itworker7's comments

over the course of your career, technology will change at least 4 or 5 times, unlearning is as important as learning. Technology changes - people don't. What you need to learn at Uni is not syntax but critical thinking, active listening, and good story telling. Always be quietly selling yourself. Find the why. There are far worse things than caring too much. Kindness is never wasted.

checkout swissmicros.com They make several functionally close HP calculators. Its a rather interesting approach and unless HP itself resurrects the OLD calculator line, these are close as you can get to a new HP calculator.

I hope not, the preponderance of religious gullibility is already off the charts. I guess sheeple just need to follow something.

trust no one. get it in writing. seriously, having been involved in several acquisitions, even the majority stakeholders may not completely know what is going to happen. The stakeholders may be told anything by the NewCo, simply to keep it together while the transition is under way. Acquisitions are not always good, or bad, but they never quite go exactly as presented. If you have ownership, stay sharp, keep your wits and remember that once the paperwork is completely signed it is no longer yours. And it is not a done deal until the money is in your bank account.

Its like the meme of sitting in a burning room and saying I'm fine. We are not fine. We are not good at all. We have moved so far to the right that the center of 25 years past is now seen as extremist left.

and darkness falls

If you want a trip down memory lane. Look up InSoft Communique. They had multi-person IP video conferencing, shared whiteboard, shared screen applications on Sun and HP workstations using Parallax video cards. The big challenges back then were bandwidth and the cost of the JPEG motion video compression cards @10k each. Consider, this was pre mpeg. The company eventually was bought by Netscape Communications, just before Microsoft released Internet Explorer. Great technology, bad timing.

its about ratios. 25% clean protean like salmon, 25% slow burn carb like brown rice, 50% veg like avocado, tomato, bok choy, or maybe broccoli steamed. The sauce is garlic, lite soy, mirin and a little sesame oil

In physics, a gallon of water weights 8.34 lbs. (For this analogy, a gallon of water is a unit of work.) And the gallon of water weighs 8.34 lbs irregardless if it is sitting on my desk in a physical building, or on your desk, in the cloud. Same weight, same unit of work. same effort. For a brand new, greenfield application, the cloud is a no brainer. I agree 100%. But for legacy applications, and there are so, soooo many, the cloud is just some one else's computer. Yes, the cloud is more scaleable, yes, the cloud is more manageable, and yes, you can control the cpu/storage/memory/network in much finer amounts. But legacy applications are very complicated. They have long tails, interconnections to other applications that cannot immediately be migrated to the cloud. I have migrated clients off of the cloud, back to on premise or to (co-lo) local hosting, because without rewriting the legacy application, the cloud costs are simply too great.

The essence of IT is to apply technology to solve a business problem. Otherwise, why would the business spend the money? The IT solution might be crazy/stupid/complex but if it works, many business simply adopt it and move on. Now, move that crazy/stupid/complex process to the cloud and surprise, it is very, very expensive. So, yes, the cloud is better, but only for some things. And until legacy applications are rewritten on-premise will exist.

One final insight. The cloud costs more. It has been engineered to be so, both from a profitability standpoint(Amazon is a for profit company) but also because the cloud has decomposed the infrastructure of IT into functional subcomponents, each of which cost money. When I was younger, the challenge for IT was explaining to management, the ROI of new servers, expanded networking, additional technology. We never quite got it right and often had it completely wrong. That was because we lacked the ability to account for/track and manage the actual costs of an on-premise operation. Accounting had one view, operations had another view and management had no idea really, why they were spending millions a year and could not get their business goals accomplished. The cloud changed all of that. You can do almost anything in the cloud, for a price. And I will humbly submit, that the cost of the cloud - minus the aforementioned profitability, is what on-premise organizations should have been spending all along. Anyone reading this and who has spent time in a legacy environment, knows that it is basically a futile exercise of keeping the plates spinning. On-premise failed because it could not get management to understand the value on in-house IT.

As I said, the costs are the same. A gallon of water weighs what it weighs regardless of location. It will be interesting to see, I predict the pendulum will swing back.

This change will likely kill meetup. If you run a tech group in a decent sized metro and have say 200 members, will they all be willing to pay to show up to the meeting? And if someone signs up, but doesn't show up - how does a group bear that cost? Perhaps WeWork should change their name to WeBill.

its up for me, have you checked other sites?

but what if we don't use outlook - not everyone does. this is at the fundamental heart of the problem with Microsoft (Apple is just as guilty, btw). It is the "hey, we have a nice ecosystem - everyone should use it" viewpoint. As a developer and consultant - I will decide which tools are appropriate and best for the job at hand, not something dictated by corporate marketing. Skype has gotten much worse since Microsoft acquired them. Every time I start Skype I have to update it and its not as stable as it once was, especially on OSX

no

I agree with that. And remember before Microsoft was the evil empire... IBM was the original evil empire (yep, holding on to a grudge is fun)

when I would come out for business in the late 80's at Sun I would always stop at 3 places: Computer Literacy, Fry's and Weird Stuff Warehouse. WSW back then sold even more exotic hardware as the minicomputer era was running down. Nothing like finding VAX parts or even an RK05 disk drive. yes, everything changes but not always for the better, I will miss them.

I would have expected to see this in the Atlantic, surprising that it was in Popular Mechanics. Very nicely written. Having lost my father-in-law late last fall, the story was a little difficult but it made me realize how much in common we all have when facing the loss of a loved one. And yes, my family is planning on spreading at least some of his ashes at his favorite golf course.