mikedanko's comments

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: anybody using Ubuntu One?

I never got it to work. Multiple boxes, various problems. I was really sort of interested in building on it and liked the concept, but I ended up just tossing it in the end and syncing data via jungledisk and keeping a cloud drive with it.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Dropbox for Teams

Yeah, I'm completely lost at Dropbox's new price point when compared to Jungle Disk, which is just as, if not more flexible than Dropbox. Jungle Disk is a lot more user friendly than you're letting on to, I've used it both personally and in the workgroup edition.

5 users over the course of the year on Jungle Disk: $240 320Gb of storage on Jungledisk for a year: $576. Total

I'm tempted to say these are non-competing products since you can just mount the cloud disk with Jungle Disk, but you need to sync with Dropbox, but you can do the same with Jungle Disk.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Home - Chrome OS

Probably when SysAdmins did too, as I believe the ChromeOS program manager was quoted along those lines the other day. The wording was closer to pink slipping them completely, but I'm going off the top of my head here.

I think the pilot program is about right for something as bold as how they're marketing this. Putting as many of these in the hands of the very people they're pissing at and saying "ok, you tell us then" is the only way to change some minds. If they don't ship 100,000 of these to smart people, I can't see it taking off.

The marketing is horrendous otherwise. A new sort of web based platform? I get that, I'm ok with that. A new sort of product that has marketing materials telling me my opinions are bullhookey and a PM that wants to see me out of a job is another.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Show HN: Our telepresence setup

Has anyone used Kinect's video chat? Does it work with computers or is it like the PS3 where you have to have another PS3 to have video?

I'm really surprised no one has tried to deploy some business apps for consoles, I'd imagine it'd take off pretty well as it'd be a great excuse for team building after hours.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: The Yes Men take on Apple

Conflict free iPhones made by Chinese slave labor. There is absolutely no way to get past the fact that someone may have died to bring you that shiny gadget. As disconnected as people are with their food supply, they're even more disconnected to everything else in their homes.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Suggestions for Online Meetings

Not so much. There are some open source projects based around red5 like bigbluebutton, but for the most part, they don't work all that well.

Adobe Connect, or Acrobat.com, or whatever it's been re-branded to, used to allow a meeting holder to have two other participants and gave you a free conference bridge. That's been relegated to one other participant and VoIP. You can still do presentations, share screens, have webcams, etc., but just with one other person and you have to call them on the phone.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Logstash ready for use (log/event collection, searching, graphing)

I've found that it's great for a sort of RAD tool, but the functionality ends there because licensing and scalability are so expensive. The other problem is that it's so generally purposed that it reaches a point where integration with existing sort of FCAPS compliant setups is more of a chore than anything. Best put, it sort of reminds me of a Oracle Application Express for logs. I can do most anything with it quickly to get a good handle on things, but in the end I'm going to take those ideas and make something better with them.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Facebook’s Modern Messaging System: Seamless, History, And A Social Inbox

Google does it now but integration is poor, and I suppose Facebook sort of took the user stories and simplified them but...

I don't see how this is different than anything Yahoo did 4-5 years ago. From the standpoint of using their IM app, things are forwarded to email or SMS depending on what the user wants. If you're in the webmail app similar options are provided. They also had a sort of seamless SMS from their webmail client a long time ago. I'm not sure what I'd call it, Intermodal Communication? How is what Facebook is doing here any different than the Yahoo model?

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Facebook’s Modern Messaging System: Seamless, History, And A Social Inbox

The only thing with gmail is that it's a pain to deal with between Voice/IM/GTalk, it's far from unified and you can't use it like normal GMail users if you're GAFYD. Google talk supports the whole email sort of exchange, but only after a conversation has been initiated and there are no more paths for the jabber transports to take.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Apple to abandon their XServe line

Lion Server? Has there even been talk of it? Dead now?

I'd imagine the only use case for server that couldn't be done easily in a better way was spotlight server, and it's only a matter of doing it more cheaply than available CMS solutions.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Why we don't schedule deployments during off-hours

My body and mind have taken a beating I don't think I can do much longer from ten years of useless night work swinging shifts sometimes three times a week, that guy is too happy.

That's a great list of personal reasons, but business can come first for the same reasons. My last big deployment was to half a million set top boxes. In the end, I had to do it at night, but I had oh so many reasons for doing it during the day:

* What if a percentage of the boxes bricked halfway through the deployment? A statistical insignificance in the lab doesn't help me help 15k people with bricks on their TV's. When they start playing with the boxes, I'm going to have to roll trucks and that's expensive. Instead man up the call center during a time where we don't have to pay shift diff.

* From an end-user standpoint, there's a different set of eyes on the products at different times of day. Think about it this way, if you sell porn, how much are you selling at 2AM vs. 9AM do you think? They're not going to call and complain about their porno not working, but it doesn't mean there's not a huge level of dissatisfaction. There's a lot of general economics and trade offs involved.

* Top notch help has the luxury of sleeping at this hour because they've probably earned the tenure. I'm not going to get the vendor of a vendor to help me with this stuff at 3am, and they're definitely not going to be fresh and chipper, and getting anyone beyond support on the phone takes hours -- by that time, they're awake anyway.

Change the above as you see fit to adapt to your type of work, it's all the same.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Apple deprecates Java

Folks have mentioned Eclipse as an IDE, but there's also Eclipse as a platform. I have three Eclipse RCP apps I use for visualization daily.

I also manage a lot of equipment that requires java webstart to load a configuration GUI to accomplish tasks that would be darn near impossible at a CLI or any other way.

I logged into Cisco TAC the other day. Requires Java for ticket management tasks.

I use some rf propagation tools for a hobby that are java apps.

I make frequent use of Deskzilla. Java app.

I could go for days. I won't.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: PagerDuty (YC S10) wakes the right person up for your tech emergencies

Large scale engineering dept guy here, the problem there is that most companies like that won't accept a SaaS solution.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely brilliant. I think it's the first time I've ever given a thumbs up to a third level metasolution to a problem.

Pagerduty needs to push some use cases on their site. It might break the SaaS reluctance to steaks and strippers type corporate managers. "It can eat my rediclously complicated jasper report that I send straight to the trash bin on arrival so I don't have to read it and figure out what buttons on the phone I have to push with all the reluctance of a four year old kid with a plate of brussel sprouts and broccoli in front of them? Sign me up!"

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Are news portals interesting, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

It's easy to say you're doing it wrong, it's much harder to say how you'd do it right. The ideas are there, they need some integration.

Google News? I abuse the heck out of it, just as feeds to feed Reader however.

The problem I still see with those sites as well as your own, that there's just way too much clicking and tab management involved. Everyone does it, you'll follow a really engaging story, try your damnedest to find the "print" button so you can get it all one one page then decide to instapaper for later or readability for now. Open endless tabs to look up references or if something is late breaking head off to twitter search.

I'd imagine a news portal could be interesting, but not without dramatically lowering the time it takes to navigate around the content and act on it. Finding a way to unobtrusively simplify the use case of someone following tasks to read and understand an article hasn't been done AFAIK, or at least done well. It would seem to me that unscatter is just adding an extra layer on to an already complicated navigation process.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Facetime for the Mac

I was laying in bed and for whatever reason it just smacked me in the face. Yes, there's a reason, and I was reminded of an anecdote regarding blackberries being served in the lobby to the press.

iChat is a presence and messaging framework that's completely ad hoc. The server frameworks don't do anything but presence and messaging.

Not so with Facetime. Apple just aimed a loaded gun at RIM, Avaya, and Ericsson today, and Facetime is the proof of concept. Verizon on the iPad was cocking the hammer. Apple has just shown the world that it has full enterprise communication stack integration from LDAP to device and more importantly the network in-between... and that network in between has a lot of control. Apple needs these guys a lot.

Submitting the protocol stack to the IETF is a win with consumers, but I'm sure that RIM, Ericsson, etc., are seeing this as spit on the face and more to the point it's probably why the guy at RIM completely lost his cool last week.

Apple is going at the enterprise in a remarkable manner, and probably the only way they could have.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Facetime for the Mac

According to the presentation, it's supposed to be made a standard. I'm assuming this would hit the IETF's Audio/Video transport working group, so that'd be where to keep a lookout.

mikedanko | 15 years ago | on: Facetime for the Mac

Are you sure? That seems to be nothing but delivery of transport streams over HTTP and suggests nothing of negotiating calls ala SIP.
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