Posts by Doctor Syntax 42272 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Customers that Microsoft could no longer serve would have the option to migrate workloads"
Is there anything in the MoU that would protect that option being trumped by a fiat from the US? Is there anything which would protect the contents of the customer cloud being copied to some USG server on receipt of a National Security Letter or frm being deleted with no notice?
"To turn them is going to take something pretty cosmic, something so bad that it would threaten the companies very existence. And I am not talking about the malware groups - this would be something that Microsoft did to them."
Don't discount the malware groups and don't also discount that their effects, on further analysis, can be partly seen as something Microsoft did do to the victims.
There was a story on the Beeb site the other week about a reasonable-sized UK haulage firm - one whose name I recognised from seeing their fleet on the road - that was taken out of existence by malware and we have seen several large UK businesses severely hit this year.
It's not inconceivable that a few board members of some of these companies take a bit of time to reflect over Christmas and come back in the new year asking "How did this happen to us?" and really start digging. They then discover that being anything through and through is a bad idea. They discover that "Enterprise versions and all the active directory, policy settings etc controls that come with it" didn't prevent what happened. At that point some of their senior IT professionals are going to get asked some questions as to what they're going to do about it and if they don't come up with convincing answers (more of the same won't be convincing) the questions will get put to other IT professionals who can answer them.
How many high profile migrations by high profile victims does it take before a few other boards decide the time to go is before they get hit?
It will come as quite a shock to my cousin-in-law, long retired hairdresser and 90 in a few days time, to discover that she's a techno-geek. She's been using Zorin since some (fortunately incompetent) ransomware in an email she thought was from someone she knew hit her W7 computer years ago.
OTOH a friend of mine, almost the same age, runs W11 and has some sort of support arrangement with a Windows specialising techno-geek to sort out her problems.
Your "brutal truth" is BS.
Forget the experimental and enthusiast distros. There are a small handful of desktop distros and a small handful of server distros.
If you want to experiment with a desktop Linux distro for a couple fo days, do you know how much it will cost you? A couple of days of your time. You don't even need another computer to test it on providing you've got one with enough disk to spare to install it dual boot.
You could even try a couple of distros. See what the differences are and realise how similar they are. Discover that it's not so much a matter of vast differences, more a question of finding where you feel most comfortable, rather like deciding on your favourite pub.
Try it. It doesn't hurt. You can keep it a secret if you don't want anybody to know that you have.
What amazes me is the number of people who call themselves IT professionals who haven't even tried, as professional development, something that won't cost them money.
We keep hearing this bit about applications. Yes, of course we run an OS to run applications. I certainly d. But do you really want applications where the vendor is persistently trying to inveigle you into subscriptions for what you're already running, or run them on their servers with your data a their mercy, or busy shoehorning AI into all those applcations?
When is enough enough?
"Earlier this year, German-speaking user group DSAG said that if users eventually wanted to get back on the upgrade path with SAP, they would find that they had lost commercial leverage."
Really? Do SAP not employ salesdroids who will offer just about anything to get a sale? If not they must be very unusual.
Every week SWMBO sends out a PDF handout for her patchwork class. The class members need to print it out, or at least the last sheet. Why? Because the templates are on the last sheet (sometimes on the last several sheets) and they need to cut those out. Not everything can be just read.
"There are sometimes mismatches between the amount of electricity generated in a certain region and the electricity grid's ability to transmit that electricity from that region to another,"
Meanwhile, the data centre, whose effectiveness is being measured in inputs rather than outputs, is steadily eating a fixed amount of the generation which is then not available for transmission to the rest of the customer base, even if the generation falls below transmission capacity. At the extreme we'll hear about DCs unable to operate at low generation levels because transmission capacity isn't adequate to suck in power from the rest of the grid.
You're looking at it from the wrong end og the telescope. The people who are interested in this are not those looking to install the newest shiny. They are people who need to run something developed for that platform and which is performing a critical function not easily replaced. Are they going to take the risk of asking will it run on the latest version of libxml2, let alone the latest version of Python?
They probably don't even want any patches or for it to be "slightly" upgraded. They're paying the money because some fiat says the platform must be "supported" and the reality is that it has to stay just as it is, doing just the job it was installed to do, no more and certainly no less.
What about some very expensive piece of equipment, something so expensive it was scheduled to be amortised over a couple of decades? Something whose drivers were written over a decade ago by a vendor long closed down. In tha sort of environment issues are not going to be solved by new versions of the OS, they're going to be created by them.
Now imagine you're about to purchase s new piece of equipment of that nature. Would you want its controlling S/W to run on an OS whose vendor is not only promising such longevity but visibly delivering it on their earlier versions or would you want it to run on Windows?
"if it's a regulated environment"
This is surely the key to it. Regulated environments that require applications to be certified and the applications themselves are only certified to run on a specific platform. Just the sort of environment that doesn't sit well with forced upgrades.
1. $Topic was introduced (too long to go into detail here)
2. $Topic was explained (too long to go into detail here)
3. Explanation was summarised (too long to go into detail here)
The bits in parentheses are only added if doing without them is looked on as being sarcastic.
If the training course didn't go like that it was badly designed.
My first thought was what about a circular motion around the speaker. However the greater problem is with a sentence such as "He always took his dog with him on his meanderings."
"Meander" suggests that some of the movement will be towards and some away from the speaker while the dog would complicate things even further running back and forth, So should it be "take" half the time and "bring" the other half?
A word can be short and pithy but still wrong.
There is a verb "give". Derived from that is a noun "gift" - that which is given. There is no need whatsoever to use the noun as a verb because the verb already exists and yet that is done if the giving is to be presented as something particularly significant.
The simple test there would be to use the fancy verb "donate" with that donated as "donation" and ask oneself would one say that it had ben donationed? If not, don't say it had been gifted.
/rant
As someone who runs native Linux applications on the desklaptop that's the way it strikes me too but as Microsoft pushes so many users into the remote versions of their S/W it's hard to see how a Chromebook would differ in those terms.
Meanwhile a Linux OS running MS Office & other Windows S/W locally is going to confuse a number of commentards here but I suppose they can bleat about it being inconsistent with whatever UI MS currently imposes and other Windows users are complaining about.
"Yes I know I am seeing unicorns for the last paragraph"
Not a council system* but a former client of mine used an ERP system from a small supplier. They had a number of quite different scenarios for various parts of the business ranging from the main logistics business to a few maintenance contracts. They had enough knowledge within the business to handle most of the customisation in-house. That was an important success factor. It probably stemmed from a realisation at the top that the ERP was essential to the business which made it worth having that expertise in-house
The other, which makes the OP's paragraph less of a unicorn, is that, because the ERP supplier was small, where stuff couldn't be handled in-house by the customer it was possible to go to the supplier and negotiate acceptable prices for mods or new functionality some of which was rolled out to all the customer base. That again was made possible by in-house expertise. There was a penalty in that we had a few weekend shutdowns for table reorganisations.
* For very good bad reasons any discussion of \ERP here is going to end up discussing councils.
