scuff

I love having this conversation from an IT Pro perspective & particularly a systems management perspective. It's different from a sales & marketing perspective (who would be right into pain chains & pain points etc) and different from a developer's perspective too. Interesting to see more than one person mention Gartner's…

So you're a SaaS/Cloud fan then?

I don't think you're wrong about 'catch up with Apple'. But I do see a few slight differences in execution. Microsoft still seems heavily focused on Enterprise with it's product innovations (hardware and software) .. as much as they try and convince you that every neighbourhood DJ is now using a Surface Book. And the…

Wow, thanks for sharing your process! And I think I like your spouse.

Hey thanks for sharing your experience. I think people underestimate how popular Build your own Cloud will be. We saw similar things when we started playing with virtualisation in the late 90s. Suddenly we were consolidating servers like mad.

That's a great point re voice being obtrusive in public. That's the reason videos with captions are taking off in popularity on Facebook too. It WOULD seem weird asking Siri or Cortana stuff in public, which is why the growing market is focusing on home-based assistants. Microsoft quite strongly states that your data is…

I can imagine! Microsoft has built the Long Term Servicing branch into Windows 10 for that very reason, but it relies on you getting to Windows 10 first. Let's hope it makes the future easier for your legacy systems to stay 'behind' until the application vendors catch up. Quite often I see that the roadblock to upgrading…

Our dog bot has us well and truly trained to respond. Didn't take her long either.

That is very cool and terrifying at the same time. Self driving cars on our roads are one thing but self-driving semis? Wow.

I understand that security risk is a big factor for Enterprises weighing up the Cloud in general. Would anything convince you? SaaS vendors would argue that they throw more resources at security than you could afford to, and that you just don't hear as publically about in-house breaches. I'm not saying they're right. But…

You got me - I'm an optimist all right. Let me have a moment to get excited about a new bit of Microsoft hardware, it doesn't happen often! But I'm not fanatical enough to rush out and buy it just because it's new. And holograms are just a little bit cooler than a new version of Word. We've talked in the past about how IT…

My favourite part of Microsoft's old Tech.Ed conference was the labs. I could have sat in there and played for days without the rest of the conference. Virtual machines & platforms like Windows Azure help with in the office learning now, if you can find a good lab guide to follow.

Oh gosh how long is it since I've dealt with an IRQ conflict!! My mother was a bank teller and she would totally agree with you re how we train people to do a job using technology, but we don't teach them the mechanics of what they are actually doing. She was one of the old school who could revert to operating as a 'paper…

Sounds like we have another problem solver in our midst! Well done with your success so far and all the best for a continuing bright future!

THAT is a great concept. 3AMFriendly !

Thanks for sharing that example. Tim Ferris talks about businesses automating the routine and humanising the exception. He means from a business process perspective not a tech perspective (automation), but he's right. I don't mind if a computer analyses my test results and detects cancer better than a doctor can. But I'd…

Great points. There is no perfect answer so, like life, sometimes you have to just give it a go. It's easy for technical people to get hung up in the perfect details and there are some strategies that will let you start with Cloud without betting the whole farm on it. Though I do like the "half pregnant" analogy!

Ouch!

I've always thought of botnets spreading malicious code. It's interesting to see the world of intelligent autoresponders arise.

Ah, it's great to meet another person with that old school background knowledge. TCP/IP is still IP! Well, until we're all running v6!

Imagine if a patch automatically backed out correctly if it caused a problem! I was in an interesting Big Data session yesterday about Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Speaker talked about how we know the difference between correlation and causation. But we also have a human tendency to look for and identify patterns…

I agree! I like to think that my role here is to structure a skeleton of a topic and then we can chat about everyone's real world experiences in the comments. The community here has a wealth of knowledge of what has worked and what has not worked in reality and I love bringing those stories out.

A lot of them I have picked up on social media, especially twitter. Do you have any you would add?

That's kind of the point of the Switchboard test data though. It is natural pone conversations, not perfect booth-recordings. It's used by the major players as the standard, so you can compare results knowing one company didn't have a clearer data set. And they admit that the next step is looking at worse conditions like a…

Another person in the health field! It's great to know that skilled medical professionals are backed by skilled IT admins like yourself.

In reality I'm seeing the "thin clients" are actually Apple Macs. Yup.

Ooh, do tell! What was automated that went wrong?

If I had a dollar I could donate every time someone shared a photo of a sick kid on Facebook ...Like chain emails, sadly the social engineering attacks prey on the user thinking 'what harm could this do'? I know there's a chance Disney isn't giving away family holidays but it's going to take me 5 seconds to share it just…

I'm just sad that nobody has agreed with me that Lotus Sametime was awesome.

Nice! Short and clear.