OSU backed itself into the championship by the virtue of other decent teams in front of them losing their final game. But as their band noticed, it’s bad news:
They have to go up against an SEC team. Remember what happened the last time OSU faced real athletes (in football and basketball):
Tigers by 3 touchdowns.
It’s always fun to read email from folks that just discovered Vladville and watch their horror / dismay / confusion or outright anger having read stuff here. The other day I got an email which basically said the following (paraphrased):
Hi Vlad, I’m a long time customer and I just found out your Vladville blog. Very insightful but I am a little surprised by the tone. Do you find that works or do you just not care (is it meant to blow off steam or is it intentionally like that)…. the jist of the last paragraph is that she knows I’m not illiterate and she knows how good I am so she wants to know what the trick is.
OWN does business all over the world, yet our most dominant area and frankly some of our best partners come out of UK. At the same time, Brit’s happen to be the most reserved and appropriate folks I have ever met. I’m fairly confident that the SBS Show banter Chris and I used to have would get us thrown into a jail over there. Thats why we don’t travel abroad. Yet, I’ve always enjoyed more traffic from UK than places like North Carolina. Sure, many will point out “First in flight, 48th in education” line from The Simpsons but regardless of location, nationality or literacy level, people respond to humor.
Frankly, professional writing hurts. Majority of people no longer have an attention span to read a full paragraph. They seek headlines, highlight boxes, pictures and visual distractions that take away from careful consideration of the message. Have you ever wondered why I have bothered to take screenshots of me right clicking and showing the shortcut context menu? Why I have to bold face things like Next > Finish? Why I now spend time recording videos because people are allergic to text?
People.. don’t.. read.. And if they do read, they do not comprehend or at the very highest level of intellect, they don’t remember. Everyone remembers a video of me smacking Indian in a Bucket on the head, but I get questions every day about Exchange 2007, SP1, if it will work on 32bit hardware and other items I have discussed here hundreds of times.
Certain things stand out. Prostitutes for example. Have you ever NOT noticed a prostitute? You are more likely to notice a prostitute than a traffic signal – in part because they wear shinier clothing. So people can see them at night! Do you think it’s a coincidence that the Cingular logo is blinding orange and white, that Sprint is flourescent yellow or and Verizon is pulsing red against a black background? Why not a nice earth tone, that blends in with the background. Ahaaaaaaaaaa! Gotcha.
You see, nobody actually reads the crap trade press puts out. They throw it on the coffee table in the break room, they skim it, see it on the side or maybe at the corner of their screen. And thats the people that try to stay informed. Why? Because you’ve read that news article 50 times and you can guess what 51st is going to sound like too: “Nothing happened. One partner sees the next coming of Christ, the other flushes reseller agreement down a toilet.”
Just because a random journalist needed to squeeze out 1,000 words doesn’t mean that there is any value in it, particularly when it’s packed with 5 irrelevant quotes just to fill the copy – trust me, NOBODY needs to see all that just to figure out how Symantec is yet again going to fuck up it’s SMB approach.
And therein lies the big secret. Since the beginning of press people have been trying to get attention. We’re in 2007 – blogs, new media, connections and personal experiences are thriving. Newspapers and magazines are dying – so why the hell would you want to imitate something that the audience does not want and is completely fed up with? More importantly, if you had a message that you wanted people to hear should you deliver it in a professional, authorative and overbearing way that they will ignore, or do you smack a picture of Brianna Banks and correlate her body of work to what the government and corporate lobbying is doing to the US consumer?
I work with over 10,000 companies so I’m willing to bet that amounts to over 50,000 people that I would like to stay in the IT business and not a day goes by that someone else doesn’t find this blog and contemplates the same profession. No, I will never make $26,000 a year as a professional journalist nor is this blog going to be printed and submitted for a Pulitzer.
But the message will come across, at the end of the day we’re all trying to get better at what we do and I’m doing my part to share what I know because I believe it benefits my audience. Why did I let you in on this? Because I hope you do the same. The difficult question is whether it is better to be thought of as an ass/joker or not to be thought of at all. I guess it’s a personality thing.
In the meantime, I get my SBS news from an accountant, I thank tens of thousands of you that give me your attention each week, I thank you all for coming back and I have my very own empirical evidence that nobody pays attention to the professional blogs.
Got something to say? Do it in a way that will make people listen.
It’s Sunday, so I figured it would be a good time to go over some reprints & corrections.
Why don’t you do more ______?
Because I am not your monkey and you’re not paying for this.
Will the Vladville Newsletter have the same stuff as the blog?
What would be the point of putting together a newsletter if its just the same stuff all over again? No, the newsletter will not just be a dump of the old blog posts but the review of the topics in a more thought thought through way along with the reactions the readers send in.
I have a blog, why don’t you link to me like you do Susan?
Unless I am directly responding to a blog post or have a link handy, I do not waste my time trying to get the exact URL for a trackback. This is not out of malice, but if I can’t remember your URL off the top of my head while I’m writing it’s not going to happen. If you want a link try thinking of a better address than blogizer.hitechnetcomsultantizerous359.com/blogrant
I love your blog (bs, bs, bs) Can I buy advertising here? I have a book opportunity, I have a lead, I have a ghost writer, I have a magazine column, I have a blog network, I want to buy your domains….
No.
Why are you switching to a Mac?
I am not. I am just building one for support. I am not switching to a Mac.
Is it really true that more people are buying Mac’s than PC’s?
Far from it. Look at the Linux-is-coming post from last night, there is a lot of buzz but buzz often does not translate into reality. However, as Apple goes from 3% to 9% market share it is harder to dismiss offering support to the people foolish enough to buy one. I don’t have to respect them to take their money.
Is Vista really that bad?
No, it’s not. There has been a far bigger blowback from Office 2007 than there has been from Vista. In a few dozen cases people rolled back because of the trialware Office 2007 people put onto the PCs and folks became too frustrated with the new Office 2007 ribon interface that they demanded Vista be removed. When someone is pissed off they tend not to listen to reason. I have a love-hate relationship with my Outlook, I haven’t downgraded but I have moved to Outlook Web Access 2007.
What do you want for Christmas?
Anything from Despair, Inc. In particular the big framed lithographs, $109. In particular, Consistency, Consulting, Failure, Incompetence, Mediocrity, Potential, Meetings and of course, Dispair. If you’re not into sending some blog guy a $100 gift, anything from Think Geek will work. Shirt size L.
What does NSFW mean?
It means “not safe for work” anotherwords, reading this will likely get you fired.
When is the new OWN Newsletter going to come out? When is the Vladville newsletter going to come out? When is the next Vladcast, VladFire, SBS Show, video…
Tomorrow, Eventually, Never..
Have a nice Sunday folks, get out there!
Warning: Clicking on the links in this post will get you fired/divorced. But if you were not expecting that you wouldn’t be here anyhow.
In a fake show of concern for the consumer, FCC did something nice in its act of collectively screwing us all by letting AT&T “ma bell” come back together. A reach-around if you will. They mandated that AT&T must offer DSL service “naked” – without the mandatory phone line and its associated fake taxes – you know, the ones paying off the Spanish-American war of 1898 or the ones paying off the infrastructure investment made by phone companies, something we in business world call cost-of-doing-business.
That’s right, depening on the territory you live in you can get AT&T naked DSL for $23–26 in the midwest and north, below $20 on the west coast but in Florida it’s still $49. If you can cheat the online ordering system and get it for about $20 in Florida. Worth the try!
But at least we won! Eh, no, not so much. You see, they only made them offer it for 30 months after which they can force people back into their bundles. This is the example of your government working for you. They take a huge, anticompetitive company and force it to offer a pricing tier thats far below the market cost, assuring a prompt destruction of any third party providers in the area. After they have destroyed their competitors and fired half their staff in the synergy-optimization benefits, AT&T will go back to the government, cry about how much money it is losing and seek permission to pound the consumer even harder.
So dear friends, this is far less of a reach-around and more of something that only Ms. Brianna Banks will do on contract video. (off-topic: Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.)
I hope you have been exhaustively offended by this post and can remember it the next time you feel our country needs a few less lawyers or feel a company has been punished too much. FCC, through this double whammy, has singlehandedly shot us back 20 years in terms of choice and nearly negated the benefits received from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which was meant to foster competition. Corporations are only motivated by the greed of their shareholders without concern for the public and they deserve every bit of regulatory beatdown sent down by the goverenment.
Unfortunately, government and corporations seem to be getting together and we’re left behind in Brianna’s shoes heels.
Do you find yourself puzzled by all the buzz surrounding the latest low cost gadgets running Linux? If you’re not that good at counting you might even think the buzz is translating into a huge opportunity. Well, no. Not really. But there is a lot of buzz. So let’s take a look at it:
First and perhaps most impressive is the EeePC from Asus, a $400 laptop, that seems to be on the neverending wishlists mostly because retailers are getting less than 10 of them at a time and it’s sold out everywhere. Coming in at under 2lb, and with a 7” screen, 4GB flash drive (1.4GB available for storage) and a 900 MHz processor this device is as unimpressive as it’s battery life.
Second, and most interestingly completely sold out Everex TC2505 gPC at Walmart, is a $200 PC. Built around the premise that all applications will be web based and delivered through the cloud, gPC is pitched as a strict web device. Not that you can expect a lot more from this 1.5 GHz VIA C7 powered system that has sold out the entire initial shipment of 10,000.
Coming in third, for the sake of cutting down this near infinite list of Linux contenders, is Dell with competitors both unique and weird. Dell is rumored to have sold over 40,000 Dell / Ubuntu PC’s, likely one for each person that signed a petition for Dell to offer Ubuntu.
Honorable mention is also in order for OLPC XO laptop, ugly enough to make a third world child cry, which at least has a wonderful moral mission of providing children in third world countries with access to technology long before they are enslaved by Microsoft technical support and forced to say their name is Abraham or Roger. 
So what’s going on here…
Some of us that have been around for a while remember the nearly weekly announcements of NetBSD being ported from one appliance to another. Everything down right to a toaster seemed to get NetBSD support. This tradition of people porting operating systems to things that aren’t powerful enough to even control the lights in your bathroom continued into the new millenium, with Mini-ITX cases and boards, often available for as little as $50 with the motherboard and chip included and completely integrated – just supply case/power and storage.
Point is, the low end of the market is not really as low as we may imagine, at least not for the essential “computer user” operations like document management, surving and maybe some basic media.
So are we seeing a revolutionary new offering catering to the side of the market that has traditionally been ignored, or are we seeing the same old thing with some crafty demand management?
IMHO, what we see here is nothing new, at least not technically. Geeks have always been willing to part with small sums of money for the gadget power and the ability to say “My ___ runs Linux.”; What does seem to be new is that the Linux gadget makers may have mastered the intentional supply chain mismanagement to artificially paint the illusion of high demand. For Dell, Ubuntu is a failure – 40,000 machines is nothing. But if you ship 4 Eee’s and all 4 sell out, you’ve got a winner on your hands. People start tracking web sites so you can see where you can buy one, one shows up on eBay at 4x the cost… you have a winner, right?
If you’re terribly bad at math, yes. Otherwise, you’ve got maybe 50,000 systems that cost 20–40% less than the entry level systems offered by Dell and HP, but far, far, far less functionality. The moral of the story is to always keep an eye open for the contenders but also to see it in the context of the big picture.
Dear friends, it’s a sad day in Vladville if I’m putting together Mac’s. Sad as it may be, the customer is always right and the customer seems to be buying more Mac’s than Windows as of late and I too must become familiar with what they are using. As of late there has been a huge scene behind OS X on non-Apple hardware so I figured I’d give it a shot and put together a Hackintosh.
Hardware
First and most important part of the purchase was the motherboard. I chose the ASRock ConRoe1333 powered by the Intel 945 chipset and ICH7 southbridge which a number of people were successful with in their Hackintosh rollout. I chose ASRock because it’s an offbrand ASUS that can handle both beating and overclocking. Not to mention that this is a fully integrated board with video, sound, NIC, and more so no need a ton of other parts. On the other hand, two PCI and two PCI Express x1, x16 slots if I feel anything ought to get upgraded. Cost: $50.
Case was the second most important aspect because I wanted something cheap, something small, something adequate. I went with the Apex M-318 which is basically an Antec Minuet case with a 275W power supply. It will fit the MicroATX motherboard, has plenty of room for two or more hard drives and a handy loading steel chasis. I’ve used this case before and frankly the size sells it: 12”x15” and 4” high. Price isn’t bad either, with the power supply cost: $50.
Now we’re at $100 for the barebones and frankly, for my purposes, the processor, memory and hard drive choices don’t matter at all as far as Hackintosh is concerned. Could have gone with a Celeron ($40), 1GB DDR2 ($20) and an 80 GB SATA2 
($40) drive for about $100 total. Maybe $60 more for an upgrade to an Intel Core 2 Duo processor if I wanted to replicate a Mac Mini, which retails at $699. So total cost could have been between $220 and $280 shipped if I went with the Mac Mini approach. But I figured if the Hackintosh doesn’t work out I could always use another Linux box as there is always something to play with. Here is what I actually went with though keep in mind that these are pretty much all performance games. I went with the WD 250GB SATA2 drive ($70), 2 GB DDR2 Ram ($50) with heat spreaders, and the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz (E4500) processor ($124) bringing the grand total of my Hackintosh to $344.
Tradeoffs
Now, I will admit that I could have saved maybe $50–100 if I chose less RAM, smaller hard drive and perhaps a slower Pentium D or Celeron processor. I also definitely could have spent a little more to get a 4MB L2 cache processor for $40 more 4GB DDR for $100 more but at the end of the day this was project for fun and I didn’t want to go for an overkill. With the current specs this is a hack of a lot more powerful than a Mac Mini for half the price, it would make a very decent Windows Home Server or Linux appliance and would be cheap to keep: 45W processor, 275W power supply. That’s not a lot of heat or a lot of noise either.
The grand total for this toy, shipped, comes to $367. Mac OS X 10.5 is $114 but I already have 10.4 sitting in the office which came in as an early Christmas from someone that I give free hosting to. Tune in next to see the assembly. Will this be worth it, whats the end goal? Well, it will be worth it if the box powers on and runs Mail.app and Safari without much trouble. That alone is why I’ve built it. If that fails, I’ll just have another WHS or HTPC box.
Exchange 2007 SP1 has shipped today, there is a TON of stuff you need to be aware of before you roll out. This is a significant upgrade that should not just be clicked through without reading the manual. So while congratulations are in order and feature set gold enough to make you go for it right now, hold on, wait a minute..
The set of release notes linked in with the download link points to the RTM (ie, the original release of Exchange 2007, not SP1). The actual Exchange 2007 SP1 Release Notes are here.
I’ll break down the SP1 over the next couple of days so stay tuned. If you need to rush and install it today, please read the documentation first.
The bad news for Microsoft Vista keep on piling on, this week from a group outraged that the Vista SP1 is apparently only focusing on the stability and reliability, not performance. Through what is arguably flawed test, a group has “proven” that Vista SP1 performs 30% worse than its 6-years-senior brother, XP SP3. Either way, the group gave in to the criticism and added another 1 GB of RAM to the system, and ran both XP SP3 and Vista SP1 with 2GB RAM. The results looked even worse for Vista running Office 2003.
Now I am not going to argue whether these conclusions are valid or not, I will even go as far to say that if I were @Microsoft I too would focus on improving the product reliability and stability over the performance.
What I will argue is that this test, with all its flaws, represents the marketplace a lot more realistically than Microsoft wants to believe. Yes, 1 GB ram. Yes, Office 2003 (or older). Yes, IDE drive. Yes, onboard SATA controller. Yes, 32bit systems because driver support for 64bit sucks. Those are the realities of your basic workstations, at best to be honest.
So what?
This reality disconnect is really only a Microsoft problem. Microsoft has been lying to itself, to its partners and to its customers about the satisfaction customers get from Vista. In much the same fashion Dave dismisses the statistics of comparing old with the new, Microsoft has been delusional in the Vista failure constantly quoting the growth units in spite of the fact that the global PC shipments have increased many times over since the release of Windows XP.
So the big question here is whether this Microsoft problem is really your problem? Is their supposed disconnect with the market reality something that should be allowed to impact your business or is this time time reject the notion of Microsoft-centric all-Microsoft business built on Vista, Office, Exchange, SQL, Server, Business Solutions?
There is a big rift, one that I have never seen before, between what Microsoft is offering and what customers are asking for or what is even available on the market. You see, the market is demanding a low cost PC with low TCO (read: managed services) and the operational basics: email, scheduling, shared files and some integration with the things they already own – smartphones, VoIP, (kill me now) Macs and iPhones.
They no longer want to buy into the Microsoft-only world and are rapidly rejecting any investment in the hardware beyond that of storage and VoIP. Since the release of Windows 95, users have done everything they could to upgrade to the latest. You can say, businesses were fanboys, swayed by the improvements in reliability, communication, speed. Not so much anymore.
The big question, one that even I am hard pressed to answer, is whether it is over for Microsoft? You see, my business exists at its core as a Microsoft business. We generally go into situations that involve the Microsoft platform at one version or another, and we work on getting it to the baseline. However, with the rapid de-Microsoftization of our core markets, is it still viable to solve problems by providing more of the same, or are Microsoft self-delusions of desktop/server strategy missing customer expectations and thereby inadequate for the long term?
See what my customers are saying in the upcoming Vladville Newsletter, sign up by filling out the box on the right.
In a further proof that people respond to what they read on the Internet in the context of their current emotional state comes the overwhelmingly positive response to yesterday’s post. It was perhaps one of the darkest things I have ever written on this blog, yet the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive and almost to the edge of craving. Nearly everyone that wrote in wanted more of it, I even got a compliment from someone in Hollywood who liked my writing and suggested I explore screenwriting.
Is it a mere coincidence that the post came right after the long weekend that people got to spend with family, relaxing and away from the stress of their jobs and clients? I doubt it.
You see, when people are in a good mood, the intriguing/critical/thought provoking posts make them feel good, fulfilled. When people are in a bad mood, critical posts become judgemental, personal and hurtful. When you have a bad day, an opinion different from your own invokes an antagonistic response. On a good day, a message urging you to consider change turns into a motivational speech, on a bad day it is a crude putdown of everything you stand for. Identical stories get comments of praise and hate, seconds apart.
What I suppose I want you to consider is that you should not judge people based on their blog posts and opinions because those can be taken out of context (in your own context). If you must judge people you have never met, judge them on their actions not on their words. Sticks and stones folks..
Lot’s of people want to keep track of what I am up to but do not have the time to read every word, every day. I also get plenty of items that people would like to bring attention to, but not the full scale Vladville storm of traffic. Things like beta products and free conference passes, swag, Microsoft surveys and other benefits that are in the small supply and can’t be blasted over the front page.
So for all of you looking for a more exclusive, focused Vlad, here is a newsletter.
Click here to sign up. It’s free! I will even spell check it.
Little bit of business, little bit of tech, lot’s of SMB insight and hair..
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