Enough of the "cloud" computing crap. ENOUGH!

[her209]

I like the MS cloud commercials.

Can I come too?
NOoo


to the cloud!
what?
yay cloud

In one of the commercials, a woman is trying to take a picture of her family. I LOL'd how easy it was for her manipulate the image.

 

[BoomerD]

To the Cloud!

yes, it has its uses, and IMO, it's not only the newest "buzzword" for the general public, but is going to be the current "wave of the future of computing" for a while.

Has "cloud computing" been around for quite a while? Yes, indeed, but it either wasn't available to the general public, or they didn't realize that was what they were using.

Remember, those "To the cloud!" commercials aren't aimed at IT folks who are already knowledgeable about the process, they're aimed at John and Jane Doe, average home computer user who don't know much more than how to log onto their home computer...for them, this is a revolutionary idea.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

It all goes back to the "deliver IT like a utility" theme that has been discussed in the industry for many, many years.

 

[mb]

In one of the commercials, a woman is trying to take a picture of her family. I LOL'd how easy it was for her manipulate the image.

I tried out the program they showed in that commercial for a minute and found it VERY easy to remove imperfections, objects or people from a scene (in that regard I find it superior to the healing brush tool found in Photoshop), but I didn't instantly find an option to swap out portions of the image like how they swapped out the heads in the commercial.

 

[Fritzo]

Google docs?

That's an example.

 

[Leros]

I tried out the program they showed in that commercial for a minute and found it VERY easy to remove imperfections, objects or people from a scene (in that regard I find it superior to the healing brush tool found in Photoshop), but I didn't instantly find an option to swap out portions of the image like how they swapped out the heads in the commercial.

Its a pretty neat feature and easy to use if the facial recognition works

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-photo-gallery-photo-fuse-using?os=other

 

[rudder]

In one of the commercials, a woman is trying to take a picture of her family. I LOL'd how easy it was for her manipulate the image.

That is because within the cloud are 2 million third-world child laborers who do the work. They cost microsoft $750/day.

 

[JulesMaximus]

Chill out dude...take a cloud day mkay?

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

LOL, 55,000 documents? Are you being serious? 55,000 is child's play. Seriously, I have an individual site with 1 million+ documents in it and that site isn't even our main file repository. I'd imagine that when everything is moved in, we'll have 3 million live documents growing at a rate of 500,000 to 1 million per year.

Seriously guys, reading some of these comments, I really have to wonder about your IT departments. I have a lot of work to do on my Sharepoint environment to optimize performance more, but damn, it sounds like a Ferrari compared to your Yugos.

Yes, it can handle that number of documents, but that is really irrelevant if you can't find anything. As you stated elsewhere, if you can't find anything then that is the fault of your IT department. Well guess what, most of us have shitty IT departments.

Let's find some examples:
* Sorting by date is useless as damn near every result has a date of the last few days, regardless of when it was really last modified
* Relevancy ranking is "dumb," being determined damn near at random
* No stemming of search terms
* Searching for say "library" returns every document library in the system
* Inability for user to determine if he is seeing a particular result because of special permissions or not.
* Inability to easily use controlled vocabularies.

etc, etc.

Now, granted, a lot of that can be attributed to a lousy IT department, but at the same time I think it says a LOT about the software when SP does not work well for many people here. SharePoint really is a great tool, when you dedicate a lot of staff and time to configuring it to work juuuust right.

 

[James Bond]

Well, I don't want my personal data at a remote location. Also, what about us PC gamers? PC Gaming surely won't be possible via Cloud. For productivity programs, Cloud is fine, but I simply don't want to do my "personal stuff" via remote applications with remote storage.

http://www.onlive.com/

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Yes, it can handle that number of documents, but that is really irrelevant if you can't find anything. As you stated elsewhere, if you can't find anything then that is the fault of your IT department. Well guess what, most of us have shitty IT departments.

Let's find some examples:
* Sorting by date is useless as damn near every result has a date of the last few days, regardless of when it was really last modified
* Relevancy ranking is "dumb," being determined damn near at random
* No stemming of search terms
* Searching for say "library" returns every document library in the system
* Inability for user to determine if he is seeing a particular result because of special permissions or not.
* Inability to easily use controlled vocabularies.

It sounds to me that maybe the solution wasn't architected correctly. The key to Sharepoint is data taxonomy and the main idea there is metadata identification and integration into the appropriate content types. Additionally, there are many awesome third-party products that fix Sharepoint's shortcomings.

Now, granted, a lot of that can be attributed to a lousy IT department, but at the same time I think it says a LOT about the software when SP does not work well for many people here. SharePoint really is a great tool, when you dedicate a lot of staff and time to configuring it to work juuuust right.

In fairness to your IT staff, Sharepoint is an extremely daunting product to implement correctly. It isn't a typical "Next-->Next-->Next" Microsoft install. In particular, since we're talking about searches, search administration and implementation in Sharepoint can be very complicated and patching Sharepoint is a harrowing experience. The first time I patched it, the entire environment went DOWN. Fortunately, we weren't quite in production yet. I had to open a ticket with Microsoft and it was an issue with the product -- "Oh yeah, that is a known issue. It is supposed to be fixed in SP1." :|

I'd be the first to tell you that my own environment has many shortcomings due to a variety of factors (including my own newness to the product when we implemented it), but fortunately, the hardware masks many of those issues. A major migration project I am doing now is to be completed in a couple of weeks and should correct some of those issues. After that -- on to Sharepoint 2010!

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

It sounds to me that maybe the solution wasn't architected correctly. The key to Sharepoint is data taxonomy and the main idea there is metadata identification and integration into the appropriate content types. Additionally, there are many awesome third-party products that fix Sharepoint's shortcomings.

Yup.

What it boils down to though is that items that have metadata defined within SP (either zoned within the document or entered into SP) are very easy to find. Those that do not (ex: dropping 100 scanned reports into a document library with no specifically entered metadata) are basically impossible to find. (at least with the SP configs I have seen). Are users going to enter or define metadata? Hell no. Users expect (and rightfully IMO) a "google-like" search experience. Without major customization and addons you don't get that from SP (again, at least from what I have seen).

SP really is capable of anything...if you configure it that way. Unfortunately, many IT departments see it as a "works out of the box" solution, and don't understand why a subset of their users is incredibly frustrated with it.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Yup.

What it boils down to though is that items that have metadata defined within SP (either zoned within the document or entered into SP) are very easy to find. Those that do not (ex: dropping 100 scanned reports into a document library with no specifically entered metadata) are basically impossible to find. (at least with the SP configs I have seen). Are users going to enter or define metadata? Hell no. Users expect (and rightfully IMO) a "google-like" search experience. Without major customization and addons you don't get that from SP (again, at least from what I have seen).

As an aside, if your organization does a lot of scanning and dumping those files into Sharepoint, I'd highly recommend looking at KnowledgeLake's solution set for Sharepoint:

http://www.knowledgelake.com/Pages/...pture-solutions-for-microsoft-sharepoint.aspx

We extensively use their products and in conjunction with an Oracle data connector in Sharepoint, we're able to scan and index roughly 500,000 documents per year. Each document goes into a library with 10 (IIRC) metadata fields but because of our Oracle connector, the indexer only keys in two of them and Oracle supplies the rest. Of all the companies I've worked with, I'd have to say KnowledgeLake is near the top.

Also, if your existing scans are in TIF format, I believe there is an OCR TIF iFilter available which would greatly help with the search.

 

[Dr. Detroit]

So I take it your not going to DREAMforce '10 next week in SF?

 

[spidey07]

So I take it your not going to DREAMforce '10 next week in SF?

I just can't stand the marketing blitz by MS, VMware, et all. "meh, just throw it to the cloud! The cloud can do it!"

With no understanding of the networking complexity and cost required to do such a thing. Remember, microsoft and VMware have always been very poor in understanding networking.

 

[ElFenix]

remote desktop is not the cloud. especially when i remote desktop into my own damn computer.

 

[Dr. Detroit]

Dreamfroce '10

Great keynote address this morning.

First 5-minutes is pretty damn good......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unXDUSTZX9I

 

[moshquerade]

Oh, I just go to the cloud! What the fuck are you thinking? Just like "I just go to the intarweb and it will take care of it for me!". WTF is wrong with this message? The cloud in computing terms is "I don't know or care WTF is behind it, not my problem or responsibility"

I know "cloud computing" is the big buzzword these days and I'm OK with where it's going in terms of load balancing applications, virtualization and data center bridging to try to eliminate geographical limitations of resources.

This kind of application virtualization has been pushed for over a decade. I feel like we've done this before. Mainframe -> distributed computing -> centralized -> geographically centralized -> geographically distributed.

But just stop this fucking marketing nonsense of "just go to the cloud! It's so easy!"

You know what? Your gmail is geographically distributed with a 2nd tier of central and it's still down. Same with ebay, amazon, all the big sites.

i agree with your rant.

go cloud

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Dreamfroce '10

Great keynote address this morning.

First 5-minutes is pretty damn good......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unXDUSTZX9I

If by "good" you mean "makes you want to puke"...

 

[ebaycj]

 

[spidey07]

i agree with your rant.

go cloud

Yeah cloud!

*puke*

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

Things are going to move to thin clients in the future. Get over it.

 

[spidey07]

Things are going to move to thin clients in the future. Get over it.

They've been saying that for 15+ years. It's been tried before and it fails everytime because of the cost of the infrastructure to support it. Nothing is radically different today. It's been moving in this cycle for a long time. It repeats every 6-7 years it seems.

1) Big push to distributed computing
2) That fails, centralize everything
3) Thin clients are the future!
4) Push everything closer to the client
5) Goto step 1

 

[Sentrosi2121]

When someone tells me that their cloud solution is safe and secure, well that'll be the first person who can tell me and back it up. And then I might buy them lunch.

 

[PricklyPete]

Hrm I don't want some screwball at a data center 1000 miles away from me having access to my system, or some jackoff hacking and taking info.

That jackoff does it now on "your computer"...so why do you think it will be different?