

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Re: @Tim

It's more than that. Microsoft have made it policy internally that all future Microsoft Server products fully support PowerShell. So much so that they are not allowed to develop a gui until the PowerShell scriptlets exist. Any and all future Microsoft Server products will be 100% PowerShell, with the GUI nothing more than a push-button method of running a scriptlet.

System Center 2012 is an excellent example of this.

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Re: I don't see much reason for Windows server

I know that a bunch of die-hard *nix folks will say very mean things, but here's the whole truth of the matter: because it is the best damned operating system on the market for a number of different usage cases.

I use Linux, Unix and even Apple server when and where they make sense. But where I spend the early 2000s pushing Linux as the best server platform available, MS has today taken that crown. It might not be something a lot of people like to hear, but I do suspect they haven't actually given the thing a fair chance in the past 5+ years. Server 2003 was a good OS. 2003 R2 was fscking gorgeous. 2008 was pants, but 2008 R2 is a sexy, sexy girl.

From what I have seen of Server 8, the desktop UI is shite-on-a-stick, but hot damn that OS does the thing, and does it well. I can forgive the stupid iOS wannabe interface, because it is simply so very fit for purpose.

Understand me here: I am not a Microsoft fanboi. I am not rich enough to be a Microsoft fanboy. The truth of the matter is that in a lot of cases I cannot afford their stuff, and neither can my customers. Open source fills the role in most areas quite nicely.

But there are usage cases where it makes abundant sense to find the money, and to put up with the ridiculous, intrusive and time consuming “licenceing audits” that are now mandatory for all volume licensed shops in Canada.

I loathe Microsoft’s licensing shenanigans. I abhor most of their business practices. I think that their attitude towards end users is appalling, and I hate that they take 2-3 years to offer technologies that other people have had on the market for ages.

But when Microsoft finally gets its crap together and incorporates things into their server OSes…they generally work. What’s more, they are easier to use and understand (in most cases) than the equivalents offered by others.

That’s Microsoft’s schtick. They are second best. Firmly, entrenched, unashamedly. But there is a great deal of money in not pushing the boundaries of everything all the time. They let other companies pioneer the technologies, fall on their faces trying to make those same technologies comprehensible, then implement their own version with a usable interface and good documentation.

Is Windows Server the best, most advanced operating system for any given technology? No. But you know what? Taken together, as a package, it is the most reliable, robust, stable and easy-to-use server package available on the market today. It is feature rich, it is interoperable with just about everything, it complies with every standard I care about, and it comes with great enterprise-level support.

To me, that makes it the best server operating system for a huge number of circumstances. Specifically those in which I want to put something in place, remotely administer it, but still give the client some ability to make changes on their own. (For example, most of my customers are quite adept at creating users in AD, managing shares, etc.)

That way I don’t waste my time on piddly little crap, and can concentrate on real problems that other people can’t reasonably solve without 10 years of experience.

Mind you, I also use Webmin for my *nix server religiously, and find my customers love it too…

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Pint

Re: For a moment, I almost felt..

Um...the company I personally own runs MS server backend (Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, VDI, App-V, SQL server, Exchange - as a local synchronisation point for Google provisioned mail - and Forefront.) Email/office/collaboration provided by Google and BYOD desktops consisting of Windows XP, 7 and 8, Fedora 16 + Cinnamon, Mint, Apple, Android and several mobile devices.

Web services are CentOS 6.2 (or in the process of being migrated to CentOS 6.2) running on top of those Hyper-V servers, and they are quite happy, thank you. Planet Telecom provides me a hosted Asterisk solution to which I plug in my OpenFire server for unified communications. Wireless gear is Netgear WNDR3700 V2 access points running OpenWRT, and the edge systems are Intel Atom boxes running CentOS 6.2.

Everything Just works, doesn't give me a lick of grief, and I've never had an easier time running any network in my entire life. I don't get what the big deal is about heterogeneous environments. I’ve been supporting them for almost a decade now, in the real world. I find them easier than trying to put up with the weaknesses of one company’s offerings just so that you can get a discount on the products they do well.

Get the thing that does the job well, with the requirement that it play nice with others. Assemble all the various bits together, use standards and open protocols. 10 years ago? Pain in the ass that probably wouldn’t work. Today?

Business as usual.

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Re: Finally...

Personally, I hope they do. The thing isn't named yet, and Server doesn't deserve to be shackled with references to the abomination that is Windows 8. How can a company produce two products with such completely different cultures? Server is about giving you the tools to do what you want, how you want as easily as is possible.

Windows 8 is about telling you to change how you do everything, because MS knows best, and it’s all for your own good. I can’t believe these two operating systems are made by the same company. Boggles the mind.

Here's hoping Microsoft obtains clue, and simply calls it "MIcrosoft Server."

No bloody A, B, C or D.

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Re: PowerShell

The way I had it explained to me: PowerShell made sense because it was an easy and familiar approach for the squillions of extant .net programmers that existed.

Also: the APIs exist independent of PowerShell. Nothing is holding anyone back from extending another scripting language to do the same thing, if they like it better. If you are willing to make a serious attempt, I am almost positive Microsoft will not only welcome it, but probably devote resources to help.

Don’t assume malice here; Microsoft have a strong business case for openness. They are making a cloud play. Public and private. That means making sure that their software can be managed and addressed by as many people as possible. .net made sense to start with – it was the community that already existed around their products. Thus PowerShell made sense.

But moving beyond that? Microsoft have already worked hand in hand with several organisations to extend PHP support (including work on some PHP libraries), Node.JS and others.

If you want your favourite scripting language to support the manipulation of Microsoft’s OS and applications, maybe you should ask them to support it? Maybe a project is already underway to ensure they do…

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Re: @Trevor_Pott (no s)

The business case for Apple is the same as that for Microsoft back in the day: it was what users were familiar with, and that familiarity increased productivity. As to using Parallels to run XP/W7, no...nobody sees the need. A couple of shops are going to stick to an App-V implementation for a little while (to run their few remaining legacy Windows-based applications,) but expect that this will be gone in 3 years.

Outside of a rapidly dwindling list of companies, there simply isn’t a need for Microsoft-based desktops any more. They are an option, but they are not a requirement.

As to people evaluating Windows 8...believe it or not, there are non-techies who take the time to do such things. Particularly when the company they own is running on some fairly old hardware. Old enough they recognize the absolute requirement to upgrade in the next 12 months, as equipment failure rates are starting to get out of control.

At that point, taking a boo at Windows 8 makes sense; it gives these folks a sense of where Microsoft is going. What Microsoft's vision and plans are: how committing to the Microsoft ecosystem will shake out over the next 3-5 years.

You can make all the bold statements you wish about how “real companies behave according to your personal prejudices,” but the real world is ever so much more intricately faceted than all that. A 50-seat company looking to do a complete replacement of its entire desktop rollout is probably looking at a significant capital expense to do so. They also are not likely to be the folks replacing on a 3 year rotation, as per propaganda. (Indeed, at least one of these organizations are replacing Pentium III workstations running Windows XP.)

Shockingly, these sorts of people fret about things like “ROI,” and “TCO.” They care about the likelihood of getting kneecapped or sideswiped 3, 5 and 10 years from now. They have their own take on how the tech industry has shaken out…and they don’t get given any door prizes at any conferences.

So yes, in the real world I am seeing lots of people moving towards Apple desktops in the enterprise. I am seeing people looking at Mint and saying “that looks more usable than a lot of things, especially when we use LibreOffice, VDI and cloud-based services to do everything.”

At the end of the day, I don’t care what my clients use for their desktop. I am happy to support their business in any way I can. I will take the time to do needs assessments, go back to my lab, bash together a few demos and take the time to explain the pros and cons of each. When asked my opinion, I give it…but I will not blithely adhere to any form of propaganda. I will take into consideration the needs of the specific company and give them a recommendation based upon those needs.

For some, that is Apple. For some that is Linux. For most small (<15 bodies) businesses that is “BYOD, use cloud services.”

Funnily enough, I get a great response from approaching my customers with an attitude of “let’s see what fits your business best” rather than “this is the software that real businesses uses, alter your business practices to suit.”

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Pint

Re: For a moment, I almost felt..

Over 30% of my clients base have made firm commitments to Apple desktops for thier next enterprise refresh, backed by a fleet of the Microsoft Servers. The rest are still evaluating, but Windows 8 is finding zero support so far. Several are quite impressed by Mint, and I suspect that before the month is out, I will have my first signed contract for a Linux Mint desktop deployment with a Microsoft server backend.

The times, they are a-changing...

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Mushroom

Re: seems a bit arse about face to me

I use Microsoft Bing for my search engine, and Google to download ebooks. I buy Music from Amazon and have an open source phone. If I want a form before function desktop operating system, I buy Microsoft. And I turn to Linux and Apple to give me a desktop operating system that allows me to get actual work done.

I turn to OpenFire/Asterix to give me a complete and easy-to-use unified communications setup, and Microsoft is making the best server software around. The most popular Linux available - Android - is under massive patent attack, being sued for copyright infringement and suffers from several legitimate accusations of lack of "openness."

Microsoft is making inroads towards the delivery of an open server suite (despite it being proprietary source code, it is remarkably open), is engaging with the open source community, writing open source code, and is even becoming price competitive in key areas such as virtualisation.

VMware, meanwhile, is putting together more and more productivity and collaboration software tools. HP is the #2 major networking provider, Cisco sells servers, Nortel is no more, IBM doesn’t make PCs, and Dell has a complete enterprise stack that is actually competitive and relevant.

Research in Motion has squandered the blackberry empire, though that corpse is still twitching. Apple owns the tablet market and is under investigation on numerous fronts for various antitrust violations.

Novell got bought out by Attachmate (who?), Twitter appears to have replaced the 6:00 news for a significant chunk of the population, and Facebook is somehow valued at $stupid_number_of_Billions.

And SCO still isn’t dead yet.

The world, it is upside down. Anyone who chooses to constantly judge anything in IT based upon 10yo+ prejudices is a fool.

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Re: PowerShell

As I see it - and as it has been explained to me by others as well - the standards are all related to heterogeneous operation. Essentially: the ability to manipulate the operating system (and *all* relevant server applications) to address everything from power management, thread assignment, disk/network/driver/user/etc. management and more. The game being player here is big. Huge. This isn’t about the nice-to-have but functionally irrelevant ability of $open_source_team to access $feature.

It is about the ability to create a cloud of hundreds of thousands of instances of the operating system and have them managed by centralised command and control software. Microsoft would really like that software to be theirs (system center X,) but that is now in no way necessary.

Microsoft of a decade ago would have had a series of impenetrable APIs and proprietary protocols to do everything. Now, they have made a firm commitment to have literally everything run through PowerShell. PowerShell is well documented, and – by this point – mature. The “standard” in question may be one of Microsoft’s own creation, but the reason behind the standard – and how Microsoft has gone about its implementation – remains true to the spirit of standards-based computing. I.E. “do something in a well documented way that anyone can tie into and use.”

Remember that PowerShell goes far beyond just Server. System Center everything 2012 is PowerShell controlled. Exchange is PowerShell controlled. SharePoint, Forefront, SQL…all of them.

This isn’t just “a cute way to access some features.” It is a conscious decision made from within Microsoft to make the entirety of their product offerings something that can be programmatically addressed by anyone running any application from any operating system. I can’t think of a better definition of standard. That seems more of a “standard” than some others which claim the name. (802.11n “standards process” being a great example, though the 802.1Qbn “VN-Tag” is another travesty of an example.)

It’s a complete reversal for Microsoft compared to a decade ago. About time.

Windows 8: Thrown into a multi-tasking mosh pit

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Re: win2k

Classicshell (sort of) supports Win 8. Nuch work is needed yet.

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Pint

Re: The sky is falling

Thanks for the suggestions, but I feel they may not work. THe issue with a multiple workspace solution (such as sysinternals) is that you still can't putthree or four windows beside one another and look at information on them while you enter information into the other. (Or into the "run" command...)

Frankly, the past week has involved a lot of testing with other OSes, and I find that after only a week I have already adaped to a post-Windows desktop client quite well. It is not for myself I worry; but my clients. I try not to let my personal choices influence them, but I do encourage them to try the next generation in use before commiting to an upgrade.

That said, I have three meetings next month regarding enterprise Apple deployments, so maybe the suport burden will simply fizzle.

Cheers!

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Re: There are alternatives...

Cinnamon!

A sysadmin in telco hell

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Re: What is?

...the person using a number as a replacement for a letter in their nickname is being a language pedant?

Also: the state of caller ID is terrible.

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...

That's terrible.

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Might be a bit poking the nest with a stick, but...caller ID hell? Now I'm curious.

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Re: BTW, why 800 numbers?

Sir, someone asked me a question. It was actually raised a couple of times in the thread. I responded with as much detail I reasonably could. From this you somehow decided to extrapolate that I "was unhappy" and felt the need to inject your uninformed viewpoint. This doesn’t “scare me.” It makes me irritated feel sorry for you that you feel this level of unwarranted and undesired personal dialogue is requested or required in such a setting.

The rest of us are trying to have an on topic conversation about the article. Kindly restrict yourself to such, or take the conversation - and your uninformed speculation - to a more appropriate medium.

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Stop

Re: BTW, why 800 numbers?

I think your comment and questions are rather wildly off topic, and I really recommend this be taken elsewhere. E-mail is probably the most appropriate venue for such a personal discussion, if you feel it must be persued.

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Re: DNS for phones

Also: see ENUM, something for which there is crazy stupid powerful resistance amongst NA Telcos...

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Re: BTW, why 800 numbers?

We did and do have non 1-800 numbers. But it's complicated. We had shut down two stores covering "the parts of Canada that are not Alberta." The remaining stores had only Alberta-local numbers. Also: many of our customers had the 1-800s on speed dial.

Oh, and it also came the same week as the website contact page was completely redone. ;/

Annnnd we had just recently sent out email newsletters and physical pricelists that had the 1-800 numbers on them.

So, folk were able to call the local numbers, sure. If they knew about them, and didn't immediately freak out when the 1-800s stopped working.

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Re: Sounds like Planet Telecom are the people you should be cross with...

Planet Telecom did check with ThinkTel. Numerous times. By phone and email. Now, if you ask me how cross I am with ThinkTel, that would be a whole other article. One I can't write right now, because I haven't been able to adequately emotionally distance myself from the topic.

I've got nothing but all sorts of awesome happy for the Planet Telecom guys. They have done us a solid more than once throughout this particular event. Good people.

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Re: OSI layers 8..10

Bruce Schneier, RSA says

Layer 8: The individual person.

Layer 9: The organisation.

Layer 10: Government or legal compliance

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Ummm...NO

New forum Wishlist

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When reporting a comment for abuse, the ability to add a small snippet of text detailing why you felt this was abusive would be good. (Followed link; was spam. Off topic ad hom attack. Potentially libellous. Etc.)

In at least some cases it might save the mods some time. (Espessially with spam links.)

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Feature request

Can the forum please include a button (two, if you need to be paranoid about violating one-click patents) that dispense caffeine? As a warm caffeinated beverage is optimal, but I will accept spontaneous intravenous intervention.

Surely this is supported by HTML5? If not, there has to be a jQuery library for it…

BBC iPlayer boss: smart TVs not sufficiently simple

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Hmm?

Google said I had been summoned? What's going on in here? What did I break? I don't remember this article at all...

One in Five IT Pros Thinks Their Job Will Be Gone Within One Year - Cloud to the rescue?

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Re: Economics rears its ugly dismal head

Which goes right back to my overall comment. "Tech is enabling a single admin to admin far more" - thus one admin can admin multiple SMEs that ten years ago each would have had their own. And yes, I believe wholeheartedly that the pace of advancement regarding administrative automation far exceeds the rate of technological progress elsewhere in IT.

In short; yes, businesses like to do "new things." But newness is now a commodity available starting from $4.99 per user per month. With a sexy dead-simple control panel.

I run 16 networks; over 2500 people. I have three other sysadmins helping me; one is dedicated app support for one company. The other two between them to administrative scut work for three orgs/1200 people.

And yes, I am constantly introducing new tech to meet business growth. R&D and project management have come to completely replace the job of being a sysadmin. But that is exactly my point! 10 years ago, this collection of companies employed 25 IT bodies. Now it employs 5. Soon to be 4. And the pace of change has – if anything – increased.

You can reskill all you want, but the absolute number of available jobs is diminishing. The number of skilled professionals is rising, as we are still cranking out IT bodies from post-secondary faster than they retire.

That means a massive downwards force on wages and working conditions. And it means the best of the best will survive the fight; those who continually upskill. Fight hard to learn more so they can earn less.

Maintenance simply has nothing to with it. Maintenance is almost entirely automated at this point. We’re five years past that. We are at the point of automating innovation. Now there isn’t a need for such.

Just hand over your $4.99 per user per month.

Wake up, small biz: Learn to speak internet

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Re: Should have gone to amazon.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk would seem a little counterproductive. (There's that whole ocean and suchlike.) But Amazon.ca did indeed have the metal business card holder I wanted. Provided not by Amazon itself, but by an "affiliate" company located somewhere in Ontario. I ended up dropping $750 on various widgets and bobs that I had been avoiding buying, but needed to get various tasks accomplished. All sourced from three affiliates.

15 minutes on Amazon solved the problem right quick. Versus ??????q of wandering around shopping malls, dodging in and out of random stores and calling random shops in the yellow pages. (If you don't even know where to start looking for an item, and it doesn't show up in any local search results, you're down to darts on a map!)

Amazon search? Simple, easy, happened to have multiple listings from multiple vendors.

Shopping mall of the semantic, tagged, indexed and searchable generation. Crowds of angry shoppers, wailing children, people with too much cologne and those who fight cashiers over $0.10 coupons simply need not be part of the equation.

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Some research links from my search history...

Facebook Fans provide good ROI: PC World analysis of some primary research.

emarketer does some digging on Facebook for Brand Research.

Nextweb overview of 10 Case Studies in which Social Media provided good ROI.

Really good: Video: Facebook, 29M increase revenues, and exactly how Facebook drives ROI

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Unhappy

Conversely...

...one of my clients moved about 10 blocks away. They sent out e-mails, posted signs, send out flyers, the works. Google Maps, despite MUCH prodding, would reset their location to the "old" location every few weeks. They got many complaints from customers every time this happened. Ended up losing a reasonable amount of business.

I'll agree with you that Maps is a PITA. But it is heavily relied upon by some.

IT staffers on ragged edge of burnout and cynicism

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Amen.