Amen to this, we run ~400 VM's on 14 hosts, using less than 1/3rd the power we did when we ran 160-180 physical boxes and everything is easier to manage, new deployments take minutes instead of weeks. We've saved a few million by not needing to grow our datacenter, probably over a million on Microsoft licensing, and made both my staff and my customers happier. There's no way I'd run things on old physical boxes just to save a few dollars on capital expenses.

This is why we've got a virtualization first strategy, VMWare HA makes sure even if you lose a box downtime is minimal (and for even more fun use Fault Tolerance and so long as your switches are properly configured you lose nothing since the two VMs run in lock step)

That's not true today, the Moto G and to a lesser extent the Moto E are fine phones, and not everybody is so silly as to waste money on "free" phones with inflated monthly costs. And because the Moto G is such a good phone the competition seems to be upping their game as there were quite a few non-hobbled sub $200 (off contract) phones announced at this years E3.

Spy satellites aren't offensive, they're intelligence assets and good intelligence about equal opponents leads to more peace and calm, not more war. The Cuban missile crisis is a good example of this in action.

If there's a war with another superpower it's all over anyways because any general who see his realtime intelligence assets quickly going away is going to assume it's part of a preemptive strike plan and so will recommend we launch. That's why the idea of blinding the enemy is so dangerous, in a MAD scenario the only thing keeping the peace is the ability to verify that your enemy is not trying to perform a first strike.

Not to mention it's $200 more expensive than the Dell Venue 8 Pro, it's not a Surface competitor so it needs to be targeted at the price range of the Venue and the 7-8" Android tablets, not at the ipad mini.

Wait, you completely misunderstand, the USER can lock the device using the find my iphone feature, when they return the property it cannot be reused until they enter their icloud account password after a device reset. This isn't about IT's ability to lock the device, that exists for any Activesync device, this is about a piece of company property being tied to a users icloud account at the hardware level.

Of those only music is something I normally repeat, I own a few hundred albums and I've listened to most of them many, many times despite having a Pandora subscription. Pandora is background noise/going to sleep noise for me, the act of listening to an album is a completely different experience. Then again I'm a self identifying non-stupid audiophile (better looking lamp cord is find for me, no moster cables in my system, but I did spend $2,100 on high quality speakers) so my enjoyment derived from music and my habits of consuming it are probably fairly atypical =)

How does that work with WhisperSync? Aren't you constantly getting thrown to wherever in the book the other person last read to?

Because by the time they're terminated you CAN'T unlock the device without their icloud account name and password, sending in their devices is to apply the code that blocks the feature and thus stop the phone from being bricked without an icloud password. You can now do that through an MDM client, but only if the feature is not yet enabled, if it is you have to have to have the user disable it and then hook it to the PC.

Withhold last paychecks isn't legal in the majority of states.

As to the "incomplete" setup, prior to iOS 7 it was a feature that the users could use to find a misplaced device, then suddenly through an OTA update it became a way to brick a phone.

No it wasn't, as soon as you install iOS 7 and enable find my iphone the device is locked to that users icloud account, there's a way to disable it but it requires attaching the phone to a physical machine. You can disable the feature through MDM now, but it has zero effect if the user has already set it up (horse meet barn door). We've lost a half dozen devices due to folks being let go and refusing to unlock our property, Apple's gotten better about unlocking the devices in the last couple months, but if they're not on our main account so we can easily show proof of ownership we're SOL.

The i* device revolution has been extremely annoying for enterprise IT since Apple has had almost zero understanding or interest in supporting us. Things like requiring plugging in an iphone to a PC to turn off the find my iphone feature with iOS 7 as an example (No I can't contact all 300 field users and ask them to mail me their iphone for a few days).

What does SM have that's even remotely like Moonshot? I don't believe they have anything like 45 modules with 4x 8-core ARM processors in 5U. Verari looks interesting, but at 1700 cores per rack it's almost 10x less dense than moonshot.

Nah, HP's all about long lived chassis, the C7000 blade enclosure is 8 years old and they're still adding new blades and I/O modules for it. The previous P class chassis was supported for 6 years.