Car analogy: I told the used car dealer to stop selling that garbage and just send all his vehicles to the dump. I mean they were all from like 2007 or before! I mean seriously, who uses a car that old (except for all the retro ones that were sold up until 2012 - and those suck too. They aren't hip at all)? They don't have the latest rear view cameras and other safety equipment or anything. It is no secret if you buy the after market warranty you can get your crappy old car fixed, but if you don't it isn't my problem you can't get parts when you need them because you are a dumb poopy pants. I throw everything away because there is a newer model that surely must be better because new and shiny!

because the spf records don't pass but the recipient recognizes the sender?

That is a terrible policy. I spent a long night at an office of a fortune 500 company for that very reason. They didn't see any reason to apply bios patches because they were just to add support for newer hardware, not to fix any sort of vulnerability. Fair enough. Several years went by and their terminal server had a processor go finicky on them. They determined the available spares included processors that were compatible. I asked "has the bios been updated to support the newer processors?" I was assured that they do regular patching and it would not be a problem. I arrive on site, install the new processors and get no post. A bit of troubleshooting and we determine it doesn't recognize the processors because the bios was out of date. Really long story shortened - we had to shutdown another server, pull the processors, install them in the problem server, boot, patch the bios, shut down move the processors back in the donor server, and then reinstall the new processors. Of course this was in a server room that was an overstuffed shoe box so a number of acrobatics were required to get the servers extended to a point they could be worked on.

So what should have been a 10-15 minute processor replacement ended up causing several hours of downtime and the unscheduled shutdown of another server.

Don't be lazy!

That said, as someone else stated, I usually wait a couple months to patch (especially HP) unless it is considered a critical issue or I have a straightforward fail-over plan. HP has screwed my arrays etc. more than once with their quality updates.

No, you don't understand. All the little internet connected things in your life like your thermostat with infrared sensor and tv with camera and xbox with 3d imager and phone with gps and toilet with butt activated hemorrhoid sensor all send their little bits of data back to the big intelligence in the cloud. This way the great data architects of Fort Meade know you need some anal cream, a diet, and some new pants. They might also recognize that you are a danger to yourself if you continue to play WoW. But if you stop playing you might be upset about your surroundings and be a danger to others, so you get a new online friend to help you play even more hours each day. I think the Internet of Things is quite Intelligently Designed. In fact, I think everyone else who supports it should all spread the word by using a hashtag for intelligently designed internet of things #IDIoT

It's already in use by the administrative share.

This is 60 minutes we're talking about here... don't get too demanding!

Yes, changing it to say "alpha" would be putting it nicely. It WAS beta quality until they hired bing developers to pretty it up. Now it doesn't work on my mac, pc or android phone.

Sounds great! Who do you recommend. Maybe Amazon or perhaps Softlayer/The Planet?

And this is why you should always outsource your data backup and security. 3rd parties are way more experienced and equipped at losing your data than you ever could be! It's like the cloud, but for paper records and tape backups!

okidata with ps/pcl support. Toner cost is a bit higher per page on the lower end models, but fine if he isn't printing books.

Clearly your experience with xerox is different than mine (I've found them nothing but unreliable garbage and their "technicians" are not very well trained to say the least), but then again I had to threaten Dell with legal action to get them to replace motherboards that had known bad nvidia chips that were dying (they kept trying to blame an operating system issue until it eventually escalated to someone in Round Rock), so it might simply be a matter of who is acting shitty at the moment. I concur that HP has their own problems though. We applied the latest SPP to a gen 8 server at the end of last year which promptly made the raid arrays impossible to configure and the workaround from their techs didn't work. We were eventually able to downgrade the firmware but that reintroduced several other bugs the firmware upgrade was intended to fix. Hopefully HP will get it all straightened out before I have to pay for the patches, but only time will tell! Yay for shortsighted profits!