Best posts made by Nic

@scottalanmiller said:

@Nic said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Nic said:

You don't have much choice if all the accountants in a 100 mile radius only use QB. And most businesses are shitty too, so they just go with whatever is handy.

Accounting is one of those things that has no reason to be local. We changed accountants over this, it's not an idle threat. Even in the poorest, remotest regions there are accountants who want to make money and do their job well.

I'm not saying that I'm surprised that Intuit has a market in working with crappy accountants to screw businesses that just don't take the effort to run well. I'm just saying that as IT we should never act like it isn't ridiculous on many levels and that businesses that do this can't honestly expect anyone else to actually take them seriously.

You can't just pretend Sturgeon's Law doesn't rule the universe

I don't at all. I'm simply stating that if you are crap, I'm not going to pretend that I don't notice and give you a prize for failing because "everyone should feel special."

That doesn't change the fact that 90% of everything and everyone is crap You can call out QB for being shitty and be right, but the reality is that once you lead the market you only have to innovate enough not to lose customers and ride that into obsolescence. People aren't going to change from QB unless there's a crisis, so you've got a guaranteed generation of customers. Yes the millennials will use something else, but the shareholders of QB are old farts who won't live long enough to care.

@Brains said in Asus RoG Rocking the WebRoot Secure Anywhere:

@Nic said in Asus RoG Rocking the WebRoot Secure Anywhere:

We have done contract buyouts before. Let me know if you want to talk to someone here.

wow i completely missed this. Ill speak to the Director.

Nic the funny thing is that I deployed your software to the company this week with a Trial offering to help with the Zepto infection. Took me about an hour or so.

Nice - hope that took care of it. You can convert the trial code over to live to minimize the work if you do want to switch over.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Nic said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Nic said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Nic said:

You don't have much choice if all the accountants in a 100 mile radius only use QB. And most businesses are shitty too, so they just go with whatever is handy.

Accounting is one of those things that has no reason to be local. We changed accountants over this, it's not an idle threat. Even in the poorest, remotest regions there are accountants who want to make money and do their job well.

I'm not saying that I'm surprised that Intuit has a market in working with crappy accountants to screw businesses that just don't take the effort to run well. I'm just saying that as IT we should never act like it isn't ridiculous on many levels and that businesses that do this can't honestly expect anyone else to actually take them seriously.

You can't just pretend Sturgeon's Law doesn't rule the universe

I don't at all. I'm simply stating that if you are crap, I'm not going to pretend that I don't notice and give you a prize for failing because "everyone should feel special."

That doesn't change the fact that 90% of everything and everyone is crap You can call out QB for being shitty and be right, but the reality is that once you lead the market you only have to innovate enough not to lose customers and ride that into obsolescence. People aren't going to change from QB unless there's a crisis, so you've got a guaranteed generation of customers. Yes the millennials will use something else, but the shareholders of QB are old farts who won't live long enough to care.

I wasn't calling out QB, I was pointing out the reaction that IT should have to businesses that are willing to choose it.

You know as well as I do how much actual selection power IT pros have in SMB

@scottalanmiller They said they work with Dell now.

For the majority, getting rich is the goal. Respect, again, only matters to the rational 1%. The true tragedy of it all is that the rational 1% are smart enough to see that the system is f[moderated], but not smart enough to come up with a solution.

@scottalanmiller Yeah maybe their marketing copy isn't up to date yet. They did emphasize that they're coming down market and that you can get good use out of them as an SMB with even just one node or two. In the case of one node you'd want to replicate off site to a cloud provider.

If I won the lottery, I'd go back to school for the rest of my life and get a degree in everything. Lately I've been thinking more about writing, so that could be something I'd do as an alternative career.

@scottalanmiller not sure, they didn't delve into that level of detail. Their idea of having a hardware accelerator card is interesting though. Basically a combo of RAID, dedupe and their own custom file system under the covers.

@dafyre said:

@Nic said:

If I won the lottery, I'd go back to school for the rest of my life and get a degree in everything. Lately I've been thinking more about writing, so that could be something I'd do as an alternative career.

Fiction or Non-Fiction?

I like to Dabble in my writing... alas, I have to work.

I like non-fiction a lot. Some of the best writing I loved as a kid was long form stuff for lay people about technical topics, like Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005HG4W9W/
I'd love to write the Community Management version of Tom Limoncelli's book for sysadmins, something like that.

@nadnerB yeah it would have been nice if they could have given us a ballpark.

@dafyre said:

@Nic said:

@dafyre said:

@Nic said:

If I won the lottery, I'd go back to school for the rest of my life and get a degree in everything. Lately I've been thinking more about writing, so that could be something I'd do as an alternative career.

Fiction or Non-Fiction?

I like to Dabble in my writing... alas, I have to work.

I like non-fiction a lot. Some of the best writing I loved as a kid was long form stuff for lay people about technical topics, like Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005HG4W9W/
I'd love to write the Community Management version of Tom Limoncelli's book for sysadmins, something like that.

Have you started yet? The journey of 1000 pages starts with a single word.

Started thinking about it, but haven't put pen to paper yet. I have the sketches of an outline in my head.

@cakeis_not_alie said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

Dear everyone in this thread:

SimpliVity are amazing, and I will punch anyone who disagrees in a sensitive body part.

Listen to me: you all know me. You know that I am both a very loud customer advocate and one of the loudest, most irritating voices for dropping prices. I need to say this very loudly and very clearly: SimpliVity are a fantastic company, with top notch service and a damned-near-impossible to beat product.

Like any company, they aren't going to meet every single niche need. They certainly aren't the cheapest on the market. They aren't trying to be all things to all people and they aren't trying to be the low cost supplier, so it's not shocking that they are neither.

What they are is the absolute best, full stop, at data efficiency. Nobody manages to do data efficiency as thoroughly as they do, at the speeds they do and with the WAN efficiency that they do. This is SimpliVity's schitck, and it has real world implications.

The first is the aforementioned WAN efficiency. The second is that highly similar workloads (such as VDI) absolutely scream on SimpliVity. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Does this make SimpliVity something of a "luxury car" for hyperconvergence? Absolutely. But it's not "a Lamborghini", it's more of a "Tesla Roadster". The price isn't about pointless flash; you get something different for your money, and different enough that it becomes addictive to those who can afford to use it. The money isn't spend on flash or brand name; they deliver actual value for it.

Now, I'd be the first to piss on them for overcharging or otherwise not living up to their promise. Everyone here should know that about me by now. I have, in fact, been in multiple meetings with their top brass where I am the loudest customer advocacy voice in the room, demanding they meet this need, or that requirement, and lower the price.

Despite that, they don't deserve to be pooped on. They aren't all things to all people, but they are absolutely untouchable at what they do.

Cheers.

Thanks Trevor, that was the sort of info I was hoping for, from someone who'd had occasion to work with them and their tech. Sounds like in practice they are as awesome as the demo shows. The whole pricing side discussion has been a bit of a diversion from that, and I'm sure that there's a lot of pent up hostility from other vendor past pricing experiences that they happen to be the one to get dumped on. Thanks for chiming in, as always!

@dafyre said:

I've been writing stories for years... I'll start them... and then put them down... or get bored with them and push them aside...

I've completed maybe 2 stories (Fantasy / Fiction) over the years, lol.

Have you published them anywhere (like Amazon self-publishing)?

@Dashrender said in New Thermostat:

@Nic said in New Thermostat:

@Dashrender said in New Thermostat:

If it checks into a central server that isn't controlled by you, today that's just a bad idea. Most of those protocols have been shown to have little to no real security.

Yeah that's the only downside. Webroot is trying to build a security framework that vendors can use since they mostly don't think about it until it's too late: https://www.webroot.com/us/en/business/iot

here's hoping that takes off!

I hope webroot also realizes that it needs to be free if it's going to be accepted.

Steve Gibson is making a new authentication mechanism - he knows the only way it will be largely accepted is if it's free, so he's open sourcing the project.

Well we do have to make some money. Plus hosting all the stuff on AWS and supporting the API calls costs us money, so if it were a free service then we'd be losing money on the deal But it's certainly something we want to make affordable enough for vendors to use so that it will be widely adopted.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/whats-your-marketing-doing/mean-streets-wife/

Aaron just decided to reduce his community profiles and remove his old stuff. He was never an official media rep for them, he just works as one of their sysadmins so I ping him when I see stuff that is relevant. Nothing awry at BackBlaze itself.

@Minion-Queen said:

Zuma. Something easy and brainless to do while on webinars

Yeah I do that too, with tapping games and other mindless games like match 3 games. I've started on You Need a Bigger Boat, which is the sequel to 10,000,000. They're both match 3 games that have RPG elements.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/57ien6/were_reddits_infraops_team_ask_us_anything/

Archie McPhee is awesome. I got to visit their physical store in Seattle and it was amazing. If you're ever in Seattle put that on your list of things to do.

@Dashrender said in Sophos or WebRoot Cloud Endpoint Advanced - Any Thoughts???:

@Nic said in Sophos or WebRoot Cloud Endpoint Advanced - Any Thoughts???:

@BRRABill Webroot is no longer using the Sophos engine. They acquired Prevx and rebuilt everything around that about 6 years back. Also I'm already at my new gig so you can page @JoshP_Webroot for any Webroot questions from here on out.

I'm guessing 6 years ago is when Webroot became the product it is today, and why I love it so much!

Yeah Webroot scrapped all their existing traditional AV and rebuilt a new product around the Prevx technology. They also added in the brightcloud.com tech and became the product we know today.