That would be a reasonable thing to do if it bought time.

Year 5? Maybe it's time to hold off on the shiny stuff for a little bit and do the busy work of shoring up the business.

Year 10? Two or three stupid multi-million dollar projects scrapped, but still no work on the billing system? It might be time to reconsider priorities. Or at least consider doing both?

Year 15? I get the feeling that my ability to configure and maintain a resilient system has created a monster. Management assumes it will run forever, and gets to be wined/dined by consulting firms to put up stupid projects.

If we ever finished ANY of the projects we decided to do instead of fixing the old stuff, it would be one thing. But to continue to retry, and fire consultants every year is just wasteful. (no, we're not the government)

No, my billing system nearly is that old. But instead of investing in replacing/upgrading it, they spend money on SharePoint, leaving our most important system to languish.

I will probably be asked tomorrow why I've been saying we should consider a roadmap to replace our 15 year old RISC stuff when we could just do this.

What should we work on this year sir? The 15 year old billing system that is mission critical and on unsupported hardware, software, and custom code written by employees long gone or a fifth try at implementing SharePoint that nobody will use?

SharePoint. Got it. Are we going to use consultants paid so well they drive Teslas and Land Rovers again? Let's make sure we don't have clawback for improper billing or properly documented terms or expectations. It is why we're on implementation #5, but you're right, it'll work this time.

The Gen9s have some of the memory tech starting in a couple of months.

I really hope they take the labs, both the ProLiants and the Integrity gear and keep them running as they have been. The Mark Hurd years were hard on them, and things fell behind. From a customer standpoint, it seems like Meg's been letting them be engineers again.

I hope those teams survive. My blades and my Integrity boxes are the only things that haven't died in my datacenter. My storage vendors haven't been remotely as solid.

Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a big cuddly bear, delivering science as carefully and enthusiastically as he can.

And there were pitchforks.

No, if you don't want to know something, hearing it from somebody warm and fuzzy won't fix that.

So no.

MariaDB is the fork of MySQL that's out of his hands.

Windows 9 will be interesting, and will break all kinds of things like every other upgrade does.

But Server 2012 is unusable. R2 improved it, but they clearly hate their customers.

1. Why does a Server install have boxes called "this PC" to click on. Just bring back "My Briefcase" and get it over with you lazy pieces of crap.
2. Why does it have a snazzy new front end that then puts back up screens we had in Windows 3.1?
3. I will cut the bitch that decided to use URLs for error messages, but not have them as active links so you could follow them.

I wasted hours of my life trying to make .Net3.5 install on 2012 because a vendor swore they wouldn't support R2, but had to have 3.5. I finally just did R2 and told them it was that or no .Net. If Microsoft didn't want me to install .Net 3.5, they shouldn't have made it the top feature in the list to install. Hide it. Make it separate. Something. But top in the list, incapable of installing saying it can't find media no matter what you do with copying files locally, powershell/DISM/whatever? Bite me you no-testing-code-shipping pieces of crap!

But I'm not bitter.

For what it's worth:

I work in the power industry. We are upgrading to the very latest version of the application we need to operate our power plants.

It is COBOL throughout.

The vendor is taking away access to the source code soon, as the version that replaces this one will be Java. By Java, they mean all the COBOL code wrapped in Java.

So, a major application for use in the power industry will be COBOL until at least 2030.

Our COBOL devs make nearly six figures. And after our salary review is done, will get some serious raises.

They're all in their late 40s-50s. We have no COBOL people in the pipeline.

Is that police department going to find a new revenue source by selling license plate and location data to somebody else who will correlate and sell location likelihood information to businesses/marketing companies?

Is that police department allowed to tag me in their system even though I wasn't under investigation, but passed their camera? Then, do they get to keep that info forever? What happens if I'm accidentally put on the no-fly list, I mean watch list, I mean...

These guys can't be trusted to type my license plate correctly, now they get permanent location, tracking and correlation? No.

I'm no Luddite, but this stuff and its related capabilities makes me want to go live in the woods. I'm sick of this.

My students hated that I made them learn vi. Why? Because if the graphics subsystem failed, or they had to go to single user mode, they had vi.

If they made it through my class alive, they could use whatever they wanted.

At least Oracle is cheap.

oh, right.

Bastards. I am sitting here rebalancing my vmware cluster to pull more cores out of Oracle so we can license less. Will it run slower? Yeah. But will we save six or seven figures a year? Yep.

Hi there, in the month of April, this is what we saw:

1. 248,000,000 spam killed at our outer gateway that never made it to employee inboxes.

2. Major security announcements verified in April: Heartbleed, we use our scanning tools and have verified that we have no exposure to this issue.

3. No down time in messaging, payroll/HR/Finance systems.

4. Moved 250 separate pieces of code into production across various systems.

5. Completed IT installation at new facility X.

6. Etc.

Give them numbers that don't mean a lot, but show that stuff is happening.

NetApp

- Command Line in cDOT is pretty useful, I script a ton of things due to this.
- OnCommand System Manager has problems, it even lost functionality in the move from the non clustered OnTap to clustered OnTap. (easy to fix on their end, just a lack of attention to detail) But when you have 30+ filers across a dozen sites, it's all well organized. I'd like to see better performance, but it does 90% of what I need.
- The old FilerView worked for a small shop, but having all filers in the same interface is mandatory when you have as many as we do.

Isilon
- The web interface is pretty in OneFS7, but working with fileshares is kind of icky. When you have something that scales to 20-40PB, you'll have a few fileshares. And every time I have to work with one, it's not a great experience.

Violin
- My old 3000 series had an excellent interface, but it's limited since it's straight SAN, no CIFS/NFS. But fully HTML5, fully rearrangeable.
- The 6000 series interface is supposed to be a tremendous upgrade. I have one in a box waiting for me to get to our DR site to light it up, so hopefully soon I'll know more. But this has been my favorite interface so far.

Nimble
- I don't use this one weekly, a different admin works on it, but it seems pretty straight forward.

DataDomain
- Same as above. It works. Nothing to write home about.

FusionIO
- Big whoop. We're actually going to put Pernix in front of our FusionIO cards and stop using their interface as Pernix has so much better functionality and integration with vCenter.

PureStorage
- I don't own this, we are about to do a POC. But it seems pretty nice from the sales pitch/demos.

If you want to see a decent layout, NetApp's onCommand System Manager does a good job.

If you want to see excellent non-Adobe flash functionality, Violin.

Hope that's useful.

There's like 40 people there, so who's going to jump him?

OK, seriously though, he's loved in Nebraska. I love Cherry Coke. It's my only vice. I've lived in a lot of places, but never could get Cherry Coke in a soda fountain/McDonald's/whatever.

While in Omaha/Lincoln, I was able to get it everywhere. Because Warren might drive through.

How soon before your video capture of me is online, and can be found via an image search?

I may not have the expectation of privacy from these things and other cameras, but surveillance cameras aren't posting their content online. These things (Glass/Cellcams) are designed for that.

In the past somebody could say they thought they saw me somewhere. Proper authorities could take that info and request surveillance from the site.

Now, somebody doesn't care about who they're recording, and I'm in the background. Now I'm tagged forever in that geolocation at that time. I'm not cool with that. In the past that was info down the memory hole. Now it's there forever, and I have no control over it.