Windows 8

[Chimpy]

Running a remote desktop session to a single dedicated box, and running a full-featured desktop off of a VDI cluster "in the cloud" are two totally different beasts. VDI is harder on IOPS than even high transaction Oracle and SQL databases and once you get over a certain (pretty low) threshold of number of clients, you pretty much have to use all SSD storage and that is not cheap.

[KallDrexx]

Except that Amazon and Azure both allow remote desktop environments that have been reported as good enough for coding (not for gaming obviously), and I know of a few people that have a dedicated Visual Studio VM instance on Azure they spin up when they want to code on a chromebook.

I was merely using my desktop as an example that I"m already personally moving to a cloud type of lifestyle.  As for corporate environments our company is moving towards the cloud for much easier on demand scalability of our products, less hardware maintenance / dealing with hardware failures, and cheaper for large media distribution (which we do a lot of, both uploads and downloads).  We've been using Office 365 for email for 3 years and it's been inaccessible probably 3-4 times, 2 of which was during a migration from the old Office hosted solution to 365.  That compares to my last company that hosted their own email servers and had email go down more than that in that period of time due to various issues with exchange that crept up on them. 

Everything shouldn't be in the cloud, but it's not a completely brain dead solution

[Ironwood]

Yeah, Azure and Amazon both do that, and much much more besides.  Especially for web coding and SQL stuff.

But the downside is cost.  While Amazon is getting there, Microsoft are still at the gouging stage.


If you're a company looking at a 3 year replacement plan and you're not looking at the Cloud right now, you're a fucking idiot or a lawyer.

[HaemishM]

WINDOWS 10 TO BE ‘CLOUD OS’

Details on Windows 10 were also provided, with claims that the future operating system will be a “cloud OS,” meaning that all of the processing and computing would be done on Microsoft’s servers, and be streamed to your computer, completely eliminating the need for a powerful rig and only requiring the basic bits to run peripherals and such. Windows 10 would essentially just be a new cloud service for Microsoft, on top of Office 365 and the new Xbox Cloud on Xbox One, pushing the company further into the cloud ecosystem.

BWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Yeah, that's going to work WONDERFULLY on launch day.

[Merusk]

So sell me on it.  I;m here at AU and based on conversations i'm having with other DTM/ DDM, CAD, BIM andIT managers mine is not a unique positio.  We'll be dragged in to it because our industry monopoly will require ir, but we wont be happy.

Particularly when tbe Keynote speech from the CTO and CEO both said, in essence, that Design professionals should give up all rights to their ideas and give them freely to the world.  Because it makes it easier for cloud and big data solutions to share and make money off of them without paying those professionals for the work.

Give me more than a one line throwaway with some subtsance on a real topic for once.  Snark is fine for general bullshitting, but worthless to me on this topic.

[Ingmar]

So sell me on it.  I;m here at AU and based on conversations i'm having with other DTM/ DDM, CAD, BIM andIT managers mine is not a unique positio.  We'll be dragged in to it because our industry monopoly will require ir, but we wont be happy.

Particularly when tbe Keynote speech from the CTO and CEO both said, in essence, that Design professionals should give up all rights to their ideas and give them freely to the world.  Because it makes it easier for cloud and big data solutions to share and make money off of them without paying those professionals for the work.

Give me more than a one line throwaway with some subtsance on a real topic for once.  Snark is fine for general bullshitting, but worthless to me on this topic.

It's not a hard thing to explain. Unless you have the resouces of an enormous company, running things in-house has the following disadvantages:

- Less reliability/uptime
- Less accessibility
- More expensive
- More time-consuming for IT to administer

Now, there are going to be some things you don't want to have in the clloud or can't have in the cloud - I'm not ready to embrace cloud phone systems, myself. But in general? It's hard to make a solid argument against it. Yes, your bandwidth costs probably go up; this will likely be more than made up for by the difference in hardware, power, software, and administration costs - it has in every ROI analysis I've done for us so far, at least.

[Ironwood]

You don't use Skype ?

And, honestly Merusk, I'd be delighted to explain it, but I do this all day every day and right now, due to timezone shit, I'm watching Masterchef kinda drunk.

 

[Engels]

The conversation about my ass reminds me of that metaphor for the definition of God as a bunch of blind men grabbing hold of various parts of an elephant, with the clerics of various faiths coming up with different definitions depending on what part of the elephant they grasp onto. One defines it as a trunk, the other as a thick leg, the other as a tusk, etc, You get the picture.

The truth of the matter is that my ass is going to be more or less useful depending on what your particular user is trying to do. Average clerical work in an administrative office? Office 365 and bob's yer uncle. Rendering thousands of node CAD style drawings from data sets? Not so much.

There are instances of cohabitation. For instance, we use my ass to calculate Abaqus structural models and then take that data, bring it to a workstation with proper video and cpu power to render it.

[Ironwood]

One of our clients wanted to use Sharepoint and 365 as collaboration for the franchises they controlled.  This was fine and we did some stunning work until they turned round with the tiny detail that even the simplest page they built was 200mb and needed both uploaded and downloaded soooo many times to work on.

It would have collapsed at that point, but I managed to work with them to find a solution.  It wasn't really an online Cloud solution !

That said, as I've said before, as the lines get bigger, fatter and quicker, the more this shit will penetrate the market.  It's already quite big.

So, yeah, what is it you're doing and why ?  But if AWS and Azure don't have any steps you can use on the value chain, I'll be really, really fucking surprised.  Cunts with E-mail servers.  Cunts with Blackberry Servers.  Cunts with Sharepoint servers.  It's nonsense.  Utter nonsense.  When I was IT Director, I had servers fucking everywhere and I look back on those days with SHAME.  There's no need for it.  No need at all.

Is this Windows 10 idea stupid ?  Course it fucking is.  Is it Always going to be stupid ?  Course not.  You've all read the sci-fi.

So many things that are now services, not hardware.  That's how it should be.  What's your Cost per User ?  We can slash that.  What is your user base ?  We can slash that.  What's your wife's neck like ?  You get the picture.

Seriously.  Time for another drink.  Merusk, I'll make more sense tomorrow.

Edit; wow, was anything spelled right there...

[Ingmar]

You don't use Skype ?

Well, yes, but not for things like the 800 number that rings our support people, for example. We use lots of cloud-based meeting stuff as well, but I'm not quite ready to accept a cloud PBX (like Ring Central or whatever), at least not yet. Doesn't feel to me like it's quite there yet.

[Hammond]

WINDOWS 10 TO BE ‘CLOUD OS’

Details on Windows 10 were also provided, with claims that the future operating system will be a “cloud OS,” meaning that all of the processing and computing would be done on Microsoft’s servers, and be streamed to your computer, completely eliminating the need for a powerful rig and only requiring the basic bits to run peripherals and such. Windows 10 would essentially just be a new cloud service for Microsoft, on top of Office 365 and the new Xbox Cloud on Xbox One, pushing the company further into the cloud ecosystem.

So Chrome OS with a subscription? With phones / tablets as powerful as they are and only getting more so what is the advantage of pushing anything other than heavy lifting stuff to the cloud? If you are a autodesk why wouldn't you create your own cloud product instead of going through a middleman? Meh this is going to be a interesting few years I think.

[Salamok]

Yeah, when my internet goes out I"m fucked but judging from past experience I"ll be bored anyways if the net goes out.

Sounds like you would be fine as long as you were at home.  I run a similar setup and even yanked my website down and use the living room as a hosting provider.  I'm not selling anything so if it all goes down in an internet outage I really don't give a rats ass (not that it goes down that often).  If I ever get my hands on some google fiber then it will make even more sense to just host my own virtual private cloud out of my living room.

[Miasma]

The conversation about my ass reminds me of that metaphor for the definition of God as a bunch of blind men grabbing hold of various parts of an elephant, with the clerics of various faiths coming up with different definitions depending on what part of the elephant they grasp onto. One defines it as a trunk, the other as a thick leg, the other as a tusk, etc, You get the picture.

The truth of the matter is that my ass is going to be more or less useful depending on what your particular user is trying to do. Average clerical work in an administrative office? Office 365 and bob's yer uncle. Rendering thousands of node CAD style drawings from data sets? Not so much.

There are instances of cohabitation. For instance, we use my ass to calculate Abaqus structural models and then take that data, bring it to a workstation with proper video and cpu power to render it.

Uhh, maybe you use that plug in that changes instances of "t-h-e c-l-o-u-d" to "my ass"?  Well it also seems to convert what you write so even though I don't have the plug in it all reads as "my ass" and was pretty damn confusing, especially with your elephant parts metaphor.

Or maybe you did it on purpose I dunno.

[Engels]

Yes, it was on purpose. Even though I agree with Ironwood about the inevitability of 90% of computing going into my ass, I still cannot say "the cloud" out loud without throwing up a bit in my mouth.

[Miasma]

It just strikes me as a funny pendulum.  Forty years ago everything was centralized and people just had dumb terminals.  Then the workstations got powerful enough to do everything themselves.  And now we're going back to dumb terminals thin clients.  Thirty years from now we will probably be saying stuff like "it just doesn't make sense to pay all those service fees to the cloud companies when I can do everything here on this quantum computer myself for less money".

[Ironwood]

Well, that's life.  That happens.  Revolutions tend to go round.

But I won't be sitting there when it happens like Canute trying to hold back the fucking tide.

[Teleku]

One of our clients wanted to use Sharepoint and 365 as collaboration for the franchises they controlled.  This was fine and we did some stunning work until they turned round with the tiny detail that even the simplest page they built was 200mb and needed both uploaded and downloaded soooo many times to work on.

It would have collapsed at that point, but I managed to work with them to find a solution.  It wasn't really an online Cloud solution !

That said, as I've said before, as the lines get bigger, fatter and quicker, the more this shit will penetrate the market.  It's already quite big.

So, yeah, what is it you're doing and why ?  But if AWS and Azure don't have any steps you can use on the value chain, I'll be really, really fucking surprised.  Cunts with E-mail servers.  Cunts with Blackberry Servers.  Cunts with Sharepoint servers.  It's nonsense.  Utter nonsense.  When I was IT Director, I had servers fucking everywhere and I look back on those days with SHAME.  There's no need for it.  No need at all.

Is this Windows 10 idea stupid ?  Course it fucking is.  Is it Always going to be stupid ?  Course not.  You've all read the sci-fi.

So many things that are now services, not hardware.  That's how it should be.  What's your Cost per User ?  We can slash that.  What is your user base ?  We can slash that.  What's your wife's neck like ?  You get the picture.

Seriously.  Time for another drink.  Merusk, I'll make more sense tomorrow.

Edit; wow, was anything spelled right there...

Yeah, pretty much.  I'm an IT admin at the embassy, we have all of those servers you mentioned and more, but they are starting to virtualize them and run them out of DC instead of locally.  Sharepoint already went that way, and we just had our Blackberry server converted over.  Only a matter of time before our racks shrink even more as they they move shit to the cloud in DC.

And you know what?  I'm perfectly fine with this.  Works way better this way in most cases (though I imagine posts in some of the less developed areas of the world may disagree).

[KallDrexx]

Yeah, when my internet goes out I"m fucked but judging from past experience I"ll be bored anyways if the net goes out.

Sounds like you would be fine as long as you were at home.  I run a similar setup and even yanked my website down and use the living room as a hosting provider.  I'm not selling anything so if it all goes down in an internet outage I really don't give a rats ass (not that it goes down that often).  If I ever get my hands on some google fiber then it will make even more sense to just host my own virtual private cloud out of my living room.

Actually thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I've had power go out at my house more than my internet.

[Numtini]

My guess on Windows in the cloud is it's Windows by subscription with no ability to stop updates. I doubt if they're actually going to move processing power there because that might actually cost them money.

As an IT critter, I see two kinds of cloud based products. One is actually a cloud based product like Google Apps or Crashplan/Mozy/whatever. That's great as far as I'm concerned. Light weight. Intended to be internet based.

The other is a normal LAN server product run on someone's private "cloud" server, which may just be a straight out server at their location connected to a VPN. That's usually just a path to a glacially slow app at twice the cost.

My favorite remains the web hosting service that tried to hype themselves to me by tellling me they were cloud based.

[Ironwood]

Bear in mind that people say that Office 2013 is 'In the Cloud' because it's on subscription and can take advantage of SharePoint Online and the like.

It don't necessarily make it fucking so.

[Merusk]

So sell me on it.  I;m here at AU and based on conversations i'm having with other DTM/ DDM, CAD, BIM andIT managers mine is not a unique positio.  We'll be dragged in to it because our industry monopoly will require ir, but we wont be happy.

Particularly when tbe Keynote speech from the CTO and CEO both said, in essence, that Design professionals should give up all rights to their ideas and give them freely to the world.  Because it makes it easier for cloud and big data solutions to share and make money off of them without paying those professionals for the work.

Give me more than a one line throwaway with some subtsance on a real topic for once.  Snark is fine for general bullshitting, but worthless to me on this topic.

It's not a hard thing to explain. Unless you have the resouces of an enormous company, running things in-house has the following disadvantages:

- Less reliability/uptime
- Less accessibility
- More expensive
- More time-consuming for IT to administer

Now, there are going to be some things you don't want to have in the clloud or can't have in the cloud - I'm not ready to embrace cloud phone systems, myself. But in general? It's hard to make a solid argument against it. Yes, your bandwidth costs probably go up; this will likely be more than made up for by the difference in hardware, power, software, and administration costs - it has in every ROI analysis I've done for us so far, at least.

None of these are issues one has with most AutoDesk products, which is why the cloud is so fuckstupid there. They want to serve the software up across an internet connection, touting how you 'wont have to upgrade"   Considering AutoCad can run on an iPad you don't need to upgrade for that at all.  When theres a crash or error its database corruption or user error which cant be resolved by the cloud.

The time consumption for IT (Technically  DT, which is a separate hybrid discipline)  is user education and user error, moving support for those out of house only increases cost due to lost productivity during the wait for support.

The ONE good idea is distributed computing for rendering, analysis and large model management. However, instead of allowing a DR client they want us to use their service, part of which allows them to strip the data from it

[Furiously]

Seems like a pretty easy sell for Microsoft. We'll authenticate everything and no one will be able to pirate your software. I'd totally be all over it if I was adobe or Autodesk.

[Numtini]

Seems like a pretty easy sell for Microsoft. We'll authenticate everything and no one will be able to pirate your software. I'd totally be all over it if I was adobe or Autodesk.

Adobe's already moved to cloud only.

[Lantyssa]

Thankfully it's simple to get a freeware or cheap PDF reader and editor these days that's every bit as good or better.

Also I'm getting really pissed at Flash installing Chrome without asking since it fucks up all the user settings and they're not something end users can fix due to GPO.  The less Adobe, the better.

[Engels]

Thankfully it's simple to get a freeware or cheap PDF reader and editor these days that's every bit as good or better.

Also I'm getting really pissed at Flash installing Chrome without asking since it fucks up all the user settings and they're not something end users can fix due to GPO. 

Not to go on too much of a tangent, but I have run into this but don't know what user settings are messed up. Can you clarify?

[Hammond]

Depending on GPO settings most likely it is the default programs (IE default browser) that gets switched and is locked down. Personally we don't lock that down but many people do.

And seriously just fuck Adobe between the Ask toolbar and Chrome I refuse to use them anymore.

[Yegolev]

When theres a crash or error its database corruption or user error which cant be resolved by the cloud.

I don't believe this is the case, if you have a good vendor.  The asterisk is that you get what you pay for, and also some vendors are awful.

It would probably help everyone here to avoid using "the cloud" as a term and start working with the real industry terms like Saas, NaaS, PaaS, etc.  The elephant analogy is a very good one and applies to blind people that assume they know what an elephant is, rather than have a real investigation into the anatomy.

[Lantyssa]

Yeah, it's based around the default browser.  I always have to go through several settings to fix it though, because of course MS has several ways to set the default and they don't always behave the same.  Because we run VMs though, I generally end up having to make a couple of new images each time it happens until I stumble across the proper ones.

(Really need to make myself a procedural doc, but it's getting stupid how many such things I need to make for assorted work-arounds when I just want to update my programs.)

[Numtini]

Don't worry, they're not going to make any of the low end stuff cloud only. Just Photoshop etc.

And no, afaik, none of it is really cloud based, it's just a subscription checked by internet validation.

[Ironwood]

Like I said, be careful when someone tells you something is Cloud.

Usually, it ain't.

[Fabricated]

relevant:

[Trippy]

Good thing for Microsoft they are stopping Windows 7 shipments next year so the Windows 7 line will no longer continue to climb faster than Windows 8

Edit: to clarify, cause it's not shown in the above chart (different time periods), according to market share data from Net Applications, the Windows 7's market share in November 2013 as a percentage of all Windows installs increased more than Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 combined.

[Ironwood]

It's already hard enough to find Windows 7, but I personally think it's a clownshoes move from MS.  Windows 7 should still be the weapon of choice for Business, but everywhere we're getting Windows 8 Pushed on us and, frankly, it's just not as good.

Most of the Windows 8 Window-dressing is just that.

(See what I did there ?)

[ghost]

For fuck's sake.  I run a business with people that are barely computer literate.  Windows 8 is like trying to get them to read Sanskrit.

[Ingmar]

At least for now all our current vendors here seem to ship everything with Win7 by default unless it has a touch screen.