Posts by thondwe 506 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jan 2010
MS should just charge a flat fee per "user" (FTE) to cover all users for all products - or at least in groups of products. Fire all the licence people and pass the savings on to the users....
How many years are used up devising, enforcing, and understanding/purchasing licences - life's too short.
Rather than chasing IE off Windows (when Apple/Google are as bad), they could mandate that Gadgets (PCs, Laptops, Phones, Routers, etc) be supported for 5 years with OS updates. They could even stipulate a Test suite which needs to run the same way (and at the same speed!) 3, 4 or even 5 years on, so we don't get the Apple IOS upgrade - lots of new features, but sorry your iThing now runs like a dog, please buy new...
Same deal with Apps perhaps - e.g. they have to support 5 year old hardware - even if it's just older versions with Security updates only.
This would be GREEN and PROTECT the consumer!
Atoms where it, then Atoms where sets of particles, then particles were waves/smaller particles/strings...
Quantum theory - we need a new particle, then we've found it, then we need another one... So are there just infinite possibilities? New model needed?
We're fish in a pond trying to work out where the water's coming from/going to - lots of models/theories will work, but without being outside looking in we'll never really know
SO a brief trawl of Twitter searching for Teamviewer revealed a surprising number of lovely ladies advertising #teamviewer sessions. Am guessing they take PayPal payments to? Do gamers or others do something similar for some reason???
Is the hacker "backdoor" via this route??
Just a thought...
All platforms suffer from dependency hell, Windows, Linux, Java, PHP, .NET, Docker, ... If you have more than one app dependent on any one thing, an update will probably break at least one.
Worse of course is that the supplier of that broken app won't keep up/have gone out of business, focused on another product...
Application/OS Virtualization can remove some of it, at the cost of bundling all the dependencies with the App...
I think the underlying issue, is how much money/effort do you put in to run your own datacentres and does running your own add much to your business? Do you want staff fighting hardware/software suppliers (and their B resellers), virtualisation stuff, backup stuff, exchange/sharepint etc, 24x7 availability, etc etc, or do you want them delivering some saleable functionality to your business (assuming you're NOT a hosting company)?
Having someone else run your "Cloud" (Public or Private - don't care), is very appealing - which means VMware is after a share of that market - and that puts them up against Microsoft, Amazon, OpenStack etc. They are losing their original market, and struggling in the new one?
So Windows 10 comes with Bing and Apple do their own thing, so are the EU going to try this with MS/Apple? MS have been trying to get rid of Bloatware, and the EU want Google to allow it?
Be far happier if the EU said to Apple (e.g.) - all default apps must be capable of being replaceable with 3rd party options (which then become the default)?
Tis all Bonkers
I'm with you, and by the time you've added in Internal Purchasing, Framework Purchasing Agreements, Tendering and all that rubbish it takes us months to buy a couple of servers with exactly the same spec as we already have 50 of. Oh and we have to correct the order from the supplier because they've not spec'ed it correctly cause we read the spec sheets more carefully than they do...
Not only that, we buy them from "resellers" who order them from the "Supplier" who then have some muppets build them (3rd party?) and ship them (another 3rd party) - as a result we don't get what we ordered and it's never shipped to the right location - and no ones knows even when it's going to come.
AND, the reseller's don't support what we buy, that comes from the manufacturer directly...
AND, once it's here it needs it's firmware upgrading, which then breaks something else, and DOA pieces replacing before it even thinks of working...
No wonder AWS/Azure/... is so appealing!
It's quicker and easier to spec and buy a new car...
Fume....
Except that a huge %age of Windows desktops are corporate, and these get refreshed at a speed of a nailed down snail. So far the "converts" will be home users with new gadgets, Microsoft consultancies and Surfaces being "product placed" in shows like Elementary, NCIS, etc...
Thin Client systems have always been expensive (lots of server side kit needed), done wrong (X-Windows) and the clients have always been as least as expensive as a standalone PC. Add to this Microsoft's stupid Windows desktop licencing (hence the use of Windows Server for this) - it is really a limited use case to either protect data, provide access to legacy software, or work around some stupid application licence...
More buzzword rubbish. IT isn't Bi-Modal if anything, it's Multi-Modal for a start, and it's really about the services - I.T. has to provide the services demanded by it's users, so if you have a set of users which use an old app, so be it, whist having another set who live at the bleeding edge...
One persons I.T. system is another's archaeology - but if it does the job...
VMware are hanging on by dint of the "cost of change" - VMware shops not jumping on Hyper-V because of fear of change.
Hyper-V 2016 (well Windows 2016) does seem to have something to add to the local datacenter - looks to be getting much of NSX style SDN stuff - and that'll be included in the licences too...
VMware's heading the way of a number of other Vendors - a better implementation of something MS does OK (e.g. SCCM/SCOM/VDI/AV competitors) for those who need it and have a cheque book to pay... Falling from big player to bit part actor
It's always been software - even firmware is software, just difficult to replace with a 3rd party solution - can be done though - OpenWRT etc.
And almost everything has been "programmable" - most stuff is scriptable.
What's "new" is having a single button to create a piece of infrastructure - e.g. VM + Storage + ACLs + Firewall Config... "Software Defined Anything" is a lousy name - it needs something that actually reflects central control/management - HAL or Eddie or Skynet...
Universities (and most corporates) are not always awash with Cash so have to accept a level of risk. If your DR/BC plan is essentially restore from backup, then a single Array Failure can take loads of services off line for the time it takes to restore from Backups, assuming you have/can make capacity available to restore them too...
NOT everyone wants to spend lots of dosh on dual live systems....
If you haven't got live capacity to restore to (e.g. by killing Test/Dev) then you may be waiting for EMC to ship a replacement...
Paul
From the stuff I've read the ISP only need record the DNS name of the sites visited, NOT the URL. So how does this work if you've changed your DNS to OpenDNS (or others) in order to filter stuff for your kids, but OpenDNS is in the states?
Then of course the source IP is from the router - so how do you point the figure at a person with the gadget - so cheapo wireless hotspot in Café...?
Read a few of these sorts of things across the web, and most are inaccurate - not matching features in a VMware SKU with a similar feature in SCVMM + HyperV.
Broadly these days they are comparable and if you're a greenfield site then it's likely to come down to costs - but for Windows Workloads Microsoft make it hard to justify VMware, they just keep throwing in features in the price - Windows 2016 will have SDN a la NSX for example... - and you'll likely need to licence Windows and System Centre even in a VMware environment...
If you're an established user of one or other product, then jumping ship is more difficult to justify due to the local skills/knowledge you'll have in your staff.
Suggestions out there that this state of affairs is reflected in VMware's making most money from established customers and it trying to catch up with Azure via "vCloud Air".
Anyway, PLEASE do some research before posting articles with obvious glaring omissions...
Windows Server 2016 brings a new type of RDP - "Personal Session Desktops" which seem to look more like a VDI session than an RDP session and could pull the rug out from under the VDI market for all but niche use cases. But since it's just a fancy RDP session one could assume that an RDP CAL licence would work.
Am fully expecting MS licencing (spits!) to break this logic though!
Paul
Agree - Apple Music is barely usable on a iDevice, and the iTunes changes are appalling. Can't wait to see how bad the Android/Windows Apps are going to be. Has Apple lost all it's UI people now?
It's saving grace is price - Spotify costs us £15 for two people, but Apple would charge the same to cover my whole family.
Someone from the reg called me today wanting to send me junk mail. Generally I don't answer numbers withheld or calls via our switch board now as 99% are either grilling me about the University's spending plans or offering me "white papers" which are now entirely advertising brochures
Grrrrrrrrrtrr!
Paul
It's unfinished - Multiple Control Panels - "Add Feature" my favorite so far I can install hundreds of languages, but pretty much nothing else!
Edge can't seem to deal with switching between wifi networks. I had to change the default browser back to IE to get OneDrive for Business configured...
Can't set Outlook as my default Calander App
Still two OneNotes - why!
"All Apps" is a mistake - too long too narrow...
Expect lots more quirks.
Otherwise it's a step up from 8.1 in someways - Multiple Display's handle much better for instance.
As for constant feature updates - how many Apps in the IOS/Android App store do this all the time? It's the new norm...
Isn't this just Skype Wifi re-branded? I've used it in odd places - basically if you find a pay-for wifi area, sometimes you can get Skype Wifi to do the paying - so possibly saves money, and certainly saves having to sign up to though yet another portal?
The proliferation of Wifi hot-spots is the work of devil - my poor phone hops from Coffee Shop to Fast Food emporium so often it doesn't actually get time to download any mail, etc.... I'd give up and turn it off if wasn't for the rubbish Vodafone 3G signal everywhere I go....
Errr - Someone missed something, but the paid for version of Spotify has offline ability across all it's Apps. I regularly offline stuff to listen to in the car for example.
If the Apple Music service matches Spotify for Artists, does offline AND I can just listen to Albums (not yet another Radio station) then at $14.99 for the whole family that's going to shake things up. Spotify is £14.99 for me + wife, would add about £10 for the kids...
And that's the stupidity of the broadband grant system for "not spots" on Gower we got lucky that some keen individuals to push all the paperwork through. These schemes mean money and time wasted all over the place on commitities and admin etc. The whole thing would have just better if they'd just paid OpenReach (who do all the work anyway) to FTTC every cab in the land.
Doesn't all this boil down to...
Question - "What's my other password?"
Answer - "MyOtherFavouritePassword"
Which isn't a million miles away from a two factor scheme which asks for two things? Which then let's you tick to "trust" this device (forever/30 days), which is the one that's hacked and can bypass the MFA anyway...
Getting VDI licenced in an Education is a similar nightmare - students share machines, so there's not the one-to-one correlation between a physical machine and a virtual desktop. So you could buy a VDA for EACH student - 20,000 here - concurrent use doensn;t work as the licence has a a 90 day transfer restriction.
PLEASE PLEASE MICROSOFT kick your licencing team - they introduce needless complex licences which wastes our time, our resellers time and theirs!
Make the licencing really simple - so one purchase = one instance for desktop stuff. Same with server stuff, but keep the nice rules around visualization.
(VMware Site, just starting to look at HyperV)
Usual FUD around Hyper-V then - Hyper-V shares it's architecture model with Xen I believe - i.e. it's a Microkernel with the drivers in a privileged Virtual Machine (Domain 0 in Xen terms). HyperV "free" includes a limited number of services - Firewall, Management bits, etc. which run in this VM.
ESXi bundles all its services into one system - so drivers, firewalls, management bits, etc.
Patch management is required for both systems, and ESXi has been broken on more than one occasion by patches. However, the Patch Tuesday patches so far appear not to apply to Hyper-V - others may confirm this, but my test box hasn't been touched for 4 months so far.
So I see ESXi and HyperV on a par nowadays - they just work - the management tools (SCVMM vs vCenter) is a different story
So the creds are kept on AWS, they are also on iCloud (via backup settings?), or Google (Android), cached in a web browsers somewhere (OWA), in your handy Password Manager, on the Laptop which gets left on the train...
The only way to keep data secure is to not allow the users near it! E-mail is probably now the least safe place to store anything??
Paul
I think perhaps it does fix something - licence Windows per user and this gets rid of the problem we have of VDI being tied to a device - we don't want to licence students for each of their devices to access a VDI solution.
Having said that, it's unclear whether this is concurrent users or named users - the former would be equivalent to RDS (terminal services) licencing and would be the ideal for any VDI solution. Bet it's going to be the later and then we'd need to licence 15000 students to be able to access 1 of 200 VDI sessions!
BUT what's this diagonal screen size thing? A Tablet whatever the size of screen is either going to with Windows installed or it's not (and probably licenced) - can't see MS providing a free install to enable Windows on a Nexus or iPad???????
Licencing departments come up with the most stupid convoluted unnecessary restrictions. What's wrong with one Windows licence per system (physical or virtual) running Windows???????
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