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[#] Wed Jun 01 2016 14:19:54 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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*Any* computer without a network connection is pretty much a doorstop now.
Take away the network and you restrict a computer's use to a very small number of practical use cases.

[#] Wed Jun 01 2016 16:49:34 EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold

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2016-06-01 14:19 from IGnatius T Foobar @uncnsrd
*Any* computer without a network connection is pretty much a doorstop

now.
Take away the network and you restrict a computer's use to a very
small number of practical use cases.


Back to workload.

If I'm on an airplane without internet, I can write documents, edit photos, listen to music, read a book, etc.etc with a tablet or real computer.

Hell, I can even respond to emails and they will be sent when I reconnect.

No such option with a Chromebook.

[#] Wed Jun 01 2016 16:52:09 EDT from zooer

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Google docs has an offline mode if you use google docs.



[#] Wed Jun 01 2016 16:55:45 EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold

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2016-06-01 16:52 from zooer @uncnsrd
Google docs has an offline mode if you use google docs.


Ahh, you are correct. But nothing else syncs with the Google drive from what I can see, strictly Google Docs items - and (I'm sorry this seems silly) it doesn't do it by default.

[#] Wed Jun 01 2016 17:29:03 EDT from LoanShark

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Tablets are the future for much of the population - in the very long run, you won't need a "real" computer, for an increasing percentage of your tasks.

Tablets are *not* toys.

I know nothing about Chromebooks, that said.

[#] Wed Jun 01 2016 20:54:24 EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold

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LS - You're probably right.... We're slowly moving toward SaaS and "light" clients. There may be a backlash though. Large companies might look at CapEx vs. OpEx, but for most companies and people, cash is king. And most people don't want more and more monthly charges.


[#] Wed Jun 01 2016 21:48:26 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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I still think the obvious win, at least for larger organizations with IT departments and/or specific security needs, is a set of easy-to-deploy applications that enable the thin client model on your own servers. Google Apps and Office 365 are geared towards putting everything on Google Drive or OneDrive. A lot of organizations want to be liberated from the hassles of supporting "fat" clients, but aren't thrilled about shipping out the server tasks.

Look at the popularity of OwnCloud. People *love* that thing, and it doesn't really do all that much.

LibreOffice has something like that too, but it's really just the existing application being rendered through a browser window. I can see advantages and disadvantages of doing it that way vs. writing an HTML-based renderer.

And I think Office 365 would have less uptake if Microsoft wasn't deliberately making Exchange so hard to install that it takes a small army of MCSE's and no fewer than six servers to support even the smallest organization.

[#] Wed Jun 01 2016 22:08:58 EDT from LoanShark

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If you're building a brand new company today, you're doing it in the cloud, to the extent feasible. You're going to use a Gmail-hosted domain for all your email, Exchange will be irrelevant because you have Google Calendar. You have Google Drive sharing as a poor-man's substitute for Sharepoint or whateverthefuck you used to use. I probably shouldn't say poor-man's because although I don't know much about Sharepoint, I never saw of it as much more of a glorified file server.

You have:

PagerDuty as the last-mile of your monitoring-and-alerting solution
Expensify or Concur for receipts
Even iDoneThis for timesheets - perhaps

You will use hosted Jira for *everything* - there's a whole development ecosystem here:
- hosted Elastic Bamboo for builds
- Jira for tasks and time sheets
- Confluence for your Wiki
- Bitbucket for your Git server
All 4 of the above are hosted, you are not installing anything on your own infrastructure.

We have *nothing* on our own physical infrastructure. We have a Wifi router. That's it. We used to have a little Linux box that was built to power flat panel display monitors that run stuff that makes us look cool. That has been decomissioned since the latest office move.

Of course, you still need Macbooks. It is not yet possible to do software development on an iPad.


Nor do we have anything deployed in a traditional "colocation" provider. Every box we run is on hardware that is provisioned with mouse clicks.

We have use hosted Newrelic for server monitoring.

there are a few legacy-ish things that I want to get rid of that are not "hosted", that are instead built out on EC2 deployments. There's an LDAP server that was a mistake, that will go away if I can ever find the time to make it disappear. There's an indispensable Splunk installation that is not "hosted" in the normal sense: we still manage its infrastructure by managing the EC2 box that hosts it.

Some of these things are more pricey than we would like. But there is at least one head that we do not have to employ that we would otherwise have to employ, and our infrastructure investment is more *predictable*, which may ultimately trump low cost.


We do not have any IT staff. None. Only developers. And it's starting to feel like a mid-size company.

I'm still changing the fucking LDAP passwords, that needs to stop.

[#] Wed Jun 01 2016 22:37:36 EDT from zooer

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The company I worked for ten years ago had google for your domain, we shared docs and I believe it was our domain's email but gmail handled it.



[#] Thu Jun 02 2016 08:16:23 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Jira (et al) is actually a pretty good example of what I was trying to point out.  Atlassian offers the software as a service *or* as a set of applications you can install on your own server.   Some customers are going to choose the maintenance-free, pay-forever model.  Others are going to choose the some-maintenance, pay-once model.  Kudos to Atlassian for giving customers the choice.  I think that's the right way to go.

What "your own server" looks like has already changed, of course.  The dusty box in the closet is already long gone.



[#] Thu Jun 02 2016 13:57:11 EDT from LoanShark

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Well, that happened... I write that big email, and then I found that that Bamboo Cloud is being EOL'd at the beginning of next year.

We can choose between the new product, Bitbucket Pipelines and a free perpetual Bamboo Server license. Umm, yay?

[#] Thu Jun 02 2016 15:24:25 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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I don't know much about Sharepoint, I never saw of it as much more of a glorified file server.

Sharepoint has NO USEFUL PURPOSE.  It is nothing more than a wiki that can only handle attachments, no text.

I've been through a couple of mergers now where everyone has a wiki, everyone prefers their wiki, but the direction is to move everything over to Sharepoint.  Because Sharepoint.  No particularly good reason.  That kind of thinking is the only reason Sharepoint gets used at all.



[#] Thu Jun 02 2016 17:37:46 EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold

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The latest version of Sharepoint is so big and bloated, it's next to useless.

[#] Thu Jun 02 2016 18:10:24 EDT from the_mgt

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That goes along the line of "the reason for exchange is outlook" and "the reason for outlook is office business/pro"

I sadly have only two reasonable clients that use thunderbird. All other use Outlook, despite of all the shortcomings.

And yes, all your cloud models that are free now will probably introduce a fee at one point. Sugar sync did that, I replaced it with Seafile. Dyndns did that, and I think that was one of the dirtiest stunts ever pulled on the internet. Luckily, there are enough alternatives. Oh, and for google services, you are already paying with your privacy. 



[#] Fri Jun 03 2016 07:55:29 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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I haven't seen any alternatives to Dyn that don't either (1) charge a fee, or (2) require you to periodically visit their web site (presumably to view ads).  Are there any?



[#] Fri Jun 03 2016 11:08:28 EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold

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Check out NoIP......


http://www.noip.com/integrate

They give you an API to create your own client.

[#] Fri Jun 03 2016 12:40:02 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Definitely better than Dyn, but they do require an interactive confirmation on their web site every 30 days. That's what I'm trying to avoid.

[#] Fri Jun 03 2016 18:03:28 EDT from the_mgt

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I use http://freedns.afraid.org 

The have a lovely list of domains to choose from and should be supported by ddclient (in a recent enough version or with a patch, I do not remember). The service is supported by my router, so I stopped worrying.



[#] Fri Jun 03 2016 18:04:33 EDT from the_mgt

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Oh, and NoIP tends to forget to send you the nag-email, it runs at a clients side for about 2 years now, without anybody clicking any emails.



[#] Fri Jun 03 2016 21:02:59 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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All right ... giving afraid.org a try. I like how it's a community project (but seems to be sufficiently large with enough paying members that it's not going away anytime soon).

Now I just wish I didn't have to use the stock firmware on my MI424WR to keep the MoCA working.

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