Windows 8

[Fabricated]

Here in academia we've done a lot of Citrix remote software/desktop shit and the general consensus among the users, IT staff, faculty, and the high level staff is that while it serves a purpose it fucking sucks. Desktops aren't going anywhere, anytime soon. If you do any work that is reasonably processor intensive (i.e. almost everything that isn't office) the cloud is awful and sucks.

[Engels]

The problem is that the bean counters, executives and their personal assistants only use a browser and office.

Don't get me wrong, as a IT dude, I do have a vested interest in desktop support, but its not simply that. To me it all smells a bit like a diffusion of responsibility going on here. Throw it all up in the cloud, knowing full well in the back of your mind that you're giving up control to some nameless people in some data center somewhere that have poor customer service lines of communication, and hope for the best. It'll work great for a while, I'm sure. We have all sorts of hardware redundancies now that mask failures in infrastructure rather well, but in the end, you have a heck of a lot of moving parts that you have no direct control over whatsoever.

If I were a conscientious IT manager of a firm that relies on a 2nd party cloud I'd be a bit apprehensive.

[Salamok]

Here in academia we've done a lot of Citrix remote software/desktop shit and the general consensus among the users, IT staff, faculty, and the high level staff is that while it serves a purpose it fucking sucks. Desktops aren't going anywhere, anytime soon. If you do any work that is reasonably processor intensive (i.e. almost everything that isn't office) the cloud is awful and sucks.

Running desktop apps via citrix is a crap user experience.  I was talking about the complete replacement of desktop apps with web app equivalents.  There isn't a need for your accounting, mail, word processing (not desktop publishing), order/issue tracking, marketing, etc... software to be a desktop application and there are very good reasons for them to be web applications.   I can totally see all of the general office form entry class of applications moving to the web and that + email + word/excel/powerpoint pretty much covers the vast majority of office computer use.  All of the heavy content creation type of apps (desktop publishing, CAD, photoshop, video/audio editing, things that need to be compiled, etc...) are for the technically skilled minority and even some of those are available as web apps.

The problem is that the bean counters, executives and their personal assistants only use a browser and office.

(edit: aka the majority) and those are the people who don't need a desktop.

Don't get me wrong, as a IT dude, I do have a vested interest in desktop support, but its not simply that. To me it all smells a bit like a diffusion of responsibility going on here. Throw it all up in the cloud, knowing full well in the back of your mind that you're giving up control to some nameless people in some data center somewhere that have poor customer service lines of communication, and hope for the best. It'll work great for a while, I'm sure. We have all sorts of hardware redundancies now that mask failures in infrastructure rather well, but in the end, you have a heck of a lot of moving parts that you have no direct control over whatsoever.

If I were a conscientious IT manager of a firm that relies on a 2nd party cloud I'd be a bit apprehensive.

Albeit we have more resources and little to no sense of fiscal responsibility where I work but we have created quite a few in-house web apps hosted on our intranet that have eliminated the need for some fairly expensive niche desktop solutions.  The code and maintenance is 100% under our control, web applications != cloud or at least sometimes the cloud is inside your network.

[Engels]

See, although for desktops it spells out the same kinda doomed fate, for me in-house application servers are a different fish altogether. I'd be overjoyed if all I had to do to hook up the new secretary is point to a bookmark in her browser that launched a web-app that's hosted in the downstairs basement. The issue begins when your in-house app is actually hosted on a cluster on a server farm in bucksnort corn country and there's two dudes there manning the phones.

[Lantyssa]

Do they even know what a computer is in Bucksnort?  It's a pretty small town.

[Fabricated]

Here in the midwest we prefer the term BFE, or Buttfuck Egypt.

Also webapps are 99% trash if Banner, Cognos, Blackboard, etc are any indication. Google Docs is about the best webapp I've used and it's pretty limited. I imagine webapps will improve like anything else but they're not terribly awesome right now.

[Chimpy]

Dear god, BANNER 

What a god awful combination of Java and ActiveX dependencies.

[Fabricated]

I enjoyed how we had to support desktops with ancient and wildly unsafe versions of Java we couldn't update until as recently as 3-4 months ago. That was almost as boss as the awful custom-written app one business office used that literally required Firefox 2.something and would work with nothing else.

[KallDrexx]

Hah at least you weren't screwed like we were at work.  We use java applets a ton, mostly for transfering extremely large video files to our servers for processing without the slowness of HTTP.  And since we do a ton of video production we have a lot of macs.

And Apple decided to be the one and only deciders of what goes on their platform, pushed out a security update that fixed a security vulnerability in java applets in Safari.  And by fixed they literally just uninstalled java from the systems......

[Fabricated]

We have domain Macs and they're awful. Just awful. I know because my primary computer is one. I have a Domain Mac and run an RDP session into my PC desktop for SCCM and the like.

I like Spaces, iTerm, and that's about it. At the time we didn't have an extra monitor and I don't work without at least 2, so I took my one PC monitor and ran it into the Mac. We do have more monitors now and newer PCs...I should just ditch the Mac but eh.

[Yegolev]

This thread is like Computer Politics.  Cloud is ObamaCare and this is a conservative forum.

I'll have a chance to try Win8 in March, I think.  My primary question will be if I can roll it back to W7 if I don't like it.

[ghost]

My feeling is that Windows 8 would be an unmitigated disaster on laptops that aren't equipped with a touch screen.  Using a little trackpad to do the gestures would be terribly irritating and my friends that really hate it so far are trying to use it on laptops. 

[Fabricated]

Just to give you idea how bad Windows 8 is; most of the biggest changes like full-screen metro apps and gestures and all that were the big features added to OSX Lion and not even the biggest douchebag Apple lover I know likes them in OSX. Most people hate the way full screen apps work in OSX, hate its shitty multiple monitor support, and don't use or like the gestures.

[Lantyssa]

Here in the midwest we prefer the term BFE, or Buttfuck Egypt.

Bucksnort is an actual town in Tennessee.

I use BFE as well, though my Bee stands for Bum.

[Hammond]

We have domain Macs and they're awful. Just awful. I know because my primary computer is one. I have a Domain Mac and run an RDP session into my PC desktop for SCCM and the like.

I like Spaces, iTerm, and that's about it. At the time we didn't have an extra monitor and I don't work without at least 2, so I took my one PC monitor and ran it into the Mac. We do have more monitors now and newer PCs...I should just ditch the Mac but eh.

What program are you  guys using to integrate the Macs into the domain? I have been working with centrify a bit and overall it seems fairly straight forward.

[Sky]

Just to give you idea how bad Windows 8 is; most of the biggest changes like full-screen metro apps and gestures and all that were the big features added to OSX Lion and not even the biggest douchebag Apple lover I know likes them in OSX. Most people hate the way full screen apps work in OSX, hate its shitty multiple monitor support, and don't use or like the gestures.

Yes. I recently added a second monitor and the menu bar being tied to the main display is a total pita. I do like it for GIMP, but most other things are a hassle.

I'll have to monitor our local apple fanatic and see if he's using any of it.

[Fabricated]

What program are you  guys using to integrate the Macs into the domain? I have been working with centrify a bit and overall it seems fairly straight forward.

We use centrify; I don't work the Mac queue so I haven't messed with it much. Getting the Macs on the domain isn't bad, it's just that it's fucking dreadful to actually use it.

We use roaming profiles (which Microsoft pretty much says not to do anymore) because they're so useful, and we handle the roaming profiles in an...interesting manner.

Every user has drive space on their home server (of which there are several; we have thousands of users) which runs solaris; your roaming profile is stored in a folder on that space. So you log in to the domain from any computer, it pulls down your profile from your personal space. It's a Samba share so it works fine with Windows...Macs? Not as good. Basically anything that touches your profile (like changing the main program options in Firefox) will get you a good 30 seconds of beachball.

I mean, it works, but it runs poorly. And hardware won't fix it; it's just the way we have everything set up so your shit properly follows you around campus. Most of our Mac users ask to go self-supported (non-domain), which lets them run off the domain and have administrative access but we only provide redeployment (i.e. reinstalling your OS and providing access to any software we provide) support then.

[Hammond]

What program are you  guys using to integrate the Macs into the domain? I have been working with centrify a bit and overall it seems fairly straight forward.

We use centrify; I don't work the Mac queue so I haven't messed with it much. Getting the Macs on the domain isn't bad, it's just that it's fucking dreadful to actually use it.

We use roaming profiles (which Microsoft pretty much says not to do anymore) because they're so useful, and we handle the roaming profiles in an...interesting manner.

Every user has drive space on their home server (of which there are several; we have thousands of users) which runs solaris; your roaming profile is stored in a folder on that space. So you log in to the domain from any computer, it pulls down your profile from your personal space. It's a Samba share so it works fine with Windows...Macs? Not as good. Basically anything that touches your profile (like changing the main program options in Firefox) will get you a good 30 seconds of beachball.

I mean, it works, but it runs poorly. And hardware won't fix it; it's just the way we have everything set up so your shit properly follows you around campus. Most of our Mac users ask to go self-supported (non-domain), which lets them run off the domain and have administrative access but we only provide redeployment (i.e. reinstalling your OS and providing access to any software we provide) support then.

Thanks for the info!   I do find it more than a little funny that the Samba shares work better in windows than on Mac OS in your situation. 

As  far as my situation goes thankfully these are dedicated machines so no roaming profiles and it is a fairly small group (5 people).  We just want to integrate them into the domain for simplicity sake for printers, file shares etc.  They are all software engineers so the support is thankfully pretty low. 

[Fabricated]

I imagine domain macs work well in small domains. It's just that if you need to get a little esoteric or support shitloads of users the scalability punches out pretty quick.

[ghost]

I bought a Lenovo Yoga for the office this weekend.  It's really pretty damned awesome. 

[Count Nerfedalot]

Well, our state agency may be on its last hardware update for awhile, the next iteration is likely to be virtual PCs.  *gag*  I only hope IT/development manages to keep decent desktop horsepower.  More and more of our app UI's are being written as Web apps anyway, but Word or Excel on a VM even just running across town with all Gigabit fiber is still a PITA when some clown copies a database backup to/from the same server hardware during the business day.  It's like the good ole days of DOS when you could read faster than the list of files scrolled by when you did a "dir".   

Sadly all our database and web servers are already virtualized (and performance has been great 90% of the time and atrocious the other 10% for mysterious reasons we no longer have the ability to discover or correct), but at least there's little chance of those being moved outside our control and to the cloud.  Given that the Legislature would crucify folks if any data got hacked from the cloud, said folks are not likely to allow the data to be moved out there without said Legislature passing a law mandating it!  But the handwriting is on the wall for the desktops I'm afraid.

That said, our IT vision guy was all for Windows 8 because he liked the idea of its common UI across multiple platforms until last week when he trialed a Windows RT(?) phone.  Now I think it's safe to say we'll be skipping Win 8 unless/until there are some drastic changes.  Development just finished moving to Windows 7, but all our users are still on XP SP3 and we are just starting to think about migrating them to Win 7 anyway.  Surely by the time we get around to considering Win 8 there will be an obviously better alternative out.    Unless Microsoft somehow cons somebody with more clout than brains into believing that Win 8 is the only way to virtualize successfully and he drinks the coolaid about how much cheaper the TCO will be per seat.   

[tgr]

Unless Microsoft somehow cons somebody with more clout than brains into believing that Win 8 is the only way to virtualize successfully and he drinks the coolaid about how much cheaper the TCO will be per seat.    

This will, of course, happen.

[Numtini]

our users are still on XP SP3

What are you doing about a browser. I'm getting people bitching about websites giving warnings about the old version of IE?

Virtual desktops. Ugh.

[Chimpy]

our users are still on XP SP3

What are you doing about a browser. I'm getting people bitching about websites giving warnings about the old version of IE?

Virtual desktops. Ugh.

IE8 still is supported by most websites I have seen.

But the real answer is to push people to an alternative browser (Firefox with ADBlock installed in our case) as much as possible.

[Fabricated]

The problem is that there are webapps that don't run well on anything but IE still because welp niche market controlled by bad company. See: Cognos, Banner, Blackboard

[Numtini]

Yeah, the local counties have a document management system that's an IE only monstrosity.

[HaemishM]

internet Explorer in every form is the bane of my fucking existence. Even 9 is a shit shit shitty shit piece of shit shit shit that acts like it's a drunken sailor on shore leave and web display standards are not even remotely hot chicks walking by it on the street.

[Count Nerfedalot]

our users are still on XP SP3

What are you doing about a browser. I'm getting people bitching about websites giving warnings about the old version of IE?

Virtual desktops. Ugh.

IE8 is the only officially supported browser.  IE 9, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and I think Safari are reluctantly allowed but you're on your own.  Many of our internal state apps don't work.  Ah, ahem.  I meant to say don't work in anything but I.E. but a period snuck in there somehow!    Lot's of stuff based on SAP for example, which surprises me greatly, but it might just be ignorant implementation - we don't use it in our agency.  Most of our public-facing sites don't work in Firefox either, apparently thanks to SharePoint being a skanky bitch although again that might not be a problem if properly implemented.

Other websites? We have a whole layer of bureaucracy dedicated to scanning daily proxy reports on every single web click by every single one of the states ~30000 employees to make sure nobody spends $0.10 of state resources browsing the web for personal use/entertainment (actual enforcement varies by agency but it's all pretty heavy handed).  Your tax dollars being spent profusely to ensure that not a dime is wasted!  But the good news is we probably can't safely go to those newfangled fancy-dancy websites anyway because the proxy hit would get us in trouble. 

And yes, virtual desktops. Ugh.

[Lantyssa]

The problem is that there are webapps that don't run well on anything but IE still because welp niche market controlled by bad company. See: Cognos, Banner, Blackboard

This is our problem.  Also I've got automation scripts that IE 9 breaks and I could never find a work around for.

We're already running Term Server, so we'll see how the virtual desktops go.  I'm sure I'll be in the fetal position over work in a few months.

[Chimpy]

Banner is the worst as until just recently it was not supported on browsers above IE8 AND it requires java.

[tgr]

Sysadmin reacts to Windows 8:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4VtNLl6Ca4

 

[HaemishM]

Our sysadmin installed it on a PC next to me at work today, attached it to a big touchscreen HDTV (though he hasn't enabled the touchscreen yet). I played around with it.

WHY? Dear... fucking... God... why? As a desktop OS, this serves no purpose. Using Metro with a mouse is painful and idiotic. Within 10 minutes had found a problem already. Load our company web site in Metro IE10 and the Flash video we have on the home page (not my choice) doesn't work. Flash Player itself doesn't work right. Load the SAME PAGE in IE10 through the desktop, shit works just fine.

Now I'm going to have to test web sites in both IE10 desktop and this shittastic fucking abomination Metro. Like I didn't have enough fucking issues with IE fucking 9.

Fuck you, Microsoft.

[Ironwood]

Also, Azure doesn't backup.

They really ought to just roll over and DIE.

[Yegolev]

Times like this make me glad I went in a different direction.  Specifically what I mean is that the OS I understand isn't also used by normal people.  I feel bad for your guys.

[Engels]

It is a bit odd that the most popular OS company is now also producing the most byzantine OS ever.