Tribalinius

Clearly, the project was handled poorly. A lot of people had/still have issues not being paid for what, 2 years now? That software went live without any safety net and no way to revert to the previous platform. Some heads need to roll, if you are hired by the government, you are supposed to be the cream of the crop period. If it's anything like the Quebec "Health" IT project we have here, there was a lot of external consultants / friends of friends / egos implicated in the project and somehow I feel they forgot the initial scope of the project. Of course, everyone in the project took home a huge slice of the pie and still do because they have been dragging the project for years now, i guess it's the same for Phoenix unfortunately. I'm ashamed to see such an IT project go to waste. It gives us, IT professionals, really bad rep again. The project, if it would have been handled properly, had a really good potential. It gives me the impression that some external influencers decided to butt in the project and keep piling demands and asking for features when the analysis was done. We all had these people in our businesses doing that. Project ABC is nearing completion but Timmy from accounting decides all of a sudden that he's an IT specialist and wants feature XYZ deployed in the first version of the software.

I haven't seen an U38N in person but it sure looks like a really budget oriented machine. Like GoodBytes said, that seems to be the kind of machine where the manufacturer opted to check boxes. "Ultrabook, check. SSD, check. Let's call it a premium turd!". Still, I bet it's still faster than the 5400RPM class HDD they usually shove in there that make the laptop feels like it's 5yo right out of the box. Budget consumer laptops are a plague when it comes to this. After all these years, you could figure manufacturer would have found a way to have decent SSDs in budget mainstream laptops found in big box store. I'm not asking NVMe 960 Pro performance but, you know, just good enough that the laptop boot and be completely functional under 30 seconds. The amount of mainstream computers still having 5400RPM drives on the floor is nuts. At my Staples, outside of the gaming/mac section, they probably have 1 or 2 laptops equipped with an SSD while there's 8-10 other comparable machines spec wise sitting there with 5400RPM drive instead. Obviously experience differs from one person to and another but I don't recall having seen a lot of filled 2TB laptop drives lately. "Normies" will usually have their normal softwares installed and 10-20GB of photos/videos, their outlook POP account and a few GBs worth of documents most of the time. From my experience with these people, 250GB would be plenty enough. Need more? Just buy a separate external drive to backup your stuff. Now for business class laptops and computers, it's totally unacceptable to me in 2018 to not have at least a SATA SSD boot drive. In fact, I'm pushing for NVMe adoption to my customers. The last 20-30 laptops and 50-ish workstations that left the workshop were all equipped with 120GB-250GB NVMe drives either by default or by upgrades because most of these people have access to network storage or work from them directly in the first place anyway. I don't hear any complaints about computer speed anymore.

Like most of the people in here, I do it for fun as a hobby now. About a decade ago, outside my tech job at the computer shop, I'd say I was averaging 50-60 PCs /year from which I'd say 80% were pretty much cookie cutters from one another but I'd always ended with 5-10 really unique systems annually that required some more work. The plus side was to be able to hone my skills while making some pocket change and the bad side, like the others said, was the extended support that I had to deal with. Fortunately, even though I was charging a bit more than other people around here, I was known for not being a part cheaper, my good work ethic and my excellent support skills in my circle. I never had to advertise my services because people would come forward to me by word of mouth or referal. I enjoyed a good customer base BUT I chose who my customers were. I was very strict on my extended support terms when people approached me for a new computer and they needed to accept them before I started working with them on it. Having the luxury of refusing people because they would not comply to my terms was the best thing I did because otherwise I would have spent a lot of weekends working on porn virus infected computers for free. That's something people are overlooking today when it comes to who you are dealing with. It always come down to know if you want to deal with someone who feels free to wake you up at 3AM for a dead fan or not. I unwinded the operation a couple of years ago when life got in the way but I might partially re-open the workshop soon with the interest around PC gaming right now. I was not making a living out of computer building 10 years ago and it sure as hell did not change since then but I figure as long as I break even, I wouldn't mind doing a couple of builds here and there. 5-10 computers per year is a nice number.

It's a budget matter. Let's say that you want to upgrade a complete class (30 basic workstations (i.e.: i3, 4/8GB, 128GB SSD or 500GB HDD, iGPU, 3y/5y warranty) + monitors + required software licenses), you are looking at probably around 1000-1200 CAD$ /computer setup bearing any volume and\or educational discounts, just to be up and running for basic tasks. You are easily looking at 25-35k CAD$ investment for a single class equipped with basic computers for research or office productivity. You would probably end up spending about the same for 15-20 decently equipped desktops for video editing\content creation\rendering and probably less for Macs. Regardless, it's a huge chunk of money to invest in. That's probably why schools tend to put that on the bottom of the priority list and try to stretch the lifespan of computers so long. At the same time, they should have a yearly budget reserved for renewing computers to be able to do a good rotation and be able to do staggered deployment over the years. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the way schools administration work these days :p.

Thank god for Cloud game saves. It should have been available since day 1.

Of course aerodynamic efficients fuselage \ windshield on a semi-trucks will all end up looking the same... Honestly i could look at Peterbilt, Kenworth and Volvo based on the same images and say that they could be suing each other based on that.

Indeed

I can understand moving the plant itself by boat because it's super far away from civilization but also the fuel? The reactor fuel should be transported in an other way. Regarding Chernobyl, I remember watching some documentaries where scientists say they have not found all the molten core fuel yet and they were fearing that the missing core fuel would be eventually reaching groundwater where it would probably end up into an hydrogen explosion releasing radioactive material outside. Scary stuff.

There's at least 10 in front of me right now? I don't get the flack Nintendo gets for "ports" when these games are released on multiple platforms anyway, just not at the same time. If you are talking specifically about Wii U ports, it's a sound economic and sale driving decision and they are gonna run out of material eventually anyway. People would have passed up Mario Kart 8, Hyrule Warriors and Pokken Tournament because they did not want to buy a Wii U and I understand them for not buying it. If we take a look at Sony and Microsoft first year, there's not much to say about their 1st year either. It kinda looks like that: PS4: - Killzone: Shadow Fall - Knack - Infamous Second Son - Last of Us Remastered (Port) - Driveclub - Little Big Planet 3 (technically past the 1y anniversary) XB1: - Dead Rising 3 (Launch) - Forza Motorsport 5 (Launch) - Ryse: Son of Rome (Launch) - Kinect Sports Rivals - Dance Central Spotlight - Forza Horizon 2 - Project Spark (Does it really count?) - Sunset Overdrive - Halo: Master Chief Collection (Ports/Remake) The rest are either timed exclusives or games launched on both PlayStation 4 / Xbox One. I'm not including eshop\psn stuff.

I'm up to 70 games-ish on my shelf at the moment, I'm not sure what you are talking about.

Governments are pretty slow to change when it comes to technology (unless it's about crypto)! At least, I'm sure you still have a decent budget to work with and you are not operating like a 3rd world country on life support! In the private sector, the word "IT" is not to be spoken in presence of accounting because they only see us as expenses . Usually they are right though, sort of. Some administrators lack the vision to see that investing in IT != instant returns but productivity and reliability later down the line.

Yeah, not exactly the same ball game! I would not have the same approach at all at a school\college\university that I have with SMBs obviously, I give you that :). I've been in the industry long enough to be able to tell that SMBs always end facing the same recurring problems over the years. We end up arriving in these companies at different times but usually when we're called in it's either because of 1) a lack of long term vision\budget from the administration in regards of IT and needs guidance, 2) a company's rapid growth outpacing their IT infrastructure or 3) a catastrophic event that occurred due to point 1 and\or 2. One other thing that you must consider also when it comes to on premise vs. going Cloud is the huge upfront cost that comes with infrastructure\license acquisition. I've seen so many companies cutting corners ranging from ordering the inadequate equipment to installing cracked software all over the place to pushing the hardware past their expected life time because they could not afford the cost of an adequate setup. Going pure Cloud alleviate a lot of these things by balancing the entry cost and recurrent fees. It's a hot topic nowadays with 2019 price increase in this thread, Office 365 and talks of Windows as a service in the other one. I won't make friends here but as an IT professional and as a business, the whole "as a service" recurrent thing makes a lot of sense to me. It makes budgeting and billing for the customer easier and also makes managing it easier. I'm also seeing less pirated software installed everywhere and that is a good thing when you need support for specific softwares. If there's a silver lining to all of this, I'd say that I'm starting to notice a trend in the past couple of years (3-4) where younger companies with younger administration tends to be ahead of the curve and wish to adapt their IT before it becomes a burden that affect their production whereas in the past I would have to deal with older people (usually 50+) that would not do a single move or spend a single penny until something affecting their bottom line would explode because, you know, their old Pentium II Packard Bell is doing just fine for shipping! Guess which one is easier to work with ;). As for the PB bit, all I can think of is: Linus: "Here's PB Project, our biggest project ever!" Leadeater: "Hold my (tunnel)beer."

Storage, again is a yes and no. It really depends on what you need and how much you need. EBS storage on AWS starts at 0.11$ /GB and goes up from there if you need provisioned IOPS and whatnot. If we take the 2 DCs from the precedent example, at 50GB /DC. We're looking at roughly 130$ worth of SSD storage for a year. If you need 10TB of provisionned space, it's an another story obviously but at that point, I'd take up the phone to speak to my rep :p. Most SMBs I deal with don't break the 1TB mark once they go Exchange/SharePoint Online. Usually, the biggest culprits tends to be out of control CEOs that keeps every email they ever had or people copy/pasting stuff all over the place on the file server because they don't have any file structure in place. Once you clear the water and put some structure in place, space is not your biggest enemy. Security is the biggest factor to consider when you make a move. Savings are great but I understand businesses concerns when it comes to security. Stuff improved a lot over time, it's not perfect but it's getting there. It's my job as consultant to make it the most secure and most isolated possible when I start an account. It goes from randomly generated passwords and 2FA to encrypted external backups and the same principles are applied internally to make sure that we have the safest environment possible. I don't say it's perfect but for someone to do damage, it will require a lot of efforts :). I've worked with countless SMBs over the years and the single point of failures for most of them were backups and humans. Like you, I've seen companies disappear overnight because of a fire (Timmy Jane forgot to put the external backup in her purse) or plain thievery where people took servers and external backups with them (same Timmy Jane scenario) and did not have anything else to recover from. Point is, there's no 100% way to protect everything. Our job is to make sure they are protected, to identify any potential point of failures and secure them as much as possible. I could tell Timmy Jane to bring the backups with her every night but if she does not, I don't have control over that.

For smaller businesses, it's the opportunity to get rid of physical servers plain and simple. You are eliminating a lot of overhead when you move them to the Cloud. I can have 2 DCs in 2 regions for roughly 30 bucks /month. Let's say 200$ /dc /year with no contract on AWS to not have to deal with any licencing fees, hardware maintenance overhead, redundancy problems, backups and hardware cost & renewal, I'd say that's a pretty good deal overall. If you're ok with a 3y term, that's an additional 60% savings on EC2 instances on AWS. I just finished an analysis for one our customer that runs their stuff in a "private Cloud" and from the numbers I crunched, moving them to AWS with their current workload, they're heading toward a 25k to 30k per year minimally in savings on a 200k infrastructure budget. Let's be honest, that's quite an impressive chunk and it's just for the physical infrastructure. You don't have the external consultants or anything else factored in in there. Obviously it's not for everyone but, in a lot of cases, if you do your homework properly you normally end up with savings with the Cloud compared to a similar speced hardware setup.

It's probably due to how Microsoft deal with the transfer. I always assumed the transfer procedure followed a path like this: Take a data block > analyse it for integrity > open communication channel > transfer data block > verify destination data integrity > close communication channel > check for an another data block and repeat. People thinks going hybrid is the best thing since sliced bread but I would not necessarily recommend it. Creating the hybrid environment is really simple and the easiest part, the hard part is when you want to cut the cord off your local Exchange. You still need to have a local Exchange server to make the link between Office 365, Azure AD and AD. If you want to manage a mailbox through Office 365 and you still have Exchange around, you're SOL because it will ask you go to through the local Exchange management console. Unless you want to go full Azure AD, you potentially end up dealing with 2 sets of credentials if you are cutting completely Exchange from your local environment. Don't get me started on Azure AD that exists in 2 flavors for certain options!

Our company focus mainly on SMBs so we did not encounter a lot of existing SharePoint installations so far. Apparently document management is not a thing for a lot of companies. You would think lawyers firms and notaries would be prime targets for that but no. We did 2 maybe 3 migrations to SharePoint Online in the past 2 years I'd say. However we did convert a lot of file servers that had a decent enterprise file system in place to SharePoint Online lately. Sharegate, even if it's not cheap, makes my life really easier on that front. Exchange is an another ball game for various reasons: 1) Moving 40GB+ mailboxes over a slow Internet connection is an absolutely nightmare. 2) Moving 40GB+ mailboxes over a fast Internet connection is not accelerating the process one bit. We always end up doing about 1GB /h /mailbox in the best case scenarios. 3) Moving mailboxes over the GUI sucks for no reason, especially when you're going back to Exchange 2010. I always end up doing everything in Powershell for more finegrain controls. 4) The 1M question, do you do an hybrid setup or do you go full cut off. That one can be a tricky one because in an hybrid setup you still need Exchange locally installed and full cut off, well, you need to bring the whole thing down while you transfer.

I recently talked to a SharePoint MVP at a conference and he seems to think that SharePoint 2019 will be the last "local" one they will produce and I would incline to think so. The last formation I attended, we were 20-ish in the formation room and we were at least 14 on SharePoint Online. On the 6 remaining, 5 were gearing up to move their SharePoint data to SharePoint Online. They are pushing a lot for people to move to SharePoint Online (recurring fees > licence fees) and for the most part the platform works great. i work with it, I develop with it and the new API to connect to it works fine. People gives a lot of crap to Microsoft but, business wise, Office 365 works great in an enterprise environment if you know what you are doing. The only part I hate about SharePoint Online and pretty much about the whole Office 365 ecosystem right now in its state is how Microsoft deploy stuff and communicate changes to the end users. Most of the time, in SharePoint, my users don't notice new options\changes or end up freaking out because feature XYZ has been removed without notice. i always fear they pull something like the SharePoint classical interface on a whim because "new modern interface!" while a lot of people are used to it. I give the classical vs. modern interface example because it's pretty much as if someone goes from Windows XP to Windows 8.1 overnight without explanation. Still, on paper and in practice, moving to SharePoint online is the better move for a business that uses SharePoint; no need to worry about storage or the platform not being updated. Security is super tight and you got enough Datacenter options to not put your Canadian data on a US server if you fear the NSA will look at you.

Like I said in another forum concerning Windows 2019, it's probably for 2 reasons. 1) Microsoft does not plan to change away from Windows 10 for a long time. It would not really makes sense to have a Windows 2016 R4 in 2022 down the line because there is no significant change to the OS for example. And 2) Every Microsoft flagship products are going to be released in 2019 (Windows Server, Office, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL at least). They are keeping up with their product stack. I'm not really happy with the CALs going up though. Even if our company's bread and butter is Cloud migrations, we still have a couple of customers who desire to run local servers and won't like a price hike on their licenses. I don't think they said anything in regards of Exchange, SharePoint and SQL yet but I figure they will go up as well. It's as if Microsoft is hiking the price just to push people to make a move toward the Cloud.

My bad, I skipped over the Elite part, still ATX compatible anyway . I adjusted that below to reflect that. Honestly though, if the H310/B360/H370 boards are available or are going to be available very soon, I'd look at that like xriqn mentionned. The Z370 main attraction would be its overclocking capabilities and with a 8400 you clearly won't do that anyway. Plus, you will be able to shave a couple of dollars on the bill by going with a more budget oriented chipset. In the same vein, the aftermarket cooler is "unnecessary" if you want to cut some extra fat. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel - Core i5-8400 2.8GHz 6-Core Processor ($178.90 @ OutletPC) CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($24.89 @ OutletPC) Motherboard: Asus - Prime Z370-A ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($156.79 @ OutletPC) Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-3000 Memory ($109.89 @ OutletPC) Storage: Samsung - 860 Evo 250GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive ($94.89 @ OutletPC) Storage: Western Digital - Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($43.21 @ OutletPC) Video Card: Asus - GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Phoenix Video Card ($204.98 @ Newegg) Case: NZXT - S340 Elite (White) ATX Mid Tower Case ($79.99 @ SuperBiiz) Power Supply: SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($79.59 @ SuperBiiz) Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit ($89.89 @ OutletPC) Total: $1063.02 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-04-03 14:46 EDT-0400 I'll reinstate that if you are in no hurry, I'd hold for a couple of weeks to let the market handle the new Coffee Lake boards, "i5 8500" rumors, Zen+ arrival, nVidia maybe releasing new stuff. I'm sure there will be a couple of deals to be made that will shave the final bill

There's that too. New budget boards coming out for Coffee-Lake are in the pipe, with Zen+ coming out you might see a price cut on certain CPUs on Intel side, Graphics might settle a bit. If you are not in a hurry, I'd give it 2-3 months just to see how it pans out.

I saw it and I read it, still it would be illogical to discard Zen+ as an option when it's going to super competitive at that price point. As for an Intel build, I figure I'd go in that sort of direction with that kind of budget: PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel - Core i5-8400 2.8GHz 6-Core Processor ($178.90 @ OutletPC) CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($24.89 @ OutletPC) Motherboard: Asus - Prime Z370-A ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($156.79 @ OutletPC) Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-3000 Memory ($109.89 @ OutletPC) Storage: Samsung - 860 Evo 250GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive ($94.89 @ OutletPC) Storage: Western Digital - Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($43.21 @ OutletPC) Video Card: Asus - GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Phoenix Video Card ($204.98 @ Newegg) Case: NZXT - S340 (White) ATX Mid Tower Case ($62.99 @ Amazon) Power Supply: SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($79.59 @ SuperBiiz) Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit ($89.89 @ OutletPC) Total: $1046.02 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-04-03 12:16 EDT-0400 Nothing too fancy but it would get the job done.

With Zen+ right around the corner and a tight budget, I would definitely consider going Zen+.

Don't forget that Ryzen refresh is coming too.

With the rise of online shopping in the past few years, all major delivery companies will need to adapt their logistics to face this trend. Warehouse wise, most of them seems alright at this point but you can't say the same thing about delivery, especially home delivery. We all saw videos where <insert delivery company> drivers throw stuff across the yard just to make a delivery faster. I had to run after delivery drivers a couple of times because they faked to knock or ring. I had an occurrence where a driver threw a freaking monitor across my apartment hallway. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the 24" monitor flying in the air. I went ballistic on that guy and made sure to report him. Nowadays, I make sure that deliveries are made at businesses I work for or at my office. I don't want to deal with home deliveries anymore, not until someone figures out a magical depot system with all major companies at the same place to pick up parcels.

Granted we're comparing apples to oranges here, we're not in the same price bracket. I did not check PSREF but I would imagine a fully decked out P50/P51 must be in the 3000-4000 CAD$ range, while a T460s, in the current configuration I have was something like 1600 CAD$. I/O wise, I seem to only lack Thunderbolt and a USB port compared to a ThinkPad P but it's clearly not the same firepower and clearly not designed for the same target audience :). For a 15.6" laptop, it's massive and bulky but it packs a punch that an ultrabook does not have yet.