@dustinb3403 said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:

@storageninja said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:

@zachary715 said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:

HIs whole argument here is that it's the public sector which is offering this benefit with "our" tax dollars. I think he's fine with private businesses doing this same matter because they aren't operating with a $20trillion and growing debt with no solution in sight

The alternatives are raising salaries a bunch for government roles (unpopular), or only historically rich, or the very stupid will end up working in government as the private sector absorbs everyone with debt who's smart. All of these options suck

Why are those the only options?

Why not just make people pay their bill, period?

If government continues to pay at LEAST 20% below the free market, we get rid of their pension systems (largely being done at the city and state level) and they can't offer things like loan forgiveness in what world do we not end up with the government full of the dumbest workers?

@hobbit666 said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

@hobbit666 said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

I think the other issue is convincing others of the benefits of hypervisors like XenServer or Hyper-V. I want to use Hyper-V or Xen for 2 new hosts that will have Citrix XenApp running but convincing management to move from ESXi is a struggle but I think this also comes from our MSP that likes ESXi and pushes that even in the FREE version.

That bit comes down to getting management to recognize their buyer's agents from their seller's agents. Once they realize that their MSP is really a VAR and is trying to make a quick buck selling them something, it should change their perspective quickly.

Not that VMware is always bad and anyone pushing it is trying to make a quick buck; only that an MSP making money by selling VMware isn't a trustworthy decision maker in this scenario.

100% Agree - At the moment we are "reviewing" our ESXi farm that currently has a SAN, and we have outgrown it. Every time we talk the instant reaction is NEW SAN with some SSD's for SQL etc etc. I'm thinking no lets look at Hypercoverage or IaaS now

But yeah since I've started here and started to question things the IT manager has been a bit more on my side with thinking

To be fair, Flash drives are at ~50 cents per GB from Dell even, so unless your buying archive storage your getting flash today. Its why when looking at HCI I always say look for something where you can add drives later as this stuff gets cheaper/faster.

@dashrender said in Company Benefits:

@scottalanmiller said in Company Benefits:

Which I always avoided by letting the gov't owe me money. As long as you always do that, they never make you do all that quarterly crap.

There is a threshold where you don't get fined, but I have no idea what it is.

I've owed like $4k before with no penalty.

One off your fine, but since I owed more than $1000 last year I'm expected to make quarterly this year. The rule to handle the weird outliers (oil royalty, winning a lawsuit etc) is make sure you pay them 100% of last years return in quarterly installments (assuming last year wasn't quarterly).

@scottalanmiller said in Company Benefits:

Which I always avoided by letting the gov't owe me money. As long as you always do that, they never make you do all that quarterly crap.

True, but it has to be withheld evenly. In theory paying my CPA to manage the quarterly payments means I can hold onto that cash longer and make more money with it while still fufilling my obligations. Your situation is likely easier as you have deductions (House, Kids), as you can just set your deductions to 0 and still not owe money. I have to set my withholding to 0 THEN add an extra percentage or cash amount to withhold (or write a quarterly check).

@zachary715 said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:

Or raising taxes on everyone to allow gov't employees to be paid comparable wages to privately employed. Still sucks lol

"I'm going to run on a platform of raising taxes to pay government workers more" - Said no one ever.

@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

VMware has a much better support reputation, of course, but pay as you go product support tends to be bad.

Its a lot easier to have a support reputation when you have a HCL, and you have signed agreements from the partners that they will support and ship firmware's for said hardware etc. The devil of any hypervisor is dealing with hardware and having someone's name in blood to hold over their head when their stuff breaks is handy...

@scottalanmiller Some customers (Gov and larger shops) require it before they will sign you up as a vendor at all.

@scottalanmiller said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:

@dustinb3403 said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:

@storageninja said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:

@zachary715 said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:

HIs whole argument here is that it's the public sector which is offering this benefit with "our" tax dollars. I think he's fine with private businesses doing this same matter because they aren't operating with a $20trillion and growing debt with no solution in sight

The alternatives are raising salaries a bunch for government roles (unpopular), or only historically rich, or the very stupid will end up working in government as the private sector absorbs everyone with debt who's smart. All of these options suck

Why are those the only options?

Why not just make people pay their bill, period?

Well, in this case, they are. He's paying it through a signing bonus. So while SOME student debt forgiveness might be a problem because it is not given fairly, that doesn't apply here where it is a signing bonus.

Next up the War on relocation bonuses.
PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE LESS STUFF

The planet a really long time ago was a Dell shop (like8-10 years). Softlayer is a supermicro shop, and stayed that way after IBM bought them. Shortly after this IBM sold off the X servers.

@manxam said in I have $500 spare!:

Invest in TSX symbol WEED when it drops next and wait... ?
Up a little over $21k myself this year with very little invested initially.

WEED: 30 million USD in Revenue. Zero profit, market cap of 21.55B.

I'd have to ask "are you high?"

While Weed will be a big market I don't see it honestly being that hugely profitable for growers in the long run. Retail stores can stock whatever they want, competitors can use delivery to get around your capital investment in stores, strains are not being patented, growing technology does't have enough IP to differentiate, and given the shelf life to oils/waxes/concentrates over lose leaf, I don't see how even having a "fresh" supply chain that's consistent is even that much of an advantage. It's a product that anyone can produce their own supply reasonably easy (This isn't like making industrial amounts of beer/scotch that require lots of storage space, or huge amounts of capital).

Their primary expansion is on the retail side, and they are trading up because retail prices went up (7 to $8a gram). Their valuation is tied to expansion opportunities, and I just don't think they will be able to establish a dominate heavy weight position in EMEA or the US. Their medical business is down on shipments quite a bit.

They are a growth company but nothing excites me about their balance sheet other than having lots of cash to do stupid things with (and drag down the stock price).

@dashrender said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:

As stated above, it's not over a year, but over 10 years, so only $6,300 a year of value.

$6300 plus 0-15% for taxes (I would View this as something more like a stock grant because of the time bomb with it, so it's capital gains long term rates applying here).

@texkonc said in Shots for Scott:

@wirestyle22 said in Shots for Scott:

@minion-queen I'm dying right now

with $150 worth of shots for Scott, yeah he may not fair too well.

Depends What and Where. My John Walker Black was $20 a shot last night. Then again This was where I was drinking it

@StrongBad

At my last job we had some sales guys who used it, but they really used it 100% of the time so they didn't end up with some documents on one laptop, some on the VDI, some on another. I used VDI, but primarily as a jump host to pop from our data center, or if I was traveling with just my iPad, That's another thing, is you REALLY want client designed for iPads with custom gesture support etc. Citrix actually has a bluetooth mouse option even. They wanted to be able to use different devices to access their data and we were using some applications that did not have native mobile, or web apps.

Now the office would loose power, cooling, water etc, and the most effective thing for DR was we all had laptops and would just wander off and find internet somewhere else.

At my new job all of our applications are web based and or have mobile apps. We use a SSO broker system to access those applications (do a 2FA once, and then I can access anything in a single click. I can get into CRM, 365, to payroll or 401K as well as internal web applications. We have VDI but its really only something I use to get behind the firewall and access my labs, and as a company I would argue as an industry we are "moving past" VDI. VDI is not the ultimate form of elegant end user computing management, its a stop towards MAM,MDM, Identify Brokering, etc.

@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:

@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:

@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:

@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:

@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:

@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:

Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here.

IT is business. Business buying fifteen servers to do the job of one is failure. Period. That's what failure means in business - not doing things that are good for the business. You are cherry picking a massive failure (wasting $150K for no reason) and using that failure assumption (where did that come from?) to compare against "what was done."

Buying sixteen servers to do the job of one is literally just like driving the taxi into the brick wall. It's insane, illogical and no one that knows how to drive would do it. So you don't use avoiding brick walls as the baseline for success. You don't use 16,000% overprovisioning as the baseline for success, either.

I didn't say but 16 to do the job of one. I said buy one, where 16 was proposed. Showing you can help a company and steer them in a better direction saving money is a great thing.

But how did sixteen get propose and why was the company talking to someone looking to screw them like that and why was that taken seriously? See the problem? To make the Hyper-V deployment sound "cool" we have to throw the company competence under the bus. And in doing so, we take any value proposition that we add to it along with it because we've only demonstrated that "business smarts" are what was missing.

If the goal is to show business smarts, you can't push business smarts in front of the bus.

Because, whatever reason for any bad project. Whoever can stop bad solution for far better, should say that. Stopping the bollocks up project and putting something better in place is a success.

Not success that you want to brag about to someone else. Telling them that the place you worked for was incompetent but that you were at least "less incompetent" is absolutely not what you want to be showing off on your CV. You want people to want to hire you, not want to avoid you.

Also, you can't explain purchasing scenario's on a resume line. There are too many factors. Maybe that other plan included a DR site and you cut those out in going to "1" server. Maybe you run mission-critical systems that people's lives depend on and you really should have app HA, FT, and VM HA, stretched clusters and other systems and you just went cheap. Maybe the application is used by 1 person and it does nothing and ZERO servers were the right amount. The only case where discussing "number of servers" matters is if the company hiring is looking for skills associated with managing at scale (Someone with 1 Host isn't going to likely know vCenter, OpenManage or SCCM very well). A single server shop tells me that you likely are not familar with remote datacenter operations.

@JaredBusch said in MangoCon 2019:

$281 for Basic Economy from ORD to DFW (United/American)
$282 from MDW to DAL (Southwest)

You don't want Basic Economy. TRUST ME.

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

We have this now and we use the same capacity with replicated local disks as you would with a SAN with RAID 10. Are you using RAID 6 or something else to get more capacity from the SAN than you can with RLS? We aren't wasting any capacity having the extra redundancy and reliability of the local disks with RAIN.

With HDT pools you could have Tier 0 be RAID 5 SSD, RAID 10 for 10K's in the middle Tier, and RAID 6 for NL-SAS with sub-lun block tiering across all of that. Replicated local you generally can't do this (or you can't dynamically expand individual tiers). Now as 10K drives make less sense (hell magnetic drives make less sense) the cost benefits of a fancy tiering system might make less sense. Then again I see HDS doing tiering now between their custom FMD's regular SSD's, and NL's in G series deployments so there's still value in having a big ass array that can do HSM.

@eddiejennings said in Resume Critique:

I'm still young within my IT career, so it's not going to be possible for me to craft an impressive, look-at-what-all-I-have-built-and-managed resume and have that resume be connected to reality at this time.

It is not about age or time in the field. I had a resume better than most people with 10-15 years experience less than 3 years in the field. Find the right job (Consulting for a partner/VAR/MSP) and this can change VERY VERY quickly.

@scottalanmiller His previous RAIN system (HP Store Virtual) requires local RAID. So your stuck with nested RAID 5's (Awful IO performance) or nested RAID 10 (awful capacity capabilities, but great residency). Considering the HDS has 5 nines already though kinda moot.

@tim_g Billionaires are outliers. Using them as a straw-man for college success or not vs. actual data is.... well a bad idea.

I'd also point out that some of the tech ones (Gates, Jobs) still went to college, and built their initial network there. Maybe they didn't need to graduate, but the first 2 years of classes (and more importantly) connections got them where they are now.

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@hutchingsp said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

In the end I ruled it out because it introduces more complexity than I wanted...

I'm confused here. How does RLS introduce more complexity? Our RLS system is so simple I couldn't possible install any enterprise SAN on the market as easily. It takes literally no knowledge or setup at all. We are using Scale's RLS hyperconverged system and I literally cannot fathom it being easier today. Just making a LUN would be more complex than using RLS alone. Just needing to know that you need to make a LUN is more complex. With the RLS that we have, you just "use it". If you want more power, you can choose to manage your performance tiering manually, but there is no need to if you don't want to as it does it automatically for you out of the box.

To be fair in comparison he could have deployed Hitachi Unified Compute (Their CI stack) and gotten the same experience (basically someone builds out the solution for you and gives you pretty automated tools to abstract the complexity away, as well as have API drive endpoints for provisioning against etc). This isn't an argument for an architecture (and I like HCI, I REALLY do) this is an argument about build vs. buy your making. HCI with VSA's can be VERY damn complicated. HCI can be very simple (especially when it's built by someone else). CI can do this too.

@mike-davis said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:

and think about investments instead of just listening to the mantra that if you go to college you'll earn more money.

If you want kids to think about investments some advise....

1. Against the Gods. https://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp/0471295639
   Teaches them Risk, and why humans are terrible at it.

2. Freakanomics. Applied statistics. (Also a fun read)

3. A random walk down Wall Street. - Good overview of why as a retail investor what your place in the world is.

Listen:

Planet money (NPR) Good podcast on all things money, finance, stats.
Freakanomics podcast - good fun trivial around stats.

Subscriptions:

Read the WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/ Well worth the subscription. I started reading USA today in first grade, but I moved onto the WSJ for biz coverage, and CSM for current events.

The Economist. Gives them a good neo liberal view of global economics with some realpolitik mixed in.