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