Comment Re:Give it to me straight (Score 1) 100
If the flare had been directed towards the earth, what would have happened?
A better question; what if this X-WHATEVER FLARE! (X 28) flare from November 2003 was pointed towards us?
If the flare had been directed towards the earth, what would have happened?
A better question; what if this X-WHATEVER FLARE! (X 28) flare from November 2003 was pointed towards us?
I couldn't disagree more with that statement, and not just for ideological reasons. By the time that Sun started really embracing open-source, Sun had been abandoned by everybody except for its longtime customers who already had a very substantial investment in the platform.
A lot of Sun's open-sourced projects attracted a great deal of attention by myself, and many others in the Sysadmin world. Projects like ZFS, and Xen/xVM made it pretty clear that Sun had some of the best people in the industry working for them, and that Solaris was probably worth reconsidering, even if it meant being coupled with Sun's expensive hardware (which is a drop in the bucket compared to the extra staffing costs associated with a high-maintenance server platform). Also, the existence of OpenSolaris meant that we could take the platform for a "test drive" on some old hardware before taking the plunge.
By the time that Sun had won us over, the writing was already on the wall w.r.t. the Oracle acquisition, and nobody would go near Sun with a 39 1/2 foot pole (which, as we've found out, was a perfectly justifiable paranoia).
Except that Google brought some reps from Citrix up onto the stage to demonstrate exactly that.
I actually thought that the Citrix demo had the potential to be game-changing. They almost completely divorced business applications from the platform that they run on, and used a dead-simple Linux-derived OS as the client. The idea that corporate users could deploy *any* app, regardless of the OS that it natively runs on to almost *any* end-user is pretty tantalizing. OS lock-in is suddenly no longer an issue, no software needs to be rewritten, and client maintenance got a whole lot simpler. It'd be hard to pitch a more appealing proposal to a corporate sysadmin/beancounter.
(Of course, you could take care of the caps lock thing at the terminal emulation level, by remapping an unused hotkey combination as a Caps Lock toggle. It's a non-issue, and I'm sure there will be other hardware that has the button included. Unlike iOS devices, the platform is open, which I suspect will be a very important thing to the corporate world, as vendors can customize hardware to fit their customers needs.)
It's one thing to complain about the rule of law being followed, but do you really give a damn about what some guys who were born 300 years ago thought?
Personally, I thought they were damn good ideas, but "sticking to founding ideals" for its own sake personally sounds like a horrible idea to me. The founding fathers were innovative politicans...not prophets.
Google -- according to their own public statements -- mines data so they can display ads, AND sell your data to other people.
[citation-needed]
Apple Basestations are marketed to consumers, but are assuredly not consumer-grade hardware. At the very very worst, they occupy a space between consumer gear, and the (MUCH) more expensive Cisco/HP stuff.
In other words, perfect for a small, 20-person business. Try to have enough overlap that you can lose an access point without catastrophically effecting the network until it can be replaced.
I'm not an Apple fanboy, and initially raised an eyebrow when I was asked to deploy an Airport-based network. However, after doing it, I'd absolutely recommend it to any organization that is on a budget.
Fortunately, they're both publicly-traded companies who are required by law to disclose their financials. Google and Amazon are both doing fine, and wouldn't simply pull the plug on any of their managed services if they wanted to retain any of their customers in the future, no matter how bad their financial situation might get.
You'd be better off writing a contingency plan for what your business will do if a plague of locusts arrives, or if the US is invaded by Zimbabwe. The idea of Google or Amazon going belly-up with no warning is completely and totally outlandish. You cannot control for every variable -- you're best off focusing on your most likely, and most easily manageable sources of failure.
Managers need to let go of their "control freak" mentality. More often than not, it hurts the people that they are supposed to be managing, and does nothing to improve productivity. (See Also: Lotus Notes. It's infinitely customizable, so there's really no limit to how bad it can get.)
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.